deriving worth

“Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living.

On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest …

It is this underlying confusion between wealth and debt which has made such a tragedy of the scientific era.”

Nobel prize winner in 1926, Frederick Soddy at Wikipedia:

A farmer who raises pigs faces biophysical limits on how many pigs he can take to market. But if that pig farmer took on debt – a promise to repay at a future date – he would in effect be issuing a claim or lien on his future production of pigs. If he borrowed the equivalent value of 100 pigs, he could represent the loan on his balance sheet as ‘-100 pigs’

While debt as the farmer’s accounting entry is negative, negative pigs do not really exist. If the farmer should suffer a series of lean years and be unable to pay the interest, he might soon owe more pigs than could be raised on his farm. After a year, with interest looming, he’d show “-110 pigs”; in 5 years, “-161”; in 40 (assuming a patient bank), “-4526.”

When the bank finally came to call on the pig farmer to collect repayment of its loan, it could well find that most of the virtual wealth that had grown so appealingly on its books had to be written off as a loss.

fried brain staccato

Although studies are scarce:

A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking…you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things. What you are actually doing…is oscillating between the two.

one in nine on food stamps

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

The Rich Have Stolen the Economy

The political system is unresponsive to the American people. It is monopolized by a few powerful interest groups that control campaign contributions. Interest groups have exercised their power to monopolize the economy for the benefit of themselves, the American people be damned.

to accommodate parasites

At NakedCapitalism’s thread on greed, Haigh says:

Blaming a financial crisis on greed is like blaming gravity for a plane crash. To prevent plane crashes engineers do not work on repealing gravity. Likewise, to minimize financial crackups market systems must strive through trial and error to build a better air-frame. Government systems, central banks and their ecosystems, including purchased politicians, have proven themselves unfit for the task.

LeeAnne says:

yes, societies need a legal process to restrain predatory behavior that’s flexible enough to shift as the vultures do their inevitable best to work around those limitations.

Such a system requires loyal career government professionals for bureaucracies that can grow in expertise and size with budgets commiserate with changes in technology, societal growth and innovation. The opposite has occurred.

The Bush administration greatly accelerated the destruction of key bureaucracies, replacing loyal career professionals with cronies loyal to Bush and undermining and underfunding as much of the regulatory apparatus and the people’s safety net as possible, not only during the administration but far beyond.

They are traitors.

enablers of exuberance

This paper explores certain legal acts and omissions that facilitated the over-leveraging and near collapse of the global financial system. These “Legal Enablers” fostered the boom that enriched a class of financial intermediaries who followed a storied tradition of gambling away “other people’s money.” These mechanisms also made the pain of the bust disproportionately felt by the middle class and poor while shielding the middlemen who created the problems. These Legal Enablers permitted the growth of a shadow banking system, without investment limits, transparency or government oversight.

In the shadows grew a variety of highly leveraged private investment pools, undercapitalized conduits of securitized loans and speculation in complex credit derivatives. The rationale for allowing this unregulated, parallel system was that it helped to create innovation and provide liquidity. The conventional wisdom was that any risks associated with a hands-off approach could be managed by the “invisible hand” of the market. In other words, instead of public police, it relied upon private gatekeepers. A legal framework including legislation, rules and court decisions supported this system. This legal structure depended upon corporate managers, counterparties, “sophisticated investors” and the market generally to prevent irrational conduct.

The hands-off approach was premised upon a series of beliefs or expectations. The first was that corporate managers would not sacrifice long-term shareholder value for short-term gains. The second was that trading counterparties would monitor each other closely and discourage excessive risk. The third was that “sophisticated investors” had the ability to select and monitor “private” unregulated investment options and that such decisions affected the direct owners, not underlying investors and market integrity. And, the catch-all fourth belief was that even if there were blips and bubbles, the market would quickly “heal itself” before causing any major disruption or harm to society.

Only after the global financial crisis struck and the government committed nearly $13 trillion and spent almost $4 trillion, to rescue the financial system and the economy, did many ministers of “private ordering” admit that these premises were faulty.

Jennifer Taub:

This paper contends that if we wish to restore investor confidence and sustain a stable financial system, we must stop enabling the excessive leverage and speculation that create cycles of irrational exuberance followed by financial panics.

Specifically, it recommends that we eliminate the loopholes that allow unregistered investment pools broad discretion to operate in the shadows, without transparency or supervision, to engage in self-dealing or related-party transactions, to inaccurately value and inadequately protect assets and to take on excessive leverage and illiquid portfolio holdings.

train crows to hunt for money

Train crows to hunt for coinsJosh Klein developed a machine that trains crows to trade coins for peanuts. Literally, for peanuts.

So you fill this thing with peanuts and set it out, say, in a public park, and the crows will scour the ground for loose change, carry it to the machine, and drop it in a slot in exchange for food.

The project, dubbed “CrowBox,” made a big splash when he unveiled it back in 2007.

Complete plans for the CrowBox freely available online so you can roll your own. Link to MakeZine.

encouraging view of tomorrow

The report, “Energy Self-Reliant States: Second and Expanded Edition” describes how 31 states have the capacity to independently meet their states’ electricity demands by using wholly renewable energy sources already at their disposal.

Several states, the report notes, could use their renewable energy resources to produce electricity that meets over ten times their statewide demands.

An additional ten states could generate enough electricity to meet well over half of their annual demands—again, solely from renewable sources.

The report’s analysis and projections only incorporates renewable energy resources that are currently commercially deployable. Link to WorldChanging.

let them all go bust

On America’s news and networks:

I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.

I couldn’t tell immediately, but one of my friends remarked in 2000 that the reporting was increasingly reminiscent of what she had grown up with in communist Poland.

Back to the main theme: the media dares not say anything too negative about financial services firms or their government operatives lest they lose access.

The private sector has learned the lesson of the Bush Administration, that the threat of freezing a reporter out is a powerful weapon.

we are so far inside our star

XXXXXXXXXXThere’s our sun.

No not there. Look to the white splash middle right. Our earth and all the planets are well hidden near the center of this bomb.

Our sun has neighbors too.

NASA sent IBEX.

More here.

shouldn’t say this

We have only a few years to see our dreams.

You can work along the west, the east, the south or north of Africa, but will you find success? First, its people shoot winners and we’re not done with that. Second, they kill losers and have always. Third, there’s no law other than prizes that soon lure murder. Fourth, you already know 1,2,3.

Deals yes, but primitive is seldom in the news. Then I think of Afghanistan and our boys given only weapons. I wonder if battle is done well or if argument is ever between the eyes.

water in the wind

The atmosphere is charged with moisture, a huge fresh water reserve; approximately 13,000 km3, 3200 cubic miles!

translated link

Eole, Aeolus, water from the windEole Water utilise simplement l’énergie du vent pour liquéfier cette vapeur d’eau. Aeolus Water simply uses wind energy to liquefy the water vapor.

L’humidité de l’air est aspirée puis condensée pour en extraire son eau. The humidity of the air is sucked then condensed to extract its water.

Un phénomène de pluie est ainsi créé à l’intérieur de l’éolienne. Rain is created inside the turbine.

fashionably nuke

The nuclear power industry is busily hunting capital and permits while coloring itself green. But nuke plants are costly, save 2 to 20 times less carbon per dollar, are 20 to 40 times less effective than investing in efficiency and renewable power.

Amory Lovins:

New nuclear power plants’ deepest flaw is their economics. They cost too much to build and incur too much financial risk. Nuclear expansion therefore can’t deliver on its claims.

full skinny on taxes

Taking into account federal income tax, payroll tax, state income tax, property tax, and various other local taxes, everyone pays between 27% and 32.2% in taxes.

No burden on the rich. The group that pays the largest percentage in taxes is the 90-95% percentile. The 400 highest income Americans paid an effective rate of 17.2%.

USA Total Taxes

nuttiness update

Lawyer Orly Taitz fined $20,000 for legal misconduct in her claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and so should be removed as president.

U.S. District Court Judge Clay D. Land wrote that one recent Taitz response to the court “is breathtaking in its arrogance and borders on delusional. She expresses no contrition or regret regarding her misconduct. To the contrary, she continues her baseless attacks on the Court….”

Her “misconduct was not an isolated event; it was part of a pattern that advanced frivolous arguments and disrespectful personal attacks on the parties and the Court.

“In all of counsel’s frivolous filings, she hurled personal insults at the parties and the Court. Rather than assert legitimate legal arguments, counsel chose to accuse the Court of treason and of being controlled by the ‘Obama machine.’ She had no facts to support her claims – but her diatribe would play well to her choir.”

religion in the brain

Religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact.

Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects—fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers—as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions.

For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of “true” vs judgments of “false”) was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts.

A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.

the extraction profession

Wall Street Pay ExtractionDo banks contribute to our society?

“Successful societies maximize the creative and minimize the distributive. Societies where everyone can only achieve gains at the expense of others are by definition impoverished.”

Are these people, as they like to say, the wealth creators?

“This completely misses the point….the question is, what has the process that generated this money contributed to the common weal?”

permanently unsafe

Metafilter digs in. A thread discussing boys and men harassing girls and women. What they’re put through is rude and horrible.

This understanding is new to me as a guy but I think I’m coming around. When my fiancee and I started dating she would tell me she couldn’t stay out after dark without someone else accompanying her for protection. I thought she was overreacting and needed to be more assertive, like me. It’s only 8:00pm! Ha Ha.

The more I learn about the dangers real women face in places that are comfortable to me, in daylight or in the middle of the night, the more I realize how wrong I’ve been.

boys not thinking

Bush and Cheney ignored the EPA proposal to declare greenhouse gases a danger. The report, known as an endangerment finding, was kept secret from the public — until now. The 2007 draft [pdf] just released by the EPA begins:

The Administrator proposes to find that the air pollution of elevated levels of greenhouse gas concentrations may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public welfare.

more at SolveClimate blog
story at LATimes

wet along the coast

Springer Spaniel Lucky Lord BarkeleyMy Mark Twain Rain Story:
While walking my good spaniel Lucky Lord Barkeley along our flooding street this afternoon, he was bitten on the nose by a crayfish!

True.

wrecked all he touched

Bruce Bartlett, the man who wrote many Reagan economic policies, says about George Bush:

During the George W. Bush years, however, I think Supply Side Economics became distorted into something that is, frankly, nuts–the ideas that there is no economic problem that cannot be cured with more and bigger tax cuts, that all tax cuts are equally beneficial, and that all tax cuts raise revenue.

These incorrect ideas led to the enactment of many tax cuts that had no meaningful effect on economic performance.

Many were just give-aways to favored Republican constituencies, little different, substantively, from government spending.

What, after all, is the difference between a direct spending program and a refundable tax credit? Nothing, really, except that Republicans oppose the first because it represents Big Government while they support the latter because it is a ‘tax cut’.

state welfare queens

These are the top ten states that get back more federal money than every dollar of federal taxes they pay in:

1. New Mexico, $2.03
2
. Mississippi, $2.02
3. Alaska, $1.84
4. Louisiana, $1.78
5. West Virginia, $1.76
6. North Dakota, $1.68
7. Alabama, $1.66
8. South Dakota, $1.53
9. Kentucky, $1.51
10. Virginia, $1.51.

These are all Republican states.

Have you ever bothered to look at the safety, security and economic stability of red states compared to blue states?

Well have you?

Republicans Should Sit Down and Shut Up!