The Automatic Earth

Harris & Ewing Machine Shop 1917 "C.W. Hecox, instructor in machine shop, D.C. public schools. Supervising manufacture of practice shells for Navy at McKinley training school" Last week, Nature Magazine wrote about a report by Stefano Battiston, Michelangelo Puliga, Rahul Kaushik, Paolo Tasca & Guido Caldarelli, researchers at ETH Zurich, originally published as DebtRank, too central to fail? at the FOC site. This is how the people at Phys.Org summarize the report: Team studies the innermost circle of the financial

For the financial markets, the situation in Europe can't get bad enough. The worse it gets, the higher the likelihood that more taxpayer funds will be pumped into the system. These funds will not achieve their ostensible goal, which is to "heal" the economies of the countries whose taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab. Those economies have been battered and indebted so badly that there's zero chance of them returning to "normal" growth and paying "normal" returns for

We need a systematic moral transformation in America – something which leads us to a society so fundamentally different than what we have now, it would be scarcely recognizable from our current perspective. That, in my opinion, is the conclusion Morris Berman gives us in his latest blog post, Sociopaths Rule, which is intended as a review and critique of the documentary, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? (Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, 2011). Berman points out that Causey and

Posthuman Godhead, by Acceler8or Why is it that so many people in the developed world have a dogmatic faith in the ability of human societies to overcome any and all problems, and to keep growing bigger, better, faster and stronger over time? Perhaps such beliefs are inherent to the human condition – i.e. some evolved mentality that cannot be changed. I doubt it, though. We have seen examples of smaller-scale communities and societies throughout history and even today that are