I am going to read this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/uoc-sda051809.php
Ok, I read it. I found his postulation that the size of different parts of the brain might be changed by your behavior a bit interesting. I wonder if you can separate the two.
When the government borrows money, lots of money, then there is a tendancy to be worried and alarmed that we are asking our children to pay for our fiscal mismanagement. The “future generations will have to pay for this” is often how it is phrased. And, of course; it is absolutely true.
What we forget to factor in is that our children will borrow from their children. Much in the same way that our parent’s generation borrowed from us. It works out because the population is growing. 20 years from now there will be more people on the planet and in our country than there are now. So the burdon of repaying the debt is always spread amongst more people than created the debt.
The Darwin angle.
Darwin postulated that human societies were just as subject to the process of natural selection as were species. I think the concept and execution of the behaviour we call “future generations will have to pay for this” or more simply, “Credit”, is the result of a fantasic adaptation to our environment.
What are the benefits of credit in this context and what are the environmental requirements of this adaptation.
Because of its very nature, it is a behavior that is passed on through generations so it has a very strong feedback loop. But the recording mechanism for the behavior is not DNA, it is humans.
The Effect of Population Waves
The human population is always growing but at a rate that is fluctuating. When the rate of growth is slowing, like now, in the wake of the Baby Boom Generation, there are relatively fewer people around to shoulder the burdon of repaying the generational debt. So we have to borrow more heavily in order to meet that debt.
Steve DeZordo is one of those guys who is just lucky. We used to rub his forhead before going out in San Francisco as a good luck charm so we would find a parking place (a big problem in San Francisco) - never failed.
I guess his luck continues. He has now rolled out a new product caboodlecats. I don’t have a cat, my wife is allergic. But it sure looks like it would be fun for the little critters. Hope it works out for him.
From what I understand about the automobile manufacturers its seems that they have a lot of valuable assets, like plants and design teams and marketing teams but that they just don’t work well together.
What if we bought out the big 3 and then split them up into a hundred smaller companies that could then sell their services independent of a brand or allegiance to a particular company. A plant that now makes Chevy Malibus could also manufacture Toyotas, or a parts manufacturer could make parts for a Ford brand or a GM brand. This would create thousands of new jobs as each new company would need its own corporate support structure. Standard Oil was broken up into 34 different companies and that worked out just fine.
It isnt right that these three companies get the bailout money but a new startup car company like Tesla doesn’t have access to these resources. They should be able to have their new car manufactured on a government subsidized assembly line too.
Something has gone terribly wrong with the government oversight of the economy when a company has gotten to large to let fail. There should be no companies that are so large that they can’t be allowed to fail. If a company gets to the point where it is too large then it needs to be broken up and the risk needs to be spread around.
Why wasn’t AIG broken up? How did it get to be too big? That is the question I want answered.
I was hanging out with my buddy Malcolm this weekend and we started riffing on a joke that really got us laughing. We were off to a concert at the Warwick Valley Winery, and being just the two bros we decided that it was a brocation. It was a great broment. Rated very high on the bromometer. So I went to spreadshirt.com and created a few new products.
With lower expectations everything seems better.
No? Maybe you havent lowered them enough.
Its a way of saying count your blessings. I always reflect on how lucky I am to never have fought in a war. My expectation was to get drafted. I can remember going down to the Bedford public library and register for the draft. The fact that I wasn’t drafted and was never shot at is wonderful. Low expectations.
Walmart’s new logo somehow made it past the corporate reviewers there. Didn’t anyone notice the starburst kinda looks like, how can I put this delicately, a cat from behind?
Some people argue that the decriminialization of drugs would result in more drug use. A new study by the World Health Organization suggests just the opposite. In the US, with one of the harshest drug policies, 42.4% of those surveyed said they used Marijuana. Whereas in the Netherlands, with their famously liberal drug policies, only 19.8 percent have used Marijuana.
Alternet has a great article about the report.
Published data from the survey on drug use
I’m going to spend some time reading the actual source document to see what else I can learn.