A simple solution for looming credit card problems? End the usury.

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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.

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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,

Roswell Joe

Afghanistan & Pakistan Tribal Conflicts

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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

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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!

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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

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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/

Comscore: Twitter Traffic Explodes

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Twitter continues to soar in terms of traffic and Comscore reports on some of the reasons Twitter is one of the most interesting applications to come around in a long time.   I think the demographics analysis helps us understand why “Twitter is different”.  For the first time in Social Media history the earliest adopters of the application are not the youngsters, but rather a very representative cross section of America.   This is important because it’s an indication Twitter will have considerable staying power and also is appealing to a crowd that has the resources to make it more valuable than otherwise, and potentially more valuable than Myspace or Facebook, the clear 800 pound social media gorilla that remains the most significant player by far in the social media space.    However at Twitter’s current rate of growth it will surpass Myspace by next year and Facebook within a few years, though it’s  not clear  from this the data that Twitter will continue at the current phenomenal growth rates.

From my own experiences I do think Twitter represents something really different and superior to the Facebook experience, and that is the real time large group interaction.   On Facebook I usually don’t have enough friends online at the same time to interact, and more importantly I usually just want to say “hi”, trade a bit of news, and eavedrop on other conversations.   This is easier on Twitter.  Much like a large party filled with interesting people where you know “some” people and are learning to meet others, Twitter  allows you to follow interesting threads and then hop over to some other one, in the meantime dropping notes or your own quips as you hop around.   It matches will with the short attention spans that are natural to our human conditions but also allows detailed follows ups with experts or company representatives or close friends.

Watch Twitter – it is the most significant new online application in many years.

Google’s Amoral Greatness?

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Update:  A Googley View of the matter:   Google speaketh o Copyrights

Often the weekend brings the best internet philosophy discussions and one is brewing today about whether Google is the good or bad guy in the content equation.    The answer in my opinion is that it is pretty nuanced and best seen as a series of  inevitabilities rather than points about fairness or best practices or who is doing what for whom.

Over at the Guardian the argument is that Google’s gotten out of hand and is running roughshod over anybody who stands in their profitable path:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy

…. one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old. This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience. There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny. And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier …

Meanwhile Mike Arrington disagrees – more accurately lashes out at the Google detractors,  suggesting:

Let’s all be clear here. What Porter and Bragg want is a subsidy from Google. A sort of welfare tax on a profitable company so that they can continue to draw the paychecks they’ve become accustomed to. That isn’t going to happen, and all this hand wringing isn’t helping to move their respective industries toward a successful business model. They either need to adapt or die. And they’re choosing a very noisy and annoying death.

Some truth to this but also pretty harsh given how disruptive Google’s been to the whole show.    Mike overlooks that the *single most disruptive act* in internet history was Google’s launch of Adsense, which monetizes content for all websites and more than any other single factor has led to an explosion of the spam, mediocre content, and some excellent content that has accelerated (though I think has not caused) the demise of legacy content providers like newspapers.

I said over at TechCrunch that:

Mike I’m not sure I agree with the analysis but here you’ve pulled together the “Google Goodness” argument about as cleverly and succinctly as it can be done.

I think a bigger perspective on this is far more nuanced.   The rise of Google search aggregation has in most cases diminished the average profitability of premium content.   It has slightly (but only ever so slightly) *raised* the tiny profitability of non-premium content such as the ocean of mediocre blog posts, stupid pet trick websites, and made for adsense efforts.    Something is gained as we move to a very democratic global publishing paradigm but also something significant is lost in this equation.   David Brooks of the NYT writes some brilliant stuff we need to hear in these challenged times.   He refuses to use Twitter.   Like hundreds of other bloggers  I write some political stuff too but few of my pieces are as informed as Brooks’ analyses.

However I’m happy to use Twitter and work for free.   I may win, but we all may lose something after the blogging and Twittering and Adsense dust settles.

Twitter’s Discovery Engine: The End of Civilization As We Know It.

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Sure it’s too early to know how the advent of “Social Media” will revolutionize the internet landscape but it will *certainly* revolutionize the online experience dramatically.     It’s been slowly happening for some time – perhaps 2 years or so – but I think we’re now at something of a tipping point where we’ll see widespread mainstream adoption of social media  – I predict Twitter will be the big winner in this space though there is plenty of room for Facebook to maintain the huge presence it now has online.

One of the most provocative upcoming items is the Twitter Discovery Engine, which will be Twitter’s attempt to allow users to  mine the information from the massive Twitter community.    They may not get it right at first but eventually we’ll see that unlike Google search – which is great for static information – Twitter will be able to connect you to a “human expert” about as  fast as you can Tweet out a 140 character note or click on their  “Follow” button.

This is very important because despite many foolish reports suggesting that Google has “solved” the problem of internet search they have done nothing of the kind.   Google’s very good at finding a lot of material about issues that stay the same over the years such as historical events.  Yet Google’s regular search generally fails – and miserably – when you are trying to find real time information on current events.    Their blog search and news search are better for information that changes regularly or has changed recently, but with a robust Twitter search you’ll soon be able to interact with newsmakers and news events in real time, asking questions and offering your own input.

The internet has always been about people much more than it is about technology.   Google is a brilliant company but I’d suggest that Google will be seen in the future as being the *last* of the major internet players to rely primarily on their technological prowess rather than their social architectures.     The new game will be the integration of human experience and expertise with the blossoming online information landscape, and this game will dominate until we have very powerful and direct integration of human brains with online information sources – probably in about 10 years.  This brain/machine integration has already begun at a rudimentary level with Braingate and mainstream devices like the Emotiv headsets coming soon.

This social media revolution  is not just a profound new development in the history of human communication, it is a social evolution of biblical proportions, and the beginning of a redefinition of social interaction that will both enhance and undermine our tribal history of human socializing that goes back tens of thousands of years and tended to favor smaller groups, less democratic social heirarchies, and simpler forms of “friend or foe” interactions.   These social mechanisms served our evolutionary needs at the time, but are becoming outmoded as the global population and global interests  come together, and fast.

Welcome to the new age new media revolution.    It’s going to be neat but be sure to fasten your mental seatbelts because there will be  some Twitter turbulence ahead.