paulbettner's posterous

Bystanders lift flaming car off trapped man

Awesome.

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 9/14/11

In this video, witnesses to a car-motorcycle crash quickly self-organize to lift a flaming car off the trapped motorcyclist. In addition to being an inspiring, life-affirming clip, it's also a fascinating study in collective action. Generally, people are less likely to take action in an emergency when others are around (each person assumes someone else is better qualified to help), but you can see this effect being quickly overcome as some people join the effort, luring others, despite the flames and danger.

On a stretch of road by the crest of a hill in Logan, Utah, on Monday, a motorcycle and a BMW collided, throwing the cyclist under the car and causing the bike to burst into flames, which quickly spread to the sedan. Rather than fleeing those two flaming vehicles, a dozen bystanders rushed toward the blaze, lifted the car and pulled the injured man out by his ankle.
Bystanders Lift Flaming Car to Save a Man (Thanks, Laurie!)

Bankers will take $5 trillion from American economy over the coming decade

Boing Boing
201109050940

How to succeed by failing: be a banker. From CNN World:

For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.

That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.

Article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University and author of The Black Swan. Mark Spitznagel is a hedge-fund manager.

The great bank robbery (Via Seth's Blog)

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Last-Place Aversion

Human nature makes me sad sometimes. 

Daring Fireball

The Economist, on a new study on why the relatively poor often oppose raising taxes on the wealthy:

Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions. The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.

In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.

In short: spite. (Via Aaron Cohen, guest-hosting at Kottke.)

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