Month: January 2009

A college student posts: I tried to make cereal with coffee. It was awful 🙁

With their economic disaster left in our laps, Republicans are offering rinsed policies while fighting Obama’s stimulus.

Although tax cuts are included in Obama’s initial stimulus package, this chart shows (in orange) that insisting on tax cuts alone will fail.

The upcoming White House proposals (in blue) will provide 6 times more employment than the errors of the storming Republican opponents, and include targeted tax cuts rather than merely re-washed trickle-down.

A quite plausible alternative, which is partially present in the president-elect’s proposal, is for the fiscal stimulus to primarily take the form of payroll tax cuts for poor and middle-income Americans. Those are, after all, the people who are most likely to spend the money quickly.

Targeted tax aid for poorer Americans would be far more egalitarian than most kinds of infrastructure spending, like broadband technology. Sensible infrastructure projects wouldn’t disproportionately employ the least-skilled Americans. Forgoing the payroll tax for households earning less than $75,000 a year is surer progressivism than bridge-building.

There’s another type of brain drain we seldom talk about. Our stupidity:

Should government step in and require simple, cheap improvements in efficiency for the good of the nation?

Many ideologues spring forth to bash any and all such “impositions” on the market. Yet add up 100 million households and offices, and there’s 140 power plants that do nothing but keep a nation’s gadgets in power-wasting standby mode. [!]

Maybe we need intellectual innovations as much as we need technical innovations.

Perhaps every system should be required to undergo an energy audit–how much energy and time will this require on an economy-wide basis? Will the proposed benefits actually be worth the energy and effort, which otherwise could be devoted to more pressing problems?

For example, such an audit would lead to the total repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley. This utterly misguided, if well-intentioned, system of regulation is essentially a 5-10% “tax” on corporate America and thus the nation as a whole. As financial scandals unfold one after the other, it is clear SOX has done virtually nothing to stop fraud and legerdemain, but it has proved horrendously costly and ineffective.

Can we as a nation afford to have tens of thousands of people toiling away on such a stupendous make-work project with virtually no tangible, measurable results?

Can’t the same be said of the tens of thousands of people devoted to figuring out who pays what share of an inflated medical bill, inundating the system with paperwork and emails and adding up to 50% to the cost of the actual care? Is this energy and human investment really generating useful returns?

The answer to both questions is obviously no.

We as a nation are rather obviously fiddling while Rome burns, expending staggering sums of money on gigantic make-work projects which are widely seen as enormous wastes of time and energy like SOX compliance and billing/invoicing etc. the bloated, Kafka-esque “healthcare” system.

We as a nation have avoided hard choices by borrowing trillions of dollars.

[more]

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” – Groucho Marx

A fairly well off ‘victim’ of Madoff’s Ponzi Fund says it’s not $50 billion; that it’s $17 billion; that he’s such a sociopath he’s inflated his own fraud.

Alexandra Penney—a New York artist and former editor of Self Magazine—lost her life savings in the Madoff debacle. She’s writing about it at The Bag Lady Papers.

Before I reached for a bedtime Tylenol PM, I Googled the Hemlock Society. I wanted to know a painless way to die.

A commentor replies, “You’ve got to be open to big changes. BTW, I read that some people affected by this matter will be able to recover $500k from some kind of fund that covers fraud or something- it’s not much, but it might tide you over.”

Just might tide her over, y’think?

Canada’s Tyee says, “Welcome to the golden age of schadenfreude.“

75 percent of patients hospitalized for a heart attack did not have risky cholesterol levels. Well then.

Wow. Who knows this?

Nearly 22 percent of hospital charges result from treating diabetes.

$171 billion dollars per year.

Diabetes is rapidly on the rise and is projected to increase 165 percent by 2050… but it’s not ‘old people’ that are significantly increasing the costs.

Prevalence of diabetes in hospitalized adult patients ranges from 12 percent to 25 percent…

We are at a moment unique in human history, when we are using the planet’s bio-capacity so quickly that we risk a catastrophic collision with ecological reality. Every creature and every biological system on Earth is now dependent, intentionally or unintentionally, on our management. We’ve never been in the position of managing the planet before and we have no idea how to do it.

It’s really serious.

“It’s commonly assumed that the opposite of poor is rich, but actually it’s sufficiency — a sense that there is enough.”

A Forum for Alternative Energy Knowledge:

In the United States, we have been trying to build a viable industry out of renewable energies for at least three decades. In that time, we saw it grow in an explosion of interest in the late 70’s and early 80’s, only to die a silent death in the 90’s and first half of this decade. Last year, renewables were once again all the rage; this time with the assumption that they were here to stay. Now, only a few brief months later, when crude prices once again dropped into a temporary depression, the fervor has died.

Why is that?

Are we that fickle? Shortsighted? Irresponsible?

I founded the Energy Management Group in 1978 under an agreement with an association of more than 8000 grocery stores and another agreement to assist 11000 churches to reduce energy cost and impact. There was much enthusiasm until interest rates climbed to double digits, supply side economics became the fashion, and the Wall Street binge roped America. Perhaps throwing our prosperity away is a reply to a complex world with few solutions. Argument rather than vision has dominated public forum and left many treasuries vulnerable to inconsequence and guile. Will crisis and joblessness spark good sense?

You see, it’s not theory. It’s not ssssyyysstem versus ssssyysssttemm.

Everything changed in the 1980s, however, with the advent of Reagan, Thatcher and Chicago School economists who preached the alignment of management with shareholders in the name of “efficiency”.

In effect, “efficiency” came to mean short-term earnings to the detriment of long-term organisation-building; what was touted as “wealth creation” was actually “wealth capture”, from suppliers, clients and employees as well as competitors, on the grandest scale since the robber barons.

I found this at CoolBuzz who wisely warns, “Don’t try this at home!”

Remember. There’s profit in the line item.

Alice Waters wrote these words in 2006 for The Nation:

It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825 when he wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that “the destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.” If you think this aphorism exaggerates the importance of food, consider that today almost 4 billion people worldwide depend on the agricultural sector for their livelihood.

Food is destiny, all right; every decision we make about food has personal and global repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that the food we eat could actually be making us sick, but we still haven’t acknowledged the full consequences–environmental, political, cultural, social and ethical–of our national diet.

These consequences include soil depletion, water and air pollution, the loss of family farms and rural communities, and even global warming. (Inconveniently, Al Gore’s otherwise invaluable documentary An Inconvenient Truth has disappointingly little to say about how industrial food contributes to climate change.)

When we pledge our dietary allegiance to a fast-food nation, there are also grave consequences to the health of our civil society and our national character. When we eat fast-food meals alone in our cars, we swallow the values and assumptions of the corporations that manufacture them. According to these values, eating is no more important than fueling up, and should be done quickly and anonymously. Since food will always be cheap, and resources abundant, it’s OK to waste. Feedlot beef, french fries and Coke are actually good for you. It doesn’t matter where food comes from, or how fresh it is, because standardized consistency is more important than diversified quality. Finally, hard work–work that requires concentration, application and honesty, such as cooking for your family–is seen as drudgery, of no commercial value and to be avoided at all costs. There are more important things to do.

It’s no wonder our national attention span is so short: We get hammered with the message that everything in our lives should be fast, cheap and easy–especially food.

So conditioned are we to believe that food should be almost free that even the rich, who pay a tinier fraction of their incomes for food than has ever been paid before in human history, grumble at the price of an organic peach–a peach grown for flavor and picked, perfectly ripe, by a local farmer who is taking care of the land and paying his workers a fair wage! And yet, as the writer and farmer David Mas Masumoto recently pointed out, pound for pound, peaches that good still cost less than Twinkies.

We can ‘bailout’ food and farming too.

There is a story Chief Smallboy on the Coal Spur told me about men and women. I was 17 or 18 and traveled every day after school, weekends, summer an’ winter, along the roads out of town; anything to get OUT of town. I met him in a bar with 3 tables and 6 chairs and 1 beer tap serving 300 people along a 100 mile road. That’s hard to imagine.

I sat down with my soft drink and asked him what is a native. He said a native is a man in a tent with a woman and his children and he kept them alive. I asked, “How?” He said, “By leaving.” “Wha’?”, I scorned.

He said when it’s cold and the pemmican is used and the fire is weak, a woman cries and children cry. When a man can’t listen to tears, he leaves. He opens the tent and walks. He will find something.

He walks and walks in snow. He has nowhere to go. He cries too. He cries loud and he cries quiet. He is alone in the snow. Where is something he can find?

The days are not days and nights, he said, because there is nothing but snow and walking and walking. Where is something he can find to bring? He doesn’t know.

How can he know? He is only a man in the snow. He walks and walks and cries and cries, “Why am I here in the snow? What can I bring?”

He remembers the warm fire and the moving shadows and the woman and the smiles of the children and he asks, “What can I bring? Where is something I can bring from this snow?” And he walks and he cries.

He walks. He cries loud. He cries quiet. He is moaning and confused and there is snow. Nothing to bring. There is only snow, white cold snow. There is only weeping for his woman, for his children. It is so many steps.

And Chief Smallboy said, “The buffalo are tired of this crying. It is a good winter. The sky is still and the wind is low and the man screams and screams. Can you hear it? Day and day and day, listen to this screaming man. The sky is moaning and tears are falling and this is a silly man again, that silly man crying again.”

The buffalo speak to themselves, “What can we do with this sad thing?”

The man walks and walks in sadness and tears in the snow to find a gift to bring. He cries that there is no gift. The man is alone. The trail is cold and white. And where is something the man can find? He walks alone in the snow.

The buffalo see this. Day after day. They hear the moaning and the crying. They see he is hungry and he has nothing and he is alone and the sky is cold and he wants to bring food to his family. It is so sad for the herd. They can think of nothing but this crying. It is day and day and night and night, the horrible moans of this man in the snow.

A buffalo stops and says to his herd, “It is a good time now. I can see the man. I can give what he wants.” The buffalo says to the herd, “I can stop this horrible sadness. Oh why does this man cry so much? Does he not see the sky?”

The beast stops. He waits and he listens. He knows the man is coming. He sees the man is close and he knows the man will find him soon. He walks across the path. He gives himself to the man. The sky is quiet again.

The walking is over now. The man can go to his woman. He says, “Ahh now, there it is. Here. I found it. Here. This is your meat. I am the man.”

The joy is here. Warm. Singing. The fire. The shadows are dancing.

Chief Smallboy said these are the true things he can remember. He said, “Now you know about the man and the woman and the children. And the buffalo and the sky. That is all.”

Imagine for example how the bastards who ran Bear Stearns or Lehman Bros into the ground would have reacted to a newspaper report that suggested their business was built on fantasy and sand.

But one rule of the new ecology is that there is wonderful expertise out there on the Net, and there might be ways of harnessing all that collective knowledge — rather as Linux harnessed the distributed skills of great programmers across the world to build a ferociously complex operating system….

Steve Talbott at NetFuture:

It’s one thing to work toward a worthwhile goal, pursuing it in an economically disciplined and profitable fashion. It’s quite another thing to make profit your primary goal and the measure of everything else.

Society’s welfare hangs upon the difference.

The difference, moreover, is immediately recognizable in all concrete human contexts where people are actually paying attention to each other.

It’s the difference between serving each other’s needs as effectively as possible, and using each other.

…
To succeed in this would be to obliterate ourselves.

Nick Herbert has developed a test.

If someone could learn how to knock over pennies with their mind and it had something to do with quantum mechanics, this calculation would serve to quantify the “miraculousness” of such an feat.

Re-juggling power and wealth:

Let’s take two wealthy capitalists. One has $10 million in tax-free municipal bonds which earn about $500,000 (5%) in low-risk, no-tax returns. The second one has $10 million sunk into a small business with a payroll of 25 employees and a brick-and-mortar office-warehouse. This “small business” generates millions in payroll and thus in payroll taxes, pays huge property taxes and sales taxes, and also generates tens of thousands of dollars in local government “junk fees” (business licenses, parking permits, fire inspection fees, etc. etc.)

The municipal bond investor is unaffected by the recession/depression until such time as one of the local governments which issued the bonds he owns goes bankrupt. He pays virtually no business or capital-related taxes.

Now let’s consider a third capitalist who has $10 million in boutique hedge funds. Accounting legerdemain enables this capitalist to report much of his hedge-fund generated income as long-term capital gains, thus limiting his Federal taxes to 15%. He pays no business-related or payroll taxes, and doesn’t even pay any FICA (Social Security) taxes on his income.

Many will note that the buyer of municipal bonds is providing capital which is spent repairing roads and schools, etc. and thus this money is productively invested. Others will claim the hedge funds might have provided capital to far-flung firms and thus “greased the wheels” of some distant productive enterprise.

Nice, but which capitalist is actually supporting his community with jobs and taxes?

Our Government has truly failed.

Bush’s extraordinary rendition is extraordinary perdition.

The NYTimes has published the 6 year ordeal of one of Bush’s detainees. It makes me ill to read it.

Revenge, not justice. Foolishness and error.

Roger Ebert in Chicago’s Sun Times:

“If you are a member of the U.S. Congress, you should not give a damn if you are a Democrat or a Republican. You should discard ideology and partisanship. You should be searching only for what works, or gives promise of working. You should be listening to the best counsel of the wisest people you can find. This is no time for playing to the crowd. That is all over with. This is the hour to seek what might lead us back from the brink.”

[tip j-walk]

Getting in touch with our food is often A DILEMMA

I could not kill a chicken
With feathers, blood and stuff,
‘Cause I would just remember,
Those balls of yellow fluff.

I could not kill a rabbit,
I know they are a pest,
We had a white one and a grey one.
I loved the grey one best.

I simply could not kill a pig
And listen to it wail,
It used to be so soft and pink
With tiny curly tail.

I’d never ever kill a sheep;
I once knew one called Jock;
He was so small and sickly,
He never joined the flock.

Well, I could never kill a calf,
Those eyes and velvet nose.
It surely takes a monster
To murder one of those.

Don’t think it’s right to kill a deer.
So beautiful and strong.
They should be left to run the hills
And glens where they belong.

But now I’ve got a problem,
I don’t know what to do.
I love my steak and onions
And crave a good lamb stew.

Roast chicken is delicious
Roast pork is my desire.
So there is nothing for it
But to shut my eyes and FIRE!!!!!!

In the early 80s I visited a dozen venture and investor offices to seek development assistance for fluorescent antibodies, the building of a nano-scale library of detectors that would form the basis of an important new industrial and medical sector. I’m noticing progress in the field.

Slowly we are creating sensors and more slowly we are connecting them together. In all likelihood, machine networks will exceed human to human voice and data in the near future and become the dominant source of revenue for communications firms.

A microscopic biological sensor that can detect Salmonella bacteria
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2008/081215.htm

traditional microbiological techniques – such as ISO method 6579 – for detecting foodborne pathogens take up to five days to obtain a positive result, including pre-enrichment, selective enrichment and confirmation of colonies, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Another downside of culture methods is that they show poor sensitivity when there is only a low level of contamination in the samples. A number of investigators have used the fluorescent-antibody (FA) technique for Salmonella detection. Although FA procedures offer considerable time savings, a large number of the pathogen needs to be present in samples in order to observe detectable fluorescent signals. This usually meant that enrichment culture techniques were required prior to immunofluorescence microscopy. Consequently, the FA procedure for Salmonella detection has not been in routine use.
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=4963.php

Psychologist Carol Dweck found that praising a child’s effort on a task (“you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (“you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

V.S. Ramachandran

I have known many an eminent theoretical physicist who prays to a personal God; an old guy watching him from somewhere up there in the sky. I might mention that I have long known that prayer was a placebo; but upon learning recently of a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo, I immediately started praying. There are two Ramachandrans—one an arch skeptic and the other a devout believer. Fortunately I enjoy this ambiguous state of mind, unlike Darwin who was tormented by it. It is not unlike my enjoyment of an Escher engraving.

Because it’s “practically everywhere”, will subliminal advertising become as potent as thinking?

A recently published thesis underscores the need for firm rules and oversight.

Marketing statements influence us subliminally more than was ever assumed.

Even when you are not aware of being exposed to advertising material, it can still affect your actions.

As we work toward various charter to manage content, I’ve asked people to think about the domain of their brain, to establish information sovereignty, a natural extension of the rights of property, in order to restrain and manage the pillage of thought.