Driving merrily over the cliff of economics

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Whoops! It's 1985 All Over Again

A longish NYT article. Nothing new, but a good overview. We've been here before -- with the last president who was a deluded ideologue.

In broad schematic terms, the United States imports and the rest of the world exports; the United States borrows and the rest of the world lends. Financial flows are so lopsided that last year America soaked up nearly three-fourths of the surplus savings in the entire world.

Not surprisingly, this state of affairs is adding to the country's foreign debt. At the end of last year, the nation's financial deficit - what the United States owes the rest of the world, minus what the rest of the world owes the United States - amounted to more than $3 trillion, about 30 percent of the country's annual economic output. And it is growing. In the 12 months through October, foreigners acquired nearly $885 billion of new United States government and corporate debt.

THAT wouldn't be a problem if the world were comfortable lending ever-larger sums to the United States to pay for American investment and consumption. But this is unlikely.

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If the trend were to continue, it would require foreigners to lend the US about $1 trillion a year. That's about 75% of the savings of the entire world.

I don't care how good Bush is at defining reality and rejecting rationality. He can't define away mathematics.

I can see why they couldn't find a new treasury secretary. Who could stomach this leadership?

PS. Later in the article, this quote appears explaining how the Reagan administration blinked on the 'no new taxes' promise.

...So as he started his second term, Mr. Reagan changed course. Mr. Regan left the Treasury to become the president's chief of staff, while James A. Baker III, the chief of staff, moved to the Treasury.

One of Mr. Baker's first statements was that the Treasury's policy of nonintervention was "obviously something to be looked at." By February 1985, the United States had started intervening in the currency markets to weaken the dollar.

I think James A. Baker III, in several different ways, rescued America and the world from the disaster that was Ronald Reagan. I don't see a James Baker in this administration.

Torture is us. Not that anyone cares ...

New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread (washingtonpost.com)

The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained.

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Sure didn't take us long to sink into the gutter. I wonder if we were faster than average, or merely average. I'd bet on faster than average -- having Rumsfeld at the top of the military has cast a long and very dark shadow.

Why should stress accelerate aging?

BBC NEWS | Health | Stress 'may speed up cell ageing'

The stress of caring for a sick child can add 10 or more years to the biological age of a woman's cells, researchers have found.

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I've been puzzling about this for a while. What adaptive advantage is there for stress to accelerate aging? It seems like evolution went to some trouble to make this happen (note to creationists -- I'm speaking metaphorically).

I can't come up with value for a human adult, but unfortunately for attempts to prevent this, I can think of an explanation for children. Under stressful conditions, such as war, famine, and plague, it makes sense for a child to age faster -- to race to maturity and get out of harm's way. The adaptation may have developed very early in animal (or pre-animal?) evolution, so it may be deeply embedded in our genes.

BTW, about ten years ago I was quite interested in punctuated aging -- the idea that we age in "bursts". I based this on the note that few biological processes in the developing organism are continuous; we develop and adapt in episodic bursts. It helped that there's been a longstanding cultural belief that stress and disease aged us, and it helped that I noted my dog (Molly) seemed to age in bursts.

I wonder if stress-induced accelerated childhood aging would explain why children of the 19th century seemed to have the behavior and capability of adults today. Or why today's 25 yo male seems the biological age of yesterday's 21 yo.

GWB's kinda guy

Economist.com | Official vetting

EVEN loyal members of the Bush administration might concede that, in retrospect, Bernard Kerik didn't have the best résumé to become secretary for homeland security. New York's former police commissioner, it turns out, abandoned a Korean daughter for most of her life, accepted unreported gifts from firms doing business with New York City, was expelled from Saudi Arabia after a physical confrontation with a local police official, was fined $2,500 for assigning detectives to help research his book and, inevitably, employed a possibly illegal nanny...

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Yeah, a nanny. Suure. Enough evidence leaked out, from the press or FBI, that Kerik was probably told to shop for an illegal nanny -- or take a swim with cement fins. Bush has just the best judgment.

Laptops become a commodity

InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop

Wal-Mart is offering a laptop that dives below the $500 pricepoint, and it's no accident the machine, from Linspire, runs a Linux-based operating system.

The Balance laptop, at $498, enters a mass market at a price that will undoubtedly accelerate Linux adoption.

The laptop comes with the OS, Internet suite, and Microsoft-file compatible office suite and can be used with both dial-up modems and broadband connections. The machine comes with a VIA C3, 1.0 GHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, which is expandable up to 512 MB with SODIMM (Small Outline Dual In-line Memory Modules). It includes a CD-ROM drive and a 14.1-inch LCD screen...

... The laptop's included Mozilla Internet suite comes with a fast-functioning browser and email program that can display Web-based forms, PDF documents, images, and multimedia files. The suite's included instant messenger program works with AOL, MSN and Yahoo logins.

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No-one makes money on desktop machines. I recall reading that if one excluded the kickbacks Microsoft provided Dell, that they lost money on their best selling desktop machines. Laptops were different -- they still had a solid margin.

Not any more. Only Apple will be able to demand a premium for their top selling entry-level laptops, and the iBook may drop to $900 or so. Updrade this thing to 512MB and hook it up to a monitor/mouse/kb and there's a very compact and virus-free machine for my mother to use -- with gmail for her email.

Boing Boing: Engineered spider web

Creepiest science news of the day. I think they mean Hadassah University:

Boing Boing: Engineered spider web: "Scientists at Jerusalem's Hebrew University used synthetic biology to crank out spider web fibers in the lab. They introduced certain genes from garden spiders into a virus that was used to infect caterpillar cells. Spider fibers then formed in the cultured cells."

Note: Spider fibers formed in the cultured cells.

Coin toss bias

Toss Out the Toss-Up: Bias in heads-or-tails: Science News Online, Feb. 28, 2004

Their preliminary data suggest that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time.

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This was the most viewed article in Science News in 2004. I can see why. One of the best examples of why one should never have complete confidence in conventional wisdom.

Bias arises because of the mechanics of how people (can) toss coins.

Brave new minds

Sharper minds

The LA Times has a review of the wetware enhancers -- cog drugs for the able minded. I didn't realize Provigil had gained a reputation for enhancing cognition; caffeine, of course, has been known to do that for some time.

The review omits nicotine, a curious drug which is both calming and alerting (and hence beloved in wartime).

I suspect some of these will have quite hideous side-effects. I'm sure I'll end up on one or more though -- especially if the alternative is bagging groceries.

Russ Feingold is running for 2008 (?)

Salon.com | Goin' south

... The people of Alabama appear to be among the most generous and most unsung philanthropists in this country. What they give is unimaginable to many others and they give it time and again: They regularly give their turn at the American dream to someone else. And they give it simply because they're asked. So many people in Greenville [jf: Alabama] don't seem to have basic healthcare coverage or promising job opportunities. Meanwhile, their children volunteer to risk their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can only be humbled by their sacrifice.

But because I am a lawmaker and a student of history, I also know who has been asking them to give so much. And I can only wonder how many more generations of central Alabamians will say yes when the increasingly powerful Republican Party asks them to be concerned about homosexuality but not about the security of their own health, about abortion but not about the economic futures of their own children. As my wife and I drove through Greenville that night, I thought how fundamentally unfair this all is in order to support an increasingly radical conservative movement.

Now, some may think that Alabama and Wisconsin are the polar opposites of American politics. But in both states I've found that -- along with sharing a sincere appreciation of a good turkey dinner -- too many hardworking people are losing their battles for decent paying jobs and adequate healthcare. I'm tired of seeing the power-hungry persuade the hardworking people of this country that the only way to preserve important values is to vote against their own families' basic interests. I believe that the working people of both states have sacrificed for other people's agendas for too long. And I believe that any political party or political movement or political candidate who would consistently say this would be heard throughout America.

We need to go to the Greenvilles of every state, red and blue, and say, "Thank you. You've sacrificed long enough. Now it's your turn at the American dream."

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Sure reads like a stump speech to me. If Russ doesn't use it, someone else should.

The vile prejudice against conservatives in academia

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Jon Chait on the Political Composition of Academia

This would be funny, except that its tiresome. Conservatives are in a tizzy because academics don't like Bush. They suspect a conspiracy of tenure committees. Chait and DeLong have far more plausible explanations.

Don Lancaster: The Case Against Patents

Guru's Lair: Patent Avoidance Library

In the old era, before the world changed as it had not changed in a hundred years, I subscribed to an iteration of "Whole Earth Review". It was fascinating back then; Wired at its peak was a pale imitation. WER was at the very edge of an emerging revolution, it was a fine companion to another lost gem -- BYTE.

Eventually WER came down to earth and disappeared again, but I still have those issues. The kids have scattered them around the house, so I see them on occasion. I picked one up and a fine article by Don Lancaster, published in 1992 (even then a reprint), caught my eye. It was "The Case Against Patents". Every word rings true today, though his was the perspective on an engineer who found patents didn't help protect his innovations.

The article doesn't anticipate how bad things would become -- nowadays patents are used by megacorps (Microsoft's suite is enough to destroy Linux ten times over -- when they choose to pull the trigger) to destroy competition and prevent innovation. So not only do patents not protect the innovator (as in 1992) they now have the abilit to destroy the innovator (a new discovery).

Lancaster ends with the note that innovators don't innovate to make money, they innovate because they have to. In other words, they're build that way. Good thing to, because Lancaster would say there's no money in it.

I wondered what had happened to that old article. Were it published today it would be the talk of slashdot -- but it's 13+ years old now. Ancient history. Lost lore. Except Lancaster put it on the web. At his site. Which I'd never heard of. Google knew it though.

So this posting is courtesy of the combination of Google, Lancaster's (and my) urge to share, and my kids urge to chaos.

The Economist helps with the problem of raising children of the wealthy

Economist.com | The servant problem

Upper middle class americans have trouble finding child care at a price they want to pay. Fundamentally the problem is that legal outsourced high quality individual child care costs a substantial fraction of the after-tax income of an upper middle-class working parent.

The Economist suggests the one logical solution.

In the age of the global economy, the solution to the servant problem is simple: rather than importing the nanny, offshore the children.

Of course if one doesn't like that answer, one can do the work oneself. It's not easy work though ...

Aside from the social commentary, there's yet another aspect to this satire. Birth rates are far higher offshore than they are in wealthy nations. So, in a peculiar sense, wealthy nations have offshored more than raising children ...

The British Medical Journal publishes a unique case report

A precious case from Middle Earth -- Bashir et al. 329 (7480): 1435 -- BMJ

Sméagol (Gollum) is a single, 587 year old, hobbit-like male of no fixed abode. He has presented with antisocial behaviour, increasing aggression, and preoccupation with the 'one ring.'...

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The BMJ has always had a bit of a sense of humor. This case report was written up by a group of medical students and a psych professor, perhaps as an end-of-rotation assignment. The patient's history is obtained from a chap named Gandalf.

Disappearing in the sand

The New York Times > Science > Beware! Sand in This Physics Lab May Eat You Alive:

This physics experiment showed an peculiar configuration of sand could cause it to pass any weighted object with minimal resistance. I assume this was only a neat physics experiment, until this comment:

Dr. Lohse said the findings could explain reports of travelers' being swallowed up in the desert.

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Do the bodies every reappear?

Editing -- the secret to a happy life ...

The Onion | Local Woman's Life Looks Bearable In Scrapbook

Jane Hemmer's family scrapbook, prominently displayed on her coffee table at all times, gives the impression that her life is not only bearable, but even pleasant, sources not particularly close to the 58-year-old homemaker said Monday...

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The Onion's satire contrasts a cheer filled scrapbook to a darker reality.

But is the Onion again ahead of the curve? Is a life perhaps not so much well lived ... as well edited? Few live blessed lives, but in most lives there are happy intervals. With a bit of editing, a bit of contrast here and dimming there, cannot the Play be made lighter? There may be something to be said for the art of mastering the past.

I need the opinion of the elders on this ...