But you do need growth...at least, you can't have its opposite for long, and entropy doesn't allow you to stand still.

You need growth, but growth denominated using what value standard?

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

Another perspective on the received wisdom of "Growth, growth, growth", in constrast to the "Three R's" of resource conservation --Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle-- for which I do not believe any serious, professional economist or wealthy financial analyst has advanced a mathematical expression of, shall we say, prosperity.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

If they're so rich how come they're not smart?

Impossible: according to Greg Mankiw, if they are rich, they have to be smart.

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

Think of nothing else except how to make money for the next 20 or 30 years. Do not allow another thought to enter your mind--or any emotion whatsoever!

Firstly, the super-rich live extremely isolated and incestuous lives. They move in relatively small social circles. Most of them have no direct experience of the lives of normal people.

Secondly, their culture is immensely competitive with an extremely finely graded primate hierarchy.

Thirdly, it's all about the numbers and the display. If you can boast at the country club that you're getting 20% on a return, that gives you points over the person who only gets 10%.

Finally, they have no concept of what the numbers mean in real terms to real people. Adding 5% to a shareholder pay-out typically means short-term cuts in work force, poor strategy, homelessness, broken marriages, stress, premature death, suicide, and all kinds of other social ills. It also means a poverty of imagination and of real innovation - innovation meaning practical useful stuff, and not the kind of fake innovations you get in marketing and in the money markets.

But all of this is invisible to them. Quite possibly some of them might care if it were made visible - and if someone wanted to create a revolution in the US, deliberately promoting a philanthropic program for the super-rich with wide-ranging progressive values might be one of the most effective things to do.

But some of them don't care at all. They're the ones who are self-entitled, narcissistic, and emotionally low-functioning. They probably can't be reached.

The others might be more amenable.

For now though, it's best to consider the super-rich as the classic low information voters. The engaged ones are likely to be psychotic, and the rest are simply disconnected from the world around them, living in a happy Disney dream world of shopping, competitive philanthropy and socialising, with a bit of not-too-strenuous investing.

Op-Ed Columnist - We're Not Ready on Nuclear Power - NYTimes.com

Something approaching a worst-case accident at a nuclear plant, especially one in a highly populated area, would make the Deepwater Horizon disaster look like a walk in the park.

"We are way, way behind when it comes to the hard work of preventing accidents and responding to these catastrophes when they happen," said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "With the deep-water oil drilling, we allowed the technological advances to drive the process at a rate that was unsafe, and we got really badly burned. The potential of a nuclear catastrophe is a major disaster in waiting."

There are already plenty of problems on the nuclear power front, but they don't get a great deal of media attention. David Lochbaum, the director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me last week that there have been 47 instances since 1979 in which nuclear reactors in the U.S. have had to be shut down for more than a year for safety reasons.

"We estimated, in 2005 dollars, that the average price tag for these outages was between $1.5 billion and $2 billion," said Mr. Lochbaum.

People of a certain age will remember the frightening accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, a partial meltdown that came dangerously close to a worst-case scenario. As Mr. Lochbaum put it, "In roughly two hours, conditions at the plant rendered it from a billion-dollar asset to a multibillion-dollar liability. It cost more to clean up than it cost to build it."

Another frightening accident occurred in 2002 at the Davis-Besse plant at Oak Harbor, Ohio. A hidden leak led to corrosion that caused a near-catastrophe. By the time the problem was discovered, only a thin layer of stainless steel was left to hold back the disaster.

The potential problems with nuclear power abound. No one knows what to do with the dangerous nuclear waste that is building up at the plants. And no one wants to have an extended conversation in polite company about the threat of terrorists who could wreak all manner of mayhem with an attack on a plant.

For many very serious people, our overreliance on foreign oil and the potential dire consequences of global warming make the case for moving more toward nuclear energy a compelling one. But if this is done without a whole lot more serious thought given to matters of safety and rigorous oversight, it's a step we'll undoubtedly come to regret.

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It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

It's the mentality of pirates. One might say the hedge funds are 21st century privateers, commissioned by the elite to raid and plunder the rest of society for the sake of that elite.

And the world will live as one

there should be no frontiers anyway, but for these guys it's the only way they can keep extorting roaming the planet like it's the pre rule-of-law wild west...

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter