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Water and Electricity
We do know that they don’t mix well. In an article in the Guardian about the floods in York, I read about the flood barrier on the River Foss that Problems arose at the weekend at the Foss barrier and pumping station, which controls river levels by managing the interaction between the rivers Foss and…
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Kissinger on SDI and the Soviet Collapse
I’ve been reading Henry Kissinger’s “summation” of international relations, World Order, which is as interesting and insightful as people have said. He says of SDI that [Reagan] challenged the Soviet Union to a race in arms and technology that it could not win, based on programs long stymied in Congress. What came to be known…
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Germanwings 9525 and a potential conflict of rights
Work continues on the investigation into the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525. I note happily that news media are reverting to what I regard as more appropriate phraseology. Our local newspaper had on Friday 27th March two-word major headline “Deadly Intention“, without quotation marks, and the BBC and Economist were both reporting as though an…
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Quantitative Easing and Helicopter Money
The US Federal Reserve Bank is to end its programme of quantitative easing (QE). QE was introduced by former chairman Bernanke as a response to the financial crash starting in 2008 (or 2007, or whenever). A colleague asked me a few years ago if I understood QE. I didn’t. Now I (am under the illusion…
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A Continuing Economic Puzzle
For me at least. I came across a fine article in Vanity Fair magazine from September 2011 in which Michael Lewis endeavors to explain pervasive German attitudes to finance and financial risk . Lewis is well-known for his incisive inquiries into finance. I first read his The Big Short (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2010), about the crash…
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Detention
When I was in school in the 1960’s, detention was what happened to you if you attempted to imitate farting when the French teacher was writing on the board, and he figured out it was you. You spent forty-five minutes after school in a classroom with, quite deliberately, nothing to do. It turned out to…