This, “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis” is already Frederick Kaufman’s third article on the subject in as many years. As the article indicates, here “Goldman Sachs” just stands for the financial speculators in general. He is milking this thesis a bit dry at this point — but he has a point, sort of.

There are those who argue that financial speculators, for their own good, closely track underlying supply and demand, and therefore stabilize — not destabilize — markets. But this is not the case. Experiments have shown that, even for an instrument with a perfectly known valuation, the existence of human players itself creates speculative intent which can at least temporarily unanchor market prices. Speculation itself certainly doesn’t stabilize markets, in fact it has to be disequilibriating — required for price discovery. What keeps prices stable are well structured instruments that anchor to real economic variables by some other mechanism, things like periodic reconciliation of contracts, payment of agreed-upon dividends, or taking delivery of commodities. Anything that needs no reconciliation for an indefinite period of time is asking for trouble.
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I was playing with a laptop from HP the last couple of days and noticed that when off AC power (on battery), the maximum CPU frequency is only half of the specification. The machine runs Windows Vista. The CPU is an AMD ZM-80, duo core 2.1GHz. On AC power, the processor can reach 2.1GHz on heavy load, but on battery power, the maximum it will go to is 1.05GHz on each core. This is really a problem because performance (especially for single-threaded applications) is pitiful at those levels. In fact, 1080p HD WMV demo videos could not play smoothly just like on a four-year-old Pentium M 1.6GHz.
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… in this ad:

Here’s the quote in question at 0:37:

One of the things which I think has increased the cost of living has been this administration’s reliance on a high interest rate policy.

In fact, the issue of the day was over fiscal policy being too tight and being overly concerned about the threat of inflation.

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In the realm of restricted composition, there is Ernest V. Wright’s Gadsby, which avoids the most common letter ‘e’ in English.

In Chinese, there is this elementary passage which plays on the homophone issue of spoken Mandarin Chinese. Every character in the entire passage is pronounced “shi” (with varying tones), but nevertheless at this level the passage would make no sense if recited. But, written in the Classical Chinese idiom, the passage makes perfect sense when read visually (and isn’t particularly difficult to comprehend even for a modern reader).

《施氏食狮史》
石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。施氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。是时，适施氏适市。氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。食时，始识是十狮，实十石狮尸。试释是事。

This is one demonstration that written Chinese can hold significant semantic content beyond phonetic value, a mechanism that has been key for tying together diverging spoken dialects over a thousand years.

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