Short Takes
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
January 17, 2012 | 8:54 pmSays psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led [a] study published yesterday…
’The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’
Can you “figure out” why this is utter nonsense? I should as obvious as monkey see, monkey do. With this sort of thing passing for science, we are surely doomed.
- The Mark of Cain
November 9, 2011 | 3:13 amWatching Herman Cain duel with his female accusers is like watching the Jerry Springer Show. Not a pretty picture. If you partake, be sure an wash you hands afterwards.
- The Truth About Sovereign Debt
November 1, 2011 | 4:01 pmDuring the housing bubble people bet on rising home prices by taking out loans on to-good-to-be true terms and investment banking made bets on the rising home prices by lending on to-good-be-true terms. Everyone drank the Kool Aid. Prices went down. Having made bad bets, home owners should default on their loans and bankers should take their losses. This is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
The nations that joined the EU placed bets on rising economic prosperity that would come from joining the EU and adopting the Euro and borrowing from the EU banks on to-good-to-be-true terms. The EU investment bankers made speculative bets on EU member nations by lending them billions on to-good-to-be-true terms. The borrower economies went down not up. Everyone drank the Kool Aid and having made bad bets the borrowers should default on their loans and the bankers should take their losses. This too, is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
So how do the bankers hold the world hostage to their bad bets? They claim they are too big to fail. In other words, the only game they know is heads they win, tails we lose.
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- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
Author Archives: Critical Thinker
Grist for the Mill – Score, Cycles, and Roxana of Bactria
In an effort to get my feet back on the ground…
I recently decided to volunteer as a SCORE consultant to small business enterprises. This is basically doing what I have been doing for 30 years, but without the pay checks. … Continue reading
Rethinking Growth – Harvard Business Review
The Next Evolution in Economics: Rethinking Growth – HBR Now – Harvard Business Review.
Stan Stalnaker uses an organic metaphor to suggest that growth-centered economic behavior is cannibalizing the whole of our economic interests but that change is in the offing.
Stalnaker’s … Continue reading
Misleading Leading Indicators
The conventional wisdom of free marketism is that the stock market is a “leading indicator” and employment is a “lagging indicator”. The message you are supposed to read from this is that, even though more and more people are being … Continue reading
I Am, Therefore I Tweet
In my previous entry I put forth the idea that human beings are genetically compelled to communicate and that tweeting reflects this compulsion. Tweeting may or may not be useful communication.
Our compulsion to communicate was selected for because it enables … Continue reading
Why We Tweet
I woke up this morning to some tweeting and like so many others, couldn’t help thinking to myself why Twitter, the 140 character limited instant messaging system, has gained such popularity. The first answer that came to mind was the … Continue reading
Is the Art of Thought Dying?
There is a theory of human mind that suggests that thinking is really just a conversation in which we explore our ideas about the world with others.
We are all aware of our thinking when we converse with other people, but … Continue reading
Business Cycles – The Greatest Con Never Told
CON ARTISTS ARE CUNNING FOLK. Their game relies on tricking their “Marks” into seeing as meaningful, supposedly natural patterns of events that are, in reality, meaningless. Once their Marks are hypnotized into seeing these patterns as filled with meaning, the … Continue reading
Risky Business
The September 28th issue of The New Yorker contains an article worthy of note. In “A Life of its Own – Where will synthetic biology lead us?1“, Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer, leads readers along a yellow brick … Continue reading →