That old saw we all learned about supply and demand in Econ 101 continues to hold true. Commodities prices go up. Commodities prices go down. The Morgan Stanley Commodity index is at the same place it was in April with a big hump peaking in July http://www.tradesignals.com/charts/CRX.X/ Think anybody was taking profits? Hmmmm…. Those who were long energy futures had to have pretty good timing to survive the plummet in demand and prices, or they probably got killed. Short sellers 1 long people 0.
On a non economic note Atlantic Monthly’s July/August 2008 issue had a feature called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807.
In the near post Gutenberg era the article may have been titled “Is Writing Making Us Stupid?” The college curriculum of the day was two years of the “trivium” or three rivers or “ways” in Latin from which the word “trivia” is derived. The next three years was the” quadrivium”, which brought the elements of math and science into the curriculum. Sound familiar?
Only you couldn’t take notes like you can in the college of the present day. The only writing at the time consisted of documents like the “Book of Kells”, an original copy of which would today be worth conservatively a billion dollars on the open market. Writing was just too expensive. Why pay a scribe to write a textbook when you could pay him the same to write a codex?
That meant that a student had to memorize his entire college curriculum. The system prescribed for this was to imagine that your brain is a cathedral. Then one would place everything one learned in one of literally a million places in the cathedral. It sounds like the file system everyone has on their personal computer only a lot more work.
As Nietzsche once said, “Without memory you cannot promise”. Without memory you also will not prosper in today’s economy.
