Mr. Loeb’s views, irrespective of their validity, point to a bigger problem for the economy: If business leaders have a such a distrust of government, they won’t invest in the country. And perception is becoming reality.

It is precisely because these views are not questioned that they pose a problem for the economy. Were they questioned, in public, and confirmed, the process would benefit the marketplace of ideas. As is, they’re counterfeit goods. Baby formula made of talcum powder.

The author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, should know better.

As for the subjects of his report, the billionaire financiers who are upset at being painted as villains: grow a pair.

Or, better yet, try loving your country without such shallow conditions. If patriotism comes with a prenup, I’m pretty sure “hurt feelings” isn’t cause.

He warns:

This country is in a dark place economically unlike any I have seen in my half century or so of life. While I worry about the fiscal deficit and the trade deficit, we have seen those before and handled them. The more serious deficit we face is one that cuts to the very core of America’s character: it is an optimism deficit.

If the market was irrationally exuberant before, it’s irrationally pessimistic now. The fundamentals of the economy have not changed – only the finance sector has proven itself unworthy of being taken at face value.

Life isn’t easy. Anyone who peddles the contrary story is either lying or doesn’t know any better and is not to be trusted. But that same hardship is what makes hope meaningful. Without hardship hope is just wish fulfillment.

If ever there was a time for optimism, it’s now, when the glass is half full. When its running over the question is moot.

Thus, the possibilities for experiencing the delight of rickrolling will increase.

Here are a few suggestions to keep the rick rolling.

Every time someone orders:

• Scarface, show them Un prophète.
• Goodfellas, show them Gomorrah.
• Twilight, show them Let The Right One In.

Please add your suggestions below.

Directed by Bong Joon-Ho, written by Park Eun-kyo and Mr. Bong, with amazing shots by Hong Kyung-pyo and spellbinding acting by Kim Hye-ja. It’s a milestone not to be missed.

A mother’s love is the most creative and thus, possibly, the most destructive force. (cf. Kali)

To me, it has the range of movies like Chinatown, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Days of Heaven, Birth and Happy Together.

Good old Cuban-Mexican-American Flight of the Conchords / Future Sailors material from 1999-2000.

A more effective appointment system might be one that unfolds over a series of appointments, gradually preparing the mind for a necessary change rather than expecting it to make a hard turn.

While self-knowledge can certainly help in making more thoughtful routines for one’s mental efforts, there are likely to be basic rules that could be applied to improve this flow – and not just for one’s self but also for groups.

Thus, not only might there be optimal times to schedule specific types of meetings, there may also be optimal sequences for meetings – patterns, rhythms.

While organizations are likely to gradually find the right time for their own group thinking, that evolution could be facilitated (or accelerated) using insights on how to best condition the mind for different kinds of work.

A more perfect plan

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
– from To a Mouse, by Robert Burns

At the core of every appointment is a gaping hole: the unknowable future. Believing that the future will resemble the present is dangerous folly.

Because we can neither see into the future, nor fully control the workings of any system, no matter how closed, all plans are inherently lacking. The implications and/or consequences of these gaps will vary depending on the reasoning behind the plan rather than its details.

An intricately detailed plan that is ill-thought-out is more to likely to fail catastrophically. A plan drawn up in broad strokes but based on a well-thought-out logic will probably fail in a less dramatic fashion. What then is the best logic for planning?

The best logic is simply that which seeks to improve itself. The most successful planning methods require feedback, anticipate change and invite evaluation. Skepticism, not just of present conditions but also of past assumptions, is the utmost conservative gesture.

The thoughtless execution of a thoughtful plan can be its own undoing.

For example, if you lack something, being asked about it may trigger a different reaction than if you don’t lack it.

One could test this theory as follows.

When asked “Have you seen it?” If the answer is negative, you may hear, internally, a voice that says “want to see it” at the same time that you are deciphering the original question. This doubling of voices may result in your mishearing: “Do you want to see it?”

For example, if you have not seen a photo, being asked if you have seen it may prompt you to want to see it. It will induce a desire. If you have seen it, the question will simply prompt a recollection of that photo; which, while warm, will not feel as bright or sound as loudly as an unsatisfied desire.

We wear contacts to improve our sight. Why not wear miniature headphones to improve our ability to hear “distant” sounds?

“Listen to the breeze, listen to mp3s, listen to your favorite places and people, to translations and the news. Anytime, anywhere.”

What would a management consulting firm recommend? Has the RCC already hired one? Wouldn’t those reports be the property of the Church’s patrons: the laity? Could the laity request such a study be done?

Marshall implies that the activists slandering Muslims are unwittingly aiding and abetting Islamists and terrorists. I’m not sure it’s entirely unintentional – or, at least, undesirable.

Those who benefit from “holy war”, whether actual or rhetorical, politically, in terms of fund-raising or marketing, have an active interest in escalation and provocation.

Bin Laden isn’t just a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda and like terrorist groups. He’s also a recruitment tool for those who would claim him as a political adversary – in distinction from those who view him, instead, as a marginal sociopath, failed leader and criminal on the run.

The stronger Bin Laden appears, politically, the more attractive certain right wing policies and candidates seem.

Today’s dark public mood appears to be the culmination of a long stretch of national anxiety encompassing a historic terrorist attack and two lengthy wars, followed hard by the worst economic crisis of the last 75 years. The nation is in a period of volatility that started well before this year, and that may stretch well beyond it.

In the political realm, there’s no doubt that this environment will produce significant victories for Republicans in November’s congressional elections. But the long-term consequences are much less clear.

Washington, We Have a Problem, Vanity Fair:

The press may claim the vestigial title of Fourth Estate, but it is the lobbying industry that is now effectively the fourth branch of government…Organizations you’ve never heard of wield far more influence in the capillaries of the bureaucracy than any elected official.

The Empty Chamber, The New Yorker

While senators are in Washington, their days are scheduled in fifteen-minute intervals: staff meetings, interviews, visits from lobbyists and home-state groups, caucus lunches, committee hearings, briefing books, floor votes, fund-raisers. Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning…

Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said, “Of any free time you have, I would say fifty per cent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising.

Not unlike the epic challenges posed by previous existential threats, our generation will have to focus on the increasingly absurd government of the United States of America; an awesome tool that has been modified to serve the narrow interests of the few instead of the multiple interests of the many: a more perfect Union, Justice, domestic Tranquility, the common defence, the general Welfare, the Blessings of Liberty.

There’s no other way forward as we confront the inevitable upheavals brought about by climate change, the “creative destruction” wrought by the global economy, the threats posed by terrorism (physical or virtual, anarchic or state-sponsored); in short, all the risks inherent in our complex civilization.

As you would expect, Gingrich doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. Which is especially a bummer if you consider all the real existential threats we Americans face. If you’re going to scare monger, at least do it right.

That this intellectually dishonest, self-serving hypocrite is considered an intellectual powerhouse in the Republican party should shed some light on just how craven and base are the impulses that prolong its popular influence in the U.S..

They really do appeal to the worst of us. Ronald Reagan must be turning over in his grave.

This might be a verifiable claim. At least when it comes to how we talk on mobile or smart phones.

You wouldn’t need humans to interpret transcripts – you’d use computer programs already being tested. You could thus graph the ebb and flow of relationships and identify the speech patterns of certain cities, states, life stages, income brackets, religions, political parties, etc. You could compare the habits of nations and/or population subsets across national borders.

It may not produce earth-shattering insights but then neither is being told that drinking a little wine here and there can help you live a long life. At the very least, it will be more information about our speech patterns than we have now.

Scenario one: Little Brother

Without invading their customers’ privacy, our telcos could tell us whether we are, on average, listening as often as we’re talking. Or, for that matter, how often we ask questions of people with whom we’re engaged in frequent and lengthy conversations. These companies already monitor who we’re calling and for how long – though they don’t appear to publish this data, in aggregate. Why not ask them to monitor the gaps and register changes in our voice calls and require them to publish this information?

Scenario two: The more you talk with us, the more you know yourself.

Instead of asking the telcos to do it, you could motivate callers to do it for their own quality of life as well as for the sake of science. An app that tells you when you’re adopting an unfriendly tone (consciously or not) could also ask you if you would like to share your patterns either anonymously or as a “friend feed” for a site like Facebook or Twitter.

In relying on volunteers you’d only reach the subset of Americans interested in changing the way they talk to one another. According to Peter Hessler, that may not be too many people. According to Oprah Winfrey, it might be quite a few.

Would you be tainting the data by giving users real-time feedback? Perhaps not. People smoke despite warnings. People go on diets and then break them. The estimated size of the self-help industry suggests results vary.

In any case, one could factor for the distortion caused by immediate feedback by creating control groups. The app could be randomly set, by default, to provide some users with less granular data – say, daily or weekly reports.

Previously: Peter Hessler on the Chinese Barbizon. Hessler is an absolutely wonderful writer.

No doubt the president’s advisers would much have preferred not to address [the Islamic community center] at all, wish it had never come up. But it’s difficult to imagine any president doing otherwise. We learn again that saying you’re for “democratic values” and freedom actually means being for “democratic values” and freedom. Are we in the tradition of the opening and plural societies of Amsterdam and London and America? Or the closed and authoritarian ones of Madrid and Moscow? The infrastructure of the Republican party has chosen to hoist its sail to religious bigotry. There’s no other way to put it. The president has done the only thing he could possibly do which is to state clearly that we’re Americans and we don’t discriminate on the basis of religious belief.

President Obama is not the most aggressive champion of liberal values (19th century liberal, 20th century liberal) but he is a champion nonetheless.

The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours back to the seas. As it does so it washes away whole mountain ranges—which then rise again from sea-floor sediments when oceans squeeze themselves shut. As oceans reopen new crust is pulled forth from volcanoes; old crust is destroyed as tectonic plates return to the depths from which those volcanoes ultimately draw their fire.

…Water lasts in the atmosphere for a fortnight or so; carbon dioxide stays in the oceans for thousands of years. Mountains rise and fall over tens of millions of years; oceans open and close at rates even slower than that.

And for some things, in some places, there is a sort of stillness. The argon in the atmosphere just sits there, inert. The crystalline cratons at the centres of continents get neither buried nor torn apart by plate tectonics, though they may sometimes be submerged in shallow seas and sediments as they drift from place to place. Not everything, everywhere is in flux. But it feels as though the harder scientists look at the world, the fewer islands of stability they find.

Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

Land-based wind power — this year deemed “potentially competitive” with fossil fuels by the International Energy Agency in Paris — has expanded sevenfold in that time. And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.

“I’ve seen all the smiles — you know: It’s a good dream. It can’t compete. It’s too expensive,” said Prime Minister José Sócrates, recalling the way Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, mockingly offered to build him an electric Ferrari. Mr. Sócrates added, “The experience of Portugal shows that it is possible to make these changes in a very short time.”

Here’s my response wherein I argue that if the item is fun to use, pretty to look at, and works well for many years after it was purchased, it will keep its value to its owner. (There are items that “work great,” are cheap to buy, but eventually are neither fun to use nor pretty to look at. These are discarded quite easily. Are they good design? Not really.)

I also wondered if requiring 50 year-warranties on items with a certain footprint might be an effective way to promote innovation in the private sector?

What would such a nudge mean for personal computers? They are currently problematic, to say the least, when it comes to waste. Mismanaged waste disrupts the environment, leading to global security issues.

Could we reach a point in the current trend of mass computing where the Internet cloud is so powerful you won’t really need a new terminal every five years but rather can buy a terminal that works great, looks pretty and is fun to use for 20 years? What would computers look like if they came in truly classic and collectible varieties? A ’68 Mustang, an ’83 XJ-6.

Such computers might look like the computers in science fiction movies prior to the 1980s: computers as home appliances, designs meant to last for decades.

Essentially, talking furniture.

While it’s possible to conceive of computers being omnipresent – contact lenses, ear buds – I think we’ll always want a physical anchor, even if it becomes purely symbolic.

“There is no God but God” is not a religious statement (“There is a god” would suffice for that), it’s a philosophical claim.

“There is only one god” is not so much a statement of faith in the beyond as it is a statement of faith in what man can know.

It is ironic that this first step towards scientific thinking should be a leap of faith.

Downing saw in Birkenfeld nothing more than an overly clever informant trying to blow the whistle to his own tune. And that is when the music stops with the Justice Department.

After reading responses to Google’s announcement I got the impression that half of Wave’s potential users didn’t know how to use it and the other half, the one’s who were willing to figure it out, couldn’t find other people with whom to make it up as they went along.

The latter problem suggests an alternate rollout. Google said they intended Wave to replace email. While email is undeniably useful for work it’s also, like all communication, a form of play.

Perhaps, Google could have introduced and refined the concepts of Wave by presenting it as a way to play and nothing more. Such modesty would have ruffled feathers but it could have stimulated valuable and relatively low-cost development from the public at large.

Google has famously out-sourced some of its development using millions of “beta testers”. Why it didn’t do so with Wave, a product as open-ended and thus deserving of social development, is, to me, an interesting mystery.

previously: Facebook as a MOO.

Etymonline:

1839, only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for “no go,” as if spelled “know go”); in this case, “oll korrect.”

Merriam-Webster as paraphrased in Wikipedia:

This apparently resulted from a fad for comical abbreviations that flourished in the late 1830s and 1840s. The abbreviation in this case is from the misspelled “oll korrect.”

Bottle by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby for Cappellini

Bell-table by Sebastian Herkner from ABR

Cupola by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby for Meta

Lighthouse by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Established & Sons

Racer, a racing video game with actual physics (i.e., an actual RC mobile camera).

previously
physical spaces that simulate artificial spaces

Surface table by Terence Woodgate and John Barnard for Established & Sons

Richard Hofstader writing in 1954 with my changes in brackets:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the [Tea Party] revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the [Tea Party member] experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of [Bill Clinton]. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the [Middle East] — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed. He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he naturally does not like [Islamic fundamentalism], what distinguishes him from the rest of us who also dislike it is that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-à-vis [Islamic fundamentalists]. He would much rather concern himself with the domestic scene, where [Islamic fundamentalism] is weak, than with those areas of the world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the [Middle East], and he is opposed to all “give-away programs” designed to aid and strengthen these nations. Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except Congressional investigations, and to almost all of its expenditures. Not always, however, does he go so far as the speaker at the [Tea Party convention] who attributed the greater part of our national difficulties to “this nasty, stinking 16th {income tax} Amendment.”

Nothing of consequence has changed between now and then, between their revolt and ours.

What role has this political movement played over the last half-century? Is it even a political movement, at all, Hofstader channeling Adorno wonders, or rather a way of avoiding politics; a nihilism disguised even from its own adherents as conservatism.

Is it a way of thinking or simply a way of feeling? A feeling which expresses itself in rhetoric that does not wish to change the status quo – which provokes it – but instead wishes only to amplify its own feelingness? Is this process a way of prolonging a pain (and/or anger) that has become meaningful and helpful?

Toxic feelings are intoxicating. As anyone who has ever escaped from the vicious cycle of a domestic dispute can attest, strong feelings can become pleasurable, however perverse this may seem from the outside or after the fact.

We “nurse” grudges. Strong feelings protect themselves by steering their subjects away from resolution. They are a flame that does not want to be extinguished, that would rather burn down its entire world than be put out.

People participate in politics out of a sense of shared responsibility as well as self interest. But self-interest need not be strictly rational. The process of politics can also satisfy emotional needs. A political movement which satisfies primarily emotional needs is not concerned with real change. In fact, it’s not strictly speaking a political movement but rather a social one. It is motivated not by ideas but by feelings.

From a political standpoint, it might thus be counterproductive to engage an an emotionally-driven, social movement as if it were primarily an ideologically-driven political one.

This does not mean ignoring its political import as that would mean abandoning the political process. Rather, it requires that the political response be complemented with a cultural strategy. In addition to addressing the political claims made by such movements – precisely because they are incoherent and/or inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution (created as it was to “establish Justice”) – we must also address the “real suffering” these positions mask.

Even if these are self-inflicted wounds (e.g., the cognitive dissonance and thus real discomfort a racist feels upon having to accept a mixed-race President), they are wounds, nonetheless. In fact, I hazard that these are often proxy wounds.

I believe that such movements provide a socially acceptable cover for expressing deep personal pain: “I hurt.” They are additionally appealing because they allow such expressions without requiring of the injured party that she or he examine their own role in their discomfort.

They provide a public alibi for private distress. By immersing themselves in a broader social narrative – thin and convoluted as it may be – the participants avoid reckoning with their own personal narrative.

The incoherence of the Tea Party is thus not a bug, it’s a feature. Its members are not looking for integration, they are avoiding it. Such movements have more in common with the romanticism of religious revivals than with the realism of political organizations.

In the essay cited above, Hofstader goes on to ask if this isn’t a distinctly American condition, “a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity.” But I suggest this is a universal condition, a response to the insecurity of identity. The less noble face of the religious impulse.

table bench chair from established & sons (2009)

CH24 from Carl Hansen & Son (1950)

Chair no. 14 from Thonet (1859)

This discussion on MetaFilter is mostly more of the same: the policing of art with a variety of interchangeable though not always compatible standards. For example, commercial art must be X, art for women must be Y, art about cities in developing countries must be Z, etc.

Which prompted me to wonder: if one common standard for “politically conscious” critiques of art is whether the work introduces a difficult topic to mass media, hasn’t the Rodarte makeup line, facile and shallow as it was intended to be, been more “successful” than the Lourdes Portillo documentary, deep and thought-provoking as it is and was intended to be?

According to Google, there are currently 32,600 results for “lourdes portillo juarez” versus 281,000 results for “rodarte juarez.”

Personally, I don’t believe art should be judged by its political consequences. Political acts should be judged by their impact. Likewise, art that is, in essence, a political gesture should be judged by its political impact. As for the Rodarte makeup line, here’s an excerpt of my comment on MetaFilter:

I don’t care for the Rodarte fashion. It’s purposely dark and creepy. That’s what they do. Should I be outraged by their aesthetic in general or only when it invokes a reference that is mainstream?

…What are appropriate topics for fashion? Are they different than topics appropriate for art? Why?

…Or, simply: fashion is a superficial art form. On purpose. If your critique of fashion is that fashion is superficial, it may be your observation that is shallow and lazy.

fwiw: The most expensive also has the least lines.

The price of stocks is a look into the future. You sell it based on what you think it’s going to be worth, you buy it for what you think it’s going to be worth. Either way, its present price is a reflection of a future price. Moreover, these predictions become reality the more people make the same prediction.

There’s not too many things I can think of that are so strongly tied to a future state.

Wouldn’t the great⁹ grandchild of the luckiest couples on Earth be the luckiest kid on Earth?

The luckiest kid on Earth would be a nice story for children.

Aside
I’ve stolen the idea of breeding for luck from Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a science fiction novel I read an-astonishing-to-me 25 years ago. It’s quite a sticky idea to have stayed with me all these years.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn the ins and outs of how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide:

Within these pages, you’ll discover the tools and options you need to create detailed worlds and dynamic adventures for your players to experience in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

Although if this pricing index became popular it would probably eliminate some really sweet deals.

Come on, Kinect developers, let’s see what you’ve got.

Can supercomputers and massive amounts of data help businesses make that leap more consistently – with less risk of falling flat? For a few years now, Netflix has been trying to answer that question. No doubt Google and Amazon are also engaged in the same experiment as are hundreds if not thousands of other groups.

It’s noteworthy that the building block of these prediction engines is the human mind on a mass scale; or, more precisely, what logic we can infer from human behavior as expressed via simple human-computer interfaces – liking, recommending, a one-to-five star rating system, purchasing, gifting, etc. It’s a curious “gold rush” to tap the collective conscious.

We spend a great deal of time thinking, talking and acting upon this collective conscious, a complex system of actions and reactions that define our society, from politics to marketing, from trend-setting acts like Lady Gaga to the recent controversy around vaccines and autism.

Yet we seldom talk about the collective unconscious, a concept which to me is as essential as other simple machines like the pulley or inclined plane. Invoking the collective unconscious, if only as a tool, allows us to take a interesting perspective on how thinking happens.

To me, the tool works by laying out a few rules based on observable phenomena: that we are not exactly who we think we are; that an idea may contain another, very different idea; that we can never see the ground upon which we are standing – that for there to be a known there must also always be an unknowable unknown; that we communicate with one another in ways we are not aware of; that we think in ways we cannot be fully aware of lest that awareness impede the very process of our thinking.

Let’s say our predictive engines get very good at catering to consumer wants; that 9.999 times out of 10, the engine I use to help me choose the next movie I watch results in a highly pleasurable movie viewing experience. Much of the data being used to make these predictions is coming from the aggregated choices of other people (in the future, it’s not just Soylent Green that is made out of people!) To the extent that these people are engaged in conscious choices, let’s assume they are also being guided by unconscious choices.

In the same way that these social filtering mechanisms create feedback loops whereby a popular item can become a super-popular item, don’t they also become feedback loops for unconscious trends?

Thus, instead of one person committing a “Freudian slip,” we can imagine an entire society committing a Freudian slip? In essence, an entire society playing a massive trick on itself.

I’d love to see that. But, then, by the very rules of the unconscious, I can’t.