Food for the pleasure center of the brain

Cars With the High-Tech Comforts of Home - NYTimes.com

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Paul Johnson writing in Forbes in an article entitled “Can we afford Liberalism now“:

The financial crisis, detonated by greed and recklessness on Wall Street and in the City of London, is for the West a deep, self-inflicted wound. The beneficiary won’t be Russia, which, with its fragile, energy-based economy, is likely to suffer more than we shall; it will be India and China. They will move into any power vacuum left by the collapse of Western self-confidence.

If we seriously wish to repair the damage, we need to accept that this is fundamentally a moral crisis, not a financial one. It is the product of the self-indulgence and complacency born of our ultraliberal societies, which have substituted such pseudo-religions as political correctness and saving the planet for genuine distinctions between right and wrong and the cultivation of real virtues. India and China are progress-loving yet morally old-fashioned societies. They cannot afford liberalism. …

We are traveling along the high road to incompetence and poverty, led by a farcical coalition of fashionably liberal academics on the make, assorted eco-crackpots and media wiseacres. This strain of liberalism is highly infectious. The Indians and Chinese have yet to be infected. They’re still healthy, hard at work and going places, full speed ahead.

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From the New Scientist, “Atlas of hidden water may avert future conflict“:

They are one of the world’s greatest and most precious natural resources, yet are entirely hidden. Now, for the first time, a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.

The map of “blue gold” (pdf format, 4 MB) is the result of nearly a decade of sometimes difficult talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.

Aquifers are underground layers of rocks or sediments from which water can be extracted – normally by drilling boreholes or digging wells. They hold 100 times the volume of freshwater that flows down rivers and streams around the world at any time.

What the UNESCO map reveals is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia.

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I am thoroughly enjoying a slow read through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notebook. 

It is particularly gratifying when I see that he an I share interests and “follow” the same people like Art Devaney and Karen Armstrong.

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These are my links for October 30th 2008

• Young Professionals Meet for a Power Breakfast, but They Don’t Call It Networking - NYTimes.com - “So, what exactly, are these three doing at 8 a.m. on the third Friday of each month, meeting with other young professionals at their local coffeehouse?They are participating in likemind, a monthly kaffeeklatsch for creative professionals…

  Likemind gatherings have no formal structure, no fees and typically no agenda. But participants exchange ideas, job tips and useful contacts, while also batting around ideas about technology, art, business and culture.

  Likemind caters to young professionals in advertising, media and design who are products of the age of personal blogs, warts-and-all YouTube videos and viral marketing. For them, the best pitch is the disguised pitch. Nothing, participants said, is more uncool than the hard-sell of traditional networking (which may explain why likemind is not capitalized). We just show up over coffee and talk,” said Eric Cedo, a participant in Detroit, in an e-mail message.

• BBC NEWS | Business | Bosses ’should embrace Facebook’ - Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests.Attempts to control employees’ use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said.

  Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm, it added.

• BBC NEWS | Health | A guide to the Hippocratic Oath

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I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community | Only selected advertising » Friends of the Earth: Inhale

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It was only a matter of time before pre-war apocalyptic poetry started being quoted in Financial Crisis reporting, but I am happy to see it is by Paul Krugman, and in a very interesting article that all of us interested in emerging markets need to heed.

From The Widening Gyre - NYTimes.com:

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

Some of these disasters were more or less anticipated. Economists have wondered for some time why hedge funds weren’t suffering more amid the financial carnage. They need wonder no longer: investors are pulling their money out of these funds, forcing fund managers to raise cash with fire sales of stocks and other assets.

The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.

These countries were at the core of the last global financial crisis, in the late 1990s (which seemed like a big deal at the time, but was a day at the beach compared with what we’re going through now). They responded to that experience by building up huge war chests of dollars and euros, which were supposed to protect them in the event of any future emergency. And not long ago everyone was talking about “decoupling,” the supposed ability of emerging market economies to keep growing even if the United States fell into recession. “Decoupling is no myth,” The Economist assured its readers back in March. “Indeed, it may yet save the world economy.”

That was then. Now the emerging markets are in big trouble. In fact, says Stephen Jen, the chief currency economist at Morgan Stanley, the “hard landing” in emerging markets may become the “second epicenter” of the global crisis. (U.S. financial markets were the first.)

What happened? In the 1990s, emerging market governments were vulnerable because they had made a habit of borrowing abroad; when the inflow of dollars dried up, they were pushed to the brink. Since then they have been careful to borrow mainly in domestic markets, while building up lots of dollar reserves. But all their caution was undone by the private sector’s obliviousness to risk.

In Russia, for example, banks and corporations rushed to borrow abroad, because dollar interest rates were lower than ruble rates. So while the Russian government was accumulating an impressive hoard of foreign exchange, Russian corporations and banks were running up equally impressive foreign debts. Now their credit lines have been cut off, and they’re in desperate straits.

Needless to say, the existing troubles in the banking system, plus the new troubles at hedge funds and in emerging markets, are all mutually reinforcing. Bad news begets bad news, and the circle of pain just keeps getting wider.

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Typical Brian type car, a heavily modified Renault 5. Perfect for burning rubber, drag racing, games of chicken and bouncing your car. Dice hanging from rear-view mirror and optional fluorescent under car lighting are badges of true distinction.

In Denmark they call boy racers (young men in souped up cars) “Brians”, as in “There goes a another f*cking Brian with fluorescent lights under his car”. Their female equivalents are “Bettinas”.

Tommy and Kenneth are also naughty names, associated with troublesomeness. Tommy is also bad in Norway.

Lila, Mona, Michelle are dodgy girls names, although this really depends on which generation.

I also love the fact  Danes call dealers “Narcomen”, which although it sounds like “narco man”, actually comes from “narco mania”.

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These are my links for October 26th 2008

• America’s latest export: empty municipal coffers | Business | The Observer - Is the US economic crisis about to get even worse as state governments are unable to raise loans to cover tax routine short-falls? This means public sector workers not getting paid and/or infrastructure projects being cancelled or postponed.
• Why All the Best Marketers Know Each Other - Stepcase Lifehack - “ideological incest”: when ideas inbreed too much without anything new entering the meme pool. Some say this happens in an echo chamber. They have redundant mutations which render them stagnant, then unhealthy, then degenerative, and ultimately, crippling. Luddites suffer from advanced stages of ideological incest, as do political polemicists who engage in too much wordslinging and not enough changebeing.
• Martin Wainwright on Victorian gang violence | Education | guardian.co.uk - New book by academic shows Manchester's historical precedent for knife crime and gangs, and may have some lessons for similar problems today

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