A telling Obama video. He really swallowed that visa baloney the tech speculators feeding him. It’s not enough for the them to offshore all fabrication of their gadgets, now they want Americans competing with the engineers from around the world on their own turf. All so a handful of 1% speculators can squeeze absolutely the most from their non discretionary budget. Shameful posture for the alleged democratic president, by the rich and for the rich.
January 2012
On August 7, 1865 Jourdon Anderson dictaed a letter to his former master in Tennessee, Colonel P.H. Anderson who was asking him back to work. Oy! to the loss of the epistolary art. Oy! to the human dignity. The letter.
I think Taleb quipped recently that if you see the word “natural” on a package it pretty much assures that there is nothing natural about it. This is rather common in our culture. I have been watching some “Reality TV” lately and the entire appeal of these shows is that they have nothing to do with anyone’s reality by design. There must be more examples.
Budapest 2008
So I was thinking about John Gray’s rant for hire and wait a minute. Dr. Gray knows better, he said it himsefl in his brillinat riff on Karl Marx – John Gray Revisits the Communist Manifesto. Of course he knows the problem with the “free markets” is not the weaker “family values” but the structural conflict between the capital and labor. It finally came to a head when the labor was decoupled from geography during the current globalization. Here is the fresh off the Davos illustration (via Felix Salmon).
- December 7, 2011: Citigroup to Cut 4,500 Jobs on Slumping Revenue.
- January 29, 2012: “Jobs should be our number one priority,” declared Annual Meeting Co-Chair Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, in a session on the global agenda for 2012.
As in his freaking job only…
The Guardian chimes in – We can now see the true cost of globalisation:
“On an international scale, it should no longer be taboo to propose limits to foreign takeovers, or to the nonstop, unquestioned flow of capital around the world. We should welcome the fact that China’s workers themselves are becoming increasingly restive about their plight. Higher wages and better conditions for them might push up the price of an iPod in London or New York, but they would also help the Chinese economy towards Beijing’s aim of a rising middle class and stronger consumer demand at home, instead of economic growth that depends too heavily on cheap exports. Strong, sustainable Chinese growth, and rising labour standards, would be good for the west too: they should help to narrow Beijing’s yawning trade surplus by opening up vast new markets. Apple’s critics would once have been written off as naive idealists; but as we sift through the wreckage of the Great Recession, perhaps it’s finally time to heed Marx’s words, and stand up for workers everywhere.”
I once published a photo of Bodleian Library ceiling taken by Archidave, an architect, designer and antiquarian from Bristol, UK. There are few more of his photos that speak for themselves.
- Exeter Cathedral. Built during three centuries 1112-1400. The divine curves of Exeter.
- Worcester Cathedral. Built between 1084 and 1504. That’s they way to work on a real project, take five centuries.
- Bristol cathedral That one is crazy beautiful. Another shot: Chior at Bristol cathedral.
- North Aisle of Salisbury Cathedral. The main part built really fast in 38 years from 1220 to 1258.
Idiots call the suburban angled ceilings “cathedral”, they nether saw a cathedral ceiling.
Kazimierz, Krakow
I was running the Harvard Steps today after listening again to the EconoTalk podcast and somewhere between the sections 38 and 27 of the stadium it all connected for me.
Investing:
When writing the Black Swan Taleb invented the terms Mediocristan to Extremistan to designate the areas (“quadrants”) of divergent volatility. The middle ground between the Mediocristan to Extremistan being exposed to the unexpected Black Swans. Hence the investment advice is to allocate most of portfolio to safe Mediocristan investments, i.e. bonds and still leave a small percentage of a portfolio to highly speculative investments in the Extremistan quadrant (extreme upper and lower bound). In that podcast Taleb extends this advice to managing a company. I.e. a very safe cash flow and very small but very aggressive allocation to risk.
Career and Creativity:
Following the same logic the middle class is the most unsafe career proposition (as in the last recession). Instead analogous to the investment advice, the wise proposition is to chose a safe stable profession and leave an allocation for the creative endeavors. That would be a government job for example, a plumber, etc. Taleb mentions there Kafka who wrote while working as a clerk and Einstein who created the theory of relativity while he was a patent officer. He mentioned there french aristocrats who enter a diplomatic career to leave time for writing, etc. This actually answers the queastion that bothered me for decades, why was there so much creativity in the CCCP compared to the “free world”? (as pointed out by Zizek). You see the CCCP system is the Taleb distribution by default, a government job and an ample room for experimentation.
Procreation:
Again in the podcast. Women’s strategy is to marry an accountant and have some random sex with a rocks star. You see the same idea of avoiding the unstable middle.
Exercise:
Here Taleb borrows from Art De Vany, the father of the Paleo movement. Our ancestors sprinted and walked a lot. Hence do not jog! Use the combination of walking, sprinting and lifting heavy objects. I.e. marathons (and sustained low impact workouts) are bad for you.
Rick Bookstaber concludes in the typical roundabout way:
“A recent New York Times article critiquing of popular music for 2011 came away with the view that “2011 may well be remembered as the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history. The genre didn’t produce a single great album, and the best of the middling walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier.”
Yes with all the YouTubery going on, the music is pretty much dead (not just music), who would have funked it? Let me try my hand at the aphorisms again: Being most informed is the flip side of being most knowledgeable.
There will be few links in this post, so please stay on the subject people. Nassim Taleb gave a full interview to Russ Roberts. There he says that the idea for inventing the term antifragile came to him after reading Guy Deutscher’s book Through the Language Glass. Guy Deutscher writes that the ancient Greeks didn’t have the name for the color “blue”, because they didn’t have the mental concept (did’t recognize the color pattern). So inventing a name is analogues with recognizing a concept, hence Taleb’s name “antifragility”, etc.
This prompts a footnote to my post Etymology of Alcohol Spirit and Sublimation. The name Al-cohol comes from the arabic name for a blue color used for the eye shadow – “cohol”. This name for the color is common for Arameic, Hebrew and Arabic. David Boxenhorn who used to publish Rishon Rishon blog, points to his post on colors in Hebrew. David Boxenhorn writes:
“According to Even-Shoshan, kahol is from the Hebrew literature of the Talmudic period (not necessarily the Talmud itself). The root k-h-l appears as a verb, however, in the Bible, Ezekiel 23:40:כָּחַלְתְּ עֵינַיִךְ “You put kohl on your eyes”. So it seems that the word entered Hebrew in the Talmudic period from an ancient word for eye coloring.”
It also appears that the same word for the eye coloring is at the root of Alcohol via Arabic and the color name of the popular flag. Speaking of the Israeli flag. What to do with the techelet mentioned in the Torah? There are the rabbinic arguments if “techelet” even indicates the “blue color”. Perhaps there was the same die that was also used for the eye makeup? (the substance they also used in the Temple for example, techeles, argomon, etc.) In other words it referred to a pigmented powdered substance rather than a color. And that pigmented substance might have come in different colors, not only blue. Just when it came time to “borrow” that name for the blue color it was the most common shade for the powder in “circulation”. Like we call a copy Xerox long after the company and the object is in disuse. So at the time of the birth of the “blue color pattern” that shade of blue was the most recognizable and “marketable” instance of the KHOL powder. Color is the recognition of a pattern. For example for sure ancient Greeks or Hebrews could see the color of the sky but what they were lacking according to the hypothesis was a name for the color pattern, the recognition that all these distinct objects have a similar color later called KHOL for blue. In other words the interesting part of the theory is that KHOL (eye makeup) gave the name not just to AL-KHOL or the techelet in tzitzis but to the color of the very sky above our heads. The premise is that during the Talmudic times the recognition of the blue pattern seeps into the Semitic languages (Arabic and Hebrew) from the Aramaic. They suddenly recognized that all those objects display the familiar pattern of the eye makeup.
P.S. In many languages there is no distinctions between light blue and blue (English, perhaps Hebrew). While in Russian for example these are two distinct words синий and голубой. Technically it would mean that the languages lack the “light blue” pattern till this very day and still group it (recognize) only with the rest of the blues.
There is the succinct and beautifully clear answer from Joh Gray “It depends” – PDF. Although I have to say that there is a better take on the subject from Johnny Caspar in the Coen Brothers Miller’s Crossing, still their best film in my opinion: ►click to continue
Under the Skull of the Social Revolutionary
by Ben Atlas on 01.31.2012.9:00am · 0 comments
A quote from an interview by the former Twitter CEO:
A familiar jingle, except the morons never bother to ask or actually to prove that people were removed from “what’s happening in the world” before the silly websites. This is ignorant to the very core. All these assumptions that gadgets and memes drastically change human nature and existence is the leftover poison of the religious mind that still holds a man in it’s firm grip.