Dogmatisim

That is, most people have an internal psychological need to fulfill a "quota of dogmatism." If you're very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. I've also met people -- I won't name names -- who are extremely dogmatic on ethical issues but quite open-minded on empirics. The ethical dogmatism frees them up to follow the evidence on the empirics, as they don't feel their overall beliefs are threatened by the empirical results.
-MR

Nazi Fiscal Policy

Private demand accounted for less than half of the growth in aggregate demand from 1933-1934. Germany's economy had recovered in 1935 to the level it had been in 1928--a marginally better performance than America. Yet private consumption and investment were below pre-Depression levels, while state spending was 70 percent higher, led by the military.

True

"I was thinking about how before the internet, or more specifically when I was really young, if you heard a song that you really liked on the radio or MTV, owning that song involved a really complicated series of hurdles like 1) hoping your mom would bring you to Caldor or Zayre’s, and 2) hoping you somehow had $10, and 3) hoping against all odds that the record department wouldn’t suck and they’d actually have the one LP you wanted in stock, for once, just for god damned once."
-AWL

Anosognosic’s Dilemma

Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.
-Errol Morris

Seize the metropolis its you its built on

"The for-profit education industry accounts for 9% of the students, 25% of all Title IV disbursements but 44% of all defaults. And the President of the largest for-profit institution is paid nearly 25x the compensation level of the President of Harvard. There is something wrong with this statistical progression..."

There is no other pill to take, so swallow the one that makes you ill.

So the lesson for young writers from all this: Be Tracy Flick. Don't say anything remotely interesting, certainly not over e-mail. If you lack the mental discipline to completely suppress critical thought about people and institutions you spend your life covering, get good at pretending. The lesson for activists: Our news cycles are so short that, with a little coordination, nothing is too tame or trivial to be transformed into a weapon of personal destruction--so that's an excellent use of your resources. We'll doubtless get--are getting--precisely the quality of public discourse we deserve.

And this tidbit from prized bottom Tucker Carlson :

Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv.

“Too soon?” he wondered.

Memories

“I liked Mike,” says John. “He used to come over to our house all the time and just stay there. I think he was so lonely. He and I got along fine, watching television until three or four in the morning, or looking at books. Deborah [called me into] the kitchen once, and she said to me, ‘John, the most famous human being on the planet is in the library, and I want you to get him the fuck out. Tell him he has to go home!’"

...Then came “Thriller,” with its sound mix cranked up to top volume. Fourteen minutes later the crowd was on its feet, applauding and crying, “Encore! Encore!” Eddie Murphy shouted, “Show the goddamn thing again!” And they did.
-Vanity Fair

Going to the goodwill to pick up this album

Fuck you 2010. What have you ever done? What? Try topping this. Charge up goddamn your MacBook Pro or whatever dildo your plan on fucking you listeners with.

There is hope.

The alternative model is that many low-education workers are not employable through marginal changes in current conditions. It may require a big upward Schwung for the entire chain of labor, so that desperate employers at the bottom of the ladder, unable to find anyone else, grudgingly hire these not-so-productive individuals because there is no other way of expanding. In other words, it requires conditions which raise the marginal value product of these workers to the private sector, keeping in mind that the fixed costs of hiring a worker mostly have been going up due to the greater bureaucratization of society.
-MR

Some numbers

For the Fiscal Year ended September 2009, the average employed worker contributed $12,748 in income tax payments to the Federal government. The budget created by Mr. Orszag (who we read is a very bright fellow) spent $16,809 on behalf of that same worker for: defense, federal worker salaries, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security payments, unemployment benefits, and food stamps. Oh, and that’s just the biggest/most noticeable items in the budget. That “average” worker now has $65,237 in Treasuries debt to pay off, up from $56, 861 just eight months ago.

Wie wäre es mit Fakten, Herr Krugman?

“Where did the financial crisis begin? Which central bank conducted monetary policy that was too loose? Which country went down the wrong path of social policy by encouraging low income households to take on mortgage loans that they can never pay back? Who in the year 2000 weakened regulations limiting investment bank leverage ratios, let Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 and thereby tipped world financial markets into chaos?” he wrote.



Behind the calls for us to pursue a more expansionary fiscal course lie two different approaches to economic policymaking on each side of the Atlantic. While US policymakers like to focus on short-term corrective measures, we take the longer view and are, therefore, more preoccupied with the implications of excessive deficits and the dangers of high inflation.

Time to see if Jim Chanos is still accepting investors

From TheMoneyIllusion
Is there anywhere else in the world where a 1076-foot skyscraper would be built for “farmers” and located not in a city, but in the “countryside?”

Bass

Mr. MURPHY: This is all - this all really makes sense. And so I started being drummer in bands. I think now I've settled on that the instrument that's most appropriate for me is the bass guitar, because it's somewhere between the two. It's like the workhorse and you can play it very physically and it delivers a lot more like punch in the stomach. But it also can drive the song around. It's a rhythmic instrument, but it's also a melodic instrument or at least a tonal instrument.
-James Murphy, Fresh Air

So hedge fund bro on being wrong

When the public is most frightened, only the strong are left, and that's when the market is in the best possible hands. I call it taking out the canes. Whenever disaster strikes, the very sagacious wealthy people take their canes, and they hobble down from their stately mansions on Fifth Avenue, and they buy stocks to the extent of their bank balances, and then a week or two later, the market rises, they deposit the overplus in their accounts, invest it in blue-chip real estate, and retire back to their stately mansions. That's probably the best way of making money, to be a specialist in panics. Whenever there's panic hanging in the air, that's a great time to invest.
-Slate

When released, Casino had the most uses of the word "fuck" (438) in a feature length film.

See also:

Kubrick vs Scorsese from Leandro Copperfield on Vimeo.

Baltimore

When bored, they brought the ruckus, snatching bus tickets and issuing beatdowns at random. They gave no reason. They published no manifestos. This was how they got down. This was the ritual.

...You had to be harder then. You could not bop through Park Heights like the second coming of the Peanut King. Even the skating rinks demanded six deep. Lexington Terrace was overrun by gonorrhea. Teen pregnancy was the fashion. Husbands were outtie. Fathers were ghost
-Ta-Nehisi Coates

Cities and Water and Externalities

In the 17th century, life expectancy at birth was 20 years lower in London than in the English countryside.

By 1896, there were almost 1,700 public water systems in the United States, and municipalities were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service.
-The Health of the Cities NYT

How I understand my life so far

ERROL MORRIS: The students that were unaware they were doing badly — in what sense? Were they truly oblivious? Were they self-deceived? Were they in denial? How would you describe it?

DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.-NYT

This is fucking spectacular

Putting his money where his mouth is? Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds—and perhaps on inflation in the future.

Given his investment positions, Cantor should be joining me in calling for more short-term fiscal stimulus and urging the Federal Reserve to act more aggressively to raise the price level. But either Cantor doesn’t understand his economic self-interest properly, or else he’s more committed to his principled opposition to sound macroeconomic stabilization than he is to the performance of his portfolio. One doesn’t normally urge members of congress to be more greedy and venal, but in this case it might do a lot of good.
-Yglesias

The reason this Cantor story is such good news is that if conservatives and libertarians keep losing money this way, perhaps they will re-evaluate their views of cause and effect. Maybe they’ll start taking markets more seriously, instead of believing they are smarter than the markets. Or maybe not.
-Money Illusion

Stalking Etiquette

I enjoy looking up fat acceptance blogs on tumblr and than perusing the sites of girls who post their photos. This is a superior alternative to pornography, but creepy. Its superior because you find pictures created by folks who aren't trying to earn money through exhibition. Its creepy because the images, words, assorted media were not created for your consumption. Here's my question...why is their not a greater market for porn which gives the consumer the illusion of an intimate relationship? I am not referring to crying into a strippers tits type intimacy but more like "hi, my name is Scarlet, here I am naked, listening to Animal Collective waiting to go to work at Bed, Bath and Beyond." Payment seems to be the problem. The exchange of money for performance distorts the curiosity of the customer. You want a fair shake (insert dick joke) after committing even the smallest amount of cash. The employee, employer relationship is initiated. If I know I am purchasing sexual arousal I want the greatest amount of that good at a given quality I can obtain.

Some Canadian bro on energy

Prof. Smil is an expert on the history of technological innovation. He points out that the U.S. energy industry – which includes production, processing, transportation and distribution, coal and uranium mines, oil and gas fields, pipelines, refineries, fossil-fuel fired, nuclear, and hydroelectric power plants, tanker terminals, uranium enrichment facilities, and transmission and distribution lines – constitutes the world’s most massive, most indispensable, most expensive and most inertial infrastructure. Its principal features change on a time scale measured in decades, not years. That’s why “we’re going to be a fossil-fuel society for decades to come.”

Meantime, he argues, there’s plenty we should do to reduce demand. North Americans are the energy hogs of the world. Our industries are super-efficient, but our lifestyles are ruinous.
-Globe and Mail

Internet!

Mummy! from Lizzy Caplan

How Americans see soccer

But it's churlish to complain about World Cup enthusiasm. What the sports-radio guys misunderstand is that situational enthusiasm, born of ignorance, is the heart of American sports culture.

Most normal sports-watching people are too smart to tune in for boring or irrelevant action. There is a whole hype industry waiting to bring the general public up to speed when it's time to care. Who watched any of Butler's regular-season college basketball games? And why should anyone have? Only basketball nerds would bother.

March Madness, not the Super Bowl, is the real reference point for the World Cup. Or the Olympics by way of March Madness. Once every four years, soccer stops being confusing and dull and organizes itself into a straightforward tournament, populated by easily identified teams. Who cares if Americans can't name any of the players or their professional clubs? We know what Haiti, Greece, and North Korea are. We can root for that.
-Tom Scocca

She is going to be big. Zooey Deshahnelahdal... big.

Ants

This interview on Fresh Air is horrifying:

First some general questions about ants. You refer to them throughout the book, and when you're talking about an individual ant, as she. Why?

Well, ants are a sisterhood. They guys really don't do too much. They're kind of kicked out of the society pretty soon after they're born. They have a single function, that is to have sex okay, two functions, to have sex and die. And they don't participate in the social life.

...Well, the army ants, which do much the same thing as the marauder ants, they can catch lizards, snakes. They can even kill infants in cribs and cattle, if they're tied up. So their capacity for destruction is immense. That's why you do not tie up your cattle in Africa.

But in all these cases, it depends on a immediate presence of a huge force, and you pour on well, it turns out the front lines of these raids have these little minor workers, which are the cheap labor, and this is the way the Romans conducted their attacks.

...they have very powerful mandibles. Much of their mass is the muscles for their jaws. They often don't actually kill the prey, though. They will chop off its legs and carry it back, and once took a cricket from the ants that was being carried to the nest, and I put it in a little dish, and I looked at it the next day, and it was still alive. It just didn't have any legs or anything. They'd removed all its moving parts.

So I had this nightmare the next night of having all my legs removed and being dragged into the underground chambers of the ant to be eaten at their convenience.

Ants are quite willing to die for their colony. So what they want to do for their colony is much more than we'd want to do for our society, usually, and that includes killing themselves in warfare, including if you come along; and it also includes, if you're dying of old age, they do not have health insurance. They don't argue about such things. They wander off and die if they're diseased or hurt, or they serve what final duties they can, and that includes, as you say, guarding the trail.

So along the borders of the trail are all these old ants, crippled ants, staggering and unable to stand up but yet reaching up with their jaws, feebly trying to keep the enemy at bay.

Terrorism doesn't stop an ant colony. If you come along and smash a quarter of the population, you can never slow the colony down. It has to grow back, but you can never get a nerve center.

Ants disperse all this information amongst themselves, and they move efficiently and do the right thing without anyone telling them what to do.

This is a single nationality with a single scent. So you can carry an individual ant from San Francisco with you all the way down to Mexico, if youre so inclined, and drop it off and it will merge seamlessly with the society there. You carry that same ant a quarter inch across the border to the next society in Escondido and it's dead within a minute. And these huge colonies have borders that are miles long, and millions of ants are dying each month right in people's backyards out of view at the base of the grasses. And it's basically the largest battle ever waged. And it doesnt seem like much because, heck, what are they doing?

More weight...

The End of Men
The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining. Since 2000, manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone too. Henderson spent his days shuttling between unemployment offices and job interviews, wondering what his daughter might be doing at any given moment. In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.

But we're richer right? And touch screens, don't discount touch screens.

Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation. Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.

Charlie Munger gave 25K to this man

Diagnosis and treatment of most conditions require complex steps and considerations, and often multiple people and technologies. The result is that more than forty per cent of patients with common conditions like coronary artery disease, stroke, or asthma receive incomplete or inappropriate care in our communities. And the country is also struggling mightily with the costs. By the end of the decade, at the present rate of cost growth, the price of a family insurance plan will rise to $27,000. Health care will go from ten per cent to seventeen per cent of labor costs for business, and workers’ wages will have to fall. State budgets will have to double to maintain current health programs. And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it’s the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you’ve made almost no difference. Our deficit problem—far and away—is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care.
-Atul Gawande, New Yorker

Query

Exposure to geophysical events remains unchanged despite the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Turkey and Costa Rica and volcanic eruptions in Iceland, Ecuador and Guatemala. This exposure is not affected by human activity. However, steadily increasing insured values have meant a substantial rise in exposures, and thus risks, over the years. On the other hand, the meteorological risk situation is also changing in the case of storms and heavy precipitation. The number and intensity of weather-related catastrophes is expected to increase in the coming decades, largely on account of climate change. For Winter Storm Xynthia, which wrought major damage in Europe on 27 and 28 February 2010, Munich Re continues to anticipate a reinsurance claims burden of around €70m. Provisions of around €160m have been established for the two hailstorms that occurred in Australia this March.

Dear climate change skeptics, why is Munich Re worried about losing gobs of money?

via PK

Regular John

Simple song. Dave Grohl on drums. Excellent non-guitar solo.

And in the music industry:

It’s the worst of times for the summer touring business. Apart from standing rock fests like Bonnaroo, Sasquatch and Lollapalooza (see story), along with package tours like Warped and Taste of Chaos, all of which offer multiple acts for reasonable prices, the business is in terrible shape. Stadium dates and entire shed tours are being canceled, while promoters and agents pressure managers to take reduced fees, cancel dates and give back deposits.

Ironically, the situation this year is uglier than it was last summer, when economic conditions were at their worst, and some are attributing the numerous disasters to overexposure, as certain acts attempt to move high-priced tickets in markets they’ve hit frequently in recent years, including radio shows

Wednesday

Paul Kedrosky
The leak numbers are now, and have always been, larger than the number from official sources. Even the 60,000 bpd revised estimates tonight are likely too low, as the leak taskforce members concedes is possible. The flow rate is increasing as erosion causes the pressures to expand the drill hole and increase the flow of oil on a daily basis. Given enough time Matt will be correct, if he isn't already -- after all, this is a 100mm barrel-ish reservoir at immense pressure.

Robin Hanson
Industry has devised hyper-stimulating food, art, stories, sport, games, drugs, etc., which rich low-self-control folks eagerly consume, at the expense of work, kids, and work-like-hobbies. Hyper-status-seeking can compensate, inducing more work and hobbies, but not more kids. Most are deluded to think this a stable situation; if allowed, gene and culture selection would rapidly cut such waste. Most also have the addict’s delusion, “I can quit anytime I want.”

The Awl
• Katy Perry bends over to allow suited day traders to snort colored sugar off her back with Pixy Stix straws.
• Katy Perry solders together both of the Twix bars that come in the wrapper to make a candy version of a double dildo, then shrugs.

How do I control and manipulate people legally?
Make sure there's never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there's never enough ______ to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work on all six cylinders just to keep the system from collapsing.
• Katy Perry uses Circus Peanuts to dab up the excess moisture from her stomach after her sex partner ejaculates on it.

I'm Comic Sans Asshole
When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I'm banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I'm shredding Reign In Blood on my double-necked Stratocaster

Internet!

A Conversation with my Father

Dad: (Reading from WSJ editorial page) "The Democrats tried to pay for an extension of unemployment benefits by borrowing from the oil spill cleanup fund establish after the Exxon Valdez accident."

Me: I heard their also trying to use the fund to buy crack and hand jobs for the teachers unions.

Dad: It wouldn't surprise me with Obama in the White House.

Two things you can thank MTV for in 2002 that didn't suck

Yes you are better than this and I am not.

Something about Soccer

If a player is 5% short of the level they need to be to complete a 90 minute match, given its demands, then that player may well concede the half-a-second, or the half-a-meter, to the opposition that leads to the game's decisive moment. Winning and losing are literally separated by these margins, and so it will come as no surprise that a good deal of work has been done on the physical demand of the game, so that coaches know what physiological level players need to be at to avoid fatigue.

What if I told you that on average, a player will have a TOTAL of between 60 and 90 seconds of ball time in the entire 90 minutes? Amazingly, this is the time that a player has to swing the match. One decisive through ball, one strike, one dribble and pass, but a total of about a minute in a 90 minute match. It's no wonder that work off the ball becomes so important!
-The Physiology of Football

Mao's Famine

The last time I spoke with Yang Jisheng about Tombstone, he summed up China and the party’s progress with words that stuck in my head. “The system is decaying and the system is evolving,” he said. “It is decaying while it is evolving. It is not clear what side might come out on top in the end.”

The Best Coasts

How the hell is this not lawsuit material? Does In and Out have those kind of lawyers?
Can I get girls by handing them the exactly perfect object at the correct moment. (Sunblock, Beer, Hamburgers, Cat). Did she put the pot leaf on the bed or did she buy it that way?

China

"BTW, I just read that China is building a 350kph train line from Chongqing to Chengdu. That’s kind of mind-boggling when you consider the rough terrain. The track will be 66% tunnels and bridges. Does this make sense? My heart says yes but my brain says no.

When China becomes rich these project will pass a cost/benefit analysis. But they will be too expensive to build. NYC now wishes it had built a better subway system. But it is too late. Construction costs are now too high. China is building rail lines, subways and airports that are totally inappropriate for a country that is much poorer than Mexico. But they are highly appropriate for a country twice as rich as Mexico, which is where China will be in 30 years. I still lean toward the Huang perspective, because the argument I just made ignores the opportunity cost of capital invested in these projects, but I think the alternative view is also defensible."
-MoneyIllusion

Fast Kicking, Low Scoring and Ties!

Facts about Ethiopian industry

5. Ethiopia is fertile and well-farmed. Food processing and agribusiness ought to be a growth sector, right? So strives the national economic strategy. Unfortunately the coast is far away and transport costs alone exceed the international price of most food products. Plus the coasts are controlled by your enemy, a failed state, and a greedy mini-state eager to charge you through the nose. Time to focus on high value-add products?
-Chris Blattman

Thursday

via Kottke

Slavery=Self Control=Productivity

School, propaganda, mass media, and who knows what else have greatly changed human nature, enabling a system of industrial submission and control that proud farmers and foragers simply would not tolerate – they would (and did) starve first. In contrast, industry workers had enough self/culture-control to act as only slaves would before – working long hours in harsh alien environments, and showing up on time and doing what they were told.

So what made industry workers so much more willing to increase their self-control, relative to farmers? One guess: the productivity gains from worker self-control were far larger in industry than in farming. Instead of a 50% gain, it might have been a factor of two or more. Self-controlled workers and societies gained a big enough productivity advantage to compensate for lost pride.

Humans are an increasingly self-domesticated species. Foragers could cooperate in non-kin groups of unprecedented size, farmers could enforce norms to induce many behaviors unnatural for foragers, and the schooled humans of industry would willingly obey like enslaved farmers. Our descendants may evolve even stronger self/culture-control of behavior.
-Overcoming Bias, Self Control is Slavery

North Korea

"The markets are the sole source of income for many North Koreans, but they flout the government’s credo of economic socialism. Theoretically, everyone except minors, the elderly and mothers with young children works for the state. But state enterprises have been withering for 30 years, and North Koreans do all they can to escape work in them."

"Farmers tend their own gardens as weeds overtake collective farms. Urban workers duck state assignments to peddle everything from metal scavenged from mothballed factories to televisions smuggled from China."

“If you don’t trade, you die,” said the former teacher, a round-faced 51-year-old woman with a ponytail. She went from obedient state employee to lawbreaking trader, but could not escape her plight"

(The Pyongyang office of Goldman Sachs was unavailable for comment)

"She taught primary school for 30 years in Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city, with roughly 500,000 people. What once was an all-day job shrank by 2004 to morning duty; schools closed at noon. At least 15 of her 50 students dropped out or left after an hour, too hungry to study."

(Better or worse than Zimbabwe?)

So like more than a third of the workers, the worker said, he pays roughly $5 a month to sign in as an employee on the company’s daily log — and then toil elsewhere.

"Such payments, widespread at smaller state companies, are supposed to keep companies solvent, said one 62-year-old woman who is a trader in Chongjin. Even a major enterprise like the city’s metal refinery has not paid salaries since 2007, she and others said, though workers there collect 10 days worth of food rations each month."

“How would the companies survive if they didn’t get money from the workers?” she asked without irony.

(I like what I hear Mr. President. Full employment ho!)

-NYT, Views of North Korea Show How a Policy Spread Misery

Lesotho

"Thousands of people in the impoverished Commonwealth kingdom of Lesotho have asked South Africa in effect to annex their state because it has been bankrupted by the HIV pandemic."

"The impact of Aids – brought in by the migrant workforce – has ruined the economy. Uniquely in the developing world, Lesotho's deaths are close to outnumbering its births. A third of the population is HIV positive."
-Lesotho's people plead with South Africa to annex their troubled country

I'm with Helen

"If you turn out to be wrong, even temporarily, even only once, on a hot-button issue, that’s enough for effective excommunication from polite society. That, to me, is chilling: I’d much rather live in a world where people should be able to change their minds and should be allowed to be wrong on occasion. For surely we are all wrong, much more often than we like to think."-FS

Items Musical

Apparently this bro is Swedish. He is trying goddamn hard. Still have not listened to last years Dylan. Don't really care.

In other Spain news the economy still sucks.

FROM Breaking Bad




This is so sad.

I have various interpretations.
1. They thought it would work ironically.
2. They failed to do the proper preparationn with the older attendees.
3. They faked it as a meme and have succeded.

potential yobization

In Britain today white, working-class children now seem to do worse in school than immigrants. A 2003 Home Office study found white men more likely to admit breaking the law than racial minorities; they are also more likely to take dangerous drugs. London School of Economics scholar Dick Hobbs, who grew in a hardscabble section of east London, traces yobism in large part to the decline of blue-collar opportunities throughout Britain. "The social capital that was there went [away]," he suggests. "And so did the power of the labor force. People lost their confidence and never got it back."

mad men

Another thing he may have gotten from Salinger was a pretty high bar for narrative. He remembers seeing Star Wars a few years later, when it first came out, in 1977: “Oh my God, my friends were nuts. We saw it twice the first day, and I was like, ‘Why are we seeing this again?’ And they were like, ‘Who’s your favorite character?’ And I was like, ‘There’s no characters in this movie.’” He was 12.

Fact

In eco-conscious Sweden, it's now legal to freeze bodies in liquid nitrogen, then shatter them.

Yen

Think about it, do you know of any wealthy acquaintance that has yen-denominated cash deposits? Dollars, euros, pounds, Swiss francs, even Singapore dollars, yes, but no one holds the currency of the world's second-largest economy. This arrangement is not viable in the longer term. To quote JK Galbraith, the Canadian-American Keynesian economist: "The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events."

Fuck yeah Yves Smith+Links

It is perverse that unions for middle and lower income workers are demonized, but unions for the educated, like the legal, accounting, and medical professions, get nary a second thought. And how about CEOs? While not a formal union, there are mechanisms that help keep pay aloft (most important, comp consultants who are hired by the CEO human resources department who manage to persuade boards to set the standard for their CEOs pay in the top 50% of his peer group or higher. That assures constant leapfrogging of pay). Why is collusion among workers to achieve higher pay levels savaged, but far more egregious featherbedding by top executives and boards given a free pass?
-Naked Capitalism

Read this now.

What are the ten least bohemian cities?
I won't give him ten, but how about Kuala Lumpur as the world's most non-bohemian city, counting the free world only? (Otherwise Pyongyang wins.) It doesn't have much to do with rent control. Dubai is an interesting choice but I don't think it counts as part of the free world. Santiago, Chile does not strike me as very bohemian. Better not nominate Prague!

In the United States, I would name San Antonio as the most non-bohemian major city, or maybe El Paso, with Atlanta as a runner-up. Might there be somewhere very non-Bohemian in northern Florida? Does Richard Florida have an index for this somewhere?

A commenter:
Someone mentioned Atlanta. I've been in both places, and if I really wanted a bohemian lifestyle I'd go to Atlanta instead of New York right now. Its (just) possible to find housing in Atlanta without holding down a regular job in Atlanta. In New York, it can be difficult to meet housing costs even if you have a regular job.
-MR

The first paragraph of my novel

He stalked the corridor firing aimlessly, his cordless stereo blaring "The Times They Are a Changing". Mr. Galt huddled against a hollow faux marble pillar felt the bullets slowly chewing threw the flimsy material of his defense. A shell casing rolled slowly down the rough concrete floor inclined for handicapped access as a requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The shaken man dribbling urine into his corduroy trousers imagined the crime scene technicians raising the copper cylinders to the light muttering the jargon of their profession to themselves as his desiccated corpse was wheeled out of the entrance way.

Thank fuck the housing market has been nationalized

A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.

“I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn’t help,” said Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son’s. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. “They’re all crooks.”

Anecdote Time!

Mr. Pemberton and Ms. Reboyras decided to stop paying because their business, which restores attics that have been invaded by pests, was on the verge of failing. Scrambling to get by, their credit already shot, they had little to lose.

...They used the $1,837 a month that they were not paying their lender to publicize A Plus Restorations, first with print ads, then local television. Word apparently got around, because the business is recovering.

One reason the house is worth so much less than the debt is because of the real estate crash. But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck they used as a contest prize for their hired animal trappers.

It was a stupid move by their lender, according to Mr. Pemberton. “They went outside their own guidelines on debt to income,” he said. “And when they did, they put themselves in jeopardy.”

Fucking banks man. Frannie for evah! Housing Huzzah! We will not be crucified on a cross of homes we don't really own. Resume anecdotes,

His mother, Wendy Pemberton, who has been cutting hair at the same barber shop for 30 years, has been in default since spring 2008. Mrs. Pemberton, 68, refinanced several times during the boom but says she benefited only once, when she got enough money for a new roof. The other times, she said, unscrupulous salesmen promised her lower rates but simply charged her high fees.

...“I stopped paying in August 2008,” said Mr. Tsiogas, who is in foreclosure on his house and two rental properties. “I told the lady at the bank, ‘I can’t afford $2,500. I can only afford $1,300.’ ”

Mr. Tsiogas, who lives on the coast south of St. Petersburg, blames his lenders for being unwilling to help when the crash began and his properties needed shoring up.

Their attitude seems to have changed since he went into foreclosure. Now their letters say things like “we’re willing to work with you.” But Mr. Tsiogas feels little urge to respond.

“I need another year,” he said, “and I’m going to be pretty comfortable.”

-NYT, "Cunts are still ruling the world"

Go to Laos Young Man!

$3000 Shirt

What I always used in my class was the example of the $3,000 shirt. 1 shirt ("poet style", with yoke, sleeves, collar) takes approximately 7 hours of hard work to sew. To weave the cloth for that shirt takes approximately 7 times the 7 hours of sewing, i.e., 49 hours of hard work. To spin the thread for the cloth for that shirt takes approximately 7 * 7 * 7, i.e., 399 hours of spinning.

So, irrespective of the time either raising the wool (and the subsequent fleecing, washing, and carding required) or the linen (and the subsequent retting, hackling, etc. required), in that one shirt you have 400 (okay, I rounded) hours of hard work. Multiply that times $7.25 (minimum wage) and you have a $2,900.00 shirt (okay, I rounded again).

After pointing out that then you'd have to figure out costs for pants or skirt, bodice or vest, jacket or cloak, stockings, etc....

I have had students who remembered that lesson for years. And it perfectly explains why the Industrial Revolution was indeed all about clothing.
-Brad Delong