Oh No!

Here comes another speech! Just when you thought he might stop and start doing his job, horrible Norwegian people intervene.

AT&T Wireless Overwhelmed.

As an indicator of the bottleneck ahead, AT&T has been overwhelmed with a 5,000 per cent increase in wireless data consumption in three years, driven by the minority of customers who own Apple’s iPhone. For now, AT&T is the exclusive US carrier for that device.

“We’re seeing a disproportionate number of users driving consumption,” Ralph de la Vega, AT&T Mobility president, said at the conference.

“If we don’t find a way to keep them from crowding out others, we’re going to have a very significant issue.”

Mr de la Vega said the top 3 per cent of its smartphone customers were responsible for 40 per cent of data usage, consuming 13 times more than the average smartphone user. With new smartphones that have software fromGoogle and others coming, and the prospects of wider distribution of broadband-enabled notebook PCs, the demands for connectivity will continue to jump geometrically.

--from today's Financial Times.

Decumulation.

Where do people in money management come up with these words? Apparently, when you sell stock to help pay for your retirement, you're "decumulating!" If all the baby-boomers do it at more or less the same time, it amounts to a fairly massive "decumulation." (via Kedrosky)

Belichick on Coaching.

“Age was never a big thing for me, whether it was the head coach of Cleveland or any of those assistant jobs. It was more about doing the job,” Belichick said yesterday. “I feel like if the players feel like, as a coach, you can help them, and you know what you’re talking about, and you can tell them things that’ll make them better and help prepare them because they want to prepare, they want to do well and they want to improve. If you can show them you can do that, then they respect you. If you don’t, I’m not saying they’re disrespectful, but they don’t listen carefully, they’re not as attentive because I don’t think they feel like they are getting information or the assistance that they’re looking for, and what they’ve been used to getting in the past. That’s really what it’s about for me.” -- from The Boston Herald.

If a Shoe Drops

And everyone pretends it didn't, did it? The Fed says: we have a Rapid Response Team for that!

Afghanistan.

From the analytics service Stratfor:

By most accounts, McChrystal is a sharp and capable military leader. It is not only his prerogative as senior commander in Afghanistan but his job to turn the tide against any and all opposition there -- to seek as long-term and lasting a solution as possible to problems like internal security. To do that, he has outlined a long-term operational strategy and asked for what appears to be essentially as many troops as the Pentagon conceivably might give him.

But the White House has a different role: American grand strategy. It is the executive that is responsible not only for Afghanistan but for balancing American resources across a series of geopolitical challenges, from a resurgent Russia to Iran. The president must decide what he wants to accomplish in Afghanistan, given the spectrum of challenges and what resources can be allocated to that mission.

It should be no surprise that the role and perspective of the senior military commander in Afghanistan and the president of the United States might produce different answers to the question of the appropriate American strategy. Afghanistan is a war that the Obama administration inherited, and the circumstances there have gone from bad to worse to worse yet in only a year's time. Some of the president's closest advisers now appear to be laying the groundwork for a White House decision on the Afghan strategy that does not match with McChrystal's request.