Few will be all atwitter if RTE in Ireland is found to have the same political survival culture as News International, if not quite on a par with the Murdoch brand of such an activity. Those that might help with your cash flow would come top of the list for a free lunch, weekend in the Sauna, spot of shooting, to be followed by a positive or contrived story. The BBC are masters at this but then, given the nature of the business, so is everyone in it.
Irish politicians will need to be very careful about throwing feigned acrimony or denial around or they could find themselves on the wrong borrowed horse. God forbid that someone asks for a Judicial Inquiry or the plods get involved. Even worse RTE could start actually investigating the politicians' relationships with bankers, developers and, drum roll here, journalists! While the British have remained stalwartly wooden in the face of systemic corruption and illegality the Irish love a fight. Given the amount of money that went missing there is no doubt the place, along with many others, is rotten to the core.
The future of that island, both north and south, is in the hands of a political cadre that didn't evolve from socio-economic or democratic principles but from a populist nationalism that has permeated and substituted for what passes as governments' policy since the nation's inception. The Irish have done a remarkably good job in hiding the fact that they had their own Civil War by blaming everyone but themselves. The simplicity of getting elected on this basis hasn't filled the halls of democracy with capable, never mind great, thinkers. This doesn't bode well in the search for a political solution to their present economic problems. But at least they can follow ingrained tradition and blame the rest of Europe. Or, if they take my advice, bury fat Americans.
Fat Americans are an integral part of the global economic recovery. What would happen if they all stopped over-eating or paying more for their XXXXL clothes? Processed and fast food companies would go broke. Thousands in China would starve. Internationally when you get a large fizzy drink at a burger joint it is less than a pint - in the USA it is around a gallon. The same phenomena applies to coffins. So many Americans won't fit into a standard size coffin that super-sized ones are available, on display at funeral homes, which necessitate the purchase of a, likewise, super-sized plot in the cemetery - making the funeral industry very profitable and an ideal candidate for outsourcing.
The same Americans are too big to be cremated and, if you can get them in, burn so hot they can damage the incinerators. We're talking people that can weigh a quarter of a ton here. 6 of them weigh as much as a small truck, so ambulances can't carry them. The cure for rampant obesity - smoking. It has come to my attention that this explosion in girth has coincided with an equal and opposite implosion of cigarette smoking. Encourage, if not mandate, all fat people to smoke. Give anyone over 400 pounds free cigarettes and they'll die thinner and can be buried cheaper. Health care costs might rise a bit but think of the tax revenue. As 75% of Americans will be overweight by 2020 the US debt and budget deficit should be long gone.
Tuesday 13 March 2012
Saturday 10 March 2012
Ecologists are to blame
So who is really to blame? Theophrastus is who. It is the Ecologists who asserted that all human existence and behaviour can be reduced to a formula and number that begat the rot. We're all digits in the computer of life. Hence the belief that all outcomes can be predicted by formulae - the best of which get a Nobel Prize - hence Game Theory et al. Thus, according to this poppycock, the chances of your best mate fucking your wife are the same as those for a, soon to be cuckolded, Rwandan Gorilla. And there is an elegant formula to prove it.
Never mind that these theories are disproved by reality - the relationship between wolf and bison populations isn't linear any more than a Credit Default Swap takes all the risk out of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. Given the Self excluding nature of these theories, "this is a load of bollocks" is an unapproved response as you can't be outside a universal, mathematically elegant, truth.
This brings us to the truly head banging realisation that the same theory is used to prove opposite ends of the same argument. Those arguing for expansion of the planet's economy are using the same mathematical models as those bitterly opposed to it. Your Goldman Sach's Quant is more like a Greenpeace Eco-warrior than either of them care to admit - even if they realised it. Neither of them take individual behaviour into account as it isn't permitted by the model. Unpredictable individual behaviour is so anathema to an elegant mathematical solution that they invented a means to do away with it - Chaos Theory. When this was challenged by some bright spark that wondered how this could apply universally they invented Fractals. We're all predictably the same - have to be - or the models don't work. Then one day, somehow, somebody let the smoke out of the computer.
Now you'd wonder why any cognitive being would subscribe to an outcome where they're regarded as mathematical rather than biological. But it seems that rather than accept that not everything can be predicted by digits they concluded that there must be a "Theory of Everything". Which brings us, alas, to the purveyors of String Theory. Faced with the reality that most of the mathturbation that got them to this point is based upon giant assumptions that ignore the tricky bit between Particles and Relativity they spent decades introducing invisible dimensions and multiple universes but still couldn't get the numbers to work. The results have all been Infinity. Fear not say these intrepid number doodlers we'll insist that we're on the right track and give our grant money a new name "M Theory". Unfortunately this didn't stop the grants from shrinking so a lot of mathematical physicists were looking for a job just at the time that unregulated financial markets boomed. "I know a theory that takes all the risk out of stupidity" they said, "because we can predict the future - it's just like wolves and bison. Even if it isn't, we have another model that proves you can't lose." What they overlooked to mention is that they couldn't find Gravity and three quarters of Matter and Energy.
In a world where everything can be predicted in numbers and theories nothing else matters - yea, right! Unfortunately, economists didn't seem to realise that any theory that always ends up at Infinity wouldn't, in fact, work. Especially as the same theory could be used to arrive at both plus-infinity and minus-infinity simultaneously. Surely this would raise a few heads, you'd think - not if we're making so much money that it has to be right - QED. Wrong - somebody forgot that the rich like to, whenever and wherever possible, fuck the poor. The theory choked financial system, politically manipulated, permitted the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. The theory was that by exporting our poverty we'd all be better off and spend our time having our hair done or buying a flat screen TV. While the people that got our poverty would be delighted to have it as they live on less than $2 a day. Corporations loved it. The rich loved it. The poor, and increasingly the middle-class, got fucked.
Now what would have happened if chemists rather than physicists had come up with economic and financial theories. Well, chemists don't have any vague theories, they do have Principles. Principles, many and varied, are the key missing ingredients in mathematical financial theories - none of which have empirical proof outside of mathematics. So chemists would probably have done a better job. They don't join molecules together in an invisible dimension or another universe. Nor can they fill a test tube with ingredients that only exist in theory - they might try something that does exist. Not so Physicists - they just keep flogging this dead horse in the hope that it will, theoretically, come back to life - somewhere in the 15th dimension or in the billionth universe. If you believe String (M) Theory it is happening in a Universe near you right .... now.
My suggestion is that chemists round up all physicists and lock them up in a Silo. Where they can plan a theoretical escape.
Never mind that these theories are disproved by reality - the relationship between wolf and bison populations isn't linear any more than a Credit Default Swap takes all the risk out of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. Given the Self excluding nature of these theories, "this is a load of bollocks" is an unapproved response as you can't be outside a universal, mathematically elegant, truth.
This brings us to the truly head banging realisation that the same theory is used to prove opposite ends of the same argument. Those arguing for expansion of the planet's economy are using the same mathematical models as those bitterly opposed to it. Your Goldman Sach's Quant is more like a Greenpeace Eco-warrior than either of them care to admit - even if they realised it. Neither of them take individual behaviour into account as it isn't permitted by the model. Unpredictable individual behaviour is so anathema to an elegant mathematical solution that they invented a means to do away with it - Chaos Theory. When this was challenged by some bright spark that wondered how this could apply universally they invented Fractals. We're all predictably the same - have to be - or the models don't work. Then one day, somehow, somebody let the smoke out of the computer.
Now you'd wonder why any cognitive being would subscribe to an outcome where they're regarded as mathematical rather than biological. But it seems that rather than accept that not everything can be predicted by digits they concluded that there must be a "Theory of Everything". Which brings us, alas, to the purveyors of String Theory. Faced with the reality that most of the mathturbation that got them to this point is based upon giant assumptions that ignore the tricky bit between Particles and Relativity they spent decades introducing invisible dimensions and multiple universes but still couldn't get the numbers to work. The results have all been Infinity. Fear not say these intrepid number doodlers we'll insist that we're on the right track and give our grant money a new name "M Theory". Unfortunately this didn't stop the grants from shrinking so a lot of mathematical physicists were looking for a job just at the time that unregulated financial markets boomed. "I know a theory that takes all the risk out of stupidity" they said, "because we can predict the future - it's just like wolves and bison. Even if it isn't, we have another model that proves you can't lose." What they overlooked to mention is that they couldn't find Gravity and three quarters of Matter and Energy.
In a world where everything can be predicted in numbers and theories nothing else matters - yea, right! Unfortunately, economists didn't seem to realise that any theory that always ends up at Infinity wouldn't, in fact, work. Especially as the same theory could be used to arrive at both plus-infinity and minus-infinity simultaneously. Surely this would raise a few heads, you'd think - not if we're making so much money that it has to be right - QED. Wrong - somebody forgot that the rich like to, whenever and wherever possible, fuck the poor. The theory choked financial system, politically manipulated, permitted the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. The theory was that by exporting our poverty we'd all be better off and spend our time having our hair done or buying a flat screen TV. While the people that got our poverty would be delighted to have it as they live on less than $2 a day. Corporations loved it. The rich loved it. The poor, and increasingly the middle-class, got fucked.
Now what would have happened if chemists rather than physicists had come up with economic and financial theories. Well, chemists don't have any vague theories, they do have Principles. Principles, many and varied, are the key missing ingredients in mathematical financial theories - none of which have empirical proof outside of mathematics. So chemists would probably have done a better job. They don't join molecules together in an invisible dimension or another universe. Nor can they fill a test tube with ingredients that only exist in theory - they might try something that does exist. Not so Physicists - they just keep flogging this dead horse in the hope that it will, theoretically, come back to life - somewhere in the 15th dimension or in the billionth universe. If you believe String (M) Theory it is happening in a Universe near you right .... now.
My suggestion is that chemists round up all physicists and lock them up in a Silo. Where they can plan a theoretical escape.
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