Thursday, October 11, 2012

The US and World Rankings of Blogs is out and I am ranked---that is all I have to say about that...

This is the US and World Ranking for my blog (Yes, that is in "millions"). I have a long way to go. 

I would estimate there are 2.5 million blogs dedicated to Cat Videos ahead of me, so I don't feel so bad. LOL! Oh, well, I will decieve myself into thinking quality ranks ahead of  quantity. 

Go HERE to check out your site, if you are a fellow blogger. 

Source: HERE

"Hooray for GDP!!" Nice paper on the positives and negatives of this measure of production and whether is it a good measure of Standard of Living.

Here is a link to The Conversable Economist to a TERRIFIC post on the significance of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of societal well-being/standard of living.

Gives the pros and cons of this way of measuring of production. 

Here are the top 4 points of a the paper the posting cites as source material.
  1. GDP is hopelessly flawed as a measure of welfare. It ignores leisure and women’s
    work in the home. It takes no account of pollution and carbon emissions.
  2. GDP ignores distribution. In the richest country in the world, the United States, the
    typical person or family has seen little or no benefit from economic growth since the
    1970s. But over the same period inequality has risen sharply.
  3. Happiness should be the grand aim of policy. But the evidence is that, above a certain level, a higher material standard of living does not make people any happier. ...
  4. Even if higher GDP were a good idea on other grounds, it’s not feasible because the
    environmental damage would be too great.
Here is the link to the original paper cited. "Hor

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Nice interactive showing the wealth of Members of Congress based on their style of investing...

Each dot represents a Member of "Congress"---The House of Representatives (435 of them) and the Senate (100 of them).  Republicans are the Red dots and the Democrats are the Blue dots.

Scroll your cursor over a dot and the name of the Congressperson will pop-up.  Wish they had the estimated value of their wealth. That would have been helpful.

It is set up in quadrants so you can see the results based on how aggressive Members are in their investment portfolios relative to their wealt.  One would presume the more aggressive you are in investing the higher the return on those investment. However, it does not always work out that way.

More info HERE where I found this infographic.  Go HERE for MUCH MORE interactivity with this graphic.  MANY parameters you can set and change.  Very informative.

View My Stats