FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, NewsSean Carroll of Cosmic Variance fame has entered an essay contest on the nature of time.
.... The arrow of time finds a plausible explanation in a 'Heraclitean universe,' described by a quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space....
Candace Gingrich: A Letter to My Brother Newt GingrichTo borrow a very tired phrase, Generation Equality has skin in the game. If civilization endures they have a reasonable shot at a 100 year lifespan.
... Welcome to the 21st century, big bro. I can understand why you're so afraid of the energy that has been unleashed after gay and lesbian couples had their rights stripped away from them by a hateful campaign. I can see why you're sounding the alarm against the activists who use all the latest tech tools to build these rallies from the ground up in cities across the country.
This unstoppable progress has at its core a group we at HRC call Generation Equality. They are the most supportive of full LGBT equality than any American generation ever -- and when it comes to the politics of division, well, they don't roll that way. 18-24 year olds voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And the numbers of young progressive voters will only continue to grow. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, about 23 million 18-29 year olds voted on Nov. 4, 2008 -- the most young voters ever to cast a ballot in a presidential election. That's an increase of 3 million more voters compared to 2004.
These are the same people who helped elect Barack Obama and sent a decisive message to your party. These young people are the future and their energy will continue to drive our country forward....
Editorial - The Price of Our Good Name - NYTimes.comArgghhh. The stupidity rayzzz ... they burnzzz...
...Does this mean that truly dangerous men will be set free, to go back to plotting more attacks against America? No...
Obama Vows Swift Action on Vast Economic Stimulus PlanNo joke about the vacuum. Gail Collins made a semi-serious plea for Cheney and Bush to resign, so Pelosi could turn things over to Obama.
...Mr. Obama’s address, a video of which was made available on YouTube, was the keynote of an effort to calm tumultuous financial markets roiled by an apparent leadership vacuum in Washington before he takes office in two months...
Warning expanded on tainted cookiesThere's no particular reason that Melamine, used to counterfeit protein, should be limited to Chinese products.
... State officials are expanding their warning about contaminated cookies being sold in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture is warning consumers to avoid eating any Wonderfarm brand cookie-type biscuits due to melamine contamination....
... State officials are urging consumers to immediately dispose of any Wonderfarm brand cookie products, which are made by Interfood Shareholding Co. in Vietnam.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Insider’s Crusade - NYTimes.com... This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.
Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.
And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition...
The Hot Ticket to History, Unscalped - NYTimes.comReality (or at least our approximation thereof), is not nearly as sensible as fiction.
....The celebration for the first African-American president could not be more exquisitely timed. It occurs during the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, on the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, with the theme of the “new birth of freedom” foreseen by Lincoln at Gettysburg...
Police spy on climate activist while global warming goes unarrested | Environment | guardian.co.ukThis insanity involved state Republicans and state police, but the terrorism laws came from Cheney/Bush. They blocked protections that would have prevented this kind of abuse.
I'm not sure what's more shocking: the news that the Maryland State Police wrongfully spied on me for months as a "suspected terrorist," or that, despite surveillance of me, officers apparently wouldn't recognize me if I walked into their police headquarters tomorrow.
I'm a former Peace Corps volunteer, an Eagle Scout, church member, youth baseball coach, and dedicated father. I also happen to be director of one of the largest environmental groups in Maryland, a nonprofit that promotes windmills and solar panels in the fight against global warming. So imagine my shock to get a police letter last month saying I was one of 53 Maryland activists on a terrorist watch list that has been discontinued because — can you believe it? — there's "no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime."...
... The mess all began last summer when astonishing evidence surfaced revealing that the Maryland State Police — under former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich — posed as activists and infiltrated an anti-death-penalty group, attending the organization's meetings and taking secret notes to send back to HQ. But what were they doing to me and my organization — the Chesapeake Climate Action Network — during this surveillance program in 2005 and 2006? Bugging our phones? Reading our emails? Monitoring me as I walked my kid to the bus stop?
I still don't know for sure. Yielding to public pressure, the police finally gave me a printed copy of my "file" on October 29. It raised more questions than it answered. Seven of the 12 pages were withheld without full explanation. And of the pages I did receive, at least half the words were redacted — blacked out with a marker.
There was a photo of me on the last page, lifted from my website. And on the first page, there were these words: "Crime: Terrorism, environmental extremists."
What terrorism would that be? My file — what little of it I have — makes reference to a morning speech given in Bethesda, Md., by then-governor Robert Ehrlich on November 17, 2005. A small audience of invited guests and journalists attended inside a classroom at Walt Whitman High School. Ehrlich wasn't doing enough to fight global warming, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network believed, and several of my staff arrived to peacefully demonstrate and hold up signs that said things like, "It's Getting Hot in Here, Gov!" But troopers with the governor's "Executive Protection Division" believed this was extreme, according to my file. For example, CCAN staffers invited high school students to hold up protest signs during the governor's speech. Pretty extreme, huh?
There was no civil disobedience at this event. No one was arrested. No county, state, or federal laws were breached. The entire affair was utterly peaceful, above board, and appropriate. Political demonstrations exactly like this happen a thousand times a day in America. There were no media reports of anything unusual.
Yet Ehrlich's security team considered this "aggressive protesting." Afterward, the troopers contacted the Maryland State Police's Homeland Security and Investigation Bureau. The result was creation of intelligence files on me and three of my staff under the crime category of "terrorism, environmental extremists." The real motivation, however, appears to be political spying. We were opponents of the governor's policies. We were organized and vocal about it. We wound up on an intelligence list along with dozens of other innocent, nonviolent opponents of the governor's policies...
... the state police say they've released everything to me that's relevant to me, but I don't believe them. Since July, the state police have made numerous public statements related to this spying controversy that have proved to be factually untrue. They initially said, for example, that the entire surveillance program was limited to anti-death-penalty activists. But we now know activists for peace, immigration, and the environment were spied on too. I believe more of the spying story is yet to come out, however. With the help of a heroic Maryland attorney, David Rocah of the American Civil Liberties Union, and an equally heroic Maryland state senator, Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, I believe all the facts will soon surface and we'll see legislation in the state General Assembly in 2009 specifically banning police abuses like this....
So it now appears that the US government, at the least, will come to own Citigroup. October had the first CPI fall in … well … a long, long time. Switzerland is teetering on bankruptcy …
End of the beginning? — Crooked Timber
The failure of Citigroup, which looks increasingly likely to happen in the near future, would mark the end of the beginning of the financial crisis…
… Citi is not only too big to fail, it’s too big to rescue with any of the half-measures that have been tried so far. Only outright nationalization is feasible, and that will probably require joint action by a number of governments; Citigroup’s global operations are too big for the US to handle alone….
… The national bankruptcy of Iceland seems likely to followed by something similar for Switzerland. As Citi itself points out, UBS and Credit Suisse are bigger, relative to the Swiss economy, than Kaupthing was for Iceland. Felix Salmon (also predicting doom for Citi, has been all over this).
Given a failure and rescue, Switzerland would probably have to follow Iceland in a rush application to join the EU (which might have its hands full rescuing some of its own members). It’s a safe bet that the end of secret bank accounts, “wealth management” through tax minimisation and the like would be part of the price…
… If even part of this plays out as it seems likely to, the financial system that emerges from the crisis will be radically different from the one that went in: massively smaller, with far fewer institutions and products, and tightly regulated where it isn’t under outright public ownership.
But before we can even get to that point, we’ll have to survive a global recession which is already the worst in decades, even though it’s still in the opening phase where unsold inventories pile up on wharves. Obama’s inauguration is going to look a lot like that of FDR in 1933.
Is this a part of the unwinding of $300 trillion in derivatives that we’ve been wondering about? Who’s winning in these monstrous money flows?
In the good-old-days of five days ago, I wrote:
One theory is that the combination of the 1994 Gingrich Marketarian [3] "revolution" and consequent firewall demolition, combined with at least one major technology transition, produced accelerated returns at the cost of new instabilities. Over a long enough timeline investment returns might be somewhat lower than with a balanced regulatory environment, but "safe" investment timelines are now 20-50 rather than 10-15 years.
I think that's true, but not the entire story…
… We know humans are predictably irrational. We know people will aggressively search for cheap gas when prices are rising, but won't when prices fall -- even at the same income/price ratio. [5] Similarly we know humans will criticize balance sheets when share prices fall, but not when they rise.
This means that market volatility enables predictable predation strategies during rapid rise. Money can be diverted into senior executive compensation, into insider trading, into payments to political parties and senators, and into sophisticated financial instruments that none of us have the ability to fully understand or model.
This form of market predation (parasitism really, since a dead host is not useful) is bad enough by itself, but it's aggravated by "ratchet effects" [4]. CEO compensation doesn't fall as quickly as share prices. Senatorial contributions can't be stopped without risking undesirable electoral outcomes.
Volatile markets, like those of the past twelve years, can start to look an awful lot like Amway…
So does the combination of technology transition, firewall demolition and volatility-facilitated fraud account for what we’re seeing? How about if we throw in the rise of China and India? What role does skewed wealth concentration and the effective “disabling” of about 20-40% of the US population?
What was it Reich wrote last March …
… American consumers are coming to the end of their ropes and don't have the buying power they need to absorb the goods and services the U.S. economy is capable of producing. This is likely to mean fewer jobs, which will force Americans to pull in their belts even tighter, leading to still fewer jobs – the classic recipe for recession. That recession may turn into a full-fledged Depression if fiscal and monetary policies can't make up for consumers' lack of buying power. And there's reason to worry they cannot because consumers are in a permanent bind. They're deep in debt, their homes are losing value, and their paychecks are shrinking...
...We're reaping the whirlwind of many years during which Americans have spent beyond their means and most of the benefits of an expanding economy have gone to a relatively small group at the very top. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage is below where it was in 1999. The nation's median hourly wage is barely higher than it was thirty-five years ago. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. The rich, meanwhile, can't keep the economy going on their own because they devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us: After all, they're rich, and they already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, they're more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return...
... Go back to the years just before the Great Depression and you see the same pattern. As I've noted before, Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, noted this in his memoir "Beckoning Frontiers":
"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."...
So here’s my current list of the contributing factors …
Bush and the GOP have responsibility for #1 and #4 and partial responsibility for #5 (culture of greed, think “broken windows” for CEOs). They don’t have responsibility for the entire catastrophe, but they may own the critical mass.
Silence can speak loudly. Nobody I read is now saying Depression is impossible.
The “end of history” seems pretty funny now. Hah, hah.
Update: I'd forgotten about a earlier post that covered things from a slightly different angle. I have more to say about the complexity factor in a later post.
Update 1/12/2009: This 2003 post feels relevant. Generational wealth transfers and the Bush estate tax cut combine with declining family size to boost high end real estate purchases.
See also:
I love to see experimental testing of human culture and behavior. Maybe the experiments aren’t as well funded or robust as well done clinical trials they’re still a big improvement over our unreliable “common sense”. On the other hand, if they get published in Science they’re probably pretty darned good.
We now have the results of several experiments that, together, suggest that “broken windows” and other features of a disordered environment affect the incidence of crime and antisocial behavior. This is not a surprise to teachers, parents or police, but the effect size is notable.
A doubling of anti-social behavior is enough to justify a lot of investment in the prevention of ‘social crimes’. I now have a business justification to mow my lawn more frequently …
The “broken windows” theory of crime is correct | Can the can | The Economist
A PLACE that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave…
… The idea that observing disorder can have a psychological effect on people has been around for a while. In the late 1980s George Kelling, a former probation officer who now works at Rutgers University, initiated what became a vigorous campaign to remove graffiti from New York City’s subway system, which was followed by a reduction in petty crime…
… Dr Kelling’s theory takes its name from the observation that a few broken windows in an empty building quickly lead to more smashed panes, more vandalism and eventually to break-ins. The tendency for people to behave in a particular way can be strengthened or weakened depending on what they observe others to be doing. This does not necessarily mean that people will copy bad behaviour exactly, reaching for a spray can when they see graffiti. Rather, says Dr Keizer, it can foster the “violation” of other norms of behaviour. It was this effect that his experiments, which have just been published in Science, set out to test.
… When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean…
… In the “order” condition (with four bicycles parked nearby, but not locked to the fence) 27% of people were prepared to trespass by stepping through the gap, whereas in the disorder condition (with the four bikes locked to the fence, in violation of the sign) 82% took the short cut.
… With no fireworks, 48% of people took the flyers with them when they collected their bikes. With fireworks, this fell to 20%.
.. In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box). But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did…
The power, and the glory of a Science pub, comes from the experimental designs and the consistency across multiple settings. These experiments were done in the Netherlands, so of course effects may vary in different cultures.
Doubling. That’s big.
Local police should have no trouble justifying budgets to prevent ‘social crimes’ with these results. There are obvious implications for military and economic interventions in the world’s trouble spots as well.
I guess I need to rake my leaves too …
Update 11/22/08: Obvious follow-up study. Is the effect relative? So if you eliminated all the Graffiti, would rust become the new differentiator between order and disorder? If the effect is relative, then we'd always be chasing our proverbial tails. The return on broken window policing would be transient.
The decline of the Republican Party | Ship of fools | The EconomistWhoa. That's harsh.
... in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics...
