big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
History’s most severe job losses under Republican domination and G. W. Bush.
George Washington’s weblog: People forget that the worst unemployment numbers during the Great Depression did not occur until years after the initial 1929 crash.
How Bad Will It Get, And What Can We Do?
Stanford’s Andrea Lunsford:
Technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”
From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.
I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that a huge debt-financed bubble was a bad, bad thing. I still think, as you might predict, that the nature of our particular financial system both made the bubble larger than it might otherwise have been, and made its collapse more spectacular than it had to be.
An important chart to remind us precisely about the whom and when of ‘huge debt’.
None of the networks, no government.
It’s the ACLU that’s funding these released [sic] files on torture.
I can’t explain how one man carries air and is paid for water. There is great random. We see one winner and don’t see a dozen. I can say that it takes tremendous will and effort. We ride the river or cross the current. There’s the lesson.
Dave Johnson:
So what can we do to change the system itself?
How do we restructure the model – the economic paradigm – in ways that let We, The People enjoy and share the benefits of our economy?
Aren’t We, The People supposed to be making the decisions here?
Getting a grip on this problem requires us to regain understanding of why we have corporations in the first place.
In other words, companies are allowed to push costs onto the rest of us, but are not asked to share the resulting profits with the rest of us.
We even let them treat us as ‘costs’ – a layoff pushes the worker onto the community while the company keeps the wages they were paid.
America became an economic powerhouse because we made things here. China is an economic powerhouse because they make things there.
I dunno. What say you?
Hutus and Tutsis had a shared language, religion, and culture and frequently intermarried.
But the colonizers didn’t have many troops, so they needed to divide the population in order to rule over it.
They appointed the Tutsis as their aristocratic class to manage the rest and concocted a racist myth to justify it.
Tyrants mighty in their own time. What a colossal wreck.
Not to worry, ladies and gentlemen, Socialites Without Borders are teaching Rwandans how to mingle and a fine organization they are. 😉
Felix Salmon wrote back awhile: “If profits and compensation in the financial sector go up and keep going up, that’s a priori evidence of inefficiency, not efficiency.
“Those higher profits mean that customers are paying more for their financial services over time, not less, which means that financial services are imposing a larger and larger tax on the economy.”
Pipes leak below. Pipes leak above.
Bush and Cheney do not seem to be able to sustain their cover:
The procedures of the CIA program are designed to be safe.
They are in full compliance with the nation’s laws and treaty obligations.
They’ve been carefully reviewed by the Department of Justice, and they are very carefully monitored.
The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law.
And the program has uncovered a wealth of information that has foiled attacks against the United States; information that has saved countless, innocent lives.”
Yet some of those “highly trained professionals” had little more than two weeks of training on the job.
At RawStory:
Since Monday, when the CIA released a significant part of those documents — a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture practices — there has been hardly a mention in the mainstream press about the fact that the report largely contradicted what the former vice president has been saying in public.
Torture saved no lives.
Does the total cost of our financial system exceed the total benefits?
Overmighty finance levies a tithe on growth, by Benjamin Friedman: …The crucial role of the financial system in a mostly free-enterprise economy is to allocate capital investment towards the most productive applications.
…it is important to ask what this once-admired mechanism costs to run.
If a new fertilizer offers … a higher crop yield but its price and the cost of transporting and spreading it exceeds what the additional produce will bring at market, it is a bad deal for the farmer. A financial system, which allocates scarce investment capital, is no different.
The discussion of the costs associated with our financial system has mostly focused on the paper value of its recent mistakes and what taxpayers have had to put up to supply first aid.
What has somehow escaped attention is the cost of running the system.
A fast reply in the comment thread, “I did not think it was possible for economists to ask the right questions.”
Snippets from Ted Kennedy, 1980:
I am asking you to renew our commitment to a fair and lasting prosperity that can put America back to work.
We have learned that it is important to take issues seriously, but never to take ourselves too seriously.
Our cause has been, since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the cause of the common man and the common woman.
The commitment I seek is not to outworn views but to old values that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures.
We must insist that our children and our grandchildren shall inherit a land which they can truly call America the beautiful.
Among you, my golden friends across this land, I have listened and learned.
Brian McDermott at FastCompany:
“What we are experiencing is a colossal failure of leadership in the business community.
“CEOs are greedy, shortsighted, unethical, arrogant, and lacking in vision and commitment.
“It’s truly pathetic.”
Don’t make yourself silly over a drip from a faucet.
U.S. cities lose 25 to 30 percent of the fresh water in their pipes. [link]
There are many barrels leaked before we use our average of a barrel per day.
Be wary of the drip from your pocket, because nobody has been maintaining America during our frenzy of wealth.
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry: [link]
Another slap on the hand. Corn is important and corn syrup has its place, but it seems we need to look carefully at our policies.
Paul Livingstone at R&D Magazine:
This summer marks the centenary of a demonstration by Fritz Haber which showed, for the first time in public, the exothermic equilibrium reaction that would break the strong triple bonds of nitrogen and pair it with hydrogen to create ammonia. When oxidized, ammonia can be used to make fertilizer, explosives, and other products.
It was the touchstone process, that, when industrialized with the help of methane by Carl Bosch, led to the Green Revolution. It was the beginning of a transformation of agriculture that today easily supports the lives of more than a third of the world’s population.
In fact, industrial nitrogen is the primary reason why some say the Earth can support up to 10 billion people. But even after decades of improvements in efficiency and chemical process, industrial nitrogen still has unsolved problems. Not least of which is the propensity for farmers to use too much.
Now we must contend with the consequence of poor nitrogen use.
- Farms in northern China use six times more nitrogen fertilizer per acre than farms in the midwestern U.S.
- Runoff ‘dead zones’ of algal blooms
- Nitrous oxide emissions, which are about 298 times more effective at trapping atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide
- Easy bombs.
“Our aim is to ensure Germany can continue to fight for as long as possible, in order to exhaust and ruin England and France,” Joseph Stalin ordered in 1939 because “under these circumstances, we, finding ourselves in a beneficial situation, can simply await our turn.”
“What we can do is maneuver around the two sides, push one of the sides to attack the other.”
George Bush and the preordained Obama bump in federal debt .
“It is becoming clear that the main ‘work’ of the future will be education. that people will not so much earn a living as learn a living.” – Marshall Mcluhan: The future of education
Only one crime was solved for each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year. [BBC]
John Stuart Mill cautioned: “Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works”.
John Maynard Keynes was aware of this: “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
When Ronald Reagan stepped in to save a big Chicago bank, his administration “made it clear that a permanent shift in policy had taken place, telling Congress that none of the nation’s top 11 banks would be allowed to fail.”
Some wingnut says we’re accustomed to torture and that’s a good thing:
Without getting into the substance of the controversy, I’m doubting that there will be a lot of popular outrage over any of the allegations of abuse.
Right or wrong, I think the average American assumes that some rough stuff goes on behind the scenes and that’s okay.
Hollywood tells us so…
I’ve long been fascinated with the disconnect between what pundits, politicians and various activist groups complain about and the status of interrogation techniques in the popular culture.
In countless films and TV shows the good guys — not the bad guys — do things to get important information that makes all of the harsh methods and allegedly criminal techniques in the IG report seem like an extra scoop of ice cream and a Swedish massage.
“We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” — Jimmy Carter 1979
Income distribution really starts to change after Ronald Reagan’s Free Market Trickle-Down propaganda. The policy crashes under George W. Bush, the first administration since 1933 President Herbert Hoover to flatten income gains of the typical family.
[more analysis at economicPopulist]
That’s a video frame of lightning flashing 50 miles above the top of a thunderstorm.
A giant jet about a hundred to a thousand times bigger than a typical lightning stroke.
The finding totally shocked the research team, since it’s the first clear proof that an electric charge can move directly from the troposphere into the ionosphere, two layers of Earth’s atmosphere.