From http://www.ukcia.org/research/...:

Alcohol impaired performance relative to placebo but subjects did not perceive it. THC did not impair driving performance yet the subjects thought it had.

Alcohol makes you more aggressively confident, pot makes you more careful of your driving.

Think about musicians though. It's certainly possible to execute very precise muscle movements with precision and control while stoned. Why shouldn't you be able to drive?

How many Domino's Pizza delivery drivers drive while stoned? You get good at it.

Quoting from http://www.milkeninstitute.org...:

The total value of housing units in the United
States amounts to $19.3 trillion, with $10.6 trillion
in mortgage debt and the remaining $8.7 trillion
representing equity in those units as of June 2008.

Of the approximately 80 million houses in the
United States, 27 million are paid off, while the
remaining 53 million have mortgages. Of those
households with mortgages, 5 million (or 9 percent)
were behind in their payments and roughly 3
percent were in foreclosure as of mid-2008.

So, say 10% of $10.6 trillion was at risk of default, or $1 trillion.

The notional amount of CDS
increased from less than $1 trillion in 2001 to slightly
more than $62 trillion in 2007, before declining to
$47 trillion on October 31, 2008.

So the derivative market inflated the real value of the mortgages by about a factor of 6, and then magnified the size of the possible default problem by a factor of 15.

I'm reminded of a sentence from John Lanchester's book, I.O.U.:

"Even once it's explained, however, it still seems wholly contrary to common sense that the market for products that derive from real things should be unimaginably vaster than the market for the things themselves."

Of course not, the prisoner's dilemma is a crude model, and those who take it as gospel are mistaking the map for the territory, practicing bad science.

You believe? So you're relying on faith? You're telling a story that matches your preconceived notions, and waving your hands a lot?

Capitalism has outlived its usefulness, time to move on. I suggest Libertarian socialism. Start with a basic guaranteed income for all who want it. Fund it with money creation. The private sector creates on the order of 10 times more money than government; there is plenty of room for government fiscal policy (funded by the Fed, say, at zero cost) to reward altruistic behavior.

Hamilton's rule: rB > C. If government makes the Cost negative, you get rewarded for altruism. Even if you are not related to the Beneficiary.

We choose to have a duty. Government protects "unalienable rights." Because we want to.

Like the rules of the prisoner's dilemma happen in nature.

Did you know that worldwide OTC derivatives total $710 trillion, according to the Bank for Internatiional Settlements?

The private sector created some $76 trillion in one year alone.

There is plenty of room for the government to create money to spend on projects the private sector considers too long-term to invest in. Government debt is a complete distraction. There is an artificial scarcity of money.

We should be spending money on research. Using economics as an excuse not to do research is silly, since the private sector wouldn't exist without money creation and debt being rolled over or forgiven.

"Science is not magic"

Remember Clarke's three laws?

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that ... something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Thermodynamics doesn't apply at large scales. Relativity doesn't necessarily conserve energy, for example; where does the energy from red-shifted photons go?

Also, thermodynamics admits no scale effects. But scale effects are all over. Emergence is an example of a scale effect.

Dark energy also violates energy conservation.

The limits of thermodynamics apply only within a very limited physical range. Steam engines, mostly.

The mortgages themselves weren't the problem. The problem was the inflation of the mortgages into many times their original value, using financial derivatives and insurance. Because the derivatives were rated AAA, shadow banks didn't take out enough insurance. And insurance companies didn't really insure the derivatives, because they were rated so high they couldn't fail.

Then a few RMBSes failed, and market groupthink took over. Suddenly no one wanted these derivatives, not because they had no value, but because the market became paranoid and emotionally panicked. No private party wanted to roll over funding using the derivatives as collateral anymore. The private parties all wanted T-bills, because they were much much safer.

The government stepped in to take the instruments off the banks' balance sheets.

The government didn't make banks create financial derivatives. The government didn't rate those derivatives AAA. The government didn't fail to insure them adequately. In fact, the government became the insurer when the ostensible insurers (i.e., AIG) failed.

Righties like to quote Kenneth Rogoff. Here's a quote from him:

Without question the best and most effective approach to the problem would have been to bail
out the subprime homeowners directly, forcing banks to take losses but keeping them manageable.
For an investment of perhaps a few hundred billion dollars, the US Treasury could have saved
itself from a financial crisis whose cumulative cost, counting lost output, already runs into many,
many trillions of dollars. Instead of âoesaving Wall Street,â a subprime bailout would have been
targeted, almost by definition, at lower-income households. But unfortunately, this approach too
would have been politically impossible prior to the crisis.

Why don't righties quote that passage from Rogoff? Why wasn't bailing out individuals politically feasible? Because of the ignorance of the Tea Party, that's why.

Yes. But market forces block most implementations, because ignorant salespeople gotta get paid first. Engineers who might want to work on these things have to code intrusive sound popup ads so some stupid boss can go to a country club. He can pay for bodyguards, he makes more money from finance than r&d.

To get faster development, give everyone a choice of working on their own ideas, or going into the market. Hold challenges to stimulate the type of disruptive thinking that came up with, say, graphene, and how to overcome remaining barriers to ease of production or use. Entrepreneurial private firms can compete too, or do what they do today, unmolested.

We should pursue policies that address terrorism at its root causes, instead of creating hardships for people and animals by closing borders.

As a Border Patrol guard near Nogales told me: " The only people that are going to bother you are Border Patrol agents."

I lived in the country, with a troupe of turkeys released into the wild by some neighbors. They kept me company, visiting me each day. They were curious, intelligent creatures.