Integrated Man

Ridin' to the City on Acela

If I were poetically or musically gifted, this blog would glide to the cadence of Arlo Guthrie's 'Ridin On The City of New Orleans'. But I'm not so gifted, so you're stuck with my stilted prose. 

Nonetheless my recent ride to New York City from New Haven on Amtrak's Acela summoned the same wistful, mournful tones of Guthrie's ballad, with perhaps a touch of irony borrowed from Peggy Lee's 'Is That All There Is?'.

Swiftboating Climate Change

The assassins are about.  They're gunning for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and their weapon of choice is a 60 megabyte down-loadable file, courtesy of Murdock's Wall Street Journal, of hacked correspondence from the server of the University of East Anglia. Correspondence goes back thirteen years. 

I have not read any of the items, nor do I intend to.  The news stories reveal little of surprise or interest. It's not news that universities have in their midst high-strung personalities whose egos too often overwhelm their intelligence and professionalism, not unlike business and government. Nor is it surprising that researcher's might be tempted to cleanse the data of those pesky little anomalies that introduce niggling little doubts about their pet hypothesis, not unlike business and government.  Nor is it surprising that Climate Change True Believers would want to exclude Deniers from the debate, much as Deniers have wanted squelch advocates.  None of this is news, and none of it required an electronic breaking and entering to reveal known and knowable flaws in the debate. But one senses the fit and feel of another Swift-boat assault on the truth by the forces of ignorance and deceit, with the Birthers, the Tea-Partiers and the Palinista's bringing up the rear.  The timing of this so close to the beginning of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen is more than suspect.

Capitalist Papers 6 - The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing", so spake Oscar Wilde. 

Today, it seems, even the cynics appear challenged to put a price on, for example,....real estate, securities of financial institutions, depleting energy resources, food stocks, pro athletes and nursing home attendants, medical care and music, news and reality t.v.  If price is the mechanism of rational allocation of resources in a competitive market economy, the collapse of various pricing mechanisms is yet another indicator of the cancer afflicting Capitalism.

Pull the Plug; Walk Away

Concerted Procrastination is an accepted and well worn decision-making practice among senior executives in all venues -- government, business, NPOs.  The theory is that, if you can wait long enough, difficult problems will resolve themselves when all options have been reduced to the worst one by default.  Then the 'decision' is inevitable, and often unarguable.

I,too, though not a senior executive by any means, have practiced it on occasion, most recently in relation to forming my personal opinion on the efficacy of the Government assisting the US auto industry to a soft landing.

Capitalist Papers 5 - Information Please -- Reconsidering the 'Efficient Market' Hypothesis

One of the myths of capitalism is the "Efficient Market" Hypothesis.  It confers upon The Market an all-knowing wisdom of the herd that divines at any point in time the best valuation of a security based on two fallacious assumptions:

-    that a broadly based market assumes a broadly based correct assessment of value, based on...

-    ...reliable information that is broadly available to all at the same time.

Capitalist Papers 4 - Eulogy for the Consumer - TEOTWAWKI

W got it half right in his photo op with the finance chiefs of the G7 on 10/11 when he said: "That which affects Wall Street affects Main Street as well."

The other side of that coin is: "That which affects Main Street affects Wall Street as well."  The Capitalist Catechism recognizes this in theory ("The customer comes first") but Capitalism's most ardent acolytes appear to have lost sight of this verity, ensconced in their gated communities or C-suites elevated above the street-level din.

The truth of these two statements can be found in the events leading up to the current crash in the price of oil.  Let's review: