Blogotariat

Well it looks like Mitt Romney will start a short priced favourite to win the Republican Florida primary but it has been an up and down ride to get there.

The fluctuations on Intrade over the last month

The market has closely followed the polls.

Sundance, for me, begins and ends with Ice-T. Attending for the first time this year, I landed Saturday amidst a disastrous snowstorm, and, due to time constrictions, was forced to schlep my suitcase around in the blizzard. Plus, I forgot my hat (I live in California!). Nevertheless, I remained calm in the face of meteorological adversity, knowing my reward was the premiere of Something From Nothing, Ice-T's documentary on the craft of hip hop. The film, as expected, was worth the vexing hustle. At any given moment, I was rapping with Grandmaster Caz and B Real; smiling to hear Dre talk Pac; looking over my shoulder where Ice sat with his son and Coco. It was magnetic.

On arrival at Davos I wrote about how appropriate the "transformation and new models" theme of this year's World Economic Forum is for framing what needs to happen in education. What I'm realizing a few days into the Forum however is that the topic of education really isn't on the agenda at all!

We've addressed everything but -- the threats to our economic strength, our environment, our public safety, our health. We've addressed youth unemployment and the need for international cooperation and collaboration. But we just aren't focusing on education or on the need to address the enormous educational disparities that persist in countries all around the world.

How can this be?

This election process of ours has become reminiscent of an overcooked, deeply redundant television series written by a cabal of hacks with no concern for freshness of tone or inventiveness of detail, relying instead on weary bromides, eye-rolling hyperbole, sophomoric name-calling and the deadening boredom of clichéd characters made interesting only by the manipulated controversies stirred up for the sake of media drama.

Welcome to Election 2012, the Series.

Oops.

What I utterly condemn is when protests turn violent, the way we saw the violence yesterday.

J Gillard Press conference 27 January

How annoying. This blog took quite a while going through the debate around the Constitution to set out the position of indigenous people in relation to the state. It needn’t have bothered. All we needed was a Canberra farce and we have all we need to know.

My old Goldman colleague poses this question over at his Reuters blog. He could have added that there is currency manipulation via QE too:

Mysteries of macro
By Emanuel Derman JANUARY 27, 2012

1. Consider two countries, America and China. Suppose (only suppose) China manipulates its currency to keep it low, thereby making exports cheaper and imports expensive, benefiting its balance of payments and mercantile ambitions, harming America’s.

2. Now consider America alone, with two subpopulations: borrowers and savers. Suppose someone at the top manipulates T-bill prices, keeping them high (i.e. keeping interest rates low), benefiting the borrowers and harming the savers.

My question:

I'd been downsized. Thrown under the bus. Killed, some people call it. What a rip-off! I'd made a deal--"I'll give my time on Earth to the Corporation in exchange for money and health insurance to keep my family safe"--and now they weren't holding up their end of the bargain: "We don't want you anymore. Get lost!"

But, surprise, now I was found. I had thought I didn't like spending my precious days on Earth sealed into a box at Time Warner headquarters, where I toiled in corporate communications, but I had no idea. I wasn't fully conscious of how alienated I was, how estranged from myself. I couldn't afford to be, because then how could I have kept doing my job?

Now, anything was possible.

Mortician And Newly-Minted Internet Sensation Caitlin Doughty Wants To Radically Change How We Think About Death, Dying And The Funeral Industry

Amy Storch and her son Ezra had a messy afternoon yesterday.

As Amy describes it on her blog, amalah.com, the little boy came down with a stomach bug after eating a whole lot of raspberries, and the results were very magenta -- all over Amy, Ezra and the house.