Samsung Electronics says its operating profits for the third quarter will hit $6.29 billion, up 80% year-over-year and smashing Wall Street expectations.
That forecast from the South Korean tech conglomerate exceeded analysts’ expectations of about $5.89 billion. It marks a surprise for a company that as recently as the previous quarter saw operating profits fall 4% from the same period last year.
What’s driving the comeback? It’s all about Samsung’s semiconductors division, the backbone of its third quarter success. And that’s partially thanks to smartphone rival Apple, which uses chips manufactured by Samsung in its latest iPhone 6 lineup (Samsung’s own phones also use Samsung-made chips). Samsung’s chip business saw revenues grow by around 24% to about $28 billion last year.
Aren't Samsung and South Korea generally great examples of crony capitalism? (Here's The Economist in 2010 briefly on the topic.) Doesn't their success send some sort of challenge to small government advocates that their approach isn't the only one that can succeed?
Somewhat interesting to read about the way the interaction between State and Federal powers in the US makes creating an effective background check system in the US so difficult.
But never forget - the fundamental resistance to increased effectiveness of any such system is driven by a "they're coming to get our guns!" paranoia encouraged by the NRA and like bodies.
As I noted in a recent post, some climate scientists are warning that the current Californian drought may well be small compared to some ones that may be coming under climate change - lasting up to 35 years, perhaps.
Now it seems to me that for a State with a high population and a very big agricultural sector (which has presently been getting by on diminishing groundwater), a 35 year drought would be a very big problem indeed. How are economists and their models on the effects on GDP dealing with that scenario?
More generally, a paper just out in Nature Climate Change explains that changes to tropical rainfall are shown under all modelling of the future climate under AGW, but the problem is working out where. As the abstract explains:
Many tropical countries are exceptionally vulnerable to changes in
rainfall patterns, with floods or droughts often severely affecting
human life and health, food and water supplies, ecosystems and
infrastructure1.
There is widespread disagreement among climate model projections of how
and where rainfall will change over tropical land at the regional
scales relevant to impacts2, 3, 4, with different models predicting the position of current tropical wet and dry regions to shift in different ways5, 6.
Here we show that despite uncertainty in the location of future
rainfall shifts, climate models consistently project that large rainfall
changes will occur for a considerable proportion of tropical land over
the twenty-first century. The area of semi-arid land affected by large
changes under a higher emissions scenario is likely to be greater than
during even the most extreme regional wet or dry periods of the
twentieth century, such as the Sahel drought of the late 1960s to 1990s.
Substantial changes are projected to occur by mid-century—earlier than
previously expected2, 7—and
to intensify in line with global temperature rise. Therefore, current
climate projections contain quantitative, decision-relevant information
on future regional rainfall changes, particularly with regard to climate
change mitigation policy.
Again, I wonder how economic forecasts over the coming decades can take this uncertainty into account.
Given the show had become boring and not worth watching in the last couple of seasons, I wasn't expecting the re-boot to be good. I hope this review is right, though.
I don't think he has many more left in him, though, by the sounds of the report.
I'm not sure what Chevy Chase does in his spare time now, but he has not physically aged well, at all:
He's an inspiration for dieters, though.
Doris Day, on the other hand, looks pretty much how I think she should (she's 91):
Last time I saw Billy Crystal on TV, I thought that his head was starting to look strange. But in this photo, I think the beard makes him look more normal:
He's 67, and just had a TV series cancelled.
David Letterman, 68, on the other hand, looks positively ancient when he grows a beard:
Kirstie Alley turned up on The Middle this last season (still a funny sitcom, shamefully overlooked by the Australian market) and she is a good looking 64 (as long as she keeps the weight off):
Mind you, she would surely have had the best medical assistance Hollywood could buy.
The best preserved comedian of the modern era, however, has to be Bette White, who at 93 is still working and appears to have stopped aging 30 years ago:
Is there a reason for this post? Not that I can tell. It's strangely pointless...
Given that there is a strong chance the El Nino's full effects are really just getting into gear, there is strong reason to believe we're in for a period of severe weather of different types around the world.
Mind you, I see that some economists have come out arguing that El Nino events are actually pretty good economically - the benefits outweigh the downside, globally. Yet some of the examples given in the article seem to be along the same lines that can be used to argue that earthquakes and war can be "good" for an economy.
Personally, I'd prefer that the economy improve without the death, destruction and pestilence along the way - but I'm not an economist.
I had been intending to note here that I was completely underwhelmed by the trailer for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies - it was a terrible, plodding example of trailer salesmanship, if you ask me.
Yet we all know a great trailer can be made from a bad or average movie, so it is always possible that it can work in the other direction, too.
That seems to be the case here, and I am pleased to see that the movie is generally getting solid reviews.
Interesting to read how the IS propaganda machine actually spends a lot of time on positive PR spin about the its economic and social future. "Look! - a man growing melons. Look! - a camel herder! Look! - a homosexual being thrown off a building and the crowd below stoning his body."
[Apparently, the medieval period has a lot of allure to a certain subset of the population. It's a bit like those who enjoy medieval dress up fairs - hey, I've been to one or two - but with the violence real.]
A bit of a worrying future in store for California:
A team led by climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University in California has used historical data and climate models to show that global warming is increasing the odds of the state seeing warm, dry conditions similar to those that spawned the current drought (N. S. Diffenbaugh et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 3931–3936; 2015).
The droughts could even last for many decades. By incorporating palaeoclimate data into climate models, Benjamin Cook of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and two co-authors are predicting droughts that could last as long as 35 years (B. I. Cook et al. Sci. Adv. 1, e1400082; 2015).
“We’re in a new climate, and it’s a climate in which the probability of severe drought conditions is elevated,” Diffenbaugh says. “That recognition is really critical.”
I find Nick Xenophon's proposed changes to the Senate voting system to be very reasonable.
They will upset Senator Leyonhjelm, who openly advocates gaming the voting system by the creation of microparties simply to direct preferences, so that people have no idea who they may get. As we have seen in all other Senate or House of Reps election results, Leyonhjelm's party has a vanishingly small voter base, and he wants it to have a chance in future by the same devious tactic. This deserves to be crushed.
Been a while since I made a "just cooked this for the first time" post, but the weekend saw my first attempt at tempura.
The recipes for this on websites vary a lot - quite a few involve self raising flour, or baking powder added to plain flour; others recommend cornflower mixed in with it, or even potato starch. The matter of using an egg (or just yolk) is not even settled. The only universal thing is that the water used must be ice cold, and you do not want an over-mixed, smooth batter - lumps are good.
In any event, I found that plain flour, mixed with an equal quantity of iced water containing a lightly beaten whole egg, worked well. And one cup of flour and one of water makes quite a lot of batter. (Actually, I think I added a bit more water - I don't like thick batter. But it basically seems hard to go wrong (as long as the oil temperature is pretty high too.)
As for the dipping sauce - 1 cup of dashi (powdered stock type, of course); 1/4 cup each of mirin and soy sauce, plus a couple of teaspoons of sugar, all heated in a saucepan and cooled a bit for serving, worked well.
The history of tempura as a Japanese mainstay is interesting. As the Kikkoman company's website explains:
China, which has long influenced Japan, has traditions rich in
culinary techniques based on the use of oil. In fact, written Chinese
includes an array of characters used to distinguish different types of
frying, such as quick-frying over high heat, searing at low heat, and so
on.
Yet Japan was unaffected by this particular culinary aspect of China:
early Japanese cooking was more strongly influenced by the injunction
against eating meat that arrived with the introduction of Buddhism in
the sixth century. This meat-eating taboo came to Japan by way of China,
but Buddhism was not the state religion of China, nor was it closely
associated with the ruling classes, as it was in Japan. Pig lard was
used to prepare some dishes in China, but pork fat was unavailable in
Japan, once the eating of pork was prohibited. Vegetable oils were
obtainable here, but they were used mainly as fuel for illumination and
their quantity was limited; thus the use of oil in cooking was slow to
catch on.
Tempura most likely made its first appearance in Japan via Spanish
and Portuguese missionaries and traders, who introduced deep-frying in
oil during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Gradually, the type
of cooking we now know as tempura became firmly established during the
eighteenth century. As if to endorse this history, I have encountered a
deep-fried squid dish in Portugal. And to my surprise, I enjoyed
something called “fritters” —deep-fried seafood or vegetables—which had
an uncanny resemblance to tempura in Malacca in Malaysia. Malacca is a
bustling coastal port where the descendants of Portuguese colonists, who
arrived during the early sixteenth century, pursue fishing and other
trades while conducting their lives in the local vernacular, a dialect
of Portuguese....
What was early tempura like? The oldest extant records, dating from
the late seventeenth century, indicate that it consisted of balls made
of a paste of thrush meat, shrimp and ground walnuts, which were
deep-fried in oil, then covered with a sauce thickened with kuzu (a
perennial of the bean family) starch. No batter coating seems to have
been applied.
In the mid-eighteenth century there are records of deep-frying with a
coating, apparently fish dusted with flour or root vegetables like
burdock, lotus and taro dipped in a thin mixture of flour, soy sauce and
water. Considerable innovations then followed, creating the tempura we
know today: the production of vegetable oil increased and its price
stabilized, making it possible to use generous amounts in cooking; soy
sauce manufacture became an established industry, and this seasoning
became more widely available; it was also during this time that
bonito-flake stock was more commonly used.
During the Edo period, tempura-style cooking first became popular at
movable outdoor stalls. In those days, Edo was built entirely of wooden
structures, and so was extremely vulnerable to fire. Cooking outdoors
rather than in houses was encouraged, and outdoor stalls serving foods
like tempura were very popular. Like sushi, tempura flourished as a
snack enjoyed by the common townspeople, and went on to become an
essential element in the “flavor hierarchy” of Japanese cuisine.
I don't know why, but a lot of my pleasant dreams lately seem to be about the memorable scenery. Is it because the internet is serving up spectacular images of locations from all over the world - like a daily dose of National Geographic, instead of just a once a month (or once a dental visit) experience as it used to be when we relied on printed images?
In any event, my Zite feed has referred me to a short article at Country Living about Giethoorn, a
quaint Dutch village in which the houses are thatched and the streets are actually canals. It certainly looks dream-worthy:
You can take as true, when it comes from someone like me who only invests about 5 hours a year in watching sport, that everyone saying that the Rugby League grand final tonight was stupendously good viewing is correct. It showed everything that, even to my generally disinterested mind, makes this code the best to watch: a scoring rate that is "just right"; genuine tension that comes from clear movement of team lines back and forth in relation to the try line; less risk of idiosyncratic umpiring decisions changing a game; and the ability to always see the ball in play.
Given the latest American mass shooting (Oregon, 13 dead, 20 injured), that appears very likely to be another case of a person, probably with guns legally purchased by themselves or by a relative, who has gone nuts due to some perceived slight from fellow students, I was wondering whether one of the key differences between Australia and the US is not just the ridiculously easy access to firearms over there, but also the greater ease with which Australian authorities can remove firearms from people.
Well, I assume it is much easier in Australia. Certainly, this is the situation if a person has a domestic violence protection order against them in Queensland:
A temporary protection order will suspend your weapons licence and a final protection order will revoke your weapons licence.
You are required to surrender all weapons licences and weapons
possessed to a police officer as soon as practicable, but no later than
one day after the court makes the order, or the order is served on you.
If you fail to surrender licences or weapons in the time specified, you
may commit an offence against the Weapons Act 1990 and will be liable to a penalty of up to 10 penalty units.
You cannot apply for a weapons licence for a period of 5 years from
the date of the order if a protection order is made against you.
And certainly doctors who are concerned about whether a patient should have weapons can inform the police. A booklet here describes the process and issues.
But in the US? A paper from 2014 by some psychiatrists argues that national registries of the mentally ill aren't likely to help gun violence, but the power of authorities to order the removal of guns from those deemed "dangerous" might:
The debate regarding creation and maintenance of a national registry as a primary legal tool for keeping firearms out of the hands of people with mental disorders has obscured a potentially useful strategy for reducing firearm violence or suicide—temporary removal of a firearm from a person’s custody during periods of acutely elevated risk (32). Some states, e.g., California (33), permit removal of firearms from people during mental health emergencies and restrict access during the period of commitment. Specified clinicians in these states can work with appropriate personnel to facilitate removal of firearms from persons they believe are at significant risk of harm to themselves or others. Indiana and Connecticut (34) allow firearms to be removed from imminently dangerous individuals, whether or not they have mental disorders. Under the Connecticut statute, the state’s attorney or two police officers can file a complaint in court whereby temporary seizure of firearms of persons posing risk of imminent personal injury to self or others may be authorized for up to 14 days. After the initial firearm removal period, a court can extend the order for up to a year if it finds, after a hearing, that the danger persists. Under this statute, a history of confinement in a psychiatric hospital is only one factor that the judge may consider, in addition to several non-clinical factors, in evaluating the danger that the person presents.
Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVRO) empower families
and law enforcement to petition a judge to remove guns from relatives
who pose a risk to themselves or others. Shooters often exhibit
dangerous warning signs, and GVRO laws help keep guns away from people
with the intent to harm. California passed a landmark GVRO last year,
in response to the shooting at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. How many other mass shootings could have been prevented had the
shooters’ families had legal recourse to keep them away from deadly
weapons?
No one wants firearms in the hands of someone who’s not competent to own them. However, when someone crosses the danger to self or others
threshold, they need immediate care, not a restraining order. Police
and family members should focus on the individual, not their guns.
If the person is truly a danger to self or others, committing them to
a psychiatric institution will safeguard them from their firearms.
Has anyone taken to these nuts the matter of how incredibly illiberal their idea is, not to mention the ridiculous increase in the number of psych ward beds you would need? And of course, NRA membership would be almost a given for Tea Party Republicans, exactly the last people who would want the government spending the money that would be needed to make their "anything but the guns!" line in any way effective.
Whoever the heck is funding the IPA to send one of its youth workers* to Cambodia to shoot some street footage and talk platitudinous pap about free markets and entrepreneurs being wonderful must have money burning a hole in his or her large pocket.
I really fail to see the point.
And, incidentally, I wonder what the future Cambodian business persons interviewed for 15 seconds by the IPA think of its policy of actively discouraging any governmental response to climate change? Given that more than one body seems to think Cambodia is near top of the list of nations most likely to suffer badly as the world warms, I'm not entirely sure they would appreciate this aspect of the IPA's advocacy back in Australia.
* what is the average age of someone primarily employed there? Take out Roskam and I reckon it would be lucky to be 25...
Exhibit 1: I hired it with low expectations, which were pretty much confirmed, but watching Fast & Furious 7on DVD made me wonder how this series manages to be internationally hugely successful. (The only other one I have seen much of, however, is Tokyo Drift. Maybe I saw a bit of the first one, too. They're not exactly memorable.)
The key seems to be that they are aimed squarely at the interests of males aged 14-18, which means there is considerable overlap with those up to the age of 30, too. But then there is also the obvious marketing to the girlfriends of said primary audience, what with the hunky, good hearted lead actor; the continual emphasis on family and relationships; and the physical toughness and competency of the female leads.
This does make for some oddly mixed messages - the soft porn objectification of the women incidental to the story sits uncomfortably alongside the kick ass "girls can do anything" feminism and interest in relationships of the female leads. I get the feeling that a large part of the international success might be simply from the producers knowing exactly how much female skin they can get away without ratings interfering with the male teenage audience in key markets. (The ethnic mix of the cast doesn't hurt, too.)
Anyhow, parts of FF7 reminded me a lot of Mission Impossible, except that their stunts really are, well, impossible.
I don't find the movies offensive, but they are very, very silly and really don't deserve to do as well as they do.
Exhibit 2: My son has read the Maze Runner books, and the first movie was OK in a young adult way, so it was off to see Scorch Trials, the second in the series, last night.
Turns out it's a mish mash of the post apocalyptic and zombie genres: a bit Mad Max, a bit World War Z, making it less interesting than the first movie, which I still don't really understand. (My son assures me that, although the books are increasingly different from the films, it all makes sense by the end. I have my doubts.)
Look, it's very well executed in a visual effects sort of way - green screens and computer graphics can create really convincing looking vistas of devastated cities these days; but even some of the physical sets looked great. (Although, again, perhaps I am being fooled as to how much of what I am seeing of the cavernous interior of a decrepit shopping mall is real.)
There is one particularly odd scene, though, where they seem to stumble upon a still functioning equivalent of Studio 54 (under gay management, for some reason) in the midst of the rubble of a metropolis. A roughly equivalent scene is apparently in the book - I think it was in the movie so as to let in a drug addled kiss from the lead actor - but it was a bit weird.*
Back to the positive - the action is competently handled.
But they need to wind this series up soon - I was surprised how much older the actors looked in this film compared to the first, especially the young female lead.
And this morning, while shaving, I suddenly realised - "hey, unless I'm mistaken, those dudes wandering the deserts and dilapidated cities for a week or two never seemed to grown a hint of stubble." Maybe they are truly mutants.
* Update: I have only seen a little of the Hunger Games movies (the basic premise has no appeal) - but did Scorch Trials throw in a touch of camp weirdness inspired by them? Certainly, though, it would seem to be a common thread of these young adult series that it's a case of "The oldies - they're just using us! We have to fight back!"
Update 2: Oh look, you can learn about the digital rendering of the post apocalypse in this video. It's pretty incredible how actors now just have to imagine what they are looking at in movies like this:
Update 3: my son complains that I sound too critical of Scorch Trials. Let me be clear: I officially declare it "o-kaaay", provided you say that with the correct inflection that indicates you have reservations...
