There are several economists who are being called Dr. Doom. Roubini is the best, he sounds like a recorded message played after a nuclear attack. James Bond villains are less terrifying – and I’m talking about what he says now.
In three parts.
Paul Krugman writes that Iceland has just had to bail out a domestic bank for nearly a billion dollars, which on a per capita basis is a bigger bailout than the failed $700 billion mother of all bailouts. This piece by Max Keiser, a year ago, uses Iceland as a perfect example of the retarded-debt-craze-asset-bubble that has just bukkaked from a great height over the entire anglo-saxosphere and beyond.
The presenter, Max Keiser may be a nut case, a tabloid version of the higher brow economic Cassandra nut case, Nouriel Roubini. But in the land of the mad, Keiser is king, and we are currently in the land of the mad.
[Dear readers, I am very sorry if you are bored by all this financial stuff, which I assure you, I have absolutely no fucking clue about (just like people who work at investment banks, apparently). Unfortunately, I just can’t get enough of it. All those graphs and stats and doomsday scenarios and schadenfreude together – its like a disaster movie made specifically for slightly autistic, embittered beta-male, web nerds, like myself. Perhaps the economy is tanking because, like me, everyone is watching the economy tank rather than working.]
Merci Brice.
Plus Ca Change… professional New Yorker and androgynous person from the future, Laurie Anderson, talks about the problem of the national debt. Only this was nearly 20 years ago.
You would think that the problem of debt would be bigger now that: Asia is lending us money to pay the interest on the money it lent us to buy their mouse pads and umbrellas; capital markets have curled up into a nasty little tight spit-ball and the securities industry has shat the proverbial bed.
But as a percentage of GDP the numbers are far less scary according to the second graph here. So what’s the deal? Why aren’t the numbers worse, if the story is?
This first episode made in 2006 is from what could have been an extremely humdrum reality TV show about Wall Street. It may accidentally become a classic period piece, if the producers can embrace the irony as the series moves into its 3rd series, in a dramatically altered universe.
[from Hulu, so US only]
There are long tracts of glass in the Sahara, caused by meteorites skidding across the sand and melting it. Glass looks pretty and feels precious, but sand does not, and this is perhaps part of the reason why people perceive glass recycling to be a valuable exercise – something that is debatable at best.
I am actively against recycling non-metals, because I think it does nothing to aid consuming less, and may actually exacerbate the problem. In other words, I think it creates a net damage to the environment. It would be better that people had to pay directly for the removal trash which scrap merchants wouldn’t pay them for and for these people to be non-subsidized.
Showing up in a car to the bottle bank with Perrier bottles reminds me of Roman schoolboys who had slaves who would take a proxy beating for them when they did something wrong. Both are dubious ways of avoiding blame.
Recycling is about preventing people digging something out of the ground and burning fuel to make something from it. If it were truly viable, then people would be ransacking landfills to recycle them.
Reuse yes, recycle no. Penn and Teller make the point better than I ever could.
Running time: 30 mins
Full screen
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Running time: 3 hours
Full screen