One Stop Thought Shop

coming up next

2009-11-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

Consumer spending accounted for 70 percent of the U.S. economy before last year's economic meltdown, a level that Volcker said was sustained only by "the magic of financial engineering."

We cannot rebuild the economy to the tune of 70 percent consumption or housing booms. It will just break down again.

The alternatives to help bolster future economic growth include boosting exports, applying innovative technology to green issues and improving the nation's infrastructure.

for all dogs

2009-11-04T10:53:00.000-08:00

Socializing 101:

The best time to socialize your pup is between the ages of three and 14 weeks. At this time, their brain is very open to new experiences, and they're better able to learn appropriate responses to the world around them.

By exposing our dogs to different kinds of people, animals and environments, especially when they are young — from dog obedience school and vet visits to dinner parties and neighborhood walks — we can foster confidence and an easy-going manner. This goes a long way in helping them cope with new and potentially unsettling situations.

Best of all, socialization doesn't end when puppyhood does. No matter what age your pooch is when you adopt him, you can still help shape him into a more stable, happy and trustworthy companion.

there was lousy disclosure

2009-11-04T09:16:00.000-08:00

Charlie Gasparino's account of the financial crisis and its roots: "They were just so drunk on their own euphoria on making money.

"So I wanted to write a book that basically said Wall Street’s embrace of this business model, risk, got itself in the position it’s in now, and what the position was, in 2008, was a severely damaged securities industry, and foreign investors basically owning chunks of U.S. security firms, and the U.S. losing our global dominance. And that was the story, and I thought that was a good story.

"Listen, I've been an investigative reporter my whole life. Generally, when you have a story of magnitude, like a Watergate or something like this, you have someone on the inside that knows something is wrong, that there's something wrong with the balance sheet. What's interesting about everything that I've uncovered about this is that there was almost nobody on the inside that thought anything was wrong, that anybody was wrong...They all thought AAA was AAA and that's the scary part."

class war?

2009-11-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

Americans in the bottom 90% saw their average incomes increase a meager $47 a year between 1974 and 2007.

Yes, back then in 1974, we certainly did face injustice at every turn. But we were living, thanks to years of struggle—and success—by our activist forebears, in a society where politics actually revolved around confronting those injustices and making change that could really help average working people.

power trumping truth

2009-11-03T16:55:00.000-08:00

Why ignore evidence?

World Health Organisation study shows that severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

via Mind Hacks

the settlers

2009-11-03T16:49:00.000-08:00

Send no soldier to die for these folks:

"This land is Israel. We are in Israel. God gave this land to the Jews. The Torah tells us so. You want war? Declare war on God, not on us…"

harm and only harm

2009-11-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

ex² Governor Eliot Spitzer:

So the simple question remains: why aren’t we focusing on the problem that got us here in the first instance — the scope, range, and size of the mega-institutions whose risk taking has so far inflicted only enormous harm on our economy?

when this error began

2009-11-02T21:39:00.000-08:00

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.

mixmaster biorobots

2009-11-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

Argonne materials science:

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?

climate's food impact

2009-11-02T20:55:00.000-08:00

oops

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."

removes ethical considerations

2009-11-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

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.

cute corporate capitalist cultistry

2009-11-02T15:18:00.000-08:00

Mick Arran:

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.

it ain't all federal

2009-11-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

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."

brainy affluence

2009-11-02T10:27:00.000-08:00

Arnold Kling:

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

big and also dumb

2009-11-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

Cormick Grimshaw:

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.

sovereign control

2009-11-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

Dear GOP, I get it.

You don't like the government regulating business. But guess what? I don't like business regulating the government.

tummy blues

2009-11-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

BBC:

People with a diet high in processed food had a 58% higher risk of depression.

melanoma goes green

2009-10-31T22:33:00.000-07:00

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.

they come they took

2009-10-31T22:22:00.000-07:00

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.

we can do this

2009-10-31T20:47:00.001-07:00

You might say survival is a new thing. These are the first days to save us all.

ideounlogical

2009-10-31T19:13:00.000-07:00

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.

New York Magazine:

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.

respect up front

2009-10-31T18:26:00.000-07:00

other than gumming

2009-10-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

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

the showdown era

2009-10-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

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?

we sit among ruins

2009-10-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

Mikhail Gorbachev:

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.

snippet from Economist's View