I am sure someone will shout “20/20 hindsight”. That’s bullshit. Everything I am saying now was obvious five years ago, and lots of smart people knew and understood it. Some of us even bought into “arbitrage” fairy tales and tried to profit from getting our views “impounded into market prices”. We learned to take a different Keynes quote seriously, the one about markets remaining irrational longer than you can remain solvent. [Shlieffer and Vishny’s famous coinage, “the limits of arbitrage” is not strong enough, because it suggests that efficient arbitrage is the norm subject to some exceptions and limitations. It is more accurate to view efficient arbitrage as the unusual special case, in bond markets as well as in equity markets.]
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More disturbingly, there is evidence that young people may be not just complacent but also poorly informed. A study, published in February, by academics at East Carolina University, surveyed the information habits of 3,500 18-to-24 year olds during the 2008 US presidential campaign. The aim was to investigate whether those learning about news from cable television, comedy shows, podcasts, and social networking sites were equally well-informed about politics. The findings provide few reasons to be optimistic: “Users of these sites tend to seek out views that correspond with their own; they are no more knowledgeable about politics than their counterparts and, in fact, seem to be less so… they do not seem to be more likely to vote.” As David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, said: “If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?
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Tweeting is the opposite of depth of work; so is gossip and reality TV and Facebook and 99.9% of blogging. Mainstream TV news is the definition of shallowness of work; if a journalist at NBC or CBS ever dared to go deep, she’d be fired on the spot. The Daily Show does go deep, and so does the Colbert Report.
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Since the Obama administration claims the “right” to murder anyone in the world and that there is nothing at all that may constrain that “right,” murdering every Afghan, or every Iranian, or every American who disagrees is, in logic and in fact, in the nature of a postscript. “We can murder anyone at all, and as many people as we decide is advisable or necessary. And we never need to explain our reasons to anyone.” The evil has been committed. It is complete. The rest is multiplication.
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By putting half baked implementations into non-beta software Chrome and Safari actually do harm to the web. Why are we cursing Internet Explorer 6. It was not for lack of innovation and standards support when it first shipped. It is because that standards support was buggy and incomplete – that’s right, it was half baked. And now we see Chrome and Safari releasing unfinished implementations as well.
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I am often asked questions like this, and I am less optimistic now that I once was. Certainly we need new energy sources or the future will be very unpleasant. But new energy creates its own problems, which in time we will have to address. We can foresee this with nuclear energy and its waste. Even so-called “green” energy sources will be environmentally damaging. All of our adaptations are short term. They solve immediate problems but set the stage for future problems. Eric Sevareid once said “The chief source of problems is solutions.” He was right, but that does not mean that we forego solutions. I like to use an athletic metaphor to think about sustainability. It is possible to lose—to become unsustainable and collapse. But the converse does not hold. There is no point at which we have “won”—become sustainable forever. Success consists of staying in the game.
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We created a far harsher world for our children to grow up in. It was as though we decided that the freedom and lack of worry which we had inherited was too good for our children, and we pulled up the ladder we had climbed.
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