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VIBES 1.0
VIBES 1.0
5 STORIES
GOING OUT OF MY HEAD (AND INSIDE)
BUSINESSWEEK (2008) 9/22
HELM/ 88
With the economy appearing to head downward, retailers are looking for new ways to get you into the store. This is not retail anthropology where social scientist look at the location of the products, the size of the aisles, and lighting. Rather, it is another avenue.
This firm of dunnhumby inc. works first with current customers. They have improved Macy’s sales by 5% in these difficult times. So what do they do? They crunch data on your credit card transactions.
Starting in the mid 90’s, they started looking at consumer paterns as well as continous repeat business or customer loyalty.
As an example, there was a poor selling loaf of bread and a super market wanted to dump it. However, although the sales could be better, it attracted a customer who would drive long distances to get the bread. Further, it would drive a customer to a different store if the bread was dropped. It is a destination product and thus very important. Decision were made to give it less shelf space, but to keep the loaf of bread.
The firm was also helpful in some in-store promotions. They also bring together, groups of occupations to see what they like in terms of in store products. One group could be certain professionals. Others are skilled craftsman.
Even body types seem to have a correlation. Slimmer folks buy new clothes at the beginning of the season. Heavier people wait until later in the season to see what is popular.
Thus, there is more to gain and this little firm has now partnered with some large firms, because they want to know was is out of their heads.
A SENIOR SEX REVOLUTION
U.S. NEWS 7 WORLD REPORT (9/15)
LYON ET. AL./ 54-55
VIAGARA and related medications have changed sex life of seniors. In other words, the male can get an erection later in life. Further, there are a number of strategies. Those with heart problems are more limited. The statins and other meds push blood pressure down. Viagara push the blood pressure efven further downward and the individual male dies.
For females there are new creams for the vagina that also include antibiotics so that intercourse is not hurtrful. The medical community can also provide a small dose of testosterone that can get the female interested again.
However, there are numourous socialolgoical and psychological inputs that spoil the sex. Even thought the couple is legally married, they bring into the room all the nuns, rabbis, imans, and preachers discussion about the evil of sex. So for two consenting married partners, sex carries baggage. A life time also means that women have been more likely to have been hit on, raped, and felt an obligation to sex. On the other men get raped by gangs of girls who push unfriendly things into their rectum. They could be raped by another male. They had sex too young. They were stripped and whipped over sex.
That needs work as roughly 40% of couples report such problems. Another is that the females supposedly pushes herself a way from the husband and onto the children.
The males can go to Viagara, the pump, caverject (a hypodermic needle filled with A chemical to help erections, but now be out of business.
The female also needs not only that listed above, but some printed erotica. And so sex can be a problem or an an pportunity for every age group. How this effects, bi-sexuals, gays, and transgender is yet to be noted.
WHY THE CRASH?
TIME (2008) 7/29
Serwer and Sloan
Why did Wall Street go bad?
Keynesian economics. (this drives what is called overcapacity.) Thus, there is less multiplier or in plain English, money is passed around more often and it generates more activity and growth when the middle and working poor have money. Supply side means tax cuts for the rich and Keynesian means tax cuts to the middle through at this time infrastructure improvements like falling bridges as well as straight tax cuts especially for small businesses. Supply side believes that money trickles down to the masses when it can also trickle out with free trade and globalization Supply side generally means privatization and deregulation. Keynesian believes in regulation and strategic nationalization outside of the main capitalist infrastructure. In other words, the government should not make cars, toasters, and related.
a) Calm the market b) buy out the bad debt (the funny money) c) provide order and importantly liquidity so that folks will start buying again. Further, hopefully they will save so that more banks do not have funny money. On the global level, the feds print more money to increase liquidity and yet begin slowly to increase the prime rate. Why would another country buy our shrinking dollars, because through globalization they own a lot of the USA and if Yanks go bust so do other countries Further, they can buy our property and there are lots to sell at great prices. And some day, the country can get back on its feet if we have an innovative product that is sold around the world. Take that product and multiply it by the thousands and you have a vital economy like we were heading toward in 2000.
Why Can’t Obama get mad and fight back? Grunwald (40-41)
If he gets too mad and too angry, he looks like a Black Militant and scares away voters. He has to use humor when McCain attacks him at their first debate. Even though history appears to be on Obama’s side, in the last two weeks weeks, McCain has completely reinvented himself into a populist Keynesian. Thus, Obama must keep attaching McCain to Bush. Even thought the first debate is on foreign policy, Obama must keep trying to move the conversation back to the economy. Money is on McCain. Obama is a great if not fantastic orator, but McCain is a debater. He talks fast and can raise his emotions right to the edge of outright anger and yet pull it off.
THE WEEK (2008) 9/26
HEALTH AND SCIENCE/21
There is a fingerprint beneath the regular finger print. You can wipe off finger prints, however if the criminal has touch metallic sources, he can still cause a finger print.
HACKERS (44-45)
Hackers have an annual convention where they trade secrets and new technology. There and good and bad hackers, but they do exist and they fit the stereotype of very bright and inward oriented types.
The convention is filled with armed FBI, CIA and other law enforcement to catch the bad hackers. However, there are even more police there that are dressed like hackers. So what is going on. Yes, they will arrest a few hackers. IN REALITY, THEY WANT TO RECRUIT THEM TO HELP FIGHT OTHER HACKERS AND WILL PAY GOOD MONEY TO GET THEM.
Meyer, D (2008). Why we hate us: American discontent in the new millennium New York: Crown Publishers, 271 pages.
Dick Meyer formerly of CBS and now NPR suggests that we have come to the point where we can understand that we live in a fake world. As an example, even 100 years ago, when we entered a small town, it had authentic churches, restaurants, and public places.
Today, a real small town may have empty stores, a gas station-convenience store and a few cars. Things may center on the school and the bar. Nope. That’s too real so we go to a Disneyfied small town that is exactly perfect that was built in 2002 to “look” like a small town that is filled with phony nostalgia from the 40’s and 50’s.
We are hyper-individuated, lonely, and angry at the blue or red state people. Through numerous examples of restaurants looking like ships to retail shopping malls with big plastic animals in the back. Friendship has been replaced by friendliness. Small towns have few people and most urban centers stretch through suburbs, exurbs and endless shopping malls.
All can be easily torn down for a theme park. Neighbors move in an out and gated communities try to recreate something that reminds one of a backdrop from an old 70’s show. Everything is for sale and most of us have gotten lost in the Land of fake.
We search for loneliness by craving privacy to watch the ever present omni media. Here personalities come into our homes and we feel like they have somehow become part of us. When beloved sitcom goes off the air, we are brought to tears.
Meyer notes that we know the name of the Unknown Soldier. Americans love title inflation to their name and credit cards accounts where one lives from paycheck to paycheck. We can have it all on omni media and our choice to watch our favorite channels guides us in our consumption. Our gang of membership is the folks on television or a talk internet chat line. The best watch to wear is authentically inauthentic. It looks like a Rolex and it cost 90% less.
Omni media is followed by omni marketing. Everywhere we go (where there is some energy source) marketing follows. Products and service are built into the story line or in the background of a show. A 22 minute half hour is filled with 8 minutes of advertising.
Meyers could have drawn upon such sources as early as Townies discussion of gesellschaft to the Putney’s’ Normal Neurosis and the work on Globalization of Nothing. However, he suggests that you prepare yourself in as many ways as possible for what Sir Isaiah Berlin describes as PLURALISM. That means that you tolerate but not necessarily like other people and other life styles. Rather, you acknowledge them. Second, is AUTHENTICITY. As best you can and within the limits of the law, you become more honest. All of this does not mean that the world makes dramatic changes, because it probably won’t, but you can enjoy the world. You may do it with people who you truly like if it is just a few and be more honest with yourself.
You may enjoy bowling alone, or for that matter deciding that bowling is not for you and that on your day off, you do something that might take you away into some else’s life or find some where else that is the nearest faraway place.
This is a good read but it overlooks areas in the field of sociology of alienation that is not researched in this area. However, on balance, the details and the side panels of insight make the work valuable.
Prof. Joel Snell Kirkwood College CLEANERCOAL
CLEANER COAL NBC/ 11/18/ 2008 5:30 CST.
BRIAN WILLIAMS AND ANN COLE
At the moment clean coal is an oxymoron. Coal is so abundant and so necessary, but it is not clean. However, way down the road is the hope for sequestration where the particulates and the coal come out of the chimney and head into the ground. It is expensive, but one can not over look its potential. Coal is abundant. Jobs related to coal can not be outsourced. Half of the USA’s energy comes from coal. There are roughly 108 electoral votes that come from coal. So, it was a pleasant surprise when NBC reported that both East and West Germany have a new plant next to some traditional plants that burn…clean coal.
Brian Williams introduced the story, but the lead researcher and reporter Anne Thompson went to a German plant that is already in operation. Produced by Vattenfall Energy, a private/public company, they have the plant in place and it is operational! The cost to the consumer is 50% greater than regular coal. That means that if you spend 1 dollar before, you now spend 1 dollar and 50 cents now. However, the trade off is worth the investment for a couple of reasons. It takes a huge energy source that won’t run out and put us back to the hunting and gathering societies and it does so at less the cost then most cap and trade programs. Even China can afford something like this as they put up a coal plant that is new up about 3 or 4 a week. Incidentally, as the construction process with technological improvements continue, the 50% cost could be reduced.
Coal is burned with oxygen and #8212 bio chemicals. The energy that is so precious and needed to provide for electricity and electric cars of the future, the heat and waste head for two major cylinders. These two cylinders can then be moved some 200 miles away into a bomb resistant cavity. There it is stored in the ground and won’t leach into underground water reservoirs.
Further, there is ash that can be used in some forms of construction. What all this suggests is that as plants are created, this strategy or another could make a good energy system. This does not mean that our country should spend all of its money on this. Numerous wind mills and solar are in the works as well as nuclear and improved insulation in housing.
There have been a couple of books that envision a country that suddenly finds that fossil fuels has gone beyond Hobart’s peak and it is very expensive and countries continue to fight over it. In the mean time, your neighborhood is filled with houses that have started to grow food in both the front and back yards. Just down the street in one house you can barter for food and other items. That takes the place of the old corner street market. Regardless, coal is with us. Coal is dirty but abundant. We need energy and this new technology might bring the coal people with some environmentalists. It is also possible to dig coal and then return the land in an attractive way to bring back the green.
Not to be utopian, but even when gas is a couple of dollars or five or six dollars, we are running out of fossil fuel. Further, there will or should be more people and regular energy sources appear to be on a course toward scarcity. SEXLIES, ANDMORTGAGEDEALS
SEX, LIES, AND MORTGAGE DEALS BUSINESS WEEK (2008) 11/24
HOVENISIAN/71-74
BUSINESS WEEK describes part of the food chain of the sub prime housing loans market. If you go back just a few years ago, the USA was emerging as the business model for other countries. The free market, without regulators could win the world. This form of libertarian capitalism is about 180 degrees opposite of command economies. That means those old names like fascism and communism. Economic freedom was full blown and it has many supporters yet today even after the Fed. Chairman Allan Greenspan a follower of supply side, regulatory free system acknowledged that it now no longer works. It also follows the Crash of 08’ that is October, 6 2008 when Lehman brothers went down the toilet.
We seem to be going now toward the middle of the two extremes, but that is another story. The path to the USA economic system was unregulated low interest rate economic exchange. For the financial community, the first system to go, the path of disaster was the folks who trade financial commercial paper. It starts with mortgage brokers, then to wholesalers, to lenders and then securities operators.
The first party is continually trying to get people to buy a loan for almost anything but mainly houses. The sub prime market first started as a way to get low income folks into a nicer neighborhood. However, there were also others who wanted to get cheap loans called Arms. The first few years are great then payment balloons to a huge amount. There were investors, house flippers, and others who got in the sub-prime business.
Once the mortgage contract is sold or rented, then that money goes to a wholesaler who brings together a ton of loans and sells them to lenders that are generally big time. Once the lenders get the money they “bundled” it into commercial paper like CDO’s and other esoteric money schemes. Soon all of this was rated usually AAA by lax raters.
To add to this, and to make the whole thing even slimy, young women who sold sex with the mortgages called mortgage sluts worked extremely hard to get lenders to buy their funny money.
BUSINESS WEEK traces one young lady into how she got into the business with a nice title and made close to a million a year encouraging mainly male lenders to buy her money.
As time went on and the early regulations faded, it was a full blown open scandal waiting to fail and be discovered. The banking business had been corrupted by intermediary parties.
The outcome is that as this is being written, the Dow has gone below it all time bottom of around 8,000 and a financial giant lost 25% of it value in one day. Further, the American Auto companies may go bankrupt.
There is another financial tsunami coming our way as the hedge funds begin to go under. All of this puts a heavy strain on the economy and it may take a year or years to climb out of this. Further, many other countries have invested in America by buying our dollars or buying property here. So if they begin to not trust that Yanks can get their house in order they dump their dollars and it makes it even harder for us to get at growing again. Now that all of that has been said, that does not mean America will go under. It is just too big and under pressure of needing a new way of doing things economically, we will grow again.
In the mean time, people will lose their money and their dignity and that makes it ripe for a social movement to emerge that wants revolution with simple solutions. Don’t buy it. Generally, you trade one bad situation for another.
If you have read of the Crash of 29’ you will discover that President Roosevelt had numerous schemes to keep people busy and to keep the unemployment rate at around 6%. FDR got us through the Depression, but it was World War II that got us out of it. Huge amounts of money never spent like that before went into building weapons and fighting a war that we won. Then, most of our allies and enemies were in shambles and we were not in such bad shape. So by 1955, we had half of the world’s GDP.
If we can get our act together and start building, we may come out of this.
WHYWOMENARECHEATING
WHY WOMEN ARE CHEATING
THE WEEK (2008) 11/14
24/
NEW YORKTIMES REPORTS those women under 35 are more likely to cheat than ever before. In the past decade, the infidelity rate has gone from 5% to 15%. For men it remains at 28%. On the other hand, that means a lot of both sexes are remaining faithful. The reason for the increase among women is the work place and business travel. Further, women have gotten on sex chat lines and some of those chats have lead to actual sex.
24/ Placebos still work. They are given out more and more because patients want a pill. Some of the placebos are not just sugar pills but have vitamins in them or a mild pain reliever.
24/ Cold germs are every where and resistance to them is harder for those under stress and or have immune system problems. Further, cold germs mutate very quickly and are very adaptative.
24/ early drug users; especially those who have used cocaine are more likely to have heart trouble earlier in life.
26/ a new book on JOHN LENNON by Phillip Norman indicate that he had a very harsh early life and spent the rest of his life bullying others including his band mates. He was a musical genius, but his personal life was a disaster. Norman tries to mute it, but between the lines, the Beatles without John were much mellower. Each has so far lived out their lives without the buzz that Lennon caused. Further, he was a mean drunk. So we give our regards to Paul and Ring, and George.
42/ Here are some new psychology sites to find out more about you.
BUSINESS WEEK (2008) 11/10/ STEAD/ 14
Short term stimuli include a tax rebate, followed by unemployment insurance, raising food stamps payments, followed by infrastructure improvement. Tax cuts to corporations do not generate enough return.
IS AMERICA A LAND OF A FREE MARKET ECONOMY?
PORTER/40 The USA is #20. The first 19, 10 are social democracies.
CROCKETT/ 58
The device is about $100 plus a small service fee will make your cell phone into a large Tower for a long, long distance.
GINCRICH/ 59
It is time to scrap adolescence. It has failed. Teens are more likely than ever to be involved in sex and drugs. So, we go back to the 1800’s. When a child turns into An adult at 13, that’s it. They go to work and study. What ever the job, they are paid. They also must go to school, but it will take longer. If they don’t show up for work then they are docked and the family knows about it. Further, if they show up to work on drugs, they are sent home.
School would take longer but the teen is entangled in the world or work with responsibilities. They will no longer be housed all day in a school building. Gingrich Suggest that they work on the internet. SOCIALVIBES suggests that they go to school a portion of each week. To cut gasoline for buses and cars, teens go to school 2 days a week and work three. Thus, schools can have double the number of students. Work is provided by corporations and the community. Pay is low but steady. It changes the idol rich as well as the poor trapped in bad schools. Work and school could last into their 20’s where they then attend college…especially community colleges with their numerous support systems as well as delivery systems.
If you drop out of school, then you spend more time at work. Further, you are more closely watched.
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