A Timely Quote from The Diamond Age
One summer, as he was living in Ames and working as a
research assistant in a solid-state physics lab, the city was actually
turned into an island for a couple of days by an immense flood.
Along with many other Midwesterners, Finkle-McGraw put in a few
weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic sheeting. Once
again he was struck by the national media coverage—reporters from
the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some
bewilderment, that there had been no looting. The lesson learned
during the Sioux City plane crash was reinforced. The Los Angeles
riots of the previous year provided a vivid counterexample. Finkle-
McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political
views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically
different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be,
and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not
a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some
cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view
implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never
voiced.
Charlie Sheen’s UStream Adventure
Charlie Sheen’s inaugural vidcast may be the most effective anti-drug promotion ever filmed. Now we know the real reason Bree Olson bailed. She apparently saw the script in advance.
This video is an object lesson in celebrity failure, a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to follow Sheen into fame and fortune.
I don’t know where stardom starts, but it ends in Sheen’s Korner.
This is what it looks like when your family has abandoned you, all your real friends are gone, and there’s no one left to give you a reality check. You end up behind a desk in a seedy home office with nothing but your producer, your drug dealer, and your spare girlfriend to keep you company.
Everyone in that room was paid to be there. Watch the way they laugh at his jokes — the microsecond pause before each laugh — too loud, too long and too clear for the joke that preceded it. Watch the random, disconnected way everyone behaves, like they’ve been in Sheen’s orbit so long they don’t even have free will — stuck waiting for the next bit of random wordplay, as if the last one to laugh is going to have their allowance cut off.
This is what the end of the road looks like. This is the new face of #despair.
Sheen’s debut is particularly poignant because PUA philosopher Roissy had just finished anointing Sheen as the super-alpha, the gold standard by which all lesser men should be judged.
There’s no doubt that Sheen handled that interview like an alpha. But now, scriptless, directionless, surrounded by sycophants, all that manic energy is gone.
Sheen’s previous performance was a kind of combat, a kind of verbal judo, fought against an intimidated reporter who never stood a chance. But now, with no opponent in front of him, with no challenge to rise to, Sheen looks like what he is — a lonely old drug addict, sliding into middle age.
The sponsors will RUN, not walk away from him now, and his career is effectively over. He may still have an Ozzie-style comeback left in him, but that’s many years away, after he spends a long, painful stretch #winning rehab.
@charliesheen needs to send his next tweet from a hospital, and that gap-toothed enabler on his left needs to be in jail.
Charlie Sheen takes his act to Twitter, but is it wrong to watch?
Subtitle for this one should be, “How to get one million Twitter followers in 25 hours.”
What’s the secret? Be Charlie Sheen.
Not content to be in the punch line of every joke on the Internet this week, Charlie Sheen took “winning” to the next level by starting a new account on Twitter. As I write this he has 1.2 million followers — including, regretfully, myself.
I felt a twinge of guilt as I clicked the Follow button yesterday because the act felt strangely personal, as if by giving Sheen this sliver of attention, I was actually contributing to the man’s downfall.
As I said on Facebook yesterday, “We’ve just given a suicidal narcissist a direct line into the lives of one million people.”
I think there are two distinct groups of people following Charlie Sheen today. Half the people wanted to be there for his first day on Twitter and the other half want to be there for his last.
Half of America wants to see him get better and the other half wants to watch him flame out.
Following a celebrity on Twitter is fundamentally different from reading interviews or watching them on television. Most media appearances are supervised by publicists who keep their celebrities on message and make sure they don’t drift too far from social norms.
Even most Twitter accounts are like that — sanitized, ghost-written lists of fluff churned out by assistants or carefully crafted by celebrities who know how to control their image.
But Sheen is playing without a net, so when the inevitable public meltdown comes, we’ll all have a front row seat. I’m afraid these million followers are going to be like another drug for Sheen, another source of manic energy, randomly prompting mood swings with every snarky comment.
Mark Cina at The Hollywood Reporter says Sheen’s Twitter account is a kind of publicity stunt, organized by a celebrity endorsement firm called Ad.ly. Comedian Patton Oswalt is saying the account is a fake, ghost-written by a service.
Perversely, these accusations are making me feel better. That implies there will be a level of editing here, a layer of cynical insulation between the audience and the star. Does using this spectacle for commercial gain make the situation more depressing, or less?
At first glance this is just another celebrity train wreck, but Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill has a different take. In his Wednesday Telegraph column he characterized Sheen’s outburst as a heroic stand against “the therapy police.”
O’Neill’s column was a real eye-opener for me because the average observer looking at our society would say we have no guiding principles at all. We pay lip service to the moral standards of our fathers and grandfathers but we treat most infractions with a wink and a nod.
The media brings us tales of promiscuity, drug use, binge drinking and destructive behavior as if it was all a kind of circus staged for our amusement. Sheen’s high-octane partying has inspired a kind of shameful awe, with the subtext that “all men would do this if they could.”
Our society is willing to tolerate any kind of self-destructive behavior from celebrities, as long as they’re willing to go on Oprah and apologize for it later.
O’Neill says by refusing to accept the diagnosis of mental illness, Sheen is committing the only unforgiveable sin.
“In his refusal to speak their lingo,” O’Neill says,” to play their game, to do what all celebs in his situation must do these days – arrange to be interviewed by Hello! so that they can be photographed weeping while confessing to having suffered a mental breakdown – Sheen is rebelling against the super-conformist modern narrative of weak individuals who need to be saved by psycho-priests. They won’t forgive him for this.”
I would take this one step further and note that the language of moral judgment has been replaced by the language of psychological diagnosis.
Charlie Sheen may be taking drugs, cavorting with prostitutes, risking his life and putting his kids in danger, but we’re not allowed to judge him. We can’t hold him up as a cautionary tale and condemn him as a moral failure. We have to understand him and encourage him to “get help.”
I worry that of these new million Twitter followers, half of them are celebrating Sheen’s lifestyle and the other half have tuned in to watch him die. I worry that Sheen is on his way to becoming a kind of stoner folk hero, and I worry that by subscribing to his Twitter feed, I’m deriving entertainment from the destruction of a human life.
Do these thoughts make me a hopeless prude? Probably. But there’s something very “Roman empire” about the way the mob is embracing Sheen’s lifestyle — celebrating his antics in the arena while they wait for the axe to fall.
Tax cuts won’t solve the problem
Republicans are celebrating (prematurely) now that Obama seems to be on board with preserving the Bush tax cuts.
I believe that tax cuts are always good, but doing something good for the economy is not the same as fixing the economy.
A friend of mine said recently that Keynesianism is a religion. Paul Krugman is using an unfalsifiable argument when he defends money printing and government stimulus. Sure, our predictions were wrong and unemployment is getting worse instead of better, but imagine how bad it would have been if we had done nothing.
Now Republicans are in exactly the same boat with tax cuts. Obama has called their bluff. They got what they wanted and preserved tax cuts for the “rich,” but what if the economy doesn’t improve?
What will the Republicans say? “Well sure, our predictions were wrong and unemployment is getting worse, but imagine how bad it would have been if we had let those tax cuts expire.”
Same unfalsifiable argument, same blind faith.
Tax cuts are really just another kind of stimulus. You can argue that private stimulus is more effective than government stimulus but even if we grant that, it misses the point.
The economy is not struggling because we lack “liquidity.” Demand for credit is going down, not up. There’s no monetary “shortage” out there. The problem is malinvestment. The succession of bubbles we’ve had in tech stocks, real estate, and bond markets have shifted the focus of the economy to things that cannot produce sustainable profits.
We have too many construction workers, too many bureaucrats and far, far too many real estate and finance professionals performing jobs that do not generate real wealth.
We have to regroup, refocus and retrain. Trillions in bad debt needs to be recognized, restructured and discharged. Hundreds of banks need to fail, thousands of mortgages need to be discharged and hundreds of executives on Wall Street need to go to jail.
Tax cuts are great, but tax cuts can not fix the fundamental problems with this economy.
Picture the economy as a big bucket with a small hole in the bottom. You’ve got a water hose that represents cash — money, liquidity, stimulus, tax cuts, whatever. Good investment stays in the bucket and raises the water level, bad investment leaks out of the hole.
You notice the water level in your bucket going down and you panic. You grab the hose and sure enough, the water level rises again, as long as you keep pouring water/cash into the bucket. But this action does nothing to patch the hole. You’re still leaking money out the bottom. In fact, when you add money into the system, velocity increases and the leak gets worse.
Congress comes along and has to make a choice. Are we going to let these tax cuts expire and reduce the flow of water into the bucket, or are we going to let things continue as they are?
Expiring the tax cuts would hurt the economy, i.e. reduce the total amount of water in the bucket, but they would also reduce the amount of bad investment leaking out the bottom. Allowing the tax cuts to continue will preserve the current rate of flow into the economy, but will do nothing to fix the fundamental problem.
Somebody needs to stand up and shout, “Hey! You’ve got a hole in that bucket!” and find a way to patch it. (In real life, this person is Ron Paul.)
But instead of listening to these people, politicians are arguing amongst themselves. Republicans say, “We need to cut taxes and pour hot water into the economy!” Democrats say, “The government needs to spend more and pour cold water into the economy!”
The only time they agree is when they get together on TV to shout, “Shut up, you idiots! The bucket’s fine! We’re just not getting enough water from the hose!”
This is the basic premise of the Austrian Business Cycle. Our efforts to patch the bucket may disrupt things and lower the total water level for a time, but the whole system will be healthier when we’re done. The repairs will be messy, but the repaired bucket will hold more water in the long run.
So no, I’m not expecting tax cuts to fix the economy. Honestly, I was hoping the Democrats would repeal them. This would serve two purposes. First, it would cause a surge in unemployment and provide evidence that tax cuts for the rich finance jobs for the poor. And second, they would force a lot of marginal companies to go bankrupt and help deflate the stock bubble on Wall Street.
We’re at the point where we must abandon our current tasks so we can focus our attention on better ones. Cutting interest rates and preserving the tax cuts encourages people to stick with the (failed) course they’re currently on.
A tax increase could provide a much-needed reality check to people who are currently addicted to easy money, reducing the “water level” so much, ordinary voters might even notice the hole in the bucket.
It’s a uniquely perverse way of looking at tax policy, but this is the world we live in.
So what should we do? Increase interest rates and stop the crazy flow of money that is making this problem worse. Free money from the Fed is encouraging all kinds of distortions in the market, to the point of rewarding blatant corruption. It must be stopped before things can get better.
The question is, will we stop it voluntarily, or will we have sanity imposed upon us, by a bond market that doesn’t believe our promises anymore?
links for 2010-12-10
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Note that if these tax cuts get approved, Republicans will be in the exact same position Krugman is in now. "You said tax cuts would help the economy! Where's my job?" "They helped a little, just not enough! And imagine how bad things would be if we had let them go back up!" Completely unfalsifiable arguments. We can't prove the stimulus prevented bigger losses and we can't determine what level of tax cuts would help. Ultimately, the problem cannot be solved with stimulus or tax cuts because they're both the same thing. The problem isn't lack of cash. The problem is malinvestment, and tax cuts do nothing to resolve that.
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There's a really good point made in this video. It's easy to be bearish on the market when you're watching economic fundamentals. We've seen bubble after bubble after bubble in my lifetime and we know these things are not sustainable in the long term. But what's "long term" when you've got every banker, every politician, and every bureaucrat in the world colluding to keep prices up? We have the power to create bubbles, and when one pops, money can quickly shift to a new one, until the music stops and there's nothing left to blow up. We're certainly headed there, but it may take years, perhaps even a decade to be real. Look how long Europe went before it even started talking about austerity. A lot of bulls can make a lot of money before reality hits.
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The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are "white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God."
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Whatever concerns I might have about Wikileaks, however, I’m still more troubled to see political actors pressuring intermediary firms in an effort to throttle a media organization that has been convicted of no crime. Indeed, the State Department’s assertion notwithstanding, it’s not clear that Wikileaks could be convicted in light of the strong precedent set by the Pentagon Papers case.
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Awesome video. Perfect summary of what's happening in Ireland and what is about to happen all over the world. Warning: contains Irish language. Give this man a TV show.
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"Rumor has it he answered more questions than Obama has at any time in his administration, including, I believe, one on Haiti. And, while he didn't quite come off as Al Haig, he was very much in charge. The reporters appeared to welcome him back as though he had never left. The scene was, many are saying, surreal."
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"Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That’s what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!"
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Hannity: "A stunning act of desperation."
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Disturbing. I think it makes Obama look weak. Particularly the way he left. This contrast does not enhance Obama, it reminds people of what they miss, a reminder of what leadership looked like. Dammit, I hate having to praise Clinton all the time, but he looks better with every year that goes by. Even after he lost the Congress, Clinton was always the alpha dog. This press conference was a terrible, terrible idea.
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Claim: PayPal will let you give money to the Klu Klux Clan but not to Wikileaks?
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Ah Fred Phelps, keeping stereotypes alive, literally praying for Anderson Cooper's death. WARNING: This video is super, crazy offensive. And please, as you watch it, remember that this man is to the average Christian what terrorists are to the average Muslim. There will always be crazy people at the fringes, but fundamentally, Christianity is a religion of peace.
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"Students in Europe who are rioting in the streets have it right. (And I am amazed that Texas college students have taken little action in the face of 86% tuition increases from 2003-2009.) Those European students should be outraged that their governments are unraveling a lifetime worth of mutually understood plans, infrastructure, and moral fiber."
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"So Netflix has a $9 monthly service plan that in effect, counts on you being able to push a $50 monthly service toward a traffic profile that the cable company would charge you $200 for, without paying the $200. If and when you're forced to pay the $200 or stop pounding your connection as if it was a business link Netflix instantaneously implodes."
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"In truth however, there are no real tax cuts in this proposal. The true burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes but how much it spends. Since this deal ensures that government will be more expensive next year than it was this year, American citizens will have to shoulder the added cost. Just because Congress has decided to deliver the bill with debt rather than current taxes does not mean that the spending will not be paid for. The only thing the plan accomplishes is to alter the means by which government spending is financed."
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"Satellite broadcasts of the US TV shows Desperate Housewives and Late Show With David Letterman are doing more to persuade Saudi youth to reject violent jihad than hundreds of millions of dollars of US government propaganda, informants have told the American embassy in Jeddah."
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"I have a crude, limited fashion sense that may well have cost me the love of my life, who implored me to dress like an adult rather than like the free-market Fonzie."
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The place with the highest median family income is the Washington, D.C., metro area, which includes the nation’s capital, as well as wealthy suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. In 2009 families in this region earned a median income of $102,340, a 0.7 percent increase from 2008. D.C. also boasts a better than average unemployment rate of 5.9 percent, far below the September’s 9.2 percent national average.
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Bush is apparently more popular than Obama in this latest poll. Talk about a race to the bottom!
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"Paul illustrates, in my view, the dark side of libertarianism. The Achilles heel of Paul's brand of libertarianism is foreign policy. You could describe him as an isolationist, but I think he is worse than that: during the Bush administration, his antiwar rhetoric took on a vicious quality. Today Paul showed once again why he is outside of the conservative mainstream. The House of Representatives voted 402-1 to congratulate Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo on her Nobel peace prize. The one Congressman who voted No was Ron Paul."
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Movies about geeks are inherently dishonest because they replace awkward, disconnected people with actors who form connections for a living. Movies gloss over the messy, boring business of working geeks with the slick, precise magic of Hollywood editing.
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Now, in an ironic turn, we've learned that there's another player in this drama who alleges that the Winklevoss brothers did a very similar thing to him.
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I saw this watch company sponsor a news program in 1952 and decided to see if they were still around. Turned out to be venerable Swiss company. I found a nice model in their Heritage collection and decided to check the price. Then I had a heart attack and died. At this moment my brain is animated exclusively by shock. Price for the "nice watch?" $4,500
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I love the fact that this video is available, easily searchable and permanently preserved in digital form. I wish it all was. Particularly notice McCarthy's appeal to Democrats and bipartisanship about 4 minutes in.
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If we have sound money – which simply takes an honest accounting and a zero-price-change foundation, then expansion of credit as a means of faking "growth" disappears and so does the ability to run nearly all financial Ponzi schemes. You either actually produce more or you don't – there is no more fake "wealth" produced through asset bubbles, because borrowing becomes relatively expensive – too expensive to do for other than either essential or productive purposes. That is, nobody borrows 100% of a house's price any more, nobody borrows 100% of a car's purchase price over 7 years, and almost nobody borrows except on an emergency basis (e.g. to fix said car) for "retail" purchases. They certainly don't use their house as an ATM machine nor do we have kids borrowing $150,000 for 4-year degrees in Sociology.
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A delightful and effective piece of propaganda. I almost used my "humor" tag for it, but it's really not funny at all.
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One major problem we have in this recession is that 2 million of the 8 million jobs that have been lost are in construction. Giving researchers in St. Louis government grants to study Parkinson’s doesn’t help out of work construction workers in Florida.
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President Obama’s deal keeps the lower personal income, dividend and capital gains rates enacted under President George W. Bush the same for at least the next two years. What’s new is a 2 percent reduction in social security payroll taxes for one year.
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“I don’t want to say it, but this could mean IOUs and more tax-refund deferrals,” Chiang said.
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Employment is escalating as energy and resources companies increase investment and hiring to meet demand from China.
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What’s so troubling about the Sunday interview is that it wasn’t Bernanke, the media-shy economist, talking. It was a politician attempting to bolster confidence in his constituents and support for his policies. That’s not an ideal character trait for a central banker at a time when official interest rates, already close to zero, can only go up.
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Imagine how much fun this is going to be when the real cuts start. I should probably create a "riots" tag.
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"While the comments about gold shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise, we are once again reminded of the beauty of defending Keynesian economics – you can always say that some outrageous (and quite impossible) amount of deficit spending and/or money printing is required to heal the economy and, then, after that amount is not offered up, you can say that policymakers just didn’t try hard enough."
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When the world itself is falling apart, the one thing that remains stable and defiant of all the hell breaking loose is the guild. Whether you are in a small casual guild with just your friends, a 10-man raiding guild, a 25-man one, or a hardcore raiding guild with over 50 active raiders, Cataclysm will introduce something new to your guild. You and your guildmates will be able to join efforts in order to bring your guild to a higher level, earn guild achievements, and unlock exclusive rewards!
links for 2010-12-09
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Presents Austrian economics to high school students using "mainstream" language that will prepare them for college.
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Operation Payback is facing a little payback of its own. First Twitter closed the pro-Wikileaks hacker movement's account. And now we hear the Feds are shutting down some online discussion of Operation Payback attacks.
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"The last time my father left, for real this time, the legal document that came to define our relationship decreed that I had to go there every other weekend. I'm not especially good at being told what to do, by anybody, and neither is he, so when I'd go to the trailer he lived in to angrily serve out my sentence he was rarely ever there. I did what any eighteen year old would do in this situation: I took advantage of his deep roster of top shelf liquor, perused his library of intense VHS erotica, and played darts. I would also take huge stacks of his CDs home to pawn. At the time, I felt like we were more or less coming out even. The upshot of all this, aside from the fact that it makes such a heartwarming Christmas tale, is that I learned Darts is actually a really good game."
links for 2010-12-08
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Ha! One of my favorite kooks has just been quoted in a Congressional hearing. I think this is a pattern. Lone, obsessed guys turning themselves into subject matter experts and setting up shop on the Internet. Now that the internet has connected everything one nerd with OCD can out-think an army of Princeton professors. Michael Burry is the obvious example, but I'd put Karl in the same category.
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"What is important about the latest Wikileaks release is the reaction these revelations have caused in the realms of government, media and corporate power in America—a collective reaction that I for one found startling, not to say frightening. To me, it revealed a New McCarthyism that transcends mere party affiliation and ordinary political divisions, and glides off into a realm of hatred for the individual—an enforced moral acquiescence, whereby a truth spoken is a truth that must be shut up, regardless of the cost."
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Jon Stewart's audience laughing at the Fed? I'll call that progress.
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This really surprised me. I knew the middle class tax cuts would be preserved but I didn't think the Republicans would be able to preserve tax cuts above $250,000. I thought there might be a millionaire tax compromise. Nothing's over until a bill is passed, but I'm surprised to see Obama caving so soon.
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When President Bush panicked on live television in September 2008, ushering in an era of bailout economics as unpopular as it has been ineffective, the backlash was inevitable, even if the exact form it would take was unpredictable. In our new era, you can smother an American political strain only for so long.
links for 2010-12-06
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A PLS is typically a bank savings account (though sometimes a government bond program) that pools some of the interest from all depositors and pays out big cash lottery prizes on a regular basis.
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Several U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show growing anxiety among Chinese officials about citizens getting uncensored online content through Google — with one Politburo member reportedly angry to find negative comments about himself online.
links for 2010-12-05
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PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.
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Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, which grooms future diplomats, has confirmed to The Lede that it did send an e-mail to students this week warning them to avoid posting comments online about the leaked diplomatic cables, if they ever hope to work for the State Department.
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A bank robber held 34 people hostage for more than seven hours in a nationally televised drama that ended when a police sniper crawled through a ventilation duct and shot him in the head, the authorities said. The robber died moments later.
links for 2010-12-04
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is poised to add the Internet to its portfolio of regulated industries. The agency's chairman, Julius Genachowski, announced Wednesday that he circulated draft rules he says will "preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet." No statement could better reflect the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of Obama administration policies.
Michael B. Duff 