dismantling the economist

[dismantling the economist: the 'rational' person as well as the paper]
Tidbits without much editorial comment from the single issue of November 13-19th.

The Rand Corporation reported that compensation paid out by the government and insurance companie to victimes of September 11th is at least $38.1 billion.

Japan's navy was mobilised for the first time in five years to try to make a submarine, believed to be Chinese, come to the surface.

The head of the panel set up to organise new presidential elections in Haiti for December 2005 resigned, citing presure to manipulate the process. She had opposed a scheme to buy $112m-worth of electronic-voting machines for a country with one of the world's least reliavle electricity supplies.

(The morality article will go in a separate post).

Wal-Mart is already Mexico's biggest retailer.

I couldn't bear to go through the whole of the article on globalisation of outsourcing in India - the subtitle is "the global deployment of work has it critics, but it holds huge opportunities for the rich and poor countries alike"; followed by long paragraphs on how it increases profits. Where's the benefit to the poor? This is after all the magazine which argued not so long ago that it was the rich countries' duty to export their garbage to the poor countries to provide them with an economic oppportunity. no comment on the morality of that.

The new "Blood and Gore" business: Al Gore and David Blood partnering to set up a investment-management firm integrating sustainability research.
Are you surprised that only 9% of the traditional rational economists felt that including non-financial measures (such as social and economic sustainability) made for an "appropriate valuation" of their company?? Power of the incumbents...

These guys are masters of under-statements.
"Greenland may be melting faster than previously thought." "Like a canary in the coal mine, the hypersensitive polar regions may well experience the full force of global warming before the rest of the planet does." "One of the report's most confident predictions is that the break-up of Arctic ice will open the region to long-distance shipping and, ironically, to drilling for oil and gas. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the Danish government, which controls Greenland, has just declared its intention to claim the mineral rights under the North Pole. It, at least, clearly believes that the Arctic ocean may soon be ice-free. "
[By the way, I'm having a hard time locating the web site lising the current up-to-date readings of atmospheric CO2 concentration, but check out http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/07.htm and http://carto.eu.org/article2546.html if you haven't seen those kinds of graphs before. It's worth a good scare.]

Finally, "Male and female sperm can be sorted using lasers". So rich people won't have to wait for the ultrasound to weed off female fetuses??

Ha... if you can't tell, I'm a bit tense this afternoon ;)