Author: Brian

Until we have somethin’ to trade, here’s how America’s economy works these days:

It is a slow day in the East Texas town of Madisonville.

It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich tourist from the East is driving through town. He enters the only hotel in the sleepy town and lays a hundred dollar bill on the desk stating he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks up the stairs, the hotel proprietor takes the hundred dollar bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to pay his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer then takes the $100 and heads off to pay his debt to the supplier of feed and fuel.

The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute who has also been facing hard times and has lately had to offer her “services” on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel and pays off her debt with the $100 to the hotel proprietor paying for the rooms that she had rented when she brought clients to that establishment.

The hotel proprietor then lays the $100 bill back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler from the East walks back down the stairs after inspecting the rooms. He picks up the $100 bill and states that the rooms are not satisfactory. Pockets the money and walks out the door and leaves town.

No one earned anything.

However the whole town is now out of debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

link to comments

Why organized thievery in this nation?

Eli Lilly studies show Zyprexa didn’t alleviate dementia symptoms in older patients, but markets the drug to those very people.

Bloomberg finds internal company documents.

Headline:

China loses low-cost manufacturing crown to India, Mexico

Story:

China has lost its position as the world’s lowest-cost components manufacturer to India and Mexico.

Surprise:

China’s total manufacturing costs are now only six percent below American factories.

It’s important to note now,

because business lobbyists and conservatives generally have launched a campaign to tell us …China and other low-wage countries are going to eat our lunch unless we tighten our belts and accept less (except, of course, for rich businessmen, who must have more “incentives” to “keep jobs here.”)

It’s nonsense.

As serious as America’s problems are, they are far less severe than those anywhere else.

And we have more weapons with which to fight those problems than anyone else does.

When rich businessmen want to talk down America’s prospects the best “ooga booga booga” they have is China. China has all our debt. China has low wages. China has us by the balls.

Bullshit. We have China by the balls.

Really interesting, though, is the hole Gladwell punches through the hoary stereotype we sometimes hold about America – that it is a classless meritocracy.

“While it appears meritocratic, in large part it is not.”

Gladwell cites studies showing that Europeans in the lowest economic classes have a far greater chance of moving up in the world than Americans.

“Once you are rich in America you stay rich… but if you are at the bottom it just never happens, statistically, it never happens that people make it. And that’s very different from western European counties.”

…so much for the land-of-opportunity myth.

UK’s Telegraph:

Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw “ball of light” heading straight towards him from the sky.

A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.

The teenager survived the strike, the chances of which are just 1 in a million – but with a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand.

He said: “At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand.

“Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder.”

“The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards.

“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” he explained.

Provocatively, Peter Schwartz, a futurist planner who worked at Shell Oil in the 80s, said that peak oil is wrong, that “clean technology professionals shouldn’t believe what they hear about peak oil”.

zach wilson says, “This is such a stupid, intentional misrepresentation of the position of many advocates of the peak oil concept it is simply infuriating.

“Peak Oil has never been about supply, it has always been about flow rate.

“Peak oil is about whether or not we can maintain the current, expected level of oil production at current costs and if not, what the ramifications for that are.

“More expensive oil means that we’re spending more of our GDP on energy which means a lower quality of life across the board. Someone has to suffer, likely a lot of people have to make major sacrifices.

“At $125 a barrel, [we will be] spending 1/4 of our GDP on energy…. and as a result many dependent sectors of the economy will suffer – like food production and manufacturing.

Simon says,
“The more sophisticated Peak Oil arguments may be about flow rate, but the ones that permeate the popular media right now are all about the ‘end of oil’ which is of course sexier/scarier and make for better ratings.”

In case you didn’t sense futility in the Bush Administration, the mailing of tax rebate checks is shown to be utterly dumb.

Congressional Budget Office:

By itself simple observation of aggregate consumption over time may not detect the effect of rebates.

Yes, we cannot detect the effect. Call it $158 billion in chump change.

businessweek article

Game Theory has been nuthin’ but self-serving rather than true community and solid efforts?

A Bad Nine Years

RightWingNuts are seething over debt, but:

“The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office,” reported David Leonhardt in the New York Times yesterday.

“The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.”

Leonhardt lists four factors that account for the present deficit — a $2 trillion difference from the surplus Clinton bequeathed to Bush. 37% can be attributed to the business cycle and the resulting lost tax revenue from two recessions. 33% comes from legislation — like Medicare Part D — signed by Bush. 20% is accounted for by Bush spending that Obama continued — examples being two wars, the Wall Street Bailout, and a portion of Bush’s tax cuts.

“About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February.”

After 779 days continuously at sea, he writes in his blog post:

An Evolution of Sailing

From my humble, fragile, delicately balanced position at sea it appears to me that most of the world sees sailing as an exclusive activity for rich white men.

100 years ago as working sail died out and faded as a necessity of life we were left with the myth, history, poetry, song and legacy of Melville and Conrad. Wealthy men began racing and kept sailing from fading from the modern world.

Since then sailing has evolved along with man’s scientific knowledge. As man strives to sail faster and faster, boats have become sleeker and more built for speed, and the songs and figureheads have been left behind. In the 21st century it seems the common sailor has been left out entirely as corporations have taken over boatcrafting to market racing. We have forgotten that nature and the spirit never hurry.

The Tao and other ancient wisdom says, “Racing maddens the mind”. Racing hurries over the face of the sea driven by more and more money. After a lifetime of meeting sailors, I have come to realize that for many, it is the only way they think they can get out on the water. Then those that do manage to go on their own are so influenced that they think they have to go fast.

My reaction to this is to act out the ancient fables like Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare”. The things that I discover match the metaphors of sailing myth, song, poetry and our soul’s longing for distance.

If sailor’s goals were to search for our hearts highest longings and sailors made an effort to share this, then sailing could be perceived as a beneficial activity for the betterment of humankind.

This Chi process of living in reverence to tradition and spirit, once reincorporated into sailing will make sailing and those doing it evolve. More inspired people will feel joy, then let their spirits free to voyage on any waters and space to eternity: This is a course I propose we set in our sailing and life endeavors.

we humans are wonderful and weird simultaneously, wot?

provocative article discussing baseline things

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Leadership is about creating change.

While many like to see themselves as leaders, mostly they are engaging in three different pursuits that we commonly confuse with leadership:

* rulership
* stewardship
* lemmingship

Rulership is about protecting and preserving one’s position of power and privilege ….

Stewardship is the responsible and intelligent management of established institutions….

Lemmingship occurs when heads of organizations repeat the same practices and strategies…

If the past few months have felt like America’s institutions and maybe society itself are falling completely apart, it could be because that’s exactly what’s happening.

U.S. society may collapse:

Tainter, who heads the department of environment and society at Utah State University, told the newspaper that the current course of the economy and what some believe is a desperate effort to shore up the complex and almost inscrutable financial sector of the economy are manifestations of at least a partial collapse that invariably follows a society’s boom.

“Possibilities range from little effect to a mild recession to a major depression to a collapse.”

“It’s time for a second American revolution in the spirit of perestroika,” writes Mikhail Gorbachev, of all things, in the Sydney Morning Herald June 10, 2009.

Years ago, as the Cold War was coming to an end, I said to my fellow leaders around the globe: the world is on the cusp of great events, and in the face of new challenges all of us will have to change, you as well as we.

Do Republicans even know what Socialism is?

Palin: We are the only state with a negative tax rate where we don’t have any income, sales or property tax statewide, and yes we have a share of our oil resource revenue that goes back to the people that own the resources. Imagine that.

Hannity: And it went up higher since you’ve been the governor and you negotiated with the oil companies. That all went up so people get a bigger check.

Palin: There was a corrupt tax system up there and we had a couple of lawmakers end up in jail because of the tax system that was adopted so we cleaned it up and said we wanted a fair and equitable share of the resources that we own, and the people will share in those resource revenues that are derived.

politicalirony.com says, “If this isn’t socialism (or at least redistribution of wealth beyond Obama’s wildest dreams) then I don’t know what is.”

Can’t wind for losin’

Yes, people put money in their mattress:

“It was all my money in the world,” she said.

JERUSALEM – An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress she said had almost $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites on Wednesday.

The woman told The Associated Press that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present on Monday – and threw out the old one.

The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress. “I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened,” said the Tel Aviv woman…

New Scientist:
Do you think you’re smarter than most? Chances are, your children will feel the same way about themselves.

A new study of thousands of twins suggests that intellectual confidence is genetically inherited, and independent from actual intelligence.

mature and interesting scholarship, and not a common view

I’ve always promoted life-cycle analysis. We need to know the total picture before we commit to heavy infrastructure. The Bush corn fuel boondoggle points out that we don’t think ahead.

A new study compares the “full life-cycle” emissions generated by 11 different modes of transportation in the US.

Unlike previous studies on transport emissions, this one looks beyond what is emitted by different types of car, train, bus or plane while their engines are running and includes emissions from building and maintaining the vehicles and their infrastructure, as well as generating the fuel to run them. (source: newscientist.com)

“Although mass transit is often touted as more energy efficient than cars, this is not always the case.”

Crisscrossing the US with a rail network, however, creates a different problem. More than half of the life-cycle emissions from rail come not from the engines’ exhausts, but infrastructure development, such as station building and track laying, and providing power to stations, lit parking lots and escalators.

Yuick!

Jellyfish numbers are increasing.

These are Nomura, the biggest jellyfish in the world, which can weigh 200 kilograms, 440 pounds, as big as a sumo wrestler, and 2 metres in diameter

Jellyfish are kept in check by fish, which eat small jellyfish and compete for jellyfish food. Jellyfish feed on fish eggs and larvae, further impacting on fish numbers.

To add insult to injury, nitrogen and phosphorous in run-off cause red phytoplankton blooms, which create low-oxygen dead zones where jellyfish survive, but fish can’t. “You can think of them like a protected area for jellyfish.”

Pondering infinity, hell, merely the earthy blip we live on, love is a wonderful thing.

This link points to a wonderfully funny but sad rendition of the History of Everything.

And here’s a link to a wonderful and sober rendition of the Great Tree of Life.

68% of task-force members for upcoming DSM-V psychiatric diagnosis manual report taking money from drug companies, reports USA Today.

found at MindHacks

Trying to be an unbiased reporter or neutral analyst on a heavily biased television program is incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. Either you end up fighting the host’s premises and rephrasing loaded questions, or you are tacitly accepting the way the host defines a situation, making yourself an accomplice to a political mugging.

Stuart Rothenberg:

For those of us who enjoy following politics and are interested in the news, there are fewer and fewer options on television. The Sunday shows and PBS programming – “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” for example – remain, and there are a handful of others worth watching elsewhere (e.g., “Morning Joe” on MSNBC is fun, informative and thoughtful, and CNN and C-SPAN have their moments). But too often, caricature and vitriol have replaced reporting and analysis.

The networks continue to present national news programs each night, but politics can’t compete with “American Idol” or “CSI,” so cable stations have filled the vacuum with endless hours of what cable executives seem to think constitutes “news” and “politics.”

America’s cable “news” networks have concluded – on the basis of considerable research and evidence, I’m sure – that most viewers don’t want straight news and analysis as much as they want to hear what they already think or to watch predictable partisan attacks.

The three big cable “news” networks don’t exist to provide a public service, after all. They have corporate officers and stockholders to answer to, which means they need more and more eyeballs to generate more advertising dollars.

Their answer: talk radio on TV.

Arrogant and blind, Bush, Cheney, and their crew…!

In its first report to Congress, the Wartime Contracting Commission presents a bleak assessment of how tens of billions of dollars have been spent since 2001.

The 111-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, documents poor management, weak oversight, and a failure to learn from past mistakes as recurring themes in wartime contracting.

This is disgusting.