There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
The end of western civilization
Topic: Society
7:20 am EDT, Aug 1, 2008
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
From the archive:
I was surprised to find out during a campus visits with my son that the '80s are now a big nostalgia craze for college students. To those of us who lived it, it's as weird as nostalgia for polio.
Don't get me wrong; I still live in your world. In this very house even. But now I exist between two eras: an Edwardian past and a quixotic future where dirigibles can travel through space and time.
...
Don't look so crestfallen, Mom and Dad. At least I'm not into cyberpunk.
This Title Is Just A Placeholder For Something Witty
Topic: Miscellaneous
6:54 am EDT, Jul 31, 2008
King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies." But he also considers other possibilities -- "It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value." His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object. ... What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object." For him, there's "something in nothing." A lot of nothing.
"There are a lot of really great stories out there," said museum director/curator Karen Bachmann, "and time to share with the community."
Many definitions of distraction exist. An April report by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, for example, describes three basic, unofficial categories: purposeful, incidental and uncontrolled.
My observation of people in general, not just my clients, is that we desperately want to take a break from our hectic, overscheduled lives--but not right now. Try it: Put down this magazine and do nothing at all for ten minutes. No planning, no worrying, no activity of any kind. Just ten minutes of empty time.
Did you do it?
I thought not.
After the salted yak butter tea had been served, the chief continued: "If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Mr. Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea."
Perhaps owning a personal vehicle is a false entitlement that will become economically impossible for many of us in the near future. But something will need to fill the void.
Over a stove burning dung in the centre of the main room, Lhamotso boils a kettle of water to make yak-butter tea, a salty brew popular here. The television is the only appliance.
"We have a housing market going into cardiac arrest. This bill is like CPR to stabilize the situation," said David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington.
Don't buy a house today if you aren't going to stay there at least 7 years. That's right, a mortgage lender is telling you that if you don't have at least a 7 year time frame in mind, you shouldn't buy a house right now. Why? It's all about the math. If the market drops another 5% over the next year and then stays the same for two years, it's going to take 7 years for you to recoup the 5% loss and then build up enough to pay the 6% Realtor's fees when you sell and make a little profit too.
This paper estimates the evolution of equilibrium real home prices in the United States and finds that despite recent declines, single-family homes remained 8 to 20 percent overvalued as of the first quarter of 2008. In the short run, the gap between actual and equilibrium prices does not exert powerful influence over price dynamics. Instead, that dynamics is driven by the inventory-to-sales ratio and by foreclosure starts in a highly inertial relationship. Taken together, this implies that price declines are likely to continue, including past the point where overvaluation is eliminated. The paper also finds that from the early 1990s onwards changes in regional home prices have been more synchronized than before, and that the recent movements in the average price index have reflected a nationwide housing boom, followed by a nationwide housing bust.
Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.
When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.
But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007.
Forty percent of gamers are women according to a new survey released today by the... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]
A film buff tells a friend that he's finally broken "the code" - the mystery behind the character & story threads that bleed from one Quentin Tarantino movie or screenplay into the next. His friend is less than impressed. Starring Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic) and Selton Mello (Tarja Preta). A short film by Brazilian directing duo 300ml.
If someone says we're at the bottom, good luck in believing that. We've got a lot of inventory to work through and a lot of loan losses to sort out.
Quote of the week: When asked how to solve the housing crisis, Bill Gross, from PIMCO, replied: "One of the wisest men I know has this serious but admittedly impractical solution: have the government buy one million new/unoccupied homes, blow them up, and then start all over again. Absent that, he's not quite sure what to do, nor am I."
Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money come from?
Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.
Bush: first of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.
In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world.
Senator John McCain captured the essence of the issue eloquently in a simple declaration in 2005 that "it's not about them; it's about us." Yet in a nod to the conservative base of his party, even McCain has feinted to the right.
She tells me she's ready. She may be small, she says, but she's mean. She outlines her plans for fending off terrorists. She says, "I kind of hope something happens, you know?"
She wears an American flag pin on the lapel of her blazer. She sits on the jump seat, waiting for her life to change.
By the measure that matters most, the Bush administration can point to its record in fighting terrorism as a success. There have been no terrorist attacks in America since September 11, 2001. No rival wants to be accused of breaking this streak.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm! Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.
In a sworn statement in the spring of 2008, for example, the former top prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions disclosed that the Pentagon had pressured him to time "sexy" prosecutions for political advantage, and to use evidence against the detainees that he considered tainted by torture. After resigning in protest, the prosecutor, Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, also disclosed that when he suggested to William Haynes, the general counsel at the Pentagon, that a few acquittals might enhance Guantánamo's reputation for fair treatment, as had been true of the war crimes trials of the Nazis in Nuremburg, Haynes was horrified. "We can't have acquittals! We've got to have convictions!" Davis quoted the top Pentagon lawyer as saying. "If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?"
"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists.
"Nooooo!" the audience roared.
Phillip Zelikow, the director of the 9/11 Commission, who returned to teaching history at the University of Virginia, tried to take stock. In time, he predicted, the Bush administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."
Stephen Wiltshire from London is a star among savants. Stephen is autistic. He did not speak his first words "pencil" and "paper" until he was 5. Yet, when he was 11 he drew a perfect aerial view of London after only one helicopter ride. For this film we're testing the "Living camera" in Rome.
Calvin Trillin wrote this article for last year's Food Issue of the New Yorker. It's an amazing article, triple-gold-star -- but it's not available online. Anyone preparing for a trip to Singapore is obligated to obtain and read a copy of this article.
Writer admits that he loves street food above all other types and speculates that his sense of taste is at full strength only when he is standing up. Discusses the popularity of street food in Singapore. Even establishments called coffee shops are essentially mini hawker centers. It has become possible to eat in Singapore for days at a time without ever entering a conventional restaurant.
(Be advised that the abstracts provided here are not excerpts from the article.)
