I.O.U.S.A.

I.O.U.S.A. is a must-watch documentary explaining in simple terms the United States government’s financial woes. Seeing the fiscal incompetence of our political leaders will end up depressing or angering you. There’s a great clip of Congressman Ron Paul calling Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to the carpet. The visuals and graphics do an excellent job highlighting the future crisis we face (ex: ‘Thriftville vs. Squanderville’ with Warren Buffet. Every American should see this.

Popping the filter bubble

Eli Pariser’s TED Talk, Beware online “filter bubbles”, is an overview of his new book, The Filter Bubble. The comments from his KQED interview highlight much of his and others’ concerns about the way companies like Google and Facebook are personalizing our Web activity.

“We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives, and it’s not going to do that if it leaves us isolated in a Web of one.”

The feeling of security and the reality of security

Great TED Talk from security expert Bruce Schneier.

“We estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. You hear a lot of tiger attacks. There must be a lot of tigers around. You don’t hear about lion attacks. There aren’t a lot of lions around. This works until you invent newspapers, because what newspapers do is repeat, again and again, rare risks. I tell people if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it, because by definition news is something that almost never happens. When something is common, it’s no longer news.”

Smile more

“Smiling is one of the most basic, biological, uniform expressions of all humans.”

‘Spontaneous compassion’ and how 4th-graders are solving world problems

Favorite quote from this TED Talk with teacher John Hunter:

“Spontaneous compassion.”

From TED:

John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board — and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches — spontaneous, and always surprising — go further than classroom lectures can.

9/11, healing and the power of forgiving

If they can, so can we.

From TED:

Phyllis Rodriguez and Aicha el-Wafi have a powerful friendship born of unthinkable loss. Rodriguez’ son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001; el-Wafi’s son Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted of a role in those attacks and is serving a life sentence. In hoping to find peace, these two moms have come to understand and respect one another.

Cracking Stuxnet

Ralph Langner helped discover the intended target of Stuxnet, a computer virus directed specifically at shutting down Iran’s nuclear program. Because of its sophistication, he speculates Israel and the United States collaborated on the attack.

Read Vanity Fair’s A Declaration of Cyber-War if you’re not familiar with Stuxnet and want to learn more without getting a computer science degree. It’s a fascinating story.

Langner’s TED Talk shares how they cracked the code:

‘The Big Short’ end of the stick

The Big ShortI don’t know much about the intricacies of Wall Street and the world of subprime mortgage bonds, collateralize debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps, but Michael Lewis’ The Big Short does a excellent job of highlighting what went wrong in the last decade that led to our economic crisis.

Many people lost homes they shouldn’t have held mortgages on in the first place, and the banking and finance industry was rewarded for its carelessness with a whimsical, multi-billion dollar government bailout. You finish The Big Short realizing the financial industry is one big sausage factory whose end product is something you’re not really sure what’s inside, but tastes great until you discover it might actually be bad for you.

In many ways Wall Street is a lot like legislation in Washington, DC, where no one completely understands what’s happening, but somehow everyone makes money off the deal.

Two excerpts best summarize the book’s gist:

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of “investing” is “gambling with the odds in your favor.” The people on the other side – the entire financial system, essentially – had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What’s strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.

More to the point, from former Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund, featured prominently in Lewis’ first book Liar’s Poker:

It’s laissez-faire until you get into deep shit.

There’s a great 60 Minutes interview with Lewis and others featured in the book:

Part 1

Part 2

Anonymous Extraordinaries

“Anonymous Extraordinaries are people who work selflessly and vigorously for what they believe in. People who are motivated by conviction and not recognition.”

‘Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure’

Retired Army four-star general Stanley McChrystal gives an excellent TED Talk on leadership, especially as it relates to leading in the military in the age of new media.

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