Category Archives: Asides

Don’t worry, we can always lease Heathrow to the Russians…

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The headline is from Willem Buiter’s blog.

The government of Iceland is using the threat of a €4 bn loan from Russia in exchange for a 99-year lease on the airport at Keflavik – a former American air base – as leverage to obtain financial support from the West. This is high-stakes poker -not without risk to Iceland, if their bluff is called. I would have securitised the future revenues from hydro and geo-thermal power generation before bringing on the Red Army. It does show, however, that there may be more collateralisable assets around for governments to draw on that one might have thought. Good news for Chancellor Darling.

Buiten’s reasoning (in another post to his excellent blog) is:

A government should only nationalise a bank (let alone most of its banking sector) if it has the fiscal strength to support the bank (or its banking sector). If it does not have the fiscal resources, now and in the future, to restore the banks to solvency, a private sector insolvency problem is transformed into a government insolvency problem. On the whole, the consequences of state default are more serious for the residents of a country than the consequences of a private bank default.

If the banks in question have a large amount of foreign currency debt, maintaining government solvency when the government tries to make all the banks’ creditors whole, requires two distinct resource transfers: an internal fiscal transfer, through spending cuts or tax increases from the domestic private sector to the government, and an external transfer through a larger primary surplus in the balance of payments accounts. Such an external transfer generally requires a depreciation of the real exchange rate and a worsening of the country’s external terms of trade.

Vista, the “unqualified success”

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Since (we updated it), I’d also refer to Vista as an unqualified success. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t still picking on it, but we’ve sold 180 million copies, something like that, of Vista. The quality, the compatibility (and) particularly from the consumer market, the level of acceptance — I’d call it an unqualified success, over the last six months or so.

Steve Ballmer, in an interview. But what we really want to know — and what Microsoft knows but won’t divulge, thought they know the number — is how many of those Vista copies have been actually activated. I know lots of people who bought laptops with Vista but who paid for the ‘downgrade’ to XP. Each laptop counts as a Vista ‘sale’, but not as a copy in actual use.

Prius plug-in

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Hmmm… Here’s a supplier (based in California) who will adapt my Prius to recharge from the mains. $5,000 plus shipping and installation. Bet it voids the warranty. I think I’ll wait for Prius v2.0.

Markets down, online lingerie sales up

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There’s a silver lining in every cloud.

Froggybank.co.uk, an online shopping network of 180 websites, said it had analysed the spending habits of its half a million members for the past three months, only to discover that underwear sales, far from being pulled down by the economic crisis had risen two per cent. Or, in other words, when people think “credit crunch”, they think “pants!”

$5,000 for your genome

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From Technology Review…

Starting next spring, a complete human-genome sequence can be ordered for just $5,000, thanks to a new sequencing service announced by Complete Genomics, a startup based in Mountain View, CA. The stunning price drop–sequencing currently costs approximately 20 times that amount–could completely change the way that human-genomics research is done and open up new possibilities in personalized medicine. Researchers say that a $5,000 genome would enable new studies to identify rare genetic variants linked to common diseases, and it could open up the sequencing market to diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, making genome sequencing a routine part of clinical drug testing. Complete Genomics, which has received $46 million in venture funding to date and has largely stayed under the radar, plans to launch with a bang and anticipates the capacity to sequence 1,000 genomes in 2009 and 20,000 in 2010. That would represent a massive jump: with a price tag of $100,000 to $1 million over the past two years, only a handful of human genomes have been sequenced to date. Apart from anything else, this is an illustration of what Moore’s Law can do.

Extending naturally from what has already been covered, the question of how research teams handle the earliest stages of the therapeutic pipeline often determines how successful the later clinical phases become. In practice, spending time with teams who specialise entirely in this space has made it clear that the gap between generalist CRO support and deeply embedded specialist expertise is significant — both in the quality of structural data produced and in how proactively problems are communicated and resolved. Working with a provider focused entirely on medicinal compound identification and new treatment development research can provide that structural biology depth that in-house teams rarely have the bandwidth to develop themselves. The insights generated from fragment screening and cryo-EM work at this stage are often what determine whether a target is worth pursuing at all.

The coming October surprise

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John McCain has pulled out of Michigan, which is big news because it signals that he has concluded he can’t win there. It looks as thought Obama is pulling ahead. So here’s a prediction: if Obama is still ahead in two weeks and the Republicans are facing defeat, Bush and Cheney will orchestrate a ‘national security’ emergency to, er, bring voters to their collective senses and reach for the Vietnam vet.

What sort of emergency? Well, how about bombing Iran after concocting some sort of Tonkin-type attack to ‘justify’ US action?

UPDATE: Turns out lots of people are thinking like this.

On this day…

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… in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit, thereby triggering a chain of events that led to the establishment of ARPA and the funding of the ARPANET, which in turn led to the Internet. Talk about unintended consequences. Full story in my book.

Robbery 2.0

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Lovely story in Good Morning Silicon Valley…

As a rule, most criminals are not particularly bright, a fact that gives law enforcement a fighting chance against lousy odds. But once in a while you see a little flash of cleverness that has to be abstractly appreciated despite the way that it was employed. Taking inspiration from similar ploys seen in the movies and adding a Web 2.0 twist, an armored-car robber in Monroe, Wash., escaped Tuesday with the unwitting help of a dozen or so decoys responding to a Craigslist job ad.

According to reports, the suspect — wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask — approached the truck in a Bank of America parking lot, gave the guard a face full of pepper spray, grabbed the cash bag, sprinted about 100 yards to a creek, hopped into a waiting inner tube and floated off to freedom. The getaway vehicle was later found about 200 yards downstream, sans passenger. At the bank, meanwhile, there was no shortage of people matching the robber’s description. A dozen or so men dressed in identical gear were wandering around wondering if their potential employer had stood them up. Each had responded to a Craigslist ad purportedly seeking to hire road maintenance workers for $28.50 an hour, and each had gotten e-mail instructions to show up at 11 a.m. Tuesday near the bank wearing certain work clothing — “yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask … and, if possible, a blue shirt,” said one. The FBI is on the case, hoping the offender was less clever in covering his digital tracks.