President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”
The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.
“Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimazu, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.”
Gross, who runs the world’s largest mutual fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in his June outlook report that “the debt super cycle trend” suggests U.S. economic growth won’t be enough to support the borrowings “if real interest rates were ever to go up instead of down.”
Dan Fuss, who manages the Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, which beat 94 percent of competitors the past year, said last week that he sold all of his Treasury bonds because of prospects interest rates will rise as the U.S. borrows unprecedented amounts. Obama is borrowing record amounts to fund spending programs to help the economy recover from its longest recession since the 1930s.
“The incremental borrower of funds in the U.S. capital markets is rapidly becoming the U.S. Treasury,” Boston-based Fuss said. “Do you really want to buy the debt of the biggest issuer?”
Monday, June 7, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Most Prosperous Country in the World?
Consider the following estimates. In any one year:
27,000 Americans commit suicide.
5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.
26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
23,000 are murdered.
85,000 are wounded by firearms.
38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.
135,000 children take guns to school.
5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic violations).
125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of these are nonsmokers.
6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.
1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth-graders have "huffed" toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.
31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy usuers.
37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous.
2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.
600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.
25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counselors for help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in their lifetimes.
1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.
2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.
14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.
1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.
126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.
2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.
5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.
1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come from white families.
150,000 children are reported missing.
50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, "Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids."
900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.
2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.
700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
5,000,000 workers are injured on the job; 150,000 of whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis, impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.
100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.
14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are men.
100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.
60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or contaminants in food, water, or air.
4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so would vegetarianism.
At present:
5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole; 2,700,000 of these are either locked up in county, state or federal prisons or under legal supervision. Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than leave. The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980. Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug related crimes. African Americans constitute 13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences. For nondrug offenses, African Americans get prison terms that average about 10 percent longer than Caucasians for similar crimes.
15,000+ have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing rapidly; 10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large numbers among the economically deprived or addicted.
10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism is on the rise.
16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
160,000 will die from diabetes this year.
280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of mind control drugs.
255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in recent years. Many of the "deinstitutionalized" are now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions.
2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome.
10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted quality of the air we breathe.
40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.
1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions worsen.
1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible profit.
1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some cases psychosurgery.
1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 have died of that disease.
950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind control drugs for “hyperactivity” every year--with side effects like weight loss, growth retardation and acute psychosis.
4,000,000 children are growing up with unattended learning disabilities.
4,500,000+ children, or more than half of the 9,000,000 children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer brain damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.
40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and more than one of every ten men, are estimated to have been sexually molested as children, most often between the ages of 9 and 12, usually by close relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always extends into their early teens and is a part of their continual memory and not a product of memory retrieval in therapy.
7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary with the business cycle. Increasing numbers of the chronically unemployed show signs of stress and emotional depression.
6,000,000 are in “contingent” jobs, or jobs structured to last only temporarily. About 60 percent of these would prefer permanent employment.
15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time “contract” workers who need full-time jobs and who work without benefits.
3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never qualified for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they joined the armed forces because they were unable to find work.
80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department of Labor as below a “comfortable adequacy”; 35,000,000 of these live below the poverty level.
12,000,000 of those at poverty’s rock bottom suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living at or below the poverty level experience hunger during some portion of the year.
2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the streets or in makeshift shelters.
160,000,000+ are members of households that are in debt, a sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago. A majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for necessities. Mounting debts threaten a financial crack-up in more and more families.
A Happy Nation?
Obviously these estimates include massive duplications. Many of the 20 million unemployed are among the 35 million below the poverty level. Many of the malnourished children are also among those listed as growing up with untreated learning disabilities and almost all are among the 35 million poor. Many of the 37 million regular users of mind-control drugs also number among the 25 million who seek psychiatric help.
Some of these deprivations and afflictions are not as serious as others. The 80 million living below the “comfortably adequate” income level may compose too vague and inclusive a category for some observers (who themselves enjoy a greater distance from the poverty line). The 40 million who are without health insurance are not afflicted by an actual catastrophe but face only a potential one (though the absence of health insurance often leads to a lack of care and eventually a serious health crisis). We might not want to consider the 5.5 million arrested as having endured a serious affliction, but what of the 1.5 million who are serving time and what of their victims? We might want to count only the 150,000 who suffer a serious job-related disability rather than the five million on-the-job injuries, only half of the 20 million unemployed and underemployed so as not to duplicate poverty figures, only 10 percent of the 1.1 million institutionalized elderly as mistreated (although the number is probably higher), only 10 per cent of the 37 million regular users of medically prescribed psychogenic drugs as seriously troubled, only 5 per cent of the 160 million living in indebted families as seriously indebted (although the number is probably higher).
If we consider only those who have endured physical or sexual abuse, or have been afflicted with a serious disability, or a serious deprivation such as malnutrition and homelessness, only those who face untimely deaths due to suicide, murder, battering, drug and alcohol abuse, industrial and motor vehicle accidents, medical (mis)treatment, occupational illness, and sexually transmitted diseases, we are still left with a staggering figure of over 19,000,000 victims. To put the matter in some perspective, in the 12 years that saw 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, several million died prematurely within the United States from unnatural and often violent causes.
27,000 Americans commit suicide.
5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.
26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
23,000 are murdered.
85,000 are wounded by firearms.
38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.
135,000 children take guns to school.
5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic violations).
125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of these are nonsmokers.
6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.
1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth-graders have "huffed" toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.
31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy usuers.
37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous.
2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.
600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.
25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counselors for help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in their lifetimes.
1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.
2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.
14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.
1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.
126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.
2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.
5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.
1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come from white families.
150,000 children are reported missing.
50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, "Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids."
900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.
2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.
700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
5,000,000 workers are injured on the job; 150,000 of whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis, impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.
100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.
14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are men.
100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.
60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or contaminants in food, water, or air.
4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so would vegetarianism.
At present:
5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole; 2,700,000 of these are either locked up in county, state or federal prisons or under legal supervision. Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than leave. The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980. Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug related crimes. African Americans constitute 13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences. For nondrug offenses, African Americans get prison terms that average about 10 percent longer than Caucasians for similar crimes.
15,000+ have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing rapidly; 10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large numbers among the economically deprived or addicted.
10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism is on the rise.
16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
160,000 will die from diabetes this year.
280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of mind control drugs.
255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in recent years. Many of the "deinstitutionalized" are now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions.
2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome.
10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted quality of the air we breathe.
40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.
1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions worsen.
1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible profit.
1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some cases psychosurgery.
1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 have died of that disease.
950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind control drugs for “hyperactivity” every year--with side effects like weight loss, growth retardation and acute psychosis.
4,000,000 children are growing up with unattended learning disabilities.
4,500,000+ children, or more than half of the 9,000,000 children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer brain damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.
40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and more than one of every ten men, are estimated to have been sexually molested as children, most often between the ages of 9 and 12, usually by close relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always extends into their early teens and is a part of their continual memory and not a product of memory retrieval in therapy.
7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary with the business cycle. Increasing numbers of the chronically unemployed show signs of stress and emotional depression.
6,000,000 are in “contingent” jobs, or jobs structured to last only temporarily. About 60 percent of these would prefer permanent employment.
15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time “contract” workers who need full-time jobs and who work without benefits.
3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never qualified for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they joined the armed forces because they were unable to find work.
80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department of Labor as below a “comfortable adequacy”; 35,000,000 of these live below the poverty level.
12,000,000 of those at poverty’s rock bottom suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living at or below the poverty level experience hunger during some portion of the year.
2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the streets or in makeshift shelters.
160,000,000+ are members of households that are in debt, a sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago. A majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for necessities. Mounting debts threaten a financial crack-up in more and more families.
A Happy Nation?
Obviously these estimates include massive duplications. Many of the 20 million unemployed are among the 35 million below the poverty level. Many of the malnourished children are also among those listed as growing up with untreated learning disabilities and almost all are among the 35 million poor. Many of the 37 million regular users of mind-control drugs also number among the 25 million who seek psychiatric help.
Some of these deprivations and afflictions are not as serious as others. The 80 million living below the “comfortably adequate” income level may compose too vague and inclusive a category for some observers (who themselves enjoy a greater distance from the poverty line). The 40 million who are without health insurance are not afflicted by an actual catastrophe but face only a potential one (though the absence of health insurance often leads to a lack of care and eventually a serious health crisis). We might not want to consider the 5.5 million arrested as having endured a serious affliction, but what of the 1.5 million who are serving time and what of their victims? We might want to count only the 150,000 who suffer a serious job-related disability rather than the five million on-the-job injuries, only half of the 20 million unemployed and underemployed so as not to duplicate poverty figures, only 10 percent of the 1.1 million institutionalized elderly as mistreated (although the number is probably higher), only 10 per cent of the 37 million regular users of medically prescribed psychogenic drugs as seriously troubled, only 5 per cent of the 160 million living in indebted families as seriously indebted (although the number is probably higher).
If we consider only those who have endured physical or sexual abuse, or have been afflicted with a serious disability, or a serious deprivation such as malnutrition and homelessness, only those who face untimely deaths due to suicide, murder, battering, drug and alcohol abuse, industrial and motor vehicle accidents, medical (mis)treatment, occupational illness, and sexually transmitted diseases, we are still left with a staggering figure of over 19,000,000 victims. To put the matter in some perspective, in the 12 years that saw 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, several million died prematurely within the United States from unnatural and often violent causes.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
I couldnt agree with this more.
This article is going to be short. It will contain one main message. It's an important one. The message is this:
No emotional communication via email, text or voicemail (AKA asynchronous media). Ever.
You should use email, text and even voicemail to transmit straight data only. "What time are we meeting," "what's the address," that kind of thing. The occasional compliment or flirty message is okay, but even those can be misunderstood.
Now let me explain why emotional communication via text or email is a terrible idea.
1) Error rate in message generation is high.
Communication has three phases:
Message generation: Did you compose it accurately?
Message transmission: Did it fly through the air and safely get there?
Message interpretation: Did the recipient understand it the way you meant it?
When you talk to someone face-to-face, all three things happen in real time, more-or-less simultaneously. You say "I like your shirt." It flies through the space between the two of you at 330 meters per second; she hears it and processes it. Generation, transmission and reception complete in 0.25s, with high fidelity.
Disrupt any of those three phases, and you've got miscommunication.
Now what would happen if you were eating a muffin while attempting to generate the message? It just might come out garbled enough to sound like "You look like dirt," and that's what she'll hear.
But that's not such a big deal in person, because you'll see her frown, you'll finish swallowing your muffin, restate your compliment, and all's well with a chuckle. If you were doing the same thing over the phone, you wouldn't have the benefit of body language feedback.
Typos are rampant over text because of clumsy fingers, predictive text software and over-abbreviation. "I like ur shirt" can become "I lick up shorts," a somewhat different animal.
2) Message transmission is unreliable.
Let's say you live in 15th century Morocco. You're upset about something and you want to convey that to your significant other. The only way to do that is to write a note and give it to a messenger. Except that the messenger is a notorious and disorganized drunk who's liable to lose the message en route. Will you still hand him the message?
Emails get lost, stuck in spam filters or accidentally deleted. Text messages sometimes never get sent. They can also get to their destination fine but sit ignored in the inbox while someone's busy. If you don't get a response, can you tell the difference between technical failure or being ignored? You can't -- but you'll be stewing in your own juices in the meantime.
Email and text are like disorganized drunk messengers. If the message has time-sensitive emotional content in it, wait till you can deliver it in person, or at least in real time over phone.
Also, it's pretty easy to send a message to the wrong person. One of my readers sent "omg did u see how fat suzy looked in those pants" to Suzy instead of Susan when she clicked her contacts list, with predictably hilarious results.
3) Message interpretation is super-unreliable.
A vast portion of our communication happens nonverbally. Facial gesture, body language, tone of voice all encode essential information that are missing in text-based communication. Without the nonverbal contextual cues, how would you interpret a statement like "That was just brilliant?" Is it genuine praise or sarcasm? You simply can't tell.
This is fertile ground for misunderstanding and disaster. So resolve to do all emotional communication in real time.
4) Asynchronous communication catalyzes cruelty.
Ever wonder why there's so much nastiness online? People seem to have no problem eviscerating one another on a website or via email. And yet, we don't experience nearly as much of that in person.
Why? Because it's much harder to be an asshole in person, that's why. When confronted with a real person, your mirror neurons are active, which allow you to empathize with others and feel what they feel. When you're cruel to them and see them wince, you feel it too. This is a natural internal brake to otherwise gratuitous cruelty. Thus your neurology builds empathy, cooperation and civility into society.
Additionally, all animals have submission signals which tell an assailant to stop attacking: "You win! I lose! Please don't kill me!" You've probably seen dogs roll over and expose their belly, or other animals expose their necks. Humans put up the white flag, too. Submission signals are an essential survival feature of any species. Otherwise they'd annihilate their own race.
This is why modern warfare has massacred so many people. If you're miles away from your victims and can't see their faces or their kids' faces, it's pretty trivial to press a button and launch some missiles. We weren't able to kill 100,000 people in a flash in the days when people engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
A nasty email or text message can be the modern communication equivalent of that missile. You don't see the recipient. Your mirror neurons are not engaged and you don't have to bear their reaction, so you can afford to be cruel. You launch it, and boom, it can destroy without your having to be around to watch and feel. Except that once you've done that, you've compromised your humanity and the real damage is done to you: you lose a little bit of your soul.
I'm being a tad dramatic here, but you're usually the one who regrets sending the message after the air clears and you sober up from your fit of passion. This is the principle of enlightened self-interest, straight out of The Tao of Dating for Women: always choose the action that keeps you in good stead for the long term. It ends up being better for you and for everyone around you.
So if you like pointless relationship-eroding drama, go ahead and conduct your arguments over email and text. But if you value your peace of mind, never communicate emotionally via email, text or other asynchronous media. In the long run, the sanity you'll save is your own.
No emotional communication via email, text or voicemail (AKA asynchronous media). Ever.
You should use email, text and even voicemail to transmit straight data only. "What time are we meeting," "what's the address," that kind of thing. The occasional compliment or flirty message is okay, but even those can be misunderstood.
Now let me explain why emotional communication via text or email is a terrible idea.
1) Error rate in message generation is high.
Communication has three phases:
Message generation: Did you compose it accurately?
Message transmission: Did it fly through the air and safely get there?
Message interpretation: Did the recipient understand it the way you meant it?
When you talk to someone face-to-face, all three things happen in real time, more-or-less simultaneously. You say "I like your shirt." It flies through the space between the two of you at 330 meters per second; she hears it and processes it. Generation, transmission and reception complete in 0.25s, with high fidelity.
Disrupt any of those three phases, and you've got miscommunication.
Now what would happen if you were eating a muffin while attempting to generate the message? It just might come out garbled enough to sound like "You look like dirt," and that's what she'll hear.
But that's not such a big deal in person, because you'll see her frown, you'll finish swallowing your muffin, restate your compliment, and all's well with a chuckle. If you were doing the same thing over the phone, you wouldn't have the benefit of body language feedback.
Typos are rampant over text because of clumsy fingers, predictive text software and over-abbreviation. "I like ur shirt" can become "I lick up shorts," a somewhat different animal.
2) Message transmission is unreliable.
Let's say you live in 15th century Morocco. You're upset about something and you want to convey that to your significant other. The only way to do that is to write a note and give it to a messenger. Except that the messenger is a notorious and disorganized drunk who's liable to lose the message en route. Will you still hand him the message?
Emails get lost, stuck in spam filters or accidentally deleted. Text messages sometimes never get sent. They can also get to their destination fine but sit ignored in the inbox while someone's busy. If you don't get a response, can you tell the difference between technical failure or being ignored? You can't -- but you'll be stewing in your own juices in the meantime.
Email and text are like disorganized drunk messengers. If the message has time-sensitive emotional content in it, wait till you can deliver it in person, or at least in real time over phone.
Also, it's pretty easy to send a message to the wrong person. One of my readers sent "omg did u see how fat suzy looked in those pants" to Suzy instead of Susan when she clicked her contacts list, with predictably hilarious results.
3) Message interpretation is super-unreliable.
A vast portion of our communication happens nonverbally. Facial gesture, body language, tone of voice all encode essential information that are missing in text-based communication. Without the nonverbal contextual cues, how would you interpret a statement like "That was just brilliant?" Is it genuine praise or sarcasm? You simply can't tell.
This is fertile ground for misunderstanding and disaster. So resolve to do all emotional communication in real time.
4) Asynchronous communication catalyzes cruelty.
Ever wonder why there's so much nastiness online? People seem to have no problem eviscerating one another on a website or via email. And yet, we don't experience nearly as much of that in person.
Why? Because it's much harder to be an asshole in person, that's why. When confronted with a real person, your mirror neurons are active, which allow you to empathize with others and feel what they feel. When you're cruel to them and see them wince, you feel it too. This is a natural internal brake to otherwise gratuitous cruelty. Thus your neurology builds empathy, cooperation and civility into society.
Additionally, all animals have submission signals which tell an assailant to stop attacking: "You win! I lose! Please don't kill me!" You've probably seen dogs roll over and expose their belly, or other animals expose their necks. Humans put up the white flag, too. Submission signals are an essential survival feature of any species. Otherwise they'd annihilate their own race.
This is why modern warfare has massacred so many people. If you're miles away from your victims and can't see their faces or their kids' faces, it's pretty trivial to press a button and launch some missiles. We weren't able to kill 100,000 people in a flash in the days when people engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
A nasty email or text message can be the modern communication equivalent of that missile. You don't see the recipient. Your mirror neurons are not engaged and you don't have to bear their reaction, so you can afford to be cruel. You launch it, and boom, it can destroy without your having to be around to watch and feel. Except that once you've done that, you've compromised your humanity and the real damage is done to you: you lose a little bit of your soul.
I'm being a tad dramatic here, but you're usually the one who regrets sending the message after the air clears and you sober up from your fit of passion. This is the principle of enlightened self-interest, straight out of The Tao of Dating for Women: always choose the action that keeps you in good stead for the long term. It ends up being better for you and for everyone around you.
So if you like pointless relationship-eroding drama, go ahead and conduct your arguments over email and text. But if you value your peace of mind, never communicate emotionally via email, text or other asynchronous media. In the long run, the sanity you'll save is your own.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Happy B day to me
Let me just say something simple on this anniversary of my birth
YOU ARE ALL DISEASED.
YOU ARE ALL DISEASED.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Net Neutrality takes a big dump
So yeah fellow trollers ... the US is Boned.
Net Neutrality is finished and guess who won?
FCC Loses Key Ruling on Internet `Neutrality'
Net Neutrality is finished and guess who won?
FCC Loses Key Ruling on Internet `Neutrality'
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Meet the Palin's
Sarah Palin is making the most of her time in LA.
Fresh off her appearance on the "Tonight Show," Palin is meeting with network executives to pitch a reality show alongside "Survivor" creator Mark Burnett.
Entertainment Weekly's Lynette Rice reports that Palin and Burnett are shopping a "TV docudrama about Alaska" to executives at Fox, CBS, and NBC. According to one of Rice's sources, the show is a "planet-Earth type look" at Alaska.
The Live Feed's James Hibberd reports that Palin and her family would appear on-camera on the show.
Palin has been a ratings magnet almost every time she's been on TV. Her appearance on the "Tonight Show" Tuesday night drew 5.8 million viewers and helped Jay Leno beat David Letterman in his first week back on the show. Palin also lifted Oprah's ratings as well as the ratings of various shows on Fox News, where she recently signed on as an analyst.
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REALLY????
Can someone PLEASE make this stop? Guess what ... if we ignore her she WILL go away. I wonder if anyone including Mark Burnett has ever read Empire of Illusion. Probably not. I don't know WHAT Sarah reads, but I bet it's not a book. I realize the irony, of course, that by telling everyone to NOT discuss it, that I'm still putting her name out there. Trust me when I say this ... flavours of the week don't become that way because they're news worthy, but because they're ratings gold. But who am I kidding?
Fresh off her appearance on the "Tonight Show," Palin is meeting with network executives to pitch a reality show alongside "Survivor" creator Mark Burnett.
Entertainment Weekly's Lynette Rice reports that Palin and Burnett are shopping a "TV docudrama about Alaska" to executives at Fox, CBS, and NBC. According to one of Rice's sources, the show is a "planet-Earth type look" at Alaska.
The Live Feed's James Hibberd reports that Palin and her family would appear on-camera on the show.
Palin has been a ratings magnet almost every time she's been on TV. Her appearance on the "Tonight Show" Tuesday night drew 5.8 million viewers and helped Jay Leno beat David Letterman in his first week back on the show. Palin also lifted Oprah's ratings as well as the ratings of various shows on Fox News, where she recently signed on as an analyst.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
REALLY????
Can someone PLEASE make this stop? Guess what ... if we ignore her she WILL go away. I wonder if anyone including Mark Burnett has ever read Empire of Illusion. Probably not. I don't know WHAT Sarah reads, but I bet it's not a book. I realize the irony, of course, that by telling everyone to NOT discuss it, that I'm still putting her name out there. Trust me when I say this ... flavours of the week don't become that way because they're news worthy, but because they're ratings gold. But who am I kidding?
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