Some friends sent me this blog post, which shows how the current planned bailout exceeds the combined expenditure of a number of government spending events from the history of our nation. That post uses the current cost of the bailout ($4.616 trillion), which some friends have noted is closer to $7.6 trillion if one includes unspent guarantees.

These numbers are inflation adjusted, but I was still curious to see how they stacked up in terms of national GDP at their time. I wanted to know how big each event was in proportion to what our nation was producing, since this number has grown dramatically over the last century.

The figures aren’t really apples-to-apples comparisons, since all of these expenditures were multi-year affairs. Having each of them broken into expenditures per year would yield some neat %-of-GDP graphs (different bumps for each item, % of GDP on the y-axis, years on the x-axis; volume representing the total cost of an expenditure.)

In any case, here are the non-matched-fruit comparisons. As you can see, the bailout is still truly massive, on par with (but lower than) the New Deal and WWII (which I added):

The spreadsheet is here.

Note: WWII cost figure from the National D-Day Museum

This short biopic essay discusses a trend linking India and its diaspora that would be great to see to this extent in Vietnam. Snippet:

Our parents’ generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.

Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt.

India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.

This old David Foster Wallace commencement speech has been making the rounds since his suicide last September. I finally got around to reading it, and it struck me immediately that the whole thing was about mindfulness, in the Buddhist sense:

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

I have no idea if DFW ever chose to describe this “control over how and what you think” as mindfulness, but it’s clear at least from this speech that he thought about it deeply and that it had profound, personal consequences for him. Here are the first and last paragraphs of his speech:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

…

None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

Unfortunately, one doesn’t get very far thinking about mindfulness. I know from my own stuttering, occasional meditation that noticing the water that is always around you requires constant practice. It’s why they call it a practice and not a philosophy. Using a little voice in your head as a reminder takes you a very short distance towards actually becoming mindful; what’s required is actual doing, gently, repeatedly.

I’ve never been depressed, so I can’t speak to whether or not mindfulness can serve those who carry that burden. However, DFW had some profound thoughts on the nature of the mind. I can’t help but wonder if he would still be with us if he’d had chance circumstances in his life that would have led him to mindfulness practice.

We’re developing a new set of features at Instructables, with the potential of making it easier for many new users to interact with (and get useful information from) the site. With that lowered bar, however, comes an increase in the many problems of social software and group interactions online. To prepare, I’ve been reading about a lot of similar features on other sites.

While surfing, I came across this entertaining piece by Clay Shirky: a 2003 ETech talk entitled “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.” I’ve included a snippet below; click through to see my outline, which I created simply as a crib sheet to refer back to in the future.

Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

[...]

The patterns here, I am suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for, are givens. Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you can start going out and building on top of that the interesting stuff that I think is going to be the real result of this period of experimentation with social software.

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