John Lanchester:

It isn't hard to know how to slay the zombies.

Nobody in power wants to do that. Nobody with power in the banking system, and nobody with power in government. Both the British and the American plans to help the banks are very, very, very expensive variations on the theme of sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly singing 'La la la, I'm not listening.'

The average British household owes 160 per cent of its annual income. That makes us, individually and collectively, a lot like the cartoon character who's run off the end of a cliff and hasn't realized it yet.

We in Britain are, to use a technical economic term, screwed.

The German economy is fucked off a cliff.

The consequences for Britain are going to be horrific.

There needs to be a general acceptance that the current model has failed.

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn't fully dropped.

Taleb on hedge fund managers:

They are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

Louis CK:

When I read things like, "The foundations of capitalism are shattering," I'm like, "Maybe we need that." Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

It's Finished

John Lanchester:

If I had to pick a single fact which summed up the cultural gap between the City of London and the rest of the country, it would be that one. I have yet to meet a single person not employed in financial services who was aware of it; I wasn't aware of it myself. I think if I had been, there are two questions I would have wanted answered: how did that happen? And is it a good thing?

This is one of those points of stock-market logic which seems surreal, nonsensical and wholly counter-intuitive to civilians, but which to market participants is as familiar as beans on toast.

Sometimes, when you eat chili-hot food, the first few mouthfuls tell you nothing other than that the food contains chili. It takes a moment or two to detect the presence of other flavors. Bank bail-outs and collapses are a bit like that.

Most of us have had a few drinks at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of I've-always-fancied-you-isn't-it-time-we-did-something-about-it, but let's take comfort in the following truth: none of us has ever done anything as embarrassing as buying HBOS.

That feeling you get when you've eaten something, and a few minutes later you think, oh-oh, I think that my dinner just said that was a case not of adieu but au revoir? That would be AIG.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

It's Finished

Emily Gould:

The Internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to. If you are looking at the Internet and expecting it to be a source of fleeting funniness, unchallenging writing, attention-span-killing video snippets, and porn, then that is exactly all it will ever be for you.

Writing for free feels, to me, sometimes like a vice and sometimes like a privilege. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I organized my thoughts in a more palatable way, I mightn’t be able to knead and pat many of my blog posts into little women’s-magazine-personal-essay-shaped molds. And per the logic that giving away the blog-milk for free devalues not just one’s own personal cow but also the cow of anyone who might ever have a cow to sell, I suppose that is what I ought to have done.

These manifestations of culture are sometimes genuinely shallow, but sometimes they’re only deceptively shallow-seeming, like those places at the ocean’s edge where you’ll wade in a few feet and then lose your footing in suddenly cool, deep water.

Clifford Geertz:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

John Lanchester:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Benjamin Kunkel:

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

Virginia Heffernan:

Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.

Why I write for free

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond:

Communications and cooperation between development and operations isn't optional, it's mandatory. Flickr takes the idea of "release early, release often" to an extreme - on a normal day there are 10 full deployments of the site to our servers. This session discusses why this rate of change works so well, and the culture and technology needed to make it possible.

A recent presentation at Velocity 2009.

See also, Lexically Sparse Slides Improve Recall of Taught Material.

10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

Matt Taibbi:

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.

And they're about to do it again.

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

Truth:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Compare:

“Are you sure the election was a fraud?” I asked him.

Susan Signe Morrison:

This interdisciplinary book integrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, with special focus on fecopoetics and Chaucer’s literary agenda. Filth in all its manifestations—material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung)—helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages. Applying fecal theories to late medieval culture, Morrison concludes by proposing Waste Studies as a new field of ethical and moral criticism for literary scholars.

From a year ago:

American authorities may be deluding themselves into believing they can forestall the endgame of post-bubble adjustments.

Eric Janszen, from February 2008:

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ... To make it possible to see without seeing.

The Great American Bubble Machine

Christopher J. Ferguson:

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Multiple intelligences provides a kind of cover to preserve that fable. "OK, little Jimmie may not be a rocket scientist, but he can dance real well. Shouldn't that count equally in school and life?" No. The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger.

That is the root of the matter. Too many people have chosen to believe in what they wish to be true rather than in what is true.

Michael Tomasello:

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals.

Kurt Schwenk, via Carl Zimmer:

I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you’d be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

From TED:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius

Arthur L. Costa:

This chapter contains descriptions for 16 of the attributes that human beings display when they behave intelligently. They are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions to which are not immediately apparent.

When we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they never quit.

Effective problem solvers are deliberate: they think before they act.

The ability to listen to another person -- to empathize with and to understand that person's point of view -- is one of the highest forms of intelligent behavior. We often say we are listening, but actually we are rehearsing in our head what we are going to say when our partner is finished.

Some students have difficulty considering alternative points of view or dealing with more than one classification system simultaneously. Their way to solve a problem seems to be the only way. They perceive situations from an egocentric point of view: "My way or the highway!" Their minds are made up: "Don't confuse me with facts. That's it!"

Intelligent people plan for, reflect on, and evaluate the quality of their own thinking skills and strategies. Interestingly, not all humans achieve the level of formal operations.

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.

The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating.

Responsible risk takers do not behave impulsively. They know that all risks are not worth taking.

Working in groups requires the ability to justify ideas and to test the feasibility of solution strategies on others. It also requires developing a willingness and an openness to accept feedback from a critical friend.

George Cochrane:

It might be painful, especially at first. It might be frustrating. You might throw out the first 20 things you make, hate them, hate yourself, and curse the day anybody encouraged you to try.

But at least you’re starting.

Decius:

It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Describing the Habits of Mind

First Law:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Second Law:

The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Third Law:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Fourth Law:

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Susan Hill:

Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Decius:

Stupid people like stupid black and white choices. They are blinded by their convictions.

Q&A with Slavoj Zizek:

What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

On Criticism

Alain de Botton, on a roadside diner:

Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through -- and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.

Alain de Botton, on a life's work:

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

Edith and Sherman Collins:

This world is not my home I'm just a passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

Joel Garreau:

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

Why are you working so hard?