本质上说，市场是一部复杂的投票机器，它是一帮有着不同前景参照点（来自行为金融中的前景理论）的资金代言人，不断对经济基本面、流动性和风险情绪这三个决定性要素，进行按资金量加权的动态双重投票过程──第一重是赋予这三个要素不同权重：经济数据公布的时候（包含业绩发布的关键报表时刻），权重都在基本面上；央行领导讲话时，最多的权重加在流动性上；而地缘危机和雷曼时刻，避险情绪又占据了99%的考量。第二重则是给这种投票赋予资金量的权重，大资本的话语权总是高于散户，尽管他们也不一定总对。同时，每个投资人的参考点是不一样，这就导致对于同一消息的不同判断，例如QE退出，有人觉得流动性会变差，有人觉得这是经济走强的信号，而这会导致不同的交易行为。

所谓市场一致预期不过是相对得到公认的参照点，因此市场总体是根据个体相对一致预期的预期差来做反应，而其控制的资金量筹码起到权重作用。在这个过程中，晴雨表式的厂商（包括意见领袖）的作用就是试图建立能够影响市场判断的重要参考点，操纵其间的预期差，并从中渔利。市场每时每刻就在这种动态、混乱，而且略显神经质的投票过程中随机游走。http://cn.wsj.com/gb/20130710/SHY071549.asp

Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist

 

as when she came to it.

She was also often outrageously lucky: lucky that the striking miners were led by Arthur Scargill, a hardline Marxist; lucky that the British left fractured and insisted on choosing unelectable leaders; lucky that General Galtieri decided to invade the Falkland Islands when he did; lucky that she was a tough woman in a system dominated by patrician men (the wets never knew how to cope with her); lucky in the flow of North Sea oil; and above all lucky in her timing. The post-war consensus was ripe for destruction, and a host of new forces, from personal computers to private equity, aided her more rumbustious form of capitalism.

The verdict of history

Criticism of her comes in two forms. First, that she could have done more had she wielded her handbag more deftly. Hatred, it is true, sometimes blinded her. Infuriated by the antics of left-wing local councils, she ended

Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist

Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist

 

ONLY a handful of peacetime politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “-ism”.

The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom—odd, since as a prim, upwardly mobile striver, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individuals were set free. Unlike Churchill’s famous pudding, her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from micromanagement by the state.

In this section

• Freedom fighter
• Revolution in the air
• Right target, wrong shots
• Memento Modi
• A new specie

Reprints

Related topics

• China
• United Kingdom
• USSR
• Winston Churchill
• Milton Friedman

In her early years in politics, economic liberalism was in retreat, the Soviet Union was extending its empire, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were dismissed as academic eccentrics. In Britain the government hobnobbed with trade unions (“beer and sandwiches in Number 10”), handed out subsidies to failing nationalised industries and primed the pump through Keynesian demand management. To begin with the ambitious young politician went along with this consensus (see article). But the widespread notion that politics should be “the management of decline” made her blood boil. The ideas of Friedman and Hayek persuaded her that things could be different.

Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist

Life's Messy. Train Your Brain to Adapt

What's the Big Idea?
Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think that there is a cognitive basis for chronic disorganization.
Organization, she says, is not just about a cluttered desk. It’s about self-regulation, a skill that is developed by the pre-frontal cortex--the seat of executive function in the brain. The left pre-frontal cortex regulates your attention: it evaluates, judges, makes decisions. Modern life, with its barrage of incoming emails and phone calls and texts, taxes the pre-frontal cortex, inhibiting the brain’s ability to focus. Those who have naturally strong self-regulation can handle the overload—and those who don’t are left feeling guilty and out of control.

But the plasticity of the brain means we can all learn to be better focused and more organized. “When you can focus all of your brain on one thing, that’s when you’re at your best,
she says. "You’re integrating all your brain. But it also consumes a huge amount of resources. You get tired. That’s really how the brain learns—when the brain is learning, it’s laying down new networks. The brain is changing when we focus. It takes a lot of energy, and when it’s depleted it isn’t able to manage the emotional brain. When your pre frontal cortex is depleted, your emotions rule all day. ”

Q: Can we actually reshape our habits just by thinking?

A: I did a coaching demonstration yesterday with a young woman who is really suffering from clutter at home—really suffering. If you look at the genetic wiring around organization, there’s a good amount of the population who have competent executive function. The other part of the population has better access to their emotions. That’s generalizing a lot, but those folks, like the woman I was coaching yesterday, are very good at living the moment, very good at connecting, they’ve got great emotional intelligence, they can pick up other people’s emotions—but they can’t find their keys. Those folks are really struggling. Privately they feel despair, because their emotional expression is turned high. It’s a strength, in terms of their ability to connect with people, but it’s a weakness when it comes to organizing.

Q: How do you take control, even when you're feeling overwhelmed?

A: Negativity is a very important part of life. When you have negative emotions, they have a message to give you—and they’re very good at getting it through. They overtake the good. They’re like crying babies demanding your attention. And so the first thing to say is, don’t permanently suppress them. Listen to them and figure out, ‘is this an error message? Or is this something I really need to pay attention to?’ The limbic system is an old part of the brain. It takes in a lot of input from a lot of places faster than they get to the thinking brain. So there’s often something important in the negative. Stress is the trigger for learning and growth. Stress is what makes us accomplish things. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s part of life. It’s not that you want to wipe it off the board. It’s more about what your relationship is with the negative.

Stress is designed biologically to be powerful; it takes over your brain much more than positive emotion. Your heart rate goes up, you breathe faster; your blood pressure goes up. It makes you ready to respond. It’s got a purpose, but it doesn’t help when it’s time to sit down and work on something for thirty minutes. Naming the emotion, giving it a language, in an empathetic caring way—just a little self-empathy instead of ‘I’m an idiot for feeling like this’—that in itself can shift it.

Q: How do we form these cognitive habits?

A: You have to train yourself. When you encounter the situation, you have to reappraise it. You do this by talking to your irrational emotions. Then practice changing the negative self-talk.

What's the Significance?
The quickest way to deal with stress, says Moore, is to summon a positive emotion. In her experience as a counselor, the most successful people are able to cultivate a three to one balance between positive and negative thoughts: “What we’re really talking about is using your brain’s most precious resource, which is your attention, in the way that it allows you to accomplish the most and make the biggest impact on the world.”

So why do we so often fail to stick to our organizational goals? "Perhaps you’ve got the motivation, you’ve got the willpower, but the confidence is crap," she says. "The motivation goes to sleep when you don’t think you can do it. You can only build confidence by doing it, by actually experiencing it." Organization is achieved through future-oriented thinking: the ability to monitor one's emotional response (i.e. "I want to watch TV now!") and redirect attention towards the activities that will help us achieve our goals (i.e. "if I spend 30 minutes doing the dishes now, I will wake up to a clean home tomorrow").
If you learn how your brain works and work with it, you can start to exercise more cognitive control over your own functioning. The first step is to figure out what is it that you really want that being organized will give you. "That’s the fuel that will keep you going when you’re struggling to change your brain," says Moore. "Every time you make a change that lasts, you’re changing your brain."

 http://bigthink.com/think-tank/lifes-messy-train-your-brain-to-adapt

icing on the cake - Idioms - by the Free Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

 

icing on the cake

something good that is added to another good thing He was delighted to have his story published – getting paid for it was just icing on the cake.

icing on the cake - Idioms - by the Free Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

If rules are made to be broken, then plans are made to be changed. - Welcome to Nowhere

 

If rules are made to be broken, then plans are made to be changed.

If rules are made to be broken, then plans are made to be changed. - Welcome to Nowhere

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

 

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Meaning

Don't persist with a task if the pressure of it is too much for you. The implication being that, if you can't cope, you should leave the work to someone who can.

Origin

This is widely reported as being coined by US President Harry S. Truman. That's almost correct, but in fact Truman was known to have used it at least as early as 1942 - before becoming president. Here's a citation from an Idaho newspaper The Soda Springs Sun, from July that year:

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Quotations Page and Literature Page Forum

 

"The grass is always greener on the other side, until you jump the fence and see the weeds up close."
- Albert Grashuis

Quotations Page and Literature Page Forum

Quotations Page and Literature Page Forum

 

"The lure of adultery can be seen in the old saying: 'The Grass Is Greener On The Other Side Of The Fence.' Yet, the grass is greener where you mow it, fertilize it, water it, and take care of it."
-- Unknown

Quotations Page and Literature Page Forum

The collapse of the Soviet Union: Russia’s imperial agony | The Economist

 

Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story. By Dmitri Trenin. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; 270 pages; $49.95 and £34.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

8 Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year journey Through the Soviet Collapse. By Lawrence Scott Sheets. Crown; 313 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.com

“THE dying process has begun”, wrote Alexander Kugel, a journalist and theatre critic, a few months after the bloody Bolshevik revolution of 1917. “Everything that we see now is just part of the agony. Bolshevism is the death of Russia. And a body the size of Russia cannot die in one hour. It groans.” The agony lasted over 70 years. On December 25th 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, on television, relinquished his duties as the last president of the USSR. The hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin without fanfare. The empire expired with a sigh.

The collapse of the Soviet Union: Russia’s imperial agony | The Economist

China’s economy: Poor by definition | The Economist

 

SINCE 1978 China has liberated more people from poverty than any other country in history, partly because China before 1978 consigned more people to poverty than anywhere else in history.

China’s economy: Poor by definition | The Economist

哲人对人世的告别-三联生活周刊

 

克里奇利说，海德格尔的《存在与时间》又长又难懂，但其基本思想很简单：存在即时间，人活着就是短暂地活在生与死之间。存在即时间，而这个时间是有限的，我们死时它就结束了。因此要想理解本真的人生的意义，就应该朝着死亡谋划我们的生活，即所谓向死而生。自我只有通过面对死亡、在我们的有限性中创造出意义才能成为自己。

哲人对人世的告别-三联生活周刊

From Headline News to Banned Search Topic—China’s Take on Occupy Wall Street - Global Spin - TIME.com

 

Media cycles in China often follow predictable patterns. First a news topic is allowed, even encouraged as a way to teach the public a valuable lesson. But as worries mount over the destabilizing effect of bad news—be it a product-safety scandal or an instance of local corruption—censors step in and a once well-covered subject disappears from the papers. Savvy Chinese media consumers know how to read between the lines. But even China-watchers may have been taken aback by a development in China's financial capital. Shanghaiist, an irreverent independent blog, reported that police in Shanghai had visited bars frequented by expatriates to ask puzzled foreigners whether they were somehow involved with the OWS movement an ocean away. It's unclear what the cops planned to had they happened to corner a Wall Street rally instigator at a Shanghai nightspot. But one thing's quite likely: the incident wouldn't have been given much play in the now spooked state-controlled media.

From Headline News to Banned Search Topic—China’s Take on Occupy Wall Street - Global Spin - TIME.com

Every dog has its day - Idioms - by the Free Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

 

Every dog has its day. and Every dog has his day.

Prov. Everyone gets a chance eventually. Don't worry, you'll get chosen for the team. Every dog has its day. You may become famous someday. Every dog has his day.

Every dog has its day - Idioms - by the Free Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

Philip Pilkington: Exorcising The Inflation Ghost – An Attempt To Cure Our European Compatriots of Their Inflation Phobia Through Regression Therapy « naked capitalism

 

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme

Philip Pilkington: Exorcising The Inflation Ghost – An Attempt To Cure Our European Compatriots of Their Inflation Phobia Through Regression Therapy « naked capitalism

language is tool based on …

 

people not realizing language is a tool, based on conventions, and subject to change

Amid Anger Over Grisly Collision, China Recognizes a Humble Hero - Global Spin - TIME.com

 

Amid Anger Over Grisly Collision, China Recognizes a Humble Hero

Posted by Austin Ramzy Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 6:38 am

65 Comments • Related Topics: Asia, China, , bystanders, car accident, Chen Xianmei, China, China hit-and-run, Foshan, Good Samaritans, heroes, hit-and-run, Wang Yue, Yue Yue

This image from video shows a girl just before she was hit by a van in a market in the Chinese city of Foshan on Oct. 13. (Photo: Reuters)

If there is a bright note to the sad story of Wang Yue, the two-year old who was ignored by more than a dozen passers-by after a hit-and-run collision, it is 57-year-old scrap picker Chen Xianmei, who stopped to help the gravely injured toddler. The incident has prompted a vast outpouring of online anger and soul searching as to how so many people could be so callous towards the suffering of a child.

Wang Yue was hit by a van in hardware market the southeastern city of Foshan on Thursday. The van that ran over her didn't stop, and a second van that also hit the child didn't stop either. Security camera video of the incident shows multiple people walk or drive past the girl on scooters and three-wheel carts.

Chen arrived about 10 minutes after the girl was hit, and can be seen in the footage dropping her bag of recyclables, straining to move the child out of the path of oncoming vehicles and then calling for help. The child's mother, who was hanging up laundry nearby, came rushing to the scene after hearing Chen's calls, which had been ignored by others, according to state media. On Monday night the child's mother posted an online update that said Yue Yue remained in intensive care and could not breathe on her own, but that she had gained some feeling in her limbs. The drivers of both vans have been arrested.

Chinese press reports said Chen had moved to Foshan from a smaller city in Guangdong, and that she spent her mornings working as a cook and collected bottles and cans in the afternoons. In video and photos online Yue Yue's sobbing parents can be seen bowing before their daughter's rescuer, a skinny woman who appears not much bigger than a child herself. In an interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily, Chen sounded flustered at the response her actions have received. The local government gave her a $3,000 reward, and a businessman reportedly offered another $15,000. "I only did a simple thing," she told the newspaper.

But her actions have raised complicated questions. Recently China has seen prominent cases of bystanders ignoring injured people. In Wuhan last month an elderly man who had fallen in a market died after he suffocated from a nosebleed. While a large crowd had gathered, no one had offered to help, and he was only taken to the hospital by family members who arrived more than an hour later, according to the official China Daily. As my colleague Hannah Beech reported, one explanation is that many Chinese fear the liability they might incur, because Good Samaritans have sometimes seen the people they intend to help turn on them. In one famous 2007 case in Nanjing, a young man who helped a woman who had fallen while getting off a bus was later sued. The woman claimed that he was the one who pushed her, and a court ruled that he was partly responsible.

Other explanations include the so-called "bystander effect," in which crowds make people less likely to help injured people. Still others discuss a decline of morality that has shadowed China's dramatic economic reforms. But it is worth noting that such questions have been around since before the People's Republic was founded. In his 1939 work Peasant Life in China, Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong examined how social obligations were determined by the closeness of relationships. Fei "called this a concentric pattern of social relations with positions measured by how close one stood in relation to the actor," Linda Wong wrote in her 1998 book Marginalization and Social Welfare in China. "The more distant the location from the centre, the weaker the claim, so that ultimately one did not have any obligation to people unknown to oneself."

There are direct echoes of that description in Chen's description of events. She told the Southern Metropolis Daily reporter that many of the people she asked for help responded that if it wasn't her child, she shouldn't bother with it. Thankfully, Chen had the decency to ignore that advice.

Amid Anger Over Grisly Collision, China Recognizes a Humble Hero - Global Spin - TIME.com

Supreme Court to Hear Arkansas' Double-Jeopardy Case - TIME

 

Even Americans who know very little about the U.S. Constitution know this much: once a jury decides you are innocent of a crime, the government can't keep hauling you back into court to try your case over again. It's called the prohibition on double jeopardy, and it's in the Bill of Rights because the Founding Fathers thought it was an essential bulwark against tyranny. But like most truisms in American law — that the police have to read you your rights before they question you, that it takes a unanimous verdict to be convicted, or that the police need a warrant to search your house — there are exceptions large enough to drive a prison bus through.

Supreme Court to Hear Arkansas' Double-Jeopardy Case - TIME

Trade with China: And now, protectionism | The Economist

 

THE global economy is sicker than a man with a bellyful of bad oysters. The last thing it needs now is a trade war. Yet on October 11th America’s Senate passed the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act, which would allow any “fundamentally misaligned” currency to be labelled a subsidy subject to countervailing duties. No prizes for guessing which large Asian nation the senators have in mind.

Trade with China: And now, protectionism | The Economist

Frans de Waal Interview: On Empathy and Selfishness - TIME

 

Gordon Gekko got it wrong. In his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, primatologist Frans de Waal uses a variety of studies on empathy in animals to debunk the idea that humans are competitive to the core. He talked to TIME about contagious yawning, why we share and Bernie Madoff. (See photos of Madoff's downfall.)

How do you define empathy?
Empathy is sometimes defined by psychologists as some sort of high-level cognitive feat where you imagine how somebody else feels or how you would feel in their situation. But my definition is more focused on the whole of empathy, and that includes emotions. If you are sad and crying, it's not just that I try to imagine how you feel. But I feel for you, and I feel with you. (Read about what makes us moral.)

You explain in the book that empathy really starts with our bodies: running together, laughing together, yawning together. So yawning really is contagious?
Yeah. Dogs catch yawns from their owners. Chimpanzees yawn [in response to those] that we show them. Yawn contagion is very interesting because it's a very deep bodily connection between humans or between animals. Humans who have problems with empathy, such as autistic children, don't have yawn contagion. It's either because they don't pay attention to the yawns of others or they're not affected by them. (Read about the secrets inside your dog's mind.)

There's an example in the book where you talk about apes sharing food as a demonstration of empathy. What's in it for the apes who already have food — why do they choose to give it away?
In biology, we usually make a sharp distinction between why things evolved and why animals do things. For example, sex evolved for reproduction. But if you ask people why they have sex, reproduction is not always mentioned. So there's a separation between why the behavior evolved and why the actors actually engage in it. The same is true for altruistic tendencies. You share food with your kin. You share food with individuals who may repay the favor. So the sharing behavior evolved for self-interested reasons. But that doesn't mean that the individual actor, at the moment that he does it, is thinking of the potential benefits.

Is it true that women are more empathetic than men?
All mammals have obligatory maternal care. A female who doesn't respond right away to the distress or the coldness or the hunger or the danger of her young ones is going to lose them. She has to be very sensitive to their emotional state. So if that's the basis, and out of that grew other sensitivities to other individuals who were not offspring, then it's very obvious that there should be a gender bias.

It's interesting that you say certain things one might expect to be related to empathy aren't, necessarily — like fairness.
Fairness is something we started investigating in monkeys. We would have two capuchin monkeys side by side working on a very simple task. One would get cucumber pieces, and the other would get grapes. If they both get cucumber, they're perfectly fine. But if you give one of them grapes, the other guy is all of a sudden not happy anymore. Some explanations of fairness are the golden rule: I treat you well and in a fair manner because that's how I want to be treated, which is a very complex explanation. What we see in monkeys is probably much simpler. It's probably more related to resentment.

If you look at young children, that's exactly where they start. But then by thinking about it, we develop a fairness ideal and a norm, where we say it's better in society if things are fairly distributed. Part of our response at the moment to Wall Street and the bonuses of the bankers is still that simple response: What are they getting, compared to what we are getting? So many people have nothing at the moment, and that enhances our sensitivity to it. But it's basically a monkey reaction.

What about people who seem to lack empathy altogether, like psychopaths? You talk about a "mammalian core."
There's a book called Snakes in Suits, which is about psychopaths in business. Madoff would be a good example, probably, and Kenny Lay, the head of Enron. I find that such a striking title because it makes them into reptiles. Empathy is not a reptilian thing. Empathy is a mammalian thing. Psychopaths are capable of taking the perspective of somebody else, but only to take better advantage of you. They're able to play the empathy game, but without the feelings involved. It's like an empty shell. The core of empathy — emotional contagion and being in tune with the feelings of somebody else — seems to be completely lacking. They are like aliens among us.

Do we know why that happens?
We don't know how people end up that way. There is a theory that says people who don't have that emotional connection with others when they're young don't develop an aversion to hurting others. I'm from a family of six boys, so I know what fighting is among siblings. What you learn is that if you're fighting with a younger sibling and you squeeze him too hard, he screams, and you stop. Dogs learn the same thing. When big dogs play with small dogs, they learn to restrain their strength. If you don't learn that, then you keep doing it, and actually you may gain benefits from that. If the screams of somebody else or the crying of somebody else don't have any effect on you, you may look at it as a good strategy of getting things.

Given all the science that tells us about empathy in animals and in ourselves, why do you think the idea persists that at bottom we're competitive backstabbers?
It was established at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when probably it was useful to have a picture of humans as competitive and to base the capitalist system on that image. And in doing so, a lot of political ideologues and economists started to forget that we are also a highly social species. The founder of economics, Adam Smith — to his credit — did realize that if you build a system completely on competitive principles it would not work very well.

What happened a year ago on Wall Street is exactly an example of what Smith was warning [about]. Society is not really made to be a purely competitive operation. And I think we have learned that lesson, but I don't know for how long. The whole argument that nature is red in tooth and claw, and for that reason society ought to be like that, is flawed. Because nature is not like that. If you look at our close relatives, you see animals who survive by cooperating. Yes, there is competition. There is dominance, hierarchy. They sometimes fight. They sometimes even kill each other. But they stick together because they survive together much better than alone.

Frans de Waal Interview: On Empathy and Selfishness - TIME