Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC gave a great talk on what caused the recession, why the oil price is going up, and the future of globalization.
I use the Rails console mainly to poke around in my database. Unfortunately the display of the records returned leaves a lot to be desired. Hirb solves this problem perfectly! Here are the quick steps you need to get the basic functionaliy:
- Install the gem: sudo gem install cldwalker-hirb –source http://gems.github.com
- Start the console: ruby script/console
- Require Hirb: require ‘hirb’
- Enable it: Hirb.enable
- Try it: x = Model.find(:all)
It’s a pity that Yahoo is still maintaining the 5000 query limit per IP address. 5000 stock quotes is the equivalent of 10 years of daily data for two companies only.
Interesting video on global warming. More videos at the proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change
Returns by Asset Class 1997 - 2006
It’s hard to look at this chart and not conclude that picking asset classes is difficult and that relative returns are not durable over time. Also, unsurprisingly, correlations between asset class returns are fairly high.
Here’s something to think about:
In 1917 the breakdown in consumption for a typical family ( 38 year old working father, non-employed mother, 13-yr old boy and 8 yr old daughter ) was:
Food – 41%
Housing – 27%
Clothing – 18%
Healthcare – 5%
Transportation – 3%
Other – 7%
By 1987 this had changed to
Housing – 33%
Transportation – 26%
Food – 19%
Clothing – 5%
Healthcare – 4%
Other – 12%
You might ask: how do we reconcile this with the 17-20% of GDP ( ~$8K per person ) that we are spending on healthcare today? First, it’s interesting to note that the average citizen took the money they saved on food and clothing (the basic necessities of life) and ploughed it straight into bigger houses, more expensive cars and (probably) an increased level of entertainment. Along the way, though, we gradually socialized the cost of healthcare so that despite saving 20% of our consumption on food (not to mention the saving on clothing), we are now unable to find that same 20% to pay for our healthcare.
However, I don’t think it is a problem, per se, that we are spending an increasing amount on healthcare. It seems as though it’s a trend that is irreversible and given the continuing decline and commoditization of the other line items in the typical family budget, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Healthcare is one of the industries where we continue to spend R&D dollars for new products and an expanded menu of options is inevitable.
The real problem is that neither “the American people” nor their elected representatives and the Chairman, are willing to put aside the $8K per person per year that we’re currently inclined to spend. The future price of US 10 yr notes is left as an exercise for the reader.
Twubs is a great website for tracking a specific Twitter hashtag. For instance, you can follow the post-election chaos in Iran in real time. The window below shows the current activity surrounding the election in Iran. It was getting over 1000 messages per minute on June 16, 2009.
One of the major issue with large data centers is power. This is applicable to both large data centers like Microsoft / Google and also to large Enterprise Data Centers which are very energy inefficient.
Definition of Power Effectiveness: Data Center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is defined as the ration of data center power to IT (server) power draw. Thus a PUE of 2.0 means that the data center must draw 2 Watts for every 1 Watt of power consumed by IT (server) equipment. The ideal number would be 1.0, which means there is zero overhead. The overhead power is used by lightning, power delivery, UPS, chillers, fans, air-conditioning etc. Google claims to have achieved a PUE of 1.3 to 1.7. Microsoft runs somewhere close to 1.8. Most of Corporate America runs between 2.0 and 2.5.
A typical large data center these days costs in the range of $150 Million to $300 Million depending upon the size and location. A 15 MW data center facility is approximately $200 million. This is the capital cost so it is depreciated over time.
Most of the facility cost is power related. Anywhere from 75% to 80% of the cost is power (pdu, chiller, ups, etc).
A typical 15MW datacenter with 50,000 servers costs about $6.0 million per month for operating expense (excluding people cost) and the share of power infrastructure (pdu, chiller, ups, etc) is between 20% to 24% and actual power for the servers is 18% to 20%. Thus total power cost is between 38% to 44%. These numbers reflect what Microsoft / Google would do. EPA has done a study and they believe these numbers are close to 50% for inefficient data centers.
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