“The United States is printing money – quantitative easing it is called – because its interest rates are almost zero and still the economy is not growing. It’s the last chance corral. They can’t drop their interest rates much more.”
Archive for the ‘CrashBlogging’ Category
Just a sign of the times
Friday, October 12th, 2012Software Patents and the End of Innovation
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012From Nancy Heinen, Apple general counsel until 2006:
“When patent lawyers become rock stars, it’s a bad sign for where an industry is heading.“
Yes it is. And from the same article:
“Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.“
The whole piece is worth a read.
-Thx to Mother Jones.
Politics: Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
Friday, July 20th, 2012Written by Bill McKibben for Rolling Stone Magazine
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.
More – search for the title line with Google…
Mass burials – should we look?
Friday, July 6th, 2012– I watched a show tonight that took place in Spain. But it could have been Syria, Chile or Cambodia. or any number of other places. They were digging up a mass grave that dated from Franco’s time and the people buried there had probably been killed in 1936.
A person was asked if they thought there was value in digging these folks up and they offered the opinion that they didn’t think so. It was the past and long ago. We should just forget it and get on with today and life.
So wrong
I couldn’t have disagreed more. Every strongman, every dictator, every despot should know that their crimes against others will not be forgotten. They should know that misusing their power against others who cannot defend themselves will not quietly go away. There will be no place to hide.
To me, it is abhorrent that it took so long between the years of the killing fields and when Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge cronies were tried. Abhorrent that Pinochet was able to hide from international judgement for so many years.
When the dust settles in Syria, those at the top of the now Syrian government should be held until all the atrocities are enumerated and then they should be judged and punished according to their complicity.
Qaddafi got a rough judgement and so should everyone who abuses their power and abuses other people like this. And these judgements should come sooner than later.
Everybody in one of those graves had a name, had a mother, loved someone and was loved by someone and had dreams and a future. Everyone of them had a right to express their differences with the government of the day without it costing them their lives.
It still goes on today and it should not. We yammer on about our compassion for human rights and justice but so much of it is just talk. The kind of talk and hang wringing that gets done when we’re really obsessing over the geopolitical consequences or the effect it may have on trade.
And, while we’re talking, we can hear on the radio that they are marching men right now into the stadium at Srebrenica – and few of us that day were much in doubt as to what was next. But the politicians just keep on talking. Talk, talk, talk while people were dying.
Spain, Rwanda, the Katyn Forest – you name it – the lists go on and on.
It is wrong. And those who do it, or those stand silently by while it is done, should be punished every time, without fail, to send a message for all who are yet to consider making such a decision.
Crisis forces dismal science to get real
Wednesday, July 4th, 2012– Just a few days ago, I wrote about an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch section. This article, acknowledged what I think is a deep and unavoidable truth about the world. And that is that all our economies are based on models that insist on indefinite growth for the model to succeed.
– And, I said, any eight year-old knows that you cannot go on creating more and more stuff on a stage of finte size. Common sense tells you the stagewill fill up and you will come to the end-game.
– So here we have an article about an ongoing deep angst in the world of economists about how their models are failing to predict the ups and downs of the world’s economy. Hand wringing and questions about the deep assumptions being taught at the various schools of economics abound.
– And not one WORD about the most fundamental issue of all. That ALL their models depend on indefinite growth to succeed and that this is just impossible. Give me strength!
– Dennis
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As economics teachers struggle to make sense of a post-crisis world, they may have an unlikely army of helpers: ants.
In September 2008, the same month that Lehman Brothers collapsed, the Argentinian ants became the unwitting stars of a German television show that set out to illustrate collective efficiency. To the frustration of the show’s producers, the insects ended up showing how easily rational expectations can go awry.
The ants – Linepithema humile – had a choice between a long route and a short one to get to a pile of food. In theory, their chemical communication and millions of years of evolution should have led them to work out the short route.
They chose the long one, and most kept using it even though some had found the shorter path. “The Germans were furious,” said economics professor Alan Kirman, whose neuroscientist friend and colleague Guy Theraulaz ran the experiments in the south of France.
Kirman, professor emeritus at Aix Marseille University and France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, has started to use the footage in a talk he gives about modern economic thinking. The insects were far from efficient, he said, but reached their goal in the end.
“I think the economy is a lot like that.”
There lies a hint of the revolution that is building at the heart of academic economics, particularly in Europe.
As the euro zone crisis deepens, economists in France, Germany and Italy have been forced to turn away from classroom theories and look at the real world – from insects to financial markets, from banks to brain scans – to better understand what’s going on.
An increasing number of teachers argue that the textbooks, some by experts who didn’t see the crisis coming, are divorced from reality, inconsistent, dull, and, in a crisis that has gripped the globe for more than four years, even dangerous.
“A crisis is a wonderful opportunity in some sense,” said Kirman. “If it weren’t for the fact that millions of people are suffering as a result, what better time to be an economist, because now you can see what’s going wrong with our theory.”
– More… ➡
$1.6b cyber attack tip of iceberg, says top official
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012Cyber attacks by a foreign state resulted in a British company losing £800 million ($1.58 billion) in revenue, the head of MI5 revealed yesterday.
This “was not just through intellectual property loss but also from commercial disadvantage in contractual negotiations”, said Jonathan Evans.
“They will not be the only corporate victims. The extent of what is going on is astonishing, with industrial-scale processes involving thousands of people lying behind both state-sponsored cyber espionage and organised cyber crime.”
Most state-organised cyber attacks in Britain are believed to be carried out by China and Russia, with an array of targets ranging from weapons manufacturers to petroleum producers.
The director general said the Security Service was involved in the investigation of “cyber-compromises in over a dozen companies and is working with many others that are potential future targets of hostile state activity. But this is only a tiny proportion of those affected.”
– More… ➡
End of an Era
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012– Parents, it is time to think about where your children are going to be when the sh** hits the fan. I don’t think we’re going to avoid this mess but you could shift them to a place where another generation or two might have reasonable lives. If you think that might be in a big city in the U.S., I think you are missing the point.
– Dennis
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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 25th June 2012
It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the US, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue “sustained growth”, the primary cause of the biosphere’s losses(1).
The future
The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.
The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.
We have used our unprecedented freedoms, secured at such cost by our forebears, not to agitate for justice, for redistribution, for the defence of our common interests, but to pursue the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need. The world’s most inventive minds are deployed not to improve the lot of humankind but to devise ever more effective means of stimulation, to counteract the diminishing satisfactions of consumption. The mutual dependencies of consumer capitalism ensure that we all unwittingly conspire in the trashing of what may be the only living planet. The failure at Rio de Janeiro belongs to us all.
– More… ➡
Myth of Perpetual Growth is killing America
Monday, June 25th, 2012– This article is from no less than the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch.
– Amazing, isn’t it, that any eight year old could tell you what the problem is with assuming that things can get bigger and bigger when they only have a fixed amount of space to grow in.
– But, it has taken the mavens of Wall Street until now to smell the coffee.
– Dennis
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Commentary: Everything you know about economics is wrong
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, everything you know about economics is wrong. Dead wrong. Everything. The conclusions of economists are based on a fiction that distorts everything else. As a result economics is as real as one of the summer blockbusters like “Battleship,” “The Avenger” or “Prometheus.”
The difference is that the economic profession is a genuine threat, not entertainment. Economics dogma is on track to destroy the world with a misleading ideology.
Why? Because all economics is based on the absurd Myth of Perpetual Growth. Yes, all theories and business plans based on growth are mythological.
Economists are master illusionists who rely on a set of fictions, fantasies and forecasts that emanate from a core magical mantra of Perpetual Growth that goes untested year after year.
And yet it’s used to manipulate the public into a set of policies and decisions that are leading the American and the world economy down a path of unsustainable globalization and GDP growth assumptions that will self-destruct the planet.
– More… ➡