More About Pheromones

Trigger

Just read “Sexual-DuftstoffeBetörende Böcke”. The underlying scientific article was published as “Identification of an Olfactory Signal Molecule that Activates the Central Regulator of Reproduction in Goats”.

What’s New?

From the abstract of the scientific article:

“In sheep and goats, the seasonally anestrous endocrine state of females is changed to the estrous state upon exposure to male scents [7,8]. This so-called “male effect” is one of the most conspicuous primer pheromone effects in mammals [9,10]. In this study, we have identified an olfactory signal molecule that activates the central regulator of reproduction, the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) pulse generator, in goats.”

Scientists finally learnt more about the details how pheromones actually work. Thus, these pheromones not only affect the behavior of female goats and sheep, but also their reproductive readiness. Whether this also applies to humans awaits further research.

Law Enforcement Against Insider Trading In Germany

Trigger

Just read “Büros durchsucht/Großrazzia wegen Insiderhandels”. Law enforcement raided about 50 offices in Germany and Switzerland in conjunction with insider trading. A total of 23 persons were considered as suspects. 150 police officers, 20 officers of the German SEC, and 8 attorney generals took part.

These suspects knew each other from previous professional engagements or from hanging out together at same associations or because they had the same hobbies.

Is Insider Trading A Crime?

Not really!

I also just read that the founder of open-end mutual funds in the U.S. (Paul Codman Cabot) actively obtained nonpublic material information on a regular basis in the 1930s before it became an artificial crime.

I wrote more about this here and here.

Chilling Effect On Investment

We are now living for about more than five years now in the Great Depression and our politicians and law enforcement have nothing better to do but to go after insider trading?

French Socialists Want To Reduce Top Manager Salaries By 30%

Trigger

Just read “Wirtschaftsflaute\Frankreich will Chef-Gehälter um bis zu 30 Prozent kürzen”. President Hollande has insisted on 70% income tax for the rich during his election campaign.

In Brief

This measure to reduce top managers’ salary is foremost aimed at the many state-owned companies in France.

Salaries have already been capped at Euro 450,000 for managers at predominantly state owned companies.

The political elite in France are fools!

Previous, Related Blog Posts

Here.

American Experience On Penn Station

Trigger

Just watched American Experience on Penn Station in New York city. My remarks here will be preliminary as I did not have time for further research on this topic. This is a great documentary!

Own Experience

One of my first trips to my new and first employer in the U.S. around 1995 was from J. F. Kennedy Airport to Penn Station in New York city. I was not too impressed with this underground rail station with Madison Square Garden on top of it. The post office next to it looked more impressive.

Well, this documentary corrected my views thoroughly.

Quick Notes

CEOs of the Pennsylvania Railroad  (PPR, the largest railroad company in the U.S. for decades and at one time the largest publicly traded company in the world) company were dying on their job so did Alexander J. Cassatt.

It was a colossal private project financed by private money without government subsidies. “[T]he total project cost to the Pennsylvania Railroad for the station and associated tunnels was $114 million” (Wikipedia).

Lot’s of black sandhogs workers were hired to drill the tunnel under the Hudson River. Thus, it was possible to hire black Americans to work on dangerous jobs to work closely together with white workers in tight spaces in the early 20th century preceding Civil Rights and all that. This documentary shows a lot of photographies of black and white workers working together.

The great Baths of Caracalla in Rome was a model for Penn station.

When on site accidents and rising death toll during construction became a public concern, journalists were allowed to tour the tunnels as a pioneering public relations approach.  PPR hired a pioneer of public relations, i.e. Ivy Lee. “[H]e was considered to be the first public relations person placed in an executive-level position [at PPR]. In fact, his archives reveal that he drafted one of the first job descriptions of a VP-level corporate public relations position.” (Wikipedia).

Cassatt was inspired and studied the Gare d'Orsay train station in Paris to learn about an underground train station and how electric powered locomotives pulled the trains into this station.

The demolition of Penn Station in 1963 was the tipping point for building preservation and historic landmarks in the U.S. Grand Central Station survived because of it.

Home Schooling Is Prohibited In Germany

Posted: 3/5/2014  Updated: 1/16/2019

Update Of 1/16/2016

Just read The German Government Forcibly Removed These Children From Their Parents Over Homeschooling (dated 1/14/2019). A comment written by Robert Clarke, lead counsel in the case of Wunderlich v. Germany.

A very regrettable travesty in the annals of European jurisprudence! A week ago, the “European Court of Human Rights ... sided with Germany, reaffirming that Germany’s ban on homeschooling does not violate the family’s rights under international law … The German rationale is to prevent “parallel societies” from emerging. Lawyers representing the state presented this rationale to the European court without any evidence to support it as a theory.

We presented evidence to the contrary, showing that in countries with the longest history with homeschooling and the highest number of homeschoolers, the practice is tested, credible, and continues to grow.” (emphasis added)

Original/Revised Post

Trigger

I just read “The German Home-School Refugees Can Stay”. It is about a German family (the Romeikes) with many children who applied for asylum in the U.S. because homeschooling is prohibited by law and by the supreme court of Germany. The family is now allowed to permanently stay in the U.S.

Lady Liberty Is Smiling For Once

Given that the Statue of Liberty is inconsolably weeping since it was build, this is refreshing news for her.

Parents Ought To Decide Where And How Their Children Are Educated

In principle, it should be left to the parents to decide where they think their children will receive the best education whether it is private, public, or home schooling.

Any parents who decide to homeschool their children are to be commended for their efforts.

In Germany, the highest court of the land (Bundesverfassungsgericht) has decided against parents of homeschooling in favor of mandatory public schooling. What a miscarriage of justice! What an insult to liberty!

Car Dealerships Are An Obstacle To Software Updates

Trigger

I just read “Why Your Car Won’t Get Remote Software Updates Anytime Soon Software is taking over cars. But it may be a while before it can be updated without a trip to the dealer.”.

This article pointed out that one stumbling block to timely and convenient software updated to your car are the entrenched special privileges that car dealerships enjoy in most states.

When will these anachronistic anti free market franchise privileges finally be abolished? They are unconstitutional!

Tesla Trailblazer

“There is an alternative—the same sort of remote software updates used for PCs and smart phones. Indeed, one automaker, Tesla Motors, already provides what it calls “over-the-air updates,” which allowed it to execute a recent software fix without requiring anybody to bring in their cars (see “Tesla Motors’ Over-the-Air Repairs Are the Way Forward”).”

Previous, Relevant Blog Posts

Here.

Linux Wonderland

Introduction

I intend to present here my experiences of abandoning Microsoft Windows 8.1 for Fedora Linux on my new Lenovo notebook.

Finally A Better Graphics Driver Installed

My notebook has a Nvidia Geforce graphics card installed, but Fedora only installed a default driver for the Intel graphics, which is also present. The resolution of the display was underwhelming.

Contacted Nvidia support. My commendation for the prompt Nvidia support. After several email exchanges, my case was escalated and then the level 2 engineer from Nvidia pointed me to the bumblebee project in my case, because their driver installation script would not work on my notebook. Fedora had installation instructions for this driver and it worked for me.

Hardware Enumeration Is Iffy

This was shocking to me to learn that Linux command line commands like lspci do not completely and correctly enumerate all hardware devices on your computer. My Nvidia Geforce was never listed neither from the beginning nor after I installed the proprietary Nvidia driver through bumblebee project.

This is the least I expect from a great operating system that is capable of listing all hardware devices on my system.

Fedora Visual Files Utility Is Bad

Rather primitive I would say compared to Windows Explorer. E.g. you cannot expand the file name column to see the whole name of the file when you opt to see many of the other columns. This is truly awful and drives me mad!

Two Phoenix Police Officers Shot Not Wearing Bullet Proof Vests

Trigger

See e.g. here. This blog is not a justification for the murder or injury of police officers by criminals. I also do not want to second guess the decisions and actions of the two police officers here.

The Facts As Reported

One veteran police officer shot dead, his veteran partner was injured in a shootout with a single suspect. The suspect died of gunshot wounds.

The suspect was wanted on a probation violation warrant after having just been released from prison Jan. 9 where he served time for a drug conviction and resisting arrest. In addition to the warrant, the suspect was a key suspect in the attempted murder of a man who was shot in the chest on Feb. 25.

Both police officers were members of the department's Major Offenders Bureau tasked with tracking down and arresting violent offenders and fugitives. They were conducting surveillance at one of the businesses the suspect was known to frequent.

The Police Officers Did Not Have Time To Put On Their Bullet Proof Vest

This is the official excuse given by the Phoenix police department.

But, the suspect was known to be armed and dangerous! It was not a chance encounter with the suspect but the shootout occurred while suspect was under surveillance by these officers.

Apparently no effort was made to call for backup by these two veterans.

Something does not seem to add up here.

Paul Codman Cabot Mutual Fund Pioneer

Trigger

Just read “Book Review: 'Passion for Reality,' by Michael R. Yogg/Cabot, a mutual-fund pioneer, independently forged an investment philosophy that closely mirrored Benjamin Graham's value investing.” (subscription required) dated 2/27/2014.

Harvard Magazine article about him here by the same author as the book above.

Mr. Cabot was also the financial wizard as long time treasurer of the Harvard University endowment.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not have an article about him nor about his State Street Investment Corporation, which I find peculiar.

Significance - Democratization Of Investment

The open-end mutual fund history basically begins with Paul Cabot in 1924 when he and two others founded State Street Investment Trust. Unfortunately, neither the review nor the article above really tell the story how he survived the Crash of 1929. According to this article, it appears that the new open-end mutual funds fared better during the Crash then e.g. closed-end funds.

We learn from the review that (emphasis added):

“it [State Street Investment Corp. of 1924] was a true mutual fund - known as an open-end fund - in which people could  invest and withdraw at any time. The idea was revolutionary in the early 1920s, ...”

“State Street was also a pioneer in research, carefully investigating companies before money into them, Cabot thoroughly analyzed annual reports, looked at the competition and visited the management of a company to size them up firsthand ...”

His lifetime success depended to some extent on what is now wrongly criminalized as insider trading.

I have a strong hunch there is more to be learnt about the financial history of the U.S. from this man.

U.S. Senators Meddle With Natural Gas

Trigger

U.S. Senators Jim Inhofe (R) and Carl Levin (D) naturally get it wrong. Two busy buddies in search of a solution where there is no problem.

Just read “Fill 'er Up—With Natural Gas Fill 'er Up—With Natural Gas\How Congress can encourage vehicles that run on America's fuel.” (subscription required).

Senators Don’t Understand Free Enterprise and Markets

Some excerpts (emphasis added):

“Our legislation would expand regulatory incentives to produce alternative-fuel vehicles …”

“to allow alternative-fuel vehicles to use high-occupancy-vehicle lanes on highways without passenger restrictions”

[As someone who can probably not afford such a vehicle or would not buy such a vehicle I find this proposal offensive and unjust!]

“Under the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, automakers can receive bonus credits toward their CAFE obligations for producing alternative-fuel vehicles.”

CAFE Should Be Abolished Instantly

This is an unconstitutional program created by Soviet like central planners in Washington DC. For the rest of the world it is unfathomable how such a socialist monster could be implemented in the U.S.

Senators Inhofe and Levin are so gracious to create new hand outs within this program. Marvelous!

Reality Check For Senators

Senators Inhofe and Levin claim their is a chicken and egg problem here, i.e. there are insufficient gas stations available yet for natural gas. The private sector can easily take care of this if politicians keep these environmentalists in check and remove regulatory obstacles.

I have recently read that large private trucking companies are already planning to convert some of their fleet from gasoline/diesel fuel to natural gas. And this is probably only the beginning. Here is a recent article from the Wall Street Journal titled “UPS to Invest $70 Million in Propane for U.S. Fleet

Package-Delivery Company to Buy 1,000 Propane Trucks, Install 50 Fueling Stations”.

If natural gas is a viable fuel for private businesses they will come and develop it.

Senators will you get out of the way and let free markets work. They work best without you!