'The latest research on the effects of environment and genetics on personality...'

'The new research deepens their study of the epigenetics of the brain and behavior, dealing for the first time with real-life challenges like stress. It also takes a rare systems biology approach, looking at the brain from the molecular level to the physiological level to behavior. "We did not know a stress response could be reprogrammed by your ancestors' environmental exposures," says Skinner, who focused on the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance and genomics aspects of the paper. "So how well you socialize or how your anxiety levels respond to stress may be as much your ancestral epigenetic inheritance as your individual early-life events." -- Crews says that increases in other mental disorders may be attributable to the kind of "two-hit" exposure that the experiment is modeling. "There is no doubt that we have been seeing real increases in mental disorders like autism and bipolar disorder," says Crews, who focused on the neuroscience, behavior and stress aspects of the paper. "It's more than just a change in diagnostics. The question is why? Is it because we are living in a more frantic world, or because we are living in a more frantic world and are responding to that in a different way because we have been exposed? I favor the latter."'

'Dopamine, which is released during the stress response, stimulates areas of the prefrontal cortex, probably resulting in heightened attention and improved cognitive capacity. Chronic stress, however, appears to cause an overproduction of dopamine, which can result in reduced attention, increased overall vigilance, as well as a diminished capacity to learn new material and increased paranoid and psychotic behavior.'

'Submissiveness and dominance have their effects on the same reward circuits of the brain as power and cocaine. Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly. This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power. What’s more, power also makes people smarter, because dopamine improves the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobes. Conversely, demotion in a hierarchy decreases dopamine levels, increases stress and reduces cognitive function. But too much power – and hence too much dopamine – can disrupt normal cognition and emotion, leading to gross errors of judgment and imperviousness to risk, not to mention huge egocentricity and lack of empathy for others.' -- Political power is the dizziness of loss aversion.

'Social media is playing a vital role in Syria's conflict, as both sides try to shape domestic and international opinion in their favour. Chilling videos of acts of brutality have the power to go viral and be broadcast on global TV networks - but sometimes, the pictures aren't everything they appear to be.' "Some facebook pages really look like hit lists."

'Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. “There’s this grilled cheese place down the street,” says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. “They can’t test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make.” At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can’t be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you’re in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the “traffic” is on the line with every decision. The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday, we can only shrug: We went with B. We don’t know why. It just works.'

'#2. You Emotionally Bond With People You Sing With: Scientists have discovered that when we perform synchronized activities such as singing songs, reciting chants or even as simple an act as walking together, we end up feeling more connected to the people we're performing these activities with. ...how harmonious the participants felt had nothing to do with any positive emotions created by the synchronized activities themselves. Whether or not they enjoyed performing the activities, they simply became more cooperative with each other. The researchers concluded that "synchrony rituals" may therefore have evolved as a way for societies to get individuals to work together and be willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the group.'

'This depiction of the digital marketing landscape was shown at a Buddy Media event marking the launch of the social marketing software agency's new suite of measurement tools. You can click to enlarge it, but that won't make it look any simpler.'

Demetri Kofinas: "That's why we have evolution."

'Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users. On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway. The subtext—an overt subtext—of the popular account of Facebook is that the network has a proprietary claim and special insight into social behavior. For enterprises and advertising agencies, it is therefore the bridge to new modes of human connection. But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook. So the social network is left in the same position as all other media companies. Instead of being inevitable and unavoidable, it has to sell the one-off virtue of its audience like every other humper on Madison Avenue.' -- Waiting for Godot

'Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all. Their metabolism is dialed down to almost nothing, an adaptive advantage in a place with so few resources. The bacteria that survive are the ones that can satisfy themselves with minute traces of oxygen and a parsimonious diet of organic material laid down millions of years ago. “These communities have not received input or new food since the dinosaurs walked the planet,” Roy said. “Those that are left down there are the ones that can deal with the lowest amount of food.”'

'..."go-getters" who are willing to work hard for rewards had higher release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in areas of the brain known to play an important role in reward and motivation, the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. On the other hand, "slackers" who are less willing to work hard for a reward had high dopamine levels in another brain area that plays a role in emotion and risk perception, the anterior insula. -- The role of dopamine in the anterior insula came as a complete surprise to the researchers. The finding was unexpected because it suggests that more dopamine in the insula is associated with a reduced desire to work, even when it means earning less money. The fact that dopamine can have opposing effects in different parts of the brain complicates the picture regarding the use of psychotropic medications that affect dopamine levels for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder, depression and schizophrenia because it calls into question the general assumption that these dopaminergic drugs have the same effect throughout the brain.'

'The second question is whether consumers will use just one electronic wallet on their phones, choosing between, say, Google, PayPal and their own bank, or whether they will have several. Most analysts think that consumers will gravitate towards a single electronic wallet which will hold many cards. This is because there may be significant benefits to be gained from aggregating transactions and the data associated with them. For example, PayPal’s wallet will allow consumers to use various stores of value besides money when paying for goods or services. These could include coupons, loyalty points from stores and banks and air miles from airlines. PayPal stands to profit from steering customers into shops, perhaps by reminding them that they have unused coupons. It could also tell shopkeepers about the tastes of their customers, allowing retailers to make targeted shopping offers (“this would look great with the black skirt you bought last week”) or extend credit on the fly. -- Google, too, is hoping to do far more with its wallet than process payments, which it sees as akin to queries typed into its search engine. In the same way that it sells advertisements that are precisely targeted to a user’s search, it hopes to be able to deliver offers matched to people’s spending patterns.'

'The thought of Karl Marx continues to resonate throughout the world and is never more prominent than in the use of the propaganda term “capitalism” by both advocates and opponents of economic freedom. The opposition to “capitalism” by the Occupy movements show that Marxist thought has penetrated deeply into global economic culture. -- In the analysis of the American economist and social philosopher Henry George, the surplus from production is ground rent. Suppose in some geographic region, the average product of labor is greater than the wage paid to workers. The existence of that surplus at that location makes the location valuable, and so entrepreneurs will bid up what they pay to be located there. They will keep bidding up the rent until the rent has soaked up all the surplus. Generally, what economists call the “producer surplus” is really land rent, and since landowners produce nothing, they are non-producers, and the surplus is better called the “non-producer surplus.” -- Hence Marx is right that economists have fetishes. Most economists have made a fetish out of the producer surplus, imagining that it goes to the better producers rather than to non-productive landowners. This is what Mason Gaffney has called the “corruption of economics.” -- Karl Marx recognized that land rents grow not just out of soil but also from society. But rather than conclude logically that this rent should belong to society, Marx made a fetish out of labor and thought that the surplus is part of the economic wage. Marx did not understand that this surplus should be paid by the land title holder for the use of land, in order to have efficient economic calculation. The rent is an implicit reality apart from any explicit payments by tenants to landlords or no explicit payments by owner-occupants. If that rent is not explicitly paid, not only does the landowner take what comes from society and nature, but the rent generates land value that becomes an object of speculation that creates the boom and bust sequence.'

'The 19th-century economist and social philosopher Henry George developed the theory of the business or trade cycle based on malspeculation in land value, although he did not use that term. Such malspeculation would not occur in a pure free market, thus the “business” cycle should more accurately be called "the interventionist cycle" or "the economic distortion cycle." There are two major interventions that cause malspeculation. First is an injection of money into the banking system, an increase in loanable funds not caused by higher savings but by money expansion. The resultant cheap credit fuels both malinvestment and malspeculation in real estate. When the money injections stop, interest rates rise back up, and such projects and purchases slow down and stop. When land values stop rising, speculators sell, and the fall in land values brings down the financial sector that provided the mortgages. Malspeculation carries land values beyond that warranted by the rents. Henry George called this a lockout of labor and capital. With the use of real estate now unprofitable and unaffordable, land values crash. -- The boom-bust real estate and economic distortion cycles have repeated for that past 200 years, yet the 2008 crash surprised not just malspeculators but also economists, financial analysts, and governmental officials. The reason the cycle recurs is that, as the philosopher Hegel observed, people do not learn from history. Or they learn the wrong lessons. They shun Georgist theory, and thus become mal-economists, mal-financiers, and mal-authorities. Add “malspeculation” to your dictionary. Malspeculation is a vital concept that curiously has not had a name, because the role of land in the boom-bust cycle has not been appreciated. The Crash of 2008 was caused by malspeculation, and so the word will find the light of day.'

'#7. Critics say that LVT redistributes wealth from landowners, but there is nothing morally wrong with an inequality in wealth and income. But when government provides public goods paid for by taxes other than on land, this pumps up rent and land value, redistributing wealth from workers to landowners. And for land value provided by nature, geoist ethics say that human equality requires an equal benefit from natural resources. Inequality in market wages respects equal self-ownership, while an unequal benefit from the natural heritage does violate our creation as moral equals. -- #9. Critics of LVT claim that much of wages is due to luck, connections, and talents, so a portion is wages is unearned. But as Henry George wrote, justice is the end, taxation only the means. It is just for the benefits of natural resource to be shared, and for landowners to pay back the rental generated by public goods. Self-ownership is also just, even if some have greater wealth due to luck. Nobody is coercively harmed if one person has more talent than others. If others own your luck, you become a slave to them, violating self-ownership. -- #14. Socialist critics claim that LVT leaves intact capital inequalities. But much of the historical inequality of wealth has come from land tenure. Over time, inherited wealth other than land dissipates or gets donated to charity. With good education and equal access to natural opportunities, inequalities in financial assets are not unjust so long as there is no force or fraud.'

'...innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac). As with Maslow's hierarchy, you shouldn't look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the highest level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We're already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn't seem particularly pressing. We've become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he creates, say, a popular social-networking tool than if he creates a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. The arc of innovation, to put a dark spin on it, is toward decadence.'

'“You still feel good when everyone wishes you happy birthday on Facebook even though you know they were prompted to do it.” Dr. Rosen said the average person was not addicted to Facebook. Instead, he characterized the relationship as a compulsion. “Addictions are about finding pleasure,” he said. “Compulsions are born from anxiety, and Facebook is psychologically important. It allows us to project on the world, in a way that we’ve never been able to before, who we are and what we want to say about ourselves.” As a result, he said, Facebook “drives our behavior online.” He added: “We are always checking to see if anyone posted on our wall, if they liked a photo, responded to an update. For those who use it, they are feeling more of a need to look at it and check in and reduce the anxiety of feeling like they are missing out on something.”'

'It was the great unwinding of the Zynga arbitrage. As Matthew Ingram of GigaOm pointed out, Zynga had been something of a Facebook proxy before the latter went public. It makes sense: the companies are symbiotic. Without Facebook, Zynga wouldn't exist. And without Zynga, Facebook wouldn't have about 12 percent of the revenue that it does. Once that had sorted out, Zynga's stock began trading more normally. But if Zynga and Facebook are so connected, why did one tank while the other didn't? The answer is that they both tanked -- kind of. Remember: Facebook's underwriters wouldn't let its share price fall below $38 a share today. That's what underwriters do. They take a company public in return for a guarantee to buy at the IPO price. So if traders thought that the IPO price was overvalued, they might have taken it out on the next best thing. Which was bad news for Zynga. That's why the news didn't get any better for the FarmVille creator even after its stock stopped flash crashing. Just look out on Monday. The underwriters won't be there with their safety net.'

'...its $100bn-plus valuation vastly exceeds the value of its relatively low value ads, meaning it really has to become much more like television than like Google. Except that it isn't television. It doesn't really even have an audience – that is, people thinking and feeling something similar (ideally, all at once). And it isn't run by people who even care about media – or doing what media does: that is, holding people's attention by means of pain, or charm, or jokes. (Facebook will eventually try, like all other internet companies, to hire media people – but they won't get the jokes.) Of course, the future is coming and we have somehow convinced ourselves that forward-thinking technology companies, by learning so much more about people's behavior and habits and knowing more about them than they do themselves, will somehow, with undreamed-of efficiency, sell them something. And these social media savants will be able to do this without having to rely on the much more mysterious and hit-and-miss process of producing good stories.'

'But here's the rub. In 2011, Facebook made $4 per user per year. To earn its market cap of $100 billion today, it would have to earn five-times that figure per user. This sets up a tug-of-war over user information. Facebook has lots of it. Advertisers want to see more of it. Users want them to see less of it. The true value of Facebook could depend on who wins that turf war. The upside is that Facebook has created something without precedent: an addictive product for hundreds of millions of people who spent their time creating, for free, something of huge importance to advertisers, which is personal information about their lives and interests. The downside is that Facebook is still extremely protective about the sort of ads it displays, partly because it's extremely sensitive to the fact that its users consider Facebook private. -- Ultimately, Facebook isn't like Google, or the yellow pages, or TV, and it doesn't want to be. It wants to be something totally new: an infrastructure for the social web that can attract old-fashioned ads, create new ads that blend user content and marketing, create software that underpins that social web, and charge monopoly rents for its sprawling influence. And its investors are betting on the fact that no company this wide, this deep, this addictive, and this influential could possibly fail.'

'Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are parts that have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed. One aim of gestalt dream analysis is to accept and reintegrate these. As with all gestalt therapy, dream analysis involves much dialogue and acting out. The dreamer is encouraged to enter into dialogue with the various aspects of the dream. The dreamer will also be encouraged to take the part of the dream elements, to act out the dream from their perspective. This applies as much to inanimate as to animate objects. So, for example, if you dream of being chased across a field you might begin a dialogue where you turn to face the pursuer and start asking him/her/it questions. Then you might take the place of the pursuer and start describing the chase from that point of view. This process could then be repeated from the perspective of a tree in the field overlooking the chase - a new perspective that could bring unexpected realisation.'

'Jung proposed two basic approaches to analyzing dream material: the objective and the subjective.[22] In the objective approach, every person in the dream refers to the person they are: mother is mother, girlfriend is girlfriend, etc. In the subjective approach, every person in the dream represents an aspect of the dreamer. Jung argued that the subjective approach is much more difficult for the dreamer to accept, but that in most good dream-work, the dreamer will come to recognize that the dream characters can represent an unacknowledged aspect of the dreamer. Thus, if the dreamer is being chased by a crazed killer, the dreamer may come eventually to recognize his own homicidal impulses. Gestalt therapists extended the subjective approach, claiming that even the inanimate objects in a dream can represent aspects of the dreamer.'

'Google submitted a new patent that uses the imaging and sound pickup capabilities of your smartphone to trigger advertisements for relevant products or experiences: "Implementations may include one or more of the following features. Sensing the environmental condition can include sensing at least one of temperature, humidity, sound, light, or air composition. The digital billboard can be installed at an indoor location, and sensing the environmental condition can include sensing an indoor or outdoor environmental condition. In general, in another aspect, a computer-implemented method includes enabling advertisers to associate advertisements with one or more environmental conditions to allow the advertisements to be provided to users whose environmental conditions match the environmental conditions associated with the advertisements; and enabling the advertisers to bid for environmental conditions associated with one or more keywords."'

'Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet. Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends. But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it. -- The more often an emotion is experienced by the user, the larger the potential market of a product that serves that feeling. -- People don’t realize they use products to satiate feelings so emotional needs must be translated into a concrete story.'

'Where is this business model? Google provides a service – a search algorithm. Microsoft provides computer software. Apple provides innovative and beautiful software.What exactly is the bottom line for Facebook? Essentially, the company is worth whatever information it can pilfer from its client base. And that information may be worth more to the American intelligence companies that apparently crowd around Facebook than to the private sector itself. This is a company, then, that is fundamentally at war with its users. It provides the "thinnest" of services – social connectivity. Go online and it is hard to find a kind word for Facebook. Feedback to articles (not the articles themselves) is crammed with comments on Facebook's various problems from a business standpoint. Many deplore Facebook's lack of real privacy and manipulation of data and are skeptical about the company's prospects going forward. We share the same sentiments. We cannot account for the US$ 104 billion that the company is putatively worth now. Google, with ten times the earnings, is worth the same amount, capitalization-wise. The money being tossed around this Facebook deal is phenomenal. Central banks, in fact, have printed so much money over the past four years that some of it has got to go somewhere. Some of it has gone toward Facebook.'

'The goal all along has been to increase the power and authority of the EU. Various manmade facilities such as central banking and the governments of nation-states themselves were enlisted in creating first tremendous debt and now the response, which surely shall be greater centralization. The top men have actually said as much. We figure that the global elite that apparently wants to rule the world has two scenarios in mind. The first one is to keep the EU together – with a good deal of pain and chaos. The second one is to collapse the EU – with a good deal of pain and chaos. Either scenario facilitates world government. The trap is sprung. The powers-that-be, after exposing us endlessly to "Merkozy," now reveal that they have plenty of firepower and are prepared to use it. Gone is the nonsense about the new German empire and the special relationship between France and Germany. Gone is any pretense that England stands back, wishing to disengage from the EU. The old men of the City of London are entirely in charge and always have been. They are hardly hiding their intentions now. They will do whatever it takes using the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. They will print as much as necessary. We have written consistently that this "global crisis" would involve the disbursement of US$ 100 trillion before it was over. We believe we are at the US$ 50 trillion mark if you throw in the US$ 15 trillion or so in "short term" loans issued out by the Fed in 2008. Let's see how much it costs these dynastic families (if that is what they are) to unearth the European Union, which already had one foot in the grave.'

"We're seeing the house being burnt down, and the Germans keep insisting that we need to get the building regulations sorted out before we douse the flames with the water supply they control." -- Pull it

'Whatever JPM was up to (and I am still not entirely clear on what that was), it was not classic hedging, which serves to minimize losses, but something far more speculative. The reason this gives me such cause for concern is that it once again exposes a small portion of the derivative monster that will certainly be awakened when the European situation goes into full meltdown over the Greek, then Spanish, the Portuguese, then Italian situations. While derivatives are, in theory, a zero-sum game, and therefore could, in theory, be forgiven and forgotten in a pinch, the reality is that they’ve been used to pretend that risk did not exist and therefore losses don’t exist. The ugly truth here is that we are at the tail end of a most unfortunate credit bubble – four decades of global excess by the OECD countries – and there are massive losses to account for. Just as the offsetting counterparties involved in the subprime CDO and CDS mortgage crisis did not zero out because the losses they were allegedly papering over were all too real, the same will prove true of the derivative paper allegedly covering sovereign and corporate debts. Remember, the biggest holder of derivatives is the company that just demonstrated that it doesn’t really understand the concept of hedging. Overall derivatives, especially interest-rate-linked derivatives, have increased by over $100 trillion since the crisis began. As JPM just evidenced, and as hinted at by the interminable hand-wringing over allowing Greece’s paltry $78 billion in credit-default swaps to be triggered, real dangers lurk here.'

'If you are going to go the devaluation route you are going to have to do it all at once. Like the big-bank weekend (maybe coinciding with a week long bank holiday) in which all core European countries get their own currency back. There is a precedent. It is not a pretty one. When the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed there was a single currency over a huge area covering much of what is now Euroland. In this case the rather Germanic Austrians were in charge (or rather were in charge until their empire collapsed). What they did was put troops on all the borders and made it illegal to take cash (or wire cash!) across borders. Then all Austro-Marks in each country was stamped - converted to Drachma for Greece, Marks for Germany, Peseta for Spain or whatever the currencies of the day were [If someone remembers the 1918 border splits better than me they are welcome to say...] In this conception all Spanish debts become Peseta debts. All German debts become Mark debts. All Greek debts become Drachma debts. Unstamped currency goes worthless. If you are going to split the currency I see no alternative to a big bang - and if you do that I see no alternative to troops at the border... Unilateral Greek default and devaluation without planning for the periphery to do the same - well that is a true mess. Too ugly almost to think about - and it would be unilateral for less than a week. The rest of Europe falls into that abyss with maximum movement of deposits and cash in the meantime.'

'The ultimate solution for all government debt is always pay off, repudiate or hyperinflation hence the impasse in EU Land. No nation has ever paid off their national debt, the citizens generally benefit from repudiation over hyperinflation but central banks always use inflation as the solution. Due to rather recent German history the German people will never allow any government to sanction high rates of inflation. The EU was a vehicle designed to control all of Europe but the German people will not stand for the massive money creation and ultimate inflation necessary to preserve the failed European Union and inflate away the massive sovereign debts of nations in the EU. The German people will surely demand withdrawal from the Euro and a return to the currency credibility of a restored D-Mark (Deutsche Mark) backed in some way by gold. The alternative is to risk a return to the 1930's and the Germans have not forgotten that mistake. I would suggest that at the next federal election in Germany in the fall of 2013 Chancellor Merkel will likely be repudiated at the polls because of the EU problems. She and her party alliance will be forced from power as her dream for a German-led Europe through the European Union crumbles like so many grandiose plans of earlier empires. Remember, 70 years earlier in 1933 another chancellor was swept into power because of government debts, hyperinflation and outside meddling. It did not end well for Germany.'

'A scheme to get Greeks to pay property taxes by bundling them with electricity bills didn’t last long, reports FT. People stopped paying their electricity bills and now it looks like the power company – which had to be bailed out last month – has stopped even trying to collect the levy. According to FT, the government had hoped to raise €1.7bn-€2bn from the levy in the fourth quarter of last year. But a massive unions-led civil disobedience movement against the tax collection method and a ruling that it was illegal to disconnect people’s electricity supply for non-payment sent the collection rate even lower.'

'It's the NEW AMERICAN WAY....' -- Keeping those land prices high

'Britain is quite mad. You know, we're not sure Rebekah Brooks was such a nice woman. But given the larger cruelties of the world and whom she apparently works for, the charges seem a bit exaggerated. Even the phone hacking. The crazy elite families have apparently been building a full matrix of eavesdropping facilities for the past 50 years. The idea that this young woman is going to be charged for something that governments around the world spend billions on every year is a bit rich.'

"Never trust a Greek who's broke, he has money hidden in the basement hidden in the mattresses – all drachmas!"

'We are apparently betting the nation’s (perhaps the planet’s) economic future on a service that essentially enables petabytes of frivolous banality to flow through the world’s data pipes. The critics are not wrong. Facebook is frivolous. Incredibly so. What they get wrong though is assuming that old economy stuff is not frivolous. Take the auto industry. For a century people have used cars for completely frivolous things like taking road trips, going to dumb B-movies, going over to visit friends to play board games, or to a workplace to sit in a cubicle and be bored for 8 hours. Drag races, NASCAR, random drives to feel the wind in your face (why not go running so you can lose some weight at the same time?): what is so “serious” about any of this? Still think the old economy is more serious than Facebook? Suddenly, Farmville seems very green and eco-friendly. Ultimately, to a scary degree, everything in the American economy is about sustaining frivolity. Much of it obesity-inducing, gas-guzzling, non-renewable, planet-destroying frivolity. If we’re going to do this, we might at least do it more efficiently. Enter Facebook. By digitizing much of the frivolous banality in our lives that currently takes expensive physical infrastructure, gasoline and tens of millions of jobs to sustain, Facebook is showing us the true value of the fading American industrial economy itself. -- The Facebook IPO is ultimately unsettling for just this reason. It shows us that even those who toil away today at apparently noble, uplifting professions that elevate minds and nourish souls, ultimately do so in service of a fundamentally frivolous economy. An economy that is basically one giant feedback loop between frivolous consumption driven by television and complicated production systems that absorb the talents of millions. It is really a huge circus of sound and fury signifying almost nothing.'

'...what mattered to the babies was if the environment was consistent before and after birth. That is, the babies who did best were those who either had mothers who were healthy both before and after birth, and those whose mothers were depressed before birth and stayed depressed afterward. What slowed the babies' development was changing conditions -- a mother who went from depressed before birth to healthy after or healthy before birth to depressed after. -- In the long term, having a depressed mother could lead to neurological problems and psychiatric disorders, Sandman says. In another study, his team found that older children whose mothers were anxious during pregnancy, which often is co morbid with depression, have differences in certain brain structures. It will take studies lasting decades to figure out exactly what having a depressed mother means to a child's long-term health. "We believe that the human fetus is an active participant in its own development and is collecting information for life after birth," Sandman says. "It's preparing for life based on messages the mom is providing."'

'The secret fear of marriage is that the kid wins the Oedipal drama.'

'What do religion, psychology and "ancient alien theory" have in common? -- For Jung, the collective unconscious is a vast repository of human knowlege, instinct, memory and experience accumulated since the birth of the species and genetically and psychologically passed down from generation to generation. Therefore, the archaic collective unconscious is an invaluable and wisdom-filled source of information unconsciously linking us all together, much like the World Wide Web, the Internet, links us together and has become an integral part of our interconnected collective consciousness. ...many of the phenomena frequently cited by ancient alien theorists are more convincingly evidence of the existence of the collective unconscious than of early extraterrestrial influences. Whether or not extraterrestrial life exists and has visited this planet in UFO's, past or present, is still an open question. But it seems clear that deep in our collective unconscious resides the archetypal idea and imagery of these alien entities, just as the archetypal idea of God and the Devil live within us.' -- She's baaack. Mommy looms large over you laying in your crib. Nice, nasty, or indifferent? God, Devil, neither or both?

'...successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential. -- ...technology only becomes interesting once it becomes technically boring. Technological futurists are pre-Fieldists. Marketing futurists are post-Fieldists. This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered. Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t. The future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path. This actually suggests a different, subtler reading of Gibson’s unevenly-distributed line. -- ...as everyday experiences get mangled by layer after layer of metaphoric back-referencing, these metaphors get reified into a sort of atemporal, non-physical realm of abstract experience-primitives. These are sort of like Platonic primitives, except that they are reified patterns of behavior... The Field stretches to accommodate the future, rather than moving to cover it. 1997 never happened. Neither did 1500 in a way. What we did have was different stretched states of the Manufactured Normalcy Field in 1500 and 1997. If the Matrix were to happen, it would have to actually keep that stretching going.'

'Social-media data collection, though, makes the illusion of a unified self hard to sustain. By imposing a single persistent identity, social media inevitably confront people with their inconsistencies. Yet one can’t abstain from Facebook without suffering growing economic consequences. What emerges from this pressure is social media’s tendency to both instantiate and discredit authenticity. They validate the quest for it while dismissing the possibility that you’ll ever arrive at it. The self-directed consumers who shop to express intrinsic inner being is supplanted by the well-connected, autoconfessional self who never pauses in disclosing information and thus runs ahead of any need to self-impose consistency. -- Social media gives us more information about ourselves than we can process, so any schematization of it seems to add to self-knowledge rather than limit it, broadening our identity repertoire. -- The data self coalesces in social media’s mircoaffirmations: we are matched with people who can affirm us, we see a reflection of ourselves in the data that makes us feel recognized, we are told what to want in a way that assures us we will be doing what is right and normal. What threatens the data self is not inauthenticity but lack of access, a disruption of the information flow. If the sharing process is disrupted, we are left with the underlying terror that there might be something crucial about our lives that can’t be expressed in data. The true existential threat is not that our identity will be exposed as fake, but that endless sharing of it will make it feel increasingly inexpressible. Key things might seem to escape our attempts to tell all. ...it becomes impossible to feel that something meaningful could also be unsharable. We are only what we share. Activity only means something to us because we know we can share it.'

Video inside.

'This scenario is likely to happen more and more as onerous Bank Secrecy and USA Patriot Acts make it increasingly difficult for financial institutions to be in full compliance with anti-money laundering regulations. Instead of trying to comply, they are electing to opt out so as not to encounter heavy federal fines. It sure would be nice if the world had a decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency that could be transferred to mobile devices in a secure fashion. Wait a minute! Doesn’t bitcoin allow for rapid and trustworthy international value transfer? As a distributed network, bitcoin possesses the capability to route around interference and disruption. In fact, this was a key design consideration as resiliency has grown to become an imperative for privacy-enhancing electronic cash. Its detractors remind me of the holy papacy being fearful of the printing press because it allowed for individual interpretation and diminished mankind’s reliance on the anointed biblical teachers.' -- The tighter your grip...

"The False-Self views the Truth-Self as naked and insane and defenseless ... because, of course, the False-Self is created when the Truth-Self is utterly defenseless, usually when it is at the mercy of parental power, such mercy of which, of course, is not forthcoming."

'Scamworld is in many ways a primitive, naive place. It’s populated on one side by mock-businessmen with a cartoonish view of their own existence. On the other side are their victims, people for whom the internet is a mystery, people who are inclined to believe that with the right software, or by purchasing a website, they can get rich. -- "So it kinda depends on your level of investment," he continues. "What we like to do here is OPM: Other People's Money. Before you actually see a bill for your credit card, you're on the way by paying that back before your 45 days is up on that credit card statement [sic] is actually coming to you. So we actually let our clients tell us what they can bring to the table and invest into their own market." OK, so again: "What kind of money are we talking about?" "We've got three different platforms, Leigh, that we actually bring people in on. Now, I'm going to give you a breakdown, tell me what platform you might be able to come in on, and I'll work with you to get you through this platform, or get you up to the next platform. Because what I can do is, as a senior principal here, I can go down to my financial department, and if you can bring ‘so much’ to the table I'll tell them to invest the rest into you, because you sound like someone I want to work with..." He rambles on in this way for a while, which is calculated to put Leigh further off-balance. Then he gets around to the cost of the program, which "depends on what I can get you approved for." In other words, the product costs whatever she can get her hands on. In other words, he's going to bleed her only credit card dry. -- Help me help you.

'Dominant Social Theme: There's no money! The governments can't help! Help! Free-Market Analysis: As the power elite that wants to run the world grows more crazed and desperate, their bought-and-paid-for financial facilities and media mouthpieces become crazier, too. If we had a free-market system of money instead of a monopoly/government/mercantilist one, then the market itself would take care of the money necessary. That is not what the powers-that-be want you to think. They want you to be frightened and thus use their dominant social themes like this one (the world is running out of money) to make you feel hopeless and powerless. These themes are almost always scarcity-based. At the end they propose globalist solutions (run by the power elite) to provide the necessary antidote to market failure. The powers-that-be are by now fully aware that they have poured their tens of trillions into a dysfunctional economic system that needs to be allowed to fail. But since this bubble system of banks and financial firms is NOT to be allowed to fail, it will go on wasting gigantic sums of money. Then, central banks will have to print MORE money and even MORE money. At some point price inflation shall bring the whole system down. Unless, of course, the powers-that-be can somehow make the case to people that the market failure is organic. But it is not organic. The current money system is a fake and a fraud. It is a system of command and control for a very few. And now these few are faced with explaining and justifying its failure during what we call the Internet Reformation. Conclusion: Good luck.'

'The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them, says Rory Sutherland. At TEDxAthens, he makes a compelling case for how reframing is the key to happiness.' -- "Our perception is leaky."

'Nothing makes people more neurotic than the expectation that they should be enjoying themselves. -- “To some extent the needs and wants of people have to be continuously stirred up,” [Dichter] argued, so that everyone will work hard to buy what they desire. In the early 1950s he discerned that, when Americans borrowed money, they preferred to do so from loan sharks at high interest rather than from a bank, because they saw bankers as judgmental father figures, whereas loan sharks lacked the authority to moralise. He advised one bank to advertise checking accounts with overdraft facilities, recognising that people wanted more money than they had but didn’t want to take out loans. As for credit cards, Dichter presciently called them “magic” for the way they provided “the American consumer with a symbol of inexhaustible potency.” One can only imagine what he would make of America’s latter-day spendthrift habits. -- “Recent published findings in neuroscience indicate it is emotion, and not reason, that drives our purchasing decisions,” reported Mobile Marketer magazine earlier this year. The quantitative trends that tossed Dichter aside have ultimately led back to his ideas.'

'We try to avoid anxiety by getting rich, by making a hundred thousand dollars when we're twenty-one years of age, by becoming millionaires. Now none of those things lead to the joy, the creativity that I'm talking about. One can own the world and still be without the inner sense of pleasure, of joy, of courage, of creation. I think our society is in the midst of a vast change. The society that began at the Renaissance now is ending, and we are seeing the results of this ending of a social period in the fact that psychotherapy has grown with such great zest. Almost every other person in California is a psychotherapist. And this always happens when an age is dying. You see, the Greeks began their great age in the seventh, sixth centuries B.C., and then they talked of beauty and goodness and truth, all these great things that the philosophers talked about. But by the second century B.C., first century B.C., that had all been forgotten. The philosophers now talked about security, and they tried to help people get along with as little pain as possible, and they made mottoes for human beings. Beauty and truth and goodness had been lost. Our Renaissance began the modern age, and at the beginning of an age there are no psychotherapists. This is taken care of by religion and by art and by beauty, by music. But at the end of an age – every age down through history has been the same – every other person becomes a therapist, because there are no ways of ministering to people in need, and they form long lines to the psychotherapist's office. I think it's a sign of the decadence of the age, rather than a sign of our great intelligence.' -- Release

'The purpose of defense mechanisms is to stop you from changing. So that after the trauma or the break-up or the loss you are still you. More sad/ashamed/impotent/enraged/depressed is fine as long as you're the same guy. This is what makes treating narcissism particularly difficult: the pathology's Number 1 characteristic is identity preservation. "I want to change." Nope. You want to be happier, sure, more successful, feel love, drink less, but you want to remain you. But that won't work. The identity you've chosen blows, ask anyone. Change is only possible when you say, "I want to stop making everyone cry." The first step isn't admitting you have a problem but identifying precisely how you are a problem for other people. But I'll save you the trouble, you'll fail at this, too, because of the Number 2 characteristic of narcissism: inability to see things from the other's perspective. All psychological defenses have a common structure: that two legitimate but contradictory beliefs are held simultaneously, one consciously, one unconsciously, alternating variously. That way all possibilities are covered. Change is neutralized. -- Is the name 'Heart Attack Grill' meant ironically? The waitstaff are dressed like sexy nurses and doctors, which is meant ironically, i.e. what they provide (fatty food) runs counter to the sartorial expectations. But the name is... not ironic, it's literally correct – right? Wrong. The name Heart Attack Grill is ironic, because the expectation is that you won't get a heart attack there, and the reason you know you won't get a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill is – and this is where you need to judge the strength of your soul – exactly that it is called Heart Attack Grill. That's why it is safe to eat there.' -- I'm OK if you're not OK

'Highlight is a fun, simple way to learn more about the people around you. If someone standing near you also has Highlight, their profile will show up on your phone. You can see their name, photos of them, mutual friends, and anything else they have chosen to share. When you meet someone, Highlight helps you see what you have in common with them.'

'About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts. -- "Self-disclosure is extra rewarding," said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves," Ms. Tamir said. ...acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex.'

'People can "like" certain articles of clothing on the brand's Facebook page, and the like counts are updated in real time on hangers in the store. Presumably you'd want to find something you actually like — but that not many people "like"— so that you can maintain your flimsy illusion of actually having unique tastes.'

"Are you familiar with Bitcoin?"

'What social benefit does humanity derive from gold bricks sitting in bank vaults? What social benefit does humanity derive by diverting tremendous amounts of resources into the mining of gold, just so that after the gold is mined it can sit in bank vaults, completely unappreciated for its aesthetic beauty. Those same resources could have been used to mine iron and make steel for the production of consumer goods. The argument might be made that humanity needs money to trade with, so therefore the social benefit is derived from the existence of a money. However, I would argue that is not true. Humanity needs a money that cannot be arbitrarily inflated and is created through the free enterprise system, but this does NOT necessitate that the money be backed by anything in particular. ...we can say that a “socially optimal” money should have the following characteristics, in addition to those already laid out by the Austrian School: #A socially optimal money should not precipitate the mass diversion of physical resources into the production of money. #A socially optimal money should be infinitely divisible to deal with deflation over the long term. #A socially optimal money is one in which the units of account are prevented from being inflated or co-opted by the state. Gold does not meet any of those characteristics. As we have seen from our past history, the state can easily co-opt a gold money supply and inflate the units of account. -- Bitcoin addresses all of gold’s shortcomings. Bitcoin is clearly a more “socially optimal” form of money than gold. Further, since Bitcoin is entirely digital, it can be transmitted across a wire transaction, thereby eliminating the need for expensive insurance and shipping costs. These costs needed to be accounted for under free banking, where banks would accept notes issued by other banks at a discount to cover the cost of transporting the gold between banks. With Bitcoin, this is not an issue. In fact, since Bitcoin is a global network, it would retain its full value between banks on differing continents! While I appreciate the gold standard and Herbener’s address to Congress, I think it is time we stop advocating for Roman era money and start advocating for a 21st century upgrade.'

'Facebook is basically a glorified family photo album for the entire human race. However, a photo album is not a business model. -- There is only one scenario under which the company will become a screaming buy – legalised gambling. Presently, Facebook receives more than 15 per cent of its revenue from Zynga, but there are only so many people on this planet who are willing to waste their time playing Farmville and Mafia Wars. Online poker, however, is another story altogether. If Facebook can become the virtual casino to the world, its profit potential will be enormous. Until that time, I would pass on the stock.' -- Roaring Naughties

'In order to understand the complex range of customer experiences, we end up simplifying the data points, in order to look for trends and averages. This is common in the games sector, as well as other industries. However, it limits us – because we stop looking at individuals, and look instead for common patterns and we can only understand behaviour we can measure. Once the player stops using our game – they become invisible to us. Players adjust their attitude to our game over time: they will in time tire of the repetitive nature of our puzzles and eventually will even cease to value your virtual goods. In short, all players have a lifecycle, which needs to be understood. If we don't acknowledge the player's changing attitude over time we'll start to alienate them. They'll start to see the game experience as a burden, as work, or even something exploitative. This is what I mean by the "Social Game Hangover": it's like recovering from a party where you forget how much fun you had, and instead focus on the dull throbbing pain in your head plus your noticeably lighter wallet. When this happens, who does the player blame? The other players? Themselves? No, the game exploited me!'

'Control is one of the big attractions of living in the digital world, we only post the best pictures of ourselves enjoying the best parts of our lives. But does that mean we start to treat our lives more like a brand, to be sold to our friends and protected from anything negative? Aleks Krotoski talks to Sherry Turkle director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and the Self to ask if this could cause us problems.'

'A cult is perhaps the paradigmatic version of a culture that doesn’t work. Cults are crazy and idealistic in a bad way. Cult members all tend to be fanatically wrong about something big. And then there is what might be called anti-culture, where you really don’t even have a culture at all. Consulting firms are the classic example here. Unfortunately, this is probably the dominant paradigm for companies. Most of the time, they don’t even get to the point of having culture. People are mercenaries. People are nihilistic. A robust company culture is one in which people have something in common that distinguishes them quite sharply from rest of the world. If everybody likes ice cream, that probably doesn’t matter. If the core people share a relevant and unique philosophy about something important, you’re onto something. Similarly, differences qua differences don’t matter much. -- In thinking about building good company culture, it may be helpful to dichotomize two extreme personality types: nerds and athletes. Engineers and STEM people tend to be highly intelligent, good at problem solving, and naturally non zero-sum. Athletes tend to be highly motivated fighters; you only win if the other guy loses. Sports can be seen as classically competitive, antagonistic, zero-sum training. Sometimes, with martial arts and such, the sport is literally fighting. Even assuming everyone is technically competent, the problem with company made up of nothing but athletes is that it will be biased towards competing. Athletes like competition because, historically, they’ve been good at it. So they’ll identify areas where there is tons of competition and jump into the fray. The problem with company made up of nothing but nerds is that it will ignore the fact that there may be situations where you have to fight. So when those situations arise, the nerds will be crushed by their own naiveté. So you have to strike the right balance between nerds and athletes. -- Most startups are run by non-zero sum people. They believe world is cornucopian. That’s good. But even these people tend to pick competitive, warring fields because they don’t know any better. So they get slaughtered. The nerds just don’t realize that they’ve decided to fight a war until it’s all over. -- The optimal spot on the matrix is monopoly capitalism with some tailored combination of zero-sum and non zero-sum oriented people. You want to pick an environment where you don’t have to fight. But you should bring along some good fighters to protect your non zero-sum people and mission, just in case. -- Stephen Cohen: We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.'

'It may upset people to hear that competition may not be unqualifiedly good. We should be clear what we mean here. Some sense of competition seems appropriate. Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever. But that does everyone a great disservice if what’s theoretically optimal is to manage to stop competing, i.e. to become a monopoly and enjoy success. -- One problem with fierce competition is that it’s demoralizing. The perfect illustration of competition writ large is war. Everyone just kills everyone. There are always rationalizations for war. Often it’s been romanticized, though perhaps not so much anymore. But it makes sense: if life really is war, you should spend all your time either getting ready for it or doing it. But what if life isn’t just war? Perhaps there’s more to it than that. Maybe you should sometimes run away. Maybe you should sheath the sword and figure out something else to do. Maybe “life is war” is just a strange lie we’re told, and competition isn’t actually as good as we assume it is. -- One truth about that world is that, as always, companies want investors. But another truth about the world of perfect competition is that investors should not invest in any companies, because no company can or will make a profit. When two truths so clash, the incentive is to distort one of them. ...monopolies pretend they’re not monopolies while non-monopolies pretend they are. Non-monopolies always narrow their market. Monopolies insist they’re in a huge market. One important data point is how much cash a company has on its balance sheets. Apple has about $98b (and is growing by about $30b each year). Microsoft has $52b. Google has $45b. Amazon has $10b. In a perfectly competitive world, you would have to take all that cash and reinvest it in order to stay where you are. If you’re able to grow at $30b/year, you have to question whether things are really that competitive. Consider gross margins for a moment. Gross margins are the amount of profit you get for every incremental unit in marginal revenues. Apple’s gross margins are around 40%. Google’s are about 65%. Microsoft’s are around 75%. Amazon’s are 14%. But even $0.14 profit on a marginal dollar of revenue is huge, particularly for a retailer; grocery stores are probably at something like 2% gross margins. But in perfect competition, marginal revenues equal marginal costs. -- For a company to own its market, it must have some combination of brand, scale cost advantages, network effects, or proprietary technology. Of these elements, brand is probably the hardest to pin down. One way to think about brand is as a classic code word for monopoly. -- The Goldilocks principle is key in choosing the initial market; that market should not be too small or too large. It should be just right. Too small a market means no customers, which is a problem. Markets that are too big are bad ... it’s hard to get a handle on them and they are usually too competitive to make money. If there is no compelling narrative of what the market is and how it can scale, you haven’t yet found or created the right market. A plan to scale is crucial. The best kind of business is thus one where you can tell a compelling story about the future. The stories will all be different, but they take the same form: find a small target market, become the best in the world at serving it, take over immediately adjacent markets, widen the aperture of what you’re doing, and capture more and more. Once the operation is quite large, some combination of network effects, technology, scale advantages, or even brand should make it very hard for others to follow. That is the recipe for building valuable businesses. -- There is always some room to operate in existing markets. Instead of creating a new market, you could “disrupt” existing industries. But the disruptive tech story is possibly overdone. Disruptive companies tend not to succeed. Disruptive kids get sent to principal’s office. Much better than to disrupt is to find a frontier and go for it. -- Zynga is another interesting case. Mark Pincus has wisely said that, "Not having clear goal at outset leads to death by a thousand compromises." Zynga executed very well from the beginning. They started doing social games like Farmville. They aggressively copied what worked, scaled, figured out how to monetize these games—how to get enough users to pay for in-game perks—better than anyone else did. Their success with monetization drove the viral loop and allowed them to get more customers quickly. The question about Zynga is how durable it is. Is it a creative or non-creative business? Zynga wants the narrative to be that it’s not a creative or a design company. If it is, the problem is that coming up with new great games is hard. Zynga would basically just be game version of a Hollywood studio whose fortunes can rise or fall with the seasons. Instead, Zynga wants the narrative to be about hardcore psychometric sauce. It’s a better company if it’s figured out how psychological and mathematical laws give it permanent monopoly advantages. Zynga wants, perhaps needs, to be able to truthfully say, “we know how to make people buy more sheep, and therefore we are a permanent monopoly."'

'People often talk about “first mover advantage.” But focusing on that may be problematic; you might move first and then fade away. The danger there is that you simply aren’t around to succeed, even if you do end up creating value. More important than being the first mover is being the last mover. You have to be durable. -- The really valuable businesses are monopoly businesses. They are the last movers who create value that can be sustained over time instead of being eroded away by competitive forces. -- An interesting question is why most people seem biased in favor of perfect competition. To start, perfect competition may be attractive because it’s easy to model. That probably explains a lot right there, since economics is all about modeling the world to make it easier to deal with. Perfect competition might also seem to make sense because it’s economically efficient in a static world. Moreover, it’s politically salable, which certainly doesn’t hurt. But the bias favoring perfect competition is a costly one. Perfect competition is arguably psychologically unhealthy. Every benefit social, not individual. But people who are actually involved in a given business or market may have a different view—it turns out that many people actually want to be able to make a profit. The deeper criticism of perfect competition, though, is that it is irrelevant in a dynamic world. If there is no equilibrium – if things are constantly moving around—you can capture some of the value you create. Under perfect competition, you can’t. Perfect competition thus preempts the question of value; you get to compete hard, but you can never gain anything for all your struggle. Perversely, the more intense the competition, the less likely you’ll be able to capture any value at all. Thinking through this suggests that competition is overrated. -- If globalization had to have a tagline, it might be that “the world is flat.” We hear that from time to time, and indeed, globalization starts from that idea. Technology, by contrast, starts from the idea that the world is Mount Everest. If the world is truly flat, it’s just crazed competition. The connotations are negative and you can frame it as a race to the bottom; you should take a pay cut because people in China are getting paid less than you. But what if the world isn’t just crazed competition? What if much of the world is unique? In high school, we tend to have high hopes and ambitions. Too often, college beats them out of us. People are told that they’re small fish in a big ocean. Refusal to recognize that is a sign of immaturity. Accepting the truth about your world – that it is big and you are just a speck in it – is seen as wise. That can’t be psychologically healthy. It’s certainly not motivating. Maybe making the world a smaller place is exactly what you want to do. Maybe you don’t want to work in big markets. Maybe it’s much better to find or make a small market, excel, and own it. And yet, the single business idea that you hear most often is: the bigger the market, the better. That is utterly, totally wrong. -- Well-defined, well-understood markets are simply harder to master. Hence the importance of the second clause in the question that we should keep revisiting: what valuable company are other people not building?'

'...the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth. They needed to give people money. So that’s what they did. New customers got $10 for signing up, and existing ones got $10 for referrals. Growth went exponential, and PayPal wound up paying $20 for each new customer. It felt like things were working and not working at the same time; 7 to 10% daily growth and 100 million users was good. No revenues and an exponentially growing cost structure were not. Things felt a little unstable. PayPal needed buzz so it could raise more capital and continue on. (Ultimately, this worked out. That does not mean it’s the best way to run a company. Indeed, it probably isn’t.) Feb 16, 2000 was a good day for PayPal; the Wall Street Journal ran a flattering piece that covered the company’s exponential growth and gave it a very back of the envelope valuation of $500M. The next month, when PayPal raised another round of funding, the lead investor accepted the WSJ’s Feb. 16 valuation as authoritative. That March was thoroughly crazy. PayPal closed its $100M round on March 31st. The timing was fortunate, since after that everything sort of crashed. PayPal was left with the challenge of building a real business. -- You can’t have a bubble absent widespread, intense belief. The incredible narrative about a tech bubble comes from people who are looking for a bubble. That’s more overreaction to the pain of the ‘90s than it is good analysis. Antibubble type thinking is probably somewhat more true. In other words, it’s probably better to insist that everything is going to work and that people should buy houses and tech stocks than it is to claim that there’s a bubble. But we should resist that, too. For bubble and anti-bubble thinking are both wrong because they hold the truth is social. But if the herd isn’t thinking at all, being contrarian—doing the opposite of the herd—is just as random and useless. To understand businesses and startups in 2012, you have to do the truly contrarian thing: you have to think for yourself. The question of what is valuable is a much better question than debating bubble or no bubble. The value question gets better as it gets more specific: is company X valuable? Why? How should we figure that out? Those are the questions we need to ask.'

'Progress comes in two flavors: horizontal/extensive and vertical/intensive. Horizontal or extensive progress basically means copying things that work. In one word, it means simply “globalization.” Consider what China will be like in 50 years. The safe bet is it will be a lot like the United States is now. Cities will be copied, cars will be copied, and rail systems will be copied. Maybe some steps will be skipped. But it’s copying all the same. -- Vertical or intensive progress, by contrast, means doing new things. The single word for this is “technology.” Intensive progress involves going from 0 to 1 (not simply the 1 to n of globalization). -- It’s worth noting that globalization and technology do have some interplay; we shouldn’t falsely dichotomize them. Consider resource constraints as a 1 to n subproblem. Maybe not everyone can have a car because that would be environmentally catastrophic. If 1 to n is so blocked, only 0 to 1 solutions can help. Technological development is thus crucially important, even if all we really care about is globalization. -- Teaching vertical progress or innovation is almost a contradiction in terms. Education is fundamentally about going from 1 to n. -- Companies exist because they optimally address internal and external coordination costs. In general, as an entity grows, so do its internal coordination costs. But its external coordination costs fall. Totalitarian government is entity writ large; external coordination is easy, since those costs are zero. But internal coordination, as Hayek and the Austrians showed, is hard and costly; central planning doesn’t work. The flipside is that internal coordination costs for independent contractors are zero, but external coordination costs (uniquely contracting with absolutely everybody one deals with) are very high, possibly paralyzingly so. Optimality—firm size—is a matter of finding the right combination. Size and internal vs. external coordination costs matter a lot. North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. The familiar Austrian critique dovetails here as well. Even if a computer could model all the narrowly economic problems a company faces (and, to be clear, none can), it wouldn’t be enough. To model all costs, it would have to model human irrationalities, emotions, feelings, and interactions. Computers help, but we still don’t have all the info. And if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. So, in practice, we end up having companies of a certain size. Anyone on a mission tends to want to go from 0 to 1. You can only do that if you’re surrounded by others to want to go from 0 to 1. That happens in startups, not huge companies or government.'

'A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do.' -- Deciding what to work on can be the hardest part of your job at Valve. This is because, as you’ve found out by now, you were not hired to fill a specific job description. You were hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work you could be doing. At the end of a project, you may end up well outside what you thought was your core area of expertise. There’s no rule book for choosing a project or task at Valve. But it’s useful to answer questions like these: #Of all the projects currently under way, what’s the most valuable thing I can be working on? #Which project will have the highest direct impact on our customers? How much will the work I ship benefit them? #Is Valve not doing something that it should be doing? #What’s interesting? What’s rewarding? What leverages my individual strengths the most? -- Structure happens: Project teams often have an internal structure that forms temporarily to suit the group’s needs. Although people at Valve don’t have fixed job descriptions or limitations on the scope of their responsibility, they can and often do have clarity around the definition of their “job” on any given day. They, along with their peers, effectively create a job description that fits the group’s goals. That description changes as requirements change, but the temporary structure provides a shared understanding of what to expect from each other. If someone moves to a different group or a team shifts its priorities, each person can take on a completely different role according to the new requirements. Valve is not averse to all organizational structure – it crops up in many forms all the time, temporarily. But problems show up when hierarchy or codified divisions of labor either haven’t been created by the group’s members or when those structures persist for long periods of time. We believe those structures inevitably begin to serve their own needs rather than those of Valve’s customers. The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.'

'I don’t think in terms of technological determinism. I think in terms of human vulnerabilities: technological affordances and human vulnerabilities. The technologies of mobile connection make us some offers we can’t refuse. Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that shows that our iPhones light up our brains in the same places that love lights up our brains. We’re wanted. Somebody wants us, somebody needs us, somebody’s calling to us, somebody remembered us. -- We’ve cornered ourselves into a communications culture, where I think we’re spending less and less time reflecting. The issue for me is reflection and spaces for reflection. Social media satisfy some needs. People feel connected. In some online places, people do feel responsibility and belonging. But in fact, people can just leave when they wish; the friended is not a friend. What I’m finding in my work is that online life can create a sense of disorientation. The speed of online friendship is so fast: you get this sense of intimacy so fast and the sense of close connection; you feel that you’re getting right to the heart of things really quickly. You’re not going through all the hard things that come with a shared life and a shared community; you have the sense of cutting to the chase. That goes on for awhile, and then somehow you don’t know what you have. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You don’t know what you can ask for. So then people wonder, “Do I have everything; do I have nothing? What do I have?” It’s fine if you have a couple of those ambiguous relationships; everyone does. But when ambiguous relationships become more and more of your life, people become very disoriented. I have tremendous respect for the support and the connection and the fun that people have online. But I think when we decided to call these online connections “communities” and “relationships,” we chose the words we had available to us, and we confused ourselves. -- ...the point is, when we’re with people we feel as though we’re getting some kind of authenticity, and we experience ourselves as authentic. Which is why we go see people in person—we know, no matter how much they’re made up or fluffed up or prepared, we’re going to see the real something. And that’s what these kids are trying to avoid, when they only want to text, when they don’t want to have a conversation, and that’s what they’ve become exhausted by. They’ve put themselves in a world where they are performing all the time. They have organized a world where they’re always at their screen. That’s when they just kind of crack and find some way to drop out for awhile. -- I’ve studied kids and dolls – whenever I do a robot study, I do a parallel study with a doll. And everything is different with a doll. With a doll you have the psychology of projection. A child will act out with a doll what is on her mind: a little girl with a Barbie who feels guilty because she broke her mother’s china will put the Barbie in detention. Because of its passivity, because it’s inert, the doll is a projective screen for the child’s imagination, fantasies, sense of wonder, anxieties. Everything’s projected onto the doll. But a relational artifact, a sociable robot, is in a position to initiate a conversation. The robot is in a position to voice an opinion. With a robot, one is not free to project what is on one’s mind. The psychology of projection gives way to the psychology of engagement. The robot is presented as active, in place to be a new kind of best friend. Why do we need robots to do that? With every technology we need to ask if it’s serving our human purposes. What is the human need? What human purpose does it serve to have imitation people, who really aren’t people, pretending to be people? -- it’s only a collective fantasy that a robot, a machine that does not recognize your existence, can address your loneliness. In my view, this is a fantasy. We need to understand its roots. My research suggests that its roots lie in people having a sense that no one is there to listen to them. We have to acknowledge this. So many of us are lonely. But it does not follow that something that will never experience anything about human life can understand the things we want to talk about, about our lives. -- A common reaction to my book has been: “What are you complaining about? The people in your book, the elderly people who are happy with their robots, can’t tell the difference. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why not give them this thing? If the machines will be so good we can’t tell the difference, what does it matter?” I think it matters very much. I think our humanity is at stake. -- It’s as though we don’t even have the word “solitude” anymore where solitude is a good thing. I have heard this formulation, how we need to “solve the problem of solitude,” not just on this one occasion. So, for example, people think of always having a device at hand as a way to solve the problem of solitude. We have a very hard time thinking of a life that does not include reaching for a device when one is alone. And I think we have an increasingly hard time even imagining that, imagining anything but loneliness. And of course, our connectivity devices give us the fantasy that we will never have to be alone. The capacity for solitude is crucial to our ability to reach out to people, not in anxiety but with a genuine ability to forge relationships. ...where we expect more from technology and less from each other; we’re treating each other as less human.'

'Another key trait of human networks is their ability to magnify inputs, Christakis said. If someone is altruistic and helps out a friend, that will likely trigger a cascade, making that person more likely to help others and making those others more likely to pass it on. This generates a higher benefit to the whole group than the original input itself. The downside of networks, of course, is that they can also magnify violence, germs, panic, and other negative factors. “Networks magnify whatever they are seeded with, good or bad,” Christakis said. Different people occupy different positions in a network, with the more popular in the center, with more and closer connections. Whether it is better to be in the center or out on the fringe depends on the situation, however, as does the desirability of tight-knit friends who all know one another compared with friends who are attached to unconnected others. A central position has greater access to information, but greater vulnerability to germs. A tight-knit group might perform better on a hunt or a raid, while a looser, more extended group might be more effective at gathering far-flung information. -- A later experiment involving a different group of people found that cooperators in groups with noncooperators tend to sever links with noncooperators and form new bonds with other cooperators. This leaves cooperators in like-minded groups and noncooperators with no choice but to team up with people like them. When network membership was fixed, however, cooperators eventually stopped, creating groups dominated by non-cooperators. “Generous people hang out with generous people. Ungenerous people hang out with ungenerous people,” Christakis said.'

'One thing we know about anxiety and depression is that they correlate significantly with people's sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. People who believe that they are in charge of their own fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than are those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. -- #Shift Toward Extrinsic Goals, away from Intrinsic Goals: Twenge's own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depression are related to a shift from "intrinsic" to "extrinsic" goals. Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one's own development as a person – such as becoming competent in endeavors of one's choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that have to do with material rewards and other people's judgments. They include goals of high income, status, and good looks. Twenge cites evidence that young people today are, on average, more oriented toward extrinsic goals and less oriented toward intrinsic goals than they were in the past. For example, a poll conducted annually of college freshmen shows that most students today list "being well off financially" as more important to them than "developing a meaningful philosophy of life," while the reverse was true in the 1960s and '70s. The shift toward extrinsic goals could well be related causally to the shift toward an External locus of control. We have much less personal control over achievement of extrinsic goals than intrinsic goals. I can, through personal effort, quite definitely improve my competence, but that doesn't guarantee that I'll get rich. I can, through spiritual practices or philosophical delving, find my own sense of meaning in life, but that doesn't guarantee that people will find me more attractive or lavish praise on me. To the extent that my emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals I can control my emotional wellbeing. To the extent that my satisfaction comes from others' judgments and rewards, I have much less control over my emotional state. -- My hypothesis is that the generational increases in Externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by the decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time and weight given to schooling. By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives. We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders.'

'As long as kids grow up in a literate society, surrounded by people who read, they will learn to read. They may ask some questions along the way and get a few pointers from others who already know how to read, but they will take the initiative in all of this and orchestrate the entire process themselves. This is individualized learning, but it does not require brain imaging or cognitive scientists, and it requires little effort on the part of anyone other than the child who is learning. Each child knows exactly what his or her own learning style is, knows exactly what he or she is ready for, and will learn to read in his or her own unique way, at his or her unique schedule. -- The message repeated most often in these stories of learning to read is that, because the children were not forced or coaxed into reading against their wills, they have positive attitudes about reading and about learning in general. This is perhaps most clearly stated by Jenny, who wrote, regarding her daughter (now 15) who didn't read well until age 11: "One of the best things that came out of allowing her to read at her own pace and on her own initiative was that she owned the experience, and through owning that experience she came to realize that if she could do that, she could learn anything. We have never pressured her to learn anything at all, ever, and because of that, her ability to learn has remained intact. She is bright and inquisitive and interested in the world around her." #Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end or ends. There's an old joke, which I recall first hearing several decades ago, about a child who reached age 5 without ever speaking a word. Then one day, at lunch, he said, "This soup is cold." His mom, practically falling over, said, "My son, you can talk! Why haven't you ever said anything before?" "Well," said the boy, "up until now the soup has always been warm."' -- Needs must

'We adults flatter ourselves when we think that we are the best models, guides, and teachers for children. Children are much more interested in other children than in us. Children are especially interested in, and ready to learn from, those others who are a little older than themselves, a little farther along in their development, but not too far along. Children are drawn to older children, and older children are drawn to adolescents. Adulthood is too far off to be of much concern. That is why age-mixing is crucial to children's self-education. #Younger children want to do what older children do: Children on the verge of being able to play strategy games, or read, or perform new operations on the computer, or engage in more advanced athletic activities, become motivated to do so by observing those activities in older children and adolescents. In our study of how and why children learn to read at the school, some told us that they wanted to read because they were envious of the older kids who were reading and talking about what they had read. As one student put it, "I wanted the same magic they had; I wanted to join that club." Younger children don't just blindly mimic older ones. Rather, they watch, think about what they see, and incorporate what they learn into their own behavior in ways that make sense to them. Because of this, even the mistakes and unhealthy behaviors of older children can provide positive lessons for younger ones. Young children talk endlessly about what they like and don't like about the activities of the older ones around them. Negative models can be as helpful as positive ones. -- #Older children are excellent helpers and advisors of younger children, partly because they do not help or advise too much: Children often prefer to ask an older child rather than an adult for help or advice, even when an adult is available whom they could easily ask. I suspect there are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons, I think, has to do with control. Children seeking help or advice do not want to give up their own control of the situation. They don't want any more help than what they ask for, and they want to decide themselves whether or not to accept what is offered. So, here is a valuable lesson that we adults can learn from children about helping and advising children: Don't give more help, or more advice, than is asked for! Come to think of it, the same lesson applies to helping and advising adults. -- #Older children expand their own understanding through explanations to younger children: Everyone who has ever been a teacher knows that we learn more when we teach than when we are taught. The requirement to put ideas into words that others can understand, and the need to think through objections that others might make, leads us to think deeply about what we thought we knew. Often this leads us to a better understanding than we had before. In an age-mixed environment, children, not just adults, can learn through teaching. -- #Older children develop compassion and nurturing skills through helping younger ones: Even more valuable than the cognitive gains derived from interacting with younger children are the moral gains. To develop effectively as responsible, ethical beings, children need to have the experience of caring for others, not just the experience of being cared for by others. -- Sudbury Valley has about 200 students, who range in age from 4 on through high-school age (age 18 or so). It seems to work great for everyone in that age range, and I think such a broad mix is valuable for everyone. The 18-year-olds are sometimes almost like uncles or aunts to some of the 4-year-olds. They are, I think, learning to be parents. In our culture we provide very little opportunity for people to learn how to be parents, until they actually are.'

'#Age-mixed play is less competitive, more creative, and more conducive to practicing new skills than is same-age play. Age-mixed play is, in short, more playful than is same-age play. When children who are all nearly the same age play a game, competitiveness can interfere with playfulness. This is especially true in our current culture, which puts so much emphasis on winning and on all sorts of comparisons aimed at determining who is better, an emphasis fostered by our competitive, graded school system. In contrast, when children who differ widely in age play a game together, the focus shifts from that of beating the other to that of having fun. There is no pride to be gained by the older, larger, more skilled child in beating the much younger one, and the younger one has no expectation of beating the older one. So, they play the game more joyfully, in a more relaxed manner, modifying the rules in ways to make it both fun and challenging for all involved. A playful mood facilitates creativity, experimentation, and the learning of new skills, while a serious mood tends to inhibit these and leads a person to fall back on skills that have already been well learned... "I'm 23 years old and I've played a lot of soccer. It would be pretty silly for me to try to be better than the three 8-year-olds who crowd around my feet every time I try to kick the ball. I think that the 8-year-olds are too busy running after kids who are three feet taller than they are to worry about being the best 8-year-old. In this game, as in real life, the only standard that matters is one you set for yourself. One of the profound truths you learn is that we are all so different from each other that peer pressure and comparisons of worth are meaningless. If you're 11 years old and you are only allowed to play with other 11-year-olds, it's very hard to glimpse this profound truth, which unlocks the meaning of excellence."'

'When given a choice, children spend considerable time interacting with others who are older or younger than themselves. Sudbury Valley has, at any given time, approximately 170 to 200 students, who range in age from 4 to 18 years old and sometimes older. Students can move freely at all times throughout the school buildings and campus, and they can interact with whomever they please. The school is large enough that students could, if they chose, interact just with others who are within a year or two of themselves in age. But they don't do that. In our quantitative study we found that more than 50% of students' social interactions at the school were with other students who were more than two years older or younger than themselves, and 25% of their interactions were with other students who were more than 4 years older or younger than themselves. Age mixing was especially frequent during play. Active play of all sorts was more likely to be age mixed than was conversation that did not involve play. Age mixing allows younger children to engage in, and learn from, activities that they could not do alone or only with age-mates. -- Here's an example of intellectual play in the zone of proximal development. In several instances we observed 7- or 8-year-olds playing complicated card games in groups with older children and teenagers. By themselves, 7- and 8-year-olds would not be able to play such games. They would not be able to keep their attention focused long enough, or keep track of the rules, or even hold their cards straight enough to keep others from seeing them. They could play the games with older children because the older ones kept them on track, reminded them when necessary of what they had to do, and sometimes gave them strategy hints: "Pay attention." "Try to remember which cards were played." "Think before you lay down a card, so you don't put down something another player can take." Attention, memory, and forethought are the elements of what we commonly call intelligence. In the process of playing cards, which they were only doing to have fun, the older children were incidentally helping the younger ones to develop their intelligence. -- When you are little and just with kids your own age, the range of possible activities is restricted by the knowledge and abilities of those in your age group; but in collaboration with older kids there is almost no limit to what you might do!'

'#Free age mixing: An enormous amount of learning occurs in interactions with others. When we segregate children by age, in schools, we deprive them of the opportunity to interact with those others from whom they have the most to learn. In hunter-gatherer tribes, and at Sudbury Valley, children and adolescents regularly, on their own initiative, play and explore in widely age-mixed groups. In age-mixed groups, younger children acquire skills, information, ideas, and inspiration from older ones. In such groups, younger children can do things that would be too dangerous, or too complicated, for them to do alone or just with others their own age. Older children also benefit from age-mixed interactions. They learn how to be leaders and nurturers. They develop a sense of responsibility for others. They also consolidate and extend their own knowledge through explaining things to younger children. #Access to knowledgeable and caring adults: In hunter-gatherer bands, the adult world is not segregated from the children's world. Children see what adults do and incorporate that into their play. They also hear the adults' stories, discussions, and debates, and they learn from what they hear. When they need adult help, or have questions that cannot be answered by other children, they can go to any of the adults in the band. -- At Sudbury Valley, too, adults and children mingle freely (there are 10 full-time staff members and roughly 200 students, between the ages of 4 and 19). They know all of the students over the entire span of time that they are students at the school (unlike teachers in a conventional school who know each set of kids for just one year) and take pride in watching them develop. Since the staff members must be re-elected each year by vote of all of the students in the school, they are necessarily people who like kids and are liked by kids.'

'The Sudbury Valley model of education is not a variation of standard education. It is not a progressive version of traditional schooling. It is not a Montessori school or a Dewey school or a Piagetian constructivist school. It is something entirely different. To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves. -- The school does not interfere with students' activities. Students are free, all day, every day, to do what they wish at the school, as long as they don't violate any of the school's rules. The rules, all made by the School Meeting, have to do with protecting the school and protecting students' opportunities to pursue their own interests unhindered by others. -- The most important resource at the school, for most students, is other students, who among them manifest an enormous range of interests and abilities. Because of the free age mixing at the school, students are exposed regularly to the activities and ideas of others who are older and younger than themselves. Age-mixed play offers younger children continuous opportunities to learn from older ones. For example, many students at the school have learned to read as a side effect of playing games that involve written words (including computer games) with students who already know how to read. They learn to read without even being aware that they are doing so. Much of the students' exploration at the school, especially that of the adolescents, takes place through conversations. Students talk about everything imaginable, with each other and with staff members, and through such talk they are exposed to a huge range of ideas and arguments. Because nobody is an official authority, everything that is said and heard in conversation is understood as something to think about, not as dogma to memorize or feed back on a test. Conversation, unlike memorizing material for a test, stimulates the intellect. The great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued, long ago, that conversation is the foundation for higher thought; and my observations of students at Sudbury Valley convince me that he was right. Thought is internalized conversation; external conversation, with other people, gets it started.'

'Next time you are in viewing range of a child under the age of about five years old, sit back and watch for awhile. Try to imagine what is going on in the child's mind each moment in his or her interactions with the world. If you allow yourself that luxury, you are in for a treat. The experience might lead you to think about education in a whole new light – a light that shines from within the child rather than on the child. -- #Language Education: Infants and young children continuously educate themselves about language. Early in infancy they begin babbling language-like sounds, practicing the motor acts of articulation. With time they restrict their babbling more and more to the sounds of the specific language that they hear around them. By a few months of age they can be observed to pay close attention to the speech of others and to engage in activities that seem to be designed to help them figure out what others are saying. For example, they regularly follow the eyes of older children or adults, to see what the others are looking at, which helps them guess what they are talking about. With this strategy, a toddler in the garden who hears someone say, "What a pretty chrysanthemum," has a good chance of identifying what object is being referred to. Between the ages of two and 17, young people learn an average of about 60,000 words (Bloom, 2001, Behavior & Brain Sciences, 24, 1095-1103); that works out to nearly one new word for every hour that they are awake.'

'#Pretend and sociodramatic play: We are the imaginative animal, able to think of things that are not immediately present, and so we have fantasy play, or pretend play, which builds our capacity for imagination. In this type of play children establish certain propositions about the nature of their pretend world and then play out those propositions logically. In doing so they are exercising the same capacities that allow us, as adults, to think about things that are not immediately present, which is what we all do when we plan for the future and what scientists do when they develop theories to explain or predict events in the real world. We are an intensely social species, requiring cooperation with others in order to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable. Children in sociodramatic play are also practicing the art of negotiation. As they decide who will play what roles, who will get to use which props, and just what scenes they will enact and how, the players must all come to agreement. Indeed, a basic rule of all social play is that everyone must agree. Anyone left unhappy by a decision will quit, and if everyone quits there will be no game. Since the motive to play is strong, the motive to keep the other players happy is strong. That is true of all social play, but it is especially apparent in the negotiations that are observed in sociodramatic play. Keeping our companions happy, so they stay with us and continue to support us through life, is surely one of the most valuable of human survival skills, and children continuously practice that skill in social play.'

'From an evolutionary perspective, the main purpose of play is education. Play is nature's way of ensuring that young mammals will practice the skills they need for survival. You can predict what a young mammal will play at by knowing what it must learn. Young carnivores, such as lions and tigers, play at stalking, chasing, and pouncing. Young zebras and other animals that are preyed on by lions and such play at running, dodging, and escaping. Young monkeys play endlessly at chasing one another and swinging from trees. Young humans – who have far more to learn than do the young of any other species – play in far more ways than do the young of any other species. We come into the world as little scientists, pre-programmed to try to understand everything around us. Nobody has to tell us to explore and learn about our environment; we do it naturally, all our lives, in increasingly sophisticated ways, unless someone turns it into work by trying to make us do it. -- #Rough and tumble play #Language play #Exploratory play #Constructive play #Pretend and sociodramatic play #Games with explicit rules -- When children are free to play, have sufficient time to play, and have playmates of a range of ages with whom to play, they play in all of these ways. In doing so, they learn all of the basic skills that are required of human beings everywhere--physical skills, linguistic skills, intellectual skills, social skills, self-control, and law-abiding skills. We cannot teach any of these skills to children. All we can do is provide the conditions in which they can teach themselves, using the joyful, playful means designed by evolution. Our job is to make sure that children have lots of time and and opportunity to play. They'll take care of the rest.'

'The phrase petrodollar warfare refers to a hypothesis that one of the driving forces of United States foreign policy over recent decades[when?] has been the status of the United States dollar as the world's dominant reserve currency and as the currency in which oil is priced. #The hypothesis: Most oil sales throughout the world are denominated in United States dollars (USD).[1] According to proponents of the petrodollar warfare hypothesis, because most countries rely on oil imports, they are forced to maintain large stockpiles of dollars in order to continue imports. This creates a consistent demand for USDs and upwards pressure on the USD's value, regardless of economic conditions in the United States. This in turn allegedly allows the US government to gain revenues through seignorage and by issuing bonds at lower interest rates than they otherwise would be able to. As a result the U.S. government can run higher budget deficits at a more sustainable level than can most other countries. A stronger USD also means that goods imported into the United States are relatively cheap. Political enemies of the United States therefore have some interest in seeing oil denominated in euros or other currencies. -- In 2000, Iraq converted all its oil transactions under the Oil for Food program to euros. When U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it returned oil sales from the euro to the USD. The Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran takes this theory as fact. As retaliation to this policy seen as neoimperialism, Iran has made an effort to create its own Iranian Oil Bourse which has sold oil in Gold, Euros, Dollars, and Japanese Yen since its opening. The theory is supported historically by Iranian intellectuals as a move made by the American elites after World War II with the Bretton Woods Act, taking away Gold backing from the Pound Sterling and discreetly starting the eventual pegging of Gulf Arab Oil producers' currencies after Britain gave them independence in 1961 and 1971. These countries were further secured militarily after the Gulf War in 1990. This pegging of the currencies along with the exchanges being exclusively in USD in only two places, the IPE in London and NYMEX in New York City, has given the United States a near monopoly, with growing economies such as India and China waiting in line for orders. Critics say this revolutionary move by Iran in creating a rival market may also be one of the reasons for the ongoing energy-related US competition with Iran.'

'The war rhetoric from Washington towards Iran is again being ramped up - just ahead of the second round of high-level international talks on the country's nuclear program. US military top brass claim they would need just three weeks to defeat Iran's armed forces.' -- Let the dollar circulate