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The Investment Banker and the Fisherman, Delayed Gratification

3 Aug

[and a bonus joke for free, because that’s how we are in TNT]

Here’a bit of wisdom from Hindi jokes (which, BTW, hits you with about a dozen adds interspersed among the lines of a joke, LOL!).

* * * * *

An Investment Banker was at the pier of a small coastal Indian village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna.

The Investment Banker complimented the Fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked, “How long does it take to catch them?” The Fisherman replied: “Only a little while.”

An Investment Banker was at the pier of a small coastal Indian village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna.

The Investment Banker complimented the Fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked, “How long does it take to catch them?” The Fisherman replied: “Only a little while.”

The Banker then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The Banker then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take dinner with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play cards with my friends, I have a full and busy life.”

The Banker scoffed, “I am a MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats.

Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution.

You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mumbai, then London and eventually New York where you will run your expanding enterprise.” Continue reading →

Small Nations’ Alliance « Second Vermont Republic

3 Aug

Objective: To encourage (1) the nonviolent breakup of meganations such as the United States, China, Russia, and India; (2) the peaceful coexistence of a community of small, sustainable, cooperative, democratic, socially responsible, egalitarian, nonviolent, ecofriendly nations; and (3) the independence of small breakaway states such as Quebec, Tibet, and Vermont.

via Small Nations’ Alliance « Second Vermont Republic.

Thomas H. Naylor: A Community of Small Nations for a Sustainable Planet

3 Aug

World-wide localization. To cure the cancer, shrink it.

I believe it is high time for the smaller nations of the world to begin withdrawing from the United Nations. The U.N. is morally, intellectually, and politically bankrupt. It is time for these smaller nations to confront the meganations of the world and say, “Enough is enough. We refuse to continue condoning your plundering the planet in pursuit of resources and markets to quench your insatiable appetite for consumer goods and services.” These small nations should call for the nonviolent breakup of the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, and the other meganations of the world.

A small group of peaceful, sustainable, cooperative, democratic, egalitarian, ecofriendly nations might lead the way. Such a group might include Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Could it happen? Who knows. The Soviet Empire fell apart under its own weight, and Russia’s still struggling. Back in 1400 who’d have thought that the British Empire would span the globe. And look what happened to that.

via Thomas H. Naylor: A Community of Small Nations for a Sustainable Planet.

Cruel Isolation of Prisoners – NYTimes.com

2 Aug

Who’s the Tomás de Torquemada of the California prison system? Has the US Prison system passed the Inquisition in cruelty? Has it reached the gulag level?

Once used occasionally as a short-term punishment for violating prison rules, solitary confinement’s prevalent use as a long-term prison management strategy is a fairly recent development, Colin Dayan, a professor at Vanderbilt University, said in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times. Nationally, more than 20,000 inmates are confined in “supermax” facilities in horrid conditions.

via Cruel Isolation of Prisoners – NYTimes.com.

Scientists map religious forests and sacred sites

1 Aug

The Oxford researchers estimate that religious groups own about eight per cent of land across round the globe, much of it being covered in forest, and about 15 per cent of the world’s surface is ‘sacred land’ – land that has ‘sacred’ connotations rather than being necessarily owned by faith communities….

The Oxford research team is engaged, firstly, in investigating what legal or official data exists on boundary lines and the rights to the land. Once the status of the land and its boundaries are known, the geographical co-ordinates can be entered onto their database at the Biodiversity Institute.

The researchers will work with groups of many different faiths: those who manage the sacred groves in India, the Shinto shrines in Japan, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which owns 300 fragments of forest including the last remnants of Afro-montane tropical forest containing rare and endangered insects. The religious sites appear to contain a high proportion of species that feature on the IUCN’s Red List (of threatened species).

via Scientists map religious forests and sacred sites.

The intersection of food, design and politics

1 Aug

Fascinating images from the Good Olde Days (But the Best Days are Yet to Come).

Above and below are some samples from The Diggers Archive, a group of radical thinkers from 1960s San Francisco that used food (free healthy food!) as part of their art and political message. These pieces are from their newspaper FREE CITY NEWS, that showcased some pretty cool hippie graphic design.

via The intersection of food, design and politics – Imprint – Salon.com.

Gowanus – Big Development Can Wait

31 Jul

Resilience at the margins. Check it out.

Artists and small businesses priced out of other neighborhoods have been taking up residence in the old warehouses. Nightclubs have popped up on streets that taxi repair shops and truck depots once dominated. Restaurants, bars and bakeries have all moved in, creating a scene that longtime Brooklyn residents compare to Dumbo before the multimillion-dollar lofts and Williamsburg before Bedford Avenue became a destination.

Why is it the artists that pioneer these areas? There’s something both obvious and deep there.

via Gowanus – Big Development Can Wait – NYTimes.com.

Sure Cure for Debt Problems Is Economic Growth [Yeah, right! But…]

31 Jul

The super-rich: have got it figured out: How to keep their part of the economy, that part that feeds their bank accounts, growing. The neat thing is they can keep things growing in their back yard even when the overall economy is stagnant. Which means that,for the rest of us, the economy is shrinking. Back  in the old days, the economy grew for everybody: win-win. Now it grows for the rich, but not for us: win-lose.

And the rich don’t care. Why should they, they hardly even notice. Because it just doesn’t affect them.

“The basic issue is that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal track,” says Dean Maki, the chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. “From that point, none of the choices are fun.” The most obvious choices, Mr. Maki says, are to reduce spending (ouch), raise taxes (yuck), let inflation run (gasp) or default (thud).

We wouldn’t need any of that if we could restore economic growth. If that happened, Americans would become richer and pay more taxes. Et voilà! — we’d pay down the debt painlessly.

via Sure Cure for Debt Problems Is Economic Growth – NYTimes.com.

JOURNAL: Central Planning and The Fall of the US Empire – Global Guerrillas

30 Jul

The always interesting John Robb notes that Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of bad decisions made through central planning. Lots of resources were used badly. That wasn’t supposed to happen in market-driven USofA. Now it has:

The succession of market bubbles, the global financial collpse of 2008, and the recent US debt problem is prima facie evidence that gross misallocation has occurred for decades. The wealth of the West, particularly the US, is being spent on the wrong things year after year, decade after decade. We are now as fragile as the Soviet Union in the late 80’s.

What happened?

Central planning took over the decision making process in the US, both through the growth of government and through an unparalleled concentration of wealth.

The emergence of a class of the SUPER-RICH, Robb argues, has led to a form of central planning:

The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy.   As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces.  A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth.  The result was inevitable:  gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.

via JOURNAL: Central Planning and The Fall of the US Empire – Global Guerrillas.

Foul Use

29 Jul

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