big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
We were quite well paying down the debt of war.
And came supply side and trickle down and tax breaks and unfettered free markets and moralists and their corruption….
We now will pay down a thirty year debt of fools, stop smog and poison, repair food and water, educate our families and keep our fair America.
Many hands — or many flagella — make light work. In studies of the motion of tiny swimming bacteria, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory found that the microscopic organisms can stir fluids remarkably quickly and effectively. As a result, the bacterial flagella could act like tiny motors to mix liquids.
Wee tiny Martha Stewarts?
average crop yields are predicted to decrease by 30–46% before the end of the century under the slowest warming scenario and decrease by 63–82% under the most rapid warming scenario
David Battisti, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, “For every one degree Celsius increase in global temperature, there’s a 10 percent decrease in crop yield.”
George Soros has this to say about the role of markets:
But markets are suitable only for individual choices, not for social decisions.
They allow individual participants to engage in free exchange; but they are not designed to exercise social choices such as deciding the rules that should govern society, including how the market mechanism should function. That is the purview of politics.
Extending the idea of a free-standing market, self-governing and self-correcting, to the political sphere is highly deceptive because it removes ethical considerations from politics which cannot properly function without them.
It’s just so adorable the way capitalists and their lackeys manage to think of themselves as brave, risk-taking pioneers, standing alone against the barbarian hordes in the awesomely dangerous jungles of corporate throat-cutting and skinning-alive Big Business behavior when what they really spend their time doing is cutting risk to the minimum and shoving the expense of whatever’s left onto someone else.
That’s neither capitalist nor socialist. That’s extraction.
In New York City, average full-time compensation rose from $65,401 in 2000 to $106,743 – a 63% increase.
EconomicPopulist writes,
“The condition of state and local budgets are in their worst shape since the Great Depression, and if the economy doesn’t turn around quicker than the mainstream believes, we are going to see defaults that will shake the economy to its foundation.
“Only four months into the 2010 fiscal year, 26 states already have deficit problems totaling $16 Billion. This is after the states had to close $178 Billion of budget gaps this past summer. Only 22 states had budgets deficits of less than 20% of their total budgets. At least 9 states are projected deficits for 2011 of at least 20%, and those are often optimistic projections.
“All the easy cuts have been made. Any new cuts will mean sawing into bone.”
I think that perhaps the most important trend of the past thirty years is the increased importance of cognitive skills relative to physical labor. Obviously, this has been going on for more than just the past thirty years, but during the past thirty years we saw an acceleration. This has had a number of consequences:
1. It changed the role of women. Their comparative advantage went from housework to market work.
2. This in turn, as Wolfers and Stevenson have pointed out, changed the nature of marriage. Men and women look for complementarity in consumption rather than in production.
3. This in turn leads to more assortive mating, with achievement-oriented men looking for interesting mates rather than for good maids.
4. This in turn leads to greater inequality across households. It also fosters greater inequality among children. The children of two affluent parents are likely to have much better genetic and environmental endowments than the children of two (likely unmarried) low-income parents.
5. Inequality is exacerbated by globalization and technological change. If your comparative advantage is basic physical labor, you have to compete with machines as well is with workers from the Third World.
The net result is an economy that has improved considerably for people with high cognitive skills, but which has improved only somewhat for people with relatively low cognitive skills.
via growthology
We’ve made the point in this blog before that you need a license to drive a car in the United States, but you don’t need a license to be the CEO of a financial institution that can draw on the full faith and credit of the United States when the CEO makes a mistake. We need to replace “too big to fail” with “too smart to fail.”
We need CEOs who meet a higher standard that Dick Fuld, Angelo Mozilo, Charles Prince, and Stanley O’Neal. And that responsibility rests with the shareholders and the Board of Directors. They need to take that responsibility to avoid a repeat of the last two years.
You don’t like the government regulating business. But guess what? I don’t like business regulating the government.
BBC:
People with a diet high in processed food had a 58% higher risk of depression.
Health Ministry officials in Israel warn the public that compact fluorescent bulbs may cause skin cancer.
Not only wee bits of untended mercury, but these UV rays are similar to that of the sun.
Stay forever at least a yard away.
I wonder who thieves are, we should all know, but wonder less about where thieves go:
Bruce Wasserstein, the head of the Lazard investment bank and the father of ‘mergers and acquisitions’ died on Wednesday after a career that put him at the center of global dealmaking from the go-go days of the 1980s through the current three decades of banking.
I keep tellin’ ya, ladies and gents, we know nothing about the rich. How is that?
Blind as we are, we have an important task to know who rules.
You might say survival is a new thing. These are the first days to save us all.
Arrogance so common, well, so Sarah, so Bernie Madoff, er, so easily Republican.
Among a long line of successful psychotics, she built a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.
Her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces. “I am” and “I want” are an inadequate substitute for Ayn Rand’s years in Russia. This is the comedy, the tragedy, and the power of Rand.
After reading the details of Rand’s early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at all—it looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood.
Repeat:
She built a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.
So damn familiar and utterly tiring, she was proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash.
bumped into a snippet:
We will need to think out-of-the-box to come up with smart solutions. We need to build an innovation ecosystem. We need solutions that are scalable rapidly. We need to lead the world in key areas. We will have failures, but the impact of success will far outweigh the downside. We not only need more entrepreneurs, we need them to come up with big vision. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to run the risk of failure; to change the game dramatically. We need entrepreneurs who are not satisfied with building a small, profitable company but are willing to build big.
to save us
an aficionado of business disruption:
After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent.
One of the most successful ways to do this is to change the rules of the game in such a way that the incumbent would need to abandon or destroy its core business in order to lay chase to your strategy.
words via a man on the desert, provocative words, the best these days, wot?
The real achievement we can celebrate is the fact that the 20th century marked the end of totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that were based on utopian beliefs.
Yet new ideologies are quickly replacing the old ones, both in the east and the west.
Many now forget that the fall of the Berlin wall was not the cause of global changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the east, and the Soviet Union in particular. After decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realization that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet perestroika, which was also available to the countries of eastern Europe.
But it was soon very clear that western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.
He says:
Alcohol is more harmful than many illegal drugs.
The man is then fired as UK’s chief drugs advisor.
Professor David Nutt — Estimating drug harms: a risky business?
“I think we have to accept young people like to experiment – with drugs and other potentially harmful activities – and what we should be doing in all of this is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives.
We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information.
“If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you’re probably wrong. They are often quite knowledgeable about drugs and the internet has made access to information extremely simple. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information.
“A fully scientifically-based Misuse of Drugs Act where drug classification accurately reflects harms would be a powerful educational tool. Using the Act in a political way to give messages other than those relating to relative harms undermines the Act and does great damage to the educational message.”
We are dealing with huge challenges using irrational policies.
a world waiting…
There are 480 million newspapers printed daily; 800 million automobiles registered on the planet; 1.1 billion personal computers including all desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks; 1.2 billion fixed landine phones; 1.4 billion internet users; 1.5 billion TV sets; 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions; 1.7 billion unique holders of a credit card; and 2.1 billion unique holders of a banking account.
The Next Four Billion by Tomi Ahonen.
strikes me as numbers to work with…
As well as Yellowstone’s continental dome, nor’westers are sitting on a pretty big pot:
As Wall Street took our economy, it takes our thinking too.
In the U.S. and the U.K., the public sector is not nearly as indebted.
We have for centuries strived to live up to our founding ideal, of a nation where all are free and equal and able to pursue their own version of happiness. Through conflict and tumult, through the morass of hatred and prejudice, through periods of division and discord we have endured and grown stronger and fairer and freer. And at every turn, we’ve made progress not only by changing laws but by changing hearts, by our willingness to walk in another’s shoes, by our capacity to love and accept even in the face of rage and bigotry.
The universe was roughly 5 percent of its present age.
“Despite decades of complaints that the United States does not have enough scientists and engineers, the data show our high schools and colleges are providing an ample supply of graduates,” said the State University of New Jersey. “It is now up to science and technology firms to attract the best and the brightest graduates to come work for them.”
We are a great people. Of course we are capable. But thieves are too common and never more able.
