Honestly?

There appears to be a mini-epidemic of media prefacing their message with the word "Honestly..."

A major tech company is advertising their computers with a young women speaking who prefaces her remarks about how wonderful their computer is with "Honestly..."

In the last couple months I have heard members of Congress commenting on the people's business, prefacing their remarks with "Honestly..."

Political pundits regularly preface their remarks with "Honestly..."

As I contemplate why they say "Honestly" as a preface to their remarks the following questions pop into my head:

Do they preface their words with "Honestly" because they often lie but are actually telling the truth this time?  Otherwise why would they feel the need to preface their remarks with "Honestly..."? 

Since they apparently often lie, am I to believe they are actually telling the truth this time?  Or are they just particularly interested in having me believe this lie?

More fundementally, is this epidemic reflective of the fact lots of folks in the public eye believe honesty in the public realm is no longer a matter of character, but rather a matter of convenience? 

Another Corporate conspiracy

For three score years I have never needed glasses for much of anything.

Suddenly I find myself stocking my car, the table by my bed, my briefcase - even my toolbox - with reading glasses.  I need them to read economist, I need them to read the printing on prescriptions, the list of contents on food.  With cans of paint or other hardward store items I sometimes feel like I need a microscope to read how to avoid being poisened, or properly use the product.

It seems to me it all happened in the last couple years.  I have figured out it must be a conspiracy by the 1%.  I thought it might be the government conspiracy but couldn't figure out how they would make the print on everything smaller without passing a bunch of laws that CNN would be talking about 24/7 endlessly, so I would have heard about it.    My eyes have worked fine for 60+ years so the problem clearly couldn't be me, so it must be the 1%.

I figure that since the economy sucks the 1% don't want to risk putting their money into expanding businesses and hiring people.  Not much money to be made there and it is a lot of risk.  So instead they have looked for every possible way to pump up the profits of their corporations.  I would imagine they were all sitting around the country club one day jawing about how tough it was to make more money when one of them had a brilliant idea.  If they just started making the print smaller on everything their corporations make they could cut their costs by squeezing more words on a smaller piece of paper - saving both ink and paper. 

But the side effects where the best part of their insight.  All they had to do was increase their holdings in companies that make glasses, and bask in the boom of sales of reading glasses caused by the smaller print.  And as a further side affect they could fill their packaging with disclaimers in print so small no one would read it, and use the disclaimers to avoid lawsuits if someone is injured.  After all, one of the real failures in the American way is that there is always some sharp lawyer with a golden tongue who wants to make the people that create things pay when people get hurt.  Those lawyers have no idea how hard it is to keep profits up if you have to make sure what you are selling is safe.

I haven't had a chance to check my theory, but it's a damn good theory so I am going to assume it is correct until I get a chance to check it.  Don't have time to let a lack of facts keep me from understanding what is happening in the world if I am going to become part of the 1%.

Understanding the Boston Bombers -

After I heard the FBI had interviewed the older brother and didn't think he presented a threat, I thought it might be interesting to look at what astrology (at the least the parts of astrology that I think have some predictive value) would predict about the behavior of the two Boston Bombers.  Below is what I found:

(see * below for the sources for the quotes - dates and places of birth came from online biography website - both were born in Central Asia - no time of birth was available):

Tamerlan Tsarnaev - The older brother was born on October 21, 1986.  Using what Astrology says about someone born on this date paints the following picture.   :

He was born in the Chinese year of the Fire Tiger - 

"This type of Tiger finds it difficult to contain his enthusiam and boundless energy...He is independent and unconventional, and his moves are hard to predict.  The only thing one can be sure of is that when he acts, he will be dramatic and influential....He seeks constantly to convert his nervous energy and inspirations into forceful action...he is a thoroughly optomistic soul and has no use for doomsday prophets..."  * 1

His Sun sign is Scorpio - 

"This is the sign of extremes.  Scorpio people are variously described as powerful, weak, independent, clinging, passionate and cold....a bundle of contradictions encompassing the best and worst of human nature...The key..is intensity...you do nothing by half measures...you live on many levels...you present a calm and smiling face to the world..(but you are)... ferociously persistent and extremely strong willed...you always have a hidden agenda..." *2

 His Moon sign is Gemini -

"Versatile, witty, charming, lively, amusing...(but)...disorganized, inconsistent, superficial, cunning and manipulative.."  * 2

His Mars (considered to govern in what ways you are aggressive) is in Aquarious - 

"...There is an element of reform or fighting for freedom in your outlook.  High strung and unpredictable, you struggle between wanting to do things alone and group activities..."  *2

Dzhokhar Tsarneav - The younger brother was born in Central Asia on July 22, 1996.

He was born in the Chinese Year of the Water Rooster - 

"This is an intellectual....He has tremendous energy and initiative at his disposal and will seek to use his resources...to speed up progress...His mind functions with computerlike efficiency and thus could lose sight of the main issues when he overstresses details...."  * 1

His Sun sign is Cancer - 

"Complex, fragile, unpredictable...need constant support and encouragement..desperately want...approval..but resent wanting it....have a real blind spot when it comes to seeing a failing in one you love...when you are close to someone, you believe you are supposed to help that person..."  * 2

His Moon sign is Virgo - 

"Intellectual, meticulous, industrious, steadfast, responsible but critical, high-strung, standoffish, argumentative...."  * 2

His Mars is in Virgo -  

"...ambitious and proud, though this is not always apparant on the surface.  Extremely strong-willed... can separate self from emotions when it comes to making decisions.  In your work you are shrewd, calculating and quietly determined...." *2

I wonder if the FBI knew anything about Scorpio's born in the year of the Fire Tiger when they interviewed the older brother.  Whatever criteria they used certainly didn't do the job.  We have a blind spot in the US about astrology because both scientific and religious leaders defending their turf see it as a threat to their authority.  I hope that blind spot doesn't extend to the FBI investigating terror suspects, but am not optomistic.  I think it could provide reliable useful information based on readily verifiable facts.

* 1.  "The Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes", Theodora Lau.
* 2.  "The Only Astrology Book You'll Ever Need", Joanna Martine Woolfolk 

What Western Medicine is good at - and not so good at

Western medicine has become very good at:
1.  Dealing with trauma injuries.  The bomb blast at the Boston marathon where hundreds of people were injured, but only three died is a good demonstration of how quickly and effectively we deal with trauma injuries.

2.  Attacking specific pathogens - In the last 100 years we have eliminated many diseases that plagued our species by identifying the pathogen, and figuring out how to kill it.

We became good at these aspects of medicine because a lot of smart people whose primary focus was solving specific problems, figured out how to solve a lot of different problems.  The logical parts of our brain that dominate in our culture are ideally organized to attack these sorts of problems.  Classic linear thinking - break the problem down into individual components and then figure out each component.

Western medicine is not so good at general wellness and health.  In large part this is because our general health depends on maintaining a particular chemical balance in our bodies.  But the problem is much more diffuse and complex than focusing on a specific pathogen, or specific type of physical injury.  The "break it down to small components" approach does not work well because:

1.  Every chemical in our body interacts with or is influenced with many other chemicals.

2.  We are not clones, each of us has a slightly different chemical fingerprint.

Right now most of the smart people with access to the money and tools to make headway on understanding this complex interaction are funded by or employed by drug companies.  Drug companies are making billions of dollars with the current approach that develops new drugs that accomplish specific goals (lowering cholesterol for example) without really understanding how the particular drug will interact with all the other chemicals in the bodies chemical balance.  The current system is working for those companies, even if it isn't working in terms of the making really big strides forward in understanding each individual's chemical characteristics.   

Think of the drug advertisements to which we all are constantly exposed.  Airy feel good visuals and music to get you feeling good about the drug, while in the background some guy drones on about all the potentially really bad side effects.  Do the drug companies have any idea how to figure out who might be affected by these really bad side affects?  No.   Do they care - well certainly not in the sense of doing anything that will impact their short term profits. 

It is my opinion the medical profession goes along with this sorry system because we have granted a medical monopoly to the people with the highly developed linear thinking skills that work so well with trauma injuries and pathogens.  They have created a system that requires years of intensive focused linear thinking to become Doctors.  As a result the people that run the medical monopoly distrust non-linear thinking, they think linear thinking is going to solve all medical problems.  They inadvertently stifle non-linear thinking in the medical profession. 

The next big medical advance needs to be a coherent theory of how our bodies chemical systems develop their individual differences, and what that tells us about how the system interacts.  Once we have that theory, linear thinking will probably unravel all the mysteries eventually.  But it is going to be non-linear thinking that produces the initial theory and the medical profession is currently almost incapable of taking a theory that arises out of something other than their linear comfort zone seriously.

Is Economic Growth Always What We Need?

This last week the financial world was buzzing about the decision by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to start printing enormous amounts of money and use the money to buy financial assets in financial markets.   The BoJ's plan is a lot like what the Federal Reserve has been doing in this country, only supersized.  The BoJ goal is to jump start growth in gdp.

Growth is all economist's ever talk about.  Nothing, in economic jargon, transcends the importance of growth.  I think some people have lost sight of the purpose and true meaning of growth in their obsession with the buzz word.

Growth is the pursuit of more material wealth.  Quality of life issues aren't really factored into growth.  GDP doesn't consider how healthy people are, how happy people are, how nutritional thier food is, how safe their environment is.

Japan's new prime minister is obsessed with generating growth, hence the new policy.  Is this what is good for Japan?

Some simple facts about Japan.  It is a country with an aging, and shrinking population, who have one of the highest living standards in the world.  The Bank of Japan's goal is largely to generate inflation.  It's result will be to drive down the value of the Japanese yen.  So the aging, shrinking population of Japan will not have the purchasing power they would have had otherwise.

But the BoJ's policy will drive up stock and bond prices, so lots of financial professionals will make tons of money.  Business will be happy because a lower Yen means they can sell their products to other countries at lower prices.  In essence the policy will be taking money out of japanese workers paychecks so business can offer their products to consumers in other countries at lower prices.

As has characterized the last couple decades in the west, Japan's Government policy favors the wealthy at the expense of the majority of citizens.

Growth is crucial to pull a poor country with a rapidly expanding population out of poverty.  For a developed country, growth's benefits are more nuanced.  Growth often produces environmental damage, encourages unhealthy behavior and often does more to make rich folks richer than to bring to neediest up to a reasonable standard of living.

Oh, and incidently, the BoJ action could set of the 21st century version of a 1930's trade war.  In which case everyone will suffer.

Obama's Mapping the Brain Project

President Obama has proposed a 100 billion dollar effort to map the brain.  It makes me grind my teeth.

It is not that mapping the brain is a bad idea.  It probably would result in valuable basic research.  What makes me grind my teeth is that it will probably slow down the evolution of our understanding on how our brain really works, because it ignores the half of our brain function that we know the least about to push a big pile of money into learning more about the half we already know quite a bit about.

I heard a program about the project this morning on the radio*.  A brain research guy from Stanford made comments that, to me, epitomized the problem.  He was talking about the brain as this machine - like all brain researchers needs to do to make big strides in human understanding is to map the connections where all these electrical events occur.   He speaks of the brain like it is sort of a big 3-D motherboard.  He (and all the other experts) all qualified their comments to downplay expectations - they clearly realize there is much they don't understand about the brain, but every single one of them spoke of the brain as if it were a machine communicating by electrical impulses.  It is a half truth, and this proposal is following a long tradition of brain research ignoring the other half.

When was in college I took some brain classes in 1973-74.  Brain science at that time also saw the brain as a machine.  In class we cut open heads (of animals - not each other) and cut out parts of the brain to see what happened to the animal when it recovered.  Or inserted electrodes into particular parts of the brain, then zapping a little electricity into the brain to see what part twitched.  

Even at that time many in brain research had begun to realize that decades of cutting open the heads of animals produced some useful information, but didn't begin to explain how the brain works.  But, at that time it was what brain researcher's did, so they kept doing it because they didn't have any better ideas.  

Far more intriguing to me at the time was a line of research that went back as the late 1800's (mostly for veterinary purposes - understanding livestock) that showed the chemical make-up (neurotransmitters) of mammalian brains varied greatly over the course of a day, a month, a year and the variations were both predictable and reflected in behavior (think of the studies on crime and the full moon for example).   This suggested a new way of looking at the brain - even if our brains were largely stamped out of the same genetic mold, variations in our brain chemistry individual to each of us could be the factor that makes each of us unique individuals.  It is both a machine and an ongoing chemical process that modifies how the machine functions.  

Even though my career went a different direction I followed brain research pretty closely for the next couple years, and saw evidence other people were also starting to think of the neurotransmitter data as providing a new way to look at the brain - as a chemical process.  The particular balance of chemicals at the start of the process (at conception and in the early years of brain development) influences how the reaction proceeds and the relative influence of different systems using different neurotransmitters.   At one point, perhaps about 1976 or 1977, I read a quote from a researcher from the National Institute of Health about some neurotransmitter related research saying the study results sounded a little bit like astrology.  The statement was qualified quickly (the next sentence as I recall) by a comment to the effect that he wasn't seriously suggesting astrology was related to neurotransmitters.

Then by the early 1980's reported research relating to neurotransmitter variations had dropped off the research map.  I think part of it was astrology.  Although people today don't have a "moral" problem with astrology, in the 1970's astrology was viewed by the public - and hence by science - rather like Islamist's today view western culture - something to be shunned at best   Thirty years ago no one who wanted to have a career in brain science could say anything that sounded remotely like they wanted to do research on when and where people were born and how that affected their personality - since that was the province of astrology.  

I also think part of it was the daunting nature of trying to do research.  The only way to approach finding out if brain chemistry differs between people born in different circumstances was by finding objective physical or behavioral markers and developing a massive statistical database.  It would have required decades to compile the data.  A young scientist's career would be decades old before he would have the data to start testing theories (and more important - publishing).

But I think the biggest problem was the arrival of digital imaging.  Why embark on a career that requires spending decades gathering a massive statistical data base when you can play with electronic toys that can look inside the brain.  Surely once we can look inside a working head knowledge will gush forth?

Thirty years later I have seen ton's of reports on brain research based on digital imaging.  We have learned some things.  But from what I can see we are no closer to understanding why people have different personalities, or why some people seem to have no empathy or feeling for others.

Now we are going to spend $100 billion dollars on more research based on the notion the brain is a machine.   It won't be wasted money - we will get some useful information out of it.  But the opportunity cost is huge.  It is sort of like spending $100,000 to buy a minivan.  You will get some utility out of the vehicle - but you paid way to much and that is $70,000 you won't have to put to other purposes.

Here are some things I am very confident about:

1.  This brain mapping project won't do a whole lot to help us understand why people are different.  We won't make much headway in learning what it was in the brain of a 20 year old that led him to walk into a school and kill 26 people.

2.  The chemistry of our brain is linked directly to the chemistry of our body.  The chemical signature of our brain reflects what is happening in our body.  This brain mapping project won't get us much closer to personalized medicine - the ability of Doctors to look at you as a particular combination of chemical processes and prescribe treatments or medicines, or diagnose problems specific to you - instead of what is considered appropriate for the "average" person.  Knowing the wiring of our brain will tell us little or nothing about this, knowing the chemical mix in our brain might. (for more discussion on this point see the link below)

In short, I see this brain mapping project as Obama's lets send someone to the moon moment.  It is dramatic, but it is far from the best use of the money, and will suck resources away from other lines of inquiry that could produce really tangible results that would help solve a lot of basic human issues much sooner.

For a related discussion see:  http://motrvoter.blogspot.com/2012/05/big-surprise-genetics-is-of-little-use.html

*The program - NPR's forum on KQED, broadcast at 9:00 AM, 4.3.13 here in California

Why the Capital Gains tax breaks are misdirected

For fifty years economists and politicians have pushed lower tax rates for Capital gains as a measure that encourages investment.  Does it?   Or is it an example of politicians and economists who have very simplistic and fuzzy notions about motivating people (which notions often incidentely happen to serve their own self interests.)

Quick review on what the discussion is about.  Money you are paid for doing a job is taxed as ordinary income.  The current effective Federal income tax rate for most of us is probably about 25% or so, and many who make more money 30% or more.   On the other hand, if your income comes from investments, either from buying and selling stocks, bonds or real estate, or from "qualifed" corporate dividends, you will often pay about half the tax rate paid by someone working for a living.

Now just on basic instinct it seems like folks who are making money because they own things and don't need do to much of anything to receive their income should, if anything, perhaps pay a little higher tax than folks who are working hard, and perhaps incurring some physical risk from the act of working.  Just as a matter of fairness.  So there must be some good reason why tax policy has the opposite effect, right?  It must be set up to reward people for investing, right?

Lets see if this works by considering a hypothetical.

Richie Rich inherited property from which he makes $220,000 a year from capital gain and qualified dividends.  He spends the entire $220,000 a year on living expenses, plays a lot of golf, travels and generally enjoys life because he doesn't need to work.   

Hard working Harry makes $220,000 from working hard for long hours.  He spends about $120,000 a year on ordinary living expenses and the other $100,000 a year he invests.

Assume both Ricky and Harry won't have to pay much tax on the first $20,000 they make (which is true for all taxpayers) , but on the remaining $200,000 they will pay an average of around about 30% on ordinary income and about 15% on capital gain.

The result?  Richie Rich will pay about $30,000 tax on his $200,000 since it is all capital gain.  Hardworking Harry on the other hand, will pay about $60,000 on his $200,000.

So Harry pays twice as much tax as Richie, even though Richie never worked a day in his life, didn't invest a dime of his income, while Harry works hard at building society and actually invested $100,000.

This hypothetical reveals the fatal flaws of the Capital Gains tax.  

1.  It looks at where income comes from, rather than where it goes.
2.  It often rewards the non-productive rather than the productive.

When enough voters figure this out, perhaps the politicians and economists will also figure it out, so pass it on.