Americans’ search patterns reflect their narrowing financial straits, according to the marketing research firm comScore. The number of Internet searches incorporating the word “unemployment” more than tripled from December 2007 to December 2008. Bankruptcy appeared in more than twice as many searches, and “coupons” went from 7.6 million searches to 19.9 million.

“Coupons and discounts are a major ‘tell’ as far as consumer behavior,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore. “Coupon sites grew 33 percent year over year for this January.”

People ages 25 to 34 seem to be searching most heavily for the term “unemployment,” relative to the percentage they represent of all searches. But, Mr. Lipsman said, “No demographic is immune.”

…The world is random, intrinsically unknowable. “You will never,” he [Taleb] says, “be able to control randomness.”

To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”

The book — like Taleb — is also very funny, in a cracking-jokes-while-The-Titanic-sinks sort of way. The Times article is a good introduction to Taleb, his ideas, and the effect they’re having these days. We’ll skip here right to the end of the article:

Taleb’s top life tips

1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Traditionally, analysts have cautioned that Chinese growth figures should be greeted with skepticism, but, according to one school of economic thought, there may be something to the idea that the quake served as a brutal stimulus. In fact, some economists argue that hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, ice storms, and the like, despite the widespread destruction they leave behind – indeed, largely because of it – can spur economic growth.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

Because of this upgrade in technology and efficiency, disasters might actually spur innovation:

Studies have found that earthquakes in California and Alaska helped stir economic activity there, and that countries with more hurricanes and storms tend to see higher rates of growth. Some of the most recent work has found a link between disasters and subsequent innovation.

There are critics of such findings, who point to the negative effects of diverted human energy and natural resources lost, but there are numerous striking examples of the long-term value:

The research on longer-run effects, its supporters argue, is less vulnerable to this criticism, because the key factor is not merely new stuff but better stuff. In this model, disasters perform the economic service of clearing out outdated infrastructure to make way for more efficient replacements – Mother Nature’s contribution to what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously called capitalism’s “creative destruction.” The economy, as it recovers, actually becomes more productive than it was before, and some economists argue that the effect can be seen decades after the disaster.

Of course, those individuals who are killed by natural disasters, or their friends and families, might have a different opinion about the value of capitalism’s and Mother Nature’s “creative destruction”, but chances are good that many of us living today are better off thanks to horrible disasters endured by our predecessors. Which should make you feel better about “taking one for the team” by living through our current economic disaster, if it helps to improve the future prospects of our children and grandchildren.

The government-backed program serves two purposes: It encourages people to discard age-old practices of urinating and defecating in the open, leading to diseases. And the waste products go into research to test their effectiveness as fertilizers.

“We’re motivating people to know the value of their urine,” said Marathi Subburaman, who came up with the novel idea. “The urine that is collected goes into fields for paddy crops, and of course the feces becomes good compost in a matter of months.”

But don’t expect to make a serious living at it because according to a local official,

“If they ask to go three, four times a day, then something’s wrong,” he said. “We ask them to go to a doctor.”

“Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy. It is the single biggest problem facing America today,” he said.

But T-Boone moved beyond whining to release “The Pickens Plan, which “calls for investing in domestic renewable resources such as wind, and switching from oil to natural gas as a transportation fuel,” and will, he claims, reduce our reliance on foreign oil by “more than one-third”.

Just listen to what this radical hippy environmental wacko Republican moneybags / Bush and Swift Boat funder has to say:

“Wind power is … clean, it’s renewable. It’s everything you want. And it’s a stable supply of energy,” Pickens told CNN in May. “It’s unbelievable that we have not done more with wind.”

Of course, T. Boone’s Mesa Power is poised to blanket Texas with wind turbines and turn all that hot air into cold hard cash. But hey, it sure beats oil, and if someone this conservative can invest in alternative energy, then it should send a strong signal to others that the time to jump is now.