Sense amongst Madness - Wit amongst Folly

Hilarious ummm… exchange between a seller on Ebay and a customer who refused to pay. Scammer customer gets the tables turned…

The Socionomist predicts rising authoritarianism, and anti-authoritarianism, as the social mood turns more and more negative and the bear market worsens.

Mention authoritarianism and most people imagine its ultimate incarnation – a dictator wielding top-down control. The Socionomic perspective, however, paints a fuller picture.
Authoritarianism begins with a negative social mood trend, which in turn spawns a desire among some to submit to authority and among others to coerce their fellows to submit. At the same time, still others, caught up in the same emotional climate, battle against authoritarianism.
We forecast that a continuing long-term trend toward negative social mood will produce increasingly authoritarian – and anti-authoritarian – impulses and eventually lead to the appearance of severe authoritarian regimes around the globe.

Full Report Here

More on Authoritarianism & Wikileaks – WikiLeaks Takes Center Stage; Government Reactions Intensify

Great Speech by Libertarian Rand Paul on Wikileaks

Reading about the economy has gotten me all gloomy! And there is a lot to be gloomy about – see my previous posts, The Bank Played on… and Canadian Economic Outlook.

Oh, and there is more and it is even worse – See here and here.
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Found these 2 this morning –

Escape from Cubicle Nation looks very good – All kinds of pretty sound advice. Plus books and consulting.
http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/

This one I am not sure about – no overall theme jumps out – Really fun graphics though and some great ideas. My first thought was that no overall theme jumps out, so they won’t be able to sell anything – websites have to be clear and concise and the theme has to jump out unmistakably in order to sell anything. Browsers that don’t know what a site is about will never buy from you. The site above is very clear right away what it is about.

BUT – this site isn’t selling anything anyway! So it’s no problem and an interesting site!
http://headrush.typepad.com/

“In all probability,” British Economist William Stanley Jevons wrote in 1874, “the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.” Making mistakes turns out to be a strangely generative process: it sends you down a new path, allows an interesting new connection to form in your mind. The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. (For a rich philosophical take on this subject, I recommend Kathryn Schulz’s book, “Being Wrong.”) And not just wrong, but messy. A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments. Great scientists and inventors seem to have an openness to the serendipitous discoveries that happen when you accidentally knock over the tissue sample, or misinterpret the data from the last experiment. As one great inventor, Ben Franklin, put it: “Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-johnson/steven-johnson-6-mistakes_b_770185.html#s161831

Some recent reading – Yellow Blue Tibia — Part a droll comedy parodying the fall of Soviet communism, part an intellectual inquiry into the idea of multiple quantum realities and part an attempt to discover why, despite the ubiquity of reported sightings, UFOs have never been proved to exist. As ever with Roberts, the writing is impeccable and the ideas riveting. Roberts other books, SALT and STONE are also excellent. (more…)

About halfway through a great book, Fooled by Randomness – The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life. by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

He makes the interesting point that if your success is from a random event or ‘luck,’ then you are vulnerable to losing it by a random event. He then goes on to show how most things are indeed random and ‘lucky’ with considerable justification. Which includes most business people, and most of Wall Street. (more…)