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June 21, 2004
Fed Flunks Paternity Test for Prosperity

I read Bill Fleckenstein's column, The Contrarian Chronicles, over at the MSN Money site every week. I stole that headline from a subhead in this week's piece.

Because of the stupid way that MSN indexes things on that site, I have to have a Google News Alert to find the article for me, but I digress. Fleckenstein, certainly not a member of the Sunshine Blower's Club[1], has this to say regarding Easy Al's testimony before Congress last week:

As for the man who could never fill so much as the toe box of Volcker's shoes, Easy Al gave himself a gold star Tuesday morning when he told the Senate Banking Committee, "The performance of the U.S. economy has been most impressive in recent years, in the face of staggering shocks that in years past would almost surely have been destabilizing."

What's ironic about that is: The financial shocks have been 100% the result of his reckless policies.

There's plenty of fresh meat here for Fed Watchers.

[1]To paraphrase "The Family Guy": What's Wall Street made of? Sunshine and Farts!

Posted by nicole at 07:23 PM

June 17, 2004
Yikes.

This is posted in every kitchen in my office, and it has been driving me nuts for a year. I finally had the place to myself tonight, and I was able to get a picture.

1) CLOGG???

2) People are so dumb the need to be told not to put POTTED PLANT SOIL down the drain? Where are we getting these people!?

3) Unnecessary repairs? Yeah, right! Now that I've put POTTED PLANT SOIL down the drain, those repairs are no longer unnecessary, ARE THEY?!

Yeesh. For this I went to college?

Posted by nicole at 08:08 PM

June 15, 2004
Level of Disgust Rising

My level of disgust with the sunshine blowers* and the government numbers they tout has reached a new high. Today, here's the headline that annoyed me:

"U.S. stock futures were adding to moderate gains and the dollar weakened early Tuesday after data showed inflation, excluding food and energy, was tame in May." (CBS Marketwatch)

Tame. Stock market up. What else do you need to know?

First of all, the CPI is a bit warped. Even the Fed acknowledges that the CPI is far too low because it includes not housing prices but equivalent rents. Equivalent rents are quite depressed (ie, deflated) by the dirt cheap interest rates and programs by lenders like Fannie Mae that offer no-down-payment loans. The CPI also includes used car prices, which are similarly depressed. Keeping that in mind, here's an interesting table, straight from the BS Deparment. Er, BLS Department:




	Compound
	Annual
Category	3-mos. Ended
	in May
All Items	5.5
Food and beverages	5.1
Housing	4.3
Apparel	5.1
Transportation	12.4
Medical care	4.9
Recreation	1.1
Education and
communication	1.4
Other goods and
services	1.7
Special Indexes
Energy	29.7
Food	5.1
All Items less
food and energy	3.3

Food and energy are excluded from the "headline number". No one has to have those after all. I mean, you can choose to buy only apparel and transportation for a few months -- you don't need heat or A/C or gas or food, right? You lucky sods that don't need to eat or gas up your car or run your lights or air conditioning, well, for you, the CPI is only 3.3%. That doesn't sound like much, but we've been hearing that inflation is "tame" and therefore it's OK to leave interest rates at the "emergency" level of 1% for, oh, I don't know, a while. In any case, the rate cutting began before the terrorist attacks in 2001.

Just for fun, pick a year, say 1998 and go here. Put in $1. Multiply the result, 1.16 by your salary in 1998. Are you making that much now? Good for you, if so, because you've kept pace with inflation, at least according to the Federal Government's way of figuring it. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting ahead. If you've kept pace, you've only been running in place. All your efforts have not actually resulted you being rewarded for experience, but you're still doing better than a lot of people. If you really want to get depressed, subtract your annual cost of health insurance premiums in 1998 from the 1998 salary. Now subtract the annual cost for this year. Still ahead? Wow, I'm impressed. I can't even show a gain on that metric myself, and I work for a company who gives nicer raises than anywhere I've been an employee before.

Clearly, since the government uses this number to keep entitlements in line with inflation, they need to keep it low. Any idiot can see this, so why does the financial establishment insist on using it to gauge the inflation we experience?

Perhaps tomorrow we can discuss the bullshit jobs reports we've been getting this year and the effect of the totally wack Birth/Death model the BLS applies to the survey numbers. Probably not though. I don't think I can stomach it.

*These are the folks on CNBC and MSNBC, in the WSJ and on CBS Marketwatch who are in the business of blowing sunshine up your ass. It's up to you if you want to believe it or not. Most people desparately want to believe. After all, if you have a 401K or an IRA, there's really no where else to put it but stocks and bonds. If you believed those were bad investments, well what the hell would you do?

Posted by nicole at 09:15 AM

June 09, 2004
Fat Epidemic?

I had planned to discuss the popularity of sitting in America, but I was distracted by this, since it's related to the obesity epidemic hype.

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the discoverer of the gene for leptin, says we Americans are not getting uniformly fatter. This is a bit of semantic fanciness, IMHO, but it's a good demonstration of how the statistics CAN be viewed in a far less alarmist fashion. He gives this example:

"Imagine the average I.Q. was 100 and that 5 percent of the population had an I.Q. of 140 or greater and were considered to be geniuses. Now let's say that education improves and the average I.Q. increases to 107 and 10 percent of the population has an I.Q. of above 140.

"You could present the data in two ways," he said. "You could say that the average I.Q. is up seven points or you could say that because of improved education the number of geniuses has doubled."

The statistic we all hear regularly is that since 1991, the number of obese Americans has jumped more than 30%. The less alarmist way to say this is:

"In 1991, 23 percent of Americans fell into the obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than 30 percent increase. But the average weight of the population has increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991."

It certainly seems like people are fatter. Friedman claims that the while the obese have grown to morbidly obese, the thin are still thin. In other words, the weight has been disproportionately gained by those who were already fat. I suspect that people who merely read as chubby have crossed the line and become "fat". The BMI numbers bear this out, of course, but they are a bit jiggered too.

It's something that Dr. Friedman says later in this article that's truly alarming.

Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height. Genes control not only how much you eat but also the metabolic rate at which you burn food. When it comes to eating, free will is an illusion.

"People can exert a level of control over their weight within a 10-, perhaps a 15-pound range," Dr. Friedman said. But expecting an obese person to decide to simply eat less and exercise more to get below the obesity range, below the overweight range? It virtually never happens, he said. Any weight that is lost almost invariably comes right back.

I'm not sure what to make of this. It would seem to say that weightloss is a hopeless pursuit. In 2000, I weighed 220 lbs. Nine months later, I weighed 180 lbs., and I now weigh about 163 lbs (this gives me a BMI of 25, BTW).

Here's what I look like at present:

I know it's not a full body shot, but you can tell from my face that I'm not carrying a great deal of excess weight. I'm not skinny, but neither am I fat. I am well endowed in the ass-and-tits categories, to be perfectly straight about it. Lucky for me, I have what I'm told is a pleasing waist-to-hip ratio.

I've kept off the weight for four years now, and I can maintain the 180 without much difficulty at all, but keeping my weight at 163 isn't easy and trying to lose weight from this point is very hard indeed.

So, what was that 220 lbs. weight all about (I have some opinions about that, which I'll likely get to later this month)? Why did I gain that, if it's all determined by genetics, and if I have no free will in this matter, why have I been able to keep the weight off or even lose it in the first place? This article asks more questions than it answers!

Thanks to Ed for the pointer to the article referenced.

Posted by nicole at 03:29 PM

June 01, 2004
Americans Are NOT the Fattest People on Earth

We're not even close, in spite of the idiocy spouted by Polly Toynbee. Not only does she go on about how Western countries are so fat, she's come to the absurd conclusion that this is because of racism and inequality.

Scott Burgess debunks many things she states as facts.

Ms. Toynbee claims the U.S. has the most income inequality (which is debunked by Burgess but is off topic for me) and the fattest people. Burgess takes her to the woodshed thusly:

Burgess: No it doesn't - Pacific Islanders have by far the fattest. Among non-Pacific Islanders, residents of Greece, Jordan, Palestine, Panama, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are also fatter than Americans.

Toynbee: Britain and Australia come next.

Burgess: No they don't. The following countries rank ahead of England (which has the highest rate in Britain): Albania (urban), Argentina, Bahrain, Barbados, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, Malta, Mexico and Paraguay.

Toynbee: ... the Scandinavian countries best of all.

Burgess: No they're not. Finland is in a statistical dead heat with England (22.5% each). If we define "Scandinavian countries" as Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, and average the obesity rates in those countries, we see that the following countries are slimmer (I have excluded countries where famine and starvation are endemic): Austria, Brazil, China, France, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Vietnam...Looks like oriental countries are actually "best of all".

The racial prejudice inherent in Toynbee's argument is incredible. Apparently, she did no research at all. See Burgess' page for actual cites on his numbers.

Americans are fatter than we used to be, there's no doubt of that. You can see it everywhere, but this is an alarming illustration of where the fat has been distributed. [Warning: Quicktime. If you don't have Quicktime or are on a dial up, try this instead].

Even this fine visual display of quantitative information, admirable in and of itself, is a bit too alarmist. This is because it's based on BMI. Using BMI labels both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as obese. While it does provide a measurement, it's not free of flaws since those with a very low percentage of fat and a lot of mass fall off the edge of the curve. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that 25% of Mississippi isn't suffering from prejudice against the pumped. The maps are limited to people with a BMI over 30, and while not ALL these people would read as obese on a visual test, the vast majority of them are overweight. The problem may be that the overweight/obese line is drawn too conservatively on the BMI charts, placing too many people into the obese group. There is no doubt that Americans are carrying more weight than they should be, but a whole lot of people who just think of themselves as "chubby" are now faced with being "obese".

The food police want us to believe that we are desperately in need of their iron fist of regulation. They claim we are helpless against the message of yumminess foisted upon us by junk food. Junk food pre-dates the 80s though, and that appears to be when the problems started, so I kinda doubt that argument. I dismiss this branch of the nanny state's argument as just another power grab. It's very sad when people attempt to manipulate us into their world view while kidding themselves that they have our best interests at heart.

I agree that we are certainly fatter (children and adults alike) than we used to be, but I think that the hysterical calls for regulation are misplaced. While I think the primary problem is inactivity (in both children and adults), that there's more going on that just that, but it's a subject for another rant, as are the reasons for the increased popularity of sitting among Americans.

Posted by nicole at 12:48 PM