I'm not the first tosay the obvious, butthe FTappears to have misunderstood the world:

Some investors accused Facebook of taking advantage of enormous demand to sell at an inflated price

it says, commenting on the way FB's shareprice dropped from $38-ish to $34-ish. To which the answer is... WTF do you think FB is, a charity? If you're overwhelmed by people desperate to hand over cash in exchange for your shares, then of course you raise the price.

Back in the dotcom bubble era it was fashionable to IPO at well below what you hoped the shares would trade up to. But, that was a bad thing, not a good one. Not just because the companies weren't getting their money's worth, but more because it was a sign of bubbliness and, effectively, dishonesty: people who knew (not me, I hasten to add; I fell for the hype too; I was much younger then), knew the kind of valuations being posed were meaningless, and they knew that no-one knew how to value them, and they knew that the best guarantee of the shares going up, was for the shares to go up, because people had no other measure of value than a relative one.

[BTW, we're very close to the great switch-over to WP, this post may oscillate, who knows...]

I finally decided to write this after readingOregon County Decides to Go Nativeby DA. My thesis is: we're too confident of our ability to survive changes, and are too inclined to make risky changes, or fail to invest is safety.

This might surprise some of you who misreadEconomics and Climatology?orOn getting out more. In some senses, "economics" is the full-throttle never-mind-the-dangers end of the spectrum, though you could argue that, at least in theory, it builds in some caution. But, as usual, it isn't the economics, its the politics that is the problem. Which inevitably comes round to "its the electorate that is the problem" as DA's story nicely shows.

What I was thinking was that in the "Goode Olde Dayes" of grinding rural poverty on the land for 80% of the population, anyone or any region who got too carried away trying out exciting new ideas without a decent backstop stood a fair chance of starving to death when their new crop failed. We've pretty well lost that caution: few people think we're in any danger of starving to death, and those who do are generally treated as wild-eyed wackos. I don't think its particularly likely myself, at least not any time in the near future. The danger is more that we have an apparently resilient society, but perhaps it isn't as resilient as we think. There is a finance analogue to this too, in that people have somehow come to believe that the Euro mess will have a happy ending, possibly if everyone keeps insisting that All Will Be Well. Butit might not be.

But there is safety in diversity. The residents of Josephine County (pop: 83,000), in southwestern Oregon are safe (in the long term, as a bloc; possibly not in the short term as individuals). If their experiment goes horribly wrong they can leave, or the Feds will step in. And it will be an interesting experiment, for good or ill.

FromBigCityLibcomesthis gemfrom Bast:Joe Bast's Response to Scholars Feeling Pressure After Attacks on Heartland.

Since this is denial-world, everything is appropriately topsy-turvey. The "attacks" he is talking about are not plural but singular, and is the disastrousbillboard campaign, which even Heartland has admitted was a mistake - though not very sincerely, and Bast clearly doesn't agree; he is still defending them here.

Bast is writing to his pet scholars, and begins

For 28 years, The Heartland Institute has tried to stay "above the fray," producing high-quality research and commentary and staying focused on the issues, even as the political dialogue became more and more polarized and corrosive. Almost alone among think tanks, we focus on communicating with people who do not already agree with us. We rely on research and reason, not rhetoric and emotion, and still do.

It is pretty hard to reconcile those claims about reason and research rather than rhetoric and emotion with the billboard campaign. Bast doesn't even try to; he just says the billboards were "punching back", errrm, i.e. using emotion and rhetoric. Never mind; his job depends on him being able to believe incompatible things.

There are also (in another fine display of rhetoric and emotion) a couple of paragraphs of attacks on Peter Gleick, then some ranting about the mainstream media, then the obligatory attack on Michael Mann.

It doesn't look convincing to me. But Lindzenand Landsea[*] are still onboard (current URLhere, webcitedherein case that changes). Pielke isgone, though, so belated credit to him.

[*} See comments. BCL thinks this is Heartland's fault, not Landsea's. Looking again 6h after first posting, Landsea is now gone entirely.