Author: Curt Doolittle

No memory of yesterday. None. Reaction to sulfites is increasing as exposure decreases.

“The Department of Transportation found that, in 2009, commutes by private car took, on average, 23 minutes. Public transportation, by contrast, took an average of 53 minutes. “

Public transportation is slow. It’s loud. It’s ugly, and it’s dirty. It’s only suitable for people with very regular schedules. It dampens consumption. It’s absurdly expensive per person – particularly rail. It feeds the public sector bureaucracy. It allows large corporations to get subsidized labor rather than pay increased wages. And frankly, it’s unsanitary. So, it’s all well and good that downtown cores make use of public transportation. But otherwise, we’d be better off giving people zero interest used car loans. I realize some people love it. And as a resident of downtown Boston I appreciated it – when I wasn’t freezing to death in the wind chill. But I don’t have the regular schedule, the extra hour a day to waste, plus the extra time on either side of the work day, nor the time to make separate trips for groceries and what-not. Even in Germany almost eighty percent of the population commutes by car. I’m glad that some people think it’s sensible. But the math doesn’t make sense to me at all.

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=10259The types of inequality

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/does-americas-99-percent-represent-the-top-1-percent-on-earth/2011/10/12/gIQA5JVQfL_blog.htmlPerspective

http://www.eif.org/news_centre/publications/eif_wp_2011_009_EU_Venture.pdfAn interesting paper on the weakness of the VC community, and general entrepreneurship in Europe vs the USA. Personally, my experience is that too much money is captured in government hands where it does not seek speculative (high) returns. (And therefore does not create jobs.) The authors also note that VC’s in europe are predominantly from finance, not entrepreneurs, engineers or scientists and therefore lack the knowledge to invest in risk ventures. Personally, I think the cultural issues ( Americans are very tolerant of risk and willing to work very, very hard in startups) are not insignificant. Nor is the anti-capitalist sentiment very helpful.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/opinion/how-to-stop-the-drop-in-home-values.htmlSomeone else catches on.

If we had written down mortgages in 2007 when I suggested it, we’d have had almost NO recession and saved ourselves something on the order of ten trillion in value.

This was one of the very few boom-bust cycles that was eminently fixable.

Power: “The opportunity to alter the probability of outcomes”.

Sovereignty: “Power”

Will to Power: “The Human Desire For Sovereignty”

Given the diversity of individual ability, the diversity of individual knowledge, and the diversity of the social classes, all desire for sovereignty is constant, but the expression of it varies almost infinitely. Those at the bottom desiring sovereignty from constraints of scarcity and status deprivation, and those at the top desiring sovereignty of expression over that of their competitors for the ultimate in status attainment. Amidst this vast chaos of wills, the public intellectual attempts to define status – a re-distributor and appropriator of not just money, but status and power.

Make no mistake. It’s all about money, status and power.

In practical terms, Religions establish the terms by which the population consents to be ruled. Religions differ from systems of ethics, in that they are far harder to alter in response to fashion – ethical systems have a predictable and known life cycle that ends in skepticism and abandonment of the necessary self sacrifice that allows societies to exist as economic entities. Religions seem to persist on a much longer life cycle. THey can be altered, such as the Germanicization, or the enlightenment of christianity. I’ll write more on this topic over the next few years. It’s a core theme of my work. Religions do not need a magical component. Nor do they need a divinity. THey can be constructed without either. But I have come to believe that religions, as political constructs, are a necessary property of any civilization – of any people, of any government. I had previously thought that they were simply exceptional pedagogical tools, given the limitations of human youth and the diversity of human age and ability. But I’m convinced otherwise. We need a new religion. Because we need a new means of persisting the terms by which we consent to be ruled — governed. The west is unique and it was superior, because of ONE BELIEF: THat in all things, we should maintain the balance of power. Christianity can only evaluated as one element of the balance of power. It provided a means by which the collapsing mercantile and bureaucratic south to maintain it’s influence over the militaristic and tribal north. It functioned as a judiciary among the competing european monarchical states. It provided a balance between the state and the individual by establishing the terms by which they would consent to be ruled. It provided a political and military means of balancing the poorer and fragmented west against the wealthier and totalitarian east. We have all but abandoned christendom in our quest for world dominance – we have done this consciously as cross-civilization traders and conquerors who establish a new ethics based upon the necessities of economics — the ethics of trade and trade alone. We have all but abandoned christianity as our pseudo-rational basis of ethics, and the underlying system of ethical pedagogy in an effort to build an international empire, and a domestic multi-cultural society, based upon the economics of trade and trade alone. But we are abandoning the one thing that made the west successful despite it’s weakness, despite it’s poverty, despite it’s small size: the balance of powers. And a balance of powers is only possible among people with a similar framework of ethics. To the rest of the world, a balance of power is antithetical. And a balance of power cannot be enshrined purely in a constitution. The destruction of our constitution by way of the commerce clause, and the conversion of our supreme court from protestant ethical judgements to jewish and catholic judgements is proof enough. The proletarianization of the political mythology into totalitarian democracy and away from noble or upper-class balance-of-powers, and in particular, the balance of powers between social classes is the cause of our loss of western identity. We need a reformation. That reformation needs to specifically state the underlying ethics of the balance of power – where private property for the individual, and the separation of powers, which requires consent of the social classes, is our ethic. Everything else isn’t progressive. It’s regressive. Regressive into those systems which are used elsewhere but led nowhere. The industrial revolution happened twice. Once in greece. Once in England. Both times under rule by the middle class under a balance of power.

Well, technically speaking, she’s NOT in the 1%.

Someone ELSE made the money and gave it to her.

So that person is in the 1%.

And she’s hoping everyone can inherit like she did? Right?

Is that her logic?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/apple-in-the-enterprise-the-road-forward/18955A writer from IBM agrees that post-Jobs, the enterprise market is just too attractive to pass up.