Rubénerd!

An interesting (or at least, I thought it was interesting!) report from the Guardian:

The Bundesbank plans to bring back to Germany some of its 1,500 tons of gold stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve in New York, and the 450 tons stashed with the Bank of France in Paris, reported the German newspaper Handelsblatt.

Economics aside, why was it all there?

Most of Germany’s gold reserves have been stored overseas since the cold war amid fears of a Soviet invasion.

While a fascinating idea, the official press release from the Bundesbank website makes no mention of the cold war or the Soviet Union as a reason.

The image above is of the Deutsche Bundesbank building in Frankfurt, by MBisanz on Wikimedia Commons. A classic Brutalist design. The building in the photo, not the photographer. You're weird. KRQRG636ED2W

Towards the end of his article in the Australian Financial Review:

In so many areas, the left is being forced to deal with the byproducts of its own success – achievements within the capitalist system that have generated knock-on problems.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there were two great socialist goals: widespread economic ownership and universal education. The first has produced a highly materialistic society (undermining traditional left-wing values of compassion and collectivism), while the second has, perversely enough, encouraged anti-enlightenment on climate change.

He argues with greater education, we've become dabblers in many fields without becoming experts, which predisposes us to be sceptical of traditional sources of authority, such as the scientific community. Interesting idea.

So let me get this straight, because honest taxpayers like Neal O'Carroll have been so generous in shouldering the burden imposed by the bankers that got them into this economic mess... the bankers are getting an investment.

(Photo was taken by me during our Europe trip in 2010. Random street in Dublin during a snow storm, with a bank ATM to the side. Kinda made sense given the subject matter!)

At least it's not Moodys

(Reuters) - Positive news from Ireland is prompting a growing number of investors to look at the troubled euro zone economy, said billionaire Wilbur Ross, who this week invested 300 million euros in its largest lender.

Billionaires know all! After all, it wasn't billionaires that got us into this mess.

Ross said the deal was fueled by positive news from Ireland [..] These include the government's announcement it was ahead of target to bring its budget deficit under control, lack of protest against a harsh austerity program, and the European Union's decision this month to ease the terms of an 85-billion-euro international bailout.

Harsh would be the understatement of the century. Well to be fair this century is only 10% or so over, so perhaps more like the understatement of last century.

The power of accurate observation...

In any event, nothing says fair like giving the people at the helm a bailout, then demanding the middle class repay it in the form of reduced services and higher taxes. I looked up the word "austerity" in the thesaurus, and the word "fair" was right there.

Oh but wait, we haven't got to the truly fabulous bit yet!

A key development was a euro zone deal that eases the terms of Ireland's bailout and positive comments from the International Monetary Fund that Ireland's program is on track, assuring investors that Ireland had virtually guaranteed funding through 2013.

Ah, the IMF. So the economic hit men got what they wanted. Does that mean they can take their plundered riches and leave my Irish friends alone now?

Ending on a positive note

Although Ireland is mid-way through an unprecedented eight-year cycle of austerity, social unrest is almost non-existent and unlike Greece and Portugal, Ireland is expected to return to growth this year because of a vibrant export sector and the flexibility of its economy.

So there you have it. As long as the Irish can continue to be as creative and resourceful as they've always been, their economy will eventually pick up again from the mess the bankers got them into, and said bankers will be there to profit from them once more.

Have a Guinness on me guys and girls!

Analysts at Westpac noted on Wednesday that the US dollar erased its overnight gains in Asia as the market shrugged off Moody's downgrade of Portugal's credit rating to junk status and the placement of it on the negative watch list. Traders also paid little reaction to Moody's warning that the banks involved in Greek debt roll over may have to record impairment charges. ~ AFX News

Hardly surprising, if true. Where were these ratings agencies before the global financial crisis? I wish I were the first to make this observation, but I would rate their relevance and predictive performance as "junk".

But without more consumer spending, businesses won’t spend more. A robust economy can’t be built on inventory replacements. ~ Robert Reich

Exactly. This is another reason why my American friends should be viewing the reports that Chrysler "paid off" their governments debts six years early with nothing but scepticism. Paying off debts due to demand from governments refreshing their car fleets rather than from private consumers is tantamount to smoke and mirrors.

I'd also argue if the US government were serious about creating jobs and helping the environment they'd put people to work improving public transport instead, but that's just my no good greenie side asserting itself again.

This is the greatest thing I've read in a long time.

Critics of Social Security and Medicare frequently invoke the words and ideals of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the fiercest critics of federal insurance programs. But a little-known fact is that Ayn Rand herself collected Social Security. She may also have received Medicare benefits.

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights also has a page on their website entitled Social Security is Immoral. Me thinks we'll be seeing a revision soon to include an exception clause. Sounds like if Santa was a programmer. Bad joke, sorry.

One score and nine years ago, our father Reagan brought forth, on the North American continent, a new nation, conceived in the idea that greed is good and taxes are bad, that government is the enemy , and dedicated to the proposition that rich men are more equal than “others.” ~ James K Weston

Perhaps a slight oversimplification, but I still liked it. The quote I mean, not the actions. Something about Thatcherism would have been good to include too.

My 24th year on this spinning lump of rock was a real watershed: my dissolution with politicians finally eclipsed my optimism. It doesn't mean I'm a pessimist, perhaps more a realist.

For those of you not reading the independent North Korean Economic Report site, its writer Curtis Melvin is reporting some fresh attacks against their systems that seem to have come from their namesake. And I thought I had tough critics.

A few months ago I wrote about two attempts to hack into my computer. The post is here if you are interested. Well, since then I have fended off no less than six attempts to break into my computer–including two attempts just today (three this week). One email containing a virus was ostensibly from a North Korea expert and the second email was intended to look like it came from the Korea Economic Institute (it even referenced an actual upcoming event of theirs). I know of several others who have been targeted and some who have even been infected so please be careful out there. Someone is still not playing nice.

No kidding.

For those of you not familiar with the site, North Korean Economy Watch is a fascinating blog on not just the economics of North Korea (that they glean facts about through watching it, I'm assuming) but also a ton more other stuff with plenty of photos, maps and links. I follow very few blogs like this, but only because ones of this calibre are so hard to find these days in an ocean of me-too gadget blogs with hundreds of writers. Really, how many more of those do we need!? But I digress.

I don't come up with these terms

I haven't read into the finder details of the attack, but it seems like a case of spearfishing or "weaponised" email to use the latest security conference parlance. Instead of using botnets of readily infected Windows machines, some of the craftier malicious hackers are now targeting specific recipients by searching for vulnerabilities and exploring them to deliver their payload. In this case, some social engineering was employed to (attempt) to trick the North Korean Economy Watch folks by disguising the email as being from an agency they have a relationship with in order to lull them into a false sense of security so they'd lower their guard. Once you've done that, you can wreck havoc on their systems (or site accounts, or credit cards in other cases).

I'm relieved their site is okay, and that they practice due diligence when reading email; most people don't which is what terrifies me. No doubt we haven't heard the last of such attacks.

On an unrelated note, I have a sudden craving for kimchi, haven't had it in ages. Who's up for some?

By themselves these two interest rate stories about Australia and Canada wouldn't really be worth mentioning here, but when they appeared in my Twitter client together they made for an interesting contrast:

CBC News: Bank of Canada raises interest rate to 0.5% Read more:... http://bit.ly/cAB6Cx

SBS News: Reserve Bank of Australia keeps interest rates on hold at 4.5 per cent http://bit.ly/ag0E4B

WOW! I suppose I should move to Canada and buy an apartment, eh!

So I want to get a new 2TB drive for my FreeBSD and Fedora tower. Looking at the Cybermind pricelist most of their Western Digital drives referenced EARS, an acronym which I'm assuming has nothing to do with the drives being able to detect audible messages from their operators, or allow them to operate a European aerospace conglomerate. Oh wait that's EADS, never mind.

Now hear this, sorry, really bad pun

It turns out EARS is (amongst other things) a new formatting method for Western Digital drives that uses 4KiB blocks instead of the regular 512 bytes. It seems to me like its a cost cutting measure and would decrease drive density due to greater file size rounding. As far as I can tell no other manufacturer is doing this yet.

Potential performance and density issues aside though, what I'm more interested in is compatibly. Scouring FreeBSD and Fedora web forums it seems a lot of people have been having issues with these drives using any OSs other than Windows Vista or Windows Vista Second Edition/7. Whether it's something FLOSS OSs will adapt to in the future I can't say, but for the time being it makes these drives useless for my needs.

Insert required personal experience here

On the whole I've had good experiences with Western Digital drives; I was burned quite literally by a Seagate a few years ago when it irreversibly destroyed the desperately needed FireWire port on my MacBook Pro and Maxtor are really just a cheapie brand for Seagate now. Then again I've also heard plenty of horror stories from people about WD drives, including ones that WD use refurbished drives in some of their external enclosures.

I suppose hard drives are universally bad and it all comes down to user preference. It's a clever ploy because drive manufacturers can skimp on more stringent QC and lower tolerances, and then tell people they need to buy more drives for backups for when their crappy drives fail. It's one of the few consumer goods that are terrible but can be fixed by buying even more, it's genius!

Is there an economic model that shows a correlation between the demand for a good and a decrease in quality at the same price? It wouldn't be an elastic or Giffin because price isn't the reason people buy more, but it wouldn't be inelastic because that shows a sustained amount of consumption regardless of price. Or perhaps it would be then? Its been a while since I've studied economics ;).