I am kind of at a loss. I don’t know what I am going to talk about in this post because I am treading in the troubled water. Well, let me get this thing straight (not the straight you are thinking of): it is about man having sex with man.

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In the satellite map, the middle of China (Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia province, approximately one tenth of China) appears brownish and infertile. That is the great loess plateau (the yellow land), a land of glory and a place of misery.

Modern people may not believe that the barren loess plateau was once the economical and political center of China. The land used to be China’s food storehouse and had supported millions of people. Now the land is hardly inhabitable (but tens of millions of people are still living there) and water is scarce. Poor peasants have to cross their fingers every year hoping almighty Heaven Emperor to pour some drops of water on their land. It is a desperate situation.

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Brad DeLong wrote a nice (but long) summary of the dollar debate in his blog . Briefly, it is likely there is a 30% decrease of dollar value within next 5 to 10 years, but no one knows what will happen then. Domestic economics oriented people argued that there was no worry in this issue. The US is big, and the low value of dollar will stimulate the US production. On the other hand, the internation focused economists pessimistically predicted that the US would enter a deep recession due to the collapse of its economics.

Sure they both have some models for their arguements. BUT, all models are wrong, while some are useful. As I have claimed before, economic models are useless. If there is a potential danger in the falling dollar, why don’t they do something to fix it? A strong dollar has proved to be useful for the US economics, for example, the 1990s economics boom. If the dollar is falling down, everybody will leave you since they have alternatives such as the growing independent and strong European Union.

Mankiw sucks.

Hurricane is a frequent visitor to New Orleans, LA, and flood is not a new thing either. In fact, New Orleans has been grossly flooded at least three times, and levee leakage is a constant danger (see Scientific American, Aug 31, 2001). Numerous end-of-the-world predictions are useless if there is no money. And it also happens that in the US, everything is very costly. Repairing curb in my neighborhood ended up costing more than one million dollars a mile. For a major fixing of the levee maze in New Orleans, tens of billions are barely enough to start.

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