Last Straw

Last year I remarked on the subprime mort­gage induced fin­an­cial collapse:

To blame indi­vidu­als act­ing within the rationale of a sys­tem for pro­du­cing unwel­come out­comes is to deny the fun­da­mental flaws of the system.

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, being inter­viewed by 60 Minutes on the collapse:

The incent­ives for people on Wall Street got so screwed up that the people who worked there became blinded to their own longterm interests because their short-term interests were so overpowering.

Sounds like the defin­i­tion of cap­it­al­ism to me.

James K. Gal­braith, writ­ing for The Nation:

Bankers don’t like budget defi­cits because they com­pete with bank loans as a source of growth.

I’ve been think­ing about get­ting one of these Zepii elec­tric scoot­ers from The Lon­don Elec­tric Scooter Com­pany (they’ve just launched their web­site). You can watch a hands-on review here by Jason Brad­bury of the UK’s Gad­get Show, when they were first released a year ago. Relatively low car­bon foot­print. No emis­sions (if you’re elec­trical sup­ply is renew­able). No road tax. No con­ges­tion charges. Costs about £60 in elec­tri­city to run a year.

Great chart by Inform­a­tion is Beau­ti­ful:

It’s a “bal­loon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evid­ence for its effect­ive­ness. But the sup­ple­ments are only effect­ive for the con­di­tions lis­ted inside the bubble. You might also see mul­tiple bubbles for cer­tain sup­ple­ments. These is because some sup­ple­ments affect a range of con­di­tions, but the evid­ence qual­ity var­ies from con­di­tion to con­di­tion. For example, there’s strong evid­ence that Green Tea is good for cho­les­terol levels. But evid­ence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting.

Sharp decline in public’s belief in cli­mate threat, Brit­ish poll reveals:

The pro­por­tion of adults who believe cli­mate change is “def­in­itely” a real­ity dropped by 30% over the last year, from 44% to 31%, in the latest sur­vey by Ipsos Mori.

What I don’t under­stand is that we’ve been here so often before. Why do people listen to the pro­pa­ganda of oil com­pan­ies and the like over sci­entific evidence? How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes by pro­pa­gand­ists deny­ing that smoking causes can­cer, deny­ing that CFCs lead to ozone deple­tion, deny­ing that cer­tain pol­lut­ants cause acid rain or deny­ing that cli­mate change is man­made (or, ori­gin­ally, that it even existed)?

This is a great time to be born, a great time to be alive. This gen­er­a­tion gets to com­pletely change the world we live in. We have a chance here to reima­gine every single thing we do. But, no, per­haps we’d rather go down with the ship and listen to rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated industries.

A com­pany called Bloom Energy and foun­ded by K.R. Srid­har is set to launch a new energy device tomor­row that he says is a break­through in fuel cell tech­no­logy — namely mak­ing it afford­able (the Holy Grail of fuel cell research) and thus provid­ing a loc­al­ised and com­par­at­ively cleaner and cheaper form of elec­tri­city than that which we cur­rently get from the grid.

There was a seg­ment cov­er­ing the topic on CBS’s 60 minutes Sunday night, includ­ing an inter­view with K.R. Srid­har, which can watch online here.

While cor­rel­a­tion doesn’t neces­sar­ily prove caus­a­tion the study doesn’t need to. It only needs to prove cor­rel­a­tion to chal­lenge the claim that “reli­gion leads to bet­ter societies.”

Back in 2003 and 2004 over 70% of American’s polled were telling poll­sters not only that they believed Sad­dam Hus­sein had WMDs but that he was per­son­ally involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre.

Now they’re at it again, with over 70% telling poll­sters that they think Iran has nuc­lear weapons.

Should this coun­try really be allowed to deal in inter­na­tional politics?

How to defend the Enlight­en­ment:

On the pub­lic­a­tion of his new book In Defence of the Enlight­en­ment, Tzvetan Todorov tells Brit­ish philo­sopher AC Grayling why the Enlight­en­ment must be sep­ar­ated from sci­ent­ism and cul­tural chauvinism.