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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Slagle who wrote (1454)	10/22/2005 10:13:37 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218449

I'd suggest you may be over-thinking this situation. Sometimes people really are stupid. Refer to Carlo Cipolla's Five Laws of Stupidity. "Bush War" Bush and his henchmen had some really powerful reason for invading Iraq which is to my mind still a mystery. Those guys are not stupid and support for the operation went far beyond Bush's political allies, otherwise it wouldn't have happened. I have two suggestions. 1.) The most plausible reason I've heard was that Saddam Hussein's move to sell oil only for Euros threatened the role of the U.S. Dollar as a "reserve currency". When the the current leader of Venezuela recently announced they would sell oil only in Euros, Pat Robertson and other fringe types also suggested we kill President Lula. The U.S. gains huge advantages by being able to purchase oil for newly printed money. Other nations need to earn U.S. Dollars to purchase oil. But I have no idea if this motivated anyone. China has obtained their oil from Iran and certain Central Asian nations like Uzbekistan or some such place. 2.) I find another suggestion more plausible based on the falling out between Chevron and their Board member Condoleeza Rice when she joined the Bush administration. She is the only ex-board member of Chevron who has had her name removed from the tanker named for her. I know that Chevron management though Ms Rice was very intelligent, although with a cartoon view of the world. Her opinions were not informed by fact but by a seemingly mythical geo-political view of the world she picked up somewhere. This is not a huge problem as Board member, although annoying. But once it became clear she was taking her views into government with likely disastrous consequences, Chevron wished to completely sever their relationship with her as best they could. Sometimes people really are stupid. The Five Laws of Human Stupidity: gandalf.it First Law Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. This is not as obvious as it sounds, says Cipolla, because: people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid and day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments. He also observes that it is impossible to set a percentage, because any number we choose will be too small. Second Law The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. If you study the frequency of stupidity in the people who come to clean up classrooms after hours, you find that it is much higher than you expected. You assume that this is related to their lower level of education, or to the fact that non-stupid people have better chances of obtaining good jobs. But when you analyze students or University professors (or, I would add, computer programmers) the distribution is exactly the same. Militant feminists may be incensed, says Cipolla, but the stupidity factor is the same in both genders (or as many genders, or sexes, as you may choose to consider). No difference in the sigma factor, as Cipolla calls it, can be found by race, color, ethnic heritage, education, etcetera. Third (and Golden) Law A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. (We shall come back to this, because it is the pivotal concept of the Cipolla Theory.) Fourth Law Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. That (I would say) suggests that non-stupid people are a bit stupid – but I shall get back to this point at the end. Fifth Law A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. This is probably the most widely understood of the Laws, if only because it is common knowledge that intelligent people, hostile as they might be, are predictable, while stupid people are not. Moreover, its basic corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit leads us to the heart of the Cipolla Theory. There are four types of people, he says, depending on their behavior in a transaction: Hapless (or “hopeless”) Someone whose actions tend to generate self-damage, but also to create advantage for someone else. Intelligent Someone whose actions tend to generate self-advantage, as well as advantage for others. Bandit Someone whose actions tend to generate self-advantage while causing damage to others. Stupid We already have this definition in the Third Law. Professor Cipolla uses a matrix that looks like this: . . . .