As the old addict goes, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and we should all be concerned about the information we freely give, just as much as the information that government’s take from us with no choice, and then, (in the case of the British Government), often lose.

Googling has become a verb in our language. This shows the deep impact of Google on our culture and our lives. But Google is not primarily about searching. Google is an information shovel selling adds. As to prominent linguists like Arbib and Lakoff mirror neurons explain the adaptive evolution of the human language faculty and the development of conceptual knowledge (Arbib, 2005; Gallese, Lakoff, 2007). The problem is our easy and accepting relationship with Google. We are geesing at Google and engage with it more and more every day, uncritically unthinkingly.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is concerned about the fact that:

“….we do not properly understand the nature of the nature of the transaction between us and Google. …into our relationship with Google we do not grasp that we are not really Google’s costumers. Google calls us users, but in fact we are Google’s products. Our attention is what Google sells to its customers, which are the advertisers.” (BBC interview)

The thesis I want to develop here is that by using Google we stop developing our conceptual knowledge. Googling is not an intelligent information search strategy. But we are always communicating something. In using Google we express our intentions and the cleverness of Google is to incorporate our intentions in its advertising system and giving us the feel we are finding what we are looking for, but we aren’t. This is what Google wants us to look at.

See my article Google’s one way Mirror

when all risk horizons and positions and responses to shocks force similar unwinds or offestting risks we will see serious systemic problems.

Convergence of opinion is the worst thing in financial markets. Model and forced risk regimes force convergence and behaviour.

A low leverage sub-optimal regime is more sustainable long term than a high leverage “modeled” and optimized regime with semi-homogenous actors forced into homogenous responses.

MODERN TIMES IN MUDSHIRES

Pool savings and replace other people’s mortgages and business loans from banks with our own money, therefore bypassing the banks completely.

That way, for example, I could afford to give savers 6.5 per cent (exactly what my mortgage is costing me) and avoid the contrived, avoidable, repossession the rapacious lender is currently engineering !

Even better, a profitable business being charged an arm and a leg for a loan from a bank but having the plug pulled as the bank demands unreasonable or immediate repayment of the loan, can offer an even better interest rate.

The banks are nothing but thieves and we would all be better off short circuiting them !

Would you foreclose on a mortgage borrower just a few months in arrears with remaining equity of more than a hundred months worth of mortgage payments left in the property ?

Then evict a family, making them homeless, destroying their lives, selling their house at a loss or even contriving to make it worthless and unsaleable as it remains empty and unused.

I wouldn’t if it was my money I had lent the home buyer.

But this is what mortgage companies do so routinely it is hard not to think it must be sheer spite !

However the problem is that the government are not pushing money into a sustainable energy policy, they’re wasting billions on windmills instead of focusing clearly on nuclear – and nuclear in the direct control of Britain not France at that.

The costing of windmills is so distorted that it beggars belief. Left out of the costings, and hence leading to an inaccurate comparison with other sources, are the support grants and subsidies, and the failure to include the direct parallel cost of having to build nuclear or conventional power stations for when the wind doesn’t blow.

Factor in that the costings don’t reflect the inherent inefficiencies which result in the theoretical maximum efficiency of some 54% being reduced to an actual efficiency of circa 25%, and you can see that it’s a disaster in the making.