asymmetrical inflation:

Whether an economy generates asset price inflation or consumer price inflation depends on the details of to whom cash flows. In particular, cash flows to the relatively wealthy lead to asset price inflation, while cash-flows to the relatively poor lead to consumer price inflation.

via odograph

Oh those flourishing days!

July
1926

Tiaret is a centre of Arabian culture and Arabian schools and mosques. As I left the town, I passed a remarkable mosque, an example of splendid arts with amazing designs of strikingly harmonizing lines, arches and ornaments. It was built several centuries ago and is witness to the exceptional level of the Arabian arts of the past.

Around it were the usual primitive villages and filthy reservoirs. The children were afflicted with trachoma. The rudimentary agriculture was of a haphazard nature. Again I happened to arrive on a market day. On beautifully prancing, splendid horses, smartly turned out Arabs, mostly with light-colored skin and wearing enormous, metre-wide straw hats and burnooses, came together in the village. Frequently one could see horsemen wearing two hats, one on top of another, apparently to be chic. The dimension of the hats was hardly due to necessity, but was rather an exaggerated fashion.

Both the most primitive and the greatest of the arts all meet here; all this contradiction amazed me and was hard to understand. In any case, on the whole, when traveling around in Syria and Palestine and, later on, in Tunisia and Morocco, it was difficult not to be aware of the ancient and outstanding Arabian civilization represented by immortal geographers, Arabian arts and the Mauritanian style (typical of Africa). In the same way, during a visit to Greece, it is difficult to understand how Athens, which now holds such an insignificant position within the modern world, could once occupy such a significant place among the advanced ancient civilizations.

The ancient time remains an unsurpassed example of an era of important art and sciences, covering all subjects from the medicine of Hippocrates and the natural sciences of Aristotle to the history of Herodotos and Strabo.

Why, when conditions are more favorable, has there in essence been such an enormous downfall and degradation instead of progress?

As if too many in the Middle East resent the failings of today while ignoring the fall of yesterday.

You were wondering what the Internet will become, far too much already, if Obama’s FCC fails to secure net neutrality? It’s time to write a quick note to your government.

All assets are overpriced:

First of all, assets didn’t always appreciate faster than GDP. For the first several decades of this history, economic growth, not paper wealth, was king. We were getting richer by making things, not paper.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, the cult of the markets, which included the development of financial derivatives and the increasing use of leverage, began to dominate. A long history marred only by negative givebacks during recessions in the early 1990s, 2001–2002, and 2008–2009, produced a persistent increase in asset prices vs. nominal GDP that led to an average overall 50-year appreciation advantage of 1.3% annually.

That’s another way of saying you would have been far better off investing in paper than factories or machinery or the requisite components of an educated workforce.

We, in effect, were hollowing out our productive future at the expense of worthless paper such as subprimes, dotcoms, or in part, blue chip stocks and investment grade/government bonds.

assess the stress: A device that can ‘smell’ human fear could identify terrorists.

City University London; led by Prof Tong Sun; the 18-month project aims to develop two sensor systems that can detect the unique chemical signature of the fear pheromone.

Mike Masnick:

NFL didn’t count on outspoken Bengals player Chad Ochocinco from taking things even further.

Ochocinco has decided to set up his own Twitter-based reporting operation on goings on within the NFL, believing that via other players, he’ll be able to get the real scoop and post the information faster and more accurately than any traditional “reporter.”

He says he’s “knocking out the middleman.”

And this is exactly the point we were making about how the media landscape is changing. People want relevant news and information in a format they find most useful. They don’t care if it comes from a reporter, an athlete or the guy down the block. Yes, there are different levels of trust with who delivers the news, but reporters need to realize that they’re not the only gatekeepers any more — no matter how much they wish they were.

A thoughtful exposition worthy of your read.

“We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer,” Holbrooke said in an interview. “We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him.”

Washington Post:

The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.

He wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter [pdf].

A user wears a head-worn display, and the system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. Touchscreen controls attached to the wrist cue the next sequence of instructions.

A fossil-powered future is no longer necessary and may not even make economic sense.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables by Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi:

1. Technologies needed for 100 percent clean power are already working (or close to working) today.

2. Cost of generating and transmitting these renewables would be less than the projected cost per kilowatt-hour for fossil-fuel and nuclear power.
3. Shifting from conventional to clean power would lead to a 30 percent decrease in global power demand.

25 percent clean energy by 2025.
100 percent by 2040.

Morgan Meis:

The shadows of winter make the world one way: brittle maybe, precise. The angle of the sun makes the world of summer another way entirely: smeared across the afternoon, vibrating.

That’s why so many Romantic artists like the weather. They know that the weather does not make the world, but it does make the world ‘what it’s like’.

So, the Romantics enjoy writing about the weather, and they enjoy painting the weather. They are cloud watchers and rain walkers.

They wait for the light to be just so.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams:

Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph, and in this mood the fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at Sherry Island were ready grist to his mill …

Sean Carroll:

It is kind of a mystery. Why is it a heinous crime for one individual to act directly against another, but business as usual for a powerful politician to act knowingly in ways that will bring harm to the nation or the world?

Is it just that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?

Zo:

Where were we. Taking delight in oneself. A damn sight easier if them what gave birth to you felt the same way, if delight in one’s presence filled one’s infancy and childhood. The rest of us brokens gotta limp toward the finish line, making art of it, if we’re lucky.

There is no greater investment than taking delight in your children, for they will absorb that good feeling as if coming from the universe itself and their pleasure in being alive will spread, generationally, long after you are gone.

In a capitalist, consumerist society, this is a revolutionary act.

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – Ernest Hemingway

Economic Populist: The real reason for the economic crisis

So what does this all mean? It means that the reason for the economic crisis was the asset bubble that preceded it. The ‘wealth effect’ was a lie.

The reason for the asset bubble was monetary inflation that got directed almost entirely to the wealthy. They naturally used it to become wealthier, which means stocks, bonds, and real estate. The trickle-down theory is a lie.

The reason why the monetary inflation was directed to the wealthy is because free trade agreements which gutted the income of the working class and left the nation suffering from economic disparity. The promises made by free trade proponents was a lie.

In essence, the economic crisis that we are suffering from, and will continue to suffer from, was caused by too much concentration of wealth in the upper class.

The country will continue to suffer from these bubble and bust cycles until either the nation addresses the income disparity, or the rest of the world stops offering to buy our debt.

The 2009 American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reveals States Wasting The Most Energy Are Republican.