Category: News

On the sliding scale of thermal component model representation king of all is a ‘detailed’ model. A 3D definition of all of the internal construction geometry and material properties does away with any of the accuracy inconsistency issues associated with the derived CTM (thermal resistor network type) approach. (more…)

After three decades of experimenting with his distance running, one could say Sgt.
1st Class James Bresette of the Arkansas National Guard is becoming a marathon
alchemist after he captured the silver medal in his age division in the
13,000-runner California International Marathon here on Dec. 6…

Over the years, Soldiers have left their mark here in many ways, from painting walls
and helping clean up neighborhoods to donating school supplies around
Kosovo…

Soldiers from Charlie Battery 2nd Battalion, 130th Field Artillery of the Kansas
National Guard are settling into their Multi-National Force and Observers mission
here…

Japanese Air Self-Defense Force pilots teamed up with 129th Rescue Wing aircrews
here for refueling training Dec. 7-18…

Oh noes! BIS is down for nearly everyone in the States and Canada. It’s really just the email service. Web browsing, SMS, BlackBerry messenger, and phone calls are seemingly fine. We’ll keep you updated, but it seems like a good time to give your thumbs a rest. You’ll have to get back to work soon enough. [CrackBerry via Gizmodo]

Update: RIM has confirmed the outage, but didn’t state when the service will be restored.

Update 2 @ 1:50 pm EST:It might be coming back…we’re getting a flood of emails now. Waiting for a confirmation from RIM.

Update: Got it. Everything should be all good again. Now get back to work.

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Best Buy (BBY) comparable sales growth lines up pretty well with U.S. GDP these days, as shown below from a chart by Mike Baker, CFA at Deutsche. In our view, you know a company has finally 'Made It' once its own sales growth acts as a proxy for U.S. GDP.

Overall, Mr. Baker remains optimistic on the shares, with a Buy and $48 target:

Deutsche: Profit dollar growth accelerating Strength in notebook computers is leading to better than expected sales. While this will cause worse than expected domestic gross margins in 4Q, the higher sales lead to better than expected, and accelerating gross profit dollars... With expense growth still well controlled, this leads to accelerating EBIT profit growth.

Of course, we should take the above correlation with a  grain of salt. One reason is that, as again shown by one of Mr. Baker's charts, Best Buy has been growing comparable sales faster than the industry.

Thus the company is taking market share, which means its own sales growth data may present a slightly exaggerated view of the U.S. economy right now. This is because it includes both industry growth and market share growth, rather than just industry growth alone. Yet it's great news for Best Buy's future dominance.

(Charts via Deutsche Bank, Mike Baker, CFA, "Taking Share While Growing Earnings", 15 December 2009)

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See Also:

• Best Buy Sees A Stingy Consumer This Christmas
• Wal-Mart's Mission Is To Destroy Best Buy This Christmas
• Best Buy Launches Crazy Attempt To Compete With iTunes

As blistering cold temperatures cause America to crank up the heat, the cost of natural gas follows in suit.

———–

AP: NEW YORK — Natural gas prices jumped Thursday after the government reported that supplies fell by the largest amount ever for this time of year as frigid weather chilled parts of the Midwest and Northeast.

A wintry mix of rain and snow kept heaters cranked on high, consuming large stores of natural gas in some of the country’s largest markets like Chicago.

Still, the amount of gas in storage remains 14 percent above the five-year average for this time of year.

The Energy Information Administration said the country’s supply of natural gas dropped by 207 billion cubic feet last week, the most ever for this time of year, according to analyst Stephen Schork.

“It was brutally cold,” Schork said. “People have been saying for so long that natural gas is due for a rally and they’ve been wrong all year long. But with a big draw, I expect prices to move higher.”

The natural gas contract for January delivery climbed 35.8 cents, or nearly 7 percent, to $5.82 per 1,000 cubic feet on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Natural gas prices had slumped all year as the economy struggled to pull itself from recession. Supplies finally started falling this month, but only after underground storage caverns were crammed to near capacity.

Meanwhile, benchmark crude for January delivery gave up 65 cents to $72.01 a barrel. In London, Brent crude for February delivery fell $1.21 to $73.08 on the ICE Futures exchange.

At the pump, retail gas prices have been falling for more than a week. They dipped less than a penny overnight to a new national average of $2.59 a gallon, according to auto club AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. A gallon of regular unleaded is 3.7 cents cheaper than a month ago, but they’re still 92.3 cents more expensive than the same time last year.

In other Nymex trading in January contracts, heating oil fell 1.73 cents to $1.9485 a gallon while gasoline fell 2.94 cents to $1.8445 a gallon.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• United States Natural Gas Explodes Higher On Exxon Optimism
• Exxon: Here’s Why We Just Spent $41 Billlion On Natural Gas

Yesterday, I debunked a few of the common, “evolution-based” arguments leveled against meat-eaters that might have the potential to stump anyone with only cursory knowledge of evolutionary science. By and large, these are arguments that appeal to our emotions. They invoke a peaceful, gentle pre-history of slender, humane early humans co-existing in perfect meatless harmony with the animal kingdom, an image that sounds great and makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Those sharp spears found at various dig sites, you ask? Why, those were just used to skewer hard-to-reach apples, or perhaps to gently separate two squirrels battling over an acorn. But the fossil record shows distinct markings on large ruminant bones that seem to indicate cuts, tools, and butchering – how do you explain those? Oh, those? See, early humans were so grossed out by animal carcasses that they couldn’t bear to actually touch them with bare hands. They developed tools so that they could move the offending meat out of their line of sight without actually putting hands to flesh. Pretty ingenious!

Jokes aside, the reality is that life for Grok wasn’t a Disney movie. Lots of animals died to ensure our species’ survival. Lots of plants, too, plus innumerable other organisms, unicellular and multicellular alike. The cycle of life, you see, is also a cycle of death. Plants get eaten by animals, animals poop out the waste, and that waste gets consumed by the living soil, and the enriched soil makes it possible for more plant life to flourish. Similar cycles occur in every imaginable environment with different organisms, but the basic story is the same: the constant interplay between life and death.

Death, then, clearly has a place in our world. But that sounds cold and heartless (damn our evolved sense of sympathy and empathy!) to most people. “Death”? I mean, it’s death. It’s gotta be bad, right? In fact, one of the weirdest problems people have is that death is necessary for survival, even though the act of killing an animal for food is somewhat unpleasant. Omelets require broken eggs, but cracking that shell turns a person’s stomach. So when a vegetarian utters something like “Meat is murder,”I can almost understand, just as I can understand why people might think low-carb diets are dangerous – because Conventional Wisdom continuously, constantly promotes these viewpoints. All animals raised for food suffer needlessly and cruelly, and no one can stick to low-carb diets long term and if they do, they’ll get heart disease and die. Those are the talking points, anyway.

So, what do you say to an ardent anti-meatist whose evolutionary arguments have been rebuffed and who comes at you with concerns about animal cruelty and human health? Read on.

Meat is murder.

I went over this already in my review of Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, but I’ll reiterate: life is death. Life springs from death, everywhere and always. You cannot live without something dying to make it all possible. Grain heavy vegan diets require the destruction of ecosystems and all their inhabitants; meat heavy Primal diets require the slaughter of a pig or a cow. If you’re going to exist in this world, you have to accept the fact that things will die. Oh, and things won’t just die; they’ll die to ensure your survival. You, me, all of us have blood on our hands. Your pets have blood on their paws. Those pigs rooting around in the dirt have blood on their hooves. When you have a knee-jerk reaction to the reality of death and try to escape it, either by eating a vegan diet or hurling insults at meat-eaters, you risk throwing off the delicate balance of life on this planet. When you remove death from the equation, life simply doesn’t work.

Now, there are right and wrong ways to produce meat. I won’t argue against that. In fact, I always maintain that the industrial CAFO system is unsustainable, produces unhealthy, unsuitable, antibiotic-laden meat with skewed O6/O3 ratios, and is damaging to the environment. Whereas a grass-fed, pastured farm produces healthy meat and usable manure that fertilizes the grass and helps replenish the soil, CAFOs produce mountains of sloppy manure (these animals aren’t eating their natural diet, so they poop endlessly). Whether we can support the entire world population on pastured animal products, I don’t know. I suspect not. There are better ways to farm, better ways to raise animals on their natural diets (moving animals off grains so that we can convert the croplands designated to feed them is a good start), but feeding six billion (and growing) is a tall order. The planet probably wasn’t meant to hold all of us. There are no easy answers to the environmental impact of meat, but they certainly don’t lie in the amber waves of grain and soybean farming.

Your average meat eater gets more diseases.

Superficially, this is the most effective rhetoric. It’s punchy and technically true, and it confirms most people’s suspicions of meat eaters. Meat is unhealthy; everyone knows it, right? Of course they get the most diseases, the most heart attacks, the most cancer. They can even cite mainstream studies that claim as much, studies that make the front page of every mainstream publication. The latest was the infamous red meat study that seemed to show the more a person consumed red meat, the greater their cancer, heart disease, and total mortality. It makes for a good headline, but it doesn’t mean much. For one thing, it shows correlation, not causation (establishing a causative mechanism would require controlled studies), and for another, it also showed similar connections between mortality and marriage status, smoking, high BMI, lower education, low physical activity levels, and low fruit and vegetable intake. How many of these meat eaters were also eating potatoes fried in rancid vegetable oil, swigging a jumbo Pepsi, and polishing off the meal with a bowl of ice cream? The stigma that meat is unhealthy is a potent, virulent one, and your average CAFO-meat-eating American is more likely to be the type that smokes, drinks heavily, never exercises, and lives in front of the television. If anything, these studies are strikes against the Standard American Diet and Lifestyle, which is technically omnivorous but completely and utterly different from the Primal Blueprint, which prides itself on promoting healthy, pastured, organic meat along with regular servings of fruits and vegetables, plus exercise of varying intensities. Throw a few modern Groks against your average vegan dieter (let alone someone following the SAD) and see how their health stacks up. We already know that the evil saturated fat found in animal products isn’t so evil after all, especially in the context of a low-carb Primal diet made of real foods.

We aren’t your average meat eaters.

Meat eaters don’t eat vegetables.

This one really riles me up. It operates under a totally false dichotomy: that meat eaters eat only meat. Just because a person eats a lot of meat doesn’t mean vegetation takes a backseat. I’d be willing to bet I eat more vegetables than most vegetarians out there, simply by making room and avoiding all those refined grains that form the basis for many vegetarian diets. You could conceivably remain a vegetarian and live off a diet of pancakes, fake meat, cereal, and pizza, while a plan as nutritionally-bereft as that one is impossible on a high-meat Primal diet.

And even if someone decided to go completely carnivore, so what? You can obtain all the essential nutrients that way, if you plan it well. I’d put a slab of organic, grass-fed beef liver, a heart steak, and a side of lamb brains up against a bowl of couscous and lima beans any day.

Between yesterday’s post and this one, see how long that took? It’s tough giving a quick two or three sentence rebuttal to a quip like that. You can’t link to posts or studies in real-time conversation. Try doing that the next time you find yourself accosted by vegans at a cocktail party. It probably won’t work on them, but you might convince a couple eavesdroppers.

To sum up

There’s a whole lot we don’t know, but what we do know is this: the human animal was designed to eat meat. It fuels our cells, our brains, and it builds our musculature. We designed tools to assist us in the procuring and processing of meat, and we still get that instinctual, savage urge to consume it. Meat tastes good. It provides essential nutrients and vitamins. And, contrary to popular belief, meat and meat alone is not responsible for cancer, heart disease, and a whole host of other ailments. Meat, when properly sourced, is a crucial element in the human diet. Despite the specious arguments about saturated fat and frugivores and chimps and murder, we know that meat is a good, healthy thing for the individual. And in the end, you’ve got to look out for your health and personal well-being. I refuse to sacrifice my health and happiness just so man can “evolve” past meat.

At least that’s my take on it.

What other arguments have you heard from anti-meatists? Let it all out in the comment boards.

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Related posts:

1. In Defense of Meat Eaters, Part 1: The Evolutionary Angle
2. Did Grok Really Eat That Much Meat?
3. The Importance of Cooking in the Evolution of the Human Brain

Dennis Gartman, like half of the world right now, is a big proponent of gold.

Except that instead of buying gold in dollars, Gartman prefers going long in foreign currencies. Here’s how he does it. And no, it’s not through a gold Bentley purchase program:

The Gartman Letter: To that end, we are asked “How do we get long of gold in foreign currency terms?” We’ve had the question asked so often that we thought it wise to explain it here this morning. Simply put, there are any number of ways to be long of gold, all of which carry an implicit dollar exposure. One can buy gold futures or one can buy the gold ETF. We are ambivalent to either, for the “arb” between the two does keep them almost perfectly in line, one with the other. The “beauty” of the ETF, however, is that one can adjust the long position in dollar terms perfectly, where as the gold future, being 100 ounces of gold, carries a rather sizeable exposure. Thus, at present, one contact of February gold is “worth” approximately $113,000, or one can create the same value by owning $113,000 “worth” of the ETF, or at last night’s close 1017 shares.

The real problem here is creating an equal dollar sum on the other side of the transaction. One can hedge away the dollar risk of a long gold transaction by selling the spot FX market and then rolling the position forward each day, which is cumbersome but quite effective, or one can sell short EUR, or Sterling, or Yen futures on the IMM, which is easy but creates dollar valuation problems, or one sell short the currency ETFs (FXE, FXB or FXY for the EUR, Sterling and the Yen respectively), which makes dollar equivalence very easy but borrowing these ETFs can prove problematic. The easiest way, for the public anyway, is to use the IMM futures.

The problem with the IMM futures is that they are for fixed sums of each currency. For the EUR that is 125,000 EURs, which at the moment, given the spot rate is “worth” approximately $180,000; for Sterling, which is 62,500 pounds, that is approximately $101,400, and for Yen (1.25 million Yen) that is approximately $111,250. Thus, if we buy one futures contract of gold and were to sell one EUR future, we’d have an excess long dollar position of approximately $67,000, which can be “hedged” away by owning a bit more GLD. One gold future is almost perfectly equal to One Yen future but it is worth a bit more than that of one gold future, and one Sterling future is worth a bit less. Thus, if one “did” one contract each of Sterling, the EUR and the Yen, and one did three contracts of gold, one’s dollar risk would be approximately $54,000 (rounded off to the nearest thousand dollars), which could itself be hedged away by buying that much more GLD.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Gartman: Forget Saudi Arabia, Our Oil Future Is All Canada
• Gartman: The EU Exodus Is Coming
• Gold "Super Spike" Coming In 2010

We’ve been covering how the Olympics has been able to get various governments around the world to grant it extra special intellectual property protection on certain words and phrases, with the upcoming Vancouver Olympics being no exception. In that case, you have to be careful of the use of “Vancouver,” “Olympics,” and even “2010.” So, clothing maker Lululemon decided to come up with a line that mocks these restrictions, with a brand new line of clothing called:

“Cool Sporting Event That Takes Place in British Columbia Between 2009 and 2011 Edition.”

Note how careful the company is to avoid any of the restricted words. Nicely done.

Of course, guess who isn’t happy? Reader Joe McEnaney alerts us to the news that, even though the Vancouver Olympics can’t officially do anything to Lululemon, it has decided to try shaming the company instead, expressing disappointment that the company has “has broken the spirit of Olympic trademark regulations.” Of course, even so, the Olympic officials seem to misunderstand what’s going on here. They claim:

“We expected better sportsmanship from a local Canadian company than to produce a clothing line that attempts to profit from the Games but doesn’t support the Games or the success of the Canadian Olympic team.”

But, of course, that’s not what’s going on here at all. They’re not trying to profit off of the Olympic Games. They’re trying to profit off of the ridiculous free speech restrictions put in place by the Olympics for no good reason.

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Luxury car manufacturers constantly outdo each other in horsepower, features, comfort and, most of all, gadgets. The Mercedes S Klasse, the BMW 7 Series and the Audi A8, top of the line models for each manufacturer, pack in more gadgets than the Enterprise in an effort to justify their unattainable status. The latest move comes from Audi, which has just unveiled the latest A8 and has partnered with Google to offer its clients a first, a Google Earth-enabled navigation system.

“Google has worked with the automotive industry to bring services like Local Search into cars in the past – now we’re teaming up with Audi to bring an entirely new type of technology into the car: Google Earth,” Jens Redmer, Principal, New Business Development, and Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director at Google Germany, wrote.

“With their newly unveiled Audi A8, Audi is the first car manufacturer to bring Google Earth directly into the vehicle and to combine that with a set of useful Google services. We’ve worked closely with them to create a compelling in-car experience integrated with the Audi navigation system,” they added.

While it’s not an exact replica of the desktop software, the Google Earth in the A8 gets all the basic features, 3D terrain, satellite imagery and all manners of layers with additional … (read more)

Filed under: Government/Legal, Chrysler, Earnings/Financials

Before Fiat and prior to bankruptcy, the old Chrysler, LLC needed $4 billion just to keep the doors open. The Bush Administration came through with the company-saving cash at the 11th hour, keeping the Pentastar solvent long enough to make it to bankruptcy court. Chrysler was reportedly given $15 billion in total aid, and it appears much of that money will be repaid through future payments and through incentives for Fiat to increase its stake in Chrysler from 20 percent to 35 percent. But that original $4 billion? Don’t expect that money to come back any time soon – if ever.

The Detroit News reports that what’s left of the old Chrysler LLC (which has been renamed Old Carco), has filed court papers saying that the $4 billion will likely never be repaid. New Chrysler is not legally responsible for that debt and Old Carco doesn’t exactly have considerable assets. And the government isn’t the only debt-holder that isn’t going to get its cash. Many secured and unsecured creditors will be unlikely to see their cash, thought some $21 million in secured debt could be paid. Old Carco contains the bad assets not purchased by the new Chrysler when it exited bankruptcy in the spring. The sale of those bad assets, which includes plants, tooling and miscellaneous items like old company cars, will help pay back some of the money creditors lost.

Lawyers working on the bankruptcy case say it take years before the book is finally closed on Old Carco. One item that could help drag matters out is a $25 billion lawsuit Old Carco filed against former owner, Daimler.

[Source: The Detroit News | Image: Bill Pugliano/Getty]

REPORT: Old Carco (read: “Bad Chrysler”) to not repay $4B in TARP loans originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Capcom has released the first gameplay trailer for Mega Man 10, the blue bomber’s latest 8-bit adventure. Hit the jump for some Mega Man and Proto Man gameplay.

Goat cheese is one of life’s loveliest pleasures, as far as we’re concerned, but until recently we had never tried making it ourselves. Goodness, why not?! Thanks to our friends at Home Ec., who gave us this kit from Urban Cheesecraft to try, we have a delicious new hobby.

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Do you think the Fed is behind the curve?

— Michael Zigmont, CFA, Partner, Harvest Volatility Management, LLC

Not yet, but the big test is just around the corner.

The Fed has printed mountains of money, but the banks aren’t lending much (except to the Federal government), so most of the money is still sitting in bank reserves.  As a result, the growth of the money supply (M2) has actually been surprisingly modest.  This and the weak economy have kept a lid on inflation.

These charts from Northern Trust show what is happening. 

First, the monetary base (bank reserves) has grown tremendously over the past year, but it has been flat for the past nine months:

Meanwhile, bank lending has fallen precipitously, which has prevented most of these dollars from entering the money supply.

Combine deleveraging with a crappy economy and the growth of the actual money supply (M2) has been contained (red bars are year over year growth, blue line is 26-week growth):

Thus, so far, core inflation has remained low:

That said, as the chart above also shows, inflation has started to tick up.  If and when the banks start lending aggressively, inflation is poised to take off. 

At that point, the Fed will have to be very aggressive about raising rates–and they’ll likely have to do it when the unemployment rate is still horrifically high.  This will lead to outrage in both Congress (you’re killing the economy!) AND on Wall Street (you’re killing our profits and stopping us from lending!).  It also will require Ben Bernanke to have a backbone that he has not yet displayed (it’s easy to give money away).

To be clear: The Fed WANTS inflation to be uncomfortably high for the next few years, as this will help the country inflate away its huge debt mountain (we’ll be paying back our creditors with dollars that are worth less).  Thus, the perfect inflation rate per the Fed will be considerably higher than anyone who actually possesses dollars will want.  This will lead to lots of folks yelling that the Fed is “behind the curve” when the Fed is exactly where it wants to be.  The Fed will respond by talking tough and intentionally remaining behind the curve.

So, no, the Fed is not behind the curve YET.  But it will be soon.

Have a question you want to ask Henry?  Send an email to [email protected] with “ASK HENRY” in the subject line.  (Goofy, yes, but easy to find in a crowded inbox.)  Henry will answer as many of the interesting questions as he can.

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• NEW FEATURE: Ask Henry!