Understanding the American Financial Industry Mindset ... summary comment.

Despite all that's happened in the financial world over the last several years, the mindset of the firms and banks making up the industry may not have changed appreciably. This means that the people worldwide will have to adjust to a permanent phenomenon of game playing. The mindset is focused on me, or I, or the self as a financial enterprise playing a game within what is considered a willing group. That group is the worldwide population.

The group set is that everyone wins because there is a payout and the losers are not willing to end the games. Payouts give advantages to winners that puts losers into the background of the rule changing of the games played. Losers don't end the game playing, but they do drop out of games. Players may even get caught cheating or put the playing field at risk. Nevertheless, the games continue and the losers pay handsomely whether they like it or not.

The sad thing about the games is that they change income and wealth distribution increasingly towards biological responses that increase the actual numbers of losers. This too favors those changing game rules and means larger payouts and easier pickings over lots and lots of games and over shorter and shorter financial industry product cycles.

Rather than having a world view of people as people, the financial game players, and especially those living in America, don't see the results of their game playing. They see no morality codes that need to be adhered to other than cheating at the games and changing e rules of the games in their favor. Their existence is focused on winning more and more games with bigger and bigger payouts. They care nothing, nothing, about the progress of other players other than that they are competing with them for larger and larger payouts.

Most other people see people as people and not as not financial "John's" to be screwed. Most people live in an interactive world of human beings and have normal emotional responses, but the game players have lost that sensitivity. For them, any game goes as long as the payout is better. That is their mindset and it is what and who they are. They can even be machines. Yes, the new game players can behave like machines or they can actually be the machines themselves. Game players can control machines that play the games for them, or play some of the games for them. Machines can control machines to play games.

So the financing world has changed, or seemingly so. There is less morality in the finical world because the machine has already taken over and its goal is larger and larger payouts to game players, human and machine compositions, that play more and more games with larger and larger payouts from winning.

Yes, as a human being, you have already lost to the machine, an amoral machine at that, who is controlling your time and money-making activities more and more. There are no rules in games played by the machine game player that cannot be re-written in it's favor.

My friend, the battle against an amoral machine has already been lost.

Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine on your thoughts, today!

Check out The Adventures of the Little Woman and lose your money to a con artist.

Check out this application on the App Store if you think you are non vulnerable to cons!

The Adventures of the Little Woman Anton Sinelnikov Category: Lifestyle Updated: 25 Jun 2010

iTunes for Mac and Windows

Please note that you have not been added to any email lists. Copyright © 2010 iTunes S.à r.l. All rights reserved

Sent from my iPad with a grain of salt and a peppering of truth.  

Visit http://woohs.blogspot.com

No 'preordained path' for interest rate increases or do you like to gamble your savings away?

Canadian interest rate policy is changing!  The UK also has a split in it's voting.  When the crack appears deminishing returns for fighting inflation already built into peoples debt burden will accelerate extremely rapidly.  The idea of avoiding a second dip is pretty silly in face of the existing debt overhang and war economics.

Do you believe the conventional wisdom?

No 'preordained path' for interest rate increases

Sent from my iPad with a grain of salt and a peppering of truth.  

Visit http://woohs.blogspot.com

The problems continue from borrowing short and lending long. What Is inflation?

Just thinking about the debt overhang should send shivers through your spine. We all have read about how the reparations exacted from Germany by France led to militarisation and the holocaust. Don't be fooled that it can't happen again. The governments of the war economies of Britain, Canada, and United States continue to support debt growth well into the future.

In contrast, we know that people should not be drawn into gambling their future away on the stock markets of hell economies. We know people shoukd earn a decent real interest rate from their savings so that they can plan for future retirements and safe pensions free of inflation.

The disguised inflation of property asset inflation fools everyone into thinking we have low inflation, but our realities are very different. The watchdogs of the UN organizations have failed us while the US, Canada, and Britain were nation building in the Middle East under the guise of protecting Jewish interests for stability in the Middle East.

The war on terror is now about to become a war on debt. The price of waging war on terrorism is too expensive to think the world won't be drawn into much worse. Terrorists can't possibly help the interests of terrorists because the footing of their cause is undermined by the interconnectedness of humanity. We all go down as one as long as the wars continue. No one wins, everyone loses in wars.

What we have is war and the consequences of wars:

- disguised inflation in the form of property appreciation that cannot be sustained,

- people with debt so high they are owned by lenders in a new form of interest paying debt slavery,

- a resurgence of neo-nazist thinking and grouping,

- the US National Rifleman's Association saying they are bored having won the crazy policy of arming everyone to the hilt with weaponry that is caustic to think about,

- a dissipation of tolerance and trust, interest rates so low that it is impossible to save in a bank deposit without losing real assets because inflation has been enormously higher in return, especially in wasteful speculation in property,

- the return of the fallacy of the notion that inflation could be good to wipe out debt,

- Isreal now increasingly hated by moderates because of Isreal's own forms of extremism,

- the real possibility of a renewal of hostilities in Northern Ireland,

- the destruction of the environment of the Caribbean,

- the loss of initiative to fight a dying planet overheating with too many engines of economic growth firing on all pistons to out compete each other.

There is an strangeness of our world as it's future has streams of hate and love in conflict. The majority want poverty to end but it is growing and people are suffering from the excesses of the rich and powerful.

Quite a turn for the books!

We have a respite from the swine and bird flu only to find there are other more serious threats to manage.

Review the mismatch once again:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=borrow%20short%20lend%20long%20inflation&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Sent from my iPad with a grain of salt and a peppering of truth.

When stealing is OK!

Stealing is rampant and you need to know all the games people use to steal from you. The poor do become poorer through thievery. Theft is the game of the rich and powerful. It has become the game of the ordinary church going, mosque attending, average hypocrite that one wants to trust, yet it is naive in this modern age if one blindly does trust others. There are too many thieves around to be safe, too many pick pockets after your hard earned assets, so be wary.

When and if one treads through history, one finds that most of the financial and economic misery of the post war period arises from excesses associated with the misuse of the US dollar and the lack of sincerity in financial reforms through time that sought to make a more honest or fair world. Sure the IMF has come up with ways to mitigate excesses, but historically the pain that is felt by the small scale operator and by ordinary families, the weak, vulnerable and poor, is disproportionately high. You will experience loss yourself through theft.

Poor people bear too much of the brunt of the results of excess and abuse by large concerns, particularly banks that claim the moral high ground yet fleece the poor. The latest financial reforms in the US are a cop out to the larger issues of legalised theft, and a way to expand thievery. Read the following article on Volker's approach and see if you don't agree with me!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/26/100726fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=all

My concern is that we put people through unnecessary misery because we neglect to curtail the financial excesses of those with capital. We assume a general morality in finance that does not exist in reality. We turn a blind eye to what is essentially creative thievery. In our self created amoral society, people steal small things most of the time. Where people can keep secrets they do and they really exploit opportunities for legal theft whether they work in government or business. They do it with a warped sense of morality based on the notion that consequences are limited and it's smart to steal and deceive. The young being astute game players are increasingly adept at amoral theft. Steal a bit here, loot a bit there. It's part of the historical background.

Well then the next step is to steal by force when necessary. We are naive to think that this won't happen to our kids and to ourselves as we will experience the effect of laws that make it easier to steal and we become increasingly vulnerable to thieves. The legal systems and electronic technologies that make it easier to steal are with us and unfortunately expanding at an alarming rate.

Daily, we hear about Internet theft. Any casual conversation will lead to a discussion of who has lost what from a group on the Internet. Meet anyone and they will have experienced loss from theft.

Obviously, there is rampant thievery behind the scenes, and most worrying is when trusted people engage in it wholesale, the British MPs steal by false expenses, the villages wanting revenues do it legally by the science of the placement of speeding cameras, banks do it by the timing of the debit of interest, governments do it by keeping interest rates low so they can acquire more tax assets and finance takeovers of the private economy, firms do it by loans from banks to acquire competitors or plum operations others have spent their lives developing.

Theft has been legalised and you need to know the basic rule that it's very ok.

In fact, in the modern world if you don't steal, cheat, swindle, con, deceive, you are a mug of the highest order.

The game as it is now played has no rules except those passed by the thieves to steal legally. You might as well pass laws so that you can steal, as well.

Sent from my iPad with a grain of salt and a peppering of truth.

David Cameron's Initiative to Slash Government Excesses

As an observer of what is happening as a consequence of the extraordinary excesses of the series of governments in Britain, Canada and the US, which have been on a war financial footing for almost a decade, the appearance of a Mr. Cameron budget slasher is welcome.

The greatest challenge to these three countries is the reduction of debt. Canada to be sure has had an Alberta oil cushion to lean on, but that era is closing rapidly as the costs of pollution mount up. So much pollution has built up during the last decade in Britain, USA, and Canada that the environments are scarcely recognisable, so much deterioration in the quality of the environment! Pollution in these three countries on ever increasing scales and explosion of debt are the consequence of nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, an enormous cost of spend spend spend governments. Well, it seems trite to say that the bill has arrived and it is spectacularly large. Irresponsible is the word that describes the war spending mentality of Britain, Canada, and United States, placing the stability of the world at enormous risk!

There is so much debt around that one's head spins! David Cameron obviously a man of vision and David Clegg an astute opposition leader realise that the absolutely wasteful excesses of the Blair and Brown years have possibly destroyed the future of the country. So little is the domestic economy that one hardly thinks that Britain is a home for the British. Everyone in the middle ground of the economy is in debt up to the eyeballs, loans are too many multiples of income streams, or beholden to government handouts, or corrupted by property speculation and stock market gambling. Ownership has shifted by a stupendous amount to outside financiers who pillage the country looking for spoils like the Manchester United football team or Harrods. The real question is whether or not it is too late and whether or not the leadership of Cameron and Clegg is sufficient.

Opposition to the cost cutting in Britain comes from those who will benefit most in the long term, the ordinary people who have been led down the Gordon path of waste for over a decade. They are so addicted to waste that frugality is going to appear as extreme withdrawal and headaches will be a daily event.

Here is a review from a New York paper.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/world/europe/21cameron.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Sent from my iPad with a grain of salt but a peppering of truth.

William Li's idea that we can potentially eat to starve cancer? Below is a link to his Video on TED.com

Hi! Occasionally, you are in my thoughts and that is why you are receiving this email.

Thought you might find this interesting if you had not already come across it.

We are what we eat. Such is the logic of a novel idea, which seems to be not so novel and yet is revolutionary in concept. It has to do with blood vessels and how our body produces and destroys them. William Li presents the idea on TED that we potential have the means to avoid many diseases and fight disease issues within our bodies by understanding more about how the body heals itself naturally. When our bodies are in balance they cope with the many potential disease issues we see rampant in the total population. Surprise, surprise, our health depends enormously on our diet and exercise!

The kicker is that most diets require an overall balance to be effective but don't deal effectively with overall balance. Most diets are partial rather than general equilibrium in nature. Thus, one goes on a popular diet loses weight temporarily and regains the weight subsequently. Or, one has a diet to fight something and dies from that that something anyways. This is particularly the problem of diets designed to fight cancer.

We know cancer is potentially going to kill any one of us. What we don't often realize is that the health issues that lead to cancer have long tails, such as breathing in a small particle of asbestos that thirty years later has cancer cells growing around it that lead to the full blown disease. Our bodies, nevertheless, can cope with a host of potential cancers by being in equilibrium with regard to blood vessel creation and destruction. This is what Dr Li focuses on! How do we ensure that our bodies cope with most destructive factors that would lead to premature death or a health disequilibrium such as characteristic of obesity? Many diseases have very long tails and so we can be surprised by unexpected disease more often as we grow older.

Our bodies are extraordinarily complex and there are no easy answers. Dr Li does however present an enormous set of possibilities for reducing the likelihood of any one of an enormous set of diseases appearing out of nowhere. The method hinges on the bodies ability to create and destroy blood vessels. We may find that we can proactively increase the chances that our bodies will be in equilibrium as regards having the natural weaponry and supplies of what is needed from the chemistry of our food to fight an enormous list of potential diseases. And, win!

The corollary is that we animals have evolved in equilibrium but that balance is destroyed by what we are attracted to by those selling food. Rather that being hunters and gatherers, we have become cavities in which an enormous list of toxins are dumped daily. We are lulled into putting the toxins into our bodies because we do not proactively try to determine what is good for us and verify the actual effects of what we encouraged to put onto or into our bodies. We have become lazy in our surveillance of potential hazards, such as sugar, wheat, salt, omega 6 fat, nicotine, food colorings, proteins, and so on.

Review Dr Li's talk and let us know what you really think?

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html

Sent from AW Lake

Pessimism built into technology

Hi Readers!

Thank you for your replies.  You are absolutely right in all you write even though you do it off the cuff.  

The old issues of letting things be governed by the price mechanism produce my skepticism about recycling, which is that it will worsen the environment because of economic forces.  I just use the examples to start thoughts without firing any real argumental guns.  

The difficulty is not from the intent of policy makers which is to protect the environment, but rather that we are designed by the logic of efficiency and competition to bring the technology bull into the china world we occupy.  Technology drives economics through economies that produce the effect of profit.  Because people will choose inappropriate technologies for the environment being profit oriented, there is no hope for the environment.  The point is that the technologies we have innovated are diametrically in opposition to protecting the environment.  This means that as we use the business approach to social exchange, we will surely kill the golden goose just as certainly as if we were to release a bull into a china shop and it would break the china.  Politics must rule the economic choices, but politics is not smooth and can lead to it's own destructive goals.

Recycling is a silly construct to make people feel good!

The fact is that we are on an economic technology path to kill all that is beautiful in the world because we worship economies of scale as these provide the greatest profit.  All social arrangements of exchange based on the profit motive are designed technologically to destroy the environment.  Bigger is destructive of family and healthy social arrangements, and yet it is what gives us a rising standard of living and makes our destructive system work in the short term.  It leads however to higher and higher environment costs that are not priced by present market mechanisms.  

My assessment is very Hawking that the generating functions of our physics and the biology of our nature and tools produces a bad series of physical events.  We need to find a better series that will create the world habitat structure which is optimal.  Our economies of scale dilemma lurks in the background to destroy all our efforts.  The BPs of this world are driving it to destruction.  

The banking orientation of the IMF is driving the world to destruction.  There is so much destructive power in the money and debt out there that we will be lucky to avoid a major third war.

 

Can you see a way out?

 

Sent from my iPad

The Recycling of the obvious and why economies of scale fail in the new economic reality

How strange it is that where a resource is most plentiful, it may be the resource that is most likely to be recycled. The logic would seem to be that if local production facilities exist that can use a resource it will be recycled because there is a demand from the producing end of the production cycle. However, what is strange is that the recycled resource is at these points relatively more plentiful, thus one is seeing coal shipped, as it were, to Newcastle which already has coal coming out of it's ears!

What's missing from this logic is the relocation of the resource to be recycled in sufficient quantity to be useful in a productive process where it is most needed. Thus, if a recyclable is shipped back to where it is plentiful the intuitive shipment cost is doubled. Were the availability of a recyclable in a new location to lead to a productive process then the reshipment back would be unnecessary to the use of a resource.

A good example of what I mean is the refusal in parts of Devon to collect paper, while there is an enthusiasm to collect farm waste. The reality is that of introducing new industry to recycle farm waste which is plentiful, not back into the farm, but into producing electricity. The danger is that economies of scale in the electricity sector will destroy the agricultural sector as profits from energy production outstrip those of farming by a huge factor. End result is a negative when a positive environmental impact was intended. It's how profitability in production can distort the economics of the environment. Additionally, the negative externalities of production are not costed. Pollution is after all a free good and rarely accounted for. One can accumulate as much pollution as one's domicile and activities allow. People will even pay one to absorb their pollution but rarely enough to cover the costs of being polluted! We can see that recycling is not the process introduced but further pollution based on neglect of the true economic, environment and social cost. All is done because a profit can be obtained. Money making rules rather than judgement and good sense.

So what happens to paper where there is a paper shortage. There the paper is burned because there is no production facility that can use it! Paper is recycled in Canada and burned in Britain! Not wholly true but real enough that we can see that the problem is production for profit as distorted by economies of scale that arise when something is plentiful. It's technology use that is at fault. Technology is used to make profit and not a better local environment. Why should we lie about this reality rather than tackling it's true costs of pollution and unemployment?

Sent from my iPad

Article: Friendship in an Age of Economics

Occasionally, one finds on the Internet articles that are very close to unearthing little truths that we understand, but have difficulty expressing ourselves.  The following link finds you a page or more of interesting discussion on the nature of friendship as it stands outside normal economic considerations.

Friendship in an Age of Economics
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/friendship-in-an-age-of-economics/

(via Instapaper)

Sent from my iPad

You might be interested

Dear advertiser,
The Ipad is very useful and getting a wider variety of news stories,
which us why I do not subscribe to your paper online. However, were
you to use the GPS signal effectively you would detect my location
over a reasonable period and offer me the full service almost for
free. That way you might expand the geographic market you serve and
can effectively charge for. There is no way that I would currently be
enticed to pay a subscription for your paper given my geographic
location in Great Britain.

The anosognosic's dilemma

Readers

Thank you for sharing with me your personal connections to an anosognosic's dilemma. We share the dilemma. None of us really escape the dilemma?

We all like to feel we are in control and fully aware of what's sending messages inside us and around us. Fact is we have only a varying percentage of awareness and spend most of our waking hours guessing what the messages are. We can firmly say that we occupy two worlds, that inside our heads and that outside, at the very least. There is much more going on, however!

I think we are attached to billions of quantum worlds through our brains and the billions of bugs and plants that make us what we are, a massive world of living organisms, many of which continue to live on after we lose our own memories and self reflections, those amazing abilities to conjure up a multidimensional abstractions from thousands of living organisms sending messages to each other.

In brief, if you don't think we send messages to the quantum worlds you are flying in the face of mounting evidence, and we are discovering how organisms can and do exchange both to and have components that receive messages from quantum worlds. They say plants could not exist if they did not occupy our universe and the quantum ones. We are so much more than plants and we do have billions of plants living within us making us what we are and can be, consciously or otherwise!

RT

One person aware of the problem wrote!

> My mother was an anosognosic after a massive stroke resulting in a non-functioning the right hemisphere confirmed by Pet scans. She definitely did not know what she did not know. It was impossible for me to imagine what she experienced. So I did not know what she knew and could not know what she

Sent from my iPad

Making your weaknesses work for you! The pain-balance hypothesis.

Making your weaknesses work for you! The pain-balance hypothesis.

Our weaknesses for the purpose of this note are the things that we like. Our bodies recognise lots of weaknesses and strengths, the things we do not like. To harness and enjoy our weaknesses, we can put are strengths temporarily aside. For example to enjoy a sweetie, we can put aside the pain of a tooth ache. That is an extreme example, but you should get the equation. A minus of weakness is bodily offset by a plus of strength. In the end we have a balance or imbalance. A big negative total in the short term will be offset by borrowing on or use of our stored up positive assets, our stored up strengths, the painful things that we have had to endure.

This note is not about making our stored up strengths work for us. For example, to enjoy a sweetie we could think of the death of a toad that we witnessed a week ago. That type of offsetting will happen, but it is not my main focus now. Rather, I want to consider how to make weaknesses work for one in real time. The background and main issue is that weakness has to be offset by strength if you are not to expire prematurely. I won't say die, but in a larger context that is what happens if we indulge our weaknesses without offsetting them. One might say that we sin and then we ask For forgiveness which comes about through indulging in our strengths. A corollary, of course is that those that will experience the greatest of weakness will also experience the greatest of strength. For example, those that steal will be caught and subjected to harsh punishment. The more punishment one can endure the more one can steal and still survive. The problem with stealing is that it is a very narrow weakness that one may try to do in secret, but one still has to offset this with a strength if one is not to expire prematurely. It's generally not a good idea to put all one's eggs into a single basket, if you get the drift of this particular argument. It's better to indulge in a broad range of weaknesses because an overindulgence in one weakness reduces what can be enjoyed in others.

You may think that my concept of weakness is already adrift. I can assure you that it is not. Take time to observe around you how people and all living creatures indulge their weaknesses and you will observe how their strengths come into play. Developing one's strengths is a necessary precondition to enjoying one's weaknesses. Thus, it is that we can make our weaknesses work for us. The trick is that they must be used to develop our strengths.

Sent from my iPad

Article: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma

This is not to imply anything about the reader.  But, what am I to know, or do I?

What will you think?

The Anosognosic's Dilemma
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/

(via Instapaper)

Sent from my iPad

Article: The Perils of Positive Thinking

This article suggests we embrace our flaws rather than trying to improve ourselves all the time.  Well I certainly have loads of flaws!  I heard that, Amen.

RT 

The Perils of Positive Thinking
http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/06/the-perils-of-positive-thinking/print/

(via Instapaper)

Sent from my iPad

Article: Economists Who Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)

Wooosh .... Learning about the economy and how it really works!

I respect your brain and forward this accordingly. 

The economists referred to in this article, I have met and can vouch for their credentials. Not only that, but they are on that rare track of getting it right most of the time.  This is a must read if you have a pension and value your savings and hard work.  Learn where the economics industry and teaching has gone wrong.  

Enjoy, RT, your guardian angel.

Economists Who Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?_r=2&hpw=&pagewanted=print

(via Instapaper)

Sent from my iPad

Article: How Pornography Drugs & Changes Your Brain

Wooosh .... as sent to my blog today.

This article is not aimed at you, but I refer to it because I respect you as thinking and sound individuals. 

We are probably the lucky ones for whom addictive disease is not such a tragedy as described by psychologists, social scientists and preachers, and even Judge Judy.  

You have heard me mouth off occasionally about all forms of addiction as a secret disease that ultimately leads to premature death (this is Anne Sheaf's conclusion after a life time working in the inner city.).   

The following very considered long article, which includes references to research published by The Royal Society, summarises one of the main problems of our modern society, so it is a good idea to understand how the process works by reading the article carefully, how one can be affected, and how such a common addiction undermines relationships ultimately killing society, and families and producing slower economic growth and smaller profits!  It's becoming increasingly clear how wrong it is to condone pornography and to accept the misinformation published by the porn industry.  Sex is great but this addiction is like an ever tightening plastic bag over one's head squeezing away the breath of life. 

Arthur  

How Pornography Drugs & Changes Your Brain
http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo13/13hilton.php

(via Instapaper)

Sent from my iPad