All wages should be interest payments for deferred equity.
The wages paid by ones employers should merely be considered in ones mind to be interest payments given to the employee in lieu of ownership rights to the enterprise in which they are employed.
Climate change has created a historic opening for progressives. Rather than the ultimate expression of the shock doctrine, it can be a Peopleās Shockāa blow from below.
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It must always be remembered that the greatest barrier to humanity rising to meet the climate crisis is not that it is too late or that we donāt know what to do. There is just enough time, and we are swamped with green tech and green plans. And yet the reason so many of us are greeting this threat with grim resignation is that our political class appears wholly incapable of seizing those tools and implementing those plans. And itās not just the people we vote into office and then complain aboutāitās us. For most of us living in postindustrial societies, when we see the crackling black-and-white footage of general strikes in the 1930s, victory gardens in the 1940s, and Freedom Rides in the 1960s, we simply cannot imagine being part of any mobilization of that depth and scale. That kind of thing was fine for them, but surely not usāwith our eyes glued to our smartphones, our attention spans scattered by click bait, our loyalties split by the burdens of debt and the insecurities of contract work. Where would we organize? Who would we trust enough to lead us? Who, moreover, is āweā?
In other words, we are products of our age and of a dominant ideological projectāone that has too often taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units out to maximize our narrow advantage. This project has also led our governments to stand by helplessly for more than two decades as the climate crisis morphed from a āgrandchildrenā problem to a banging-down-the-door problem.
Every year, more than 500 Americans will be struck by lightningāand roughly 90 percent of them will survive. Though they remain among the living, their minds and bodies will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads.
As Steven Pinker observes in his latest book,Ā The Sense of Style, itās fashionable in this iPhone age to bemoan the decline of language. Fashionable, but hardly new. Grumbling about this deterioration goes āat least as far back as the invention of the printing press,ā he points out, adding that language āis not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs.ā
In fact, he argues, weāve become more literate as the written word, albeit of the two-thumbed variety, has supplanted oral communication. Thanks to technology, everyoneās now a writer; and college students, heās found, āare writing more than their counterparts in earlier generations didā and āmake no more errors per page.ā
The host of CNN's Parts Unknown starting again on Sunday wants to make a great show--and challenge some cultural assumptions.
"Everything important I needed to know I learned as a dishwasher," he says. "In an uncertain universe, some things are still for certain: Dirty plates, if you put them on a plastic rack and push them into the machine and press the button, will come out clean--every time. If you work hard at your job and do it well, even if it's a shit job, there is some kind of satisfaction in that, whether you're stacking plates, chopping vegetables, or just setting out a plate of food. There's this magnificent moment before a plate goes out to the dining room, for instance, when you know, and it's just for you. You think, Hmm, that's a pretty good fucking plate. And then it's gone."
Barry Ritholtz dropping wisdom from 10 years and 30,000 posts deep into the blog game:
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Writing is a good way to figure out what you think. To quote Daniel Boorstin, the former librarian of Congress, āI write to discover what I think . . . After all, the bars arenāt open that early.ā
The act of putting pen to paper, or in my case, spilling pixels on a screen, requires thought. Thinking about context and working out how different elements interact in a complex system like the markets is a contemplative process.
Often, I have no idea what I thought about a subject until I begin to write about. Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.
(Note: It also helps if you have something of interest to say).
Writing is a good way to become a better writer (so is reading). When I started the blog, one goal was to become a better writer. After more than a dozen years spending an hour a day writing ā and another hour a day reading outstanding writing from others ā your skills begin to improve. It is an old joke that it only takes a decade or so to become an overnight sensation.
You discover the advantages of economy. Anyone can make an article longer, the skill is keeping it tight and lean. Understanding where another set of eyes is advantageous, how to lean on someone elseās judgment ā and when to pushback when they are destroying your precious prose ā is also a worthwhile skill set.
I also became a much faster writer. It takes me about a third as long to write something today as it used to. That leaves time for rewrites, and as any editor will tell you, the difference between good and great takes place in the rewrites.
Steve Pinker with his typical brilliance on the subject of writing/cognitive organization:
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In a brilliant little book calledĀ Clear and Simple as the Truth, the literary scholars Francis-NoĆ«l Thomas and Mark Turner argue that every style of writing can be understood as a model of the communication scenario that an author simulates in lieu of the real-time give-and-take of a conversation. They distinguish, in particular, romantic, oracular, prophetic, practical, and plain styles, each defined by how the writer imagines himself to be related to the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish. (To avoid the awkwardness of strings ofĀ heĀ orĀ she, I borrow a convention from linguistics and will refer to a male generic writer and a female generic reader.) Among those styles is one they single out as an aspiration for writers of expository prose. They call itĀ classic style, and they credit its invention to 17th-century French essayists such as Descartes and La Rochefoucauld.
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader so she can see for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. The writer and the reader are equals: The reader can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. And the process of directing the readerās gaze takes the form of a conversation.
When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark
"In the novelĀ The Man in the High CastleĀ (1962), the American sci-fi maestro Philip K Dick imagines an alternative history in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War. Most of the novelās action takes place in Japanese-occupied San Francisco, where characters, both Japanese and American, regularly use theĀ I ChingĀ to guide difficult decisions in their business lives and personal affairs.
Something, somewhere, is always playing dice
As an American with no family history of divination, Iāll admit to being enchanted by Dickās vision of a sci-fi world where people yield some of their decision-making power to the movements of dried yarrow stems. Thereās something liberating, maybe, in being able to acknowledge that the reasons we have are often inadequate, or downright poor. Without needing to impose any supernatural system, itās not hard to picture a society in which chance plays a more explicit, more accepted role in the ways in which we distribute goods, determine admissions to colleges, give out jobs to equally matched applicants, pick our elected leaders, and make personal decisions in our own lives.
Such a society is not a rationalistās nightmare. Instead, in an uncertain world where bad reasons do determine so much of what we decide, itās a way to become more aware of what factors shape the choices we make. As Peter Stone told me, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, āthe first task of reason is to recognise its own limitationsā. Nor is such a society more riddled with chanciness than our own. Something, somewhere, is always playing dice. The roles of coloniser and colonised, wealthy and poor, powerful and weak, victor and vanquished, are rarely as predestined as we imagine them to be.
Dick seems to have understood this. Certainly, he embraced chance in a way that few other novelists ever have. Years after he wroteĀ The Man in the High Castle, Dick explained to an interviewer that, setting aside from planning and the novelistās foresight, he had settled key details of the bookās plot by flipping coins and consulting theĀ I Ching."
"The idea that men are naturally more interested in sex than women is ubiquitous that itās difficult to imagine that people ever believed differently. And yet for most of Western history, from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed porn fiends of their day. In oneĀ ancient Greek myth, Zeus and Hera argue about whether men or women enjoy sex more. They ask the prophet Tiresias, whom Hera had once transformed into a woman, to settle the debate. He answers, āif sexual pleasure were divided into ten parts, only one part would go to the man, and and nine parts to the woman.ā Later, women were considered to be temptresses who inherited their treachery from Eve. Their sexual passion was seen as a sign of their inferior morality, reason and intellect, and justified tight control by husbands and fathers. Men, who were not so consumed with lust and who had superior abilities of self-control, were the gender more naturally suited to holding positions of power and influence."
"Early twentieth-century physician and psychologist Havelock Ellis may have been the first to document the ideological change that had recently taken place. In his 1903 workĀ Studies in the Psychology of Sex,Ā he cites a laundry list of ancient and modern historical sources ranging from Europe to Greece, the Middle East to China, all of nearly the same mind about womenās greater sexual desire. In the 1600s, for instance, Francisco Plazzonus deduced that childbirth would hardly be worthwhile for women if the pleasure they derived from sex was not far greater than that of menās. Montaigne, Ellis notes, considered women to be āincomparably more apt and more ardent in love than men are, and that in this matter they always know far more than men can teach them, for āit is a discipline that is born in their veins.āā The idea of womenās passionlessness had not yet fully taken hold in Ellisā own time, either. Ellisā contemporary, the Austrian gynecologist Enoch Heinrich Kisch, went so far as to state that āThe sexual impulse is so powerful in women that at certain periods of life its primitive force dominates her whole nature.ā"
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty; Translated by Arthur Goldhammer ā¢ Belknap/Harvard University Press ā¢ 2014 ā¢ 696 pages ā¢ $39.95 Once in a great while, a heavy academic tome dominates for a time the policy debate
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