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The Weekly Musings: Reader Comments and Samples |
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What readers are saying about the Weekly Musings I’ve said before, your blog is my favorite and I like the Musings even more. For me, you are "pure," meaning interested in useful understanding and not contaminated with hidden agendas. I vote for you to keep on being yourself, and enjoying it.
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Sample Weekly Musings
Weekly Musings #3 (1/22/11) You are receiving this email because you are a subscriber/major contributor to www.oftwominds.com. Summary of the week: The usual weekly "report" from financial pundits begins with a reference to the conferences he/she attended in Dubai, Sydney, Zurich, etc., helping wealthy people become wealthier. This is intended to impress us with the fact that said pundit is in high demand by "people in the know." Alas, I did not jet to Dubai, but stayed home and dissected the Social Security system, and received hate mail for my foolish pains. In other words, I am an idiot. That said, I doubt those conferences are all that fun, and the airport appears to be the highlight of Dubai. And now, on to our extremely exclusive musings (only 200 people on the planet receive this!):
Item #1:
Given the dominance of large-scale systems--global corporations and supply chains, global banking and pharmaceutical cartels, Central States wielding vast powers, etc.--we tend to think "social engineering" only works on a vast scale. These four small-scale projects demonstrate how one individual and social media can engineer significant improvements.
Item #2:
This 11-minute video clip exceeds my tolerance level (5 minutes) but it offers up some singular insights into the power of visual information in a globalized social media world. Displaying large amounts of data in a visually compelling fashion is one factor in an ongoing an information revolution, but the very attractiveness of these images also greatly increases their power to deceive/misinform. Since I have long dabbled in charts and graphics on the blog, this clip brought all sorts of possible applications to mind. A visual representation of how much energy we each use annually (on average), for example: how much energy does our Internet usage consume compared to jet fuel consumption of our air travel?
Item #3:
If you read only one 1,000-word article on the robo-signing MERS mortgage/foreclosure mess, read this one. It is remarkably concise and well-written and lays out the banks' culpability very clearly.
Item #4:
Sacrificing Microcredit for Megaprofits Micro-lending innovator Muhammad Yunus describes the "mission drift" which is making the microcredit movement into a global profit center. The alternative model to conventional banking--that is, maximize profit and leverage--is to make each borrower an "owner" of the revenue stream from the micro-loans. There is nothing inherently wrong with the profit motive but it's useful to recall that there are competing ways of organizing capital and lending. Here is one description of such an alternative value system.
Item #5:
The idea here is to bypass the conventional banking sector by arranging loans from person-to-person and enterprise-to-enterprise via the peer-to-peer model. Many people are pursuing extensions of the peer-to-peer model. It seems verification and trust are key issues. Some believe that a self-organizing oversight such as "Yelp!" might work: if someone cheats someone, they would be revealed on a Yelp-type review network and their ability to rip off others would be significantly reduced. Money and legal contracts are both systems of trust. Thus they involve some risk. On the other hand, we should recall that Modern Capitalism was constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries with letters of credit that funded trade, as there wasn't enough gold or silver to fund the rising volume of trade transactions. Word of mouth probably weeded out the untrustworthy back then, too.
Item #6:
This design piece references an article which made a big splash a few weeks ago: Divided We Eat: Class and Food in America These pieces made me think of Japan's vast snack-food industry in which novelty is taken to extremes. There's nothing mysterious in food-snack novelty: in mature economies which can easily feed their populace, then selling carrots and grains offers little profit margin. But if you can package those cheap ingredients into costly tidbits with excellent mouth-feel and a marketing buzz, the profits can be immense. One marker of "class in America" is gullibility. Upper-class people know not to trust used-cars lots (alas, a fading business model, thanks to online appraisals of used-car valuations), late-night TV infomercials and the like. The upper-class perspective is that of the marketer, while that of the lower classes is of the consumer, and especially the "aspiring" consumer who desires affordable totems and markers of their own self-worth. One dominant force in American culture is instant gratification. Foods which can be purchased, ripped open and consumed on the spot play to the cultivated sense that if we're eating fast food and packaged food, it means we "don't have time" for "real food," and this "busy-ness" is itself a marker of our aspirations. In other words, if we buy pre-sized carrot pieces rather than take 2 minutes to peel a carrot ourselves, it says that we're too busy for such mundane tasks: we have places to go, people to meet and things to do. Healthy "upper class" households keep it simple: there are no packaged foods, snacks or fast food in the house and hence no temptations. Opting out of the entire consumerist aspirational perspective is difficult, but less so if you're in the class which inhabits the perspective of the marketer rather than that of the consumer.
Item #7:
Reader Jean S. made a number of excellent points in a recent email:
"You make a crucially important point in today's blog entry. (http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan11/situational-shared-awareness01-11.html "Situational Awareness and Shared Awareness") Your blog and a few others inoculate a great many people with situational awareness, but we have no common meeting ground, and hence no opportunity for development of shared awareness. Somehow, we need to know each other and know how to communicate with each other, and I don't think anybody has yet created a meeting hall where that can happen. The "Reply" appendage to some blogs doesn't do it. I despair scanning the comments following Kunstler's blog entries, always beginning with the incredibly inane "First" and moving on from there with petty arguments over irrelevancies and self-aggrandizing, blathering dissertations. We need, somehow, to all be in the same room in order to know that everybody else get's it too to begin to take the next step to do something about it. You have nailed the problem! Maybe we can look to you for insight in creating a solution." I see social media as in its infancy. Right now it's seen as a marketing channel--adverts displaying Hello Kitty toys if you mention "kittens" in your email or Facebook entry--or as a private-network channel in which we each establish our own networks and distribute "content" about ourselves to the channel. I think social media could become much more useful. For example: fellow bicyclist and oftwominds reader Maclean recently recommended that I forego the duct-tape repair of my bicycle seat in favor of finding a local craftsperson who could refurbish the seat cover with leather or faux leather. I would like to pursue this, but the process is arduous now: I have to sort through hundreds of listings on craigslist, or place an advert there, or do a bunch of web searches. If social media were developed to aid small-scale commercial enterprises, then I would be able to go to a single aggregator of such enterprises and either find a craftsperson quickly, or access the collective knowledge of the network with a short query. Craftspeople could share a portion of the revenues generated by the network, or the advert income--some "sharing" of both resources and income would make it attractive to join multiple social media "guilds". As I have noted before, the majority of our income flows to a handful of large-scale cartels and the Central/Local State. Local enterprise atrophies when mostof a community's revenues flow to global concentrations of power and wealth. Social Media could do so much more leveraging of small-scale local enterprises. The initial costs of starting such networked guilds would be relatively modest; the field is wide open. Yelp offers one model of recommendations, but it's not organized in any systemic fashion, nor is it operated by local enterprises. Yelp could overlay a much more directed social media network aimed at promoting local small-scale enterprises. These are just initial thoughts on an enormous and important subject.
Item #8:
The Chinese have really mastered the visual and musical extravaganza. This is a fun few minutes. Our friends in the Shanghai region reported that the lines were horrendous at the Expo, as was the summer heat. One thing I'm reading: The Second Tour by Terry Rizzuti A riveting and wrenching account of the Vietnam War by one who lived it, told in a style which evokes the post-traumatic syndrome the author experienced after his tour of duty as a Marine Corps grunt in Vietnam circa 1967. This week's quote of note: (via U. Doran) "Depressions are when money comes back to its rightful owners." J.P. Morgan
Thanks for reading--
If you want to be removed from the list, please email me at oftwomindz@comcast.net
This is a one-person show and nothing is automated; I maintain this list myself and
it is strictly confidential.
You are receiving this email because you are a subscriber/major contributor to www.oftwominds.com. The big story of the week/month/year: As I discussed in Thursday's entry, the loss of legitimacy of governments in North Africa and the Mideast is a one-way street: the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Correspondent Bram S. sent in this computer-metaphor for the process:
The loss of legitimacy is a complex process which defies encapsulation. The key element now playing out in Arab nations is "the consent of the governed" is being withdrawn. Once a people remove their consent, even the most repressive, dictatorial regimes quickly fall: consider East Germany, the acme of a totalitarian Police State built on distrust and betrayal. The film The Lives of Others offers a poignant exploration of these themes. Note that the 1989 unraveling of Eastern Europe's "consent of the governed" occurred quickly and without the Internet as an enabling technology. From this we can infer that the Web is not an essential element, it is either a catalyst or an enabling extension of much deeper forces. I am now seeing this process of "delegitimization" in a number of settings, both in the recent past and the present, in both developed and developing nations. One characteristic which has defined the 20th century is the dominance of the nation-state as a model of governance. Allegiance and loyalty to the Central State enabled governments to conscript millions of citizens to fight and die for the nation-state. I now see the end of Selective Service (the draft) in 1973 as the end result of the loss of legitimacy of conscription in the U.S. as a policy which had the consent of the governed. Conscription had been the bedrock policy that enabled the U.S. to persevere and accept casualties in the hundreds of thousands during World War II. But the Vietnam Conflict eroded the citizens' belief in the benefits of the policy, as young men were shipped to a distant, unwinnable war to lose their lives in vain, for "causes" unconnected to the survival of the nation-state. As a result of this delegitimization of conscription, I.e. the loss of consent of the governed for this policy, then U.S. wars are now much more technology-dependent. The Armed Forces are now professional, with high pay and benefits and intensive training. When the Armed Forces aren't large enough, as in Iraq, then professional mercenaries are hired--quite often ex-military civilians. The governing class in the U.S. is slowly but surely losing the consent of the governed. The TARP bailout of "too big to fail" banks, for example, was widely hated, yet the Ruling Elites pushed it through all too easily. This "victory" of the Ruling Elites deeply eroded faith in the governing Elites and indeed the system itself. On a very large scale and on a long timeline, we may be witnessing the slow delegitimization of the entire nation-state model. Correspondent Bram S. submitted this link with a powerful comment: "Governments will look different in 20 years because of the internet. People don't need someone to say what they need to do because of all the information is now available to everyone." (The site is written by a Swedish author/professor). nextopia We are seeing examples of this process elsewhere in the world. In many nations, corruption-- bribes and "fees" levied by the Elites and fiefdoms-- act as a huge tax on the poor. Bypassing the bribe-demanding bureaucrats entirely eliminates corruption as an unproductive and selective tax. Technology and the Web offers some opportunities to do so. If permits can be obtained online, then the local bureaucrat who once collected a bribe to issue the permit has been cut out of the loop. The citizen has more disposable income as a result. In the U.S., we see this process in the growth of peer-to-peer lending, which bypasses the entire parasitic financial Elites cartel /banking sector. In an unpredictable way, what was legitimate and consented to can suddenly be recognized as repressive and needless. In North Africa and the Mideast, this is the Status Quo and Ruling Elites. In the U.S., Europe and Japan, it may be the banking sector which is slowly being delegitimized by over-reach and the extreme concentration of political and financial power. (That is of course one major tenet of the Survival+ critique.) I will be exploring these slow and uncertain processes in future blog entries.
Item #1:
Sit down on a bench in shorts, and when you stand up, voila, you're a walking advert.
Item #2:
Interesting vector analogy--down we go toward chaos etc.
Item #3:
Interesting concept: if a large group of users purchased MySpace as "condo owners," then this would "save" or conserve certain aspects of the web from corporate control.
Item #4:
I didn't watch all the clips, but it's pretty amazing that one comic can spoof three very different presidents.
Item #5:
"I Was a Rare Earths Day Trader -How a naval confrontation in the South China Sea created a global investment bubble -- and cost me half my life savings." (Thank you, G.F.B.)
Item #6:
Correspondent Kent K. submitted a fascinating and profound observation which I think ties directly into the process of deligitmization/removal of consent: "I worked for many years in the human services field. I have worked previously in a women's shelter (in my early 20's) and was surprised at the number of times an abused woman would return to the abusive relationship. Seven times is the average, though there was cohort that left sooner: women who had children who were also being abused. They left after one or two instances." This suggests that parents may change what they consider legitimate and acceptable once they perceive their children are being sacrificed for the benefit of some ruling Elite.
Item #7:
Thanks for reading--
If you want to be removed from the list, please email me at oftwomindz@comcast.net
This is a one-person show and nothing is automated; I maintain this list myself and
it is strictly confidential.
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