Salish Sea? | OLD NEWS:British Columbia

Strait of Georgia or Salish Sea? | CTV British Columbia:

: ctvbc.ca

Date: Monday Mar. 10, 2008 8:28 PM PT

A proposal by a Vancouver Island First Nation band to rename the Strait of Georgia the Salish Sea has people across B.C. asking: What's in a name?

For the Chemainus First Nation on Vancouver Island, renaming the strait - the section of ocean between Vancouver Island and B.C.'s mainland -- would recognize the original inhabitants of Canada's west coast.

WEB_2008RobertDemarPhotography_SanJuanIslands_101.jpg

experiencewa.com

Band members pitched the name Salish Sea to B.C. government ministers as a name that's been catching on among natives in the area.

And the government of British Columbia -- celebrating its 150th anniversary -- says it will explore the name change.

Haida Gwaii -- islands off B.C.'s coast that were named the Queen Charlotte Islands -- as an example of how this could work.

Natives have been living on the coast for at least 8,000 years before Europeans sailed ships into Burrard Inlet.

But it was Captain George Vancouver who gave a name to the body of water in 1792, when he named it "Gulf of Georgia" after King George III.

In that monarch's long reign, from 1760 to 1820, and he defeated France in the Seven Years' War but lost the American colonies after the American Revolution.

  

Renaming the Strait of Georgia would require a formal application to the Geographical Names Board of Canada.

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Tsunami Fallout Arrives on the West Coast

There have been reports of cars, tractor-trailers, capsized ships and even whole houses bobbing around in open water.

Adrift: A whole house bobs in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan. An enormous field of debris was swept out to sea following the earthquake and tsunami

But even more grisly are the predictions of U.S. oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who is expecting human feet, still in their shoes, to wash up on the West Coast within three years.

'I'm expecting parts of houses, whole boats and feet in sneakers to wash up,' Mr Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer who has spent decades tracking flotsam, told MailOnline. 

Several thousand bodies were washed out to sea following the disaster and while most of the limbs will come apart and break down in the water, feet encased in shoes will float, Mr Ebbesmeyer said.

'I'm expecting the unexpected,' he added. 

Journey: This graphic depicts the predicted location of the Japan debris field as it swirls towards the U.S. West Coast. Scientists predict the first bits of rubbish will wash up in a year's time


In three years' time the debris field will have reached the U.S. and Canadian West Coast and will then turn toward Hawaii and back again toward Asia, circulating in what is known as the North Pacific gyre

Members of the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet, who spotted the extraordinary floating rubbish, say they have never seen anything like it and are warning the debris now poses a threat to shipping traffic.

'It's very challenging to move through these to consider these boats run on propellers and that these fishing nets or other debris can be dangerous to the vessels that are actually trying to do the work,' Ensign Vernon Dennis told ABC News. 

'So getting through some of these obstacles doesn't make much sense if you are going to actually cause more debris by having your own vessel become stuck in one of these waterways.'

Debris soup: There have been reports of cars, tractor-trailers and capsized ships bobbing around in open water off the coast of Japan

Vast: An aerial view of the debris shows massive amounts of timber, tyres and parts of houses. The U.S. Navy said they had never seen anything like it and warn it now poses a threat to shipping traffic

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Gold Bear Market: Storm Clouds On The Horizon

Soros sees gold prices on brink of bear market

Bloomberg News  Dec 29, 2011 – 1:40 PM ET

By Nicholas Larkin, Maria Kolesnikova and Debarati Roy

By Nicholas Larkin, Maria Kolesnikova and Debarati Roy

Gold is poised to complete its 11th consecutive annual gain, the longest winning streak in at least nine decades, on the brink of a bear market.

George Soros, the billionaire who two years ago called it the “ultimate asset bubble,” cut 99% of his holdings in the first quarter, Securities and Exchange Commission data show. Hedge fund managers John Paulson, Paul Touradji and Eric Mindich also sold bullion this year. While speculators in New York futures are the least bullish in 31 months, the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 44 traders and analysts is for prices to rally as much as 40% to US$2,140 an ounce in 2012.

The divergence of views is widening after prices declined 19% from a record close of US$1,900.23 on Sept. 5, or 1 percentage point away from a bear market. As some investors retreated to cash amid a US$10-trillion slump in global equity values since May, others bought more metal, taking holdings in exchange-traded products to an all-time high two weeks ago. Bullion’s 7.6% gain in 2011 means it’s on track to beat stocks, bonds and the dollar for a second straight year.

“It’s done its job this year of protecting investors,” said Michael Cuggino, 48, who helps manage about US$15-billion of assets, including US$3-billion in gold, at Permanent Portfolio Funds in San Francisco and correctly predicted in February that prices would keep rising. “Gold has been all over the place. If you bought gold at US$1,800 then you aren’t too happy. Some people will get out of gold, but the longer-term investors will remain.”

Trading Partners

Bullion was at US$1,530.07 at 2:35 p.m. in London, below this year’s average of US$1,572.47 and six times more than when the bull market began in 2001. The MSCI All-Country World Index of equities declined 10%, on track for the worst year since 2008, and the Dollar Index, a measure against six major trading partners, advanced 2%. Fixed-income securities around the world gained 4.3% this year, the weakest performance since 2007, Bank of America Corp. indexes show.

Investment in physical metal is cooling. The U.S. Mint’s sales of American Eagle gold coins in November were the weakest since June 2008, data on its web site show. Holdings in bullion- backed ETPs fell about 35 metric tons since reaching a record on Dec. 14, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They are still 140 tons higher than at the start of 2011 and the total of 2,326 tons, valued at about US$116-billion, exceeds the reserves of all but four central banks. ETP holdings climbed 0.3% yesterday, the first increase in two weeks.

Federal Reserve

Demand had strengthened most of this year as Europe’s debt crisis widened and the Federal Reserve pledged to keep interest rates near zero until at least mid-2013. The European Central Bank cut rates to 1% on Dec. 8, matching the record low of the euro era that began in 1999. That increases the appeal of bullion because it generally earns investors returns only through price gains.

“The longer-term trends, mainly government fiscal and monetary policies, haven’t changed,” said Tom Winmill, who helps manage more than US$200-million of assets from Walpole, New Hampshire, for Midas Funds and whose Midas Perpetual Portfolio may increase its 19% investment in bullion and gold mining companies in the next quarter. “Gold has that preservation-of-wealth role and was probably used quite a bit in the last several weeks.”

Options traders are also bullish, with the top nine holdings all betting on higher prices. The two most widely held contracts give holders the right to buy gold at US$2,000 by the end of March and May, data from the Comex exchange show.

Hedge Funds

That contrasts with money managers, who cut their wagers on a rally to 117,151 futures and options in the week ended Dec. 20, from as many as 253,653 in August, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The hedge funds and other speculators are now the least bullish since May 2009, a month in which gold jumped 10 percent.

Paulson, the billionaire fund manager mired in the worst slump of his career, sold 36% of his stake in the SPDR Gold Trust in the third quarter, an SEC filing showed. New York- based Paulson & Co. remains the biggest investor in the largest gold-backed ETP, with a stake valued at US$3.17-billion.

The 56-year-old manager’s Gold Fund was this year’s best performer among his US$28-billion fund family through about mid- December, people familiar with the figures said last week. Redemption requests for the end of the year were about US$2-billion, two people briefed on the matter said last month. Stefan Prelog, a spokesman, declined to comment.

‘Rational’ Buying

Soros Fund Management LLC, based in New York, sold almost all its shares in the SPDR Gold Trust and the iShares Gold Trust in the first quarter, SEC data show. Its 81-year-old founder, who made US$1-billion breaking the Bank of England’s defence of the pound in 1992, said in January 2010 that buying at the start of a bubble was “rational.”

The fund’s gold sales preceded a decision in July to return the less than US$1-billion managed for outsiders and focus on family and foundation money. It bought more SPDR Gold Trust shares in the third quarter and added options, SEC data show. Michael Vachon, a spokesman, declined to comment.

“Gold became very overbought,” said Charles Morris, who oversees about US$2.2-billion of assets at HSBC Global Asset Management in London and cut his bullion holdings to 6% at the end of November from 15% six months ago. “It will at least consolidate following this almighty rally. When the new bull market arrives, maybe a year or so away from now, then gold will once again prove to be a leading asset.”

‘End of Road’

Dennis Gartman, the economist and author of the Suffolk, Virginia-based Gartman Letter, said Dec. 13 that traders were witnessing the “death of a bull.” He sold the last of his gold the previous day and said Dec. 23 his outlook was neutral. The “megatrend” in bullion is “in all likelihood near the end of the road,” Markus Mezger, co-founder of Zug, Switzerland-based Tiberius Asset Management AG, which manages about US$2.5-billion of assets, said in its 2012 outlook report on Dec. 23.

Eton Park Capital Management LP, founded by 44-year-old Mindich, sold the last of its SPDR Gold Trust shares in the third quarter, according to SEC data. The holding was valued at US$135-million based on the average price over those three months. Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for the New York-based company, declined to comment.

Touradji Capital Management LP, led by its 40-year-old founder, sold all of its shares in the SPDR Gold Trust in the first three months of the year before buying back about 26% of that stake in the third quarter, the data show. Its largest holding in publicly traded equities remains Barrick Gold Corp., the world’s biggest miner of the metal. Prelog, also a spokesman for Touradji, declined to comment.

‘Makes People Nervous’

“Gold is going to go higher, but it’s not going to go in a straight line,” said Martin Murenbeeld, the 67-year-old chief economist at Toronto-based DundeeWealth Inc., which manages about US$100-billion in the Dynamic Mutual Funds. “Gold has given positive returns, but it doesn’t necessarily do it in the way that gives comfort, and that makes people nervous.”

Projections for a steady dollar may stall a gold rally. The Dollar Index, which gained 8% since the end of October, will reach 80.3 in the first quarter, from 80.6 now, the median of 10 analyst forecasts compiled by Bloomberg shows. The 30-week correlation coefficient between the currency and bullion is at – 0.48, with a figure of -1 meaning the two always move in opposite directions.

Trading Patterns

Bullion’s decline since reaching an intraday record of US$1,921.15 on Sept. 6 means it is heading for a quarterly average of US$1,684. While that’s the second-highest in data going back to 1920, it’s 10% or more below what Societe Generale SA, Barclays Capital and BNP Paribas SA predicted in September. This year’s high still managed to exceed the expectations of all but five of 35 analysts and traders surveyed by Bloomberg a year ago, who had a median estimate of US$1,700.

The metal closed below its 200-day moving average on Dec. 14 for the first time since January 2009, a sign for some investors who study charts of trading patterns and prices to predict trends that the rout has further to go. Prices have rallied as much as 2.7% since then and also gained after breaching the moving average in each year from 2003 to 2009.

Gold’s high in September has yet to exceed previous records when adjusted for inflation. The metal peaked at US$850 in 1980, equal to US$2,335 today, according to a calculator on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Central Banks

Mining companies are forecast to make the most profit ever. Barrick, based in Toronto, will report net income of US$4.72-billion this year and US$6.01-billion in 2012, according to the mean of 11 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Shares of the company, which Bloomberg Industries estimates mines about 9% of the world’s gold, fell 17% in New York this year. It’s trading at 9.1 times estimated earnings, down from 13.4 a year ago, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The drop in gold may spur more buying from central banks, putting a “floor” under prices, said Adrian Day, who manages about US$170-million of assets as the president of Adrian Day Asset Management in Annapolis, Maryland. The banks may add 600 tons to reserves next year, the most since at least 1970, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which on Dec. 1 said bullion would reach US$1,940 in 12 months.

“The bubble is in paper currency creation, not in physical gold,” said Ben Davies, the London-based manager of the Hinde Gold Fund, which gained 22% in the first 11 months of the year and invests in bullion stored in a Swiss private bank’s vaults. “Calls for a top in the market are premature.”

Bloomberg News

Leonard Cohen: Democracy - YouTube

Leonard Cohen: Democracy - YouTube: ""

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Flamingos rest on a frozen pond in their enclosure at the zoo in Zurich, Switzerland.






Giant pandas Qiqi (l.) and Zhizhi eat at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China. China will begin sending pandas bred in captivity into a controlled wilderness area in southwestern Sichuan province next month. The first six pandas will be released to a protected natural area covering more than 2,000 acres.

China Daily/Reuters

1 out of 2 Americans are Poor!!!

Woody Guthrie-This Land Is Your Land - YouTube: ""

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Its a Mean Old World

THIS SHOULD ENCOURAGE THE POPULACE TO EMBRACE THE OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTEST.

Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income
-  HOPE YEN, Associated Press 


“If Americans ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless.”
- Thomas Jefferson


"One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute."
- William Feather

14 Smart Things Adam Smith Said About Money

1. We want money to buy things
Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.

It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.


2. You need money to make money

A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have a little, it is often easier to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.


3. The pursuit and exchange of money is uniquely human
Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. 


4. The first money was labor
Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.

 
5. It is our nature to accumulate money
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.


6. If you have money, you should be able to spend it as you see fit
It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries.


7. The joy of having money is to show it off

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.


8. We want payment on land we control
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.


9. The production and sale of goods is not for the welfare of others
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.


10. Monopolies are a fact of life
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.


11. Taxes should be gentle

Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.


12. Taxes should be convenient

Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it. 


13. The government's job is to protect those who have money from those who don't

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.


14. Times get rough when too many people don't have money
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.


Excerpts from The Wealth of Nations

Happens all the time...

NASA - 2012: Magnetic Pole Reversal Happens All The (Geologic) Time:

Scientists understand that Earth's magnetic field has flipped its polarity many times over the millennia. In other words, if you were alive about 800,000 years ago, and facing what we call north with a magnetic compass in your hand, the needle would point to 'south.' This is because a magnetic compass is calibrated based on Earth's poles. The N-S markings of a compass would be 180 degrees wrong if the polarity of today's magnetic field were reversed. Many doomsday theorists have tried to take this natural geological occurrence and suggest it could lead to Earth's destruction. But would there be any dramatic effects? The answer, from the geologic and fossil records we have from hundreds of past magnetic polarity reversals, seems to be 'no.'

Reversals are the rule, not the exception. Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal. A reversal happens over hundreds or thousands of years, and it is not exactly a clean back flip. Magnetic fields morph and push and pull at one another, with multiple poles emerging at odd latitudes throughout the process. Scientists estimate reversals have happened at least hundreds of times over the past three billion years. And while reversals have happened more frequently in "recent" years, when dinosaurs walked Earth a reversal was more likely to happen only about every one million years.

Sediment cores taken from deep ocean floors can tell scientists about magnetic polarity shifts, providing a direct link between magnetic field activity and the fossil record. The Earth’s magnetic field determines the magnetization of lava as it is laid down on the ocean floor on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Rift where the North American and European continental plates are spreading apart. As the lava solidifies, it creates a record of the orientation of past magnetic fields much like a tape recorder records sound. The last time that Earth's poles flipped in a major reversal was about 780,000 years ago, in what scientists call the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. The fossil record shows no drastic changes in plant or animal life. Deep ocean sediment cores from this period also indicate no changes in glacial activity, based on the amount of oxygen isotopes in the cores. This is also proof that a polarity reversal would not affect the rotation axis of Earth, as the planet's rotation axis tilt has a significant effect on climate and glaciation and any change would be evident in the glacial record.




A schematic diagram of Earth's interior and the movement of magnetic north from 1900 to 1996. The outer core is the source of the geomagnetic field. 

Graphic Credit: Dixon Rohr

Earth's polarity is not a constant. Unlike a classic bar magnet, or the decorative magnets on your refrigerator, the matter governing Earth's magnetic field moves around. Geophysicists are pretty sure that the reason Earth has a magnetic field is because its solid iron core is surrounded by a fluid ocean of hot, liquid metal. This process can also be modeled with supercomputers. Ours is, without hyperbole, a dynamic planet. The flow of liquid iron in Earth's core creates electric currents, which in turn create the magnetic field. So while parts of Earth's outer core are too deep for scientists to measure directly, we can infer movement in the core by observing changes in the magnetic field. The magnetic north pole has been creeping northward – by more than 600 miles (1,100 km) – since the early 19th century, when explorers first located it precisely. It is moving faster now, actually, as scientists estimate the pole is migrating northward about 40 miles per year, as opposed to about 10 miles per year in the early 20th century.

Another doomsday hypothesis about a geomagnetic flip plays up fears about incoming solar activity. This suggestion mistakenly assumes that a pole reversal would momentarily leave Earth without the magnetic field that protects us from solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun. But, while Earth's magnetic field can indeed weaken and strengthen over time, there is no indication that it has ever disappeared completely. A weaker field would certainly lead to a small increase in solar radiation on Earth – as well as a beautiful display of aurora at lower latitudes -- but nothing deadly. Moreover, even with a weakened magnetic field, Earth's thick atmosphere also offers protection against the sun's incoming particles.

The science shows that magnetic pole reversal is – in terms of geologic time scales – a common occurrence that happens gradually over millennia. While the conditions that cause polarity reversals are not entirely predictable – the north pole's movement could subtly change direction, for instance – there is nothing in the millions of years of geologic record to suggest that any of the 2012 doomsday scenarios connected to a pole reversal should be taken seriously. A reversal might, however, be good business for magnetic compass manufacturers.




Related Link:
› Earth's Inconstant Magnetic Field

Patrick Lynch
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center



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Blogger Philosophy

My Philosophy of Blogging



There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or to be the mirror that reflects it.
- Edith Wharton

Ms. Wharton sums up how I think of blogs. My desire is to reflect the articles and pictures that inspire me when surfing the Web by posting them on my blogs. Blogs create a scrapbook of events to review later inspiring me for a second time. This is a great pleasure and an educational activity providing me with learning missed when I was in school. The Web has demonstrated its great value in generating and spreading new ideas. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Occupy Wall Street and other revolutions have gained momentum on the Web.
If you have a favorite cause like animal rights, you can play a part in education the world by posting to your blog. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.


"To read means to borrow; to create out of one's reading is paying off one's debts."
- Charles Lillard

Communicating my worldview, as seen from my backwater home town situated on an island in the Pacific, is my way of staying engaged with current events.  Multiple Sclerosis has reduced my physical energy and keeps me close to home so I need to adapt and find new ways of relating to the world at large.

Happiness has an optimal price?

$75,000 Can Buy Happiness:
byJennifer Robison, 

Gallup Management Journal  

The search to define happiness has consumed a lot of human energy.  

Angus Deaton, Ph.D., a renowned economist, and Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., a Nobel prize-winning psychologist, both from Princeton University....looked for happiness in numbers.  ...they analyzed responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (GHWBI), a daily survey that asks roughly 1,000 U.S. residents a battery of questions about their wellbeing.

After analyzing more than 450,000 GHWBI responses from 2008 and 2009, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman found that happiness is actually the result of the fulfillment of two abstract psychological states -- 

1.) emotional wellbeing and 

2.) life evaluation. 

The finding is important because it offered the researchers a new and more useful way of looking at happiness.

The difference between life evaluation and emotional wellbeing is vital, though the two are related.

Dr. Kahneman says, "They're clearly distinct dimensions that are correlated. But they have somewhat different determinants. What improves people's emotional wellbeing is different from what it takes to make them say that they're satisfied with their life."

In other words, life evaluation and emotional wellbeing refer to different feelings. 

Life evaluation requires a long view of a person's overall life. Though life evaluation is colored by the day's emotions, Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton's GHWBI research shows that people evaluate their lives based on a retrospective of their achievements. If they've accomplished the goals they've set, are financially secure, and are emotionally fulfilled, they're more likely to have a high evaluation of their life.

Emotional wellbeing reflects a much shorter view and refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience. If the day's experience is negative, emotional wellbeing will take a hit. That said, people with good emotional wellbeing seem to get it through social contact.

"Emotional happiness is primarily social," says Dr. Kahneman. "The very best thing that can happen to people is to spend time with other people they like. That is when they are happiest, and so, without question, this is a major story. 

We find loneliness is a terrible thing. So is extreme poverty. But loneliness, regardless of how rich you are, is a very bad thing."

But the research also indicates that you won't become happy merely by socializing with your best friends and achieving your goals. You also need $75,000.

The most reported finding is that people with an annual household income of $75,000 are about as happy as anyone gets. More specifically, those with annual household incomes below $75,000 give lower responses to both life evaluation and emotional wellbeing questions. But people with an annual household income of more than $75,000 don't have commensurately higher levels of emotional wellbeing, even though their life evaluation rating continues to increase.
 
Your emotional life depends primarily on your relationships with people.

Emotional wellbeing may not improve with additional money, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman think, because of several factors. One is that humans adapt quickly to the things money can buy. A mansion is a thrill the first month you live in it, but it's just a house the second.

Moreover, other research suggests that wealthy people don't take as much pleasure in actual pleasure as do poor people. In one test, social researchers primed some test subjects to feel rich and found that the "wealthy" subjects didn't enjoy luxury chocolate as much as the control group, the "non-wealthy," did.

And Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton believe that when it comes to the very wealthy with high life satisfaction, their evaluations may be influenced more by keeping score than by purchasing power. If life evaluation is based on reviewing how much progress people have made in their lives, money may become a marker of success.


So people who have achieved their goals, who spend a lot of time with friends, and who make a lot of money have the most life satisfaction, while those who earn at least $75,000 a year have the greatest emotional wellbeing. But that doesn't meant they aren't stressed. 

The GHWBI data show that college graduates report more stress than people without college degrees, and that stress levels are generally higher in wealthy countries.

Comparing the U.S. life evaluation scores with data available from about 150 other countries through the Gallup World Poll, the U.S. ranks fairly high. The only nations with higher scores are the Scandinavian countries, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand.

However, while Americans come in near the top for life evaluation and do well on wellbeing, they're also among the most stressed. U.S. stress levels are the fifth highest when compared to data from other countries in the Gallup World Poll.

There is one thing, however, left to mention in this discussion of happiness -- individual temperament. Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton's research, and that of others, clearly indicates that some people are just born happier, or "sunnier," as Dr. Deaton calls them. Their emotional wellbeing will always be higher than everyone else's.

That's not to suggest that those who aren't "sunny" are doomed to lives of misery. Even the most pessimistic, grumpy-by-nature people can find solace in Dr. Deaton's statement: "It may be that we're not designed for happiness." And what is it we were designed for? "To avoid getting eaten by predators," says Dr. Deaton. "If nothing eats you today, you ought to be happy. At least it's a start."






Source:
This post originally appeared on Gallup Management Journal.

Warren Buffett Backs Estate Taxes

This business article puts a different twist on Warren Buffet's calls for the 'Rich' to be made to pay more taxes.  Mr. Buffett appears to be a most generous businessman but the article implies a certain level of spin is involved in his stellar reputation.


The Real Reason Warren Buffett Backs Estate Taxes:

Here’s the true reason why Buffett likes a tax code that is hard on billionaires like him, as explained by journalist Tim Carney in his book “The Big Ripoff: How Big Business And Big Government Steal Your Money”:

Warren Buffett’s business is buying businesses. Bill Gates makes software and Paul Newman makes movies and salad dressing, but Warren Buffett makes money. He runs Berkshire Hathaway as CEO and principle owner. Berkshire Hathaway used to make textiles, but now they simply own other companies. Some familiar Berkshire Hathaway properties are GEICO, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, and the Buffalo News.

While Buffett is clearly an unusually brilliant investor, what he has done with his company has been straightforward in some ways. He buys companies that are worth more than the selling price. He buys things that will go up in value.

One great way to buy something that is going up in value is to buy a company that is already very profitable, but whose owner(s) have to sell. One common way that happens is when the owner dies and the heirs cannot afford to pay the estate tax on the properties they stand to inherit. They are therefore forced to sell them to pay the taxes. Carney cites the case of the Buffalo News, a highly profitable family-owned newspaper that Buffett bought after the family matriarch died without doing proper estate planning. Dairy Queen was acquired in a similar manner.

When the estate tax forces an owner to sell his business, it provides an opportunity for a bargain, but that opportunity is not available to everyone ... When the estate tax puts a business on the market, it is a market that is only open to big business.

Beyond making it easier for Buffett to find bargains, the estate tax drives customers to his primary business interest, insurance, including life insurance. The estate tax has created an entire industry called “estate planning.” Anyone with a business or large assets sooner or later needs to engage in estate planning, which involves hiring tax specialists, attorneys, and accountants ... Two central elements of estate planning are life insurance and annuities.

Bear that in mind the next time a liberal writer extols Buffett’s selflessness.




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Daily Must Do's

Five daily must-dos to keep your business humming - The Globe and Mail:

Here are some important, if not fundamental, things that should be part of your daily to-do list:

1. Keep the sales machine humming

Whether business is strong or struggling, you have to keep on selling. You can work on sales calls, cold calls, the creation of sales and marketing material, social media activity, or presentations. Whether it’s a hard sell or a soft sell, the funnel needs to be kept as full as possible.

2. Network, network and network some more

A strong network is among the most valuable assets that a business can have. It is the people and the companies within your network that can drive sales, generate new customers and opportunities.

3. Keep your books up to date

Too many business, particularly small ones, stuff receipts and invoices in a shoe box, and then spend hours wading through it every few weeks or months. A better approach is to spend time on your books every day. Even if it is only a few minutes, it can be enough to maintain control of your finances and, as important, avoid the dreaded shoebox pile.

4. Love your customers

While it is important to attract new customers, your existing customers should get a lot of TLC because they have already made the commitment to do business with you. If you meet their needs, there is a better chance they will give you more business.

5. Keep exploring ways to do business better or differently

Your business will change and evolve, customers will come and go, and the economy will rise and fall. All that means that you can’t be complacent or stick with the status quo, or your business could become stagnant.

Instead, you need to explore new tools, services and approaches to keep things in your business fresh and current.



Special to The Globe and Mail:
Mark Evans, ME Consulting (communications and marketing)

Join The Globe’s Small Business LinkedIn group to network with other entrepreneurs and to discuss topical issues: http://linkd.in/jWWdzT

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G. B. Shaw

THE GOLDEN RULE
by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)


Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Source:

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/14409/
 From: Maxims for Revolutionists

Author: George Bernard Shaw

California Reaches Solar Power Milestone | NBC Bay Area

California Reaches Solar Power Milestone | NBC Bay Area: "

The golden state has installed enough solar panels on rooftops of homes and businesses to produce one gigawatt of power, KQED's Climate Watch reports.

One gigawatt is equal to one thousand megawatts, or enough to power 600,000 homes. Only five other countries in the world can claim that, including Germany, which has reached 17 gigawatts.

“Getting to one gigawatt is a fantastic marker of the momentum towards California's clean energy future,” Sungevity President Danny Kennedy said in a report by Environment California. “Riding the exponential curve of growth, which is akin to the mass adoption of cell phones or satellite TVs, will create many more good jobs and great opportunity for the Golden State.”

One gigawatt is impressive, but California isn't stopping there. It's aiming for three gigawatts of rooftop solar by 2016 -- which was mandated by California's Million Solar Roofs Initiative five years ago."

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Solar Energy is becoming competitive

The shrinking cost of solar energy: By the numbers - The Week:

BY THE NUMBERS

As harnessing the sun's energy becomes cheaper and more efficient, some analysts believe solar will overtake fossil fuels in a matter of decades



Photo: Michael DeYoung/Blend Images/Corbis
It takes the sun only 14.5 seconds to provide as
much energy to Earth as all of human civilization uses in a day.
.................................................................................................


The shrinking cost of solar energy: By the numbers:

According to Moore's Law, the price of computing power is slashed in half every two years — which helps explain why personal computers become outdated so quickly. But now, as Paul Krugman at The New York Times notes, the solar energy industry is experiencing a similar trend. The price of producing solar power cr continues to fall — thanks to technological improvements and heavy subsidies in countries like China — and this onetime punchline of an energy sector continues to expand. Will solar power eventually overtake oil as Earth's primary energy source? Perhaps. In the meantime, a look at the shrinking cost of solar energy, by the numbers:

65 Percentage growth experienced by the solar energy industry in each of the past five years

7 Percentage decline in the annual price of solar energy, adjusted for inflation

17 Percentage drop in the price of installing solar panels in the U.S. in 2010, says the, says the Washington Post. "Solar companies are figuring out how to set up systems cheaply."


17 Gigawatts of solar power that were created or used in the United States in 2010. That's roughly equivalent to the output of 17 nuclear power plants.

700 Watts of power that the sun shines on every square meter of Earth

89 quadrillion Watts of power shining on the Earth at any given moment. One quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.

15 trillion Watts of power used by "all of human civilization" each day. It may be a big number, but it's just "one six-thousandth" of the 89 quadrillion watts shining on Earth at any given moment, says Scientific American.

14.5 Seconds it takes for the sun to provide as much energy to Earth as humanity consumes in a day

88 Minutes it takes for the sun to provide as much energy to Earth as humanity consumes in a year

2018 The year that analysts expect solar power to become affordable enough to compete directly with fossil fuels

2060 The year that analysts expect solar power may satisfy more than half of the world's energy needs

$491 billion Amount that U.S. drivers are expected to spend on gasoline this year

Sources: Forbes, Los Angeles Times, NY Times, Scientific American,Washington Post

Krugman: It's time for solar power

Solar Power has been my pick for the future of alternative, sustainable energy for a while now - years not weeks.  China has weighed in on solar by with aggressive trade practices to kill competition, distorting pricing and otherwise upsetting the course of the industry built up around solar power. Its not a walk in the park to see how to invest in this area.  Lots of money has been lost already by investors and companies bankrupted....


Solar Power
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES
Updated Monday, November 7, 2011

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore's Law - in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months - has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.


The success story you haven't heard about is Solar Energy

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That's right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

These days, mention solar power and you'll probably hear cries of "Solyndra!" Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste - although claims of a major scandal are nonsense - and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra's failure was actually caused by technological success: The price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn't keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, "there's now frequent talk of a 'Moore's law' in solar energy," with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues - and if anything it seems to be accelerating - we're just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it's likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

A large part of our political class, including essentially the entire GOP, is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers' money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.


So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we're willing to let it in.

 

Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.

Source:
http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Krugman-It-s-time-for-solar-power-2257045.php

Mankind's Report Card

20 ways the world has changed since 1st Earth Summit - Politics - CBC News


The United Nations says humans are more concerned about damage done to the environment than we were 20 years ago — but we're still destroying it faster than we can fix it.

That's part of a snapshot prepared by the United Nations Environment Program in a report called Keeping Track that looks at a wide range of changes that have occurred since the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.

The report is designed to be used by legislators at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio next May.

And far from being a thick report that will just gather dust, Keeping Track is actually a bit of a page-turner, filled with surprising and often encouraging news about our stewardship of the Earth.

The report uses a minimum of text and relies on colourful graphics, charts and satellite pictures to show the major environmental and social changes that have occurred on Earth since the early 1990s, from growing cities in China to the rapidly spreading footprint of Alberta's oil sands.



Changes in the world over the last 20 years.

1. The number of megacities has doubled.

2. The world is eating 26 per cent more meat.

3. Global temperatures continue to rise, with the last 10 years the warmest on record.

4. World industry is 23 per cent more energy efficient.

5. Plastic consumption has skyrocketed — with annual production reaching a record 265 million tonnes worldwide in 2010.

6. The 1990 Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-destroying chemicals is the world's most successful international agreement, producing a 93 per cent drop in the damaging emissions since 1992.

7. Cement production is the fastest-growing source of C02 emissions.

8. The Mesopotamian Marshlands, the largest in the Middle East, are recovering from deliberate draining by Iraq in the 1990s.

9. Saudi Arabia has transformed from an importer of food to an exporter due to irrigation.

10. Environmentally protected areas have increased worldwide by 42 per cent.

11. Fish stock depletion is now one of the most pressing environmental issues.

12. Renewable energy has skyrocketed, with solar energy leading the way — up 30,000 per cent since 1992.

13. Biofuel production — up 300,000 per cent — is converting more land from farming to production of fuel.

14. Organic farming is up 240 per cent since 1999.

15. The Amazon rainforest has been largely destroyed due to drought and farming.

16. Tourism and travel is the world's largest business sector — and ecotourism is the fastest-growing type of tourism, up 20-34 per cent per year.

17. Passenger trips by airplanes have doubled in the past two decades.

18. Clean drinking water access increased to 87 per cent, but widespread sanitation is still slow.

19. 30 per cent more private companies are adopting environmental standards every year.

20. Women's influence is rising with more 60 per cent more seats in national parliaments.

......................................................................................

 .................................................................
Megacities:

Pop. in millions, 2010

1. Tokyo, Japan
36.7

2. Delhi, India
22.2

3. Sao Paulo, Brazil
20.3

4. Mumbai, India
20.0

5. Mexico City, Mexico
19.5

6. New York - Newark, USA
19.4

7. Shanghai, China
16.6

8. Kolkata, India
15.6

9. Dhaka, Bangladesh
14.6

10. Karachi, Pakistan
13.1
.........................................................................

Seven Billion

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/10/26/f-vp-sheppard-population.html




Crowded planet: Should we care how many billions of us are out there?
World's population has hit 7 billion, but most of us don't seem worried
By Robert Sheppard, CBC News
Posted: Oct 30, 2011 12:23 PM ET

The concrete forest: public housing in Hong Kong.


Related LinksINTERACTIVE GRAPH: World population 

On Monday, Halloween no less, the world's population will hit seven billion, the UN

For many, it's a scary number, which is perhaps why UN demographers settled on that particular date. A sly joke, as many observers have suggested. The 21st century is not even a dozen years old and already it has produced a billion extra humans.Tomorrow's consumer? Some Indian provinces have the highest birthrate in the world but that is not the political concern it once was.

Currently, four babies are born every second of every day. The human population has almost exactly doubled since 1968 when Paul and Anne Ehrlich's seminal book, The Population Bomb, launched decades of debate and international hand-wringing over family size, contraception and dwindling resources.

Still, we seem to be taking this current milestone mostly in stride. The UN Population Fund has even commissioned a song, as if to commemorate the event.

The world media is, naturally, weighing in, particularly since July when UN demographers first announced the approaching seven billion mark. Many outlets have created entire special sections around the issue, focusing especially on the environmental impacts of population growth.

P.O.V.:Are you concerned about the world's growing population?

But there has been no drumbeat of panic about overpopulation, as it was called in the 1970s and '80s, when the UN hosted regular conferences on reproductive rights and tried to come up with a 20-year plan to keep the number of humans in check.

The last of these, in 1994, concluded after "nine days of sound and fury," the New York Times reported at the time, as developing countries, the Vatican, Muslim nations and the West squared off over birth control and the right of women to make their own decisions about the number of children they would have.

In the end, a compromise was reached on the concept of "fertility regulation," which was designed to slow the pace of population growth. It would have seen the world reach seven billion by around 2015. Oops.
Demographic dividend?

Maybe today's relative lack of concern is to be expected. India and China, the most populous countries, have had direct experience with family planning — forced sterilization clinics, the one-child policy, villages with a surplus of unmarried (and quarrelsome) men — and might be excused for not wanting to continue down that path.


Where the people are

According to the latest UN estimates, India, whose population shot up by 700 million over the last 40 years alone, will overtake China as the world's most populous country shortly after 2020. It will be overtaken itself by sub-Saharan Africa within 20 years of that.

As population expert Joel Cohen has pointed out, in 1950, there were nearly three times as many Europeans as sub-Saharan Africans. By 2100, there will be nearly five sub-Saharan Africans for every European if UN demographers are right.

Meanwhile, in the West, there is a palpable feeling that we've cried wolf too often already (the Ehrlichs, the limits-to-growth debates, the peak-oilers and their adherents).

We have also been bombarded with the message that, because of their low birth rates, Western democracies are running out of young people to keep their economies functioning and, therefore, their hospitals open and pension cheques arriving.

In that regard, India and China, far from being the demographic pariahs of yesterday, are now being seen as the talent pool, the workforce and, most importantly, the consumers of tomorrow.

Plus, as a species, we've kinda made do. Or have we?
Better gardeners

In the 20th century, the world's population increased fourfold, and, miraculously, food production kept pace.

Last year, for example, farmers collectively produced 2.3 billion tonnes of cereal grains, which represent enough calories to feed at least nine billion people, estimates population biologist Joel Cohen, author ofHow Many People Can the Earth Support.

That feat, of course, assumes that these foodstuffs would be equally distributed, which they are clearly not. (The UN estimates that 900 million people go to bed hungry almost every night.)

It is also predicated on the premise that more of what we grow would be diverted from inefficient bio-fuels and feeding animals (and, ultimately, our Big Mac diets) directly to humans, as a team of Canadian and international scientists recently recommended.

In any event, some call this quadrupling of the food supply since the 1960s, the Monsanto revolution — not always in a good way.

In raising crop yields as we did, forests were cut down, diversity was sacrificed and global energy use (much of it for fueling fertilizer factories) went up eightfold.

Another tradeoff has been dead zones of algae in river systems and along certain ocean coastlines caused by the runoff of all these fertilizers, nitrogen and phosphorus in particular.A choice of lettuces, a dinner party by the barbecue or a meal of mashed maize? We can feed ourselves, but how well?

Some UN scientists estimate that only 20 per cent of the world's freshwater is uncontaminated by farm and fertilizer runoff and, more ominously, that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will be in countries facing freshwater shortages.

The good news, says David Keith, the Canada research chair on energy and the environment at the University of Calgary, is that we are spending only three per cent of world GDP on agriculture (closer to one per cent in North America) and that this number has been coming down for decades.

That means, he argued in a lecture this summer at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ont., that we humans would appear to have the economic flexibility, and probably the technology, to give ourselves some breathing room.

But we might have to start thinking about nature in a fundamentally different way, as something to be managed. As Keith puts it, "We are in the gardening business with this planet, whether we like it or not."
The Anthropocene

It is not that no one is thinking about the implications of a crowded planet. The climate change people certainly have been, beginning in the mid-1990s and taking over, perhaps, from the overpopulation crowd.

So, too, oddly enough, are the world's geologists, a group that usually tends to look back in time, often over huge increments of millions of years.

Technically, we are still in the Holocene era, the one that began at the end of the last ice age, some 11,500 years ago. But a group of geologists, inspired by Paul Crutzen, the Nobel prize-winning Dutch chemist, are trying to change this, saying we are really living in the age of man, something Crutzen calls "the Anthropocene."

As a concept, it's a game changer, as CBC Radio's The Current pointed out recently: Just look at what all our building and hewing and paving is doing to the Earth.

An urban planet

Developed countries such as Canada are 80 per cent urban now, and the developing world is catching up quickly.

The 10 biggest urban conglomerations:
City Population
Tokyo 36,669,000
Delhi 22,157,000
Sao Paulo, Brazil 20,262,000
Mumbai 20,041,000
Mexico City 19,460,000
New York-Newark, N.J. 19,425,000
Shanghai 16,575,000
Calcutta 15,552,000
Dhaka, Bangladesh 14,648,000
Karachi, Pakistan 13,125,000


Source: CIA World Factbook

It is a view — humanity as a geophysical force, muscling in on nature's realm — that seems to be gaining traction, though geologists as a group have not yet formally pronounced.

In its now well-quoted take on Crutzen's notion, the Economist magazine noted that there is one Canadian mining company (Syncrude, in the Alberta oilsands) that moves more earth annually than all the river systems in the world combined.

It is a bit of a false comparison, mind you, in that the gradual buildup of almost 50,000 hydroelectric dams on our biggest river systems has dramatically reduced the amount of silt that these rivers carry.

Still, it is hard to ignore the effect of so many of us on the planet. In the last 50 years alone, the oceans have become (30 per cent) more acidic, the atmosphere (four per cent) wetter and the earth's surface warmer (by almost one degree C).

There is also much less flora and fauna than ever before as our need for food and building materials has crowded out other creatures and destroyed their habitats. Plus, we are genetically altering the DNA of plants and fish.

Back in the 1990s, E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard biologist, calculated that the "human biomass" was already about 100 times greater than that of any other large species that ever roamed the earth, including the dinosaurs.

Then again, he also observed that we humans are actually outweighed by the total biomass of ants, that other industrious, scavenging creature, which doesn't seem to need as much elbow room to get by.

Occupy Anthem - I Don't Want To Work! - YouTube

Occupy Anthem - I Don't Want To Work! - YouTube: ""

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Study: Killer Whales Migrate Thousands of Miles to…Exfoliate? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine

Study: Killer Whales Migrate Thousands of Miles to…Exfoliate? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine:


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Marianne Faithfull - "Working Class Hero". (live ) - YouTube

Marianne Faithfull - "Working Class Hero". (live ) - YouTube: ""




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Occupy the Mortgage Lenders

Published: Saturday 22 October 2011

Par­tic­i­pants in the Oc­cupy Wall Street move­ment are right to argue that the big banks have never prop­erly been in­ves­ti­gated for the mort­gage orig­i­na­tion, ag­gre­ga­tion, and se­cu­ri­ti­za­tion be­hav­ior that was cen­tral to the fi­nan­cial cri­sis – and to the loss of more than eight mil­lion jobs.

Talks among state of­fi­cials, the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion, and the banks are cur­rently fo­cused on re­ported abuses in ser­vic­ing mort­gages, fore­clos­ing on homes, and evict­ing their res­i­dents. 

But lead­ing banks are also ac­cused of il­le­gal be­hav­ior – in­duc­ing peo­ple to bor­row, for ex­am­ple, by de­ceiv­ing them about the in­ter­est rate that would ac­tu­ally be paid, while mis­rep­re­sent­ing the re­sult­ing mort­gage-backed se­cu­ri­ties to investors.

About 10 mil­lion mort­gages are es­ti­mated to be “un­der­wa­ter” (the house is worth less than the loan). And, in key markets around the US, four years into the hous­ing slump, home prices continue to fall.

As a re­sult, house­holds want to spend less and pay down their debts. To some ex­tent, this is the nat­ural af­ter­math of any credit boom. And house­hold delever­ag­ing in the US will take a long time.

If the banks were ever re­ally held ac­count­able for the so­cial costs of their be­hav­ior, the bill would far ex­ceed $300-400 bil­lion. Re­al­is­ti­cally as­sessed, the full down­side legal risks to fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions are in ex­cess of $1 tril­lion – par­tic­u­larly if it can be demon­strated that the “mort­gage-backed se­cu­ri­ties” sold to in­vestors were not backed by mort­gages at all, be­cause the proper legal pa­per­work was never done.

Any set­tle­ment should also in­clude the banks’ ex­plicit agree­ment that they will sup­port mod­i­fy­ing Amer­ica’s bank­ruptcy law to en­able in­clu­sion of mort­gages in the usual court-run processes. If the Oc­cupy Wall Street move­ment tells us any­thing, it is that the last thing the US econ­omy needs is more house­holds over­whelmed by debt.

Source and much more detail:

http://www.nationofchange.org/occupy-mortgage-lenders-1319290830