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And 43 comments last time I checked.

Nothing, absolutely nothing.

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HatTip to Dave Lull.

So what should they have done, as soon as they realized that there was too much risk in the system, that they had overleveraged?
When Obama took power, he appointed people who were part of the system that caused all this risk. It was the wrong message. They started doing the stimulus package. … We should have done what David Cameron in the U.K. understood immediately—try to cut the cancer immediately.

Tell us what David Cameron has done.
He realized that the problem is not a problem of recession. The problem is vastly worse. It’s the problem of risk, which can lead eventually to a much worse recession later, you see. The problem of all these people who are … against austerity, in favor of spending money we don’t have, is that they don’t realize that you’re fragilizing the system further with these packages of stimulus. Take an individual: If you’re in debt, you borrow more?

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New NNT book review on Amazon. There are 5 pages of NNT’s book reviews, mostly things he really likes, on Amazon. HatTip to Peter T.

Great presentation of modularity, February 19, 2011

This is a great synthesis of the modularity approach to cognitive science. It covers the entire field and has the right footnotes for the patches.

The style is readable, & the author has an attitude (with is a very good thing, but his jokes are often bland, not aggressive enough). While I strongly disagree with his treatment of morality (I am deontic), I can safely say, so far, that this is not just one of the best books in cognitive science, but certainly one of the most readable.

Nassim N. Taleb

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Thanks Dave

Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black
Swan,” said the “first thing” investors should avoid is U.S.
Treasuries and the second is the dollar.

Taleb, a principal at Universa Investments LP whose 2007
bestselling book argued that history is littered with rare
events that can’t be predicted by trends, also said he would
rather hold euros than dollars, even as the region’s sovereign-
debt crisis persists. “Euros have Germany, the dollar has
nothing,” he said at a conference in Moscow.

Taleb made similar comments at the same forum last year,
saying “every single human being” should bet Treasuries will
decline because of the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Barack Obama. Bernanke has pledged to
inject dollars into the U.S. financial system and cut borrowing
costs by buying $2.3 trillion of Treasuries and other assets, a
tactic known as quantitative easing.

“As skeptical as I am about Europe, I prefer it by far to
the United States,” said Taleb at the conference, hosted by
Troika Dialog, Russia’s oldest investment bank.