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It’s a remarkably universal sentiment and Google is apparently on the bandwagon:

Google has long been unhappy with the state of broadband in America, where speeds lag far behind those of other developed countries. It announced the plan for its high-speed network, which would be open to other companies wanting to offer Internet service

Google is, like Apple, one of those companies that seems to be able to do stuff everyone else does, but do it better. In this case, my narrative for phone/cable companies’ pricing is a combination of weird regulatory problems (listen Russ Roberts interview Thomas Hazlett) and phone subsidization.

Phone companies are ridiculously profitable, so maybe Google knows something that nobody else does…

He’s awesome.

The poor pay more for things and Marathon runners forget stuff

Apparently Esquire Magazine has some bright spark telling us to invest in gold. Felix isn’t impressed:

But to appreciate the fuller expression of Kurson’s genius, it’s worth flicking through his archives. There’s the 2006 article where he says that everybody should invest in credit default swaps… Kurson also reckoned that the automakers were a screaming buy in 2005, saying that “GM is moving with stunning speed to address what ails its business, and that “the United States government will not allow Ford or General Motors to default on its debt”.

He also told us to short Apple at $65 bucks, apparently.

It’s all hilarious stuff, of course, but I’m reminded of something I read at TED:

And what is the market itself but a gigantic, multi-tentacled, complexly interlinked engine for the real-time calculation of conventional wisdom? Figuring out, anticipating, and shaping conventional wisdom is what investment bankers do. It is the ocean in which we swim.

This Kurson fellow has, in the past, done his little part in awarding a few fat cat bonuses to bankers and investors smart enough to figure out his advice before he gave it. He is, perhaps, doing it again.

Fifth genome ever decoded is of a 4000 year old Greenlander. My favourite bit:

The hair was excavated in 1986 and kept in a plastic bag in the National Museum of Denmark. It was found with other waste, and the scientists speculate that it was the result of a haircut.

There it moldered, unfrozen, until discovered by Dr. Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA. Having spent two months digging for ancient human DNA in Greenland without finding any human remains, he concluded that ancient Greenlanders must have disposed of their dead by laying them on the sea ice. Only on complaining of his bad luck to a friend did he learn that the friend’s father had found the hair sample 20 years earlier.

The moral of today’s story? It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Re Risk sums it up nicely and ends with:

Slope + Loose Mud + Water = Disagreebleness x Lots

Worse than the Great Canadian Slump

On Hank Paulson’s autobio

His memoir is like Tolstoy. It gives the spectacularly unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it.

Indeed – if this kind of thing resonates, read some Arnold Kling

The last three paragraphs are best and here is the money quote

The capacity for risk is related to the maturity of funding and not what an institution is called.

(h/t Arnold Kling, who comments)

My view is that the fundamental risks, such as business cycle risk, interest-rate risk, currency risk, and so on, are inescapable. However, regulatory incentives affect both the aggregate exposure and the concentration of exposure.

Arab ambassador discovers bride is bearded and cross-eyed behind

Portrait of the Banker (as a 29-Year-Old)