Imagine that a restaurant, rather than charging $30 per meal, charged 50 cents per bite, with a waiter standing tableside collecting after each chomp. That would be an extremely unpleasant meal. But credit puts a safe distance between the ecstasy of consumption and the agony of payment, and thus makes us feel better.

The death of the credit card economy

The credit crisis. The lurching stock market. The housing bust. The diving dollar. The Freddie and Fannie turmoil. How to make sense of it all?

Our advice: Go read a book.

I liked this recommendation:

'So Big' is a fascinating story that contrasts the aspirations and values of a mother -- who grew up in economic hardship -- with that of her son who, through his mother's hard work, was given a secure, happy childhood and a quality education.

"After struggling to give her son opportunities to pursue his dreams, Selina must watch as he sets them aside in the empty pursuit of wealth. While Selina builds a thriving vegetable farm and derives contentment through her 'beautiful cabbages' and other produce, her son finds only frustration and lack of fulfillment when he forgoes a career as an architect for the pursuit of money and a sumptuous lifestyle.

"The shift in values from mother to son can also be viewed as allegory for our own nation's continuing cultural shift. We have moved away from the values of thrift and financial security held by our Depression-era parents to that of overuse of credit to fund lifestyles we cannot afford, that have not always brought happiness, and -- in the case of the foreclosure crisis -- that have caused dislocation and despair."

Recommended Reading for Our Times

Ed Felten, in 2008:

One of the standard claims about privacy is that people say they value their privacy but behave as if they don’t value it. The standard example involves people trading away private information for something of relatively little value. This argument is often put forth to rebut the notion that privacy is an important policy value. Alternatively, it is posed as a “what could they be thinking” puzzle.

I used to be impressed by this argument, but lately I have come to doubt its power. Let me explain why.

... the price I charge you tells you at least as much about how well I think my privacy is protected, as it does about how badly I want to keep my location private. So the answer to “what could they be thinking” is “they could be thinking they have no privacy in the first place”.

It can be rational to sell your private information cheaply, even if you value privacy.

Follow the money.

The media has played a significant role in convincing Americans that offshore drilling for oil in the United States could significantly lower the price of gasoline, according to an analysis released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Even though the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency has stated that the benefits from such drilling would be too small to have any significant effect on oil prices, the media has overwhelmingly conveyed the impression that it could. Media coverage of the issue may have influenced public opinion, with a majority now favoring expanded drilling, as proposed by presidential candidate John McCain.

Does "Drill, baby, drill, and drill now!" really speak for itself? Consider the audience.

Myth That Offshore Drilling Would Lower Gas Prices Gets Boost from Major Media

House prices rose 60 percent between 2000 and 2007 before the housing bubble burst. The question is whether the housing boom made people better or worse prepared for retirement. If they extracted the equity from their home through some form of housing-related debt and consumed all their borrowings, they will be left with additional debt and no additional assets and probably will be worse off in retirement. If they did not borrow and consume their equity, they will have more housing wealth to tap in retirement and will be better off.

This brief explores how the rise in house prices affected individual households. The first section discusses the impact of an increase in house prices on the homeowner’s balance sheet and describes the evidence to date suggesting that the housing boom led to an increase in debt and to increased consumption. The second section uses the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to explore the actual response of individual households. The third section discusses events since the 2004 SCF – the continued inflating of the housing bubble and its ultimate bursting in 2007. The final section concludes that a substantial proportion – perhaps a third – of older households will be less secure in retirement because of the housing bubble.

The Housing Bubble and Retirement Security

Warren and Brandeis, in 1890:

Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts. It belittles by inverting the relative importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of a people. When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, what wonder that the ignorant and thoughtless mistake its relative importance. Easy of comprehension, appealing to that weak side of human nature which is never wholly cast down by the misfortunes and frailties of our neighbors, no one can be surprised that it usurps the place of interest in brains capable of other things. Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.

... The narrower doctrine may have satisfied the demands of society at a time when the abuse to be guarded against could rarely have arisen without violating a contract or a special confidence; but now that modern devices afford abundant opportunities for the perpetration of such wrongs without any participation by the injured party, the protection granted by the law must be placed upon a broader foundation.

The Right to Privacy

William Nordhaus:

The economics of climate change is straightforward. People do not pay for the current and future costs of their actions.

Freeman Dyson:

As a scientist I know that all opinions, including my own, may be wrong. I state my opinions firmly because I believe they are right, but I make no claim of infallibility. I beseech you, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible you may be mistaken. One principle that we might all accept is that the future is uncertain.

Snow-dumping in East Antarctica would be a good way to stop sea levels from rising. A permanent high-pressure anticyclone over East Antarctica keeps the air over the continent dry and the snowfall meager. To dump snow onto East Antarctica, we must move the center of the anticyclone from the center to the edge of the continent. This could be done by deploying a giant array of tethered kites or balloons so as to block the westerly flow on one side only.

Carbon-eating phytoplankton and snow-dumping are fanciful projects. Like other engineers' dreams in the past, they will probably be superseded by better ideas and newer technologies long before they are needed. They are illustrations of the general principle that antidotes to even the worst-case consequences of climate change will be available if we allow economic growth to continue. The future of technology beyond fifty years from the present is totally unpredictable.

To reach reasonable solutions of the problems, all opinions must be heard and all participants must be treated with respect.

If you would like to revisit The Question of Global Warming:

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

'The Question of Global Warming': An Exchange

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A gold star for this preview of The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins, due out next month, which appears in the Sunday NYT magazine.

Often it was the dogs that saved me.

Running at night — it was madness. I was courting death or at least a kidnapping. The capital was a free-for-all; it was in a state of nature. There was no law anymore, no courts, nothing — there was nothing at all. They kidnapped children now; they killed them and dumped them in the street. The kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible ecosystem. One of the kidnapping gangs could have driven up in a car and beat me and gagged me, and I could have screamed like a crazy person, but I doubt anyone would have done anything. Not even the guards. They weren’t bad people, the guards, but who in Baghdad was going to step in the middle of a kidnapping?

From the archive, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy:

What was that?
I didn't hear anything.
Listen.
I don't hear anything.
They listened. Then in the distance he heard a dog bark. He turned and looked toward the darkening town. It's a dog, he said.
A dog?
Yes.
Where did it come from?
I don't know.
We're not going to kill it, are we Papa?
No. We're not going to kill it.
He looked down at the boy. Shivering in his coats. He bent over and kissed him on his gritty brow. We won't hurt the dog, he said. I promise.

About the production of the film adaptation:

The producers chose Pennsylvania because it’s one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story’s main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.

From the recent archive:

Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives. Among the tribe, it was, therefore, women, children and the elderly who most often became infected.

Also:

antrophagus: It’s only a few days until March 9

cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth

antrophagus: One can’t have everything. There’s still some time before you really feel my teeth

My Long War

Front page, above-the-fold, of today's Boston Globe:

Where agency sees attack, MIT students talk of constructive exploration

This article doesn't really break any news, particularly for those who were at DEFCON or who followed the recent threads. But they did make room for this explanation:

"I've always been interested in electronics," said Anderson, who grew up scouring alleyways for discarded machines. "Ever since I was a little kid, I would take things apart to see how they work."

These days, he proudly calls himself a hacker.

"If a lot of people think hacker, they think of someone who illegally breaks into systems," he said. "I don't at all think that's what hacker means. I think hacking is a culture of curiosity and exploration and learning and building and creating new things."

From the archive:

The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world. On the contrary: it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system. Linux, for Sennett, is the work of a community of craftsmen “who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the (Homeric) Hymn to Hephaestus”.

The spread of Enterprise Systems has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

T hacking exposes a deeper clash