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Quote of the day

Feb 21

brianUncategorized hockey, Olympics No Comments

Commentary from the Russia vs. Czech Republic hockey game today:

“What language are the speaking down there?”

“Well on the Czech bench, Czech, and on the Russian bench, Russian. And when they speak to each other, it’s English, but it’s not very polite.”

Senators who Tweet

Feb 18

brianUncategorized senators, twitter No Comments

I made a table of US Senators who tweet and how much.  I’ve seen other lists of tweeting Senators, but most of them are unreliable.  They usually contain usernames that have been compromised or don’t have any tweets associated with them.  The usernames in this table came from the Congress in your Pocket iPhone app and do not include Senators with protected accounts.

The columns are sortable and contain the number of tweets made by that senator, the number of twitter followers that Senator has and the number of twitter users that Senator is following.  The last column indicates whether or not the account for that Senator is a Twitter verified account.

The numbers are valid as of the date of this post.  Unfortunately, as I said, it is a static list.

The table shows some interesting results.  Claire McCaskill is the most prolific tweeting senator with 1377 tweets.  Richard Shelby and Debbie Stabenow are tied for least tweets with 5.  As expected, John McCain has far and away the most followers with over 1.7 M.  The retiring Evan Bayh has the fewest followers, 96.  Jim DeMint follows the most users, over 14k, while Ben Nelson and Debbie Stabenow don’t follow anyone.  I guess Debbie Stabenow isn’t really engaged with twitter.

The only three twitter verified accounts are John McCain’s, Richard Lugar’s and Kirsten Gillibrand’s.

Demand Question Time

Feb 17

brianUncategorized question time No Comments

Demand Question Time is a movement dedicated to making permanent the question and answer period President Obama had with House Republicans a few weeks ago.  Please sign their petition to make this useful bipartisan discussion part of our political infrastructure.

Will we start to add jobs back in 2010?

Jan 31

brianSustainable Economy GDP, jobs, openCRS, unemployment 1 Comment

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the GDP rose 5.7% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of last year, exceeding expectations of 4.5% growth.  Since job growth is generally a lagging economic indicator, this is good news for those seeking jobs.  Historically, as GDP goes up, the unemployment rate goes down (not vice versa).  OpenCRS, a website that makes Congressional reports available to everyone, released an excellent report last November titled Unemployment and Economic Recovery, prepared by Brian Cashell, explaining this relationship, known as Okun’s Law.

The CRS report has a graph of unemployment rate (plotted as the dependent variable) vs. economic growth rate (as the independent variable, usually measured as GDP) over the past 60 years.

According to the historical data, GDP growth of 5.7% correlates well with a decrease in the unemployment rate (approximately 0.5%).  The current (December 2009), seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate is 10.0%, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.  As a side note, Google has a slick public data initiative that can pull and plot historical data made publicly available. Below is a graph of the percentage of the total workforce that is unemployed from 1990 – 2009 (not seasonally-adjusted). Click on the “Explore Data” link to view state-by-state data.

So will the next update from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics show the unemployment rate has fallen below 10.0%?  Probably not.  According to tweets from the writers of the 538 blog, some of this growth was due to one time government spending.

So if the real GDP growth for the 4th quarter of 2009 was 2.9%, then were probably still looking at a slight increase in the unemployment rate — the break even point is about 3.5%.  However, it could mean that things are headed in the right direction.  A few quarters of 4 – 4.5% growth could bring the unemployment rate down a full percentage point, which would at least start to feel like a recovery.

A Couple of Issues in the Coming Financial Reform

Jan 08

brianSustainable Economy finance reform, financial derivatives, risk, swap No Comments

OpenCRS has posted a report entitled Key Issues in Derivative Reform.  According to it, derivatives reform will likely center around two issues:

1. Clearing OTC swaps through an independent third party.  In the past, big firms were acting as the clearinghouse for their own transactions, which was deemed OK since they were “too big to fail”
2. Not burdening the end user of financial derivatives too much — this means keeping derivatives attractive for nonfinancial institutions as a means of hedging business risk.

A good example form the report on how a business uses financial derivatives to hedge risk:

a firm can protect itself against increases in the price of a commodity that it uses in production by entering into a derivative contract that will gain value if the price of the commodity rises. A notable instance of this type of hedging strategy was Southwest Airlines’ derivatives position that allowed it to buy jet fuel at a low fixed price in 2008 when energy prices reached record highs. When used to hedge risk, derivatives can protect businesses (and sometimes their customers as well) from unfavorable price shocks

Nov 22

brianUncategorized No Comments

An update on the fundraising reported by the Capuano, Khazei, and Coakley campaigns comes form kennedyseat.com.  The second reporting period ended on Friday.  Below is a table tracking the first and second reporting periods as well as the amount of campaign cash entering the race (Michael Capuano entered the race with some money left over from his re-election to the House in 2008).

And in graph form,

I actually kind of like the Russian spam on my blog

Nov 01

brianUncategorized No Comments

I actually kind of like the Russian spam on my blog. It’s like opening up a Christmas present — you never know what you’re going to get.

The first one I actually approved as a comment, because it was kind of fun and easy to translate it from Russian, even though it was clearly spam.  It read:

тише,все ок!всем нравится,и мне!

which translates to English as:

quiet, everything is OK! everyone likes, and me!

This is much higher quality than the usual English spam.  It has one complete sentence in it, “Quiet, everything is OK,” even though the second sentence kind of falls apart.  But is this just part of the translation?  Does “everyone likes and me” actually make sense in Russian?  Yes, it’s possible that this is even higher quality spam in Russian.  But in English, this last sentence makes the whole comment kind of catchy in a “all your base are belong to us” kind of way.

Did this comment actually make sense in response to the post?  Not really. The post states that there is a report that was released.  The comment is about a position taken, but no position was taken.  But, hey, who can blame ‘em?  Most posts on the web are about taking a position.  And anyway, the comment was approved!

The second Russian spam comment came in as:

Я все понял и ни чего не понял:)

which translates to:

I understood everything and did not notice:)

This one also had good form.  One good complete sentence — actually uses a conjunction correctly.  The second phrase agrees and uses the same subject as the first without repeating.  Emoticon at the end is a dead giveaway, though.  And again, doesn’t really make sense with the page it was posted on.

And finally, the third one:

Я считаю, что Вы не правы. Давайте обсудим. Пишите мне в PM, поговорим.

in English:

I think you are wrong. Let’s discuss. Send me a PM, we’ll talk.

Very impressive.  Three sentences, all complete!  The first is a direct challenge — defend your position!  Unfortunately, it’s a comment on the same post as the first one.  There’s really nothing to be wrong about here, unless McKinsey did not release that report, but I’m pretty sure they did.

So the sentence structure is getting better, but, alas, there’s always some killer at the end of the Russian spam comment: an awkward last sentence, emoticon too close to the end of the sentence, or in this case, flubbing a shorthand expression.  ”Send me a PM?”  I think you mean IM.  But, yes, dear web crawler, let’s keep the dialog open.

National Wireless and Brodband Service Like the Postal Service

Oct 25

brianUncategorized access, broadband, network, postal service, rural, wireless No Comments

According to a post by Tom Schaller on 538.com, FedEx and UPS use the US Postal service to deliver packages to remote rural areas, instead of doing it themselves. In the article, he quotes a former postal employee:

Nearly every time I was in a rural post office FedEx or UPS would show up, bring a load of packages to be delivered and pay the postage to have them delivered. I asked a few Pm’s [postmasters] about it, they each explained that it was cheaper for them to pay the Postal Service to deliver the packages than to have to drive their trucks sometimes miles into very remote areas.

Why can’t we have a nationwide wireless phone and data network equivalent to the USPS? This infrastructure would provide service to the rural and remote areas where none is available. It’s not as if AT&T and Verizon are interested in providing service to these areas. They could adopt the same model as FedEx and UPS and pay this federal wireless broadband entity for capacity in those areas on an as needed basis. Increasingly, safety and rescue operations are relying on cellular service to help them perform their tasks. National wireless coverage may become a necessity.

More electric vehicles by 2030

Oct 12

brianSustainable Vehicle electric vehicles, kerry-boxer, waxman-markey No Comments

One-third of greenhouse gasses generated from the United States comes from transportation and the number of cars on the road in the United States will increase by 50% by the year 2030.  These two trends will fight against the upstream mandate on greenhouse gas emissions in the proposed climate change legislation before Congress.

Both the Waxman-Markey and the Kerry-Boxer bills specify a timeline for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from covered sources, which include domestic petroleum producers and importers.  The Waxman-Markey mandates greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 28-31% over 2005 levels and the Kerry-Boxer bill mandates a 42% reduction.  If the reduction in the final legislation is 30-40%, and our consumption of cars continues to increase, efficient electric vehicles will be more important than ever to fight off higher gas prices.  The cap-and-trade nature of the legislation will require upstream petroleum producers to buy pollution allowances and offsets which will likely mean higher gas prices.

2009 MA Senate Special Election Finances

Oct 01

brianUncategorized campaign, election, finance, massachusetts, senate No Comments

The candidates for Senate in the Special Election to fill the seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy filed their first disclosures today with the FEC on the amount of money they’ve raised.  As reported, Martha Coakley and Alan Khazei have raised considerable sums of money in a short amount of time: $2 M for Martha in a month and $1 M for Alan in a week.  Below is a chart showing the funds raised by the 5 candidates.

Pagliuca has actually disclosed $200,000 but $50,000 of that cannot be used in the primary due to campaign finance restrictions.  An individual may only contribute up to $4800 in the primary and $4800 in the general election.  Capuano started out with $1.2 M in his war chest banked from previous campaigns.