I'm missing the ultimate contributer in that chart. The taxpayer.

Wow I'm impressed I just saw the end of a discussion about the banking crisis on TV and the moderator asked one guy (unfortunately this was the last question and the only thing I saw):
"Do you think any more banks will file for bankruptcy in the near future"? To which he responded:

"I don't know if anymore will file but if we look at it realistically almost all banks are in fact bancrupt and it is only a question of when it will be discovered. If you look at it no bank owns the assets that it has promised to return, try running any other business like this."

Rothbard says it best

Ummm,

Isn't this functionally equivalent to any normal growing company that operate from lines of credit that are backed by it's "Accounts Receivable"?

If your lines of credit is cash and your accounts receivable is 10% of that cash, yes.

Very enlightening... Thanks.

Mark K,

Now google "Jekyll Island". Learn how the Federal Reserve has its origins there.

Ron Paul on CNN this morning

What he had to say about raising the FDIC insurance I found interesting. Also interesting to me is why they had him on at all.

I'm looking more into that chart

there is a book that can be read online by a guy named James Ledbetter called Made Possible By: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States that apparently gets into some of these issues.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&...result#PPP1,M1

*edit- not the whole book, just a preview

You do not actually wonder this.

However, let's just say it's because the institutions that are allowed to print the Euro have intellectual property rights on the design, name, and printing of the Euro. If "private entrepreneurs" want to print their own fiat money, go ahead - as long as they don't pretend it's a Euro, which it isn't. No one would care at all if they were printing up MagicalWonderBills and trying to spend those.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...htm?list878321

Article on sun spots.

And it definitely belongs in this thread because it has to deal with global warming which is definitely political, although the article doesn't actually talk about global warming

but this has been the 'blankest'- in terms of sun spots- in a long time.

I actually learned about this stuff from the same sociology professor I mentioned earlier

there is whats called the 55 year drought cycle that has to do with sun spots and some russian sociologist came up with a theory that used this to explain wars and empires long term on earth that i found really fascinating at the time and still do

one of things often not mentioned when discussing global warming is that all of the planets in the solar system are warming and this is a result of sun spot activity

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0819092017.htm

Stef essplains why the bailout bill didn't pass

I would like to read more about the science regarding climate change - for/against, the evidence that it's us that's doing it, etc. Unfortunately, it's one of those things where it's pretty hard to find a source without a pretty clear agenda.

Regarding the quantum physics, i decided just to dig out my A-level notes, read them, and then, you know, teach myself undergraduate level physics. How hard can it be?

Also, on holiday, i read Kuhn's' 'structure of scientific revolutions' which was excellent, and pretty much must read regarding some of our discussion of science previously

meh. research into the link between sun spots and the weather has been going on for a long time- the farmers almanac has been tracking that sort of information for hundreds of years. plus, that nasa article i linked to made no mention of climate change whatsoever. just because its a political issue doesn't mean you can't find unbiased sources/ and or using your own discerning ability to decide what to accept/reject

just understand non-locality, bell's theorem, the EPR paradox, and the uncertainty principle, and you're set. shouldn't take more than a few hours.

Stephen: I came to the same conclusion of "there's copyright issues"
And I did really wonder about it because it was the two big items on a double page. One page had a long article on the fake money and the other had a long article on the banking crisis.
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Ah I remember Kuhn and was supposed to tell someone (dustin?) my main concern with his theory. Here it is:

Can you explain to me how Kuhn could formulate his theory in which he states that different scientific paradigms cannot be compared (incommensurable) while he quite clearly uses comparison of different paradigms to explain his theory (Newton vs Einstein etc.)?
And how can he explain his theory without comparing it to other theories of epistemology?

I think I have a problem with the issue that "once you know that paradigms fight out who's best darwin style" the evolution isn't "natural" anymore because people will position their ideas more strongly than if they didn't know competing paradigms exist. Somewhat of a self-reference problem that I can't clearly articulate (if you assume SSR is the "winning" science theory paradigm then the approach towards science theory changes).

it was me.

tbh i dont really have an interest in debating Kuhn- it seems like it would mostly be mental masturbation

Ultimately the correct paradigm is going to win imo regardless of how they are positioned.

I would like you to explain to me what your underlying perspective here is though. Are you a relativist? Do you believe that science is value-laden and that whats accepted as conventional wisdom in science now is only the result of societal norms and that this might change dramatically in the future; that there is no objective truth?

Or maybe to simplify a little further, how can you claim certain ideas cannot be compared without comparing them.

Don't get me wrong, reading Kuhn was one of the most "wow that's pretty cool" type of experiences and certainly got me to think about ideas a lot. And I think I do act kind of Kuhnian (-the not comparable) because I use whatever science theory paradigm makes the most sense to me when trying to understand any given theory and only after I feel I understood the basics will I look for potential alternatives.
Maybe it's more of a mix of Kuhn and Lakatos. I.e. I'm looking for a certain core that gets me interested and then build from that.

This relates very little to my reading of the book at all, tbh.

I don't think he is arguing that two paradigms are incomparable at all. They are, indeed, explicitly compared regarding their ability to explain the problems being investigated. And your self-reference point regarding the evolution is exactly what he explicitly is saying - not that there is natural selection of competing paradigms - that the dominant paradigm prevents work under different paradigms because it is accepted and only when that paradigm breaks down under the weight of its failures can another paradigm rear it's head or be developed.

Anyway, I don't think it's really a philosophy of science, so much as a sociology of the scientific community. What's really interesting to me is that it is a pretty well formed rejection of popperian science in the lab - Scientists don't take negative results as a rejection of their model, they keep tweaking the model to try to make it work until the model breaks down. And there are plentiful examples of great scientists unable to accept scientific developmnents in their field.

Duck Tails Inflation Lesson

This is awesome.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...96&vt=lf&hl=en
This is hilarious. This guy just totally bashes Palin but not in a mean way but in a totally awesome way.

Yeah you'd probably be very interested in reading Lakatos. You can scroll down to "Research Program" to get a tl;dr of his ideas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos

And that should lead you to Feyerabend eventually for the full circle :P

FWIW: I'm currently researching structuralism which pretty much (supercondensed tl;dr) says that theories concist of:
A structural core (immune to falsification), intended use cases, data and approximation. It only gains empirical meaning by using special laws on top of the core and links to other theories (theory-nets). The intended use cases can be changed if some stuff gets falsified.

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Iirc he argued something like that different planar models cannot be compared because they use definitions (like "planet") and built upon that. Quick research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commens...hy_of_science)

Btw, I'm still amazed at the different use if "science theory" in Germany vs the english speaking (potentially the rest of the world?) countries. All this stuff, Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Praxeology, Kant, Wittgenstein, Methodenstreit etc. falls under the umbrella of science theory here.

yeah, i don't think much of that wiki page regarding khun, but feyer does look interesting.

Obviously it's all to science what historiography is to history, but my point was kuhn is much less conceptual than popper, and much more rooted in the practice of science. Not that either of those is inherently superior. I think that philosophy of science, in the uk at least, gets quite short shrift because we're historically all empiricists and like the doing, rather than the contintental naval gazing

The current wacky rumor going around:

intended to cause a run on the banks? or just a prank?

regardless, if something was going to happen it certainly wouldn't be made known to every branch manager 1 week ahead of time

imo

I'm just passing along the wackiness. No reputable outlet has published this. It could be just to get hits.

Somebody wants to completely collapse the banking system?