That'll cost ya your Brains!

[elfs]

The Bailout Price Tag: Everything You've Ever Loved (and a few things you might well hate).

Barry Ritholtz crunches the numbers and finds that the bailout thus far costs more than:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

But add up the numbers and you'll see that the bailout doesn't just cost more than any one of these things. As Ritholtz points out, the econopocalypse costs more than all of these things combined.

Brain reorganizes to make room for math.

Cool! During puberty, the brain re-organizes itself in significant ways to develop a symbol-processing system that allows it to perform abstract mathematics efficiently. Very cool research stuff.

"Rebuild the Republican Party"

This looks like a tragically misguided attempt to bring the Grand Old Party into the 21st century by emulating the Obama model and using the all the tools the young kids are using.

The problem is that nowhere in this do I see objectives. There's no why here. This is an attempt to pull the tribe together without describing what the tribe is for. I want to know how the Republican Party will apply core values of limited, efficient government, respect for private property and private persons, and so forth, into political policy. That's what a political party is: an entity for aggregating collective energy into a force for earning political power. The last eight years, the Republican leadership has been about giving money to the "haves and have mores" at the expense of everyone else, while pandering to the religious subset that helped keep them in office by cutting our throats on the important technological and medical issues of the day.

Until and unless the Republican Party actually becomes a party that can clearly enunciate it's respect for privacy, property, and the diversity of human thought, I'm not going back. An organization without a soul is just a mob waiting to happen.

Freedom Watch is 'pretty much kaput.'

Freedom Watch was an attempt to emulate MoveOn.org. Funded by wealthy conservative casino owner Sheldon Adelson, it cynically shadowed MoveOn, attempted (and often failed) to use humor to make its point, and ultimately collapsed. So don't hold out home for RebuildTheParty, either.

City censors atheist billboard

The city of Rancho Cucamonga has "asked a billboard company if there was a way to have removed" a billboard from an atheist group. The billboard read "Imagine No Religion," and the city said it received 90 complaints about the billboard.

Man, that's a losing move right there.

Andy McCarthy takes another swipe at brown people.

National Review Online continues to sink into the muck and slime. Where they once fired Coulter for her crusader mentality, they kept McCarthy.

The Supreme Court, in the Boumedienne decision, stated that the Military Commissions Act without Habeas Corpus was unconstitutional. Since then, several Gitmo prisoners have sued for the United States to prove their detainment was necessary, and now five Algerian prisoners have been ordered released.

McCarthy, "emboldened" by keeping the seat supporting his ass, continues his assault on common sense:

It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here. Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information. We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years, and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions

Yeah, gosh. After the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction thing, and the Fundamentals of the Economy are Strong thing, and the Heckuva Job After Katrina thing, you'd think that our confidence in our government's command of relative facts and thoughtful decision making would be solid, right? McCarthy continues:

Judge Leon concluded that "[t]o rest [combatant detention] on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation." That is puzzling. There is nothing in the training of a judge that makes him an expert in military matters. In our system of divided government, the question of who is an enemy combatant should be committed to the executive brach [sic] – specifically, to the military professionals waging the war.

But judges aren't expected to be experts on any topic that comes up in their courts; they're experts on the law, and it is incumbent upon the two sides making the case to show how their issue interacts with the law.

McCarthy's take on the way our court system is trying its damndest to figure out how to apply justice? As Radley Balko put it: "I Hope This Whole 'Imprisoning People Without Evidence' Thing Doesn't Make People Question the President's Judgment!"

Typographic Madness: 30 Brilliant Pieces of Design

Something pretty and smart to clear the palette

Comments

[jenk]

core values of limited, efficient government, respect for private property and private persons, and so forth, into political policy.

Assuming those are their core values. I think they need to enunciate their core values of building the military and repealing the 4th and 6th amendments.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, that was my point. Those were the core values once upon a time. Supposedly. What they've done-- and what they've told the mouthbreathing apparati that support them they will continue to do-- is something much more tribal and ugly.

[solarbird]

It's not. It's just branding. What you actually do doesn't have to have anything to do with how you sell yourself.

[heofmanynames.livejournal.com]

Gotta disagree w/ Ritholz: the inflation-adjusted cost of NASA is over 851bn by itself; even using the contemporary dollars, NASA, Vietnam & the S&L bailout add up to nearly 700bn.

Entertaining to note that the New Deal only cost 500bn in current dollars - don't think we'll get the same results for our first half-trill,,,,

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

When I was 10, my babysitter tried to explain her algebra. "But what does x STAND FOR?" I said. I just couldn't get my head around it.

When I was 11, I began my first algebra class, and it went just fine. I knew SOMETHING happened. Thanks for the link.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd be curious to see those spending figures as an average percentage of GDP rather than just inflation-adjusted dollars. That's interesting in a "what do you get for each dollar spent?" sense, but I'm more interested in "how much did each person pay to get x?"

Anonymous Blog Reader #127

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

I want to know how the Republican Party will apply core values of limited, efficient government, respect for private property and private persons, and so forth, into political policy.

The thing is, they need to do more than say what their goals are; they also need to show their work. They say now that they're for small government, and then turn around and vote for the Patriot Act and the bailout etc. etc. ad nauseum. It's gotten so that people just don't believe them any more, because they are so clearly doing exactly the opposite of what they say they believe in.

They're going to have to tear everything down and start from the beginning, and a large part of what they're going to have to rebuild is proof that they actually walk their talk. Once they do that, they'll start rebuilding confidence in their strength as a party.

[funos.livejournal.com]

re: brains and math

Sounds like kids do it in 'software', and adults in hardware (at least partially).

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I have a very clear memory of "waking up" suddenly and being able to understand math in a way and to an extent that I had never possessed before.

Never thought of it as brain development, though. It just felt like enlightenment - gnosis, just about. Someone explained the concept of multiple infinities and everything else just fell into place. I spent the next four years in pursuit of mathematics, pure and unadulterated.

I've met people who have that shape of mind/brain from a very early age, though - certainly preteen, some even in infancy. They systemize with wild abandon but sometimes can't remember names of individuals they meet daily. This kind of person seems to get the "social brain" growth during their teens.

The innumeracy here is depressing

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Taking all those figures out of context is horribly misleading.

This crash is still in the range of $2 trillion; the $4 trillion figure includes the purchase of assets that will later be sold again. $2 trillion is around 15% of the GDP-- like a plumber borrowing $12,000 against his $40K annual income to buy a car he doesn't need that's actually worth only $6,000. Awkward, stupid, sure. Catastrophic, not hardly.

The New Deal, on the other hand, cost roughly 50% of the 1933 GDP, which itself had dropped to about half the 1929 GDP. The total shortfall due to the Great Depression was roughly 200% of the annual US GDP, and much of this loss was _caused_ by the New Deal, which suggests it ought to be thrown in there.

So the direct comparison to today would be to estimate the cost of the New Deal as somewhere in the range of $20 trillion to $25 trillion. Ten times as big a deal.

In other words, what FDR did was to use the Great Depression as an excuse to seize control of much of the economy and waste vast amounts of money on the pet projects of the vast army of idiots in his administration.

Let's hope Obama doesn't feel TOO inspired by FDR's example.

. png

Re: The innumeracy here is depressing

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Your post would have come across as a lot more credible without the screech of axe-grinding in those last two sentences. IMO.

What do you think FDR should have done instead?

Re: The innumeracy here is depressing

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Next time I'll just hold back the obvious conclusions because they make people uncomfortable. Sure I will.

. png

Re: The innumeracy here is depressing

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

No, seriously... I'm asking for your opinion in terms of economics. If you had been President, how would you have dealt with the Great Depression? Further, what evidence can you offer that your ideas would have led to a better result than what we actually got?


As for your response, you see them as being "obvious conclusions" which make people (including, presumably, me) uncomfortable... which suggests you believe that that discomfort comes from your having presented some uncomfortable truths, as opposed to merely having presented conclusions which others disagree with.

I see them as conclusions that seem rather histrionic in their presentation, and which seem to be rather inadequately supported. You assert that "... what FDR did was to use the Great Depression as an excuse to seize control of much of the economy and waste vast amounts of money on the pet projects of the vast army of idiots in his administration." You may be right, you may be wrong, but (a) the data you provided doesn't inexorably lead to that conclusion, and (b) you stated it in such over the top terms that it comes across as a mindless rant, regardless of whether or not it's actually true.