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Gene Ellis

Luring Back the Chinese Who Study Abroad - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-the-chinese-who-study-abroad

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • First, the rate of return has remained approximately 30 percent for decades.
  • in 2009, more than 240,000 Chinese students went abroad to study at all levels — high school, undergraduate and graduate degrees, a tenfold increase over 2004.
  • Second, the return rate among Chinese who received Ph.D.’s in the United States is shockingly low. Approximately 92 percent of all Chinese who received a science or technology Ph.D. in the U.S. in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007. This rate was well above India’s, which is in second place with 81 percent.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In late 2008, the Chinese Communist Party began the “1,000 Talents” program, aimed at these supremely talented Chinese. Through a wide variety of terrific incentives — sometimes as much as $1 million — the party has encouraged academic and research institutes, as well as municipal governments, to “bring back the best.”
  • Most important, it must weaken the power of academic and scientific administrators.
  • Similarly, in many institutions, promotion depends on your relationship with the dean or senior faculty and not your academic pedigree.
  • Returnees, or those who hesitate to return, often say that in China, “personal relationships are too complex” – a code for the backstabbing and petty jealousies and the need to cultivate ties with leaders in your own field.
Gene Ellis

Europe's Galileo GPS Plan Limps to Crossroads - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-plan-limps-to-crossroads.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 07 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Galileo — first proposed in 1994, more than 20 years after America started its own system, and initially promoted as a big potential moneymaker — “can’t give a direct return on investment, but politically it is very important for Europe to have its own autonomous system,” said Mr. Magliozzi of Telespazio.
  • It is also designed to be far more precise than the American version.
  • Galileo has been financed almost entirely by the European Union since 2007. It is the first and so far only major infrastructure project managed by the European Commission.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Critics mocked it as “the Common Agricultural Policy in the sky,” a reference to Europe’s program of subsidies for farmers, which eats up nearly 40 percent of the union’s total budget.
  • A 2011 report to the European Parliament listed a catalog of troubles, noting that Galileo had been particularly blighted in its early years by a familiar problem: political pressure from individual countries to skew the project in favor of their own companies and other immediate interests.
  • It quoted the OHB chief, Berry Smutny, describing Galileo as doomed to fail without major changes and “a waste of E.U. taxpayers’ money championed by French interests.” Mr. Smutny, who disputed the comments attributed to him, was fired by the company.
  • Astrium won an initial Galileo contract for four satellites. But contracts worth $1 billion for 22 more satellites have all gone to OHB, now one of the primary corporate beneficiaries of Galileo. British companies have also done well, a boon that has helped erode Britain’s initial hostility to the project.
  • Washington also asked why, when many European nations were increasingly unable to fulfill their military obligations as members of NATO because of defense cuts, they wanted to splash billions on a project that replicated an existing system paid for by the United States.
  • They acknowledge that Galileo, most of whose services will be free like those of GPS, will not earn much.
Gene Ellis

Europe Eyes Trade Pact With Obama - NYTimes.com - 0 views

rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/...ope-eyes-trade-pact-with-obama

europe eyes trade pact obama

shared by Gene Ellis on 08 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • “A car tested for safety in the United States could be sold in Europe without further tests, while a drug deemed safe by Brussels would not have to be approved as well by the U.S. government,” according to a Reuters report that cited examples of the benefits of a free-trade agreement.
Gene Ellis

"The Euro's Latest Reprieve" by Joseph E. Stiglitz | Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...the-euro-s-latest-reprieve

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Like an inmate on death row, the euro has received another last-minute stay of execution. It will survive a little longer. The markets are celebrating, as they have after each of the four previous “euro crisis” summits – until they come to understand that the fundamental problems have yet to be addressed.
  • Europe’s leaders did not recognize this rising danger, which could easily be averted by a common guarantee, which would simultaneously correct the market distortion arising from the differential implicit subsidy.
  • Likewise, they now recognize that bailout loans that give the new lender seniority over other creditors worsen the position of private investors, who will simply demand even higher interest rates.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It is deeply troubling that it took Europe’s leaders so long to see something so obvious
  • What is now proposed is recapitalization of the European Investment Bank, part of a growth package of some $150 billion. But politicians are good at repackaging, and, by some accounts, the new money is a small fraction of that amount, and even that will not get into the system immediately. In short: the remedies – far too little and too late – are based on a misdiagnosis of the problem and flawed economics.
  • Eurobonds and a solidarity fund could promote growth and stabilize the interest rates faced by governments in crisis. Lower interest rates, for example, would free up money so that even countries with tight budget constraints could spend more on growth-enhancing investments.
  • Even well-managed banking systems would face problems in an economic downturn of Greek and Spanish magnitude; with the collapse of Spain’s real-estate bubble, its banks are even more at risk.
  • Europe’s leaders have finally understood that the bootstrap operation by which Europe lends money to the banks to save the sovereigns, and to the sovereigns to save the banks, will not work.
  • The euro was flawed from the outset, but it was clear that the consequences would become apparent only in a crisis.
  • Workers may leave Ireland or Greece not because their productivity there is lower, but because, by leaving, they can escape the debt burden incurred by their parents.
  • Germany worries that, without strict supervision of banks and budgets, it will be left holding the bag for its more profligate neighbors. But that misses the key point: Spain, Ireland, and many other distressed countries ran budget surpluses before the crisis. The down
  • turn caused the deficits, not the other way around.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
  • If these countries made a mistake, it was only that, like Germany today, they were overly credulous of markets, so they (like the United States and so many others) allowed an asset bubble to grow unchecked.
  • Moreover, Germany is on the hook in either case: if the euro or the economies on the periphery collapse, the costs to Germany will be high.
  • While structural problems have weakened competitiveness and GDP growth in particular countries, they did not bring about the crisis, and addressing them will not resolve it.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
Gene Ellis

Banks' Fire Drill for Greece Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dealbook.nytimes.com/...fire-drill-for-greece-election

banks fire drill greece election nytimes nytimes com com

shared by Gene Ellis on 16 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • In New York and London, banks have set up dedicated crisis teams, and rehearsed elaborate responses.
  • Citigroup has $84 billion in loans, bonds and other types of exposure to troubled European countries, plus France. The bank’s filings indicate that all but $8 billion of that exposure is offset with collateral it has collected and hedges on the portfolio.
  • Some banks are testing their systems to deal with the possibility of new currencies and preparing guidance for clients on how to operate in such an environment.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are also looking into the severe legal challenges that would arise if a country exited the euro. Contracts that govern loans, bonds and derivatives in Europe rarely take into account such a situation.
  • Consider an Italian corporation that owed a foreign bank 5 million euros, with a loan agreement struck under Italian law. If Italy left the euro, the bank might have less chance of getting euros back after the exit. In that case, the financial firm might be exposed to a new, less valuable currency.
  • Recognizing that threat, some banks are trying to move contracts into new jurisdictions like the United States or Britain. By transferring such loan agreements to English law, the banks may increase the chances of getting repaid in euros after an exit, according to legal experts.
  • The banks are also trying to protect their balance sheets if they do get stuck with large amounts of assets denominated in a new, weaker currency.
  • By doing so, they can better match their assets (the loans) within a specific country with their liabilities (the deposits). Then if a country left the euro zone, the value of the loan might fall in euros, but the banks wouldn’t owe as much to depositors in euros.
  • Mr. Lim notes, however, that some large banks, including Deutsche Bank, still have a lot more loans than deposits in countries like Italy and Spain.
Gene Ellis

U.S. Pressure Rises to End Bangladesh Trade Status - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-bangladesh-trade-status.html

u s pressure bangladesh trade status nytimes

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Bangladesh’s garment sector represents roughly $19 billion in annual revenue and employs nearly four million workers, most of them women. It sells more than $4.5 billion worth of goods to the United States each year. 
Gene Ellis

A Disease Cuts Corn Yields - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-disease-cuts-corn-yields.html

GM

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • No one is certain why Goss’s wilt has become so rampant in recent years. But many plant pathologists suspect that the biggest factor is the hybrids chosen for genetic modification by major seed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. “My theory is that there were a couple of hybrids planted that were selected because they had extremely high yield potentials,” said Dr. Robertson, whose research is financed by Monsanto and the Agriculture Department. “They also may have been highly susceptible to Goss’s wilt.”
  • About 90 percent of the corn grown in the United States comes from seeds that have been engineered in a laboratory, their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Almost all American corn, for instance, is now engineered to resist the powerful herbicide glyphosate (often sold as Roundup), so farmers can kill weeds without killing their corn.
  • As farmers grow more corn to satisfy the demand for ethanol, they are rotating it less frequently with other crops.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “One of the best management techniques for controlling Goss’s wilt is crop rotation — corn, then soy or another crop,” Mr. Anderson said.
  • nother possible factor is the growth of no-till farming, which leaves cornstalks, on which the bacteria can linger, to decay in the field after harvesting, rather than being plowed under.
Gene Ellis

These maps show how Asia is taking over the oil markets - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...is-taking-over-the-oil-markets

Asia oil market

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • he world is now using a record amount of oil even though Europe and the United States are paring back.
  • And even as companies are finding new sources of crude in the deep ocean, tar sands and shale rock, they’re struggling to keep up and global crude prices are much, much higher than they were back in 1980.
Gene Ellis

Coming Full Circle in Energy, to Nuclear - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-full-circle-in-energy.html

coal nuclear

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In a typical day, Mr. Durgin tells me, 21 trains depart the mine, pulling 135 cars each. Each car bears 120 tons of coal. At this pace, he says, there is more than 20 years’ worth of coal ready to mine under my feet.
  • North Antelope Rochelle is among the biggest coal mines in the world. It produced 108 million tons last year — about 10 percent of all the coal burned by the nation’s power plants.
  • North Antelope Rochelle and the other vast strip mines cutting through the plains of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — whose low-sulfur carbon met standards imposed by the Clean Air Act — were the result
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  • Today renewable energy supplies only about 6 percent of American demand. And most of that comes from water flowing through dams. Solar energy contributes next to nothing.
  • The arithmetic is merciless. To make it likely that the world’s temperature will rise no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the average of the preindustrial era — a target agreed to by the world’s governments in 2010 — humanity must spew no more than 900 billion more tons of carbon dioxide into the air from now through 2050 and only 75 billion tons after that, according to an authoritative new study in Britain.
  • The United States Energy Information Administration forecasts that global energy consumption will grow 56 percent between now and 2040.
  • “We have trillions of tons of coal resources in the world,” Vic Svec, spokesman for Peabody Energy, told me. “You can expect the world to use them all.”
  • The only way around this is to put something in coal’s place, at a reasonably competitive price. Neither the warm glow of the sun nor the restless power of the wind is going to do the trick, at least not soon enough to make a difference in the battle to prevent climate change.
Gene Ellis

Tracing Germs Through the Aisles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-germs-through-the-aisles.html

antibiotic animals

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • More than 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in the United States are given to animals.
  • Agribusiness groups disagree and say the main problem is overuse of antibiotic treatments for people. Bugs rarely migrate from animals to people, and even when they do, the risk they pose to human health is negligible, the industry contends.
  • He is comparing the genetic sequences of E. coli germs resistant to multiple antibiotics found in the meat samples to the ones that have caused urinary tract infections in people (mostly women).
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Urinary infections were chosen because they are so common. American women get more than eight million of them a year. In rare cases the infections enter the bloodstream and are fatal.
  • A new strain of the antibiotic-resistant bug MRSA, for example, was first detected in people in Holland in 2003, and now represents 40 percent of the MRSA infections in humans in that country, according to Jan Kluytmans, a Dutch researcher. That same strain was common in pigs on farms before it was found in people, scientists say.
  • He thinks the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to limit antibiotic use on farms have been weak. In 1977, the F.D.A. said it would begin to ban some agricultural uses of antibiotics. But the House and Senate appropriations committees — dominated by agricultural interests — passed resolutions against the ban, and the agency retreated. More recently, the agency has limited the use of two important classes of antibiotics in animals. But advocates say it needs to go further and ban use of all antibiotics for growth promotion. Sweden and Denmark have already done so.
  • Ms. Slaughter said aggressive lobbying by agribusiness interests has played a major role in blocking passage of legislation.
  • But the economics of food presents perhaps the biggest obstacle. On large industrial farms, animals are raised in close contact with one another and with big concentrations of bacteria-laden feces and urine. Antibiotics keep infections at bay but also create drug resistance.
Gene Ellis

At Anchor Off Lithuania, Its Own Energy Supply - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-for-energy-independence.html

gas Russia Lithuania

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The price of natural gas in Lithuania was 15 percent higher than the European average last year, according to the European Commission. Only Bulgaria, where Gazprom has a near monopoly, paid more. Gazprom also has an ownership stake in Lithuania’s natural gas distribution network. Part of Lithuania’s electrical infrastructure is still controlled from Moscow, too, and it is not yet possible to connect the country to the European grid.
  • Lithuania also does not use oil shale, which provides much of the electricity for Estonia, the third Baltic member of the European Union.
  • Lithuania used to rely on nuclear power to supply most of its electricity. But as a condition of joining the union in 2004, the country agreed to shut down its Chernobyl-style nuclear power station at Ignalina.
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  • Klaipedos Nafta, a state-controlled oil terminal operator, is leasing the ship, formally known as a floating gas storage and regasification unit, from a Norwegian company, Hoegh, in a 10-year deal for 430 million euros, or $560 million.
  • Lithuania would need to import L.N.G. at prices 5 to 10 percent less than Gazprom charges for its gas to ensure the project breaks even; Lithuanian officials said the price of L.N.G. imports could be as much as 20 percent less than Gazprom charges.
  • “We will be able for the first time in our history to negotiate, because we have alternative sources,”
  • But Mr. Masiulis said his greatest challenge was overcoming the Lithuanian bureaucracy and fending off attempts to give the project “a shade of corruption.”
Gene Ellis

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ret-to-success-is-failure.html

Duckworth

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
  • Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
  • Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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  • According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.
  • As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.
  • “The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”
  • Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s.
  • People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”
  • Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled a “report card.”
  • Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
  • She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.
  • The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
  • The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates — about 350 kids, in all — and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen:
  • I came to Witter’s class to observe something that Levin was calling “dual-purpose instruction,” the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.
  • It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.
  • The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
Gene Ellis

The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...3

shared by Gene Ellis on 26 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Both Bowman and Calvaruso knew something about “lean” manufacturing techniques—the style of factory management invented by Toyota whereby everyone has a say in critiquing and improving the way work gets done, with a focus on eliminating waste. Lean management is not a new concept, but outside of car making, it hasn’t caught on widely in the United States. It requires an open, collegial, and relentlessly self-critical mind-set among workers and bosses alike—a mind-set that is hard to create and sustain.
  • If the people who design dishwashers sit at their desks in one building, and the people who sell them to retailers and consumers sit at their desks in another building, and the people who make the dishwashers are in a different country and speak a different language—you never realize that the four screws should disappear, let alone come up with a way they can.
  • Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • All that said, big factories have a way of creating larger economies around them—they have a “multiplier effect,” in economic parlance
Gene Ellis

The tragedy of Argentina: A century of decline | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...hat-went-wrong-century-decline

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The tragedy of Argentina A century of decline
  • In the 43 years leading up to 1914, GDP had grown at an annual rate of 6%, the fastest recorded in the world.
  • The country ranked among the ten richest in the world, after the likes of Australia, Britain and the United States, but ahead of France, Germany and Italy.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Its income per head was 92% of the average of 16 rich economies
  • Its income per head is now 43% of those same 16 rich economies; it trails Chile and Uruguay in its own back yard.
  • The election of 1989 marked the first time in more than 60 years that a civilian president had handed power to an elected successor.
  • the repeated recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the hyperinflation of 1989-90, the economic crisis of 2001 and now the possibility of another crisis to come.
  • But three deep-lying explanations help to illuminate the country’s diminishment. Firstly, Argentina may have been rich 100 years ago but it was not modern. That made adjustment hard when external shocks hit. The second theory stresses the role of trade policy. Third, when it needed to change, Argentina lacked the institutions to create successful policies.
  • Railways transformed the economics of agriculture and refrigerated shipping made it possible to export meat on an unprecedented scale: between 1900 and 1916 Argentine exports of frozen beef rose from 26,000 tonnes to 411,000 tonnes a year. But Argentina mainly consumed technology from abroad rather than inventing its own.
  • External shocks duly materialised, which leads to the second theory for Argentine decline: trade policy.
  • Argentina raised import tariffs from an average of 16.7% in 1930 to 28.7% in 1933. Reliance on Britain, another country in decline, backfired as Argentina’s favoured export market signed preferential deals with Commonwealth countries.
  • an existing policy of import substitution deepened; the share of trade as a percentage of GDP continued to fall.
  • High food prices meant big profits for farmers but empty stomachs for ordinary Argentines. Open borders increased farmers’ takings but sharpened competition from abroad for domestic industry.
  • “One-third of the country—the commodities industry, engineers and regional industries like wine and tourism—is ready to compete,” says Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst. “Two-thirds are not.”
  • Property rights are insecure
  • Statistics cannot be trusted: Argentina was due this week to unveil new inflation data in a bid to avoid censure from the IMF for its wildly undercooked previous estimates.
  • hort-termism is embedded in the system
  • “We have spent 50 years thinking about maintaining government spending, not about investing to grow,” says Fernando de la Rúa, a former president who resigned during the 2001 crisis.
  • The country’s Vaca Muerta (“Dead Cow”) shale-oil and gasfield is estimated to be the world’s third-largest. If Argentina can attract foreign capital, the money could start flowing within a decade.
Gene Ellis

Robert J. Shiller attributes Japan's incipient recovery - and weak growth elsewhere - to prevailing economic narratives. - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...prevailing-economic-narratives

shared by Gene Ellis on 23 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The Global Economy’s Tale Risks
  • Fluctuations in the world’s economies are largely due to the stories we hear and tell about them. These popular, emotionally relevant narratives sometimes inspire us to go out and spend, start businesses, build new factories and office buildings, and hire employees; at other times, they put fear in our hearts and impel us to sit tight, save our resources, curtail spending, and reduce risk. They either stimulate our “animal spirits” or muffle them.
  • The output gap for the world’s major advanced economies, as calculated by the IMF, remains disappointing, at -3.2% in 2013, which is less than half-way back to normal from 2009, the worst year of the global financial crisis, when the gap was -5.3%.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Think of the story of the real-estate boom in the United States and other countries in the first half of the 2000’s. This was a story not of a “bubble”; rather, the boom was a triumph of capitalist enterprise in a new millennium.
  • These stories were so powerful because a huge number of people were psychologically – and financially – invested in them
  • With the abrupt end of the boom in 2006, that ego-boosting story also ended.
  • To understand why economic recovery (if not that of the stock market) has remained so weak since 2009, we need to identify which stories have been affecting popular psychology.
Gene Ellis

As Drilling Practice Takes Off in U.S., Europe Proves Hesitant - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-europe-proves-hesitant.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Germany’s decision to eliminate its nuclear plants led it to bring coal-fired power plants out of mothballs to make up the difference. Doing so was a viable option because coal demand in the United States has dropped sharply as American power plants have turned to less expensive gas, driving down the cost of American coal for export to global markets.
  • As a result, carbon dioxide emissions in Germany went up last year, not down
  • “Without shale gas, this would be a world where Russia would have very, very strong market power and there would be very strong dependency on gas supply from geopolitically risky regions in the Middle East, Iran and North Africa,” said Laszlo Varro, the director of the Gas, Coal and Power Markets Division of the International Energy Agency.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Gazprom, the huge Russian gas company, finds its traditional business model in trouble. Under the pressure of a market in which gas is being supplied from more places, Gazprom has had to renegotiate gas contracts with European countries, costing it $6 billion, Mr. Varro said.
  • “Gazprom is not against shale gas,” Mr. Stevens said, “it’s just against everyone else having it.”
  • As Europe becomes a more “contestable market” with more integrated pipelines, more liquefied natural gas and more shale gas, behavior will change. “If people can come in easily, the threat of coming in will make the monopolist behave differently,”
Gene Ellis

The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lessons-for-tech-industry.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • To train its new American engineers, Nissan flew workers to its Zama factory in eastern Japan. There the Nissan officials, assisted by English-speaking Japanese workers called “communication helpers,” imparted the intricacies of the company’s production techniques to the Americans.
  • Early on, Nissan guarded against quality concerns by not relying on parts from American suppliers. Most components were either shipped from Japan or produced by Japanese companies that set up operations nearby.
  • Gradually, American parts makers were allowed to bid on supply contracts. Even that came amid arm-twisting by Congress, which passed a law in 1992 requiring auto makers to inform consumers of the percentage of parts in United States-made cars that came from North America, Asia or elsewhere.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But no place has benefited to the extent of Tennessee, which counts more than 60,000 jobs related to automobile and parts production.
Gene Ellis

The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lessons-for-tech-industry.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The federal government would give Foxconn tax breaks, subsidized loans and special access through customs and lower tariffs for imported parts if it started assembling Apple products in Brazil, where Foxconn was already producing electronics for Dell, Sony and Hewlett-Packard.
  • Apple products remain expensive; the latest iPad, for instance, costs about $760 in Brazil, compared with $499 in the United States. But because those devices are made in Brazil and lower tariffs are charged on parts used to assemble them, Foxconn and Apple are pocketing larger shares of the profits, analysts say, offsetting the increased costs of building outside China.
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