Consumer Watchdog "Do Not Track Me" Initiative against Google

After this Michael Butler decided to defend the boiled peanut. This includes a recipe for boiling peanuts.

Bumbling politician of the year!

An interesting point made in the full article deals with the lack in confidence in the Fed which prevents them from doing what they could to stimulate the economy. Which means we are screwed. Again.

For simplicity, let’s assume that the Fed’s policy instrument (now that the federal funds rate is stuck near zero) is the 10-year Treasury note. As an example, suppose the yield is 4%. In that case, it’s all but certain that the Fed, if it chooses, can do something to stimulate the economy and raise the inflation rate.

For example, suppose the Fed were to bid the 10-year note yield down from 4% to 1%. It would take out a whole slew of marginal noteholders in the process. Banks that had been satisfied with a 4% return would be unsatisfied with a 1% return and would lend more aggressively. Domestic investors that had been satisfied with a 4% return would be unsatisfied with 1% and would bite the bullet and buy stocks. International investors would be unsatisfied and would shift their investments into foreign assets, thus weakening the dollar and making US products more competitive. Households would refinance their mortgages and spend some portion of the increased cash flow. Others who previously couldn’t afford houses could now afford them, so demand for houses and home furnishings would go up. And so on. With such a huge policy action, it’s virtually certain that business activity would accelerate enough to reverse any deflationary pressure.

Years ago, you couldn’t pick up a computer magazine (remember magazines?) or mainstream newspapers or magazines with an article about computers that didn’t predict what computing would be like in the future. You don’t see too much of that anymore. Here’s an article my brother ran across from eight years ago about where we’d be this year related to processors.

LUCKY PUNTERS WILL BE ABLE TO BUY 15GHZ INTEL CHIPS, containing a billion transistors, by the end of the decade, said Pat Gelsinger, Intel veep and CTO in his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in Tokyo today. Gelsinger also predicted that PDAs will hit 5GHz in the same timeframe. It’s unlikely the chips will use the existing Pentium 4 architecture which is reckoned to only be good up to around 10GHz.

“You would look at a major micro-architecture like the Pentium 4 and it is typically five to eight years that you would operate on that same micro-architecture until you would introduce a major new one,” Gelsinger told PC Advisor. “So while I expect that timeline to be fairly similar, we have not laid out a specific new major micro-architecture step that we will be taking.

“Desktops today are 75 to 100 watts, and when you go to handheld devices you are typically operating at less than 1 watt,” he added. “Obviously, you are optimising the design for different criteria. So today, if I was going to look at a StrongArm or XScale core, could I create a 2GHz or 3GHz XScale today? Absolutely. Could I do so and deliver the best trade-off of power and performance inside a 1-watt envelope? No. You tend to design the chips differently to live inside different devices.”

Found by Brother Uncle Don

This Episode’s Executive Producer: Ara Derderian
Executive Producers: Sir Paul Couture, Sir Matthew Greensmith
Art By: Nick the Rat

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