This is a huge reason for the indecision in Rwanda. The situation in Somalia was a huge hit to the US and looking at Rwanda the US realized that they would have to commit a larger force in order to not make the same mistake. The policy makers and decision 'trigger pullers' wish that things would be have a right answer and a wrong answer but that is just not the case and we can see it here. After the US pulled out its citizens they largely ignored the situation in fear of being pulled into another mistake like they made in '93. We can see these types of decisions today with Syria. There is pressure for policy makers to decide to help the Syrian opposition yet it is not as easy as that and these types of decisions take intelligence and time which we can rarely afford. It is an unfortunate business that we get to look at the decisions or lack of decisions from the past and that is something we will invariably do with Syria as we are doing with the Rwanda situation.

This is a great TED talk. And it is how many of the software companies in California are starting to be run. Having incentives for many cases impedes the creativeness to answering complex problems. Look at it in the school sense. If you take classes that you love and have a passion about the incentive or 'grades' take a back seat and you rarely think about them. But if you take a class that is something you are forced to take and is something that you are generally not interested in you start thinking just about getting a better or worse award, in this case a better or worse grade, all based on the amount of time and effort it would take. Companies know this and that is how many of the newest innovations have come about, by just having people work on stuff they love and are interested in.

This brings in the focus of who is to blame. We talked about it in the realm of finance and the housing collapse now we see what it is like in the health care side of it. Who do we blame? The patients who come in looking to be fixed right away and ask for costly surgery or the surgeons themselves for being easy and generally going through with the surgery when much easier paths to recovery could be sought. I think we can blame both sides, but maybe a little more on the side of the surgeons and other educated Doctors. They have trained in these areas and can easily give more information to the patient so they can make an informed opinion based off something other than WebMD. The benefit to going with the more expensive route is way bigger to the surgeons and doctors than the risk factor to the patient. It is greed and playing the system for what it is since they know that Medicare and other insurances will cover most of it.

I like that simple analogy to get across a pretty important point. We have now, with globalization, a pretty small world. Ideas are rubbing next to each other more and more. We see that now with the Middle Eastern ideas and ideologies and our ideologies of 'free' in the West. We have to be cognizant of how we approach these other cultures and societies because if we are not then we will continue to have the problems that we have today. Hopefully people will start to look more openly at other cultures and religions. To do that maybe we need to look at our own beliefs, we think that what we believe in is the right thing, maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. We can't just be critical of someone else just because they believe or live by a different code.  

We have talk about this is class a little bit. The message that each party is throwing out there is so distinct that now when you look at any problem you know what each side would feel about it. Discussions seem to be short with regards to making changes because no one wants to budge or sacrifice a little bit. The other interesting thing is how few undecided people there are in the country during this election. People are hardwired to vote for their party they will not even look at the alternative. Hopefully things change and we either are able to work together or maybe a third party emerges with fresh ideas and gets everyone involved again.

It seems that today there are so many different groups that are trying to have a political influence that they will come up with a new study that backs up what they are activating. It is hard for anyone to even understand any of these studies and if they were actually done in a professional manner or anything of the like. This is important because many activists groups know this and will get money from many people to continue doing these studies. It is important for us to look carefully at studies being thrown at us and to look at the data and how it was collected.

Stuff like this bothers me. I am all for people wanting to help out in places that need it even if it is for self gratification and all of that. But the situations are much more complicated than the media leads people to believe. There are religious clashes in many of the central African countries and in the Northern African countries like Mali we are seeing Al-Qaeda and similar organizations set up Islamic radicalism. Feeding the poor and helping the people that are displaced by these things is not fixing the problem. And for the people who are saying the the US is just sending money to these countries and their 'corrupt dictators' is just wrong. We are trying to do much more than that. We have US Special Forces in many of these countries like Somalia, Mali, and many of the other central African countries. The US is putting some of our best soldiers in there to help the people. The media does not cover that part, they rather highlight the Pitt's and Clooney's. 

This article goes hand in hand with the events that are going on right now. The election is coming up and we are seeing the 'framing' of issues from two different perspectives. The problem is when someone who is trying to make rational decisions on the election is fed biased and 'framed' information from the media. The facts are not complete, and the context of events and policies are not fully fledged out. We are left with shells of ideas that we must process in order to make decisions. For most people that is good enough and these debates and biased news sources only confirm their personal bias. Such a large percent of the population already knows who they are voting for before they get information. For the smaller population of people that want to make a rational informed decision they are left with sorting through the rubbish.

I agree with the first couple of sentences in the second paragraph on the first page. Not only in the Middle East but also here in the US ideas that may not be rational are considered rational by one side or the other. It is hard to find middle ground on issues because if you are on the left you tend to think all or most ideas are the right ones and the same goes for people on the right. Even if both sides have rational arguments 

on certain issues the bias people have affects their decisions and until we can as a society tone down that bias it will be a long time before we can all agree on rational ideas.

This article kind of reminds me of the TED talk video from a couple weeks ago. We as humans have different attachments to objects that we 'own'. And it is interesting that the tokens did not have the endowment effect, but that just backs up the experiments of the TED video. If we all exchanged goods with money directly or by trading and bartering then maybe that would be the most optimal way to do things, but in our world of capitalism where wall street investors just stare at a screen and are not dealing with the money directly probably do not feel the endowment effect and make risky decisions that cause stuff like the crisis in 2007.

This highlights the global inequality between countries such as Niger and Sweden. And it is sad because unless there is some sort of outside help Niger is stuck in a kind of loop. Child birth will always be hard and more dangerous in a country like that unless update their infrastructure, which is almost impossible because of the lack of money. If you scale this down and look at singular countries we have the same types of inequality problems that we see on a world scale. Many times low income families are left with fewer opportunities just as poor countries are. It is unrealistic for first world countries to pour money into everything from infrastructure, education and medicine, but since our world is becoming smaller and smaller maybe it would be advantageous to help in at least one area. 

This is pretty interesting to me and reminds me of a question that was asked in a class a few years ago: "Are we born inherently evil or good?" This one is a little different in that it asks if we are born knowing what is right and what is wrong.  I might be in a minority, but I generally disagree with the premise that we as humans are hardwired and born with a moral compass of sorts. I believe all of that comes from the experiences that we have had growing up and continues until the day that we die.  Near the end of the article it is pointed out the difference in moral views that people have from a political standpoint. These viewpoints are things that are developed over time and with every experience we have had. People that are born in a specific religious family will generally be that specific religion as they grow up. I am not sure you are born 'believing' in that religion. Same with morality, experiences may shape it and it may evolve over time. Maybe at one time you feel pushing the large man in the tracks would be a rational thing to do and maybe as you grow older and have experienced death on a personal level you would have a much tougher time deciding on the morality of that same decision. That is why asking people if they would flip the switch and/or if they would push someone physically on the tracks seems like it may not fully prove that we are inherently born with knowing something is 'wrong' because the people that are asked have had experiences that might mold their decisions.  Obviously asking someone that has been isolated from everything for their entire lives is not realistic and therefore making this sort of idea hard to answer definitively, which in turn will make it a hotly debated topic between people with different views.