Stop Torturing Obama’s Torture Policies
Over at President Picker I have posted my view on Obama’s Torture Policy. I think it’s a good policy. Comment over there please if you want to express yourself.
A simple solution for looming credit card problems? End the usury.
President Obama’s promising to work on the next looming financial crisis – credit card debt. As Americans face the finanacial hardships from crisis ONE it appears we may have crisis TWO coming right up, which is unsustainable levels of consumer debt for people who are already starting to lose jobs. I don’t envy the president’s team in this era where they need to work to support the banking structure, get them profitable, and get them loaning money while at the same time reign in the excesses, poor regulation, profiteering, and illegal banking activity that got us here in the first place.
However quality solutions are often simple ones, and I think we could go a long way towards recovery and solvency by taking a lesson from the council of Nicea which sought to regulate interest rates in more reasonable ways than we do now (although I think we’d need to remove the religious discrimination parts of those rules). Usury in history. In simple terms let’s just end the outrageous top interest rates charged by the banks on their credit cards, which often top 25%. I’d have to say these usurous rates have never had much of an impact on me because I generally pay off my balances before I get charged any interest. Also, I used to take advantage of introductory rate schemes (where you pay a few percent until an unclear time limit after which you pay a huge percent). If you monitor the dates and rates closely these are often a very favorable short term loan. However if you make the mistake of doing this without resources to pay them back at the expiration of the introductory rate you’ll be hammered to pieces with rates often as high as 20% or more.
Note that the introductory rate offers seem to be worse than they used to be and more misleading due to extra fees and also note that a single month at 24% can wipe out the savings you’d enjoy from a full year at 2%. As a general rule I’d say it’s best to avoid the “special offer” interest deals and in my opinion the Government should be requiring the banks to disclose the real APR on these offers rather than the fake number which does not reflect the fees. If, for example, you pay a 3% fee to borrow 10,000 at “APR 3%” for a year your actual interest rate on this is 6%, often more than a home equity line which is also more likely to be tax deductible.
A big part of the solution is to cap interest rates at levels that are less likely to financially ruin people. This in turn will lead to more responsible lending by banks who can no longer count on bait and switch and fake APR games to beef up penalties and fees (which are about 25% of all bank revenues!). Free markets suggest we should not over-regulate, but I think even Adam Smith would have said that the free hand starts to break down when people’s bad luck or ignorance traps them into paying 30% interest. I think much of the current banking game is based on assumptions of a lot of defaulting, and this becomes self – fulfilling as the rates skyrocket for those not paying. You wind up with a more predatory style system where you are trying to build fees and interest rather than load responsibly.
Of course we are not alone in the universe, but not for the reasons suggested by most UFO enthusiasts.
I can’t tell you how much I wish the UFO stories were all true. In fact I’d be thrilled if even *one* of them was a credible story. But they aren’t. It’s very, very unlikely that even a single one of the thousands of reported stories about aliens visiting earth are true, for the reasons I discuss below.
Every so often Astronaut Ed Mitchell is quoted – here at CNN – talking about the Government cover ups of Roswell and other alien incidents he is convinced prove the existence of extraterrestrials and their visits to earth. With all due respect to Mr. Mitchell’s accomplished career this is an area where he’s by no means an expert and clearly has just been convinced by the same silly stories that have convinced thousands of other people “We are not alone”, mostly because they want to believe rather than because there is any compelling evidence. In fact there is no compelling evidence of alien visits to earth, and the idea the Government is covering up those visits is just dumb.
Don’t get me wrong – it is in my view it is nearly *certain* that there are at least *millions* of other planets with intelligent life on them. I’ve blogged about why I think there’s a very high likelihood that there are probably many billions of civilizations in the universe. In short it’s because we – as little replicating macromolecular structures – are unlikely to be all that special and because the universe is so darn huge with hundreds of billions of *galaxies*, each with hundreds of billions of stars and probably billions of planets.
But unfortunately for us earth lies in the low traffic zone of our milky way galaxy. We are so far from the center, and so far from even the closest star, that visits from aliens – especially organic ones like the dude pictured in the silly Roswell hoax – are very, very unlikely. Even with advanced technologies it would likely take many organic being lifetimes to travel to earth. Tommo corrects me on this – time dilation would allow organic beings to travel extensively if the ship could approach speed of light.
Why would they choose this part of the Galaxy when the center is teaming with star systems and probably millions of times more life per sector?
Don’t flatter yourself – the idea that we have attained some special status of great interest to more advanced beings that have the technologies to travel throughout the galaxy is a weak idea. Possible, sure, but weak.
We are NOT alone in the universe, but we won’t be visited anytime soon.
Signed,
Afghanistan & Pakistan Tribal Conflicts
Leave it to the BBC to come up with an excellent summary of the situation along the Pakistan / Afghanistan border where the USA is about to invest a lot more blood and treasure in the fight with the Taleban and Al Queda and supporters in those regions.
Given the huge global importance of this region it is amazing to me how little we tend to know about this area, though this BBC summary helps explain why things are anything but simple there.
Our Symbiotic Economy
In biology there are several kinds of relationships between animals where one or both benefit from the interactions. This obviously happens in economic relationships as well.
Something I have wondered about for some time is the size of what we might call the “commensalist” economy. Commensalism is the relationship between organisms where one supports the other without benefit to the host. Unlike a parasite, the commensalist character does no harm to the host, but also doesn’t bring anything to the table.
In defining the symbiotics in human economics we find many economic interactions where the benefits are so disproportionate or negative they would not be commensalist. Some would be called parasitic such as scams like the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme.
Many (probably most) economic relationships are mutually beneficial such as me buying a pizza and a Coke at the local restaurant. Here, they get my money and I get the pizza and Coke – the end products of hundreds of generally mutually beneficial economic relationships between farmers, bottlers, distributors, truckers, packagers, banks, research chemists working in the food industry, and more.
Yet I’m starting to think that the economy where one party gets a lot more than the other may be much larger than generally thought. This is very relevant as we begin to spend trillions on infrastructure and other Government projects. Will this money go for mutually beneficial projects or get sucked up into commensalist nonsense or low ROI things?
Some examples of the commensalist economy? Parents sell their house to their kids for less than a market rate, stock broker churns the account for commissions, CNBC reporters entertain but do not inform their viewers, “get rich quick” schemes in general (news flash – these do not work. Stop looking for the one that does and do some real work!), good salespeople upsell unneeded and overpriced services. In fact this last one is probably the key to my question – how much of our economy is built on “upsold” products and services and the commissions.
My hunch is that this type of economic relationship is simply huge – perhaps even 20% or more of the “truly productive” and mutually beneficial parts of our massive global economy when you factor in the massive commissions on sales which often simply reflect competition between large firms for massive private or government projects of dubious value to society. Pork barrel military contracts, for example, offer some of the lowest ROI of any human activity in history yet they represent a significant percentage of USA GDP.
… more after some research ….
The Stupid File: Twitter as Cult, destroyer of moral compasses. BALONEY!
One of the most intriguing and most frustrating aspects of the “new media” is how foolish the stories become as writers search for meaning amidst the ocean of change and sea of drivel that makes up the modern information infrastructure aka “Them Dang Interwebs”.
Today’s foolishness takes the form of Jeremy Toeman’s article “It’s Official, Twitter is a Cult” where Jeremy manages to mangle the meaning of a cult about as many times as he invokes it in criticizing Twitter. Another article actually suggests Twitter is wreaking havoc with moral compasses but I’m not sure I’ll even dignify that nonsense with a read, especially because I find Twitter to be the *least morally offensive* of the many internet venues where I hang out.
Yo TwitterCritterCizers, when is the last time a group of your friends drilled a bunch of wells to give extremely poor people in Africa water? On Twitter the answer is “Last Saturday “, when the Charity:Water effort, funded by hundreds of thousands of small donations from Twitter folks, began a project to bring clean water to Africa. This act alone defies much of the cult charge since it is clearly benefitting people who are far outside the “Twitter” network and represents the opposite of a totalitarian, elitist approach to social interaction. But let’s go through the “Cult” charges one by one to note how backwards this analysis really is.
I’m harping on this partly becuase I’m a twitter fan / evangelist but also because the promise of social media is absolutely spectacular, and I think Twitter may come the closest to realizing that promise for a mass audience. Twitter and most other social media experiments represent humankind’s best effort to date to create broad based, non-elitist, participatory democracies and social networking infrastructures. Twitter *defies* the cult and elitist mentality that is still pervasive in legacy human interaction, especially in religion and politics where money, charisma, and connections completely trump solid qualifications and personal virtues.
At the risk of falling into Jeremy’s trap and talking about a stupid article, I really think its’ a good idea to debunk this mythology before the world comes to an end and only me and the glorious Twitter people survive the apocalypse , whoops…. I mean before it gets out of hand.
- It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members
Nope, in fact it’s hard to even talk about Twitter to friends, relatives, or readers of this blog who mostly think it’s silly. I like to evangelize blogging but don’t do that much with Twitter, and in Twitter land Twitter rejection is expected and OK. No cultishness in the “coercion” department. - It forms an elitist totalitarian society
Ummmm. No. There are no real “kingpins” on Twitter. In fact the founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, are not even the most followed and don’t participate in Twitter all that actively with comments. Both are pretty mild mannered geeky guys who live modest lifesyles and largely shun the fame and personal power Twitter could bring to them with the simple act of more postings and calls to action. Furthermore, on Twitter you can follow anybody you care to, and many will probably follow you back if you don’t annoy them with appeals to buy things. This is called an “egalitarian society” and is the opposite of a totalitarian one. - Its founder/leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma. Even the author of the article states this one is “a stretch”. A stretch to utter nonsense.
- It believes ‘the end justifies the means’ in order to solicit funds/recruit people
Huh? Twitter does not solicit funds or actively recruit people. It is free, it is open, you can leave, join, participate at your own whim. - Its wealth does not benefit its members or society
First, it has little wealth at this time. Twitter’s looking to monetize its spectacular success and most folks hope they can do it, but one thing that is clear is that unlike cults Twitter won’t ask the members for anything – not even active participation. More importantly Twitter’s is getting used to generate a lot of money for *charities* and good works like the Charity:Water project listed above.
Conclusion: Twitter is not a cult, it’s a minor social miracle.
PS To avoid an untimely demise pass this Twitter propaganda on to 1000 of your closest friends and relatives and follow @joeduck at Twitter
Microsoft’s Vision of 2019
Thanks to Long Zheng for this post at his blog “istartedsomething.com” about a couple of Microsoft Videos showcasing the MS vision of gadgets and interactions in the future. The shorter video is neat but it was a sequence in the long one that really, REALLY got my attention. Using surface computing (which is already a robust application), on a transparent wall, two kids in classrooms thousands of miles away from each other were reacting in real time and in *different languages* as their voices were translated instantly for the other student. The technology driving this application is pretty much here now although I think there’d be some challenges making it work as fast as in the video, but this is the kind of stuff that is so provocative, powerful, and cool that it brings a technology teardrop to my eye.
In a world challenged so dramatically by a combination of ignorance and misunderstanding, how much progress could we make with technologies like this that cross connect people and cultures almost seamlessly? Obviously we have a long way to go and this is technology for the rich folks among those in our global family, but as these technologies penetrate into affluent or lucky schools the appeal and testing will continue until we can have much wider distribution.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/
CPU = Cat Processing Unit
Twitter 404 Error
Originally uploaded by jnunemaker
I never really understood how CPUs managed all that information. Now I’m even more confused since cats are usually more annoying than they are helpful.
(This is from a 404 error page at Twitter)
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