Nobrainer’s Think Tank

I’ll follow up on yesterday’s post by letting someone else say basically the same thing while saying it better:

[Paulson] can inject all the money he wants into the consumer credit market and it isn’t going to make us want to buy cars or use our credit cards.

We did enough of that for a while. More than enough. Too much. And right now, before we spend, spend, spend, we’re going to wait and see if we keep our jobs.

But we’re also going to wait and see what the government’s going to do next. Nobody knows, and that evidently includes the secretary of the treasury.

When no one knows how the rules of the game are going to change — and they seem to change from week to week — who wants to take a risk? Who wants to borrow money? Who wants to invest? Business and consumers are hunkering down, waiting for the storm of change to pass.

The problem isn’t liquidity.

It’s uncertainty.

Paulson doesn’t realize that his erratic attempts at creating liquidity are creating the uncertainty that makes liquidity meaningless.

Hear, hear!

With news that TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, isn’t buying troubled assets, I realized that we are completely fucked. The dollar sums being thrown around are bad enough, but Washington seems dedicated to changing tacks every month which is going to make any kind of business planning impossible… aside from planning how to bribe bureaucrats so that they cough up some money for their favorite corporate entities.

We are fucked.

We’ve all seen the NBC public service announcements, the more you know…. Motivated by Bad Science, I think there should be a blog (if there isn’t one already), perhaps titled “The More You Know Blog” that posts once per day and primarily refutes the media’s bullshit du jour. And it would be even better if skewered only news/scare stories from NBC. Sure it would be a lawsuit waiting to happen with that title, but it’s an otherwise Genius (yes, with a capital G) idea.

Yesterday I finished reading Bad Science. I ordered it after seeing only a brief mention of it on Marginal Revolution. [The author, Ben Goldacre, also has a blog at badscience.net, although I haven't really looked at it].

I liked that this book actually seemed to be based on evidence and strong evidence at that. Moreover, it deserves credit for being a page turner in the I’m-excited-to-see-what’s-on-the-next-page sense and not the I’m-ready-for-this-book-to-be-over sense. Put another way, it’s very much what Everything Bad is Good For You was not.

This book, more than most others I’ve read recently, I would recommend to a wider audience. I think that most of my non-scientist/engineer friends (and even many of the scientist-engineer friends) can learn quite a bit from it. It helps tune the ability to detect bullshit, especially when it comes to science and the “sciency” things the media loves to frighten and coerce you with.

Moving on, (more…)

And they know it.

I looked out the window this morning and what did I see? Leaves. Tons of leaves just falling off the trees. They weren’t doing that yesterday morning. Today Barack Obama is the President-Elect. Yesterday he wasn’t.

Coincidence?

I think not.