Darwin Day: Threat or Promise?

February 12th, 2009 is the 200th birthday of Chas. Darwin. Yes, one of our famous politicians shares that exact birthday, but Abe the rail splitting lawyer is not the point of this post. So what does Darwin Day mean? To most of the world, he was a man who found the missing link between the observation of evolution (that was accepted as reality before he was born) and a workable theory explaining it. He changed the understanding of how it happens from "What the (expletive)?" to "Well, duh!". But this is America. We have to be different. We have to be independent. Less than half of Americans seem to share the world consensus on the value of Darwin's contribution. A survey conducted by Science Magazine (313:765-766) showed only Turkey having a lower public rate of understanding of the theory of evolution than the United States. Of course, the survey didn't have access to even more starkly theocratic nations. Here's the summary of what people think of the theory of common descent:

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Youtube and copyright

Word is getting around the Internet that Youtube is no longer the wild west. Youtube is pulling down numerous video due to copyright violations. What is a copyright violation? Youtube has published this succinct set of guidelines, including various links for further understanding. It's a good starting place for anyone tempted to make use of the creative works of others without their explicit permission. Here's a hint: "Fair use" doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want.

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The real problem with the economy

I'm not an economist, yet I know that the most vocal economists these days are not shooting straight with us. You can see it in their faces and you can hear it in their voices. Niall Ferguson is a professor of history and a professor at the business school at Harvard. His analysis of our economic problems rings true to me. He starts with the premise that we are in hock up to our eyeballs and we are in massive denial that this is the real problem:

The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Average household sector debt has reached 141 per cent of disposable income in the United States and 177 per cent in the United Kingdom. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets forty, sixty or even a hundred times the size of their capital. Average U.S. investment bank leverage was above 25 to 1 at the end of 2008. Eurozone bank leverage was more than 30 to 1. British bank balance sheets are equal to a staggering 440 per cent of gross domestic product

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Control Your Controllables

One of my favorite economist reads, Paul Kedrosky, directed me to this image, which is from another excellent financial analysis blog done by Susan Woodward and Robert Hall. This is a comparison of labor numbers from now and 1981 rescaled to the size of today's labor force. Stunning. For those of you who, like me, were still in high school in 1981 - it was the biggest recession we have had in the US since the Great Depression. Not pretty. The graph shows us a partial image of how painful events are right now. Many people have lost homes, many are without work, and I have a feeling it is going to get worse before it gets better. There is a lot of suffering out there. I get a lot of calls from desperate people who are trying to put on a brave face. Sometimes I feel like I am barely hanging on to my life raft and folks are pulling on my legs to clamber on. In the midst of all this turmoil, with so much personal pain around me, how do I keep steady?

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Republicans Reveal Attitude Toward The Future

The rhetoric that accompanied Obama's election included much from the downsized Republicans about looking forward to working with the new president and coming to grips with national problems in the spirit of a fresh start. However, the stimulus package---which may well be too big---has forced the Republicans to declare themselves. We're hearing a lot about wanting more tax cuts---almost exclusively tax cuts---in lieu of spending in the form of direct aid. This is a Republican mantra now. Tax cuts. The question, of course, is really this: what good are tax cuts when you're already buried in debt? Granted, it frees up (theoretically) money for critical and immediate payments, but if the idea is to put people back to work tax cuts are not the solution. Because corporate America is mired in over-leveraged debt burdens that must be paid down before something mundane like hiring can happen. Tax cuts, therefore, won't have any kind of immediate impact on the jobless rate. In time it might, depending on several other factors, the most significant of which would be a newfound corporate sense of ethics which would prevent them from continuing the pillage of their own capital for all the things that have gotten us into this mess in the first place. Labor is at the bottom of the ladder of what they see as important---hence the tongue lashing Obama gave them for paying out bonuses while asking for federal aid. As for working people? What good does a tax cut do someone who isn't paying taxes because he or she has no income? But this was to be expected. It is an attitude born out of the mixed priorities of what has become the Right, one of which is fiscal responsibility (I used to support Republicans on this count) the other of which is the more Libertarian view (borne of the Grover Norquist faction) that government is always the problem and must be pruned back radically. Hence tax cuts, in order to curtail revenues in order to force the government to reduce its size and, one must realize, its influence.

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