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 The US Presidential Election |  The US presidential election is now 2 days away. It has already become the most expensive election in history, including the primaries more then $1000000000 has been spent trying to win this office.
With 2 days to go Obama leads McCain 50.4 to 43.9 on pollster.com's composite tracking, and it looks like we're two days away from a historic victory. The other meta-polling site, fivethirtyeight.com, has weighed the different polls to come up with a 52.2% to 46.6% lead in Obama's favor.
Since the US election is decided state by state, and with Obama leading in several key states, they rate his odds of winning this thing at 96.2% - talk about hubris (or Truman v Dewey for those of you who are political junkies).
One big caveat in all of this. The polling models used to get these numbers all assume a huge Democratic turnout. The Democrats have registered millions of new votes this election cycle, and if those new 18-35 year old votes actually show up Obama has won... BUT if the turnout is similar to past elections then McCain is actually to favored win this thing.
Exciting few days indeed.
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| Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. | Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.
“It’s been an extremely weird day, but weird in a positive way,†Mr. Krugman said in an interview on his way to a Washington meeting for the Group of Thirty, an international body from the public and private sectors that discusses international economics. He said he was mostly “preoccupied with the hassles†of trying to make all his scheduled meetings today and answer a constantly-ringing cell phone.
Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.†He has developed models that explain observed patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why. Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and will exchange different kinds of goods with each other; Mr. Krugman’s theories have explained why worldwide trade is dominated by a few countries that are similar to each other, and why some countries might import the same kinds of goods that it exports.
More below the fold...
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| Iceland on the brink of a meltdown. | Having been on a business trip to Iceland this week, and seeing first hand the state of their economy, I am brought back to our own 6. October, in our case 1992 and not 2008.
Iceland was a surreal place, everything costs half. The ISK króna has lost over half it's value over the last year, and is currently slugging it out with Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan as the worst preforming currency of the past 12 months. Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan FFS! This is further compounded by the fact that many loans in Iceland were obtained in Yen, Euros and Dollars. Hence they have seen their loans basically double in size. The Guardian has a good article out today on this issue. It is well worth a read. For those looking to buy a cheap car it might not be a bad idea to look in Iceland. Plenty of luxury cars that they now cannot afford to have.
Finally the size of the Icelandic banks is a problem, the 3 biggest banks are between 5 and 15 times the size of the public budget (depending upon how it's calculated), which means that the Government cannot afford to bail them all out. I witnessed a bank-run on Landsbankin (which is privatized, go figure, luckily they made a new real Landsbanki)
On the up side I recommend everyone to go Christmas shopping in Reykjavik. Things are half-price, it's like Eastern Europe in the 90's. Even the Hilton Hotel was cheap...
...but tomorrow is the 6. of October...
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| New Hurricane hitting New Orleans | 3 years ago this week, New Orleans was hit by hurricane Katrina, which caused catastrophic damage.
Tonight the city braces itself for a hurricane of equal or greater strength as hurricane Gustav is making it's way for the Louisiana coastline. Unlike Katrina which hit to the east of New Orleans, Gustav is on track to hit on the western side, which is worse as the storm surges are more intense directly east of the hurricanes eye.
One can only hope that the US Government learned it's lesson 3 years ago so we'll not witness the city drowned yet again.
For more on this story read the science blog at DailyKos.
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