JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Since the Americans are so pleased with themselves for making the choice that was obvious to everyone else in the world (and we congratulate them), here’s something that could help kick-start the US economy: the Obama industry. Sales of President-elect Barack Obama’s books and audiobooks, books about Obama, election memorabilia, T-shirts, mugs, and pins with Barack’s face on them, could keep retailers afloat in these hard times.

Photo: Display at Fully Booked, Bonifacio High St. (”High Street” doesn’t sound right next to the name of the leader of the Philippine Revolution, so I will call it “Bonifacio Heist”.)

According to news reports, in the financial crash many pet owners in the US have abandoned their pets or brought them to animal shelters because they can no longer afford to keep them. It must be wrenching to let your pets go, but a lot of people have lost their houses, and I don’t think Americans have the extended friends-and-family networks that we have. In extreme cases, people have killed their pets, families, and themselves because they can’t face the thought that after a lifetime of work they’ve lost everything. (One thing about living in the third world: we’re used to making do with little, it’s sudden wealth that makes people go berserk.) 

Here at home, we have two new adopted cats. Semi-adopted. They can’t move in with us because there’s no more room and my three cats are extremely territorial. I just feed them from my cats’ supply, and Mike, whose cat Mingming died recently at age 8, buys them cat food. I call them Jarndyce and Jarndyce, from Bleak House; Mike chose their given names: Janko and Jarko (or if they turn out to be girls, Janka and Jarka). They’ve been hanging around my building for months. Every time I open the door, Jarndyce and Jarndyce look in, wondering when they’ll be invited indoors, and my fat cats stare at the ampon, wondering what species the skinny creatures are. There’s no hissing and snarling, though, they’re all very civilized. They may even be related, since Koosi is from the neighborhood and Mat knocked up all the females when he was living outside. 

This is what a pusakal looks like when she’s well-fed and cared for.

“But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”

Answer: Theodore Kaczinski.

Does the name sound familiar?

He was the Unabomber. A murderous psychopath who made it his mission to kill those who would lead the world into a future ruled by machines. Sounds a bit like Sarah Connor in The Terminator, except that real life is so much more complex and messy and far less attractive than blockbuster science-fiction movies. He was a freak, but what if there’s a germ of truth in his warnings? It would be foolhardy of us not to consider the possibility. In the NYT, Richard Dooling suggests that human over-reliance on computers led to the current financial crisis. Did the geniuses of Wall Street really understand derivatives? No, they left it to their machines.

By Kevin Allman at blogofneworleans.com, via 3Quarks Daily.

Dear American, My Dear Friend:
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America.
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.I am working with “Mr. Phil Gram,” lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a citizen, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check.
We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction.
After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Do not discuss this message with anyone! Time is of the essence!
Yours Faithfully.
Minister of Treasury Hank Paulson

My profile of Socorro Cancio Ramos, founder and chair of National Book Store, in the Star today.

I ask her if she’d ever imagined that the five-square-meter stall she opened in Escolta in 1939 would become this retail giant. She shakes her head. “Mapaaral ko lang ang mga anak ko, at kumain kami ng tatlong beses isang araw, tama na. Noong Japanese time, mabuhay ka lang, okay na.” (It was enough that I could send my children to school and we could have three meals a day. During the war, it was enough to just survive.)

Two years after she opened her little bookshop, World War II broke out in the Pacific and the Japanese invaded the Philippines. All books had to be submitted to Japanese censors, who cut out any mention of America. All their stocks were mutilated. “What will we sell?” Socorro asked her husband, Jose.

The answer: Anything and everything the customers needed. They sold candy, school supplies, cigarettes. She found a maker of tsinelas (rubber slippers), bought six pairs, discovered that the Japanese wanted tsinelas, and was soon selling hundreds of pairs. National Book Store might very well have been National Tsinelas.

In the light of the cataclysmic collapse of financial institutions, Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, author of Fooled by Randomness and the bestseller The Black Swan, asks: Are we using models of uncertainty to produce certainties?

“Black swans” are highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Taleb argues that the banking system, betting against black swans, just wiped out one TRILLION dollars, more money than was ever made in the history of banking.

“It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law’s checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand. I want this to stop, and stop now— the current patching by the banking establishment worldwide is akin to using the same doctor to cure the patient when the doctor has a track record of systematically killing them. And this is not limited to banking—I generalize to an entire class of random variables that do not have the structure we thing they have, in which we can be suckers.

“And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, we are riding in a bus driven a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence, which to me is a pathological problem with academia. . .”

The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics, in Edge. Makes stats riveting!

Mat with scarf, originally uploaded by Koosama.

“I sometimes wonder what goes on in my head when I make stupid investment decisions. A few weeks ago, I had a chance to find out, when I took part in an experiment at New York University’s Center for Brain Imaging, in a building off Washington Square Park. In the lobby, I met Peter Sokol-Hessner, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, who escorted me to a control room full of computers. Sokol-Hessner is completing a doctorate in psychology, but he is currently working on a research project in the emerging field of neuroeconomics, which uses state-of-the-art imaging technology to explore the neural bases of economic decision-making. Sokol-Hessner is particularly interested in “loss aversion”…During the past decade or so, economists have devised a series of experiments to demonstrate just how much we dislike losing money.”

From Best Science Writing 2007: Mind Games: What neuroeconomics tells us about money and the brain, by John Cassidy.