http://imo-official.org/problems.aspx

Here’s the original paper from SocialScienceResearchNetwork:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID963458_code179428.pdf?abstractid=875808&mirid=2

Bloomber & WSJ picked up this:
“To the extent that politicians favor inefficient (family) firms by allocating resources to them, long-term economic growth will also be reduced,” according to the paper.  In addition, the authors found that politically connected firms “suffer a statistically significant decline in sales growth” and access to credit between the year prior to the sudden death and the year after. 

Health Care Initiative :  “Stock prices should be unpredictable; nobody can predict them,” Parsley said. “Yet we have a model that can predict stock returns.”

… It is possible, based on the results of the study, to stay on top of the obituaries, short some politically connected companies and walk away with a profit.

A third of a century after the U.S. armed forces pulled out of Southeast Asia, Laotian soldiers of the old-line communist regime still hunt and kill men, women, and children belonging to the last few Hmong resistance bands. The leaders of the resistance bands were all trained by the C.I.A. when they were young. Most of them are grandfathers now. They have satellite phones, gifts from their American relatives. From remote jungle mountainsides, they call family members in Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or California, and forlornly ask when the U.S. military is going to come back and save them from their enemies.
Roger Warner is a frequent traveler to Southeast Asia, and is the author of Shooting At The Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos, which won the Overseas Press Club’s book of the year award.

In crude terms, one per cent of the population have a quarter of all the wealth.

Moreover, Wade found the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of the population remained almost stagnant after 1980, although consumption kept rising thanks to the build-up of private debt.

This means that 90 per cent of the American economy were financing their American dream on debt.
Where were the signs that things were going to end disastrously and, worse still, that the most vulnerable might end up paying the heftiest and most disproportionate price than anyone else?

I believe the status quo was allowed to go unquestioned because banks were benefiting obscenely from the interest on our debt, and governments were in cahoots with these banks.

Let’s not forget that governments conveniently moved away from the provision of affordable healthcare, free university education and affordable housing while the banks entered our lives, aggressively, to fill that void.

In addition, I think that this warped and unjust way of operating was not questioned because the electorate was kept in the dark in the most subtle way possible.

The whole issue was made invisible. It was kept off the radar screens of electoral politics.

The American electorate were made accomplice to this because they were convinced that what was good for Wall Street, was good for America as a whole.

It was a political sleight of hand of the highest order. And this explains the bipartisan agreement to the ill-designed deregulation of the finance sector that we have seen over the years.

America has become a bank-owned state.
– Samah El-Shahat, Al Jazeera’s resident economist

Further Samah points to Roubini’s article that this is a Crisis of Solvency not of Liquidity

But the trend, which is playing out across the country, goes beyond individual efforts. The nonprofit La Cocina will host its first San Francisco Street Festival in August, followed by a similar Eat Real Festival in Oakland from the organizers of Slow Food Nation. A new street food-focused market will debut at the Ferry Building on Thursdays in July.

Here’s the typical (misguided) thought process:

1) I’m convinced that QQQQ will go up 10% a year, so I’d like to own it;
2) But there is a fund, Ultra QQQ ProShares (QLD) that promises 2X the Nasdaq’s return;
3) And 20% is more than 10%;
4) So I’ll just buy the leveraged fund (QLD) and be twice as happy.

Seems like a reasonable conclusion, right? After all, the fund’s literature clearly promises twice the daily return of the index. But the key word is daily. Daily is not monthly, and it’s definitely not annually.”

If you were prescient enough to predict the collapse of real estate last year, you could have earned a savory 40% return by shorting iShares Dow Jones US Real Estate (IYR) So logic would hold that owning UltraShort Real Estate ProShares (SRS) would have produced a positive 80% return, right? Absolutely wrong. I say absolutely because, in absolute terms, you would have lost even more money using the double-short fund—which is supposed to go up when the index goes down. The disappointing truth: the funds worked like they were supposed to. Before you declare my last statement as blasphemous, the fund did indeed perform as the prospectus declared it would. It is the investor that held the leveraged or inverse fund for more than a single day that erred in practice.

And if you presumed wine was a far more complex tasting affair than coffee, you may be surprised to learn that coffee possesses over 1,500 aromatic and flavor compounds – compared with approximately 200 for wine.

Here’s one espresso rating in SF:
Blue Bottle (SOMA) comes up top, followed by Coffee Bar in Portrero
http://www.coffeeratings.com

Ritual & Four Barrel take 3 & 6th tied with notable others. SF Espresso is coming of age… Will update the post as I get more ratings/tastings

More info from the same source, coffeeratings.com

“Body
AKA “Mouthfeel”
Body is a measure of the density of the espresso. Sometimes called mouthfeel, it reflects the weight of the coffee solids that make it into the cup. The deepness and richness of an espresso’s color is also a measure of its body.

I rated a full-bodied espresso higher than one that’s thin, weak, or diluted. Therefore I often gave a shorter pour – or an espresso made with the same amount of coffee but less water – a higher rating. A shorter pour is more likely to possess its own natural sweetness, and a longer pour is more likely to taste bitter.

An espresso shot is called over-extracted if an excessive amount of water is used to draw the flavors out of a given amount of coffee. Not only does an over-extracted espresso taste weak and bitter, but also it generally contains more caffeine – which is mostly derived from the water-soluble elements of the ground coffee. Therefore, a properly made espresso is neither bitter nor more caffeinated than a typical cup of joe.”

Aroma:

“Aroma is the smell of the brewed espresso. A great espresso aroma is good enough to “eat.” The senses of taste and smell are highly intertwined, and a flavorful espresso made from freshly roasted beans typically releases a delicious aroma when served.A not-so-good espresso aroma is flat, stale, or smells more like cheap drip coffee. Equally bad is an espresso without a discernable aroma. A good espresso often derives a lot of its pleasant aromas from its crema, so the two criteria are loosely related.”