Bankers and good and evil

If the bankers are the "villains" of the society because they are making money from others wrong financial bets (i.e. decisions), imagine a doctor making money from others' wrong physical bets or a cleaning service staff making money from others' poor behavior, and so on. 

Bankers don't care to be morally judged because their honesty, contrary to society's views about them, is socially naked and unsophisticated. A doctor's dishonesty is socially complex and their self-made ethics is injected to and deeply blended with our mental blood vessels. 

There is no right and wrong, THAT can not be critically re-evaluated, and its necessity not be reconsidered, and its structure not be reconstructed.

Inactive

A wise one does nothing, where inactivity produces the least loss most probably.

Failure

Lesson lead to knowledge, mistakes to expertise, but only , and once the time arrives, this is failure that is the only path to wisdom.

Kittens

"[...] every kitten grows up to be a cat. They seem so harmless at first. Small, quiet, lapping up their saucer of milk. But once their claws get long enough, they draw blood."

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Frank Underwood

Don't leave us behind

I remember when Karzai refused to sign the long-term US-Afghan security pact back in 2012, there was not even a single person admiring him, in Afghanistan or internationally. Everyone called him a traitor. He thought though, very transparently, that the history is on his side. Global superpowers leave, you are left with the label of "puppet" on your forehead, forever.

The U.S. leaves with ZERO boots left behind because, exactly, they were defeated. They run away from the battleground of liberalism with tails between their legs. This is cowardice. If the U.S. didn't fail, they would keep their military presence in Afghanistan forever; that was what and why all Afghans wish for by signing of that security pact. Well, looks like Karzai was more of a realist one, 9 years ago.

Where are all those chants of democracy and liberalism? Where are those NYT writers, who are criticizing 24/7 everything Chinese and Russian?

Americans have a choice in future, to either leave us alone with our own, let it be barbaric, culture, government, and lifestyle, or when it destroys that, to accept responsibility to replace it with something solid, let it be a forever endeavor. Don't leave us with a vacuum of chaos!

Irresponsible superpower

There is no such thing as "deep tribal society" in anyone's genes. I am no expert in sociology but I guess people join a group because they have to, because they want to protect themselves in times of conflict. Much like in some Brooklyn's gang neighborhood, or whatever it's called. In good times, when the sun is shining, wind is winding, business is as usual, AND, the skirts are short enough, no one cares about tribe; no one cared about ethnicity in Afghanistan.

The problem is this isn't the first time the U.S. goes somewhere, practices its military prowess, and when its taxpayers' short-lived attentions turned to something else, they leave, leaving a whole nation in misery. Because politicians see that they can't cast any more votes out of such topics like Afghanistan. No imperialist superpower in the history, since Alexander the Great, has been behaving such irresponsibly as the U.S., today. 

They had so many chances in 2002 to turn things in the right direction. They chose not to. They chose to pick the most corrupt warlords to make them leaders, ignoring qualified, talented, good Afghan people. The U.S. cultivated, nurtured, and strengthened an administrative culture of corruption in Afghanistan by DoD contracts. Because it was more convenient for some administrative officials or CIA operatives. In Taliban's era, shopkeepers left their shops unattended to go for midday prayers, and no one was even thinking of looting the shop. Try that now! 

Realist vs fantasists

Marriage is dull, boring, exhausting, it's not for those who have prior fantasies about it. 

Quotes vs arguments

I don't like quotes. I rather prefer well-developed arguments. Look up my entire profile since 2008 and you won't find a single quote, except one by Nietzsche, which isn't really a quote but an existential question, and another by Malalai, which is an argument.

Quotes weigh more, or entirely, on the fame, sacredness or charisma of the subject of attribution, and hence, they are trying to make people regard them with reverence, awe, and respect, than to genuinely prove an accuracy or truthfulness.

Arguments are faceless, heartless, respectless, string of reasonings being developed into the shape of an opinion, which is accumulated on the previously proved opinions (theorem). Unlike arrogance of quotes, modesty is a virtue of arguments', which is the result of it, whereas errors are always probable during the course of reasoning

"I don't care about brands!"

I have heard this statement so many times more often from people with anti-capitalist, socialist, or post-modern attitudes. (Yeah, I know, these aren't the same terms, but you know what I mean.)

Such a statement is contradicting with the human nature of trying to avoid loss and hence evade risk. Also, there is a contradiction between action and word here in a sense that you are paying much less for a non-brand product while you should pay the same price should you really not care about brands!

When you buy a product, you don't just buy a piece of physical material or an intangible service. You typically buy a package, at the heart of it is the product, but it's not limited to that. The package extends from the moment you decide you want something at time t-1 to the moment you are transferred with the product at time t, to many days, months, or years thereafter, which we can denote as t+1. In such a process (t-1, t, t+1), you want to have control over the parameters, which affect the involved variables. In an indirect way we can say, you pay for information.

Brands are in a sense credible sources of validated information. You value them because of exactly that, and you are willing to pay for it. You pay for integrity of their PR activities + their corporate social responsibility + their quality products + customer service + ... and you pay because you are certain of these values. Brands are credible.

In absence of such credibility, you are taking risks of incurring losses, hence you make a compromise by reducing the price you are willing to pay for a non-brand product.

Let me make an example with used car market though it's not exactly brand and non-brand but it should establish the point, which isn't really about prestige or other probable factors to valuing brands more. The price of used cars aren't for example one-fifth of the same cars that are new because they are performing bad. The reason you are willing to pay a much lower price is because you don't know exactly what losses you are incurring by buying such a car. There is an "asymmetric information" level about the used car between you and the seller, so to speak. (This is also referring to the "Law of Lemon.") There is no credibility.

I don't care about brands, either, but to a point, where I can afford incurring a loss.

Behaving like a human

It seems behavioralists are finally winning minds. It's been a few decades they are struggling to persuade the neo-classical theorists, and are rejected, that there are more to the market than "individuals rationality" and "market efficiency". Richard Thaler is often called the "father of the behavioral economics". He has been awarded the Noble Memorial Prize 2017. (If you are not that much into economics, you may remember him in the movie "Big Short", who was explaining "synthetic CDO" in a Las Vegas casino, along with Selena Gomez!)

The basic assumption behind rationality of the market participants is in this that individuals are following Expected Utility Theory (EUT), based on a set of axioms initially established by von Neumann–Morgenstern ("VNM axioms") in their decision-making processes. Behavioralists, however, have been testing the actual behavior of individuals in the market and have found out that there are deviations from the EUT while the individuals are making economic decisions.

Among the pioneers of the behavioralist approach in economics were Daniel Kanheman (also a Noble Laureate 2002) and Amos Tversky (1979), who established the framework of the so-called "Prospect Theory", where "loss aversion" was among the most important factors that cause such deviations from rationality.

In addition, the Noble Memorial Prize in 2013 was awarded to Robert Shiller, who also had major contributions to our understanding of the behavioral aspects of the market.