Lori Gottlieb and the Collapse of the American Empire

The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are entitled to a perfect life—that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from Harvard, puts it, “if they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should be another option.” Mogel puts it even more bluntly: what parents are creating with all this choice are anxious and entitled kids whom she describes as “handicapped royalty.” _Lori Gottlieb

Pity meek and mild Lori Gottlieb, an intern in family counseling who has made some interesting observations in the course of her work. Gottlieb discussed her observations in a recent piece in the Atlantic. The piece has raised a firestorm of online debate, snark, and condemnation, almost entirely undeserved. The fault in Gottlieb's piece lies not in what she says, but in what she leaves out -- what these disturbing findings imply for the future of the American empire.

...Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

...Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle...

...Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups” because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”

...A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance.

...This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year, parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!’”

... _theAtlantic

And so on... An interesting glimpse into the modern state of child-raising in the US from someone on the front lines of family therapy.

If Americans truly are raising generations of fragile, entitled children, who is going to do the hard work that needs to be done? As long as the US economy was doing well, America could import its hard workers and many of its hard thinkers, so as to keep the wheels of commerce and invention moving along. But with the rapid emergence of crisis levels of debt and demography, the US economy may not be able to import so much of its needed human capital -- to compensate for the disastrous failures of its parents and educational system.

Children need to learn practical competence in a wide range of skills. They need to learn to focus on a difficult task, and learn to work hard at it until it is done. Children must not be age-segregated in prison schools for so many of their formative years, kept away from any responsibility or opportunity to explore the real world.

The Roman Empire collapsed over a few centuries for many of the reasons the American empire is threatened: debt, demography, social problems that were swept under the rug, entitled and abusive ruling classes, etc.

American parents have only one or two children, on average, and far too many of them are being raised as "trophy children," pampered perpetually childish pets rather than skilled, competent, and responsible proto-adults. This failure to reproduce -- and failure to competently raise the meagre progeny which they do produce -- is what truly threatens the collapse of the American Experiment (not actually an empire in the Roman sense at all).

Gottlieb was actually rather tentative and modest in her conclusions -- not taking them as far as she perhaps should have. Yet she was castigated by the "pampering nannies" of modern academia, journalism, and the blogosphere. The dysfunction can probably not be reversed before catastrophe ensues, at least not in the many strongholds of the destructive philosophy.

It is up to parents who wish to raise competent and functional children to structure an environment around the child which facilitates the acquisition of skills and an ongoing successful adaptation to adult world responsibilities.

Solar Cycles Stalling: Ice Age On Its Way?

Average temperatures in Britain could fall by two degrees centigrade, according to the study led by Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at Reading University, because of a drop in the amount of sunspot activity. _DailyMail

Little Ice Age Plunging In?
The Earth's climate is chaotic by nature, and given to drastic changes and shifts as a matter of course. The many overlapping natural cycles which contribute to global climate have been largely ignored by climate scientists -- until now.

Professor Lockwood's findings could mean the average winter temperature could drop below 2.5C, compared to the average British winter now of 5C, the newspaper reported.

In June, three different studies all concluded that sunspot activity looks set to decline over the next 10 years.

Experts said the next upswing in sunspot activity, which follows an 11-year cycle, will not be as strong as normal - or might not even happen at all.
The findings were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's solar physics division.

They said a decrease in global warming might result in the years after 2020, the approximate time when sunspots are expected to disappear for years, maybe even decades. _DailyMail

Meanwhile, climate scientists are just now beginning to admit the importance of the urban heat island effect, which has biased global temperature records upward -- contributing to the carbon hysteria which has sustained the orthodoxy of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and helped drive the bandwagon and steamroller of the great climate panic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

More honest scientists are likewise admitting that extreme weather events have nothing to do with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

You Mustn't Believe the Lies that Green Zealots Tell. Not only about nuclear power, but about climate change, resource depletion, overpopulation, etc.

Government meddling in climate and energy will be the death of us all. It is time to stamp out government meddling, before government meddling stamps us out!

A Biological World: Sustainable Materials and Fuels

GCC
Global industry is looking for alternatives to fossil fuels, as feedstocks for the production of fuels, plastics, high value chemicals, lubricants, and other materials. The planet Earth is highly prolific in its biological output -- and it could be far more biologically prolific, given just a little help.

The image above depicts the scheme of Montana startup Blue Marble Biomaterials, which aims to ride a $multimillion grant from the US Advanced Manufacturing Program to successful bio-manufacturing.

The company is implementing novel recycling systems to eliminate waste and reduce cost: a photo-bioreactor containing algae purifies wastewater and waste gas from the fermentation system and their solid waste is dried and pelletized for use in wood-burning furnaces and stoves. The company has future plans to power its facilities using its own waste gas and pelletized solid waste in already on-site gasifiers.

Blue Marble Energy’s proprietary AGATE (Acid, Gas and Ammonia Targeted Extraction) system uses different bacterial consortia (“cassettes”) in an anaerobic fermentation process to produce carboxylic acids, esters, mercaptains / thiols, and terpenes. The system is feedstock flexible; for the Missoula plant, Blue Marble is using waste coffee grounds and spent grain from a major brewer, said Kelly Ogilvie, Blue Marble’s CEO.

(Blue Marble uses a supercritical fluid extraction process to remove the remaining lipids from the coffee grounds.)

The feedstock flexibility can manifest as price stability for Blue Marble’s chemical customers, Ogilvie noted. For example, the company has a stable price on the spent grain from the brewer; a waste product which otherwise would end up in landfills (i.e., the amounts above that which could economically be used for cattle feed, the other major disposal pathway for spent grain).

If we have fixed feedstock [such as the waste spent grain], we have price stability. We can hedge off the future price volatility of petroleum. Price protection is a huge issue right now.

—Kelly Ogilvie

_GCC

Blue Marble had better have its act together, because government grants run out very quickly -- no matter how well connected company founders may be to government administrators. Bio-manufacture of this range of materials, using these new technologies, is risky and cutting edge.

As long as petroleum prices remain relatively high, crafty uses of biomass and bio-products as substitutes for petroleum can make a profit. But to build a large-scale infrastructure of bio-manufacture and bio-refining, investors and participants will want to be sure the bio-approach can withstand temporary nose-dives of oil prices, such as occurred in 2008-2009 and multiple times throughout the 1900s.

Chinese Cargo Cult Mimicry: If We Build It Will They Come?

China is building a replica Alpine village in a grimy industrial city.

It hopes the chalets in the southern city of Huizhou will be sought after by homesick Europeans.

The village will be a £5.7billion copy of Hallstatt in Austria, complete with artificial lake. Posing as tourists, the Chinese have been photographing every building there for three years. _DailyMail

Hallstatt, Austria on Lake Hallstatt
Chinese developers have built other duplicate towns, based upon villages in the UK. Now a Chinese developer has gone to extraordinary lengths to mimic an Austrian mountain village, down to the boards on building exteriors. Something tells me that the Guangdong version of Hallstatt will not provide that same fresh, brisk, clean feeling as the original.

...at the Chinese site, in the city of Huizhou about 100 miles north of the border with Hong Kong, there is little to indicate that the copycat version will ever approximate the beauty of the original.

A few low-rise buildings are in the early stages of construction, their frames covered with bamboo scaffolding and green mesh. Cranes and trucks moved around the area Friday dodging workers carrying steel construction elements.

Though the area is hilly, there was not an alpine peak in sight and the waters of a nearby lake - apparently the faux Lake Hallstatt to be - were green and murky. Instead of mirroring majestic alpine mountaintops, several dead fish floated on the surface. _DailyMail

The Chinese would do better to try to build a cleaner China, where people will want to go to understand both contemporary and historical China. Mimicking ancient European villages projects a feeling of desperate cluelessness and naivete.

First, build a better China, then if you want to build European village replicas, at least the air and water will be clean.

D-Dalus: A Possible Revolution in Flight from Austria

At the heart of D-DALUS is a revolutionary propulsion system containing a number of patented inventions, including a friction free bearing at the points of high G force, and a system that keeps propulsion in dynamic equilibrium, thereby allowing the guidance system to quickly restore stability in flight.

The propulsion consists of 4 sets of contra-rotating disks, each set driven at the same rpm by a conventional aero-engine. The disks are surrounded by blades whose angle of attack can be altered by off-setting the axis of the rotating disks. As each blade can be given a different angle of attack, the resulting main thrust can be in any required direction in 360° around any axis. This allows the craft to launch vertically, remain in a fixed position in the air, travel in any direction, rotate in any direction, and thrust upwards thereby ‘gluing down’ on landing. _D-Dalus Detail

Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine.

The D-Dalus (a play on Daedalus from Greek mythology) is neither fixed wing or rotor craft and uses four, mechanically-linked, contra-rotating cylindrical turbines, each running at the same 2200 rpm, for its propulsion.

The key to the D-Dalus' extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that's just the start of the story. _Gizmag_via_NBF

This propulsion system may eventually scale from the microscopic to the size of large freight haulers. I suspect it will be pursued initially as a spy and surveillance platform, and as an insertion and extraction method for special ops teams. Also as remotely-operated stealthy substitutes for attack helicopters such as the Apache. Eventually, it may provide the platform for flying cars and flying boats, among other consumer and adventure toys.

The most obvious and immediate application for D-Dalus is as a little flying spy robot that can fly in doors and windows and snoop around indoors. Larger versions would be perfect for search and rescue missions, and the designers even think that in the long term, vehicles based on this technology might be what you use to commute to work. That's right — flying cars! _Dvice

I suspect that these toys will prove quite expensive to buy, operate, and maintain, but I would like to be proven wrong about that. At this point, they are at the prototype stage, and may not become reliable enough for even military use for quite some time.

What Does it Mean for Africa to Grow at 4.9% per Year?

Africa boasts an abundance of riches: 10 percent of the world’s reserves of oil, 40 percent of its gold, and 80 to 90 percent of the chromium and the platinum metal group. Those are just the known reserves; no doubt more lies undiscovered. _MQ

Global Map of Nations by per cent Living Under $1.25 per dayMcKinsey Quarterly has published a fascinating look at recent economic growth in the continent of Africa (h/t Brian Wang). According to the report, real GDP growth over the continent averaged 4.9% per year between the years 2000 and 2008. This was twice Africa's growth rate over the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. The report goes on to discuss the many issues leading to such growth, and other factors that will be involved in future African growth. From McKinsey:

Africa’s collective GDP, at $1.6 trillion in 2008, is now roughly equal to Brazil’s or Russia’s, and the continent is among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions. This acceleration is a sign of hard-earned progress and promise.

While Africa’s increased economic momentum is widely recognized, its sources and likely staying power are less understood. Soaring prices for oil, minerals, and other commodities have helped lift GDP since 2000. Forthcoming research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) shows that resources accounted for only about a third of the newfound growth.1 The rest resulted from internal structural changes that have spurred the broader domestic economy. Wars, natural disasters, or poor government policies could halt or even reverse these gains in any individual country. But in the long term, internal and external trends indicate that Africa’s economic prospects are strong.

...Natural resources, and the related government spending they financed, generated just 32 percent of Africa’s GDP growth from 2000 through 2008.2 The remaining two-thirds came from other sectors, including wholesale and retail, transportation, telecommunications, and manufacturing (Exhibit 1). Economic growth accelerated across the continent, in 27 of its 30 largest economies. Indeed, countries with and without significant resource exports had similar GDP growth rates.

...To start, several African countries halted their deadly hostilities, creating the political stability necessary to restart economic growth. Next, Africa’s economies grew healthier as governments reduced the average inflation rate from 22 percent in the 1990s to 8 percent after 2000. They trimmed their foreign debt by one-quarter and shrunk their budget deficits by two-thirds.

Finally, African governments increasingly adopted policies to energize markets. They privatized state-owned enterprises, increased the openness of trade, lowered corporate taxes, strengthened regulatory and legal systems, and provided critical physical and social infrastructure. Nigeria privatized more than 116 enterprises between 1999 and 2006, for example, and Morocco and Egypt struck free-trade agreements with major export partners.

...The continent’s four most advanced economies—Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, and Tunisia—are already broadly diversified. Manufacturing and services together total 83 percent of their combined GDP. Domestic services, such as construction, banking, telecom, and retailing, have accounted for more than 70 percent of their growth since 2000. They are among the continent’s richest economies and have the least volatile GDP growth. With all the necessary ingredients for further expansion, they stand to benefit greatly from increasing ties to the global economy.

Domestic consumption is the largest contributor to growth in these countries. Their cities added more than ten million people in the last decade, real consumer spending has grown by 3 to 5 percent annually since 2000, and 90 percent of all house-holds have some discretionary income. As a result, consumer-facing sectors such as retailing, banking, and telecom have grown rapidly. Urbanization has also prompted a construction boom that created 20 to 40 percent of all jobs over the past decade.

...If recent trends continue, Africa will play an increasingly important role in the global economy. By 2040, it will be home to one in five of the planet’s young people, and the size of its labor force will top China’s. Africa has almost 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land and a large share of the natural resources. Its consumer-facing sectors are growing two to three times faster than those in the OECD7 countries. And the rate of return on foreign investment is higher in Africa than in any other developing region. Global executives and investors cannot afford to ignore this. A strategy for Africa must be part of their long-term planning. _MQ

The report excerpted and linked above is quite optimistic toward the economic prospects for Africa over the next 3 decades. Al Fin economic and social forecasters do not take quite the sanguine view as those of the McKinsey Institute.

As seen in the map at the top of this entry, Africa is quite diverse in terms of economic conditions. It is an act of false parsimony to consider the entire continent as one unit, economically. Instead, one should look at SubSaharan Africa separate from North Africa, economically and socially. Further, one should subdivide SubSaharan Africa into tropical and temperate regions, when considering investments and partnerships. McKinsey failed to stratify African nations other than by "economic diversification" and "exports per capita." Useful, but not sufficient. It is difficult to draw useful conclusions when data is so badly conflated.

The time period selected for extrapolating may not be representative of what to expect from a future Africa. The ongoing instability in Egypt and Libya, for example, suggest that the chronic instability of most of tribal Africa may be spreading into nations where tribal and religious instability had been temporarily suppressed by strong political regimes of long duration.

Urbanisation may bolster GDP growth numbers temporarily, for example, due to the more quantified economic nature of more modern city living vs. quasi-ancient rural life styles. Yet there are limits to how large stable cities can grow under certain demographic conditions. Many of Africa's cities are already pressing those limits.

Modern high tech infrastructures -- such as those which allow more advanced nations to enjoy the fruits of modern trade and sci-tech development -- are dependent upon an infrastructure of human capital which is capable of maintaining and improving the underlying technological infrastructure. In the absence of capable maintenance, repair, and construction, societal infrastructure tends to collapse at the most inopportune times.

Here is the blunt truth, which Political Correctness tries to obscure: Infrastructures to support widespread modern affluent lifestyles require a high tech infrastructure which can only be maintained by populations with average IQs close to 90 or above. The only exception is if the nation hosts a "market dominant minority" of higher IQ persons to maintain markets and infrastructures -- such as the Chinese in Malaysia or Indonesia, or the shrinking population of high-IQ minorities in South Africa.

For some countries of North Africa, the average population IQs are near 85. But for most SubSaharan African nations, average population IQs are well below 80. The reasons for such low average IQs are debatable, but the blunt facts are clear and stand in the way of large scale indigenous economic development across many chronically underdeveloped parts of the world.

Global IQ Map by Nation
For Africa to grow sustainably, it will need to attract leadership and energy from the outside -- and keep it there rather than driving it out, as was done in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, etc. An expansion of what it means to be "African" is mandatory -- but it can only be made to last in an Africa of greatly expanded opportunity and radically reduced corruption and populist demagoguery.

Al Fin futurists suspect that perpetually ambitious and corrupt African tribal leaders and strongmen will only accept the changes that are needed, under the sanction of a non-human "superior being." In real terms, that would mean either an extraterrestrial invader of superior technological capacity, a genuine artificial intelligence of superior wisdom and cognition, or a sufficiently convincing imitation of one or the other.

Bitcoin Anonymous Virtual Currency Stimulates New Marketplaces

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network.

Bitcoin is meant to be an anonymous digital currency placed online, beyond the whim and caprice of greedy governments and their corrupt co-conspirators. An anonymous marketplace where almost anything could be bought or sold, is the dream of free marketeers across time and space. Perhaps Bitcoin will pave the way to this nirvana of free marketdom. More about Bitcoin:

Bitcoin—a pseudonymous cryptographic currency designed by an enigmatic, freedom-loving hacker, and currently used by the geek underground to buy and sell everything from servers to cellphone jammers. No, this isn't a cyberpunk artifact from Snow Crash or Neuromancer; it's a real currency currently valued several times higher than the US dollar, the British pound, and the Euro.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency, designed to allow people to buy and sell without centralized control by banks or governments, and it allows for pseudonymous transactions which aren't tied to a real identity. In keeping with the hacker ethos, Bitcoin has no need to trust any central authority; every aspect of the currency is confirmed and secured through the use of strong cryptography.

Over the last few months, Bitcoin's value has risen by an order of magnitude as the sagas of Wikileaks and Anonymous (among others) have highlighted the limits of a financial system which relies on centralized intermediaries. With a current estimated market capitalization of about $100 million, Bitcoin has recently graduated from a theoretical techno-anarchic project patronized by libertarians and hackers to a full-fledged currency prompting comment from technologists and economists. At the time of this writing, one Bitcoin (BTC) is worth about US$15.

...The Bitcoin solution uses cryptography and an open transaction register. Whenever you spend a Bitcoin, you cryptographically sign a statement saying that you have transferred the coin to a new owner and you identify the new owner by their public crypto key. Whenever they need to spend the coin, the new owner uses his private key to sign it over to some further owner. As soon as a transaction takes place, the recipient (who has a very strong incentive to ensure that you don't spend the coin twice) publishes the transaction to the global Bitcoin network. Now every Bitcoin user has incontrovertible evidence that the coin has been spent, and users won't accept that coin from anyone but the new owner.

...In a process known as mining, individual Bitcoin users attempt to generate new coins by checking the integrity of the transactions list. They confirm the previous transactions and attempt to solve a difficult proof-of-work problem which involves exhaustively trying different solutions. There are a very large number of such potential solutions, so the likelihood of finding the solution depends how many other people are looking for it and how much computing power you devote to the problem. The first client to find the solution announces its good fortune to the whole network and earns a little reward for itself in the form of some shiny new Bitcoins. _ArsTecnica

One new marketplace taking advantage of Bitcoin's anonymity is Silk Road.

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics — and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8 ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 gram tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it.

The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the United States and Canada. _Wired

Silk Road accepts Bitcoin as payment, and is accessible only via the Tor network of anonymous proxy servers.

More about Silk Road from Kevin Kelly:

Silk Road is all of four weeks old, so its stealthiness is unproven. In theory it looks viable. But Tor and Bitcoin are open source, so the savvy can see what they are standing upon. But there are inherent challenges with any private currency, and there are inherent challenges with any encryption scheme. At the point where either of these systems touch the legitimate world (and they must to be useful), there is potential for breakdown, scams, break-in, or disruptions.

Bitcoin in particular has serious complexities. It is a private currency, and all private currencies are liable to scams. But an anonymous peer-to-peer one is even more liable, because there is no central enforcement -- by definition. The technicalities of Bitcoin are impressive, complex, and almost beyond the understanding for most lay users. For a sobering critique of Bitcoin, I recommend reading at least one skeptic's take on it before you decide to use it. His argument is that the way Bitcoin is engineered makes it biased towards the earliest users (the value of their "dollars" will increase more than later users) and is therefore a type of pyramid scam. That is a long-term consideration; this deflation probably will not deter a kid who wants to score some speed this week.

And the critique says nothing of the potential weaknesses of Bitcoin's encryption aspect. Usually these cypher schemes are not broken directly, but indirectly via patterns of use. As the cypherpunks say, encryption is economics. Anything can be hacked if you apply enough money. As long as the amount of money in these stealth markets remains modest, they will be secure. But once they rise to some threshold, they will trigger investments into cracking them. Perhaps bit traffic is analyzed network wide, or honey pot sellers rated high by shills set up to pounce on the unsuspecting -- whatever. _KevinKelly

The economic arms war between governments and free marketeers is as old as organised human society. Anonymous online versions of digital currency are likely to take the contest to a new level, as government enforcers devote ever more time and tax resources to stamping out the competition and incorrigible independent minded.

What is Bitcoin?

National Debt by Country

Public Gross Debt as Percent of GDP by Country – 1992-2011

gfmag

This table uses data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and measures gross debt as a percent of GDP. Most major statistical organizations measure debt with fairly consistent results, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Eurostat.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis led to a dramatic increase in the public debt of many advanced economies, with many of them experiencing their highest levels of debt since World War II. This was in large part due to the huge stimulus programs in countries around the world, in addition to government bailouts, recapitalizations and takeovers of banks and other financial institutions. Another contributing factor to the increased debt was the decrease in tax revenues.

Public debt as a percent of GDP in OECD countries as a whole went from hovering around 70% throughout the 1990s to more than 90% in 2009 and is projected to grow to almost 100% of GDP by 2011, possibly rising even higher in the following years. It could already be higher, as potential costs of aging populations may not be entirely reflected in the budget projections of some countries.

The rise in public debt has been seen not only in countries with a history of debt problems - such as Japan, Italy, Belgium and Greece - but also in countries where it was relatively low before the crisis - such as the US, UK, France, Portugal and Ireland. _gfmag

China's Command Economy Builds Toward Ultimate Collapse

Here are two videos on China's Ghost Cities, and excerpts from recent economic looks at China's recent economic growth. Can the growth be sustained, even though it is built upon massive loans and expenditures on infrastructure growth which no one is using? Keep in mind that buildings, bridges, tunnels, towers, and overpasses in China collapse regularly due to shoddy construction and corrupt oversight. All of this spending looks good on paper, but how will it look in 10 or 20 years when a significant portion of the ghost construction will have already collapsed or required demolition?

The last time your editor checked, central planning was not a huge success. According to history, bureaucrats wielding directives over long distances tend to allocate resources poorly.

But are ghost cities a recipe for a bust? Some say no. The Bloomberg reporter, for instance, assures us that China's economics are different -- that is to say, "it's different this time." (Where have we heard that before...)

It is supposedly OK that these ghost cities, built for millions of inhabitants, have only tens of thousands of people living in them -- because all that deserted square footage will eventually be put to good use.

As a bonus, building ghost cities is great for economic growth.

Via running superhighways out to the middle of nowhere, erecting steel and glass towers in the boondocks, China generates new jobs in construction, civil engineering, city planning and the like. All this construction looks fabulous on paper. The ghostly infrastructure gets counted as productive output, and the super-aggressive GDP target is maintained.

But what is wrong with that picture?

For one, there is the central planning problem. Growth and development are free market forces, with signature markings of trial and error. Successful cities are built from the ground up, not decreed by bureaucrat stamp. So how does the government know where a new metropolis should go, or what its optimal size should be?

Then you have the accounting problems. Should the promise of tomorrow be so readily reflected on balance sheets today?

Imagine if a public corporation said, "We are going to grow 20% per year by building idle factories in the middle of nowhere, that no one is going to use for quite some time. Don't worry though, the demand for these factories will show up. We'll make a profit on them eventually. Just don't ask when."

Such a plan would be brutalized by the market, because public companies are held accountable for profits and return on investment (ROI). (At least most of the time -- in bubble times investors will happily suspend their rational faculties.)

The Chinese government, of course, does not have to seek profit in its actions. Or it can measure results in some entirely non-traditional way, via "how many jobs did we create" or "how do the GDP numbers look."

At the end of the day, the "ghost city" mandate is directly channeling John Maynard Keynes, who once suggested digging holes, then filling them up again as a way to put men to work _TaipanPublishing

China’s blistering growth over the last two years were based on massive government stimulus and unconstrained lending from banks. The end result was over-investment in infrastructure and over-construction in buildings, which did not bear fruit for the money spent and offers only a shaky foundation for further economic growth

Moreover, inflation began to accelerate, forcing the Chinese government to curb lending and raise interest rates. In fact, the tightening efforts of the Chinese government in 2011 has taken the lending rate close to 1 percentage point of pre-recession levels and the bank reserve requirement ratio for large banks to an all-time high of 20.5 percent.

The fear is that if China’s growth has been fueled by rampant lending, the slowing down of lending may therefore crash the economy, or at least slow it down. Furthermore, the construction of commercially unviable buildings, many of which remain empty, is economically unsustainable and must stop sooner or later.

The main problem for the Chinese economy is the failure to distribute income to its massive population and cultivate consumption. Before the financial crisis, the Chinese economy relied on exports to the US. In the past two years, it has been fueled by over-investment and over-building.

Investors in the Chinese stock market may have already wised up to the dangers facing the Chinese economy as the Shanghai Composite has steadily declined since late 2009. _IBTimes

via IBTimes

... the recent explosion of domestic credit creation has saved the collapse of China’s economy.

But Duncan is concerned that rapid credit growth could in fact lead to a banking crisis in the mainland. “There could be no more certain way to destroy a banking system that to permit 60 percent loan growth over a two-year period… Every boom busts, China's boom will be no exception."

China has been seeking to ramp up domestic consumption in order to rebalance its economy. It is one of the key tenets of the country's 12th 5-year plan.

However, Duncan says the rate of wage inflation will not be quick enough to allow the Chinese to consume what they produce due to the country’s “adverse” demographic trends.

“There are so many young people coming into the workforce and there are so many people coming from the countryside into the cities that wages can’t just go up very rapidly.” _cnbc

Peter Hitchens tours a Chinese Ghost City

Billionaires Who Are Pushing the Future Forward

"I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better."

hplus
Opportunity societies such as the US once was, allowed large numbers of relatively young (mainly) men to achieve great wealth. Some of these young and young-at-heart men are devoting a considerable amount of their wealth to drive future-oriented enterprises such as access to outer space, advanced nuclear fission and fusion, and more. Peter Thiel, for example, is backing life extension, seasteads, and a number of other futuristic game changing technologies.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has backed space launch company Blue Origin for years, and is now backing unconventional nuclear fusion startup General Fusion. Bill Gates' investment in Terrapower advanced fission reactors appears to reflect a deep commitment to advanced abundant energy.

A fair number of these billionare drivers of the future were also school dropouts. Perhaps there is something about having succeeded without receiving the official seal of approval from the educational establishment, which gives a person the courage to push ahead -- risking part of a huge fortune on ideas that are ever further out.

Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX is the frontrunner in the private space launch race, having successfully orbited its Falcon 9 boosted Dragon capsule. Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace is likewise the frontrunning developer of privately built space habitats. Both companies are bringing private sector performance values to the space enterprise which had been hampered by a government sector mentality up until recently.

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the frontrunner for the exciting new industry of space tourism, due in large part to Branson's fortuitous partnership with pioneering aerospace engineer Burt Rutan. Billionaire Paul Allen also played an important role in that partnership.

The imagination, drive, and careful focus on important future industries and technologies sets these men apart from less imaginative billionaires. But it is the ability to invest large amounts of cash -- and inspire others to do so -- combined with their intelligent and energised future orientation, which gives them power to drive the future.

Although these men do not possess nearly the qualifications of a next level human, perhaps they can be seen as prototypes of next levels. And it is likely that persons very much like these will back the projects which lead to the transitioning of the first next level humans.

It is very fortunate that these large fortunes are under the control of such men as these, rather than under the control of men such as US President Obama and other government officials who have never done an honest day's work or had a truly productive thought in their lives.

The best way to make life better for most people is to make as many countries as possible into lands of opportunity -- where even high school and college dropouts can become billionaires and help bring about a more abundant future.

Secrets of Sleep, Learning, and Renewable Brains

Levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of cells, in rats increased in four key brain regions normally active during wakefulness. Shown here is the energy surge measured in the frontal cortex, a brain region associated with higher-level thinking. Credit: Courtesy, with permission: Dworak et al. The Journal of Neuroscience 2010.
We spend roughly 1/3 of our lives in the state of sleep. Researchers are beginning to learn why we must do this, and are gleaning hints of possible technologies for bypassing at least part of the sleep imperative, and doing well on less sleep.

“For a long time, researchers have known that sleep deprivation results in increased levels of adenosine in the brain, and has this effect from fruit flies to mice to humans.” Abel said. “There is accumulating evidence that this adenosine is really the source of a number of the deficits and impact of sleep deprivation, including memory loss and attention deficits. One thing that underscores that evidence is that caffeine is a drug that blocks the effects of adenosine, so we sometimes refer to this as ‘the Starbucks experiment.’”

Abel’s research actually involved two parallel experiments on sleep-deprived mice, designed to test adenosine’s involvement in memory impairment in different ways.

One experiment involved genetically engineered mice. These mice were missing a gene involved in the production of glial transmitters, chemicals signals that originate from glia, the brain cells that support the function of neurons. Without these gliatransmitters, the engineered mice could not produce the adenosine the researchers believed might cause the cognitive effects associated sleep deprivation.

The other experiment involved a pharmacological approach. The researchers grafted a pump into the brains of mice that hadn’t been genetically engineered; the pump delivered a drug that blocked a particular adenosine receptor in the hippocampus. If the receptor was indeed involved in memory impairment, sleep-deprived mice would behave as if the additional adenosine in their brains was not there.

...To see whether these mice showed the effects of sleep deprivation, the researchers used an object recognition test. On the first day, mice were placed in a box with two objects and were allowed to explore them while being videotaped. That night, the researchers woke some of the mice halfway through their normal 12-hour sleep schedule.

On the second day, the mice were placed back in the box, where one of the two objects had been moved, and were once again videotaped as they explored to see how they reacted to the change.

“Mice would normally explore that moved object more than other objects, but, with sleep deprivation, they don’t,” Abel said. “They literally don’t know where things are around them.”

Both sets of treated mice explored the moved object as if they had received a full night’s sleep.

“These mice don’t realize they’re sleep-deprived,” Abel said.

Abel and his colleagues also examined the hippocampi of the mice, using electrical current to measure their synaptic plasticity, or how strong and resilient their memory-forming synapses were. The pharmacologically and genetically protected mice showed greater synaptic plasticity after being sleep deprived than the untreated group.

Combined, the two experiments cover both halves of the chemical pathway involved in sleep deprivation. The genetic engineering experiment shows where the adenosine comes from: glia’s release of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the chemical by which cells transfer energy to one another. And the pharmacological experiment shows where the adenosine goes: the A1 receptor in the hippocampus. _MedicalXpress

Abel's is a sophisticated experiment which covers a lot of possiblities. Combining the findings of this experiment with findings of previous experiments gives one a fuller picture of what is going on.

The brain has evolved certain activity in N2 sleep (sleep spindles) which apparently promote the production of ATP from adenosine and phosphate groups. As ATP levels rise in N2 sleep, adenosine levels drop. So the sound sleeper receives both the benefits of higher ATP energy levels and the improved learning that results from lower hippocampal free adenosine levels.

More on sleep spindles (PDF)

Adenosine is a potent pharmacological agent, powerfully affecting heart rhythms. It also affects central nervous system activity in a largely inhibitory function, and also exhibits anti-inflammatory effects.

Adenosine and deep brain stimulation (DBS)

Why Do We Sleep? A brief look at stages of sleep, and possible benefits of sleep.

Cross-posted to Al Fin Longevity

Humans Still Do Not Understand Oceans or Planet

Wiki
Popular culture is immersed with the message that "humans are killing the oceans" and "man is destroying the planet." But science is so abysmally ignorant about what is actually happening in the seas and on land, that the faux environmentalist message of doom is based upon a blooming ignorance, and little else.

Take a recent declaration of "plankton apocalypse" by researchers from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Faux environmentalists seized on the single, unsubstantiated report as confirmation that the end of the world is near. More knowledgeable and intelligent persons knew -- or at least sensed -- that the Dalhousie report was hagwash. And so it seems to have been. Much of modern published "science" dealing with the environment and climate is unmitigated hogwash, albeit politically correct.

But there is much valid and valuable science to be learned from the oceans, if one can work objectively and without prejudicial biases.

Physorg

"The big mystery about bacteria is what they are doing in nature," Whitman said. "The organisms metabolize compounds for their own needs. We need to understand what they are getting out of it to understand what it means for the ocean, and now it will be possible to look at the environmental importance of this process and how it's regulated." That will help to answer the "why" of the two sulfur fates. _Physorg

Notice that the U. of Georgia scientists are microbiologists -- not "climatologists." Although the microbiologists link their study to climate -- for reasons of funding among others -- their results help to expose the abysmal ignorance of climate "science" with regards to the oceans and cloud formation.

SeaFriends

Scientists have discovered that marine diatoms, tiny phytoplankton abundant in the sea, have an animal-like urea cycle, and that this cycle enables the diatoms to efficiently use carbon and nitrogen from their environment.

The researchers, from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and other institutions, published their findings in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The team, led by lead author Andrew Allen from JCVI and co-author Chris Bowler, Institute of Biology, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, believes that the cycle could be a reason for the domination of diatoms in marine environments, especially after upwelling events--the upward movement of nutrient rich waters from the deep ocean to the surface.

In response to ocean upwelling, diatoms are able to quickly recover from prolonged periods of nutrient deprivation and rapidly proliferate. _Physorg

Nature
Here again, we see a significant finding that relates importantly to global carbon balance, ocean phytoplankton levels, and atmospheric oxygen levels. How many other momentous and paradigm-changing discoveries are waiting for humans to discard their politically correct prejudices in order to better perceive the reality of the universe?