Monthly Archives: September 2013

News

Poland seizes bond investments in private pension plans

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Amy sent me this story from Reuters.

Excerpt:

Poland said on Wednesday it will transfer to the state many of the assets held by private pension funds, slashing public debt but putting in doubt the future of the multi-billion-euro funds, many of them foreign-owned.

The changes went deeper than many in the market expected and could fuel investor concerns that the government is ditching some business-friendly policies to try to improve its flagging popularity with voters.

The Polish pension funds’ organisation said the changes may be unconstitutional because the government is taking private assets away from them without offering any compensation.

Announcing the long-awaited overhaul of state-guaranteed pensions, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said private funds within the state-guaranteed system would have their bond holdings transferred to a state pension vehicle, but keep their equity holdings.

He said that what remained in citizens’ pension pots in the private funds will be gradually transferred into the state vehicle over the last 10 years before savers hit retirement age.

The reform is “a decimation of the …(private pension fund) system to open up fiscal space for an easier life now for the government,” said Peter Attard Montalto of Nomura. “The government has an odd definition of private property given it claims this is not nationalisation.”

I was looking for someone who could take the spin off of this and found this article on Zero Hedge.

Excerpt:

While the world was glued to the developments in the Mediterranean in the past week, Poland took a page straight out of Rahm Emanuel’s playbook and in order to not let a crisis go to waste, announced quietly that it would transfer to the state – i.e., confiscate – the bulk of assets owned by the country’s private pension funds (many of them owned by such foreign firms as PIMCO parent Allianz, AXA, Generali, ING and Aviva), without offering any compensation. In effect, the state just nationalized roughly half of the private sector pension fund assets, although it had a more politically correct name for it: pension overhaul.

[…]By shifting some assets from the private funds into ZUS, the government can book those assets on the state balance sheet to offset public debt, giving it more scope to borrow and spend.

It is nationalization, and we should expect to see a lot more of it as spendthrift governments start to run of road to kick the can down. Maybe even here at home, some day. The United States is already up against the debt limit now, and our credit has been downgraded twice already. How soon until IRAs are nationalized into Social Security to prop it up?

News

Conservative Christian Tony Abbott wins majority in Australia

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Tony Abbott, future Prime Minister of Australia
Tony Abbott, future Prime Minister of Australia

Timothy Stanley of the UK Telegraph reports that Australia has elected a Stephen Harper of their own.

Excerpt:

Tony Abbott has won the Australian election – a blow not only to the Australian Labor Party but to Left-wingers everywhere who presumed that he was too “Neanderthal” to win. Well, us Neanderthals will be having a barbie tonight and sculling some beers to celebrate. “Good on yer, mate!”

Abbott won for two reasons. First, the Australian Labor Party is going through a long-term identity crisis. The ALP was once the party of the working man (and Sheila) but in recent years it’s succumbed to the worst aspects of factional politics, becoming a magnet for liberal pressure groups desperate for their slice of the taxpayers’ pie. The party contained plenty of factions in the past but it always managed to steer a sensible middle course between them – so while it was the ALP in the 1970s that established Australia as an outward-looking, Pacific power it was also the ALP in the 1980s that recognised the need for economic reform and rejected protectionism. It’s the party of both Gough Whitlam and Les Patterson.

However, in recent years the Left gained an ascendance over the Right that undid that delicate balance. Under Gillard and Rudd, the ALP “bought” off Australia’s metropolitan elites by embracing issues like gay marriage and the green agenda – the latter threatening the livelihoods of ordinary Australians trying to drill, mine and log their way through the global recession. It invested in silly, expensive projects that turned into giveaways to client companies and unions. And it displayed all of its internal bickering in public, reducing national politics to student union shenanigans. The ALP is now severed from the base that it once represented so well, leaving the ordinary blokes and blokesses looking around for something new.

[…]On the quiet, Abbott has picked up some of the politics that the ALP abandoned. He is said to be a devotee of BA Santamaria, the Catholic thinker who tried to build a Christian Democratic movement that combined social justice and social conservatism. Abbott’s conservatism is plain to see: he rejects doctrinaire environmentalism and favours a far freer and competitive market than the ALP’s clients would ever tolerate. But he also has Santamaria’s concern for social justice: Abbott wants to introduce a scheme that would pay for parental leave to encourage mothers and fathers not only to spend more time with their children but to have more of them, too. Dig beneath that hard man image and you’ll find a politician who is considerably softer and complex. Whereas some Western conservatives seem to be entirely motivated by the desire to win (Romney, Cameron), Abbott has a philosophy and – almost unique in our materialist age – a theology.

This puts him in the George W Bush, Stephen Harper compassionate conservative tradition – the tradition that tends to attract the most votes. For while British Tories might look at Abbott’s politics and language and sneer, they would do well to remember this important distinction. Tony Abbott wins elections; David Cameron has yet to do even that.

Congratulations, Conservative Coalition!

My previous post on Tony Abbott is here, if you want to know more about his policies.

Mentoring

How to subscribe to and download the Wintery Knight’s favorite podcasts

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I thought it might be a good idea to explain podcasts and RSS feeds to my readers and then list out the podcasts I like best.

So here is a quick introduction to RSS feeds:

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.

Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.

RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.
RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an “RSS Feed”. People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called “RSS aggregators” have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you.

(RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called “RSS Channels” and “RSS Readers”.)

For the more technical people, RSS is an implementation of the Observer design pattern. When used in a distributed or enterprise environment, it is called Publish/Subscribe design pattern. You can implement it with technologies like message queues, and that’s one of the things I do at work (sometimes).

So, if you look at the front page of my blog right now, you can see some little item lists from sources like Reasonable Faith and Investors Business Daily. Those are RSS feeds supplied by those people. My blog is subscribing to those feeds and display the last 5 items from each feed. And whenever those sources publish something new, then the content of what is displayed on my blog’s front page changes to show the new item.

On my home computer, I subscribe to lots of RSS news feeds, which is one way of finding news stories for my blog. The software I use for this at home is my Chrome browser pointed to the Feedly RSS aggregator web site. You have to have a gMail account to use Feedly. You can read about how to add RSS feeds to Feedly here. If you don’t want to have a gMail account, then you can use a desktop application like RSS Owl and add feeds to that. On my Android phone, I use a application called gReader and add feeds to that.

I also have RSS feeds for podcasts so that I can see the new ones that people make and then download them and listen to them. I use an Android application called Podkicker for subscribing to podcasts. It also downloads them and plays them. Usually, I download them when I am at home and listen to them on the road.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my list of favorite podcasts:

NEWS

Name: Weekly Standard Podcast
URL: http://dailystandardpodcast.weeklystandard.libsynpro.com/rss

Name: FRC – Washington Watch Weekly – Tony Perkins
URL: http://www.frc.org/rss/pod_WR.xml

Name: FRC – Daily Commentary – Tony Perkins
URL: http://www.frc.org/rss/pod_CM.xml

POLICY

Name: Banter: American Enterprise Institute
URL: http://media.aei.org/category/banter-podcast/feed/rss/

Name: Uncommon Knowledge – Hoover Institute – Peter Robinson
URL: http://feeds.podtrac.com/raBAhhrHEQY$

Name: Ruth Institute Podcast – Jennifer Roback Morse
URL: http://ruthinstitute.libsyn.com/rss

SCIENCE

Name: Intelligent Design: The Future – Various
URL: http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

Name: Reasons to Believe – Science News Flash
URL: http://c450913.r13.cf2.rackcdn.com/podcast.xml

APOLOGETICS

Name: Reasonable Faith Podcast – Kevin Harris and WLC
URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReasonableFaithPodcast

Name: Apologetics 315 Interviews – Brian Auten
URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/apologetics315interviews

Name: Please Convince Me Podcast – J. Warner Wallace
URL: http://thepleaseconvincemeradioshowpodcast.libsyn.com/rss

Name: Stand to Reason Please Convince Me Podcast – J. Warner Wallace
URL: http://pleaseconvinceme.libsyn.com/rss

So, if you’re looking from some good podcasts, those are the ones I recommend. Please don’t feel badly if your favorite podcast is not listed here. You can leave a comment and tell us all what it is.