the odd idea.................

 

     Now, I am faced with another illusion.  It is no longer a question of particular privileges, but of transforming privilege into a common right.  The entire nation has conceived the odd idea that it could increase production indefinitely by handing it over to the State in the form of taxes in order for the State to give it back a portion in the form of work, profit, and pay.  The state is being requested to ensure the well-being of every citizen; and a long and sorry procession, in which every sector of the workforce is represented, from the severe banker to the humble laundress, is parading before the organizer in chief in order to ask for financial assistance.

-Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms and "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" (March 1848)

Predictions are hard.....................

 ......................especially about the future:

A master-of-the-universe mentality is pervasive in finance because it’s a group of highly educated, competitive people. They see it as a sign of weakness if you admit you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

The problem is finance people (all people, really) are very good at telling you why something that just happened was obvious in hindsight. They are terrible at telling you what will happen in the future.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

annoying.....................

 An annoying malady, to think yourself so wise that you persuade yourself that no one can believe the contrary!

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book One, Chapter 56

Bagehot gets one wrong......................

 In the fall of 1862, he penned this for the Economist:

that the independence of the Southern Confederacy is a certain fact if not a fait accompli; that Jefferson Davis and his coadjutors have made the Confederacy a nation; that there is not the slightest prospect of their subjugation or forcible re-annexation; and that both by the resolution they have shown, the strength of they have put forth, and the victories they have won, they have shown that they can earn, if they have not yet fully earned the right to be admitted into the society of the world as a substantive and sovereign state.

-James Grant, Bagehot, The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

Oops.................

 Failing to learn from others’ mistakes is one of life’s greatest mysteries. Despite having nearly unlimited access to examples of others making all kinds of mistakes, people repeatedly fail to learn from past generations.

-Ted Lamade, from here

Home sales go oops...............................

 

explanation and enlargeable graph here

Is the Big Bang Theory in trouble................?

 It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

-Richard Feynman

Pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope don't seem to be supporting it.  Story here.

via

The hopeful birth.......................

 ....................of a sub-division:  Episode 24

Oops.......  Not every day is perfect and works exactly the way you want it to.  While preparing to install the laterals from the main sanitary sewer line to the individual building lots, we broke the main line.  The system just won't work with a broken main.  Repairs are in order—now completed.  

just a normal day..........................

 

Ray's story is here

the tree of expertise........................?

 By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”

-Glenn Harlan Reynolds, as cut-and-pasted from here

Maybe not the literal translation.............

   via

Oooops.................................

Into every life some rain must fall.  Went down to the Old School this morning to unlock the front door for the drywall finishers and to check on a few things.   When empty, it is generally a very quiet building, but not this morning.  About halfway down the main corridor, I became aware of an unusual dull roar.  Uh-oh.   Following the sound to the former boiler room, I was greeted by about three feet of water on the lower level floor and several high pressure sprays of water.  The new 2" water meter was installed yesterday.  Sometime in the early morning hours, the gasket on the meter failed and water did what water does.  There is nothing wrong with the City of Newark's water pressure.

We were fortunate in many regards.  The electricians had hoped to energize the main electric panel on Thursday, but didn't because AEP wasn't ready yet.  We are about a week away from framing the lower level.   Neither of those improvements would benefit from getting soaked, and they would have.   Also, if the gasket had blown tonight, with no one scheduled to be in the building tomorrow, the flooding would have continued for hours more and spread out of the basement onto the main floor.  That would have made a serious mess.  We dodged a bullet.

Interesting conclusion:  The plumber showed up about 12 minutes after I called him.  Within a half hour he had a pump set up to drain the water out of the basement.  Within an hour, the fire department showed up.  One of our neighbors, seeing water gushing from the pump, called 911 and the fire department was dispatched.  It is comforting to know that people are paying attention.

Camera phone doesn't do justice to the water flow

It's supposed to be a living room, not a swimming pool

High water marks

Predictions are hard..................

............................................................especially about the future:

"Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau," declared the eminent Yale economist Irving Fisher in the autumn of 1929.  A few weeks after this oracular pronouncement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had declined by more than a third.  The worst was still to come.  On 8 July 1932, the Dow Jones closed at 41.88, a drop on nearly 90 percent from its 1929 peak.

Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

Say it's not so..............................

..............If you are a fan of Napoleon Hill, author of the classic Think And Grow Rich, you may not want to read this essay on the "Untold Story."  Paints a fairly sorry picture of Hill's life.  Us humans can be quite complicated creatures.

via

This particular file.....................

..............................................................................is rather large:

 “things I know and choose to ignore”

-back story here

A bad bargain..................................

Transcribing his train of thought as it cam to him, Adams wrote that the practice of slavery "taints the very sources of moral principle ... It perverts human reason, and reduces men endowed with logical powers to maintain that Slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion .., The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between Freedom and Slavery in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious."
     He had said it.  Adams had long comforted himself with the fact that slavery, whatever its evils, had been enshrined in the Constitution, which he revered as the secular equivalent of Holy Writ.  But now he saw that he had no right to that comfort.  The constitutional bargain was morally intolerable.

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit

Pardon me, while I.....................

an emphatic no...............................

A practice had grown up whereby the heads of the bank regulators from around the world met with central bank governors each September.  In 2007 the bank regulators were asked whether the US sub-prime mortgage market was sufficiently large to bring down major banks.  The answer was an emphatic no.  Although the stock of such mortgages was around $1 trillion, potential losses were not large enough to create a problem for the system as a whole.  After all, the loss of wealth in the dotcom crash earlier in the decade had been eight times greater.
     This time, however, the banks had made large bets on the sub-prime market in the form of derivative contracts.  Although these bets cancelled each other out for the banking system as a whole, some banks were in the money and others were under water.  The problem was that it was impossible for investors, and in some cases even for the banks themselves, to tell one from the other.  So  all banks came under suspicion.  Banks found it difficult, and at times impossible, to raise money that only weeks earlier had been easily attainable.  They stopped lending to each other.

-Mervyn King,  The End of Alchemy:  Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy

Some laws just write themselves...............

     Behind the scenes, the stocks of credits and debits were building in an unsustainable way, like piles of bricks.  It is always surprising how many bricks can be piled one on top of another without their collapsing.  This truth is embodied in the first law of financial crises:  an unsustainable position can continue for far longer that you would believe possible.  That was true for the duration of the Great Stability.  What happened in 2008 illustrated the second law of financial crises:  when an unsustainable position ends it happens faster than you could imagine.

-Mervyn King,  The End of Alchemy:  Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy

Oops.........................

...................A cautionary tale for those who believe in "settled science."  Forty years ago, there was a dietary fork in the road:  who would be the villain - sugar or saturated fat.  It is a longish and very interesting tale. It is told here.  The fruit of this bad science is our current obesity epidemic.  And it didn't have to be  this way.  An excerpt to set the stage:

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.

thanks craig