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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Archive for Short Takes »
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
Category Archives: Great Thinkers
The Medium is NOT the Message
Marshall McLuhan famously asserted that “the medium is the message”. His idea is one that is very much in play today as the “new media” have immersively engulfed the whole of the human enterprise. So is the digital revolution actually causing us … Continue reading
Lost Leaders
American enterprise has a problem with quality. Pretty much everything we produce is shoddy stuff of questionable value–clever glittering baubles principally designed to come between bedazzled consumers and their wallets. Some say our problem with quality has to do with … Continue reading
Brain Porn
Alva Noe, philosopher, author and NPR blogger, has a fine post on the long overdue backlash against purveyors of brain porn who claim to be able to use neural imaging technologies to peek under our psychic dresses and see the … Continue reading
Science v. Magic
I did not know that at the root of the word SCIENCE was the idea of taking the world apart. I also had not realized that at the root of the word SYSTEM was the idea of putting the world … Continue reading
Knowing Everything There Is To Know
According to a NYT Sunday Review piece, “Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them“, Gilad Elbaz wants…
“…to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.”
He also wants to get rich and … Continue reading
Our Market Society
The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide … Continue reading
Profits are Dangerous to your Health
Half a century ago, U. S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, formerly General Eisenhower, spoke prescient words to the American people:
“…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the … Continue reading
Democracy OR Capitalism?
Democracy and Capitalism are two very big ideas. Democracy is an idea about a method people can use to govern themselves. Capitalism is an idea about how some people think we should produce and distribute wealth among people.
So what do … Continue reading
Bill Moyers Interviews Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson on Engineered Inequality
If you haven’t seen this interview, it is well worth watching. After watching it, give some thought to follow up questions below.
Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson on Winner Take All Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Follow-up Questions:
If inequality is engineered by … Continue reading
Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK)
Even if you are not involved in business management and know and care nothing about the ideas of the great teacher, Dr. W. E. Deming , the following discussion of what he resorted in his later years to calling, a … Continue reading
It don’t mean thing if it ain’t got that swing
FWIW — The following riff was prompted by Barbara King’s post on NPR’s 13.7 blog, “Homo Narrans: Humans As Story-Tellers (And Listeners)“, in which the nature of memory came up.
In a comment, Barbara wrote, “…But does every story originate solely … Continue reading
Atomic Economics
I have always thought I had a fairly good understanding of economic theory but, as is the case for many of us, over the past five years my acquaintance with the subject has grown much deeper. In Economics, there are … Continue reading
Starling Patterns
There’s no true fixed point of reference in life. The observed and the observer in interaction, constantly vary. There is only relation between patterns. And for a knowing creature, patterns carry meaning.
“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing … Continue reading
Ph.D. Not Required To Solve Our Economic Problems
Like the rest of us, Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Paul Krugman, whom I nominated some time ago as “Best in Breed”, is having dismal thoughts.
“I’m still trying to make sense of this global intellectual failure. But the results are … Continue reading
Our Kingdom of Lies
Heres an interesting but not surprising article in NYT today on healthcare pricing.
“There’s very little transparency out there about what doctors and hospitals are charging for services,” Mr. Zirkelbach said. “Much of the public policy focus has been on health … Continue reading →