The answer isn’t so simple. That’s the theme of this entire blog lately, eh?!
Check out this fun, interactive and very detailed piece from T. Gray.
Category: economics
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From: THE MINNESOTA INDEPENDENT
By Paul Demko 10/21/08 10:19 AM
Hard at work… Rep. Michele Bachmann has long been viewed nationally as a solid favorite to retain her House seat in the Sixth Congressional District. But the controversy engulfing her campaign following Friday’s appearance on “Hardball” — during which she called for an investigation into whether her fellow legislators hold “anti-American” views — has altered perceptions of the race in the last 72 hours.
The Cook Political Report has changed its assessment of the contest from “lean Republican” to a toss up. CQ Politics has also shifted its ranking of the race, from “Republican favored” to the less rosy “leans Republican.”
“If Rep. Michele Bachmann limps to the finish line on Election Day — either ahead or behind — it is because she shot herself in the foot,” writes CQ’s Jonathan Allen.
Consider the following…
U.S. Constitution: Amendment I – Freedom of Religion
Because of conservative, your tax dollars are funding religious groups a clear no-no whether you agree with a religion or not. Preaching politics from the pulpit has recently been the subject of a Justice Department investigation of 21 pastors of differing faiths who were warned not to pontificate in churches and challenged the right as of free speech jeopardizing their tax free status. To add insult to injury, conservative appointed judges have ruled that you do not have a right to challenge some statues. Kind of like Mullahs in Saudi Arabia where church and state are inseparable.Amendment IV – Search and seizure
Under the guise of court action against abortion, conservative had John Ashcroft subpoena all the medical records of 11,200 women. This invasion of privacy approach is so frequent it is hard to subpoena all the records from all the offices of Congressional members and committees of the suspected cases of invasion of our privacy. The federal government also has access to our Internet browsing, email content and phone records. Unfortunately we as citizens are behind the curve on understanding what changes technology has brought to them as well as us.Amendment X – Powers of the States and People
Federal conservatives have consistently tried to overturn States law. They use our US tax dollars to challenge the law of the land in Oregon in the “Death with Dignity” law; they lost, but their “help” will come again. If your state votes for something conservatives – religious, social and intellectual versions, not fiscal conservatives – don’t agree with, they will use laws enacted by a once conservative Congress to challenge it – which is the proper use of the laws of the land but in this age of ‘imperial presidency’ those types of actions show marginal regard for states rights than may be appropriate no matter who is in the White House.Amendment VIII – Cruel and Unusual punishment
Conservatives spokespeople in the federal government supported and sanctioned torture. Spreading that influence to the Judiciary is a threat which is another reason to be aware of any government that has contempt for its people. I’d like to think the founding fathers were focused on the right to bear arms for defense of our country rather than the attack of the sovereignty of another country to foster the spread of democracy. Of course that is most likely a veiled attempt to instead grab more oil. In the process our own ‘Federalis Cowboy” Commander-In-Chief captures and detains for year citizens of this and other democratically elected countries as non-military combatants and then uses illegal cruel and unusual punishment without success to coerce testimony. Caution these days about all government is a requirement of freedom.Bachmann and desperate members of the GOP have adopted a rather presumptive neo-American tactics as they blame liberals, immigrants, blacks, Asians, or minorities for our economic crisis as Neo-Nazi’s blamed Jews, gypsies and immigrants from Slavic states.
The U.S. Constitution is what we have to hold on to. Protect it or risk your life of liberty; however that comes about in this republic.
1. There is no single cause for anything.
2. Repeat after me, “There is no single cause for anything!”
3. We all had a hand in the economic mess. Getting loans we couldn’t afford, looking the other way as we tried to get more without paying the price, consuming the earth’s resources without having to deal with the consequences directly.
At the same time, those Anti-American views, racial views and implicit discrimination never go away; not in the generational cycle that is digitally accessible. Easy answers are poison. This shit is hard to understand and correct and if you don’t like confrontation, it’s best you stay home after you vote.
Ya know… maybe it would help if we just stop calling people names like “Conservative” and “Liberal.”
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Things are complicated out there. You may or may not be aware that your nervous system filters out the massive amount of data that your senses are exposed to. As a matter of conservation of energy (real and metaphorical) you are attending to very little of your environment based on your history and the current value you have for some segment of it.
Let me frame this for your consideration…
Due to our complexity as humans, when things are not there, we sometimes see things. (No, it is not the 60’s.) What’s more, when things are there in front of us and available for our experience, we don’t see them.
Two Experiments to consider…
1. In a recent paper in Science, Whitson and Galinsky (2008) found when individuals are unable to gain a sense of control objectively they will gain it perceptually through illusory pattern perception meaning they will identify “stuff” among a stimuli in their environment that don’t really exist. They are not hallucinating in the usual sense of the word. They are generating information to provide continuity linking what they can just as is sensory data is generated in sensory deprivation experiments.
Whitson, et.al, empirically found that people generate pattern perceptions to make sense of the events in their environment when they experience lack of control of the environmental events they are experiencing.
Now, consider what that means…
- It means we don’t see the flaws in people we are connected to or that we see the flaws where none exist
- it means that we see a conspiracy from a new boss when we don’t yet exist to the new boss
- it means we identify objects in random noise images where there are none
- it means we see mechanistic cause and effect relationships where no links exist
- it means we see correlations in economic markets in companies we like
- it means we don’t see how our behavior is like the behavior of someone we don’t like
- it means we can’t tell why people like us or dislike us when they do
- it means that we can’t see the flaws in our children as they lie dead with a needle in their arm
- it means that we can be more than one kind of person every day of our lives
- it means that people not like us are suspicious and people like us are allies
Staggering, isn’t it!
Examples of superstitious behavior in the modern world are countless – sports super heroes involved in astrology, learned rituals so complex that someone once referred to a baseball player as “his own seventh inning stretch” due to the time he took to address each pitch. Religion, prayer, sacrificial rituals, appeasements, holidays, traditions, incantations, etc. all come from making relationships where none exist. Gasuntheit!
When you are uncertain about your environment and don’t perceive you have control, know what is going on, etc., it is disconcerting. In terms of how we learn, not perceiving you have control is an aversive stimulus equal to shock, rejection, pain, or other punishers. Faced with uncertainty, lack of control, people look for patterns [ah, the value of search] in their environments to re-establish control. When it is not there empirically, we try to establish it perceptually with vision playing the lead role.
With the dearth of information and conflicting data sets it is a constant challenge to understand what is related and what isn’t. In an election year the conspiracies exist for those that most not understanding why their candidate is losing since they see the relationships between them and the agenda as a citizen. The media, the polls, the moderators, the economy, the Jews, the youth, the women…etc. are all plotting to undo the trailing candidate.
2. The following video is based on research by Simons and Chabris from Indiana University. It is very interesting for several reasons, all of which you’ll see if you FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS OF THE PRESENTER EXACTLY.
After you see it spend some time thinking how that affects what your life is like, how research is done and how the world works. After all that, come back write or respond with what you think the implications are of the research.
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The lesson here isn’t simple. If we were to want a society free from magical thoughts, then we need expand the tolerance for people to live in ambiguity in some areas, educate people on how feelings and emotions are the exhaust of perceived contingencies and how the environment comes to control behavior via consequences.
J. A. Whitson, A. D. Galinsky (2008). Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception Science, 322 (5898), 115-117 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159845 -
So, the question comes up more than once…
“What’s different about the changes that occurred in the 60’s and 70’s from the changes we are experiencing during our current crisis?”
There are not many parallels between the two times because they are as different as the 50 years apart that separates them. ALL the context is different. How could they possibly be similar?
First of all, we are just started the reaction and the responses to the last seven years and the 31 years leading up to this. It has just begun. You didn’t think it was some Palooka on Wall Street or in corporate America that made this happen, did you?
There are a lot of things that came together in the 60s and 70s that made them what they were and there are a lot of things that are converging now to make this what it will be. That is where the similarities probably end.
The 60s and 70s was the push back against repression, control, delayed gratification and isolation. The early 60s was a set of things in opposition to the status quo…. then other things came together, not by plan but by their own path and the confluence went POW!
Music was the medium like the Internet is today… But, no one had any idea what they were experiencing and it wasn’t because of the drugs or music. Caesar didn’t realize what was going on either. It was just what was happening.
There were waves of change between the surfers-dudes and the button-down guys represented on the one hand by parents, Pat Boone, The Kingston Trio and, on the other, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the Birds or Jefferson Airplane.
- Drugs, sex and rock and roll
- The pill
- The war – the draft – the secrecy
- The car
- Woman’s liberation
- The idealists
The “pill” represented freedoms never imagined as did the car. Both were escapes from mom and dad’s world… In a similar but opposing ways, Britney Spears music is devoid of any content relating to the world today as the Zits cartoon series is today. The 60s and 70s had irreverent tunes and MAD magazine… Both ‘anti-now’.
But where is the VOICE of today? I don’t mean the Village Voice, which morphed into respectability and successfully collects ad revenue to support circulation of its coffee house rebels. I mean the “VOICE” of someone calling the ball on what has happened in America. That means accounting for losses as well as our mis-gotten “gains”. Whose voice is going to ring out to address America’s privatized profit but socializes risk, isolation from allies, might-makes-right arrogance and the branding of ‘Democracy’ through colonization?
We have untold messages yelling at us about losing allies, losing hope, losing dialogue, losing respect, losing trust and openness that is displaced with secrecy, fear and loathing of anyone different from us including our government and the other boss in the corner office.
What are you willing to give up? Cassias Clay was willing to lose everything. Martin Luther King Jr. did. Freedom riders, lunch counter activists and everything in between including those who were caught when the world changed on them like it has today for us. You know who I am talking about; the cops that thought they were doing the right things, the governors, the FBI, the soldiers, the parents… they were All doing what they were told was right even if it was the opposite from what those they were repressing had been told.
If you have no answers, the next 12 years aren’t going to be a good time for you in America or Europe, or Japan or… You will end up sour and ailing because today you are witnessing the tree of entitlements being cut down. It will take years to grow another. What is the expression in business? “He is a dead man just looking for a place to lie down!”
So, where is the lightening rod for change from all this doom and gloom? Where is that person going to come from? Come on; use that teraflop of processing power and your angry brain to generate something you like.
- Is it the blogs?
- The social communities?
- The recipient paparazzi replacing investigative reporting?
With all the complexity, technology, information, misinformation and confusion…what we’ve done in the past isn’t going to be what we do in the future. Some prognostications:
- More suffering as the financial stuff sinks in and new things will rise out of the ashes.
Hard times are going to drive a new of barter or “in-kind” exchange. Will it be a cottage industry economy? Will it be a network community sensitive to exchange and barter… a Woot.com for product and services grow up? I am guessing it will be those types of things.
That will result in the middle man being taken out of the formula for commence more and more. That is unemployment and that leads to some heart ache but change. If it didn’t we’d be using buggy whips today…
2. Having a black President is a lightening rod! Having a President with a vision will draw the volts and colts as needed.
Now the insurgents in our own country will be running for the caves. And when they come out we, the people, have to meet them. We have to find our cohones and get them in the game. You don’t need to change them; just participate. After the election we’re going to hear and see some nasty stuff. If anything happens to the President there are going to be riots for all sorts of reasons and it won’t be only if our black president is gone.
This all sucks you know… it sucks because it is not COMPLEX. It sucks because we have to experience it to grow.
All the money and power falls apart at our feet without the slightest bit of introspection. We’ve had no introspection and we all are the greedy ones living outside our means.
For them and for us, it’s all about the race, the chase, the game for positions and status. Trouble is, once you’ve arrived, where are you? We are rudderless now. Our experiences will put us on a course with a world view rather than a mirror view.
It is as reported to be for us and for our government? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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Can you remember back to your days in 1975 while in Psychology 210: “Psych for the New World”?
A Negative Reinforcer is a stimulus or stimulus set that when removed or terminated increases the probability of that same response in the future.
Richard Fuld claims that ‘we’ made him and the others like him that have tetra dollar salaries and Mega stock and bonuses with parachutes the size of which could fund small nations… Well, he may be right. The contingencies that came together were those things that favored him doing what he did.
We did it or at least reinforced it when it happened. We got them there and we gave them the keys to the kingdom and told them all that we wanted order and profit – if not in that order, we still wanted it. Those that could claim [reliably] to be able to bring it were vetted, signed and installed.
Ugly isn’t it. Guess what…??? Fuld and those like him were the instruments of the body that didn’t want to face the clients, other boards, other nations, regulators and the zealots of legislature on the right, down the middle and the left. Fuld said he’d do it if they, the boards of directors, paid him. They did and he did.
Competition says what the compensation will be. In effect he responded. “You want more, pay me more. You want your assets and reserves and exchanges managed? Get a manager! I bring it to new levels by risking my reputation for the good of the investors and clients. Anything short of that you can get someone from GE to sit at the desk…”
That is what the board wanted to hear…
Now he is doing his job to escape aversive stimuli [career ending sanctions, indictments, loss of pensions, bonuses, and parachutes] which is reinforcing to him and his companies… it is as reinforcing to him as it is to you and I only his scale of success makes it seem more gluttonous. Perhaps you nick the IRS a bit, use the corporate cards for discretionary spending, turn in to corporate gas mileage for the trip to see sick Aunt Gert? Same difference…
We hail those who beat the system [– ironically, we’re the system]. Of course he is going to explain the run around that favors his position, just as we explain our positions favorably when it of value to us to do so…
Reinforcement is just one behavioral property that helps explain what is going on. It even explains the behavior of those tinkering to prevent it from happening again as they figure out how to restructure the economy to get our hats out of our butts.
Don’t think that it is possible to use negative reinforcement this way? Whattabet?
Those that consider this or that to be a result of single causes should bite your tongue and go take a “time out” while you consider how contingencies work; antecedents events, current state, shaped past consequences for similar behavior…
Consider this mornings Google News events from today.
FIND THE ARTICLE THAT IS NOT CONTROLLED BY CONSEQUENCES
10/6/08 Auto-generated 10 minutes ago
German Stocks Fall to Lowest Since 2006; Hypo Real Estate Drops
Bloomberg – 2 hours ago
By Michael Patterson Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) — German stocks fell the most in eight months, sending the DAX Index to the lowest since July 2006, as the deepening credit crunch forced the country’s financial industry to double a credit line for Hypo Real …Barack Obama accuses Republicans of distracting voters from the …
Los Angeles Times – 2 hours ago
‘TURN THE PAGE’: Obama in Asheville. His poll ratings have risen recently, even in red states such as North Carolina. John McCain wants to ‘distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance,’ the Democrat says in Asheville, NC, …Northern California bus crash leaves 10 dead
The Associated Press – 48 minutes ago
WILLIAMS, Calif. (AP) – A casino-bound charter bus flipped over about 10 miles from its destination, ejecting passengers and crushing others as it rolled into a ditch.
UPDATE 1-RESEARCH ALERT-FBR raises Wells Fargo price target
Reuters – 46 minutes ago
Oct 6 (Reuters) – Friedman Billings Ramsey raised its price target on the stock of Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the fifth-largest US bank, by $5 to $25, saying the proposed merger with Wachovia Corp (WB.ImClone Announces Merger Agreement with Eli Lilly at $70 Per Share
MarketWatch – 48 minutes ago
, , ) , pursuant to which Lilly has agreed to commence a tender offer for no less than a majority of the issued and outstanding shares of ImClone common stock at a net price per share of $70 in cash.European countries ramp up deposit protection
Washington Post – 39 minutes ago
By MATT MOORE AP STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Nordic countries Denmark and Sweden moved Monday to bolster protection of bank accounts as stock exchanges across Europe opened lower and central banks pumped more money to cash-starved banks.Sony Expands E-book Reader Range
PC World – 9 hours ago
Sony is introducing a second electronic book reader to its range in the US that comes with upgraded hardware and will go on sale in November.IBM Expands Cloud Computing Offerings
CRN – 1 hour ago
By Rick Whiting, ChannelWeb IBM expanded its cloud computing efforts Monday, debuting new on-demand services for ISVs and customers the company said would make it easier for businesses to adopt cloud computing practices for improving collaboration, …Facebook co-founder Moskovitz leaves to start group collaboration …
VentureBeat – 5 hours ago
Facebook co-foudner Dustin Moskovitz (left) and colleague Justin Rosenstein (right) said this weekend they are leaving Facebook to start their own company.McCain, Obama campaigns trade barbs
The Associated Press – 38 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) – Officials with the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama are trading fresh accusations of mudslinging a month before voters choose George Bush’s successor.Under Financial Restraints, McCain Drops Michigan
ABC News – 1 hour ago
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN The electoral map shrank for John McCain Thursday as he abandoned his campaign in Michigan, raising the stakes in other battleground states such as Ohio.‘SNL’ Keeps It Political
New York Times – 7 hours ago
Once again, “Saturday Night Live” led off the weekend’s show with Tina Fey, above, the Emmy Award-winning creator of “30 Rock,” as the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska.‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’ tops weekend box office
Los Angeles Times – 4 hours ago
A nation of Chihuahua dogs living in the Lost City of Techichi. in the movie “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.” The Disney film does better than expected, grossing $29 million and knocking ‘Eagle Eye’ into second place.OJ Simpson jury: Tapes did football legend in
New York Daily News – 5 hours ago
BY NANCY DILLON Jurors, including Dora Pettit (with mike), say they set aside personal feelings and based guilty OJ Simpson conviction on facts.Yes, it is sort of a trick question but it explains all you are seeing in Washington, DC, Wall Street and Main Street…
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To help pay for the rescue, the government should raise taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Buffett suggested. “I’m paying the lowest tax rate that I’ve ever paid in my life,” he said. “Now, that’s crazy.”
and here
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probably worth reading considering as a tax payer you’re about to spend $6900 of your money on it (per person in your house!). I like to know what I’m buying….
SEC. 2. PURPOSES.
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The purposes of this Act are—
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(1) to immediately provide authority and facili-
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ties that the Secretary of the Treasury can use to
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restore liquidity and stability to the financial system
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of the United States; and
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(2) to ensure that such authority and such fa-
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cilities are used in a manner that—
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(A) protects home values, college funds, re-
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tirement accounts, and life savings;
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(B) preserves homeownership and pro-
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motes jobs and economic growth;
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(C) maximizes overall returns to the tax-
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payers of the United States; and
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(D) provides public accountability for the
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exercise of such authority.
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Social Mode 