Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley.
Archive | July, 2012
Our Overburdened Central Banks – Clive Crook – The Atlantic
26 JulFollow the link and look at the chart.
Here’s a chart from the report that’s worth a look. It shows the economic interactions among three sectors: government, households/firms, and finance. Each pairwise interaction is a self-aggravating cycle, and central banks are being asked to intervene at all three points. I remember when monetary policy used to be one target (prices), one instrument (interest rates). Happy days.
That’s three autocatalytic potentially out-of-control loops, each draining the central banks.
via Our Overburdened Central Banks – Clive Crook – The Atlantic.
How to Protest the Major Parties Without Throwing Away Your Vote – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic
26 JulIf you aren’t crazy about the Republican or Democrat, but think of your vote from a utilitarian perspective and are uninterested in purely symbolic gestures, here’s how to impact presidential elections in two easy steps:
1) Postpone your calculated support for someone you don’t like until you’re standing in the election booth. Before then, support the third-party nominee you’d like to see win. If a pollster asks who you support give their name, not the major-party candidate you may wind up voting for in the end. Doing so doesn’t squander your vote on someone who won’t win, but could be the difference between a Libertarian or Green Party candidate being included or excluded from TV debates.
2) Think about whether or not you live in a swing state. If so, maybe it makes more sense to vote Republican or Democrat. But if you live in a state like California, where the Democrat will obviously win, or a state like Utah where the Republican is obviously going to win, your vote is going to have a lot more impact if you’re part of a third-party surge that signals disaffection to others.
via How to Protest the Major Parties Without Throwing Away Your Vote – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic.
Report: 2012 Election Likely To Be Decided By 4 Or 5 Key Swing Corporations | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
25 JulI know that The Onion is a satirical publication, but, alas, this doesn’t read like satire.
WASHINGTON—With polls this week showing the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney tightening even further, a growing number of political experts have declared this year’s election will almost certainly be decided by a small handful of swing corporations.
“While most publicly traded companies are solidly red or blue, there are four or five major corporations that are complete tossups right now, and any one of them could prove decisive come November,” said Nate Silver of The New York Times, noting in particular that Procter & Gamble, a traditional bellwether for the country as a whole, remained a “total wildcard.” “Both candidates will have to focus almost exclusively on these swing businesses in order to gain the upper hand.”
“And given how close this race is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing comes down to undecided executives at Dow Chemical or Disney,” Silver continued. “Let’s not forget 2000, when Philip Morris International single-handedly put George W. Bush into office.”
Ex-Citi chief: Break up the banks! – Salon.com
25 JulSaul of Tarsus?
I’m having trouble thinking of the proper simile to describe the news that Sandy Weill — the creator of Citigroup, the ur-mastermind of Too-Big-To-Fail banking, the man most responsible for repealing Glass-Steagall — now thinks that the big banks should be broken up.
Genghis Khan, on his deathbed, declaring that pacifism is the way to enlightenment? Karl Marx embracing the invisible hand of the free market as the best possible way to organize society? Ronald Reagan announcing that, guess what, government is the solution?
Are We Addicted to Gadgets or Indentured to Work? – Alexis Madrigal – The Atlantic
24 JulJust why are we so addicted to work? Is that addiction another aspect of the psycho-cultural dynamic that allows us to deny climate change and that keeps us from throwing the Republicrats out?
The upper middle class (i.e. the NYT reader) is WORKING MORE HOURS and having to stay more connected TO WORK than ever before. This is a problem with the way we approach labor, not our devices. Our devices enabled employers to make their employees work 24/7, but it is our strange American political and cultural systems that have allowed them to do so.
And worse, when Richtel blames the gadgets themselves, he channels the anxiety and anger that people feel about 24/7 work into a different and defanged fear over their gadgets. The only possible answer becomes, “Put your gadget down,” not “Organize politically and in civil society to change our collective relationship to work.”
Imagine if 19th-century factory workers blamed the clock for the length of their work days. The answer to the horrible working conditions of the late 19th century was not to smash the clocks or the steam engines! The solution was to organize and fight for your right to a 40-hour week and paid vacations.
via Are We Addicted to Gadgets or Indentured to Work? – Alexis Madrigal – The Atlantic.
Learned Helplessness and Voter Apathy
24 JulThere are things that are important to us, and things that are not. There are things that we can control, and things that we cannot. Our ability, or not, to control unimportant things is of little consequence. It is otherwise with our ability to control important things.
We cannot control the weather, for example, not very much. Nor can we control the fact that we, and everyone we know, is going to die. Yes, we may have some limited control over the timing and circumstances but the fact of death itself is beyond our control.
So how do we deal with those things that are enormously important to us, but which we cannot control?
Learned Helplessness
I want to come back to that, but for now let’s set it aside and think about learned helplessness, a phenomenon identified by Martin Seligman and his colleagues in the late 1960s. Here’s a typical experiment as explained in the Wikipedia entry:
In Part 1 of Seligman and Steve Maier’s experiment, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group 1 dogs were simply put in the harnesses for a period of time and later released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of “yoked pairs.” A dog in Group 2 would be intentionally subjected to pain by being given electric shocks, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. A Group 3 dog was wired in series with a Group 2 dog, receiving shocks of identical intensity and duration, but his lever didn’t stop the electric shocks. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. For Group 3 dogs, the shock was apparently “inescapable.” Group 1 and Group 2 dogs quickly recovered from the experience, but Group 3 dogs learned to be helpless, and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.
That is to say, the dogs in Groups 1 and 2 did not appear to be depressed. The experiment had a second part:
In Part 2 of the Seligman and Maier experiment, these three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus, in which the dogs could escape electric shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the Group 3 dogs, who had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on the shocks, simply lay down passively and whined. Even though they could have easily escaped the shocks, the dogs didn’t try. Continue reading
Will Wall Street turn on its own over Libor? – Salon.com
23 JulHere’s where, maybe, Goldman Sachs comes into the picture. Because according to a Bloomberg report, Goldman — uninvolved in setting the Libor — is considering taking the law into its own hands and taking care of this Libor business with suits against the firms responsible. Like a fictional comic book metropolis, the financial industry is dreadfully underpoliced, and many of the cops are themselves on the take, so, logically, what Wall Street needs is a morally dubious but incredibly wealthy figure to operate outside the law to achieve order by any means necessary. That’s right: Goldman Sachs is going to become The Green Arrow.
via Will Wall Street turn on its own over Libor? – Salon.com.
What Happened to the Craftsmanship Spirit? — Essay – NYTimes.com
23 JulYes! Making things with your own hands is the most basic form of building things. All other forms are built on that. Whether you’re building a computer program, an industrial empire, a philosophical system, or a social club, building takes skills and those skills start with learning how to build things with your body.
It’s all very handy stuff, I guess, a convenient way to be a do-it-yourselfer without being all that good with tools. But at a time when the American factory seems to be a shrinking presence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, there is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship.
This isn’t a lament — or not merely a lament — for bygone times. It’s a social and cultural issue, as well as an economic one. The Home Depot approach to craftsmanship — simplify it, dumb it down, hire a contractor — is one signal that mastering tools and working with one’s hands is receding in America as a hobby, as a valued skill, as a cultural influence that shaped thinking and behavior in vast sections of the country.
via What Happened to the Craftsmanship Spirit? — Essay – NYTimes.com.
Truth and Traditions 