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duminică, 11 noiembrie 2012

Seth's Blog : You can't argue with success...

You can't argue with success...

Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can't argue with you, because it knows that it didn't work.

The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail precisely because they refuse to do this.

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sâmbătă, 10 noiembrie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Prepare for Demise of California; Liberals Will Get All the Government (and Tax Hikes) They Want

Posted: 10 Nov 2012 10:12 AM PST

On Tuesday voters in California went the wrong way on three propositions.

Voters approved Proposition 30 "temporarily" increasing the state sales tax and income tax on individuals making over $250,000.
They voted against Proposition 31 that would allow the governor to cut the budget in fiscal emergencies.
They voted against Proposition 32 that would prevent unions from making campaign donations via members' dues.

Moreover, and worse yet, Democrats picked up two more votes in the state legislature giving them a supermajority, capable of passing any tax hikes they want.

Those results are so awful I suggest you prepare for the demise of California.

Indeed California's Liberal Supermajority is about to run the state into the ground and taxpayers are going to get all the government they ever wanted.

The main check on Sacramento excess has been a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority of both houses to raise taxes. Although Republicans have been in the minority for four decades, they could impose a modicum of spending restraint by blocking tax increases. If Democratic leads stick in two races where ballots are still being counted, liberals will pick up enough seats to secure a supermajority. Governor Jerry Brown then will be the only chaperone for the Liberals Gone Wild video that is Sacramento.

The high Democratic turnout in moderate and right-leaning districts helped the party pick up three seats in the senate and four in the assembly.

So now Californians will experience the joys of one-party, union-run progressive governance. Mr. Brown is urging lawmakers to demonstrate frugality and the "prudence of Joseph." As he said the other day, "we've got to make sure over the next few years that we pay our bills, we invest in the right programs, but we don't go on any spending binges." That's what all Governors say. Trouble is, merely paying the state's delinquent bills will require tens of billions in additional revenues if lawmakers don't undertake fiscal reforms.

With no GOP restraint, liberals can now raise taxes to pay for all this. [$200 billion in unfunded liabilities, the California State Teachers' Retirement System in need of $10 billion annually for the next 30 years to amortize its debt, $73 billion in outstanding bonds for capital projects and $33 billion in voter-authorized bonds, etc.]

They'll probably start by repealing Proposition 13's tax cap for commercial property. Democrats in the Assembly held hearings on the idea this spring. Then they'll try to make it easier for cities to raise taxes.

The greens want an oil severance tax. Other Democrats want to extend the sales tax to services, supposedly in return for a lower rate, but don't expect any "reform" to be revenue neutral. Look for huge union pay raises and higher pension benefits.

The silver lining here is that Americans will be able to see the modern liberal-union state in all its raw ambition. The Sacramento political class thinks it can tax and regulate the private economy endlessly without consequence. As a political experiment it all should be instructive, and at least Californians can still escape to Nevada or Idaho.

Law of the Funnel in Action

Big government and absurdly strong unions destroyed Greece and Spain. Expect no less for California.

Many large California corporations that can flee, will flee. Those stuck in California will see massive tax hikes (with many more to come) just so public unions and administrators can collect absurdly high salaries and benefits that most citizens can only dream about.

Please see the Law of the Funnel for a description as to what just happened.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

"Wine Country" Economic Conference Hosted By Mish
Click on Image to Learn More

Economists Cut US GDP Forecast, Raise Inflation Forecast

Posted: 10 Nov 2012 08:44 AM PST

Here is a headline news story that I found interesting for reasons I will explain following: Economists cut U.S. Q4 growth forecasts.

Economists expect the economy to grow at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the current quarter, down from the previous estimate of 2.2 percent growth, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve's fourth-quarter survey of 39 forecasters.

While that left estimates for gross domestic product for the year unchanged at 2.2 percent, growth in 2013 looked modestly weaker with economists forecasting 2 percent, down from 2.1 percent.

Over the next three quarters, growth was seen averaging 2.1 percent, down from earlier expectations of 2.2 percent.

The unemployment rate was forecast to come in lower than expected, averaging 7.9 percent in the fourth quarter from the previous estimate of 8.1 percent. The monthly unemployment rate released by the government was 7.9 percent in October.

Still, unemployment was seen stuck at 7.9 percent in the first quarter of next year, and holding at 7.8 percent in the second and third quarters.

Economists raised their forecasts for inflation this quarter with the headline consumer price index seen averaging 2.3 percent, up from earlier estimates for 2.0 percent. For the year, CPI was expected to average 1.9 percent, up from 1.8 percent.

Given exports were recently revised up and imports revised lowered, I expected economists to think GDP would come in higher. It would have been interesting to see their reasons. Hurricane Sandy perhaps?

I expect the economy to weaken of course (and by far more in 2013 than the economists). Curiously the economists do not seem worried about the alleged fiscal cliff, at least for their GDP estimates.

For more on the fiscal cliff, please see "Saturation Point" for QE Nonsense; Fiscal Cliff Comparisons.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Damn Cool Pics

The Ins & Outs of Owning a Tank [Infographic]
Angry Birds Star Wars Cinematic Trailer [Video]
Twilight Fan Covers Body With a Giant Tattoo

The Ins & Outs of Owning a Tank [Infographic]

Posted: 10 Nov 2012 06:06 PM PST

Imagine a highly maneuverable, armed-to-the-teeth gun boat. But on land! Sounds incredible doesn't it, but these metallic killing earth beasts do exist.

They're called tanks and they're brilliant. Nothing else with a turret – castles, chateaus, forts – can compare to this supreme caterpillar-tracked, bullet-spewing murder car.

But surely these armoured fighting monsters can only be owned by millionaires like Richard Branstons and the Chuckle Brothers? Probably. But if you wanted to own a tank, what would you do and where would it be? Here's how…

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via: Wish

Angry Birds Star Wars Cinematic Trailer [Video]

Posted: 09 Nov 2012 08:29 PM PST

Rovio Entertainment teamed up with with the recently Disney-acquired LucasArts to bring you an upgraded version of Angry Birds, with new features, special powers and characters. The game was announced a month ago and released yesterday. Here's the cinematic trailer:

Twilight Fan Covers Body With a Giant Tattoo

Posted: 09 Nov 2012 07:57 PM PST

What started off as a small tattoo for a hardcore fan turned into a full back tattoo of the main cast of Twilight. She is definitely in the running for the most hardcore Twilight fan.

Via dailymail

November Mozscape Index is Live!

Posted: 09 Nov 2012 05:32 AM PST

Posted by carinoverturf

It's that time again - the November Mozscape index is now available! Check out the Mozscape data that is now fresh in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

The November Mozscape index is launching a few days later than scheduled. A miscalculation in the amount of crawl data initially included, and the fact that our crawlers are extremely efficient, led to our first index attempt this month to be about twice the size of our 77 billion URLs goal. Had we not made this miscalculation, we would have been able to hit our original release date of 11/5, but restarting the index caused our release date to slip a few days.

Another hiccup we ran into this month was processing 76 billion URLs. It took a bit longer than our previous October index, which was only 55 billion URLs. This became glaringly apparent in one specific step of our index processing. Periodically throughout processing, we checkpoint the files that have been processed so we can roll back if something catastrophic occurs (a machine failure, file corruption, etc.). With the larger index this month, these checkpointing steps were taking noticeably longer; in some cases, it took days to checkpoint some of the larger steps. Thanks to the genius engineers on the Mozscape team, Martin and Brandon were able to come up with a solution that drastically reduced the time spent checkpointing. With Martin's update to the processing software, the time spent in some of these steps was cut from days to just minutes! Once again, taking a step back brought the Mozscape team two steps forward.

The Mozscape team is continuing to make some significant progress finalizing our private cloud solution in Virginia. We are on track to have indices produced in both the AWS cloud and our own private cloud by the end of the year. After a successful test index completed, the first Mozscape index is now in progress, running in our own private cloud. It's an exciting achievement for the Mozscape team!

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

76,734,608,461 (76 billion) URLs
776,343,422 (776 million) Subdomains
134,499,372 (134 million) Root Domains
878,838,592,381 (878 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
- 2.69% of all links found were nofollowed
- 56.69% of nofollowed links are internal
- 43.31% are external
Rel Canonical - 13.65% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 71 links on it
- 61.28 internal links on average
- 10.13 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

Page Authority - 0.36
Domain Authority - 0.19
MozRank - 0.24
Linking Root Domains - 0.30
Total Links - 0.25
External Links - 0.29

This histogram shows the crawl date and freshness of results in this index:

Crawl histogram for November Mozscape index

The freshest data in this index will be from October 16th (when processing began), and a good portion of the link data will be from late September to mid October. This index will reflect link data that dates back to about mid-September, but the majority of this index will be the first few weeks of October. As we continue to improve on the length of time it takes to process an index, this freshness will keep improving!

Another exciting announcement is our new App Gallery that launched a few weeks ago. Check out all of the great tools our users are building on top of our Mozscape data. If you have a free tool that you would love to see added to this page, submit a request to have it added to the gallery - we'd love to hear about it!

As always, we'd love your feedback. Hope to hear from you in the comments, where the big data team will be reading and responding as usual.

P.S. Remember that if you're ever curious about when Mozscape is updating, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!