Interesting

Mugged by the Debt Moralizers

2010-11-12T08:06:00.000-08:00

Politics/USA/Economics: For the millionth time, a summary of concisely what is so wrong and stupid about the right-wing/Republican/Tea Party ideology that nevertheless has swept the recent elections.

Clearly, this is a challenging subject for good God- and Debt-fearing Americans to understand so I will try to put it in common sense, Joe-the-Plumber-style English.

Although the Republicans claim to be the one with 'common sense' and 'business sense' rather than these pie-in-the-sky hippie Communist Democrats, they are apparently unable to grasp the most basic fundamental business and economic principles.

Yes, what seems immediately obvious that you should do when you are in debt, cut spending, is not necessarily true in the real world of free market competition.

Households are not businesses, and countries are not households. Countries are a lot more like businesses than they are like households.

For an example, if you have a business that is suffering in the recession, you could slash spending, fire workers, cut hours, cut services etc. But all this may in fact cause your business to simply shrink and never come back, because simultaneously your better capitalized competitors are able to take some losses in an attempt to gain market share from you.

In fact, though it is obviously a risk, it may be most prudent to take a loan, yes modify your businesses priorities, and perhaps cut the profit margin, but aim to gain customers from the other businesses who are stupidly simply decreasing their standards of service in an attempt to survive.

To survive in the free-market, it is not enough to simply survive, you have to beat your competitors, at all times, in all seasons, or they will destroy you.

Similarly, the US cannot simply cut all spending and shrink the government to nothing as Republican Tea Corp would like.

To do so will cause us to fall behind further in the world to a point that we may not recover from, with stiff competition from China etc.

The Tea Party has a valid point that the US is too dependent on debt, yes, they do. However, they are many decades too late on this point.

In fact, it has been the Republicans, esp. Reagan and Bush II, who have created this mess, by allowing huge deficit growth in the good times, which was the right time, as every good and seasoned businessman knows, to save money and pay down debt.

As a Spanish proverb says, the "times of the skinny cows" (el dia de las vacas flacas) is always around the corner and THAT is when the real winners make their moves for long-term sustaining success, as Warren Buffett often tells you, by spending when everyone else is scared to or unable to.

It's not a good situation thanks to the Republicans of the past 30 years, it's not good to have to borrow through a recession when you are already heavily in debt. This is precisely the kind of company that usually goes out of business and Warren Buffett would not buy.

On the other hand, there are always the intangible assets of a company: a brand, a leader, an ideal, things that cause people to invest in them even when they show no fiscal responsibility and very little business sense.

This is exactly the kind of company Buffett does buy, but he goes in and reorganizes them with his very left-wing mindset.

This is the kind of company the USA is, for myriad of historical reasons, and that is why we will be able to get out of this mess even if we have to go in debt up to our eyelids.

But the longer we let the know-nothing, proud to be uneducated right-wing control things, the longer the suffering will be, the more often these crashes will happen, and perhaps one day it really will be too late for the USA.

Unfortunately the knee-jerk masses only want to gyrate from one extreme to the other always too late and make everything worse than it is, just like watching a stock market crash, and only a few have the intelligence and perseverance to come out on top in the long-term.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/opinion/01krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Hitchens Dances on Falwell's Corpse

2007-05-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

Religion/Politics/Death: Bravo to Hitchens for this eulogy, and to Anderson Cooper and CNN for giving him so much air time. Looks like Hitchens will have his own show any day now, he's on there almost every day, loved by Cooper and Dobbs. Good for them, they may regain some tiny measure of respect using him this way, though strange they give him so much time to speak alone without a counterpoint, what happened to objectivity?

http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/05/christopher-hitchens-anderson-cooper-jerry-falwell.php

Asians perceive the world differently and more holistically than Westerners

2007-05-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

Sociology/Biology: Asians see the world much differently than Westerners.

"Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.
The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.
And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.
In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.
Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.
So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.
Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did."

Very interesting that agriculture 2000 years ago can still have such a powerful impact on our cultures, and what this portends for the future could be huge. May explain Asian facility for computer programming among other things?

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/ap_050822_asian_american.html

We Are Going Backwards: Abortion Rights Travesty

2007-05-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

Abortion: We should be very worried about the Supreme Courts latest Abortion ruling, the media has not given it nearly enough coverage.

Sure it's just one, fairly uncommon procedure, but reading this opinion piece you get the idea that the government SHOULD NEVER BE INVOLVED in such painstaking medical decisions as we all hope never to have to make and NO ONE takes abortion as lightly as the anti-abortionists believe.

Banning 'partial-birth' abortion is just one small step of many the anti-abortionist fanatics have been making lately and electing any more Republicans will be the deathknell to the rights of women. It may be already too late but hopefully it's not.

Remember this when you go to the polls in 2008 and please don't let anyone else forget it, lives are at stake here and we are talking about grown women's lives, mothers and wives, not the unborn.

And please don't miss the hidden agenda - the right-wing only opposes abortion because they need more poor and desperate lives to send to their grist mill in the middle east so that a draft of wealthy children will never be necessary to protect their enormous investments.

If you are not rich and you vote Republican you are being used, plain and simple, and someday you may be royally screwed because of it.

I love how people insist the Republicans are the party for individual liberty.

Isn't it interesting that they only support liberty when it helps the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

Why is having a gun a more important right than having healthcare for your family?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-neil6may06,0,2723837.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Urban Sprawl is Good?

2007-05-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Urban Planning: Urban Sprawl may actually not be such a bad thing, despite being universally derided as one of the evils of our time.

"The notion that sprawl necessarily brings with it higher energy usage, increased
car travel, longer commutes and more traffic and pollution, for example, is
difficult to sustain. If this were true, commuting times would be shortest in
the densest cities and longest in the most sprawling ones. In fact, the reverse
is closer to the truth. Commuting times in American cities are substantially
lower than those in European cities.
There is no paradox here. As cities have spread out, jobs as well as houses have moved from the centre. There is no inherent reason why low-density living needs to lead to more energy use or produce more pollution than high-density living. In fact, at low enough densities it is possible to imagine urbanites producing almost all of their own energy through solar, wind and geothermal power, harvesting water and returning waste water to the ground locally, all without the vast centralised systems that were necessary to sustain the dense industrial cities of the 19th century that we now often mistake for the natural urban state."

While it is true that American commuting times are significantly lower, it is because we all use cars rather than public transportation, so it is fairly irrational to cite this as proof that sprawl is not bad for the environment, without including some statistics about actual fuel/public transportation usage.

Most likely, as with all things, a middle-ground is the best approach, and that is precisely what the anti-sprawl New Urbanism movement is supposedly trying to achieve, though I'm not impressed with its progress so far.

The problem is that companies still put a great deal of importance on being located in the city centers.

One would think that by being higher density than most American cities but not as much as New York, London would be ideal, a New Urban community already. But apparently the problem is that people simply live too far from their jobs, and I'm not sure what the solution for that is.

The desire for many businesses to stick together with others in their industry in defined commercial zones which may be too expensive for its workers to live near is the main problem.

I believe the Internet will be the eventual solution here, enabling people to work from home and for companies to communicate with other businesses without being located near to them.

Of course it is true that one day if solar technology becomes more viable low-density living will be better for the environment, but that day is not here yet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1696761,00.html

Americans with Passports Vote Democratic

2007-05-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

Politics: 60% of Americans with passports voted for Kerry, only 35% for Bush.

This red state/blue state thing can seem pretty complicated at times but perhaps it's not.

Perhaps it's as simple as the fact that many Americans (Red staters) are too isolated from the rest of the world, totally surrounded by our uncommonly wealthy & happy country and simply unaware of the real world that makes them so stupid as to vote for someone like Bush.

This is an encouraging sign: since the world is getting ever smaller, international travel ever more common, and people ever more aware of the rest of the world thanks to the Internet among other things, this statistic gives me hope for the future of the USA.

Of course, a simple trip to Europe or Mexico or Canada certainly doesn't automatically change your mind but it at least gives people who know nothing but those ingrained American idiocies that socialism=evil and poor people=they deserve it a good chance to see the other side more openly.

LINK

Uncle Ben Finally Gets a Promotion After 60 Years

2007-05-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Racism/Media: Salon presents a visual history of racist spokescharacters as Uncle Ben has now been promoted 'from fictional cook to fictional CEO' of the fictional Uncle Ben's company (Owned by Mars.)

Always interesting to see how much things have changed in a mere 100 years, and have not.

Today we see racist advertisements of the past as unbelievable, yet we still don't have many black CEOs, and a surprisingly interesting segment on the Tyra Banks show yesterday about children's views on race showed that we still don't really see blacks being as smart or as likely to be good leaders as whites.

For all the good or bad effects Affirmative Action may have had, it hasn't really changed our view of blacks as poorer and less successful than whites, because it hasn't really changed the facts. There aren't many Black CEOs. I don't agree with Affirmative Action because it is purely reverse racism, but perhaps if the media at least presents the possibilities of blacks being CEOs, the reality can follow. At least we don't have to worry about fictional whites being left out, and the effect may be even greater. Or not.

So, I applaud Mars' decision to promote Uncle Ben as a CEO now instead of merely retiring or making him somehow less racist. It certainly took long enough though, what was the impetus? The Imus debacle?

Let's see if the remaining 'racist' brands try to up the ante, Aunt Jemina for President? They'd sure make a nice couple with Uncle Ben as First Gentleman...

Link

Chrisopher Hitchens on C-SPAN

2007-05-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Atheism: Chrisopher Hitchens on C-SPAN2 debating religion with some idiots.

I'm not a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. From what I have seen of him, he really doesn't make any convincing points. So of course he will be heralded as the leading atheist voice by the timid media.

I really think the debate on religion is completely off course here.

We all now accept that taking the bible and other religious texts literally is absurd.

So now the debate seems to be, can religion be good for people, can it teach good things, can it be a good moral founding for society and an important part of society.

This is really quite stupid to me, and completely missing the point.

Yes it CAN be used for good just as a rotting carcass can be used for sustenance if you are starving in the wilderness.

Whether it is used more for good or bad, I don't care.

The point is: IT'S ALL BASED ON LIES AND WE SHOULD LIVE IN REALITY!

Is it really a good thing if I teach you how to be a good person by telling you that if you don't do exactly as I say, a green monster will eat you? No!

I don't care if religion is making everyone a perfect angel, if it is teaching them to blindly follow their 'faith' instead of living in the real world, we are all bound for trouble!

What these acclaimed atheist authors SHOULD be telling people is how religion was created, by man, to serve man's stupid instinctual desire to make sense out of a world without sense.

They should tell how time and time again religions have been created to tell people what they WANT to hear, not what is good for them to hear or what is true or anything else!

Sam Harris gets the closest on this point and of course Nietzsche is probably the master of it but no one around today is making all the right points in my view, and the religious appeasers such as this schmuck Jonathan Kirsch are all too anxious to distract them into endless debates about what is good and bad in the Old Testament blah blah, WHO GIVES A FUCK.

I don't care what's good and what's bad in those stupid stories anymore, why don't we tell people the story of how it was created? How mortal men anxious to make a name for themselves wrote some myths to give UNFOUNDED hope to hopeless people, exploiting them for their personal gain.

Maybe if people started to see religion as what it is, history's greatest scam, exploiting our inexplicable but permanently fruitless evolved desire to find sense in a senseless world, we might make some progress, and realize why debating the good and bad of the various books is a complete waste of time and just plays into the Religious cults desire to delay the march of Reason.

The best Atheist I have seen in these debates that are occasionally on C-SPAN2 is undoubtedly Sam Harris, and you should all buy his books.

Selling Guns to Mentally Ill

2007-05-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

Gun Control: Last Sunday's 60 Minutes had a report about how we have long had a federal law banning the sale of guns to mentally ill such as Cho but since over half of the states do not allow reporting of mental health information, this is rarely enforced.

This is outrageous.

They estimate that there is only a 10% chance of stopping a seriously mentally ill person from buying any kind of gun.

I'm all for privacy of health records but there is a point at which the needs of society override that.

The records are out there, health insurance companies have no trouble getting them if you apply to join as a new member, so I don't see why the FBI gun control database shouldn't have access to it.

Kroft: "As a matter of common sense, it seems like a good idea to try and keep firearms out of the hands of people who don't know the difference between right and wrong. Call me crazy, call me irresponsible," Kroft said.

Gun advocates answer:

"Just because someone has been found to be mentally ill does not predict what
they will do in the future."

Uh... It doesn't??

I would say it's a much better predictor of who should NOT be able to have a gun than simply having been arrested for some petty non-violent crime in the past.

Of course if you can prove you are no longer mentally ill, you should be able to have a gun again, but to allow seriously mentally ill people to do whatever they want in this regard is simply idiotic.

And by the way, if you have ever been mentally ill, and you prove that you are fine now, you will still be screwed when you try to get health insurance. Once again the interests of corporations triumph over the welfare of the people in the USA.

The law already exists, we just need to enforce it. If we aren't going to enforce it, let's get rid of it. Either way this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.

According to one government estimate, there are at least 2.7 million people in the United States who should be banned from owning firearms for mental health reasons. But there are only 235,000 names in the FBI's computer.

Please write your state and national representatives asking them to support enforcing the existing gun laws preventing mentally ill from buying weapons.

Correction: The Brady Bill has expired, it is actually the 1968 Gun Control Act which we are failing to enforce.

Video Games Really Do Cause Violence

2007-05-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

Video Game Violence: Why video games really are linked to violence.

I agree, video games probably are a major cause of all this gun violence.

Yes, violent people are more likely to want to play them already, yes millions of people play them and don't commit violence, and yes millions of violent people get their thrills in video games instead of the real world.

But the fact remains, school shootings didn't happen as much before video games. People play games to do things that they would like to do for real, the more they play the game, the more they fantasize about the real thing.

But what can we do about it? Should we make these games illegal or restrict them to 18 and over only? I don't think so, though it certainly wouldn't bother me personally and would probably improve society.

As hard as it is to argue in the wake of Va. Tech, if millions of people enjoy something and only a very few abuse it or are negatively affected by it, I don't believe it should be illegal. Additionally it would probably be impossible to enforce thanks to the internet.

I think this is a distraction from the real problems Va. Tech illustrated which to me is: mental health & gun control.

First photograph of a person

2007-04-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Photography: English Wikipedia features the first photograph of a person, taken in Paris 1838.

Actually, Nicéphore Niépce's 1826 photograph does show a person, but this is the first photograph taken where a person did not have to remain in place unnaturally long, the exposure time was 10 minutes vs. Niépce's 8-hour method.

The man was stopped for that time getting his shoes shined. Of course today in America no one stands still anywhere for 10 minutes. Our pace of life has changed much more significantly than technology or style or anything else has in these intervening 170 years, that's what this photo says to me.

Perhaps the future is that you must start a blog to have social contact with people outside of your immediate interests/job/pursuits. Good or bad I'm not sure. I will go with good.

Inequality hits new highs in America

2007-04-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

Inequality:

"Consider a head-to-head comparison. We know what John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Gilded Age America, made in 1894, because in 1895 he had to pay income taxes. (The next year, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional.) His return declared an income of $1.25 million, almost 7,000 times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.

But that makes him a mere piker by modern standards. Last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, James Simons, a hedge fund manager, took home $1.7 billion, more than 38,000 times the average income. Two other hedge fund managers also made more than $1 billion, and the top 25 combined made $14 billion.

How much is $14 billion? It’s more than it would cost to provide health care for a year to eight million children — the number of children in America who, unlike children in any other advanced country, don’t have health insurance.

The hedge fund billionaires are simply extreme examples of a much bigger phenomenon: every available measure of income concentration shows that we’ve gone back to levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s.

[I]t’s much too soon to declare the march toward a New Gilded Age over. If history is any guide, one of these days we’ll see the emergence of a New Progressive Era, maybe even a New New Deal. But it may be a long wait. "

[Paul Krugman, NY Times Select]

Quote borrowed from Norwegianity

Graph of US Debt by President

2007-04-27T07:39:00.000-07:00

Deficits: This is not news to me, but I think it can't be shown enough for any remaining Bush supporters. If you are a fiscal conservative, you really should consider switching to the Democrats, because it's clear they are the true party of conservatism lately. The Republicans seem to have changed to the party of neo-Christian fascism and they will do anything it takes to maintain their power, even if it means endless spending & tax cuts putting our nation deep into debt.

Think the stock market is doing great? Adjusted for inflation we have gone nowhere in a long time, the dollar is practically worthless now compared to any time in the past, and it keeps falling. As we keep importing more than we export, eventually we won't be able to pay for it.

Unless we vote for fiscal responsibility.

Click for graph

Oprah & Iraq

2007-04-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

Media & Iraq: Not that I would ever expect Oprah to be a good journalist, but since the 'real' ones are pathetic impotents lately perhaps she is one of the few who could make a difference these days.

Perhaps unlikely though that the remaining 20% who support Bush watch Oprah, but maybe their wives do. And they probably couldn't care less about what their wife has to say about politics. But oh well. Am I overgeneralizing?

Vegans vs. Meat-Eaters: Agree to disagree?

2007-04-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

Vegetarianism/Veganism: A meat-eater writes to an advice column asking what to do about her preachy vegan friend who won't shut up. Salon's advisor Cary Tennis says not to argue, and that if they were really friends she would simply 'agree to disagree'.

I strongly disagree with this advice, you should have some defense for your positions in life.

I for one would not be friends with someone who cannot discuss something that is a part of their life and simply asks to 'change the subject'. I understand it is annoying to have someone who won't shut up about a subject and there is a limit, but they do deserve an honest and thoughtful answer if you are really friends.

I would take the opposite tack from the Salon writer, if this issue is so important to the vegan and they are really friends, doesn't the questioner owe it to at least think hard about this subject and reach some kind of reasoning? The reasoning she offers thus far demonstrates no real understanding of the issue, just a way to explain away any responsibility for her actions, saying that we are merely products of evolution and eventually may evolve to care about animals, but we aren't there yet.

Since modern society has made evolution inefficient allowing weaker people to survive and reproduce, in greater numbers than the smarter humans among us in fact, the evolved humans owe it to the world to try to be the best we can be, influence others to do the same, and have as many babies as possible. Since many of us don't want the babies part we can at least do the rest. Hopefully without being too annoying, but it does no one any good to say "I'm a product of evolution, so I do whatever comes naturally and it's not my problem."

I am a meat-eater but as a result of a very convincing university ethics class which included the following book by Peter Singer, "Animal Rights and Human Obligations", I came to agree that it is absolutely indefensible and morally wrong.

Some of the main points are:

1. It's clear that animals are able to feel pain and suffer.
2. Morally we should try to live our life in a way that creates the least overall suffering in the world, for ourselves and others.
3. The suffering we experience from eating a vegan diet is less than the mortal suffering that we put animals through unnecessarily.

That's a quick top-of-my-head summary some years after reading the book, which is much more convincing than I am.

I would say to my vegan friend that I wholeheartedly agree that they are right and would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise. Any of you who believe you can, I recommend reading this book and then tell me how you can refute it. There was also a very good video documentary including Mr. Singer, please let me know if you know the title.

Yet, I continue to eat meat. But at least I feel guilty about it.

Purgatory Purged

2007-04-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Limbo: Papal investigation determines that unbaptized babies do go to heaven, and purgatory does not exist. Whew.

Jurors Can Change Laws

2007-04-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

Jury Nullification: Juries have the right to ignore laws, though they are not informed of this. Every juror has the responsibility to acquit someone being tried for any unjust law, such as the criminalization of marijuana.

Farm Subsidies Cause America's Obesity Epidemic

2007-04-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

Farm Subsidies: not just a bad economic idea, also responsible for America's obesity epidemic