A claim about investors who remembered the Depression

On facebook, Stephen Simmons said:

Anyone my age or older here, folks whose parents were born during the Depression? If so, think back. think back to any extended-clan gatherings you found yourself at prior to 1974. Did you ever listen to our grandparents talk about money? The difference between them and us are instrumental in understanding this crisis.

Our grandparents didn't "have money". But, having raised families during the Depression, they had learend the value of saving up against future need. So, they all had spent a lifetime squirreling-away a few bucks here and there. Most of them had a little of that money -- probably only a few thousand dollars, if that much -- in some corporate stock or other. And if you *listened* to them when they got together, they talked about what the companies they owned were doing. Because they paid attention. And they voted those proxies, every year. And they wrote letters to the Board, if the company did something they didn't approve of. Sure, my grandmother's letter only represented a couple hundred shares. But so did each of the thousands of *other* such letters the Board received. The Boards listened.

And he followed it with a claim that we're all guilty for the financial crisis because we delegated thought about our investments to mutual funds and money market accounts.

I suspect this is an over-generalization (if nothing else, some people remained active investors, and some people never had money to invest), but I thought I'd check with my favorite non-random sample. What do you know about investment habits of people who remembered the Depression?

I consider it possible that putting so much emphasis on environmentalism and the treatment of employees combined with thinking of corporations as naturally evil caused people to loose track of the idea that there's some virtue in reliably producing an ordinary honest product, but I also think this was, at most, a minor contributing factor.

A bit more from Simmons-- something I find more plausible:\

Meanwhile, take a moment to wonder about the handful of folks who owned the other 20%-ish of those institutions. Who were they? Well, thanks to the stock-options that became a standard part of executive compensation as a way around the Clinton-Gingrich tax reforms, they were generally the executives themselves. Since they were the only ones who actually VOTED their shares, a system evolved in which a very small group of people were essentially voting the controlling votes on each other's salaries. With predictable results ...

I've also heard that basing most of executive compensation on stock prices was a result of people thinking that those executives weren't doing much of anything to get their (moderately high) salaries, and getting them to focus on stock prices would get them to do something. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Laurie Anderson's _49 Days in the Bardo_

I haven't been able to find any evidence that the installation will be shown again, but in case it might be and you want to see it fresh, I'm putting my description under a cut. There's some pretty raw emotional stuff (the installation is a tribute to Anderson's dead rat terrier, Lolabelle, and there is a larger issue invoked), but there is no way I can be more specific without spoiling the effect.

( The installation )

A review with some pictures.

Video of Anderson talking about the installation, with a few bits of it.

An interview when Anderson about the installation which I can't get to play-- let me know if it works for you.

Animals are never disappointed that you didn't finish at culinary school

chomji figured out the right link for the Laurie Anderson interview, which is short (10 or 15 minutes) and charming.

100 times lighter than styrofoam....

The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.

The resulting material has a density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre.

By comparison the density of silica aerogels - the world's lightest solid materials - is only as low as 1.0mg per cubic cm.

....

To study the strength of the metallic micro-lattices the team compressed them until they were half as thick.

After removing the load the substance recovered 98% of its original height and resumed its original shape.

The first time the stress test was carried out and repeated the material became less stiff and strong, but the team says that further compressions made very little difference.

"Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale," said team member Lorenzo Valdevit.

"Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material."

The engineers suggest practical uses for the substance include thermal insulation, battery electrodes and products that need to dampen sound, vibration and shock energy.

Link thanks to andrewducker.