Don't listen to losers

they may tricked you during a moment of doubt and weakness, but you don't have to stay tricked (source infra)

Get Your . . .  Together | The Reformed Broker: " . . . . The survivalist guys, the bunker guys? Let me let you in on a little secret - they've ALWAYS been the losers. They claim to be "realists" but really they're misanthropes who are unhappy and pray daily to see everyone else dragged down with them. They haven't been right yet. You've ignored them your whole life and you can go back to ignoring them right now. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Vince Shamwow Video

The Schticky Is the Dark Knight Rises of Infomercials | Underwire | Wired.com: ". . . .the Vince Trilogy. Taken together, Offer’s three ads are one of the most complex and compelling narratives of the 21st century. I’m sure you remember his debut with the ShamWow. It’s a portrait of the confidence and energy of youth (and maybe cocaine), with Vince spitting rapid-fire patter into a headset mic, praising German engineering and challenging the cameraman to keep up with his demonstration. He even went so far as to drop the now-infamous “we can’t do this all day” qualifier to the standard but-wait-there’s-more offer, making it seem like you were being an inconvenience to him by buying the product he is trying to sell you. It’s pure pitchman brilliance."

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Lois Lerner denies doing anything wrong, then takes the Fifth!

A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - WSJ.com: "We know the IRS commissioner wasn't telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: "There's absolutely no targeting." We have learned that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she'd planted the question with a friend. We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms. Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications. And Ms. Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011. She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: "Everything comes from the top." We know that Lois Lerner this week announced she'd done nothing wrong, and then took the Fifth."

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Boris Johnson: leaving Europe a shot in the arm for democracy

A real possibility now that Germany and EU getting more desperate, day by day--

Boris Johnson: leaving Europe a shot in the arm for democracy - Telegraph: "The Prime Minister has promised to hold talks to renegotiate the terms of the UK's membership and then put a new deal to the British people in a referendum after the next election. While Mr Cameron has said he wants Britain to remain inside the EU, Mr Johnson said quitting would not be "fatal" for Britain. Speaking to reporters at the Global Investment Conference, Mr Johnson said he remained "narrowly in favour" of staying inside the grouping of 27 member states and supported David Cameron's policy of negotiating a new relationship for Britain in the EU. But he added: "If that fails then yes, obviously, we should be ready to walk away," he said. "We should be ready to leave." The public would welcome a British exit because people would feel they had won back control over their own lives from Brussels, the Mayor claimed."

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Biggest economy in Europe will be the UK by 2050

At first take, I doubted--but it's possible based on the current situation, projections, and demographic trends--

Coming soon: Europe’s biggest economy will be U.K. - Matthew Lynn's London Eye - MarketWatch: " Britain is set to become the richest country in Europe. How is that possible? . . .The reality is that Germany is fated to a decade or more of declining output just like its neighbors. The only escape is a breakup of the single currency — but that would be chaotic for the economy. . . . There is another factor as well. From 2015, Germany will have a sharply declining population. By 2020, it will have 80 million people, according to the Federal Statistical Office. By 2060, that will be down to 64 million people. By contrast by 2050, the U.K. will be home to 80 million people, according to a report last year by the Population Reference Bureau. So on demographics alone, at some point, the U.K. will overtake Germany. . . .

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In Praise of Cheap Labor - Thinking Things Through

Blast from the past--

In Praise of Cheap Labor - Slate Magazine: " . . . as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items. In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty." - Paul Krugman, 1997

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The downloadable gun

The downloadable gun: next firearms frontier - 05/11/2013 | MiamiHerald.com:

"“Guns are a human right that can never be taken away,” Wilson said, “and everything else is just legislative dross."

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a Newtown-based gun industry trade group, says 3-D printing shouldn’t be a public safety concern because it’s easier for criminals to steal guns or buy them on the black market.

The National Rifle Association did not return emails and calls seeking comment. But Vizzard said it will be interesting to see whether the NRA sides with gunmakers, who presumably want people to buy guns rather than make their own, or with those who want to “democratize gun manufacturing.”

The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 says you don’t need a license to make a firearm for personal use, but the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 bans firearms that are invisible to metal detectors or airport X-rays."

(Read more at link above)

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Masters Create Their Own Fields

21st Century Masters Create Their Own Fields | Big Think TV | Big Think: "Mastery is accessible, in fact, much more so today than ever before due to the explosion of the information economy. That is why Greene says the future of mastery, or what he calls "high level intuition," will be very much about "making connections between ideas, between different fields." Or, in the case of Yoky Matsuoka, 21st century masters simply will create their own fields. "

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Consultants Business Booming

It is fashionable to complain that consultants “steal your watch and then tell you the time”, as one book put it. But customers clearly value what the consultants offer. Otherwise, the elite three and the Big Four would not be growing so fast.  (source infra)

The Manhattan office that houses McKinsey & Company does not trumpet the fact in its lobby. At Bain & Company’s recent partner meeting at a Maryland hotel, signs and name-tags carried a discreet logo, but no mention of Bain. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which announced growing revenues in a quiet press release in April, counts as the braggart of the bunch. Read more at The Economist

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The internet, creativity, entreprenuerialism

How the internet is making us poor – Quartz: "But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand." read more at http://qz.com/67323


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China exploitating Latin American natural resources

China's exploitation of Latin American natural resources raises concern | World news | guardian.co.uk: "Amazonian forest cleared in Ecuador, a mountain levelled in Peru, the Cerrado savannah converted to soy fields in Brazil and oil fields under development in Venezuela's Orinoco belt. These recent reports of environmental degradation in Latin America may be thousands of miles apart in different countries and for different products, but they have a common cause: growing Chinese demand for regional commodities." (read more at link above)

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