The Reuters article has it correctly with the necessary qualifier, Swiss Complete World’s Longest Rail Tunnel.

They fail to mention the 4 other tunnels that are quite a bit longer than the Swiss tunnel.

If you believe Wikipedia, see their article, List of longest tunnels in the world. The longest one is 85 miles compared to the puny Swiss tunnel of only 35.5 miles.

Of course, if you go by volume, perhaps the Swiss tunnel does have some bragging rights.  I don’t know the numbers for this measure.

The Reuters article, U.S. Backs Off In Currency Dispute With China, gives the details.

The decision to delay the Treasury report appears to have been taken at the last minute. Industry sources had been primed to expect it by 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on Friday.

It was apparently right down to the wire, but finally someone came to their senses.  My supposition is that someone finally backed off from this politically popular measure that would have spelled disaster for the world economy.

To hear Klaus Schwab tell it in my previous post Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum, China is trying to boost internal consumption so that they won’t be so dependent on exports.  This will make it less disruptive to their own economy to let the value of their currency rise.  They have already let it rise at the rate of 1% per month over the last three months.

So it seems that China is carrying out the policy that we wish, and they are preparing to position themselves to carry it out even faster.  Would it be smart for the United States to pick a fight with its largest creditor because we want them to do something on our timetable instead of their own?  Would they be smart to disrupt their country by raising the value of their currency too fast just to please their largest borrower?

Whatever trouble we are in, we brought it on ourselves.

Perhaps 5,000 years of experience does allow the Chinese to act as the mature player in this comedy of errors.  With only a couple hundred years of history, we naturally take the part of the immature buffoon.

Charlie Rose had a fascinating Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum.  The World Economic Forum is the organization that puts on the annual meeting of world leaders at Davos, Switzerland.

Among all the other interesting topics discussed, Charlie Rose got Klaus Schwab to discuss his understanding of leadership.  He defined leadership qualities as brains, heart, soul, and good nerves.

In discussing why there are fewer and fewer great leaders he said that the main deficiency was in the soul.  He went on to explain that it was understandable in the current environment because “instead of following your compass you have to find out what is the public opinion – more soul, vision, values part is sacrificed to the short term interest of gaining …”.  I couldn’t quite catch the last word.

At this point, I thought that after such a great interview and the showing of such great insight, that Klaus Schwab had somehow missed an important point.

The last sentence of the interview made me say “Hallelujah, he really does get it.”

The New Republic article Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don’t by Jonathan Bernstein promotes the article of the same name by Hans Noel of Georgetown University.

This is great article for political junkies who read this blog on a regular basis. If you are a political scientist, you probably know about all this already. After thinking about it for a while, I thought So that’s what political science is all about.

The article itself is published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, Vol. 8 (2010) / Issue 3. From here, you can download the 21 page article.

The New Republic paraphrases item 3 as Elections don’t necessarily do what we want them to do.. I found the explanation of the item to be the clearest and most succinct description of the problem of finding a voting method that does do what we want it to do.

You may or may not agree with some of the ten items, but you may also learn something in thinking about why you do or don’t agree.  For instance,  the scatter diagram of figure 1 in the article could just as easily be used to make the opposite point of much of the text for this item.

A quick and simple animated explanation of how Wall Street Reform will work a…

There is more on What Wall Street Reform Means for You on the White House Blog.

While the video may be telling the truth, you still don’t have to fall for the implied message hook, line, and sinker.

She is right that no job is preordained to be held by an American. If a company can get the job done just as well (or even better) by a foreign worker for less money, then it is the responsibility to the stock holders to make that move. American workers have to figure out what they are going to do to compete. Putting up trade barriers is not the answer.

The excessive pay for chief executives in America is also not preordained. These American CEOs who think outsourcing only happens to the workers will get quite a shock in a few years. What makes Carly Fiorina think that there isn’t a CEO candidate in India that can do her job better and cheaper?

The following comment has nothing to do with whether or not the former American workers of HP have cause to complain. If you are a CEO watching this video and you see the clips of disgruntled American workers and then you see the clips of satisfied workers in India, where would you prefer to hire your workers?

I found a link to the article White America Has Lost Its Mind on the facebook page of friend João Geada.

If you are at all sensitive about matters of race, then don’t bother to click on the above link.  If you can take a joke, and don’t mind a little X-rated language, then feel free to read the article.

But the more you shook your head at it, the more it seemed to have taken root deep in the lizard part of the white nervous system. Obama is not an American. He says he’s Christian, but he has a Muslim-sounding name. He’s not black, he’s not white. . . . Is . . . is he even human?

I take no responsibility for any head explosions caused by reading this article.

From the article in The New York Times, Company Stops Insuring Titles in Chase Foreclosures:

Mark P. Stopa, a lawyer in Florida who represents defaulting homeowners, said that if more title insurance firms began to shy away from insuring foreclosed properties, the entire housing market could suffer. The prices of foreclosures would plummet, because lenders will not issue a new mortgage without title insurance.

How many more shoes are there to drop about the collapse of the housing bubble?  Usually, after the second one drops, you stop waiting for another shoe.  This has got to be at least the third shoe.

Finally, someone graphically illustrates the issue of extending the tax cuts.

If you are watching this or any other video on the home page of the blog, please click on the article title first so that your browser is showing only the one article. This will keep other videos on the home page from trying to steal bandwidth from the one you want to view.

I like to think Goolsbee is making the point that I have been trying to make.

Furthermore, finally we have a Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers who understands that part of his role is to explain things to the voters. This White House White Board is a great idea.

The preamble to the video on www.whitehouse.gov/whiteboard is:

Today we’re trying out something new — White House White Board, in which one of our key players on the White House team will cut through the political back-and-forth you hear every day and break down an issue affecting American families into simple, understandable terms.  Today, Austan Goolsbee, the new Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers here at the White House, tackles the tax cut fight and what it means that Congressional Republicans are “holding middle class tax cuts hostage” as the President has said: