February 2011
How governments are reacting in the face of food... →
Wheat has suddenly become an important item on the menu of the Middle East.
Algeria put in an order for 800,000 tonnes of it last week, bringing its total purchases for January to 1 million tonnes. Jordan, Turkey, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Morocco and Lebanon have also been major buyers recently, and Bangladesh has said it will double its 2011 target for wheat purchases in order to curb domestic...
Supposedly Egypt's last ISP is down?
Yeah, looks like it. That’s pretty impressive, since Noor was the ISP for the Egyptian Stock Exchange. I guess this means the government has given up much hope of reopening markets and returning to normalcy anytime soon.
“In Egypt, the Arabic word for bread “aish” is also the world for life. Egyptians...”
– Bread Is Life: Food and Protest in Egypt - Ecocentric - TIME.com (via apsies)
Oh goodness. This is even more dire than the store closures I wrote about previously. There are a whole lot of people depending on these subsidies - it looks like about thirty million people were eligible in 2008, during...
gym time!
It’s definitely been more than a week, because of laziness being sick. This is probably going to hurt quite a bit.
so I think I might be possessed
I have these mysterious blackouts, and then when I come to, I’ve agreed to volunteer for some cause or organize some event for which I have no time at all. It’s like a demon comes inside me and takes control.
Why can’t I have a cool demonic possession? This one is just vaguely stressful.
m1chaelll-deactivated20111228 asked: I just realized we have the same theme. I changed mine a week ago but did I inadvertently select the same theme as you? Someone tried to convince me that Japan's debt just surpassed one quadrillion USD. I'm assuming they meant yen? What's their chance of defaulting? Aiya.
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Israel risk premium rises on Egypt unrest →
The spread on Israeli five-year credit-default swaps widened to near 1.5 percentage points on Monday from 1.16 points on Wednesday, before the Egypt protests began in earnest, according to the London data provider Markit. That means that the cost of insuring $10 million of Israel’s debt against default for five years has risen to almost $150,000 a year from $116,000.
Egypt’s CDS spread widened...
January 2011
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classes i would like to take
abbyjean:
persuasively explaining that people you know on the internet count as friends
being dorky is ok: how to mention your dorky habits without furious blushing
for the love of god stop clicking on things and go to bed already
retirement planning: not just for old people
meeting people with romantic potential: how to achieve this without radically redefining your own identity
you are a...
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Tomorrow In Egypt, There Will Be Trouble
negevrockcity:
February 1 is payday in Egypt. Banks are still shut down across the country and internet access is still sporadic. Egyptians won’t get their paychecks on time. Most Egyptians are living hand-to-mouth in a country where most are very, very poor. This won’t be good.
Oh goodness. This is suboptimal. Maybe I was too confident about the banking system earlier? If a whole lot of...
Egypt may risk bank run as uprising against... →
Egypt’s banks may risk a surge in customer withdrawals when they open for business, placing them among companies worst hit by the nationwide uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.
[…]
Asked about the risk of a bank run, Mohamed Barakat, chairman of state-run Banque Misr and head of the country’s banking association, said in a telephone interview that Egyptian lenders are “very...
“Many families in Egypt are fast running out of staples such as bread, beans and...”
– Okay so this is pretty bleak. Egypt imports a whole lot of its food supply, and people living in urban areas acquire basically all their food through shopping, so there’s a whole complicated supply chain upon which everyone is relying, and that’s breaking down. This probably puts a time...
10² + 11² + 12² = 13² + 14²
Wait what?
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“Some 99% of South Sudanese voted to secede from the north, according to the...”
– That sounds pretty airtight, yeah? And the north is accepting the results, so I guess there’s going to be a separation.
Not sure how to feel, now - this creates a new desperately poor country with zero infrastructure and no skilled labour force. But at least they get some institutional...
middle-aged aunts at a family event all insisting...
Vague sensation of worlds colliding.
so that think tank wants a biography from me
And the administrator (who is ridiculously friendly and helpful) has instructed me to submit a biography, and suggested that I look at the other PhD students’ biographies for some guidance.
HOLY SHIT THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. These people all have years of experience and dozens of publications and seem to have been grad students for well over a decade and have done field work on several...
herewearenowentertainus replied to your post: activism failure
Here I convey the emotion of delighted surprise, with a soupçon of lust: i.min.us/iexmNM….
Oh my.
activism failure
So today I was going to go to the protest for Egypt and Tunisia downtown. Woke up at the ginger’s, and we had a hearty breakfast of eggs rancheros and sangria (so good), and I was so excited, and so committed, so I set off for the bus and I was so ready to do this aaaand my pants ripped while I was running to get the express bus. Badly. I was wearing a relatively strappy jockstrap...
just woke up from a very strange dream
It was something about endangered deer in Vanuatu and a concert or something - but what I really remember is that everyone I interacted with throughout the dream was an attractive scruffy ginger. There were at least half a dozen of them. What the eff is my subconscious trying to tell me?
At any rate, I woke up and now I’m getting ready to go to the liquor store and then go meet with a...
abbyjean replied to your post: hey so I can’t find a Canadian government position on Egypt
you’ve warned your citizens not to go to egypt right now. bold step! :)
Oh awesome! Go Canada.
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hey so I can't find a Canadian government position...
Is there one?
Or are we just being very Canadian about this and waiting for the US to clearly say something first? If so - hey Canada, remember when we used to get to do our own foreign policy? That was fun.
Deeper Breath.
jasencomstock:
lawful:
Okay, not only is Ahmed Sorour going to make an important announcement, stations are now reporting that a line of limos was seen at Cairo airport and three private jets have left the country under heavy security.
No clue.
Hyperventilating, though.
Al-Jizz said that the nations “elites” are fleeing.
If I were living in Egypt and were in a limo/private...
Authoritarian governments start stockpiling food... →
Commodities traders have warned they are seeing the first signs of panic buying from states concerned about the political implications of rising prices for staple crops.
However, the tactic risks simply further pushing up prices, analysts have warned, pushing a spiral of food inflation.
Governments in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa have recently made large food purchases on the open...
Rally for Tunisia AND Egypt: Democracy, not...
WHEN: Saturday, January 29, 1:00pm-3:00pm WHERE: Vancouver Public Library (Central Branch) - Robson St. & Homer St. Please consider attending this rally to show solidarity with the people of Egypt and Tunisia and to tell our government that Canadians care about these events! Numbers matter. Please donate a couple of hours of your time to promote social justice and support the brave...
so there's going to be a Egypt-related rally in...
I’ll post more details tomorrow when I have them.
mykeymykes replied to your post:Hey Jakke, I just signed up for my first year Uni classes, and I didn’t sign up to anything Economics related. Did I make a terrible mistake?
though, with your Masters in Econ you really should be trying to sell the discipline ;)
My Masters in econ taught me I should be trying to discourage anyone else from going into economics, so that I can exercise more...
so about Suez
So, more knowledgeable tumblrs, I’m going to ask a really ignorant question, but it’s not meant to be a joke - I seriously don’t know how this sort of thing operates.
It seems the protests are really really vigourous there. It’s a relatively isolated port city at the south end of the Suez Canal (hence the name, I guess).
This might sound like a really stupid question - but if the protesters...
theydothingsdifferentlythere asked: Hey Jakke,
I just signed up for my first year Uni classes, and I didn't sign up to anything Economics related.
Did I make a terrible mistake?
I just signed up for my first year Uni classes, and I didn't sign up to anything Economics related.
Did I make a terrible mistake?
the coffee shop employee is leaving Canada forever
(This is not the one that love-and-radiation is so enthusiastic about - different coffee shop.) She’s here on a one-year work visa, and so her visa is expiring and she’s going back to eastern Europe. This is kind of sad, because she’s really friendly and I spend a lot of evenings here so we’ve talked and stuff.
Today she seems to have given me a free upgrade to the largest...
Technical Details On How Egypt Has Shut Down Every... →
so I'm affiliated with a think tank now?
They’re way more poli sci-based than economics-based, but it’s nice to have at least one acceptance letter, and this makes me eligible for some really interesting conferences and of course funding for research projects. (Also networking opportunities but those are meaningless to me because of my lack of social skills.) It’s also well-recognized enough on the Canada level that I...
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Why is it that 6 banks represent 64% of GDP when...
reactorboy:
ronenreblogs:
jmarie3:
alexanderclarence:
64% of U.S. GDP: JPMorgan Bank of America CitiGroup Wells Fargo Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley
[impassioned but uninformative commentary elided for legibility]
“As for the corporate chieftains at the large financial firms that were either toppled or brought to their knees by the crisis, the panel says its examination found “stunning...
jasencomstock asked: fair trade coffee?
sleeplessinsouthie replied to your post:so the most encouraging sign that my dextromethorphan binge didn’t actually do any permanent damage to my kidneys
Meanwhile, how’d things go with the ginger? Inquiring minds…
There’s not all that much more to say about it than I did at the end of that rant about Bring It On earlier - it went well, but not as well as the first date, and...
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so the most encouraging sign that my...
Is that my urine is no longer the colour of strong chai tea.
This probably means the recommended maximum dose on the bottle is just trying to prevent you from getting all overheated/emotional/blurry-visioned/dizzy like I was getting towards yesterday afternoon when I realized what was going on. It isn’t because your kidneys will shut down if you take too much.
I will keep this in mind next...
“Grindr users should work in pairs so they could accurately triangulate the...”
– EncycloMundi - live feed
Oh my goodness this is ingenious! There should be an app to expedite this. (Although this would still leave two possible target locations no?)
it's gonna take me a lot to take me away from you,...
You’d better believe that it’s epic 80s time on the coffee shop soundtrack. Between the current “Africa” and the “Final Countdown” which just wound up, I feel like I’m in a game theory homework montage, and my completion of huge piles of work is suggested by the passing of only a few minutes. (This is possibly augmented by the caffeine.)
Also: a guy just...
signing NDAs before discussing your very secret...
Oh, okay. All those madly typing people sitting within three metes of you are probably typing about something else anyway.
Also in all likelihood this venture capitalist is not the big deal he’s claiming to be, seeing as he’s meeting the prospective investors in the coffee shop with the cheapest iced espresso beverages and free all-you-can-eat wireless in downtown Vancouver.
On the...
sleeplessinsouthie asked: Have you heard about this:
http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/01/gay-bashing-in-british-columbia.html
Apparently it happened some place called Nakusp? Sounds pretty vicious.
http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/01/gay-bashing-in-british-columbia.html
Apparently it happened some place called Nakusp? Sounds pretty vicious.
brrrr, it's cold in here
So last night we ended up watching Bring It On in all its Kirsten Dunst/Eliza Dushku/Summer 2000 glory. (Yeah, remember when it was in theatres? That was ten and a half years ago.) This was my first time watching it since high school, so some notes (WARNING: spoiler alerts):
The movie basically stars a slightly more earnest version of Regina George, with her two hangers-on and her wealthy...
comandeering his computer while he's out of the...
Going quite well, actually. Logging onto tumblr might have been a bad idea? I probably should go.
date time!
Wish me luck.