"[T]he equity market began to fall rapidly, dropping more than 600 points in 5 minutes for an almost 1000 point loss on the day by 2:47 pm. Twenty minutes later, by 3:07 pm, the market had regained most of the 600 point drop. [...] [P]rices stopped falling when, At 2:45:28 p.m., trading on the E-Mini was paused for five seconds[...]"

"Let’s be serious - EVERYBODY is wondering if there is another shoe to drop in the Great Internet Gold Rush of 2011."

David Pogue on Sqaure an iPhone app that allows regular people to accept credit card payments.

"Going where the politicians seem to fear to tread, Michael Blastland asks some of the UK's most influential policy experts and politicians how the difficult decisions on what to cut should be reached. He demands hard data on which activities should be curbed or abandoned altogether and how the sums will match the rhetoric."

Trade Joe's is run by Aldi Nord and their yogurt is Stoneyfield Farm rebranded.

An interesting profile of the Aldi group and the Albrecht family.

"As with oil, it’s possible to envisage ‘peak food’ (the point of maximum production, followed by decline), ‘peak phosphorus’, i.e. the high point in the use of phosphate fertiliser (one estimate puts it at 2035), and, as the FAO suggests in its diplomatic way, ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most productive land begins to diminish (soil exhaustion, climate change) and marginal land comes up for reassessment."

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells: "In a nutshell, it is that too much debt is always dangerous. It’s dangerous when a government borrows heavily from foreigners—but it’s equally dangerous when a government borrows heavily from its own citizens. It’s dangerous, too, when the private sector borrows heavily, whether from foreigners or from itself—for banks are basically institutions that borrow from their depositors, then make loans to others, and banking crises are among the most devastating shocks an economy can face."

"Can mobile phones make a miracle?"

"Ethiopia is only one of 20 or more African countries where land is being bought or leased for intensive agriculture on an immense scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era. ... It is not known if the acquisitions will improve or worsen food security in Africa, or if they will stimulate separatist conflicts, but a major World Bank report due to be published this month is expected to warn of both the potential benefits and the immense dangers they represent to people and nature."

Written 11 March 2010. The final paragraph: "Whether [the health care reform bill] passes or not, the institutional pressures of big money have effectively and quietly deformed central parts of the bill and continue to loom over any attempt by Congress to write and pass major domestic legislation. Stronger financial regulation is now being resisted daily by Wall Street lobbies. It's not a coincidence that there have been fewer and fewer pieces of large-scale economic and social legislation since big money has increasingly dominated politics from the 1980s on. The question that remains open is whether there is any effective way of revealing what is being bought and sold in Congress."

Profile of Paul Krugman.

Interesting thought experiment.

"Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune."

Without public investment, the food crisis will only get worse

"the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer."

"... young middle-class professionals with good degrees and diplomas are facing a lifetime on low salaries with unrewarding jobs, forever poorer than their parents."

On our inability to narrow down our options. We should crush our cooking pots and burn our ships!

"best-known for his influential views on population growth. He famously emphasised the potential for populations to rise steeply."

"We may look back at the second half of the last century as an era of cheap food. It'll be like the Hundred Years' War, as we were taught it in school: a seminal moment in human history that's gone and will not return."