One problem with many “conservative” critiques of media messages is that they grapple too much with the content of what is being sent. It is clear that most media messages utilizing sexual imagery, for example, exist simply to sell products, and once understood in this light the idea of trying to figure out whether this or that message is true or good for you becomes an exercise in silliness. It becomes clear that it is a waste of time to be receiving those messages in the first place. That is, it is typically much more useful to interpret a message in a “class ontogenic” sense - that is, to understand how it came about or why it is in your space in terms of its membership in a broader group of messages, and as a policy measure what simple action(s) to take to prevent or replace them in the future if an analysis of their origination makes it clear that they probably are not going to add to your long-term well-being.

In a commercial sense, most people have little of true value to offer.

Fumbled Mumblings has an interesting post on mutual funds. I know little about them, and have tried to focus investment on areas of which I have some relative understanding. (For example, I have avoided investing in real estate because I don’t understand the market forces affecting real estate prices, rental income, and so on. I will consider it as an investment in standard of living, and on that I have some idea of what would be a better “investment” for myself.) I’m in a relatively unique position of being able to invest in something I understand better than probably anyone else in the entire world, and so having a relatively good idea of whether it’s a good investment or not. Most people aren’t in that sort of position, but most people do have expertise in some area or another, that would probably allow them to better understand or read an industry and spot potential. When I was about 11 years old, I remember making a list of companies I would invest in if I had capital - because I was a relative expert in computers and so on. If a venture capitalist had invested in Anthony Holdings Corp. back then, he would have made a very good investment. The other thing to keep in mind is the concept of company “fundamentals” (associated with what I have called “real wealth”). If you think of markets as Mel Gibson-not-on-medication, you will avoid rapid oscillations of feeling good or bad about the fundamental processes occurring behind the scenes - if you in fact understand how those companies work, where their growth is going to come from, and so on.

I noticed that GMail has an Offline feature in their “Labs” (experimental features that may change or not be completed). If you use GMail, you can enable by logging into your GMail account, clicking Settings, Labs, and then select to Enable the Offline feature. You can then click the Offline link in your inbox to switch to the offline mode.

This must be one of the biggest disadvantages to “online” e-mail programs (such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and so on) for a large number of people. If GMail is able to seemlessly integrate offline and online modes, they should be able to significantly increase the competitiveness of their e-mail.

I’m now starting a 21 Day No-Complaint Experiment (go 21 days without complaining, start back at 0 if you notice you complain). In discussing his own 21 day experiment, Tim Ferriss offers the following definition:

I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem. I later added the usual 4-letter words and other common profanity as complaint qualifiers, which forced me to reword, thus forcing awareness and more precise thinking.

Taking something like a negative description and adding the “next steps to fix the problem” is a sort of process that can be generalized to any time you feel fear, frustration, or negative emotions. Negative emotions are (can be) useful, because they can tell you about important information in your environment. The key often is to turn them into a “How to …?” sort of question (next steps to fix the problem). For example, if you start feeling frustration at not accomplishing a task, if you immediately take that as a cue to ask “How could I do this more quickly and easily? What assumption am I making here that might not be true?” and so on, the frustration becomes useful instead of just “negative”.

(I find I have some resistance to “How to …” questions, because if I’m used to getting a certain result (usually maintained with a no-action question like “Why do I always get this result?!”) and then I move to a “How to …” question (like “How do I get a different result in this situation? What exactly could I do differently to get a different result?”), the possibility of getting a good answer stands as a certain kind of threat to things that have been less than optimal but in a way comfortable.)

After doing this for 4 months, Ferriss noted that his “lazier thinking evolved from counterproductive commiserating to reflexive systems thinking. Each description of a problem forced me to ask and answer: What policy can I create to avoid this in the future?”

Here we go … Day 0.

Each time the fish strike the seabed, for instance, they push off with their fins and expel water from tiny gill openings to jet themselves forward. That, and an off-centered tail, causes them to bounce around in a bizarre, chaotic manner.

Here.

When I read article titles like this (”45 percent of world’s wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO”), I wonder what these people mean by “wealth”. For example, people in a neighbourhood (say 50 people) get together and decide to pass a house back and forth between them, ratcheting up the value of the house by $50,000 each time. “Pretty soon,” reason the neighbours, “all our houses will be worth millions more!” Multiply $1,000,000 by 50 houses, and you have “created” $50M in wealth. I think the destruction of this sort of wealth is what the person quoted above is referring to.

I think a more useful definition of wealth would refer to something tangible. I have an orchard, and it reliably produces a large bounty of fruit - so I might have peach wealth. Or I have a nice home in a good part of the world, so I have habitation wealth. And so on.

For the most part, what hasn’t happened is the destruction of this sort of real wealth (yet, anyway). What has happened is the destruction of fake wealth - wealth that never really existed in the first place, but that some people thought existed.

Theoretical change is often achieved through the reinterpretation of ambiguous data that people often didn’t realize was ambiguous.

Probably the most important things in the world are the boring ones. Slow, plodding, everyday factors that in the end make the real difference. Demographics is foremost of these. It is clear from trends - with a little bit of common-sense extrapolation - that the world population is about to enter a free-fall.*

* ‘about’ here means within the next 50 years

While people are still going on about the dangers of the Earth having more people, population decrease is already happening in “first-world” countries - buoyed only by large amounts of immigration. Canada is a good example. It imports nearly 1% of its population every year, causing a dramatic change in the cultural and ethnic make up of the country. The reasons for this government policy are probably fairly complex, but one argument for it is that a rapidly decreasing population will cause economic hardship. If indeed the whole world starts to experience population loss, this strategy will probably become less and less tenable, regardless of the merits of arguments for it.

We’ve been learning how to deal with population growth for some time, but the Western world hasn’t seen sustained population decrease for a long, long time. Significant population growth in the world started around 1750, and for the previous 3,000 years it seems that human population growth was occurring more slowly. Before that, it seems population levels were relatively stationary.

So what is more dangerous - continued population increase or population decrease? This question doesn’t seem to be debated that often, so the implicit answer would be “population increase”. How do we know that, however?

Can someone name 5 prominent female directors?

Can someone name 5 “good” movies made by female directors?

This post over on Double Blind and the ensuing comments got me thinking about who my favourite directors are. Here are 5 I like, off the top of my head. (I should mention that there are many films by these directors that I don’t like …)

1. Ridley Scott. From Blade Runner to Gladiator, Scott’s visual style is stunning, and his themes often resonate with me. An English director. He is currently working on Robin Hood.

2. Peter Weir. Weir’s Master and Commander is his crowning achievement in my view. However, he has depth and versatility, including Mosquito Coast and Dead Poet’s Society. An Australian director. Currently making The Way Back.

3. Moving outside the Commonwealth to Germany, Wolfgang Petersen. Although I’m not familiar with most of his German language movies, Petersen’s Das Boot and Troy earn him a place on this list.

4. Mel Gibson. Although engaging in embarrassing public behaviour from time to time due to his manic-depressive cycles, Gibson’s manically inspired work Braveheart is truly amazing. Apocalypto was also an engaging, unique movie in the current Hollywood landscape.

5. M. Night Shyamalan. I like the issues he explores more than anything, with movies Signs and The Village being my favourites. Shyamalan typically slows everything down, instead of simply trying to throw explosion-chase-whatever after whatever at the viewer.

Honourable mentions: Peter Jackson for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Zack Snyder for 300 - both amazing technical achievements, even if I didn’t like some of the content.

(4 of the 7 aren’t Americans, which is interesting since the U.S. has 300M people, while the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Germany combined have only 170M people.)