Yes, bullshit, like any kind of manure, is good fertilizer for the growth of the new. 

Frankfurt explores why there’s been an explosion in bullshit in recent decades in his essay. My own simple explanation is that capacity to store, transmit and process information has expanded far faster than our capacity to generate it. Bullshit is almost like a placeholder for the real thing, like fake datasets used to test the development of a software system before it can be populated with real data. Certain chicken-and-egg relationship there.

That’s the system-theoretic explanation (at global level, variety of composite system exceeds dimensionality of data circulating in it, necessitating the production of bullshit to bootstrap the system). At the social and cultural level, bullshit is the currency of non-production, which is coincidentally high when a system is being displaced by a new one, since lots of people are struggling to transition. 

One way to think of this is that impending vast changes ephemaralize the old before they replace them. So the signal of the old becomes the test-bullshit of the new.

by VENKAT at www.ribbonfarm.com

and this too,

I’m afraid your definition of “Information” is bullshit.
Data can never be compared with reality — data can only be compared with other data.

Do you have a proposed alt definition?

How about a nice recursive definition:
“Data whose truth value survives comparison with all other known information.”

Great Quote of a Great Quote

“Their position reminds me of the argument put forward by the philosopher Berkeley, who argued against empiricism by noting that reliance on scientific observation is flawed since the link between observations and conclusions is intangible and is thus immeasurable.”

From A VALUABLE REPUTATION at The New Yorker

Eve Online by an Economist

First of course is the large number of people who find it appealing to spend significant amounts of leisure time in a realm designed to be ruthless and savage. Don’t they get enough of that at their day jobs?

Yanis Varoufakis: War Spikes in the Eve Online Universe – A Political Economist’s Account

This is why the Chinese Really, Really, Really want to stamp out Bitcoin

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/serious-chinas-shadow-bankingwealth-management-products-problem.html

Great Quotes

Until recently, the shenanigans of clueless advertisers only interested those who subscribed to AdWeek. The last few decades, however, have seen the wholesale collapse of virtually every mainstream public institution. A 50 percent divorce rate and an average marriage length of two years has all but destroyed the nuclear family. Involvement in religious organizations – and belief in God – is way down, thanks largely to sex scandals in both Catholic and Christian fundamentalist churches. The public education system has been gutted by two decades of Reagan-Bush-Clinton budget slashing. Corporate consolidation and the demise of investigative journalism has led to widespread distrust of the news media. The emergence of a two-party political system featuring no significant differences between the two “choices” has reduced voter participation and led to unprecedented cynicism about government. Many branches of popular culture – movies, architecture, modern art, rock music and theater – are widely viewed as moribund and irrelevant to people’s everyday lives. 

God is dead, rock stars don’t matter, movies suck. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a New Yorker or an Alabaman, into tongue piercing or the local militia, married or single, straight or gay. Having destroyed all their ideological competitors, corporations are the last remaining institutions to offer strong identities. The choice between Democrats and Republicans is infinitely less important to your quotidian life than the one between Apple and Microsoft. Everyone knows that the real president isn’t Bill Clinton – it’s Bill Gates.

http://rall.com/1994/11/05/marketing-madness-a-postmortem-for-generation-x

Jefferson talks about this. He says, you know, “That which the government is allowed to do but you are not, this is a tyranny.”

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA&feature=youtu.be&t=16m19s

The only safe route into the future seems to be to already have a lot of money.

Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality

Iced Coffee

My wife has recently taken to iced coffee.  She has come a long way from the girl I first met. After many years of constant exposure and my chipping away at her walls, she finally succumbed to Juan Valdez and his ilk.   I was thrilled.

But I didn't think this through very well.  Whenever someone accepts something into their lives, they change it, make it part of themselves, mold it into their being.  We see this every so often where some commercial product gets used in ways other than what was intended.  My wife took coffee and started molding halfway through the first cup.

I grew up in Miami.  Espresso is practically a religion there.  You stop at a gas station in North Miami and get a coffee, you are essentially getting a sextuple espresso in a twelve ounce cup.  Maybe this is why people in Miami are crazy.  I have never really understood espresso but I have always accepted its place in the coffee kingdom.  I suspect the smell of it was wafting through the maternity ward when I was born, drifting off the lips of the nurses, swishing around the belly of my childhood doctor whose thick Spanish accent was only made more incomprehensible by the speed with which he spoke.  Was there a drought in South America forcing the indigenous populations to use less aqua?  Were their cups too small?  Its like vodka to Russians but instead of getting slower you get faster and talk like you are about to be shot . . . which in Miami might actually be the case.  It would be an interesting study - Of the Relationship Between Espresso Consumption and Violence.  Could explain a-lot about our cousins to the south.

But I digress.  Since we have established coffee and espresso have something in common, namely coffee, lets discuss what else they have in common.  THEY ARE BOTH FUCKING HOT!!!  The first time my wife and I ordered coffee together at one of the innumerable Dunkin' Donuts near our home, and she told me to order an iced latte with cream, a calm silence came over me.  A cage crept open inside of the vast untraveled regions of my being and something shot out.   It was the equivalence of the destruction of Alderan to a Jedi, a great disturbance in the force.  Now I am no Jedi but I know 'iced latte with cream' is a god damned abomination.

The Cremora appeared on our shopping list.  For those of you who have never read the ingredients of this 'non dairy creamer' let me illuminate you; dairy is the least of your worries.  The reason it tastes so good is because it is the equivalent of antifreeze to pets.  Of the eleven ingredients, I can only properly pronounce four of them.  I caved.  In marriage you carefully pick your battles.  But the medium sized canister was not enough, no, she was piling this stuff into her mug by the mug full.  We graduated to the tub sized version, the full gallon equivalent of a gallon of milk. 

Don't get me wrong, there are exceptional circumstances where iced coffee is palatable.  In the south there is no such thing as naturally cold coffee, maybe in the desert at night, but in Florida it just never naturally happens.  You might drink it at room temperature like when you are running late, get in the car, and the only option is yesterdays Star Bucks cup in the holder.   But in Florida it never gets cold enough to drink an accidentally cold cup of coffee.  Which raises an interesting question, why don't people in hot climates drink cold coffee as a rule?  If you go to Arabia do they offer you an iced Latte?  Fuck No!  In mexico do they offer you cool cappuccino?  I think not.  I know why people living in both the hottest and coldest places on earth drink hot coffee . . . because that's the way it's supposed to be consumed! 

Will coffee brew in a cold pot?  Probably not.  Can you dump instant coffee into cold water and watch it separate?  Nope.  When you go to Pizza Hut, do you order cold pizza?  Uncooked pizza?  Do they charge a premium for cooking the pizza then freezing it?  THE WHY THE HELL DO WE PAY MORE FOR HOT BEVERAGES SERVED COLD?

I bought one of those Contigo cups for my wife this Christmas to replace the one she lost.  Her first cup of coffee, 'This shit will not cool down, it's too hot to drink.'  Now I have a nice new Contigo cup.  Forget the not spilling aspect of the device, or the 'get run over by a tank and not break' feature, or, most importantly, the 'keep shit hot' component!  To her  it keeps the coffee too hot.  And then this morning, she poured fresh, steaming coffee from my brand new Stainless Steel Double Wall French Coffee Press into an old plastic cup (that aint BPA free baby) and placed it into the snow on our patio.

I now understand the plight of the Templars, walking off into mythology, building small churches in Scotland branded with gibberish.  I feel the fear of the hermit, rereading the lost books of the bible and burying them in the sand.  The world is a meat grinder.  That steak - just ground beef, that prime rib - ground beef now.  That sapphire - dust.  I am so sorry Juan Valdez, I had no idea.

From now on when my wife requests iced coffee, I will no longer respond.  She must ask for Juan's Tears and I will happily comply.

Morality Has Left The Building

Whistleblower who revealed CIA torture sentenced to prison

State Department whistleblower has emails hacked and deleted

And,

What’s more, he adds, the NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. 

“People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/02/what-does-surveillance-state-look-like.html#w7CHbSv0lBUW3aeW.99

Great Quotes

“When exposing crimes becomes a criminal act, you are ruled by criminals.”

the group Anonymous

". . economics cannot be separated from the political and social system within which it is embedded."

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

"At some point you need to ask: stock market crash? What stock market? How is it still really a stock market if it hinges to such a large extent on the Fed pumping money into Wall Street banks? At the very least, you might question if the S&P still reflects an actual market at all, if that market is supposed to reflect what goes on in the economy, and obviously doesn’t. You might want to ask what purpose such a largely illusionary stock market has, what its use is within the larger economy. And while you’re at it, you might also want to answer what use the financial system as a whole is to the real economy, if all it does is squeeze money out of it."

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/ilargi-deflation-a-stock-market-crash-and-then-christmas.html

It has been a stunning metamorphosis: The peak of the bubble, the apogee of all the craziness that was maligned and ridiculed, has become, abracadabra, a target for the housing “recovery.” The “healing process” won’t be complete until the prior bubble in home values has been outdone around the country. This is the level of insanity to which the Fed has driven this country.

 http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2013/12/31/cracks-forming-in-housing-bubble-ii-but-this-time-its-differ.html