May
10th
Fri
10th
The 30 most beautiful nature photography
Some of the most astonishing nature photos …
Source: (ArchitectureArtDesigns)
Mar
13th
Wed
13th
To put it another way, governments set up a system that in effect treated bankers as naughty children or ravenous puppies who could not be trusted not to eat too much of the dangerously fattening stuff - and regulators were to be the health conscious parents.
The perhaps predictable result is that the bankers lived up to the low expectations of their common sense, and devised ever more clever ways to raid the biscuit tin without being seen. And the regulators turned out to be the worst kind of parents: ignorant of what was really happening in the world; prescriptive in all the wrong ways.
Under the Basel system, regulators ordained - for example - that banks could lend more relative to their capital if they were providing mortgages to house buyers than they could if they were lending to a giant multinational company: regulators deemed it was less risky for a bank to provide you with a mortgage than to lend to Tesco.
Or to put it in the appropriate jargon, the risk weighting for mortgages was - and is - much lower than for corporate loans.
Feb
10th
Sun
10th
In German law, the owner of a family business who passes it on to the next generation can avoid paying inheritance tax if, during their tenure, they have increased employment and thereby benefited the economy.
Dec
20th
Thu
20th
Foldable us.
When Keiji Zhu wanted a good gift for a friend, he didn’t go to the store. He set out on a mission: to create cute, 3D replicas of his buddies from a single sheet of paper.
Foldable.me came to life via a Kickstarter project last April, and the interactive website is now spreading miniature humans through the mail. Here’s what most of Kickstarter HQ looks like in 2-inch-tall form.
Dec
18th
Tue
18th
The poverty trap in graph form
Oct
14th
Sun
14th
Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them. Perhaps later they step back and notice they’ve found an idea in everyone else’s blind spot, and from that point make a deliberate effort to stay there. [3] But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the innovation is unconscious.
Sep
16th
Sun
16th
Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old–generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time.
Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that EVERYONE will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability SOMEONE will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This docs not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral drawn by the Fool: “Don’t relinquish power, don’t give away your lands.” But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it. It is contained in the story, which, after all, he made up, or altered to suit his purposes. It is: “Give away your lands if you want to, but don’t expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won’t gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live FOR OTHERS, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.” Obviously neither of these conclusions could have been pleasing to Tolstoy. The first of them expresses the ordinary, belly-to-earth selfishness from which he was genuinely trying to escape. The other conflicts with his desire to eat his cake and have it–that is, to destroy his own egoism and by so doing to gain eternal life. Of course, LEAR is not a sermon in favour of altruism. It merely points out the results of practising self-denial for selfish reasons. Shakespeare had a considerable streak of worldliness in him, and if he had been forced to take sides in his own play, his sympathies would probably have lain with the Fool. But at least he could see the whole issue and treat it at the level of tragedy. Vice is punished, but virtue is not rewarded. The morality of Shakespeare’s later tragedies is not religious in the ordinary sense, and certainly is not Christian. Only two of them, HAMLET and OTHELLO, are supposedly occurring inside the Christian era, and even in those, apart from the antics of the ghost in HAMLET, there is no indication of a “next world” where everything is to be put right. All of these tragedies start out with the humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living, and that Man is a noble animal–a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share.
