Author: Brian

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game theory & nudge

Thaler puts transparency in government above all.

It is essential that people feel they are – and actually are – making a free choice.

But when Richard Thaler says the right outcomes are defined by the people being nudged, it does beg a question about how democracy works.

Do we know there is behavioral economics?

“Some people claim the techniques developed through BE are helping governments and big corporations manipulate us without our knowing.

“Should we be scared?”

We want to look at this 1968 documentary, yes it’s raw, about salesmen, well, let’s just say about bibles, before pots & pans, before encyclopedias and Fuller Brush, before real estate, pink Cadillacs and Tupperware, before gold parties, far before gold parties… [nudge]

How far is our democracy from missionaries and bible sales?

Doorways are forever inviting.

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why wreck a nation?

How Rich is Too Rich For Democracy?
by Thom Hartmann, 2005, CommonDreams.org

Let’s see now:

At what point does great wealth held in a few hands actually harm democracy, threatening to turn a democratic republic into an oligarchy?

It’s a debate we haven’t had freely and openly in this nation for nearly a century, and last week, by voting to end the Estate Tax, House Republicans tried to ensure that it wouldn’t be had again in this generation.

But it’s a debate that’s vital to the survival of democracy in America.

In a letter to Joseph Milligan on April 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson explicitly suggested that if individuals became so rich that their wealth could influence or challenge government, then their wealth should be decreased upon their death. He wrote, “If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree…”

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we crash and crash again

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing–and recovering–their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, “this time is different”–claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes–from medieval currency debasements to today’s subprime catastrophe.

comment snippets at Google Books:

This is the most important book that no one will ever read.

…financial markets are not self-regulating. Competition for profit leads lenders to take on dangerous and ultimately deadly levels of risk…

… the basics of economics don’t really change, no matter what fantasies people come to believe.

SO much of economics is pure theory with no attempt to verify…

*Very* data heavy, but they walk you through it pretty well.

Don’t we realize facts are sacred?

Where are facts about finance?

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institutionalized neurons

Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children.

He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

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so what winning?

nobody knows men
nobody knows women
we always touch strangers

brave

all of us weak
all of us tender
splendor to dedicate

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excuse me

You tell me where money goes.
This is 100 years of America’s budget.
This is what we buy.

our dollar goes

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caught empty

“They took the basic subprime losses and magnified them to a point at which no one — not banks, not investors, not entire governments — could bear the cost of the massacre that followed.”

Heidi Moore says,

“The problem is that even when only some of the people get fooled, all of us are paying all of the time.”

Banks should tell the truth.

To everyone.

“Wall Street is the factory for all the financial products in the United States, and you can’t allow a factory to put out some poisonous products and claim the rest are healthy.”

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calibrate your clock

hey:::   the oldest living things in the world   :::hey you

continuously living organisms 2000 years old and older

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governments do not rule the world

Goldman Sachs Rule The World Not Governments
Alessio Rastani, BBC, Sept 26 2011
…the Eurozone crash will wipe out the savings of millions.

 

 

 

When the rich steal from everyone,
it’s Free Markets;

When the rich steal from the rich for the poor,
it’s Noblesse Oblige;

When the middle steal from the middle,
it’s Good Business;

When the rich and the middle steal from the poor,
it’s Fiscal Responsibility;

When the poor steal from the rich and the middle,
it’s Criminal;

When the poor steal from the poor,
it’s Tough Luck.

  
Trader Rastani says “governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

…the big money doesn’t “buy this rescue plan.

“They know the market is toast. They know the stock market is finished.

“…it’s going to crash, and it’s going to fall pretty hard because markets are ruled right now by fear.”

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fooling ourselves

Bloom recalls one famous experiment with wine drinkers done by scientists at Stanford and Cal Tech …

“Half the people are told they’re drinking cheap plunk, the other half are told they’re drinking something out of $100-$150 bottle”, Bloom said.

“It tastes better to them if they THINK they’re drinking from an expensive bottle. And it turns out that if they think they’re drinking expensive wine, parts of the brain that are associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree.”

“So if I have people over for dinner, I should add a little ‘1’ in front of the price tag, and put it on the table?“, Spencer asked.

“That is the ultimate trick to making wine taste better”, Bloom said.

And it’s the sort of trick that works only on human beings!

Here’s another.

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cyber-spying

Let’s see if this is an organization you’d like to support.

GM’s OnStar now collects your GPS location information and speed “for any purpose, at any time”.

They also have apparently granted themselves the ability to sell this personal information, and other information to third parties, including law enforcement.

To add insult to a slap in the face, the company insists they will continue collecting and selling this personal information even after you cancel your service, unless you specifically shut down the data connection to the vehicle after canceling. This could mean that if you buy a used car with OnStar, or even a new one that already has been activated by the dealer, your location and other information may get tracked by OnStar without your knowledge, even if you’ve never done business with OnStar.

Let’s see if this is an organization you’d like to support.

All perfectly legal, of course.

And, let’s see if this is an organization you’d like to support.

The Digital Due Process group, a coalition of privacy organizations like the EFF and companies that are lobbying to reform surveillance laws in the US.

The group hopes to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which was enacted in 1986, long before the Internet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched Who Has Your Back calling on major Internet companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and about thirteen others to stand with their users when it comes to government demands for users’ data.

And while we’re at it, let’s see if we can keep our country.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause…”

Dave Winer says “I, as a mere user of Facebook, am seriously scared of them.”

Cory Doctorow: “Tech Companies Exploit the Way We Undervalue Privacy.”

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satellite farming

“A device with eyes and ears of its own, with a sense of place, and motion, and proximity, with memory of what it’s seen and where it’s been.” — Tim O’Reilly.

John Deere engineers are convinced the day of the driverless tractor will come for jobs such as orchard spraying and tillage.

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campaigns use myth

Well?

Despite a widespread belief that contracting out services to the private sector saves the federal government money, a new study suggests just the opposite — that the government actually pays more when it farms out work.

The study found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services.

On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers.

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let’s get a grip

Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends on the beliefs we hold at any given time.

Michael Shermer at Scientific American:

  1. We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, emotional and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at large.
  2. After forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments and rational explanations.
  3. Beliefs come first; explanations for beliefs follow.

According to Shermer, we reinforce bias.

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we do dispute

John Steinbeck said this:

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

But did John Steinbeck say this?

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.


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the destruction candidates

Elizabeth Drew: What Were They Thinking?

The antitax dogma of the Republican Party is strongly rooted in mythology.

The theory that tax cuts create jobs has been discredited by the results of George Bush’s tax policies.

The Republicans cling to the myth that “small business” owners are the “job creators,” and so they oppose proposals to eliminate the Bush rate cuts for even those earning over $250,000. But relatively few small business owners earn $250,000—in fact, fewer than 3 percent of the 20 million people who file business income on their personal tax forms (the 1040s) earn that much.

Finally, the antitax position of many conservatives would seem to be illogical, since they also hate deficits: but their real aim is to reduce or eliminate federal programs.

They call efforts to redistribute wealth “socialism,” but have no problem redistributing from the poor and middle class to the wealthy through taxes, as set forth in Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which the House approved on April 15. Under the Ryan plan, the taxes of the richest one percent of Americans would be cut in half, while taxes would be raised on most of the middle class. People earning over $1 million would be taxed at a lower effective rate than the middle class.

Consistent with the philosophy of Ryan’s idol Ayn Rand, this scheme would by 2050 eliminate virtually all federal programs other than defense and Social Security, much of which would be privatized, while his voucher program would replace Medicare.

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demote the farmer

grok this !

the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history.

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history.

In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.

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people thinking well

“Most people just dealt with dribble and the common, you know, celebrity-tabloid-type stuff that doesn’t really matter in the world.

Wozniak:

“So I was the designer, who could kind of design anything you could conceptualize and then Steve liked to always find ways to turn it into a business.

“And he talked about the importance of having companies to make products, and that there were very few people who drove the world—and he wanted to be one of those people that was driving the world, and not just one of the millions and millions of people who kinda don’t matter.

Also Wozniak:

“I think I’d try to be more open to things like letting you have your iTunes library and easily share it with other music programs..that’s the monopoly approach. And you know, I just don’t like it.

“Some countries have this view that this new digital age world and internet should come to every citizen, but we’ll never have that in the United States. We’re just too far from it. I don’t ever expect it.”

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social tensions

Superb & challenging summary of jobs ahead:

Mr Obama can reasonably point out that he was elected in the wake of a financial meltdown that had threatened to bring about another Great Depression, with an unemployment rate that would make the current one look like a lucky escape.

The co-ordinated global stimulus by members of the G20 in 2009, though far from perfect, helped save the world from something much worse—though that probably provides little comfort to the 205m people round the globe who are now unemployed. Nor is there much scope for further stimulus.

But today’s jobs pain is about more than the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Globalization and technological innovation are bringing about long-term changes in the world economy that are altering the structure of the labour market. As a result, unemployment is likely to remain high in the rich economies even as it falls in the poorer ones.

global jobs