Hurricane Sandy was the largest storm to hit the northeast U.S. in recorded history, killing 159, knocking out power to millions, and causing $70 billion in damage in eight states. Sandy also put the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in stark relief by paralyzing subways, trains, road and air traffic, flooding hospitals, crippling electrical substations, and shutting down power and water to tens of millions of people. But one of the larger infrastructure failures is less appreciated: sewage overflow.

Six months after Sandy, data from the eight hardest hit states shows that 11 billion gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage flowed into rivers, bays, canals, and in some cases, city streets, largely as a result of record storm-surge flooding that swamped the region’s major sewage treatment facilities. To put that in perspective, 11 billion gallons is equal to New York’s Central Park stacked 41 feet high with sewage, or more than 50 times the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The vast majority of that sewage flowed into the waters of New York City and northern New Jersey in the days and weeks during and after the storm.

{ Climate Central | PDF }

On July 16, 2012, a painting by a little-known artist sold at Christie’s for $74,500, nearly ten times its high estimate of $8,000. The work that yielded this unexpected result — an acrylic teal-hued painting of a rocky coast called “Nob Hill” — was not the work of a 20-something artist finishing up his MFA. It was a painting created in 1965, and the artist, Llyn Foulkes, is 77 years old and has been working in relative obscurity in Los Angeles for the past 50 years. In March, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles mounted a retrospective of his work, which will travel to the New Museum in June, marking the first time Foulkes will have had a retrospective at a New York museum. […]

The new interest in older artists isn’t just about scholarly rediscovery. The interest has less to do with the necessity of unearthing historical material to understand an artist’s career arc and more to do with feeding an insatiable market. “Unlike the past model where most galleries hosted one new exhibition every four to six weeks, many galleries now have two or more new exhibitions every turn-over,” said Todd Levin, and art advisor and director of Levin Art Group. “There’s a increasing need to fill the constantly expanding number of exhibition opportunities.”

Today, there are some 300 to 400 galleries in New York compared with the roughly 70 galleries in New York in 1970. As for the number of shows galleries mount each year, that has likewise increased: Gagosian mounted 63 last year at its galleries worldwide, David Zwirner had 14 shows at its spaces in New York and London, and Pace had 36 across its three galleries in New York, Beijing, and London.

{ Artinfo | Continue reading }

photo { Diane & Allan Arbus, Self-portrait, 1947 }

{ The guy on the roof… why is he hiding behind such heavy pixelation? }

In psychology literature, “ask for the moon, settle for less” is known as the “door in the face” (DITF) technique. Unlike the “foot in the door” technique, in which the fulfillment of a small request makes people more likely to fulfill a large request, DITF uses an unreasonable request as a way of making somebody more likely to subsequently fulfill a more moderate request. The technique was first demonstrated by Robert Cialdini’s famous 1975 experiment in which students became more likely to volunteer for a single afternoon after first being asked to volunteer for an afternoon every week for two years.

So, can research on DITF shed some light on why pursuing an assault weapons ban didn’t pan out?

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

Let’s say you ran one of the Fortune 10 companies. And for some reason, you wanted to ensure that this business would be hated by its customers, forever. What would you do? […] for long term contempt, you need stuff that nobody notices. […]

What I’d do is create a policy that makes it really hard for my company’s employees to ask questions of my company’s customers. I’d make it a struggle to collect feedback. In order to collect any form of feedback, I’d make it so that you had to first ask for permission from an underfunded and understaffed component of the central office of my corporation.

Of course I’d also make it take at least six months to get this approval. That way, most of the people who wanted to ask my customers a question were immediately discouraged from doing so. […] I’d staff this office with economists and lawyers. […]

Then, just to be especially perverse, what I’d do is encourage my company to use social media. I’d create policies around it, pushing my company to go online on Facebook and Twitter and stuff, and to have “authentic conversations” with our customers. I’d tell them that it was totally cool to use social media to informally do whatever they wanted, except to use that information to inform product or service decisions. This way, my employees will be completely cut off from their customers needs. And the only employees that actually make it to the customers are the people who know how to talk to the economists. That’ll make it so whatever inputs and outputs of my business are so incomprehensible that they’ll just create more frustration rather than solve problems. [And customers will] think they’re giving input to the company without that input actually making it anywhere useful.

It’s a machievellian scenario that, sadly, I didn’t make up. This “corporate policy” is actually a law that makes your government act like this, and it’s nefariously named the “Paperwork Reduction Act.” It was the last bill signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1980.

{ Information Diet | Continue reading }

Modern humans are estimated to be about 200,000 years old, but 99% of progress has occurred in the last 10,000 years. What were we doing before that?

[…]

Low Population: Until about 10000 BCE, world population never exceeded 15 million and mostly was around 1 million. Urban World History The present population of the world is 7 billion and 1 million is comparable to the population of a medium size city. When you have just a couple of million people spread in this big wide world, there is little that humanity could collectively build. Even if we assume that early human being could be as productive as us, their civilization could produce less than 1/1000 of what our society could do.

Life Expectancy: From that point until 20th century, we had a very low life expectancy (about 30 years). Imagine if we all died by the time we reached 30, how much could we learn from our parents and how much can we teach our kids. Given the low life expectancy of early humans, there was not much time to learn and teach. We just started randomly doing whatever we could to survive.

{ Quora | Continue reading }

installation { Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2005 }

The US Congress has severely scaled back the Stock Act, the law to stop lawmakers and their staff from trading on insider information, in under-the-radar votes that have been sharply criticised by advocates of political transparency.

The changes mean Congressional and White House staff members will not have to post details of their shareholdings online. They will also make online filing optional for the president, vice-president, members of Congress and congressional candidates. […]

The Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge – or “Stock” – Act prohibited them from buying or selling stocks, commodities or futures based on non-public information they obtain during the course of their work. It also banned them from disseminating non-public information regarding pending legislation that could be used for investment purposes. […]

Political watchdogs were dismayed. “Are we going to return to the days when public can use the internet to research everything except what their government is doing?” asked Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation, which monitors money in politics.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

The Federal Reserve said early Wednesday that it inadvertently e-mailed the minutes of its March policy meeting a day early to some congressional staffers and trade groups.

Late this afternoon, the central bank released to reporters a list of more than 150 e-mail addresses that it says received the early e-mail on Tuesday afternoon. (The minutes had been scheduled for release a day later.) The list includes e-mail addresses for dozens of congressional staffers, along with contacts — many of them government-relations executives — at major banks, lobbying firms and trade groups.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

We will provide the full list of people who manipulate and cheat the market shortly, but for now we are curious to see how the Fed will spin that EVERYONE got an advance notice of its minutes a day in advance without this becoming a material issue with the regulators, and just how many billions in hush money it will take to push this all under the rug.

{ Zero Hedge | Continue reading }

Christopher Knight went into the central Maine wilderness 27 years ago. […]

He built a hut on a slope in the woods, where he spent his days reading books and meditating.

There he lived, re-entering civilization only to steal supplies from camps under the cover of darkness. During those nearly three decades, he spoke just once to another person – until he was arrested during a burglary last week.

In between, Knight told police, he committed more than 1,000 burglaries, always taking only what he needed to survive. […]

Knight said he stole everything he has, except for his aviator-style eyeglasses, which are the same pair he wore in 1986. […]

Knight went to great lengths to make the camp invisible from the ground and the air, even covering a yellow shovel with a black bag. Knight never had a fire, even on the coldest days, for fear of being detected. He covered shiny surfaces, like his metal trash cans, with moss and dirt and painted green a clear plastic sheet over his tent.

Knight even situated his campsite facing east and west to make the best use of the sun throughout the day. […]

Knight carefully avoided snow, stepped on rocks when he could and even avoided breaking branches in thick growth. Knight usually put on weight in the fall so he would have to eat less in the winter and thus avoid making treks for food and risk leaving prints in the snow.

{ Morning Sentinel | Continue reading }

{ The latest meme to overtake the internet in China? “Gou gou chuan siwa” (狗狗穿丝袜), or in English, “Dogs wearing pantyhose.” }

Cops are looking for a man who smashed a woman over the head with a ketchup bottle while shouting anti-gay slurs at a Greenwich Village diner, cops said.

The attack took place in the Waverly Restaurant on Sixth Avenue at about 4:40 a.m. Monday, sources said.

The victim suffered head lacerations.

{ NY Post }

As I reported a couple of weeks ago, a recent Senate bill came with a nice bonus for the genetically modified seed industry: a rider, wholly unrelated to the underlying bill, that compels the USDA to ignore federal court decisions that block the agency’s approvals of new GM crops. I explained in this post why such a provision, which the industry has been pushing for over a year, is so important to Monsanto and its few peers in the GMO seed industry. […]

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) has revealed to Politico’s ace reporter David Rogers that he’s the responsible party. Blunt even told Rogers that he “worked with” GMO seed giant Monsanto to craft the rider.

{ Mother Jones | Continue reading }

art { Cady Noland, Mutated Pipe, 1989 }

Feb. 19
First male patient, 87, became ill with H7N9

Feb. 27
Second male patient, 27, became ill with H7N9

March 4
First male patient dies

March 9
First female patient, 35, from Anhui province became ill with H7N9

March 10
Second male patient dies
Initial report of over 900 dead pigs in Shanghai’s Huangpu River (as of Saturday, March 9)

March 11
Count of dead pigs in rivers near Shanghai reaches nearly 3,000

March 13
Officials say the number of pig carcasses in Huangpu River has risen to 6,000

March 14
Workers continued to haul dead hogs from a river in the Shanghai suburbs Thursday, where the pig body count now exceeds 6,600, according to the municipal government
Farm in Zhejiang province confesses to dumping pig carcasses into river

March 20
The number of dead pigs discovered in Chinese rivers around Shanghai has risen to almost 14,000

March 22
50 pigs wash up onshore in Changsha, Hunan province; ~1,000 dead ducks are also discovered
Number of dead pigs found in Shanghai river rises to 16,000

March 25
China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river
Government officials say that 1,000+ rotten duck carcasses pose no threat to human and livestock along river banks
Illegal Zhejiang pork found in food chain

March 26
Dumping of thousands of dead pigs linked with Chinese crackdown on pork black market

April 1
Dr. Michael O’Leary, World Health Organization, says that there is no evidence to show that a type of bird flu which has killed two Chinese men can be transmitted between people

April 2
Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples of pig carcasses pulled from Huangpu River and found no flu viruses

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

China’s population is larger than those of North America, Europe, Russia and Japan combined, and has no tradition whatsoever of liberal democracy and memories are still fresh of the devastating breakup of the Soviet Union. Going further back, China’s more recent history saw chaos and wars, and on average from 1840 to 1978 a major upheaval every seven or eight years. So the Chinese fear of chaos is based on common sense and its collective memory, with very real fears that the country might well become ungovernable if it were to adopt the adversarial Western political system.

China is in many ways unique. It is an amalgam of the world’s longest continuous civilization with a huge modern state. It is a product of hundreds of states amalgamated over its long history into one. A very rough analogy would be something along the lines of the ancient Roman Empire continuing to this day as a unified modern state with a centralised government and modern economy while retaining all its diverse traditions and cultures, and with a huge population still all speaking Latin as their common language. […]

China tried American-style democracy after its 1911 Republic Revolution, and it turned out to be a devastating catastrophe. The country was immediately plunged into chaos and civil war, with hundreds of political parties vying for power and with warlords fighting one another with the support of various foreign powers. The economy was shattered and tens of millions lost their lives in the decades that followed. That lesson remains so sharp that even today ordinary Chinese are most fearful of luan, the Chinese word meaning chaos. Independent opinion surveys on values in China show that public order is generally ranked top, whereas for Americans freedom of speech is the number one value (even though, one may wonder how a politically correct society like the United States can have genuine freedom of speech).

Having myself travelled to over 100 countries, most of them developing ones, I cannot recall a single case of successful modernisation through liberal democracy, and there’s no better example illustrating this than the huge gap between India and China: both countries started at a similar level of development six decades ago, and today China’s GDP is four times greater and life expectancy 10 years longer.

{ Zhang WeiWei/Europe’s World | Continue reading }

photo { Jordan Fox by Jasper Rischen }

While many Americans assume that the Federal Reserve is a federal agency, the Fed itself admits that the 12 Federal Reserve banks are private. […]

Indeed, the money-center banks in New York control the New York Fed, the most powerful Fed bank. Until recently, Jamie Dimon – the head of JP Morgan Chase – was a Director of the New York Fed.

{ Washingtons Blog/Ritholtz | Continue reading }

Brooklyn man furious his roommate wanted to move out allegedly murdered her fish

[…]

“They were my babies! I can’t have children, so my pets are like my kids,” Brenda Alvarez said yesterday. “They were beautiful fish and cost about $25 each.” […]

Alvarez, 45, said she wanted to move out of the Nostrand Avenue apartment because of growing tension between the longtime friends. […]

Santiago allegedly roughed up Alvarez before turning on the fish. He killed them in front of her, she said. […]

Santiago, 47, was arrested and charged with animal cruelty and assault.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

Can a country with a GDP ($23 billion) only 1/10th the size of Detroit, Michigan or one half of Tulsa, Oklahoma be a systemic risk to the global economy and clip, say, $300 billion in value, off the U.S. stock market?  […] Detroit, for example, is on its way to bankruptcy and you hardly hear a peep from the Euro Bears or their American comrades.

{ Global Macro Monitor/Ritholtz | Continue reading }

previously { Baby Ben Bernanke }

So, it’s mid-March 2013 and, the S&P 500 is at 1550, right where I said it would be nine months ago. […] I see the S&P continuing to frustrate the majority (that is what markets do).  It may hit 1560-1580 prior to actually having a legitimate correction of 5-10%.  There is so much liquidity awaiting deployment upon a pullback that the pullback will be quick.  Later in the year, it’s very likely we’ll see 1600-plus on the S&P (September-November).  In my view, the market will be a good sell at that point, so will many credit products.  There is no way the Fed can shift its policy stance concurrent with having to immunize a $4 trillion balance sheet going into the end of a fiscal year.  2014 is likely to be challenging.
 
Enjoy this while it lasts. […]

The People’s Republic’s big issues will start in fiscal years 2013-2014.  China Merchants Bank, for example, is already seeing a bigger rise in bad-loan provisioning and lower good-loan growth than Western equity analysts think.  The CEOs of two large Brazilian companies, Vale and Petrobras, are starting to plan for China to “hit a wall” in 2015-2018. Essentially, China will look OK through April 2013 then big problems will hit the country.

Europe will not implode.

{ Secret top source/Minyanville | Continue reading }

{ Deep in the belly of New York’s subway system, a beautiful untouched station resides that has been forgotten for years with only a limited few knowing of its existence. | Travelette | full story | Related: The Underbelly Project has turned it into a kind of art gallery. }

{ EB Hughes, from a men’s room bar in LA }

World’s total wealth (including all bank savings, stocks, homes, company treasuries, government funds, pension funds, mines and other natural resources) amounts to $200 trillion or about $25,000 per person.

{ Quora | Continue reading }