Wednesday's Top 10 at 10: The amazing Tal Bayer; 'We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society'; 'Last year's canes seldom bear fruit'; John Oliver on credit rating agencies; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 am today.

As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read today is #1 from the Washington Post on an American rugby coach.

1. The amazing Tal Bayer - This is the first time I've led the Top 10 with a story about rugby. 

On the face of it this story has not much to do with the global financial crisis or finance or economics or New Zealand.

But I love rugby and I love good journalism, and this piece from the Washington Post's Rick Maese about school rugby coach Tal Bayer is certainly that.

Aside from being about rugby, there is a New Zealand flavour in here. Some of the Top 10's readers may have heard about the Pride school rugby team in Washington. It's a mostly black inner city school that has done amazingly well competing against the mostly posh schools that play rugby in America. It's down to the dedication of one coach. It's a story about many things, including class, demographics and the futures of America's young, poor and black.

I won't spoil the story, but I'd suggest you read it to the end. 

There are a few interesting factoids to go with the inspiration and emotion. There are now 1.1 million rugby players in America and the New Zealand Embassy donates US$10,000 a year to the Pride school rugby team. That's US$10,000 of government spending I support.

If you click on one link in today's Top 10, click on this: 

The only father they’ve known is one who came home late with grass stains, who disappeared many weekends and who so often seemed preoccupied with other people’s children. Bayer was exhausted every night, and as the rugby season wore on, it only seemed to get worse.

“He’s here,” said (Bayer's wife) Tori, a 43-year-old physical therapist, “but he’s not here.” She’d been patient for so long, accepting of a husband who felt pulled by two families. But it bothered her to hear Bayer refer to the Pride players as “his kids” or “his boys.”

“No, these are your kids at home,” she said.

2. 'You can't leave until you pay' - This is an interesting twist. Chinese workers at a medicinal plastics factory have locked up the company's American owner until he pays their wages, the FT reports.

The stand-off is not too unusual for China. “The reason they do that is that it’s a foreign company, the boss has a foreign passport,” said Geoffrey Crothall at China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong. “I presume [the workers] are concerned the boss would do a runner, that’s why they want to make sure he stays there until they get their money in their pocket.”

Such fears are fuelled by what happened to other factories during the 2008 financial crisis, when global demand for Chinese products dipped.

“A lot of factories closed down, the boss sold off all the factory equipment, stopped paying the workers for several months, and then just disappeared,” says Mr Crothall.

3. 'We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society' - Barack Obama announced various measures to reduce carbon emissions overnight in a speech overnight that included this great line:

Nobody has a monopoly on what is a very hard problem, but I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.  And ultimately, we will be judged as a people, and as a society, and as a country on where we go from here.

4. Really? - The strongest meme in the debate about peak oil in the last couple of years is that the discovery of shale gas and oil through fracking has made the problem go away. That's certainly worth challenging, Nafeez Ahmed does that here at The Guardian. 

One internal EIA document said oil companies had exaggerated "the appearance of shale gas well profitability" by highlighting performance only from the best wells, and using overly optimistic models for productivity projections over decades. The NYT reported that the EIA often "relies on research from outside consultants with ties to the industry."

The latest EIA shale gas estimates, contracted to ARI, is no exception. ARI, according to the NYT's 2011 article, has "major clients in the oil and gas industry" and the company's president, Vello Kuuskraa, is "a stockholder and board member of Southwestern Energy, an energy company heavily involved in drilling for gas in the Fayetteville shale formation in Arkansas."

Independent studies published over the last few months cast even more serious doubt over the viability of the shale gas boom.

5. 'The world is still being held hostage by the banks' - So says John Plender in this FT opinion piece.

Another financial crisis is probable and it would be much more damaging to the global economy.

Market jitters this week over the Federal Reserve’s newly declared intention to reduce the pace of its asset-purchasing programme shows investors are worried about the US recovery as well as the bond market. The eurozone economy is, in the words of Bill Gross, managing director of bond investor Pimco, a basket case. Banks everywhere are freighted with too heavy a burden of potentially toxic sovereign debt, leaving them vulnerable to rises in bond yields, especially in Japan.

So while recent events in banking are modest cause for optimism, both the UK and the world remain hostage to unreconstructed bankers and their powerful lobbyists, to whom government ministers are extraordinarily deferential. The global economy and taxpayers everywhere are still seriously at risk.

6. Why inflation is not a problem - With all the money printing of recent years, many are scratching their heads at low consumer price inflation is globally.

One driver is massive over capacity in China's factories, which is pressing down on the prices of many manufacturing goods.

Here's BusinessInsider with the detail and a great chart. 

7. 'The most depressing slide I've ever created' - This one bears thinking about. As the developed world's population starts seriously ageing it will start trying to sell its houses to the young. And house prices will...

Let's have a look at what happened elsewhere. HT BusinessInsider. 

Citigroup's Head of Credit Strategy Matt King has compared housing markets with the dependency ratio...

It’s what I like to call “the most depressing slide I’ve ever created.” In almost every country you look at, the peak in real estate prices has coincided – give or take literally a couple of years – with the peak in the inverse dependency ratio (the proportion of population of working age relative to old and young).

In the past, we all levered up, bought a big house, enjoyed capital gains tax-free, lived in the thing, and then, when the kids grew up and left home, we sold it to someone in our children’s generation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well when there start to be more pensioners than workers.

8. The power of America's drug lobby - Propublica and NPR report on how the biggest prescribers of a not very effective blood pressure drug called Bystolic were paid large sums to make 'speaking engagements'. Another confirmation of scepticism about the TPP, which is at least partly about the American drug lobby trying to hobble Pharmac.

At least 17 of the top 20 Bystolic prescribers in Medicare's prescription drug program in 2010 have been paid by Forest to deliver promotional talks. In 2012, they together received $284,700 for speeches and more than $20,000 in meals.

Nearly all those doctors were again among the highest prescribers in 2011, the most recent year for which Medicare data are available. Forest began disclosing its payments only last year; the company didn't specify which drugs doctors spoke about.

9. Totally a video about a paraplegic lady who went surfing with the help of her sons' friends and some duct tape. She smiled a lot. It made me smile too.

10. Totally John Oliver on Matt Taibbi's amazing story (linked to by David in Monday's Top 10) about the credit rating agencies. This make me LOL.

(Updated with correct link for #7. HT dh)