BREAKING: Famous Global Warming Alarmist No Longer Alarmed

MSNBC reports that the lack of temperature rise in the last 12 years has convinced environmentalist James Lovelock ( The Gaia Hypothesis) that the climate alarmism wasn’t warranted.

By AMIR EFRATI

The riddle of the space asteroid start-up has been solved.

On Tuesday, Planetary Resources Inc., a company whose goals have been shrouded in secrecy, will outline a plan to convince governments that the technology exists to snare an asteroid and pursue space mining in the near future.

The company hopes to pressure the U.S. and other governments to lasso an asteroid and put it into a lunar orbit, setting up a competition to have private space companies do the mining, said John S. Lewis, a University of Arizona planetary-science professor who said he is an adviser to Planetary.

The approach faces budget and political challenges, both in the U.S. and overseas. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been pulling back from unmanned missions amid budget cuts by Congress. Money from any government for such an ambitious robotic proposal that is rife with technical questions and uncertainties is likely to be difficult.

Read the rest here.

via LifeHacker

Ever wondered if you respond to emails too slowly, or what kinds of email you receive most often? Gmail Meter is a simple script designed for Google Docs that can get to the bottom of how you communicate, statistically speaking.

What will Gmail Meter uncover? How many emails you’ve received and sent, what your email traffic looks like each day, your various categories of email, word count, and—my favorite—how long it takes you to respond to a message (on average). It’s pretty easy to set up. Just watch the video above or follow these instructions:

Read the rest here.

Jamie Sturgeon

Long coveted by consumers, the iPhone has come to be quietly begrudged by some partner wireless operators, who, owing to the device’s overwhelming popularity, pay Apple Inc. far higher prices per unit than they do on other smartphones.

Yet some say a shift is afoot that could restore a degree of power to carriers and in the process deliver to their investors a cut of the windfall now enjoyed by Apple shareholders.

Analysts at BMO Capital Markets said in a note Monday they believe unit costs for Apple devices are coming under pressure as new competitors nip at the iPhone’s heels and changing demographics in the smartphone market start to favour lower-cost handsets.

Read the rest here.

To the envy of its New York neighbours, a once sleepy dairy enclave in Pennsylvania has been completely revitalised by shale gas fracking. But the farmers of Troy tell the FT’s Christopher Booker that even if drilling is allowed in New York, problems remain ahead.

Japan’s stock market, hobbled by more than a decade of deflation, is showing companies will stage a full earnings recovery from the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, pricing in the biggest increase in profits compared with other countries since 2001.

Income in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average (NKY) will rise by 69 percent in 2012, after plunging 31 percent last year, according to more than 2,600 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. At 24.5 times reported earnings, Japanese equities are the most expensive among the world’s 60 biggest markets, trading so high that only by meeting analysts’ forecasts will ratios come back in line with global stocks, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“The worst is over for Japan in terms of earnings,” Masafumi Oshiden, an investment manager at ING Mutual Funds Management Co. (Japan) Ltd., said in a telephone interview on April 18. The firm oversees about 1.5 trillion yen ($18.4 billion). “Consumer spending is improving and corporate earnings are rebounding. The cautious mood following the quake is gone.”

Read the rest here.

via Lightspeed Active Trading Blog

April 20th, 2012 – Volume is the lifeblood of active traders. It’s the ocean in which market transactions are completed easily, quickly and without slippage. Sufficient volume provides traders the ability to move quickly in and out of securities without delay. Volatility and volume generally move in the same direction, with higher volumes usually combining with higher volatility and vice versa. Unfortunately, traders are currently facing a low-volatility, low-volume stock trading environment.

Volume has been plummeting for the last three years. Things are worse now than they were even after the great crash of 1987 and the dot-com bust of 2000. What’s happening to the volume and how can active traders find profits in the current low-volume, low-volatility market?

Read the rest here.

Let’s get something straight: we did not have a housing “bubble”, in the usual sense of the word. The mainstream narrative of crazed, greedy, irresponsible homeowner-wannabes driving prices unsustainably high, causing the still ongoing crash is wrong. Yes, we had a housing “bubble” in one sense; prices soared way beyond reality because excess demand fueled irrational bidding wars. The lie deals with why we had a housing bubble. The lie matters because like all problem-defining narratives, it shapes the policy solutions offered. So let’s take a look at the lie.

Joe Weisenthal on why no one should worry…

By Angela Moon and Doris Frankel

(Reuters) – The wild ride in Apple shares this year could get even more interesting when the company reports quarterly results after the bell on Tuesday.

Judging by trade in the options market, investors expect Apple shares to jump or fall by about 7.5 percent, a much greater swing than the average post-earnings move of about 4.25 percent in the past four quarters.

Read the rest here.

Earlier this month, President Obama signed into law the Jobs Act, short for Jumpstart Our Business Startups. This Act won bipartisan support because it purports to create jobs by making it easier for small businesses to raise capital. However, the Jobs Act will also significantly loosen the regulatory requirements on hedge funds – whether or not this was the intent of Congress.

Read the rest here.

via The Big Picture

By Lee Fang posted Apr 20th 2012 at 9:04AM

Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rights experts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy.

There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past.

However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books:

Read the rest here.

via The Big Picture

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that you should have sold a stock in a crisis. But in the midst of a financial debacle, it’s not so clear. Here’s how to figure out what to do.

MR. MEHANNA’S crimes were speech crimes, even thought crimes. The kinds of speech that the government successfully criminalized were not about coordinating acts of terror or giving directions on how to carry out violent acts. The speech for which Mr. Mehanna was convicted involved the religious and political advocacy of certain causes beyond American shores.

via AbnormalReturns

A great read by John Spong at TexasMonthly.com

By ALLYSIA FINLEY

‘California is God’s best moment,” says Joel Kotkin. “It’s the best place in the world to live.” Or at least it used to be.

Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas’ iconic “California Dreamin'” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But it also attracted young, ambitious people “who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies.” Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, however, the Golden State’s fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn’t Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

“Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax.

And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their “smart growth” plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. “What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.

“The new regime”—his name for progressive apparatchiks who run California’s government—”wants to destroy the essential reason why people move to California in order to protect their own lifestyles.”

Read the rest here.

Joe Weisenthal

This is so cool (via Gawker and Justin Wolfers): A British gameshow called “Golden Balls” invites contestants to play a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, wherein the two contestants have to decide whether they’re going to “split” or “steal” a pot of money.

If they both opt to split, they split the money. If one opts to split, and one opts to steal, the one who steals it gets the whole pot. And if they both opt to steal it, then neither get the money.

You have to watch this video to appreciate the raw game theory power move that one contestant pulled.

Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Read the rest here.

WASHINGTON — Some of the same spoilers that interrupted the recovery in 2010 and 2011 have emerged again, raising fears that the winter’s economic strength might dissipate in the spring.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2012-72

Washington, D.C., April 20, 2012 – The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged twin brothers from the U.K. with defrauding approximately 75,000 investors through an Internet-based pump-and-dump scheme in which they touted a fake “stock picking robot” that purportedly identified penny stocks set to double in price. Instead, the brothers were merely touting stocks they were being paid separately to promote.

The SEC alleges that Alexander John Hunter and Thomas Edward Hunter were just 16 years old when they set their fraud in motion beginning in 2007. They disseminated e-mail newsletters through a pair of websites they created to tout stocks selected by the robot – which they described as a highly sophisticated computer trading program that was the product of extensive research and development. Their claims were persuasive as the Hunters received at least $1.2 million from investors primarily in the U.S. who paid $47 apiece for annual newsletter subscriptions. Some investors paid an additional fee for the “home version” of the robot software.

In reality, the SEC alleges that the Hunters used a third website to offer their services as stock promoters, claiming that they could “rocket” a stock’s price and increase its volume by sending out newsletters. The Hunters were consequently paid at least $1.865 million in fees from known or suspected stock promoters, and they did not disclose to their newsletter followers the conflicting relationship between their two businesses.

“The Hunters used the anonymity of the Internet and the promise of easy riches to prey on investors,” said Thomas A. Sporkin, Chief of the SEC’s Office of Market Intelligence. “While touting their supposed breakthrough investment technology on two websites, the Hunters were racking up fees as stock promoters through a third.”

According to the SEC’s complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Hunters created websites Doublingstocks.com and Daytradingrobot.com to falsely tout that a former trading algorithm programmer from a large investment bank had designed a stock picking robot that they named “ Marl.” The robot could purportedly analyze the over-the-counter securities markets and identify penny stocks that were set to experience large price increases. The brothers offered investors paid subscriptions to their e-mail newsletter that would contain the robot’s latest stock pick.

The SEC alleges that the brothers separately created the website Equitypromoter.com where they marketed their newsletter subscriber list to penny stock promoters and boasted, “One email to this list of people rockets a stock price.” The Hunters were in turn paid to send selected penny stock ticker symbols to their subscribers, who were misled to believe that the stock “picks” were the product of the robot. The Hunters sent out their newsletters near the beginning of the trading day, and the price and volume of the promoted stocks spiked dramatically as newsletter subscribers rushed to purchase shares. However, the stocks typically fell precipitously shortly thereafter, leaving investors with shares worth less than they had purchased them for earlier in the day.

According to the SEC’s complaint, the Hunters also offered subscribers a downloadable version of the stock picking robot for an additional fee of $97. Rather than performing the analysis advertised, the software was actually designed to just deliver users a stock pick supplied by the brothers. In soliciting bids in 2007 from free-lance coders to create the software, Alexander Hunter wrote that the software should “not actually find stocks at all. It should connect to my database and simply request any new stocks I have put in.” He bluntly explained that the software “is almost a ‘fake’ piece of software and needs to simply appear advanced to the user.” Like the newsletter, the home version of the stock picking robot was no more than a fraudulent delivery vehicle for stock symbols that the Hunters had been compensated to promote.

The SEC’s complaint charges the Hunters with violating the anti-fraud provisions of the U.S. securities laws, namely Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder. The SEC is seeking permanent injunctions, disgorgement of all ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.

The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Adam M. Schoeberlein. The SEC’s litigation will be led by Robert I. Dodge.

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http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2012/2012-72.htm