Who is your mama?

An internationally recognised expert on intelligence warns New Zealand children could get dumber in three or four generations unless women with higher education started producing more babies.  Otago University emeritus professor Dr Jim Flynn was commenting on census figures that show mothers without a higher education were the anchor of New Zealand's current fertility rate.

"Everyone knows if we only allowed short people to reproduce there would be a tendency in terms of genes for height to diminish. Intelligence is no different from other human traits," he told the Sunday Star-Times.

"A persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually."

Statistics show women without tertiary qualifications who had reached their early 40s had produced 2.57 babies each.

In contrast, women with a higher education were producing just 1.85 babies each.

Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone.

Los Angeles, briefly speaking

Does anyone work in LA?

I wonder how all the hipsters find each other at a dark club?  They all look alike.

What happened to the originality of California? 

The  ROXY is still going.   Only if those walls could tell stories............been many years since partying there.

The traffic, scores of Muslim women shopping on Rodeo Drive wearing niqab's and head scarves, the zombies texting everywhere, did I mention the traffic?

All 3 of the near car accidents I was privy too were with blondes.

How do they get away with watering their lawns in Beverly Hills?  Isn't there a water shortage in Los Angeles? 

$625 for a T-shirt is too much at Ralph Lauren.

I didn't see much of the over 55 crowd out and about. 

The nasty tats on those beautiful young gals will look rather rough in the years to come.

Is it worth a multi-hour wait to get one's picture taken with Robin Williams "STAR" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

Spago was over-rated and over-priced.  Service was good but not what I expected.  Not even close to exceeding my expectations.






 

Wall Street fundamentals at work, CISCO style..............

Since 2011 Cisco has repurchased $21.9 billion in stock.

Since then, it has fired 21,000 people.

Some pay tax, some don't.........

Deciphering Zero's "recovery"

One can read the 696 page neo-Marxist tomes "explaining" inequality in a way only an economist could - by ignoring the untold destruction economists themselves have unleashed on society with their "scientific theories" or one can read the following 139 words by Paul Singer which in two short paragraphs explains everything one needs to know about America's record class inequality, including precisely who is the man responsible:

Inequality in the U.S. today is near its historical highs, largely because the Federal Reserve’s policies have succeeded in achieving their aim: namely, higher asset prices (especially the prices of stocks, bonds and high-end real estate), which are generally owned by taxpayers in the upper-income brackets. The Fed is doing all the work, because the President’s policies are growth-suppressive. In the absence of the Fed’s moneyprinting and ZIRP, the economy would either be softer or actually in a new recession. 

The greatest irony is that the President is railing against inequality as one of the most important problems of the day, despite the fact that his policies are squeezing the middle class and causing the Fed – with the President’s encouragement – to engage in the radical monetary policy, which is exacerbating inequality. This simple truth cannot be repeated often enough.

Feel the love??

It should come as no surprise that when Gallup recently conducted a poll asking residents to rank if their state is the "worst possible to live in" a whopping 25% of its residents, by far the most of any states, responded Illinois. Which were the other "worst possible" states? The table below ranks them all.





How about the opposite: the best US states to live in? Here is the full list in descending order.



And some commentary from Gallup:

Residents of Western and Midwestern states are generally more positive about their states as places to live. With the exception of the New England states of New Hampshire and Vermont, all of the top 10 rated states are west of the Mississippi River. In addition to Montana and Alaska, Utah (70%), Wyoming (69%), and Colorado (65%) are among the 10 states that residents are most likely to say their state is among the best places to reside. Most of these states have relatively low populations, including Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska -- the four states with the smallest populations in the nation. Texas, the second most populated state, is the major exception to this population relationship. Although it is difficult to discern what the causal relationship is between terrain and climate and positive attitudes, many of the top 10 states are mountainous with cold winters. In fact, the two states most highly rated by their residents -- Montana and Alaska -- are among not only the nation's coldest states but also both border Canada.

With the exception of New Mexico, all of the bottom 10 states are either east of the Mississippi River or border it (Louisiana and Missouri). New Jersey (28%), Maryland (29%), and Connecticut (31%) join Rhode Island among the bottom 10.

The results are based on a special 50-state Gallup poll conducted June-December 2013, including interviews with at least 600 residents in every state. For the first time, Gallup measured whether residents view their states as "the best possible state to live in," "one of the best possible states to live in," "as good a state as any to live in," or "the worst possible state to live in."

Few Americans say their states are the single best or worst places to live. Rather, the large majority of respondents say their states were either "one of the best" or "as good a state as any" place to live.

One in Four Illinois Residents Say Their State Is the Worst Place to Live

Illinois has the unfortunate distinction of being the state with the highest percentage of residents who say it is the worst possible place to live. One in four Illinois residents (25%) say the state is the worst place to live, followed by 17% each in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Throughout its history, Illinois has been rocked by high-profile scandals, investigations, and resignations from Chicago to Springfield and elsewhere throughout the state. Such scandals may explain why Illinois residents have the least trust in their state government across all 50 states. Additionally, they are among the most resentful about the amount they pay in state taxes. These factors may contribute to an overall low morale for the state's residents.

Texans Most Likely to View the Lone Star State as the Very Best

Although Texas trails Montana and Alaska in terms of its residents rating it as the best or one of the best places to live, it edges out Alaska (27%) and Hawaii (25%) in the percentage of residents who rate it as the single best place to live.

Texans' pride for their state as the single best place to live is not surprising when viewed in the context of other measures. According to Gallup Daily tracking for 2013, Texans rank high on standard of living and trust in their state government, and they are less negative than others are about the state taxes they pay. The same is true for Alaska and, to a lesser extent, Hawaii, which had relatively average scores for trust in state government and state taxes, but ranked high for standard of living. The three also have distinct histories, geographies, natural resources, and environmental features that may contribute to residents' personal enjoyment and pride in their locale.

Bottom Line

Residents with the most pride in their state as a place to live generally boast a greater standard of living, higher trust in state government, and less resentment toward the amount they pay in state taxes. However, the factors that residents use to determine whether their state is a great place to live are not always obvious. West Virginia, for example, falls far behind all other states on a variety of metrics, including economic confidence, well-being, standard of living, and stress levels. Still, over a third of West Virginians feel their state is among the best places to live, giving it a ranking near the middle of the pack.

Ho Ho Ho It's August..............

The Dow has not gained anything since Christmas Eve!

HFT exposed again............

Authored by Brad Katsuyama via Bloomberg View,

In the last few months, I have had a strange and interesting experience. In early April, I found myself the main character in Michael Lewis's book "Flash Boys." It told the story of a quest I've been on, with my colleagues, to expose and to prevent a lot of outrageous behavior in the U.S. stock market.

Many of us had worked at big Wall Street firms or inside stock exchanges, and many of us believed something was amiss in the market. But it took the better part of five years to discover exactly how the market had been organized to benefit financial intermediaries, rather than the investors, the companies or the economy it was meant to serve. Only after looking at a flurry of market innovations -- 40-gigabit cross-connects, esoteric order types, microwave towers -- did we understand that the market’s focus was less about capital formation and more about giving certain market participants an advantage over others. In the end, we felt that the best way to solve these problems was to build a stock market of our own, which we did.

After the book, our stock market, IEX Group Inc., became a topic of discussion -- some positive, some negative, some true and some false. Fair enough. If you're in the spotlight and doing something different, you should take the heat along with the light.

It's for this reason that we have done our best to resist responding publicly to misinformation about our company -- even when we read memos circulated inside banks that "Michael Lewis has an undisclosed stake in IEX" (he does not); that “brokers own stakes in IEX” (they don't); or articles in the Wall Street Journal that said we let "broker-dealers jump to the front of the trading queue,” putting retail investors and mutual funds at a disadvantage (in reality, all orders arrive at IEX via brokers, including those from traditional investors). Our hope in staying quiet was that the truth would win out in the end. But in recent weeks, the misinformation campaign has hit a new high (or low), and on one particularly critical matter, we feel compelled to set the record straight.

On July 7, Bart Chilton, a former commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, wrote an article about high-frequency trading for the New York Times's DealBook. He argued, in effect, that because high-frequency trading has become so central to the stock market, it must be serving some necessary purpose. “At any one time, it is likely that 50 percent of all trades are made by high-frequency traders in United States equity markets," he wrote. "Even trading volume on the IEX exchange, which is trumpeted as creating 'institutional fairness' in the Michael Lewis book 'Flash Boys' about the topic, is now made up of roughly 50 percent high-frequency traders.”

This is false: While high-frequency trading firms are estimated to generate 50 percent or more of the volume on other stock markets, on IEX, high-frequency trading firms currently make up less than 20 percent of our volume. (Note: It’s difficult to predict the optimal proportion of HFT activity in any market, but it should definitely not be half the volume.)

There is a reason for this vast difference on IEX: We have sought to eliminate the unfair advantages HFT has over genuine investors (such as the combination of high-speed data and the ability to place their computers feet away from exchange-matching engines). By using technology to eliminate what we see as systematic unfairness -- and the opportunity for certain traders (who purchase premium access at other markets) to prey on ordinary investors -- we have discouraged a great deal of predatory high-frequency trading on IEX. Those high-frequency traders who do trade on our market (we like to call them electronic market makers) are the ones who do not require some unfair advantage to succeed. By creating a market without distinct advantages, IEX has allowed the HFT crowd to define itself.

Chilton’s claim has the effect of making us look no different than any other market. More generally, all these false rumors about IEX attack the foundation of what our team is trying to build -- a fair marketplace, free of the conflicts of interest that have long plagued our financial markets. I am not sure what Chilton’s motives were in using that statistic, but his sources were suspect at best: He claims they were “industry folks."

One thing we have witnessed in the Internet age is that a fiction can spread, eventually appearing to become fact. A few days after the article, the brokerage firm Raymond James & Associates Inc. published a report about exchanges and dark pools. We read in disbelief as a licensed securities analyst claimed that “IEX isn’t quite the sparkling pillar of righteousness that it is often portrayed in media reports. For example, much-vilified high frequency trading firms are a major source of liquidity on IEX.” His validation for writing this was Chilton’s incorrect claims.

With so many billions of dollars at stake, it is not surprising that some people will spin rich fictions about IEX -- to deter others from believing in a fairer stock market. This is a battle being fought with words and numbers. So before you accept them as fact, make sure you consider the sources and their motivations.