sâmbătă, 3 octombrie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Trump vs. Fiorina vs. Obama on Isis; Fiorina and the "Law of Bad Ideas"

Posted: 03 Oct 2015 06:23 PM PDT

Carly Fiorina Seeks No-Fly Zone

In the Fox interview show below, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina says the US should enforce a no-fly zone in Syria, even if it means shooting down Russian aircraft.

Quote of the day: "Russian jets have been basically conducting dangerous and unpredictable maneuvers around our waters and our borders and our territory".

Can I have a definition of "our" territory please?

The closest I can find is U.S. to file complaint over 'unsafe' intercept by Russian fighter jet. That was an incident over the Baltic Sea, near Poland.

The other side of the story is Invading the Black Sea: Washington's belligerent military maneuvers in traditional Russian territory.

And what about NATO Conducts Military Maneuvers 300 Yards From Russia's Border?

So who's provoking whom?

But let's return to the main story. What right does the US have to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria?

Quite frankly this woman is a dangerous war-monger, at best. She is totally unfit to be president.

Obama Goes After Putin

The Financial Times reports Obama Attacks Putin Over Syrian Air Strikes.

Russia is being pulled into a "quagmire" in Syria and its military intervention is likely to boost the Islamist militants of Isis, a defiant President Barack Obama said on Friday after a week when his own approach to the Syrian conflict has faced intense scrutiny.

"An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won't work," he said. "They will be there for a while if they don't take a different course."

Quagmire Irony

The irony of Obama's statement should stand out like a mile. The US is in a Mideast quagmire of its own making starting with Bush and continued by Obama.

Besides, why should we give a damn if Russia gets stuck in a Syrian quagmire? Does Russia give a hoot that the US is stuck in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is Obama that much of a caring person that he is concerned about 'Putinesque" quagmires?

Speaking at the White House, Obama also said that some of his domestic critics who were calling for a more direct American intervention in the Syrian civil war were peddling "half-baked solutions" and "mumbo-jumbo".

It's difficult to say precisely who that paragraph is aimed at, but if if it's Fiorina, then we can take some consolation in the fact that Obama's policies are at least to some degree, not as idiotic as hers.

Let Russia fight ISIS in Syria

On September 29, Donald Trump said 'Let Russia fight ISIS' in Syria.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said the United States should let Russia fight it out against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria, saying Syrian President Bashar Assad looks better to him than the alternative.

'Why are we knocking ISIS and yet at the same time we're against Assad?' Let them fight, take over the remnants. But more importantly, let Russia fight ISIS, if they want to fight 'em … in Syria," Mr. Trump said.

"Let Syria and ISIS fight. Why do we care?" he said.

"We have to get rid of ISIS, very importantly, but I look at Assad, and Assad to me looks better than the other side," he said. "And you know, this has happened before. We back a certain side, and that side turns out to be a total catastrophe. Russia likes Assad, seemingly, a lot — let them worry about ISIS. Let them fight it out."

Bingo!

I do not agree with all of Trump's statements on ISIS, but he hits the nail squarely on the head here.

The real problem is US policy.

We took out Saddam Husein, a secular ruler, and put in place a religious puppet who increased tensions between Shiites and Sunnis giving rise to religious warfare and the very creation of ISIS.

Make no mistake, ISIS is a US creation. And Both ISIS and Al Qaeda rebels seek to overthrow Assad.

Realistically, Russia wants to fight ISIS and we should either welcome that stance or be neutral to it. But Obama doesn't like the tact Russia has taken.

The US supports Al Qaeda rebels because the US wants to get rid of Syrian president Assad. Russia's way to fight ISIS is to take on Al Qaeda.

History Lesson

Please recall that one of the justifications the US used to topple Hussein was the lie Iraq harbored Al Qaeda. In reality, Al Qaeda did not exist in any extent in Iraq before we topped Hussein, but does now.

And the US is now aligned with Al Qaeda because we would rather get rid of Assad than fight ISIS, even though ISIS is a far bigger threat. That is how blatantly stupid US policy has become.

Law of Bad Ideas Revisited

The Law of Bad Ideas says that no matter how stupid an idea is, someone will propose something worse.

Specifically, Corollary Number Five to the Law of Bad Ideas states "No idea is so bad it cannot be made worse."

Sure enough, along comes Fiorina, willing to get into a military battle with Russia to support blatantly stupid US policies.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Robot Taxis Starting 2016 in Japan; Self-Driving Trucks on German Autobahn; Millions of Truck and Taxi Driver Jobs will Vanish in US by 2025

Posted: 03 Oct 2015 12:18 PM PDT

I predicted robot taxis and trucks by 2020. Most doubted it, but I maintained I was as likely to be too late as opposed to too early.

The future has arrived, at least in Japan. Autonomous taxis will operate in test mode next year with a goal of full production by 2020.

Reader Alain writes ...

"Hey Mish, I saw this article and it reminded me of your self-driving cars posts some time ago. When I read your posts I thought your time frame on their arrival seemed a bit optimistic. But here we are."

Robot Taxis Starting 2016 in Japan

The Wall Street Journal reports RoboCab: Driverless Taxi Experiment to Start in Japan

From the country where hotels are operated by robots and androids serve as clerks at department stores comes the latest unmanned project: the robot cab.

Japan's cabinet office, Kanagawa prefecture and Robot Taxi Inc. on Thursday said they will start experimenting with unmanned taxi service beginning in 2016. The service will be offered for approximately 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just south of Tokyo, with the auto-driving car carrying them from their homes to local grocery stores.

According to the project organizers, the cabs will drive a distance of about three kilometers (two miles), and part of the course will be on major avenues in the city. Crew members will be aboard the car during the experiment in case there is a need to avoid accidents.

Robot Taxi Inc., a joint venture between mobile Internet company DeNA Co. and vehicle technology developer ZMP Inc., is aiming to commercialize its driverless transportation service by 2020. The company says it will seek to offer unmanned cabs to users including travelers from overseas and locals in areas where buses and trains are not available.

The project is a part of the government's effort to promote innovation and startup businesses.
Among companies trying to turn driverless cars into business is Google Inc., which started testing its system in Texas in July.

Robot Taxis Image

Image: Miho Inada/The Wall Street Journal

Note the car still has a steering wheel. That steering wheel will be gone by 2020.

Self-Driving Trucks on German Autobahn

Self-driving trucks in real conditions are on highways in Germany. It's just a test, but it won't take five years for live operation.

Truck Yeah! reports Daimler's Autonomous Truck Successfully Completed Its Maiden Voyage On A Public Highway.

Following up on their American Adventures, Mercedes successfully tested its semi-autonomous Highway Pilot system on the German Autobahn. This technology can be fitted into regular production trucks and is a huge step towards fully autonomous transportation.

The Federal State of Baden-Württemberg set Daimler Trucks loose on its highways, showing the world that the technology is pretty much production ready despite the missing legal context surrounding autonomous vehicles.

At this stage, the driver remains in control despite the truck accelerating, braking and steering on its own, but Daimler says humans can never drive as efficiently as the robot does, and since the aim is to minimize fuel consumption while improving traffic flow, driverless transportation is what we're looking at in the long run.

Also consider Daimler Tests Self-Driving Truck on German Highway

German automaker Daimler said it trialled a self-driving truck under real traffic conditions for the first time Friday, on a motorway in southern Germany.

The standard Mercedes-Benz Actros, fitted with the intelligent "Highway Pilot" system, travelled 14 kilometres (about nine miles) on the A8 motorway, with a driver in the cabin but his hands off the wheel.

The truck in Friday's trial, the world's first series-production autonomous truck, drove between Stuttgart and the town of Denkendorf in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Daimler is headquartered.

State premier Winfried Kretschmann of the Greens party, who was also along for the ride, said "partially autonomous and autonomous driving indicates that a new age of mobility is dawning".

"Autonomously driving and networked vehicles improve the flow of traffic and can play a decisive role in helping to avoid traffic jams and relieving the strain on drivers," he said in a statement. "They also boost traffic safety."

Daimler says autonomous trucks improve efficiency and cut carbon emissions. Thanks to optimised gear shifting, acceleration and braking, they generate at least five percent fewer CO2 emissions, said the company.

Daimler, whose vehicles include the high-end Mercedes-Benz range and compact Smart cars, is also the world's biggest maker of trucks with brands including Mercedes-Benz, Freightliner, Fuso and BharatBenz.

Snowball Action

This is likely to snowball much faster than I expected two years ago.

And as I have stated numerous times, millions of truck driving and taxi driving jobs will vanish by 2025 at the latest.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Seth's Blog : Bikes and cars

Bikes and cars

Bikes should give way to cars:

Cars are bigger
Cars are faster
Cars are powerful
A car can hurt a biker
Cities are built for commerce, and powered vehicles are the engine of commerce
It's inefficient for a car to slow down
I'm in a car, get out of my way
I'm on a bike, I'm afraid

Cars should give way to bikes:

Bikers need a break
Bikers are more fragile
Bikes aren't nearly as powerful
A car can hurt a biker
Cities are built by people, and while commerce is a side effect, the presumption that cars are the reason for a city is a bit... presumptuous
It's a lot of work for a bike to stop and start again
I'm on a bike, get out of my way
I'm in a car, I see you

This dichotomy is, of course, a metaphor, a Rorschach that tells each of us a lot about how we see the world.

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vineri, 2 octombrie 2015

Damn Cool Pics

The World's Longest Glass Bridge In China Is Insane

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 04:53 PM PDT

This glass bridge will offer you an absolutely breathtaking view of China, that is if you're brave enough to cross it.

These Are The Top 10 Highest IQs in Human History

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:40 PM PDT

These are the people that pushed their brains to the limit and reached levels of intelligence most people could only dream of.

Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

A concept we've covered regularly is what we call flywheel marketing, where the organic traffic, shares, and links you get from publishing one piece of content makes it easier for later pieces to see some success. One of the key pieces of that flywheel is the ability to get those social shares, and based on a recent study, we're ready to admit it: We were completely wrong about that key piece.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why, and that the real value may lie in engagement.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about an assumption that I think many of us have made over the years. I know I have. In fact, I've amplified that. I might have even covered it on Whiteboard Friday. Thanks to some research that we've done together with BuzzSumo, as well as some research we've seen from our correlation study this summer, you know what? It's looking like we were just dead wrong on this very important aspect of how SEO and social media and content marketing fit together.

You've probably seen me present on this either here on Whiteboard Friday or in one of my slide decks or in a blog post. It's this idea of flywheel marketing, where you create some great content, you amplify that content via social media and your social channels, you attract visitors through that, you naturally earn links from some of those people who visit your site, and you grow your social following. Now, the next time your audience potential is bigger and your rankings potential is also bigger, because you have more links coming to your site, and that helps all the other pages on your site. You have a bigger social audience, so now there are more people to amplify to.

You know what? It actually looks like this is totally broken and wrong. The idea that you are naturally earning links from people who come via social looks to us like it was a bunk belief in its entirety. Let me show you.

First off, BuzzSumo did the vast majority of the work. I appreciate them including Moz as well. We did participate in some of our link metrics. The BuzzSumo crew did a bunch of this work. They looked at articles that received social shares, in fact a million articles that were taken from their database, and then they looked at the number of shares and the number of links those received.

The vast, vast majority received zero links. In fact, 75% plus of all articles they looked at received zero, not a single one, social shares. Same with links, by the way. I think it was 90% plus for links or maybe even more.

This is a like a power-law distribution. You're essentially seeing that a few articles get all the shares out there. Everything else really gets nothing. If you're not going to be in the top 10% of content that's created, don't even bother. You're not going to get shares. You're not going to get links. You're not going to get traffic. Forget it. A lot of content marketing is probably spent in vain. Granted, maybe a lot of that is learning what actually works and experimenting, and that's fine.

Then they looked at the correlation between links and shares.

As you can see from this crudely drawn scatter plot, no correlation whatsoever. If you were to draw the line here, it would probably be something like, "Oh look at that total crap correlation." Here are the numbers. Facebook, 0.0221. Twitter, 0.0281. Ooh, slightly better, but still in the realm of totally insignificant. Google+ 0.0058. You're just talking about numbers that suggest essentially that there is virtually no correlation between links and shares.

Now they did look at places where there were lots of shares and links, and those tended to be a few things. I'll let you read the report, and you should. I think it's one of the most important reports to come out in our industry in a while. Credit to BuzzSumo for putting it together.

We know from our research. We've done experiments looking at whether anchor text still moves things. We've done experiments looking at whether URL mentions move the needle. URL mentions don't, by the way. Once you turn them into live links, they do. We've looked at whether you can actually rank content without any links at all. It turns out almost impossible, so next to impossible that we couldn't find a single credible example of a page that ranked without any links unless it was on a site that had lots of links pointing to it.

We know we still need links to rank.

In fact, notably ranking correlations with links haven't dropped over the last few years. Even though we all feel like the algorithm's getting a little less link centric, and I think it is, links are still clearly very, very powerful. So we have to worry about things like outreach and link focused content and embeds and tools and badges and competitive link analysis and all the other many link building methods that the marketing industry has come up with over the years.

I have a theory about why this is.

I think Google is honest when they tell us, "We don't look at social shares to determine rankings." I think what Google sees is something Chartbeat showed a few years ago. This was another excellent study that I encourage you to check out. Chartbeat basically analyzed engagement on socially shared content. What they saw was a plot that looks like this. Very, very few social articles have high read time. Even the ones that have lots of social sharing have very little read time.

It turns out a ton of things that people share socially on the Web, they don't read at all. They may click Retweet. They may even include the URL. They might share it on Facebook. But they, themselves, may never have even visited that content. Sounds crazy, but I bet you've done it. I bet I've done it. I bet I've been like well, you know, it was probably a good edition of Whiteboard Friday, I'll go share it out, having not yet watched the video and seen whether I did a good job or not. That's just the way of the Web.

I think Google cares much more about the engagement than they do about the social share counts themselves.

So you can see lots of things with social shares not performing well. But once they start to get engagement and start to earn links from that engagement, now they're suddenly ranking.

Hopefully, with this knowledge in mind, you can go back to the drawing board a little bit if you've built up, like we have, this mental model of how the flywheel works. Look, I'm not saying that this works for no one. This actually works pretty well for Moz. It works pretty well for us in this industry, but I think, and clearly the data is showing, that across the vast majority of the Web it's statistically extremely unlikely this will work for you or for everyone else.

I think we need to revisit this. We probably need to revisit our link building. We need to think about social in a different context of how and whether it's earning people who will actually come to our site and want to link to us and people who will come to our site and want to engage, or whether it's just a vanity metric.

All right, everyone, I look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Seth's Blog : On feeling like a failure

On feeling like a failure

Feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing.

There are people who have failed more times than you and I can count, who are happily continuing in their work.

There are others who have achieved more than most of us can imagine, who go to work each day feeling inadequate, behind, and yes, like failures and frauds.

These are not cases of extraordinary outliers. In fact, external data is almost useless in figuring out whether or not someone is going to adopt the narrative of being a failure.

Failure (as seen from the outside) is an event. It's a moment when the spec isn't met, when a project isn't completed as planned.

Feelings, on the other hand, are often persistent, and they are based on stories. Stories we tell ourselves as much as stories the world tells us.

As a result, if you want to have a feeling, you'll have it. If you want to seek a thread to ravel, you will, you'll pull at it and focus on it until, in fact, you're proven right, you are a failure.

Here's the essential first step: Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed.

Thinking of one's self as a failure is not the same as failing. And thus, succeeding (on this particular task) is not the antidote. In fact, if you act on this misconception, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of new evidence that you are, in fact, correct in your feelings, because you will ignore the wins and remind yourself daily of the losses.

Instead, begin with the idea that the best way to deal with a feeling is to realize that it's yours.

• Email to a friend •

sâmbătă, 3 octombrie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seth's Blog : Bikes and cars

Bikes and cars

More Recent Articles

vineri, 2 octombrie 2015

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday

Video transcription

Then they looked at the correlation between links and shares.

We know we still need links to rank.

I have a theory about why this is.

I think Google cares much more about the engagement than they do about the social share counts themselves.

Seth's Blog : On feeling like a failure

On feeling like a failure

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

sâmbătă, 3 octombrie 2015

vineri, 2 octombrie 2015

Video transcription

Then they looked at the correlation between links and shares.

We know we still need links to rank.

I have a theory about why this is.

I think Google cares much more about the engagement than they do about the social share counts themselves.

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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