mythology world's tallest man?-from Chile
pictures of satanic rituals- from South Africa
ford pinto memo- from US
Now I've decided to sell off some of my books by becoming an Amazon Merchant. I was confident I'd sell many of my books because I follow two rules: I 1) keep my books in excellent condition, 2) undersell the lowest comparable used copy by 50¢ to $1.
So far, in twelve hours, I've sold 3 of the first 8 books I put up for sale -- all recent, popular, non-fiction titles. Now, this high volume tells me that I might have to rethink my inventory price floor; If I'm already going to the post office regularly, why not include the cheap books, and make a few extra dollars?
But then I remember that the point is to get rid of books I've read, will not reference, and will not read again; the point is to clear up space with minimal expense of time, not to maximize revenue on book sales; the point is MAX(U), not MAX(Π).
Milton friedman used to take copious notes of what he read- he took, for example, eighty seven pages of notes on Keynes's Treatise on Money
Now, I know this is a speech about the environment, but let me first talk about bodybuilding, which is another passion of mine -- (laughter) -- because bodybuilding used to have a very sketchy image, as you know. And as a matter of fact, there were a lot of people that were working out in the old days; they never admitted that they were working out because they didn't want to be associated with that sport. As a matter of fact, a lot of the big Hollywood celebrities -- Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Kirk Douglas -- they all were working out with weights, but they never would publicly acknowledge it because they didn't want to be associated with the gymnasiums that were like dungeons for weirdos and for fanatics and so on.
So we knew that we had to change the image, and we did. We consciously changed the image. The book came out, "Pumping Iron," and the movie, the documentary of "Pumping Iron" came out. And I started writing books on bodybuilding for men and for women and for children and all this and started promoting and promoting.
Eventually the image of bodybuilding changed, that now you literally can go anywhere in the world and you will find a gymnasium. As a matter of fact, you can go to any gymnasium and you will find ordinary people talking about their lats and their biceps and their abs and their body fat and all those kind of things.
Moses founded the Algebra Project in 1982 with funds from a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" that he received for his work on voting rights. Initially, he focused on the goal of making sure that all students learn algebra, which he calls "the gatekeeper of citizenship." When students learn algebra, he says, they make a leap in their ability to manipulate abstract symbolic representations.
Over time, the Algebra Project has developed curricula and methods for teaching algebra in the late middle school and early high school grades. Moses and his fellow project leaders now run professional development programs for teachers around the country. To encourage student and parent commitment, project leaders conduct community meetings at schools taking part in the program. With support from the National Science Foundation, General Electric Foundation's Math Excellence program, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Algebra Project currently has a $1.7 million budget.
The Algebra Project is now working with a team of research mathematicians and educators to develop a curriculum for college preparatory math. It uses an experiential approach to introduce new concepts through concrete events. For example, to understand how to represent motion on a graphical plot, students take a subway or bus trip and then draw a "trip line" to represent the experience.
In Jackson, Miss. and Miami, Fla., Moses has started a program for ninth-graders who are performing in the bottom quartile of their peer group. Students commit to spending 90 minutes a day in math class throughout their four years of high school, including six weeks each summer. In 2003, the most recent year for which data are available, 56 percent of students in Jackson who participate in the Algebra Project passed the state algebra test, compared to only 38 percent of their peers who are not taking part.
It all starts from the cradle. In Britain, new mothers read the gentle and loving Penelope Leach; in America, they read the classic Dr Spock. But in France, mothers read one of the gurus of French child development, Françoises Dolto. Dolto was an authoritarian who believed that children should be separate from their parents and live their own lives.
Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.
When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”
They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”
There are more than 120 species of rat in the world, but only two have become serious human pests: the black rat notorious for its role in spreading plague, and the larger brown rat, also called the Norway rat because it was mistakenly thought to have entered Europe through Norway. The Norway rat has largely displaced the black rat as prime urban vermin, and it’s the rat you see in trash cans, parks and on subway platforms. The so-called fancy rats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway rat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.
Scientists began using albino Norway rats for research sometime around the turn of the 19th century, and though the rats have been inbred into homogeneous strains with names like Wistar and Sprague-Dawley, they retain enough street credibility that when a scientist recently released a group of lab rats into a wilderness-type habitat and filmed their reactions, the rodents soon began acting like wild rats. They explored every crevice as rats can do so fluidly, by collapsing their rubbery skeleton down to the width of their snout. They found everything edible in the vicinity, and, though they’d been reared in metal enclosures, they began digging, digging, digging, stopping only to check out the opposite sex and maybe waggle an ear.
Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.
In another recent study, Jonathon D. Crystal, a psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, and his colleague Allison Foote were astonished to discover that rats display evidence of metacognition: they know what they know and what they don’t know. Metacognition, a talent previously detected only in primates, is best exemplified by the experience of students scanning the questions on a final exam and having a pretty good sense of what their grade is likely to be. In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.
-IMF-supported fiscal programs have often been too conservative or risk-averse. Despite some increased flexibility in recent years, they have often unduly narrowed the policy space by failing to investigate sufficiently more ambitious, but still potentially feasible, options for higher government spending and aid.
-The IMF Board and management have not made sufficiently clear what is expected of IMF staff in exploring the macroeconomic consequences of alternative aid scenarios. As a result, the IMF risks sending confused signals to donors and recipient governments.
-Wage bill ceilings have been overused in IMF programs and should be limited to the (probably rare) circumstances where a loss of control over payrolls threatens macroeconomic stability. IMF programs have not imposed specific constraints on hiring or wages in the health (or education) sector, but IMF efforts to protect these sectors from the effects of aggregate ceilings cannot be enforced in practice.
-A striking disconnect exists between macroeconomic and health sector policy-making. Key fiscal decisions are taken with little understanding of potential consequences for the health sector and health ministries typically cannot make an effective case for increased budgetary priority. Donors have often added to the fragmentation of budgetary processes. Addressing these capacity gaps will require considerable external support, but governments must take the lead.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, professor at NYU, talks about the political economy of political campaigns and his forthcoming book, The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the different strategies politicians pursue in attracting support from voters and party delegates, the persistence of negative campaigning, the cost to politicians of sticking to their principles and how the political choices of Reagan and Yeltsin intersected to end the Cold War and dissolve the Soviet Union
Abstract; The majority of states in the U.S. now fund merit-based financial aid programs, the effects of which depend on how strongly students react to changes in college costs. I estimate such reactions using quasi-experimental aspects of a recent Massachusetts merit scholarship program intended to attract talented students to the state’s public colleges. This paper is the first to document heterogeneity in price sensitivity among students of varying academic abilities. My primary result is that, in spite of its small monetary value, the scholarship induced 6% of winners to choose four-year public colleges over four-year private colleges, the average of a large effect on the lowest ability winners and no effect on the highest ability winners. The bulk of funds nonetheless flowed to students who would have attended public colleges anyway, and the scholarship had no effect on the overall college attendance rate, which for winners was already above 90%. These findings have implications for the design of future government-sponsored financial aid programs.
In sum, the Adams Scholarship will spend $30 million annually to leave college attendance rates unchanged while paying 85% of recipients to attend the college they would have chosen anyway and the remaining 15% to attend colleges in the public sector rather than the private sector. This is not a sensible use of the state budget. Most states, including Massachusetts, could design more efficient and tightly targeted aid programs by first examining the college attendance patterns of their students, broken down as in Table 10 by income and rank in the distribution of academic ability.
Summary: The paper analyzes the determinants of success of recent fiscal consolidations in the OECD countries as well as the short-run and long-run effects of fiscal adjustments on economic activity by looking at fourteen case studies, panel data for OECD countries, and the results of simulations using a non-Ricardian multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. The study finds that while fiscal consolidations tend to have short-run contractionary effects, they can be expansionary in the long run, provided that they do not rely excessively on cuts in productive government expenditure. They can also create positive spillover effects for the rest of the world
Even I do not get terribly excited by the typical economics paper (a recent example picked at random: “Consumption and Labour Supply with Partial Insurance: An Analytical Framework”). But a couple of recent titles grabbed me and, much as I wanted to, I couldn’t look away.
One was “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization”, while the other was the more sobering “Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles”. Very different pieces of research, but both inhabit the tiny niche of the economics of crime.
When Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” he probably wasn’t thinking of seventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems to apply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violent criminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popular imagination. As a fascinating new paper (pdf) by Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, and “The Republic of Pirates,” a new book by Colin Woodard, make clear, pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs. The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”
Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.
A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult - until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it's thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it's something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren't students worn out after practicing spells?
The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?
The answer, as with so much of JK Rowling's work, seems to be "she didn't think it through". The details are the great charm of Rowling's books, and the reason that I have pre-ordered my copy of the seventh novel: the owl grams, the talking portraits, the Weasley twins' magic tricks. But she seems to pay no attention at all to the big picture, so all the details clash madly with each other. It's the same reason she writes herself into plot holes that have to be resolved by making characters behave in inexplicable ways.
The contrast between South Korea and India raised the biggest questions in economics: why have some countries succeeded with development and others failed? Why has Korea jumped from poverty to prosperity in a lifetime? Why did India do badly then, but much better recently?.
The broad question is the one Erik Reinert states in his title: How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. Reinert is a Norwegian professor who now teaches at Tallinn, Estonia. Ha-Joon Chang, a well-known Korean development economist, teaches at Cambridge. But both give strikingly similar answers to this question
Summary: Over the last decade, Islamic banking has experienced global growth rates of 10-15 percent per annum, and has been moving into an increasing number of conventional financial systems at such a rapid pace that Islamic financial institutions are present today in over 51 countries. Despite this consistent growth, many supervisory authorities and finance practitioners remain unfamiliar with the process by which Islamic banks are introduced into a conventional system. This paper attempts to shed some light in this area by describing the main phases in the process, and by flagging some of the main challenges that countries will face as Islamic banking develops alongside conventional institutions.
Choosing a cell phone plan
Why some are borrowers and others lenders
Responses to Quantity Discounts
Housing Subsidy vs Voucher
Has the move to China been good for American companies? The answer would seemingly have to be yes-otherwise, why would they go there? It is conceivable that bad partnerships, stolen intellectual property, dilution of brand name, logistics nightmares, or other difficulties have given many companies a sour view of outsourcing; I have heard examples in each category from foreign executives. But the more interesting theme I bave heard from them, which explains why they are willing to surmount the inconveniences, involves something called the "smiley curve."
The curve is named for the U-shaped are of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product's creation and sale. At the beginning is the company's brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design-the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.
The significance is that China's activity is in the middle stages-manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design-but America's is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, .swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this-that the real money is in brand name, plus retail-may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating.
At each factory I visited, I asked managers to estimate how much of a product's sales price ended up in whose hands. The strength of the brand mime was the most important variable. If a product is unusual enough and its brand name attractive enough, it could command so high a price that the retailer might keep half the revenue. (Think: an Armani suit, a Starbucks latte.) Most electronics products are now subject to much fiercer price competition, since it is so easy for shoppers to Iiiul bargains on the Internet. Therefore the generic Windows-style laptops I saw in one modern factory might go for around $1,000 in the United States, with the retailer keeping less than $50.
Where does the rest of the money go? The manager of that factory guessed that Intel and Microsoft together would collect about $300, and that the makers of the display screen, the disk-storage devices, and other electronic components might get $150 or so apiece. The keyboard makers would get $15 or $20; FedEx or UPS would get slightly less. When all other costs were accounted for, perhaps $30 to $40-3 to 4 percent of the total-would stay in China with the factory owners and the young women on the assembly lines.
Other examples: A earning case for an audio device from a big-name Western company retails for just under $30. That company pays the Chinese supplier $6 per case, of which about half goes for materials. The other $24 stays with the big-name company. An earphone-like accessory for another U.S.-brand audio device also retails for about $30. Of this, I was told, $3 stayed in China. I saw a set of high-end Ethernet connecting cables. The cables are sold, with identical specifications but in three different kinds of packaging, in three forms in the United States: as a specialty product, as a house brand in a nationwide office-supply store, and with no brand over eBay. The retail prices are $29.95 for the specialty brand, $19.95 in the chain store, and $15.95 on eBay. The Shenzhen-area company that makes them gets $2 apiece.
In case the point isn't clear: Chinese workers making $1,000 a year have been helping American designers, marketers, engineers, and retailers making $1,000 a week (and up) earn even more. Plus, they have helped shareholders of U.S.-based companies.
Marketing researchers are very interested in determining the degree of consumers' responses to changes in quality. There is also a great interest in identifying which aspects of quality are more relevant to consumers, in the sense that they value them the most, and also which aspects are considered luxuries. The usual approach is to conduct sample surveys and use psychometric techniques to derive estimates. In this paper we have suggested a basic framework to obtain price and income elasticities of attributes from market data. The advantage of using market data is the preferences are revealed through purchasing decisions, and hence one can avoid some of the biases commonly associated with survey methods. Furthermore, it is much more economical. However, the approach is not a panacea. The power of our method depends critically on the conformity of the observables with the underlying assumptions.
The basic idea of our approach is that consumers view differentiated products as different bundles of homogeneous characteristics for which an implicit market exists. The procedure consists of two stages. In the first stage a hedonic price equation is estimated. In the second stage a demand-supply system of characteristics is estimated where the shadow price vector of characteristics is the one derived from the first stage. The implied functional form for the hedonic price equation is derived from a utility-maximization framework that allows arbitrage among homogeneous attributes in a competitive market. A procedure to select representative characteristics for the estimation of the hedonic price equation is suggested. Conditions for the identification of a demand and supply of characteristics model are discussed. Methods for obtaining parameter estimates of the second-stage model that uses estimated shadow prices of characteristics are proposed, including the approach of using auxiliary data for the prices of other products, in the same broad category, for forming instruments.
We illustrate our approach using the US automobile demand data compiled from publications such as Consumer Reports, Automobile News, Motor Trend, Consumer Bulletin Test Reports and Ward's Automotive Yearbook for a period of 18 years (1969-86). We find that a linear hedonic price function for automobile characteristics is an adequate specification. The instrumental variables estimates of a demand system for the horsepower, luggage capacity and miles per gallon attributes appear reasonable. The demand for horsepower is elastic with respect to income. The luggage capacity has near-unitary income elasticity, but the income elasticity of miles per gallon is less than unity. This indicates that, as income rises, consumers care more for the performance (HP) and comfort (LU) of a car than for fuel efficiency (MPG). The own-price elasticities for all three attributes are all less than one in absolute value, with HP having the largest price elasticity while LU is totally price inelastic. Cross-price effects are mixed. The performance (HP) and fuel efficiency (MPG) are substitutes, but the size (LU) appears to be a complement to the performance (HP). However, the results must be interpreted with caution. They are obtained from a small data set. To obtain more reliable estimates, we need a much larger number of observations.
In summary, although many issues remain unresolved, the limited results obtained in this paper appear to indicate that the combination of economic analysis and econometric technique can complement the psychometric approaches and can provide useful information for marketing research.
Decisions to spend are also driven by perceptions of quality, the desire for which knows no bounds. But quality is an inherently relative concept. The same car that would have been deemed as having brisk acceleration and sure handling by drivers in Keynes’s day, for example, would be much less charitably evaluated by today’s drivers — even those with no desire to outdo their neighbors.
An economist’s formal mathematical model of the demand for automobile quality would incorporate an explicit comparison of a car’s features with the corresponding features of other cars in the same local environment. Cars whose features scored positively in such comparisons would be seen as having high quality, for which consumers would be willing to pay a premium. In purely mathematical terms, such a model would be essentially identical to one based on a desire not to own quality for its own sake, but rather to outdo others...
Until recently, for example, the Porsche 911 Turbo was considered perhaps the best all-around sports car on the market. Priced at over $120,000, it handles impeccably and has blistering acceleration.
But in 2004, Porsche raised the bar by introducing its Carrera GT, which handles slightly better than the Turbo and beats its 0-to-60 time by two-tenths of a second. People who really care about cars find these small improvements genuinely exciting. To get them, however, they must pay almost four times the price of the Turbo.
By placing the desire to outdo others at the heart of his description of insatiable demands, Keynes relegated such demands to the periphery. But the desire for higher quality has no natural limits. Keynes and others were wrong to have imagined that a two-hour work week might someday enable us to buy everything we want. That hasn’t happened and never will.
Software developer Morgan Friedman and five editors work part-time, running Overheard in New York, a collection of anonymous comments submitted by readers that range from the hilarious to the outrageous. Started in 2003, the blog is profitable, but Friedman says revenues can fluctuate by a factor of 10 over six months. A small one-week buy on Blogads costs $375, and an ad with Flash in a prime space costs up to $6,000. Overheard draws 6 million page views a month and gets 100 submissions from readers each day, says Friedman. A book was published last year, and four more blogs in the same vein now make up the Overheard network: Overheard at the Office, Overheard at the Beach, Overheard Everywhere, and Celebrity Wit. The site's core audience, Friedman says, is young women and gay men—tastemaking groups that advertisers covet. Although Overheard brings in cash, he says, "I’ve always approached it more as a community than a business. I want to make enough so we can invest more to grow. I’m not trying to build a Web 2.0 company that I can sell for millions of dollars."
BoingBoing, a "directory of wonderful things," might be the king of moneymaking blogs. Always at the top of Technorati, in June the site garnered 22 million page views from 2.6 million unique visitors. Advertising costs range from $350 to display a small button ad for one week to between $2,000 and $3,000 for the minimum 170,000 impressions on banner ads, all sold exclusively through Federated Media. Frequent posting—the four authors update the site 20 to 40 times each day—drives high traffic to the blog, which Mark Frauenfelder and his wife, Carla Sinclair, started as a print zine in 1988, to write about comics, science fiction, computers, and technology. "BoingBoing's viewers just continued to grow and grow and grow, for reasons we still don't completely understand," Frauenfelder says. "Now it's at the point where it actually becomes a business." And a good one at that: BoingBoing's ad sales top $1 million a year.
The relationship between the price of a bottle of wine and its taste is weak, according to two studies in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Wine Economics. Using a price equation to compare more than 1,000 bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy wines tasted blindly by experts, Sébastien Lecocq and Michael Visser, of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), find that the price of wine is largely determined by objective standards such as colour, ranking and vintage, rather than simply by taste and smell..
Similar results were found by Pierre Combris and Sylvie Issanchou, of INRA, and Christine Lange, of France's National Centre for Scientific Research, who observed how 120 people bid on non-vintage champagne after tasting it blind, after inspecting only the bottle, and after tasting it while seeing the bottle. The bidding was 33% higher when tasters could only see the bottle than it was with blind tasting, implying that the champagne's taste detracted from its perceived value.
“The label is a big part of the glamour,” says James Miles, director of the London International Vintners Exchange, an electronic exchange for fine wine. But although wine's intrinsic value may be debatable, its market value is not. Investing in wine has become a popular way of diversifying a financial portfolio. In 2002, when the FTSE 100 share index fell by 24.5%, the Decanter Bordeaux Index of 1,300 wines went up by 8.5%, according to “Wine Investment for Portfolio Diversification”, a book by Mahesh Kumar. The Liv-ex 100 wine index, which tracks the price of 100 fine wines, has risen by 55% in the last year and the fine-wine market is now worth more than £1 billion ($1.9 billion), according to Mr Miles. Hype generated this year by the 2005 Bordeaux, considered the best in a generation, has helped.
Interest in wine investment has also spurred the creation of new wine funds, including the Fine Wine Fund in August, charging a 2% management fee and 15% performance fee. Better availability of price information and more demand for wine in emerging markets has created a fine-wine bull market
Suicide rates in Japan have increased dramatically in recent years, making Japan's male rate the highest among developed economies. This study revises the standard economic model of suicide to accommodate Japan's experience, focusing on the change in human capital for the unemployed. We then use the new model and detrended data to empirically investigate the relationship between the suicide cycle and the unemployment cycle. Unlike previous aggregate time series studies, we find that the relationship between the suicide rate and the unemployment rate is significantly and robustly positive for both men and women even after controlling for several social variables.
"Many Westerners come to this country and shake their heads at the statistics for deaths from drinking, fires, and road accidents. But to understand Russia you have to understand that its people are risk-takers because they just do not know what is coming next".
During my time at Google we have built up a world-class group of quantitative analysts, and the economics team will complement these existing resources. Google has a great infrastructure for data analysis, and a management team that is very receptive to quantitative methods and willing to invest in this area. So what more could you ask for?-Hal Varian
In addition to working on analytics, I’ve also worked on various business strategy and public policy issues, and will continue to do so as the occasion arises. This set of issues will only get more important to Google as time goes on, so I expect that this will also involve a fair amount of my time
In Japan, every sexual fantasy or fetish has its outlet.
From so called image clubs where men can pretend they are in a train groping fellow passengers, and the "maid cafes" where clients are served and called "master" by girls dressed in French maid outfits, to a magazine dedicated to silicon "love dolls", the streets of Tokyo hide an incredible variety of business catering to sexual desires.
Japan is a country of apparent contradictions. Japanese people have very formal work and interpersonal relationships.
On the other hand, there is an extremely kinky underground world.
Are these two spheres of Japanese society really as different as they seem? Or is one the direct consequence of the other?
In our study, Singapore emerged as the most future oriented of cultures, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. The least future oriented were Russia, Argentina, Poland, and Hungary. Squarely in the middle were Germany, Taiwan, Korea, and Ireland. Even more important, however, is our further finding that the greater a society’s future orientation, the higher its average GDP per capita and its levels of innovativeness, happiness, confidence, and (as the chart shows) competitiveness
Roadmaps, capitulation, gestures, disengagements, convergences, deportations, and so forth do not bring peace. On the contrary, they bring war, just as we saw last summer. These things send a clear signal to our "cousins" that we are tired, that we no longer have spiritual strength, that we have no time, that we are calling for a time-out. They only whet their appetites. It only encourages them to pressure us more, to demand more, and not to give up on anything. These things stem from simple theoretical considerations and also from straight thinking. But it's not just theory: it has been proven and re-proven in the field over thousands of years. I returned today from a trip to India, where we heard about historical stories that illustrate the same. Capitulations bring about war; determination and readiness bring about peace. Ladies and gentlemen, we must tell our cousins that we are staying here. We are not moving. We have time; we have patience; we have stamina. Understand this and internalize it. And we must not simply say it to our cousins but feel it within ourselves. This and only this will bring peace. We can really live in peace and unity and cooperation with our cousins. But only after they understand and internalize that the Zionist state will be here forever. Thank you very much.
President Robert Mugabe's order that all shop prices be cut by at least half, and sometimes several times more, has forced stores to open to hordes of customers waving thick blocks of near worthless money given new value by the price cuts. The police and groups of ruling party supporters could be seen leading the charge for a bargain.
Mr Mugabe has accused business interests of fuelling inflation, running at about 20,000%, to bring down his government. A hotline is in place to report "overcharging", and retailers who flinch at slashing prices are being dragged before the courts. Several thousand have been arrested for "profiteering" over the past week, including the chief executives of the biggest retailers in the country, some of them foreign-owned.
Economists say the price cuts will only deepen the national crisis, leaving many shops bare because they will not be able to afford to restock while official retail prices remain lower than the cost of buying wholesale or importing. Mr Mugabe has dismissed such warnings as "bookish economics".
Some businesses fear that Operation Reduce Prices is intended to pin the blame on the private sector for Zimbabwe's economic problems as a step towards seizing control of many companies in the way that white-owned farms were expropriated at the beginning of the decade, sparking the crisis.
Parliament is expected to pass legislation in the coming weeks that will effectively give a controlling stake in all publicly traded companies to ruling party loyalists and others chosen by the government.
The impact of the price cuts was felt almost immediately as fuel virtually disappeared from sale after garages were forced to sell petrol for 23p a litre, less than they paid the state-owned supplier.
The police and army broke the locks on petrol pumps at some garages and tanks ran dry amid panic buying. Now petrol is available only on the blackmarket, at more than seven times the official price and three times what garages had been charging. By Saturday, most minibus taxis had gone from the roads because drivers could not find petrol. Crowds of workers were left on kerbs for hours trying to get to or from their jobs
