| 2010 07 27 | Ratigan on the Bailouts
These people [banksters] are stealing our money by the trillions.
Add $1T in central bank junk bond purchases, $1T in US Treasury bailouts and $6T in Fannie/Freddie (so far) liabilities and potentially trillions in AIG liabilities (again, so far) and you've got upwards of $10T that has been effectively stolen so far. This isn't counting the interest on all the debt used for these purchases or the tripling of the monetary base that will, in time, steal another $10-20T plus interest via the fractional reserve money multiplier. |
| 2010 07 27 | Wage and Price Controls in Ancient Egypt
Control took on frightening proportions. There was a whole army of inspectors. There was nothing but inventories, censuses of men and animals ... estimations of harvests to come... In villages, when farmers who were disgusted with all these vexations ran away, those who remained were responsible for absentees' production... [one of the first effects of harsh price controls on farm goods is the abandonment of farms and the consequent fall in the supplies of food]. The pressure [the inspectors] applied extended, in case of need, to cruelty and torture.[5]
Egyptian economy collapsed at the end of the third century BC, as did her political stability. The financial crisis was a permanency. Money was devalued. Alexandria's commerce declined.
article via Alexander Pagidas |
| 2010 07 26 | Slim Monolite
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| 2010 07 26 | Documentary: Joy Division |
| 2010 07 25 | TRON Legacy Trailer 2 |
| 2010 07 25 | Shutdown the CIA
If you think this is a radical idea, think again. What is radical is to empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has said, is chilling. These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur again. |
| 2010 07 24 | Hadid
FWIW, Zaha Hadid would get my vote for this year''s Sterling Prize.
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| 2010 07 24 | Minimum Wage
Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers... |
| 2010 07 23 | Bagjack iPad Case |
| 2010 07 23 |
And in the word, no less than in the mind, the Medusa fascinates much more than she appalls, and haunts us just this side of petrification. On the other side is the unthinkable, the unheard-of, that-which-should-not-be: hence, the Real.
This is what throttles our souls with a hundred fingers - somewhere, perhaps in that dim room which caused us to forget ourselves, that place where we left ourselves behind amid shadows and strange sounds - while our minds and words toy, like playful, stupid pets, with diversions of an immeasurable disaster.
- Thomas Ligotti, The Medusa |
| 2010 07 18 | Cinnamon Chasers |
| 2010 07 17 | Bill Moyers on Liz Fowler
Every time the power of government is caught doing the opposite of what was intended, the proposed solution is always to give the government more power. There is another way. |
| 2010 07 17 |
Wonder is worry without animal anxiety.
- Terence McKenna
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| 2010 07 16 | Decendents |
| 2010 07 14 | Hotellings law
Hotelling's law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible. This is also referred to as the principle of minimum differentiation as well as Hotelling's "linear city model".
An extension of the principle into other environments of rational choice such as election "markets" can explain the common complaint that, for instance, the presidential candidates of the two American political parties are "practically the same". Once each candidate is confirmed during primaries, they are usually established within their own partisan camps. The remaining undecided electorate resides in the middle of the political spectrum, and there is a tendency for the candidates to "rush for the middle" in order to appeal to this crucial bloc. Like the paradigmatic example, the assumption is that people will choose the least distant option, (in this case, the distance is ideological) and that the most votes can be had by being directly in the center.
It seems to me that this breaks down as long as there are more than two options. Though vote polling in US style representative democracies force voters into two party systems. |
| 2010 07 14 | Gary Fisher Bike |
| 2010 07 13 | Divide Chair |
| 2010 07 12 | Belief
...when one meets with someone who believes something that common sense would call absurd and for which there is little evidence to convince the not already convinced the usual question that is asked, and then the answer argued over is "Why do you believe X?" In the above book the suggestion is made that a different question might be asked: "Why do you believe THAT you believe X?"
It is pointed out that often people who profess weird beliefs do not act as though they believe them. There seems to be two levels of belief, one is simple belief and the other is to believe that you believe something. The distinction is very interesting to me. It turns the light of inquiry from the thing believed toward the dynamics of the psychology of the believer and usually, if intellectual honesty is maintained, there are very revealing personalistic answers to this second question.
- Terence McKenna in conversation with Robert Hunter |
| 2010 07 12 |
...and in the dream the angel said to Descartes: |
| 2010 07 10 | ACR S-J14 |
| 2010 07 10 | Assassinations
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki [a US citizen] no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they're sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind.
Only congress can suspend habeas corpus but it looks like the argument is that the AUMF act did just that.
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| 2010 07 08 | Crowdsourcing SEC Petition
Paul Spinrad and the Sustainable Economies Law Center have submitted a
petition to the SEC for a de minimis exemption to current securities
regulation. They're requesting that crowdfunding and the sale of
securities should become legal as long as the total amount raised is
under $100,000 and each individual buys no more than $100 of
securities.
My email:
These are comments in regards to a petition for rulemaking change. I'm a technology entrepreneur and feel this change would facilitate the creation of highly innovative micro startups for technologies that are outside of the risk/reward/time-frame of traditional venture capital and angel investor markets.
I understand that the original rule was created to protect small investors, but feel the qualifications of this rule change sufficiently address that issue.
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| 2010 07 08 | Quote of the Day
We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
- Anais Nin |
| 2010 07 08 | Minix 3
There was a study in BSD, which has very good quality control that found 3 bugs per 1000 lines of code. At that rate, Minix would have maybe 18 bugs in the kernel and Linux would have 18,000...
Our OS runs as multiple user level processes. So the operating system runs basically in user mode.
Very cool stuff. |
| 2010 07 08 | Rust
Rust is a curly-brace, block-structured statement language. It visually resembles the C language family, but differs significantly in syntactic and semantic details. Its design is oriented toward concerns of "programming in the large", that is, of creating and main- taining boundaries - both abstract and operational - that preserve large-system integrity, availability and concurrency.
It supports a mixture of imperative procedural, concurrent actor, object oriented and pure functional styles. Rust also supports generic programming and metaprogramming, in both static and dynamic styles.
Link via the mysterious "ry" |
| 2010 07 07 | Stimulus
With regard to "stimulus" plans, my difficulty with last year's policies is not so much an aversion to government spending as it is a rebuke of the notion that government spending is by its nature stimulative or beneficial to the economy. The issue is how this real value is used. Is it used to advance socially useful outcomes which private individuals, through some failure of coordination, could not achieve? Or is it used to defend bondholders, industries, and institutions with which the policymakers are most closely aligned?
The Keynesian view is that government spending is simply a monolithic letter "G." Keynes cared little about the productivity or lack thereof to which public resources were devoted, even writing " If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again... there need be no more unemployment." The only difference between Keynes and Tim Geithner is evidently that Geithner prefers to place the bottles a bit closer to Wall Street...
By all appearances, Ben Bernanke has a four-second tape in his head that says "We let the banks fail during the Depression, and look what happened." Then the tape repeats. There is no subtlety that says, "yes, but we let the banks fail in the most disruptive and disorganized way possible, forcing them into piecemeal liquidation as Lehman had to do. Today, the FDIC is fully capable of preserving and transferring the operating entity while properly cutting away the failing bondholder and stockholder liabilities so that depositors and customers are not affected." This understanding would prove useful in the event we observe further credit strains.
Link via Mish |
| 2010 07 07 | Asynchronous Reversible Computing
Reversible computers usually work in a synchronous mode, i.e., in the presence of clock signals, but in the light of the asynchronous nature of microscopic physical phenomena this may be an anomaly. The alternative, an asynchronous mode of operation, has therefore attracted attention from researchers, witness the proposal of a reversible circuit element in (Morita 2001) that works in such a mode. Simplicity of circuit elements like this is an important design objective since it correlates positively with the efficiency by which they may be realized physically... |
| 2010 07 07 | Tetrachromacy
The architecture of the human visual system, along with that of most animals, is tetrachromatic. The performance of the human system at very short wavelengths is blocked by the absorption of its own optics. Therefore it can be more properly described as a blocked tetrachromat instead of a trichromat. |
| 2010 07 04 | Happy 4th of July
Last night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that "deemed as passed" a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the "deeming" document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget...
Never before -- since the creation of the Congressional budget process -- has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money... The measure does not satisfy even the most basic criteria of a budget resolution as set forth in the Congressional Budget Act.
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| 2010 07 03 |
Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit. Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are the people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent and stress.
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| 2010 07 03 | Before and After
Handful of big banks controlled 1/3 of the US assets before the crisis. Now they control 2/3. |
| 2010 07 02 | The Economic Propaganda Machine |
| 2010 07 02 | Cliff Edge
Get ready for the cliff-edge. Be maximum long duration of nominal government bonds in safe haven markets. This means US, UK,
Germany, in that order, and perhaps others. Be long gold. Think the unthinkable.
Get ready for sub 2% on 10-yr USTs; sub 2% on 10-yr bunds; and the UK not far
behind, 2.5% 10-yr Gilts. We strongly believe that a cliff-edge may be around the
corner, for the global banking system (particularly in Europe), and for the global
economy (particularly in the US/Europe).
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| 2010 07 01 | Meego
Another iPhone rival. Like Windows Series 7 Mobile, some of the design elements are nicer/cleaner/simpler than the iPhone, but the UI performance is terrible - scroll lag, visible redraw, etc. |
| 2010 07 01 | Torture
A Harvard study on major U.S. newspapers shows that the papers, when reporting on waterboarding, were drastically inconsistent about when they did and did not describe it as torture. When used by non-U.S. countries or groups, it was almost always described as torture. But when the technique was used by the U.S. after 2000, it was almost never described as torture. |
| 2010 06 29 | Euphemisms
[Patriot Act, collateral damage, Department of Defense...] The government owns the language that is used to describe the government's activities. And the reason that people are drawn to that language is because they don't like what the government is doing and so they need to cover it up... like covering a dead body with a sheet. |
| 2010 06 28 |
In a real awakening, it is the dreamer that vanishers.
- Steven Norquist, The Haunted Universe
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| 2010 06 28 | Communism and the Fall of Rome
Most emperors continued the policies of debasement and increasingly heavy taxes... At this point, in the third century A.D., the money economy completely broke down... This forced the state to directly appropriate whatever resources it needed wherever they could be found... Eventually, the state was forced to compel individuals to continue working and producing.
The result was a system in which individuals were forced to work at their given place of employment and remain in the same occupation, with little freedom to move or change jobs. Farmers were tied to the land, as were their children, and similar demands were made on all other workers, producers, and artisans as well. Even soldiers were required to remain soldiers for life, and their sons compelled to follow them...
People fled to the countryside and took up subsistence farming or attached themselves to the estates of the wealthy, which operated as much as possible as closed systems, providing for all their own needs and not engaging in trade at all. Meanwhile, much land was abandoned and remained fallow or fell into the hands of the state, whose mismanagement generally led to a decline in production.
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| 2010 06 28 | Jamaica vs Barbados
This American Life looks at two countries that dealt differently with their debt crises. Jamaica, which assumed further debt (the Keynesian/Krugman solution) and Barbados, which cut spending (the Austrian/Friedman solution). Can you guess how each turned out? |
| 2010 06 27 | Fannie/Freddie Price Tag
Congressional Budget Office estimated that the mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could end up costing taxpayers $389 billion during the next decade.
It would seem that the claim that this wasn't a bailout and would be profitable for taxpayers might not have been entirely accurate. |
| 2010 06 24 | Quote of the Day
Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it.
To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.
- Michael Rivero |
| 2010 06 23 |
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| 2010 06 22 | Entropy USB Key
The Entropy Key uses P-N semiconductor junctions reverse biassed with a high enough voltage to bring them near to, but not beyond, breakdown in order to generate noise... |
| 2010 06 22 | Britain Raises VAT to 20%
The economic collapse death spiral: increased debt spending and followed by increased taxes with each wave being larger than the last. |
| 2010 06 21 | Stealth Shirt
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| 2010 06 21 | Portugal Legalizes Drugs and Crime/Usage Falls |
| 2010 06 21 | Quote of the Day
When I disagree with Obama, people always say, "Well, you're a big Bush guy then." And I'm like no, I didn't like Bush either. I disagree with Bush and Obama on all the stuff they agree on, which is pretty much everything. They both want to kill people, they both want the government to be bigger, and they both want less freedom for individuals.
- Penn Jillette |
| 2010 06 19 | Book: The Machinery of Freedom
David Friedman's book is now available free online. Recommended. |
| 2010 06 16 | TARP: The Real Story
The Fed now holds $909 billion of mortgage-backed securities. In the past year it has purchased 73% of the mortgages that government-backed Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae have turned into securities. Purchases by the Treasury pushed total government purchases above $1 trillion. The Fed says it plans to top off its purchases at $1.25 trillion by the end of March, but must decide in the months ahead whether the economy is strong enough to stick with that plan.
The mainstream media is reporting that TARP is being paid back and that this shows the economy is ok now and that the US public actually wasn't forced to assume the losses of the banks. AFAICS, the truth is that TARP was just one of many bailout programs. It was a hold over until the Fed and Treasury could spend $2T buying the overpriced junk bonds from the banks. |
| 2010 06 15 | Genius of Design BBC Series |
| 2010 06 14 | Quote of the Day
Anyone with a thorough understanding of existence is either silent or raving mad.
- Thomas Ligotti
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| 2010 06 08 | Howard Zinn on War
...in any discussion on war, at a certain point in the discussion, somebody would say "oh well, it's human nature"...
...the consequence of believing that war is the result of human nature is to place the blame for war on the citizenry and to take away the blame from the leaders of the nation who are driving the country into war.
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| 2010 06 08 | The Decline of Rome: Inflation and Price Controls
Rome was forced to rely ever more heavily on debasement of the currency to raise revenue. By the reign of Emperor Claudius II Gothicus, who served from 268 to 270, the silver content of the principal coin, the denarius, was down to just 0.02%. As a consequence, prices skyrocketed. According to research by economist Prodromidis, a measure of Egyptian wheat that sold for 19 drachmas (a Greek coin used in Egypt, which was a province of Rome) in the middle of the third century had risen to 982 drachmas by the end of it, suggesting an average annual inflation rate of almost 9%.
At this point, the very survival of the state was at stake. Emperor Diocletian, who served from 284 to 305, attempted to stop the inflation with a far-reaching system of price controls. They were justified by Diocletian's belief that the inflation was due mainly to speculation and hoarding, rather than debasement of the currency.
In 301 Diocletian issued an extensive edict fixing the prices for just about all goods and services, including 900 commodities, 130 different grades of labor and a number of freight rates. The most complete version of the edict that we have takes up 100 pages in Tenney Frank's Economic Survey of Ancient Rome. The death penalty applied to violations of the edict. Nevertheless, they failed in their purpose. As Lactantius tells us, "much blood was then shed over small and cheap items." Soon there was nothing for sale and the inflation got worse. Finally, after "many had met their deaths, sheer necessity led to repeal of the law."
Government money printing resulting in hyper-inflation and being met with price controls leading to a breakdown of markets (e.g. food shortages) has happened many times in the past. It happened in post war germany, it happened 2003-2009 in Zimbabwe, and it's happening right now in Venezuela. Each time, the public forgets the lessons of the past and blames the market instead of the government and central banks. |
| 2010 06 07 | SGMLKit
A simple and robust SGML/HTML parsing library for Objective-C based on Matt Miller's libsgml. |
| 2010 06 07 | VMs for Tiny Computers |
| 2010 06 06 | Nils Gilman: Deviant Globalization
An interesting talk, but while Nils admits that communism was a complete failure, he keeps pointing to problems caused by socialist governments with oppressive regulations as problems of "capitalism". |
| 2010 06 06 | Regulations Creating Monopolies
...the power of the duopoly privilege enjoyed by Moody's and Standard & Poor's is what drew Warren Buffett to make his Berkshire Hathaway the biggest shareholder in Moody's.
"So state after state has regulations relating to insurance companies that ties in with the rating agencies. And the agencies are specified. And so I can't go to the XYZ rating agency and say, "Will you do this for half the price?", and have it accepted by anybody," Buffett said.
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| 2010 06 05 | A Conversation with Alan Kay
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it's certainly engineering of a sort - but it's the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. |
| 2010 06 05 | There is No Money
So, the squandering governments in Northern Europe have pledged about a trillion dollars' worth of bailout money for the even more wasteful governments of Southern Europe. Everyone knows there will be some sort of default, but they do not expect this in the near term. It will be later. How much later? No one knows and no one cares. Until then, investors lend money to governments that will surely default. This is the foundation of international finance. It is also the basis of Social Security, Medicare, Federal pensions, and the municipal bond markets.
Most voters don't know and don't care. Politicians do know but don't care. There are no negative sanctions for continuing to pooh-pooh the inescapable reality of the unfunded liabilities of all Western governments. There are instant negative sanctions for any politician who admits the truth and publicly calls for the immediate reform and partial default of these programs. No one in the electorate wants to face the truth: either granny will get stiffed near-term or the working-age voters will get stiffed long-term.
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| 2010 06 05 | Essay: Judd Furniture
Anyway, what kind of a society is it when you can't even buy a chair? |
| 2010 06 04 | Quote of the Day
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
- Eric Hoffer |
| 2010 06 03 | Constructs
We are systems that, so to speak, look through their own representational structures as if they were in direct and immediate contact with their content.
...The respective data structures are being activated so fast and reliably that the system cannot recognize them as such anymore... simply because of a lower temporal resolution of meta-representational functions...
I think there has been no evolutionary selection pressure on the relevant parts of our functional architecture... We only needed to represent "there's a wolf there".. We did not need to represent the fact that "there's an active wolf representation in my brain now."
We operate under the condition I would call the naive realistic self misunderstanding.
...Metaphorically speaking, you are a system that constantly confuses itself with the content of it's own self model.
- Thomas Metzinger |
| 2010 06 01 | Bill Moyers interview on Banking Oligarchy |
| 2010 05 31 | The Economic Propaganda Machine
One of the basic principals of Keynesian economics is that you lower interest rates, create liquidity and thereby stimulate economic growth. This is basically saying that by increasing the paper currency supply, you can increase the production of real value within the society...
Hopefully that is intuitively illogical to anyone to begin with. If that were logical, you would just legalize counterfeiting and everyone would become wealthy.
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| 2010 05 30 | Capitalist Sweden / Socialist Sweden
I didn't know that Sweden's school system was mostly private and based on vouchers. |
| 2010 05 28 |
Do you now, as you read this, consciously experience the dramatic incompleteness of your own visual model of the world?
Do you consciously experience the expanse of nothingness behind your head?
- Thomas Metzinger, Being No One
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| 2010 05 27 | vertex.js
vertex.js is a graph database inspired by filesystems that supports automatic garbage collection and is built on node.js and tokyocabinet. It uses HTTP as it's communication protocol and JSON for its request and response data format. |
| 2010 05 26 | Economic Suicide
Publicly guaranteed debt is now financing 90% of US mortgages. So AFAICS, the banks are lending taxpayers money to lend home buyers money to buy overpriced assets. Then Fannie, etc then sell these mortgages to the banks and guarantee the returns on them - putting taxpayers on the hook for the losses on all defaults while the buyers of Fannie's bonds receive no-risk (nominally) profits. |
| 2010 05 26 | Quote of the Day
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they fail to give a map.
At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.
- William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience |
| 2010 05 25 | Marc Faber Quotes
"If deficits didn't matter as many like Economist James Galbraith argue today, why should citizens even pay taxes? It would make everyone happier if they didn't."
"If debt and money printing equaled prosperity then Zimbabwe would be the richest country."
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