CO2 #3 A Tory Case for Delaying Cuts (via Stumbling&Mumbling)

In the Times, Danny Finkelstein argues against a temporary fiscal loosening:

Summoning up the will and retaining the minimum of political support is incredibly difficult. And fragile...Once we return to a policy of borrow and spend, how will we ever summon up the will to stop again?

I'm not sure about this. If I were a Tory wanting smaller government - and this, rather than concern about the national debt, is the reasonable argument for cutting public spending - I'd have three concerns.  

1. Delaying cuts gives us the chance to make more intelligent ones. It gives us the opportunity to consult workers on where best to make efficiency savings; these are better identified from the bottom-up than from the top down. Quick cuts are bad cuts, which risks discrediting the aim of shrinking the state. 

Read this short but incredible opinion about public spending: DelayingCuts 

CO2 #2 What Business Is Wall Street In? (via Hufftington Post)

Wall Street doesn't know what business it is in. Regulators don't know what the business of Wall Street is. Investor/shareholders don't know what business Wall Street is in.

The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the high frequency and automated traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible. 

Read here this enlightening article from Mark Cuban: WallStreetBusiness  

CO2 #1 French Rats Fed GMOs Turn Out Looking Shockingly Like Americans Fed GMOs. (via FearLess)

The GMOs in the French study were approved for human consumption in the US after just a 90 day rat feeding study. Subsequently, they have gone into our American food supply and today more than 70% of the food we consume contains Genetically Modified Organisms. Over the same period of time we've become a very sick nation while countries who have avoided/banned or labeled GMOs have faired much better. France has been very skeptical of GMOs and has required labeling on any product consuming GMOs. Their recent study is one of the only long term feeding studies, unless of course you include the feeding study being conducted on the American public. Perhaps that's why the results look so much like the epidemics we are facing as a nation. More tumors. More damaged organs. 

Check the source of this study here: RatsGMO  

O2 #3 The Psychology of Morality - Time to be Honest (via The Economist)

A simple experiment suggests a way to encourage truthfulness.

“IS SIN original?” That is the question addressed by Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, in a paper just published in Psychological Science. Dr Shalvi and his colleagues, Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wanted to know if the impulse to cheat is something that grows or diminishes when the potential cheater has time for reflection on his actions. Is cheating, in other words, instinctive or calculating?

Appropriately, the researchers' apparatus for their experiment was that icon of sinful activity, the gambling die. They wanted to find out whether people were more likely to lie about the result of a die roll when asked that result immediately, or when given time to think.

Check here to read this The Economist article about how to encourage Truthfulness: Honesty 

O2 #2 What is Value? What is Money? (via Simoleon Sense)

But in that future, is there going to be more value or less value? I would argue there's going to be more value because value would be whether people are able to get on time to the places that they need to go, if they're able to get there safely, and if they're able to get there comfortably. In a world in which you have a lot of self-driving cars there's going to be less traffic. It's going to be safer because probably the self-driving cars are going to be very bad at getting drunk and doing other things that would get them in trouble. They could be very comfortable, because since you need to build less of them, you can build very nice, robust, comfortable cars. But there's going to be maybe a smaller ability to appropriate the value of all of this mobility.

I see a big difference between the generation of value and the appropriation of value. What I see about the generation of value is that usually it's more about reducing the cost to a very small amount, to reducing the cost sometimes even to zero. When you reduce the cost to zero, and you make something accessible, you have generated a lot of value. But when you reduce the cost to zero and you make something universally available, you cannot appropriate any of it. There's a big contradiction between these two dimensions, and that's something that I've been thinking a lot about recently.

I see the difference between the industries that have been generating value now, and the ones that are appropriating value now, and the ones that are appropriating value tend to be more financial industries. Industries in the financial sector are in the appropriation value business. They're not in the generation value business. I would argue that in many countries, these have been actually very bad at even generating the little value that they are responsible to generate: the proper allocation of capital. In many cases, like recently in Spain, financial entities were not able to allocate capital properly and there have been important bailouts associated with these misallocations. These bailouts are much larger than the amounts that we would see on all of the other businesses that are generating new forms of value, like all of these online companies.

Check here this wonderful and timely piece of reflexion about the difference between Value & Money: ValueMoney 

O2 #1 10 Commandments for Social Media Managers (via PR Daily)

1. You shalt feed your community, not your ego.

2. You shalt recognize followers with gratitude.

3. You shalt share content useful to the community

4. You shalt not moderate comments.

5. You shalt post community rules.

6. You shalt be transparent in all decisions.

7. You shalt not feed the trolls.

8. You shalt converse and not broadcast.

9. You Shalt Respond to All Queries Quickly

10. You Shalt Listen Before Speaking

Here is the link for the 10 commandments: 10CommandmentsSocialMedia 

A Tribute to my Country, Portugal.

Portugal

No dia 15 de Setembro, pela terceira vez na vida, o meu país conseguiu arrepiar-me a pele. Pôr-me o sangue a ferver. Fazer-me os olhos brilhar. Desde que o Lusitânia Expresso cruzou os mares de Timor e que o Ricardo defendeu sem luvas o penalti Inglês, que Portugal não me fazia sentir assim.

Lá fora, no estrangeiro onde vivo, através das imagens permitidas por uma ligação online, o Povo Português fez-me sentir o mesmo que a Humanidade sente quando lê um poema do Pessoa, quando contempla um quadro da Paula Rego, quando ouve uma música dos Madredeus. Comoção. Gratidão. Respeito. Aquilo que sentimos pelos poucos de nós que têm a coragem e o amor ao mundo necessários para fazer aquilo que todos os outros gostavam que acontecesse.

Neste dia eu percebi que a revolta contra a barbárie pode ser tão sublime quanto escrever um poema, pintar um quadro, ou compor uma música. Pode exigir ainda mais coragem, quando essa barbárie, apesar de ter acólitos, não tem rostos, como de resto todas as ideologias. Vive em menor ou maior quantidade na mente de alguns, que por infelicidade da civilização convergiram para as cadeiras de poder do mundo ocidental.

Essa ideologia acha que promover o auto-interesse individual é a melhor forma de alcançar o bem-estar comum, que por isso a desigualdade extrema é legítima, que o mercado financeiro é a realidade, e que mesmo quando essa realidade é trágica não a podemos mudar mas apenas, resignadamente, piorar o país e a vida daqueles que nele trabalham.

Hoje Portugal escreveu um poema com a mensagem que o sistema financeiro deve servir as pessoas e não o contrário. Hoje Portugal pintou um quadro onde expressa que se o sistema financeiro não serve, deite-se fora o sistema porque as pessoas não são descartáveis. Hoje Portugal compôs uma música onde as pessoas não se “modelam”, mas os sistemas sim, haja coragem política. Podemos perder tudo o resto, mas hoje ganhámos o País.