Free music at Amazon made easy by downloading their, well, downloader

Check out the Philip Glass Sampler album for free.
Amazon has a bunch of other albums for free too. Over 100.

Soros funds Institute for New Economic Thinking with $50M donation

The hope is it'll be matched up to about $200M.

In case you aren't aware, "traditional" economics and it's models as it's taught in virtually all renowned universities completely failed in the last several years culminating in the economy blowing up in Fall of 2008.

Many believe, including me, that the entire global banking system needs completely overhauled asap. But:

... it's all happening very slowly. And with no rules of the road, we have entered a Mad Max world of economics in which even the most eminent of our top regulators and central bankers can't seem to agree on the fundamental nature of financial markets.

Soros with his resources is looking to speed up the massive shift that must take place to bring reality to economics, it's philosophies, models, etc.

Watch an interview explaining the Institute for New Economic Thinking at FT.com.

"The dogma has lost touch with reality."

Grants will be available from the new Institute.
More about Mr. Soros.

National Geographic Traveler Magazine ranks the Chesapeake Bay a 42

From National Geographic Traveler:

One of America's iconic landscapes, but the bay is dying, both as a natural ecosystem and as a cultural landscape. Almost all indicators of the Bay's health are negative. Is it any wonder, given the rampant sprawl, agricultural runoff, and booming population growth in the watershed?

Sad. Very sad. When will people decide to stop wasting time and start working on protecting this treasure for their great-great-grandchildren?

What did you do for 350 day?

According to 350.org:

What does the number 350 mean?

350 is the most important number in the world--it's what scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Amendment to exempt used car lots from proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency

This is funny. As in, how could this Congressman not know all of the info is public.


Go to Change-Congress.org.

Yippie - I'm invited to test Google Wave

Google Wave is:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document.
A wave is shared.
A wave is live.

Whitehouse.gov goes open source !

Congrats to Drupal, an open source content management system [CMS]!

From Personal Democracy Forum:

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government.

Publishing social security numbers online is a 1st Amendment right

I love how this woman has used the rule of law, the Constitution & FOIA, on what you would think would be common sense - that is - government protecting their citizens from publishing social security numbers online.

From ComputerWorld.com:

A fight by the Virginia government to stop a privacy advocate from republishing Social Security numbers obtained legally from public records on government sites on her Web site is attracting the attention of some privacy heavyweights.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to uphold privacy advocate Betty Ostergren's First Amendment right to publish the numbers.

- - -

Largely in response to her campaign, Virginia lawmakers passed legislation in 2008 that prohibits the dissemination of any records that contain Social Security numbers, no matter how the records were obtained.

Lala la - Where music plays for a dime

Sing it Muddy!

(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man...

Lala.com for more.

There's an app for that - by the end of the year. Check it at Wired.com story.

How several local judges are holding Wall Street's securitaztions accountable using the rule of law

Hopefully this will get a lot of press as it certainly appears that using the rule of law - the little guy will get to protect themselves from banks who take short cuts and who want their cake, have you pay for it, and get to eat it too.

Background:

Your mortgage is "packaged" with other mortgages into a financial instrument. This process is called securitization. It seems the investors who own these new securities - called mortgage backed securities [MBS] do not file the appropriate paper work for deed transfers.

From counter punch:

Three plain talking judges, in state courts in Massachusetts and Kansas, and a Federal Court in Ohio, have drilled down to the “straw man” aspect of securitization. The judges’ decisions have raised serious questions as to the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures that have transpired as well as the legal standing of the subsequent purchasers of those homes, who are more and more frequently the Wall Street banks themselves.

Can you name the 12-million-digit prime number?

You read that right. It's a new prime number just found and the finder won $100k.

More from EFF.org.

Google pink fingers

Ya know how Google is scanning every book ever made and is posting them online?

The person at Google doing it has pink fingers.
Hat tip kottke.org.

Green chile cheese burgers from the land of enchantment

Note: I am a vegitarian 100% of the time between meals.

OMG, do not watch this hungeree.

Link to vid about New Mexico's chile cheese burgers.
New Mexico's Green Chile Cheese Burger Trail.

The warning about your life savings

New Frontline doc The Warning from PBS.

A quote from The Warning:

That's how the business has grown from nothing in 1980 to $600 trillion of contracts today. ~ Mark Brickell Chair, International Swaps and Derivatives Association (1988-1992)

From a Slate article to put $600T in perspective:

By contrast, the value of the world's financial assets—including all stock, bonds, and bank deposits—was pegged at $167 trillion last year by McKinsey.

This market is not only hidden off company's balance sheets to a great extent. This market is almost 100% hidden - that is, not transparent. And most importantly - this market is still completely unregulated.

There is maximum pressure from companies, that we bailed out with trillions by the way, not to regulate this market. These companies, who we gave our money to, are paying lobbyists hundreds of millions to lobby against "us".

If you believe "everything will come back" with your IRA's, 401(k)s etc without regulation, you are as foolish as someone who jumps out of an airplane without a parachute and expects the outcome to be ok.

If you choose to do nothing to fix this, like contacting your elected officials demanding regulations, you are as liable for the outcome as someone who doesn't help their next door neighbor whose house is on fire and is threatening your own.

What are you working on changing?

About Change.org:

Today as citizens of the world, we face a daunting array of social and environmental problems ranging from health care and education to global warming and economic inequality. For each of these issues, whether local or global in scope, there are millions of people who care passionately about working for change but lack the information and opportunities necessary to translate their interest into effective action.

Learn more about Changemakers like Andy Abrahams Wilson and the Changemakers Network:

The Changemakers initiative aims to identify and engage the leading activists, elected officials, authors, bloggers, actors, musicians and thought leaders who have the greatest capacity to spark change on issues of importance.

From Mr. Wilson:



Learn more about the movie Under My Skin.

How health care could get done

I am so freakin jealous I didn't think of being a stand up economist!

Apparently THE Stand up Economist.



And no, I wasn't smart enough to find him from his letter to the editor of The Economist:

SIR – Having used my PhD in economics as a stepping stone to the more reputable field of stand-up comedy, it would be easy for me to spend all my time mocking macroeconomists. Consider, for example, that the current head of the Congressional Budget Office co-wrote a paper a few years back titled “Can Financial Innovation Help to Explain the Reduced Volatility of Economic Activity?”.

Yoram Bauman
Seattle

I found him from his challenge to Obama's famous economist Austan Goolsbee.

Damn it! I wonder if the world is big enough for two stand up economists?

Comedian who is Prez of Chamber of Commerce chats with Ratigan

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is the same org who is fighting against health care reform and who are losing members due to their stance on climate change denial.

Wonder what will happen first - millions more losing health care, global catastrophe due to climate change or the Chamber of Commerce becoming irrelevant if they stay the course.

Would you rather live in a creative or distributive society?

From nakedcapitalism.com, some excerpts:

Quelle horreur, some smart people are starting to question whether banking serves a redeeming social function.
-
Successful societies maximise the creative and minimise the distributive. Societies where everyone can only achieve gains at the expense of others are by definition impoverished. They are also usually intensely violent.
-
Even what the great investors do belongs at the distributive end of the spectrum. The genius of the great speculative investors is to see what others do not, or to see it earlier. That’s all. This is a skill…I am not convinced, though, of the social worth of such a skill, still less of the wisdom of encouraging society’s brightest and the best to try to perfect it.

This distinction between creative and distributive goes some way to explaining why the financial sector has become so large in relation to GDP – and why those working in it get paid so much. Even when a certain sort of financial activity is purely distributive, the returns to the winning parties are so enormous that the activity is immensely seductive – and the professionals who appear to be responsible for securing these gains are highly sought after and highly rewarded….

An insightful comment at the link:

There is something CRUCIAL missing from this analysis. The importance of LEVERAGE and LIMITED LIABILITY being combined, particularly in hedge funds. That is the real rort, and it is hidden away from view. Hedge funds enable huge gambles to be made, with a limited downside. And of course all those bets become self-fulfilling as credit expands.

Why people will be homeless before they are bailed out by people we bailed out

From the Wall Street Journal:

The $1.7 trillion mortgage securitization market is still a mess, despite (or in part because of) the Federal Reserve's $700 billion splurge into the market. But another reason may be Treasury's decision to undermine private mortgage-backed securities (MBS) contracts.

BlackRock Inc. Chairman Laurence Fink went so far recently as to call this "one of the biggest issues facing American capitalism." He's worried that to protect banks from billions of dollars more in writedowns on bad second liens (a.k.a., home-equity loans), Treasury is trashing private contracts. "There is modification going on protecting our banks, protecting their balance sheets" and "I'm just very worried about it."

Ah, yes. The law. Contract law in this case. Who knew there'd be a downside to transferring risk to someone's balance sheet [by securitization]? How could you possibly have thought there would be clear contract law in place to allow for worst case scenarios?

So the circle we're trapped in is, we had to bail out the banks so they wouldn't bring down the economy. But - they can't use our money that bailed them out to help bail you out since current contract law won't let them.

Facebook tracks millions of users to find out the Gross National Happiness

From their link at Facebook:

The graph contains several metrics. The first, GNH represents our measure of Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores, though they are interesting to view on their own.

From NYTimes article:

The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood.

Banks argue for keeping stuff off their balance sheets

Ever wonder why your credit report shows every little slight detail about you, but banks and corporations don't have to account for various items on their balance sheet - even when they are publicly traded companies?

From Reuters:

"If you get off-balance sheet treatment, that provides a more efficient use of your balance sheet and has been the foundation of the structured finance market. Bringing it back on balance sheet would have an impact on all your various financial ratios," said Mike Kagawa, portfolio manager at Payden & Rygel.

Duh, really?! And that transparency is bad?

The article continues:

Industry experts said the accounting changes threaten to setback the huge strides made by the Fed's emergency loan program, the Term Asset-Backed Securites Loan Facility, known as TALF, launched earlier this year.

Through the program, the Fed was able to bolster consumer lending and reopen the securitization market for consumer ABS, nearly shutdown by a deep credit crisis in 2008. The program also drove the high costs of funding dramatically lower.

In case you forgot, TALF is the $1T, note the T, program the Federal Reserve is using to bail out the dealers of the program... I'm sorry, I mean the companies who securitize loans to keep it functioning.

In other words, the market imploded, without the Federal Reserve's $1T it would not be working and "the banks" want to keep the accounting the same.

Susie Buffett's only TV interview

The woman behind Warren Buffett until her death in 2004. Warren said of her, "he couldn't have done it without her".




Hat tip Signal vs. Noise.

Ian Shive, conservation photographer

From Current TV's blog [emphasis mine]:

The place where the two diverge is that nature photography takes no action – the image is for yourself or for a magazine. Conservation photography takes the process a step further by taking that same image and using it for advocacy, education and to bring awareness or aid to the subject or ecosystem depicted in the image. It’s sort of like giving back to the landscape that you’ve borrowed from as a photographer.

Be sure to check out his inspiring portfolio at his website.

Follow their Hunch

Go ahead, follow their Hunch:

Hunch is a decision-making tool that gets smarter the more you use it. After asking you 10 questions or less, Hunch will provide a concrete result for decisions of every kind.

Hi tide

Essay why investing in equities is parasitic in nature

It can certainly be agreed that:

Investors’ objectives

Five primary reasons for obtaining stock are for control of a company; to receive current income from its operations; for price gains; to store future purchasing power; and to create money.

In lieu of arguing in support of the value of the essay re: your investment choices, think of this as you read it. From today forward, there will be potentially life changing opportunities for you to invest your hard earned money in ways that will create the kind of lifestyle and community that will not only enhance your world, but others as well. Based on recent history, political and cultural reality, fixing our broken economy will take years. That reality increases the risk of a Fall 2008 meltdown or worse. If you are planning your investments based on markets returning to the status quo, you invest at your own peril.

About the author & his new book:

Thornton Parker is the author of “What If Boomers Can’t Retire? How to Build Real Security, Not Phantom Wealth”[.]

He defines phantom wealth as “the returns from corporate stocks that are based on market prices” as opposed to real wealth that is based on “work, earnings, and solid accomplishments, instead of just hopes.”

Read the essay.

Private property = trees most likely cut down...

Public property = trees most likely live.



Birds that live on PHP*, like the Belted Kingfisher, appreciate trees too.



PHP = Pleasure House Point.
Want to help protect it for future generations? Start here.

Moving Windmills - read his story, watch his story, share his story, donate, buy his book

Thanks to Jon Stewart who had William Kamkwamba on tonight.



Mr. Kamkwamba's website.

A post on his site for viewers from The Daily Show that includes a couple dozen links of how you can learn more and help.

His book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, is also available from links on his site. If you purchase thru his website, the affiliate fees also go to him & his 501(c)3.

By donating [Emphasis mine.]:

Payments appear as Moving Windmills Project, a US 501(c)3. Contributions are tax deductible in U.S. Click "Support My Work" tab for more info. Amounts over $250 will be doubled by a challenge grant.

Some info about the Documentary, YouTube version above:

“Moving Windmills” was submitted to the Pangea Day Film Festival, where it received the “Best North American Filmmaker” award from Participant Media. It placed third in the Cinema Properite Film Festival.

Since the film’s release, “Moving Windmills” has been screened at the World Economic Forum, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Columbia University’s African Economic Forum. It has also been accepted to the Ashland Independent Film Festival, The Without Borders Film Festival in Rome, and the Darfur Film Festival. It won 3rd place at the Seven Fund

Watch & learn about the movie at the Director's site, m ss n g p eces.

Watch Moving Windmills at Pangea Day's site.

About Pangea Day [Emphasis mine.]:

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that — to help people see themselves in others — through the power of film.

Follow Kamkwamba on Twitter.

Some photos from Flickr:



He is also a TEDGlobal 2007 Fellow.
About TED Fellow program.

Rewriting the Bible at Conservapedia is like Mastercard?

Stephen Colbert's "news" on Conservapedia apparently crashed their site.

From a cached version at Google:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible[.]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

Benefits include:

• mastery of the Bible, which is priceless

Other benefits also include, according to Conservapedia, getting close minded liberals to read the Bible:

liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds

It would be nice if this wasn't bulldozed wouldn't it?

A libertarian-economist-MBA's opinion on why we need government to deficit spend during this depression

Read entire article & comments at his blog.
Read entire article & comments at nakedcapitalism.com.
It's interesting comparing the comments due to somewhat different readership of each blog.

I totally agree with his take on the real problem. Think, houses being used as ATM's with home equity loans. Then value of homes collapse, re: collateral, with the same loans outstanding. The ones that aren't in default that is.:

But, make no mistake, the housing and writedown problems are only symptoms. The real problem is the debt – specifically an overly indebted private sector (note the phrase ‘private sector’ as I will return to this topic).

On why we're heading into a depression vs. a recession:

Depressions [are] marked by balance sheet compression[.]
Recessions are typically characterized by inventory cycles – 80% of the decline in GDP is typically due to the de-stocking in the manufacturing sector. Traditional policy stimulus almost always works to absorb the excess by stimulating domestic demand. Depressions often are marked by balance sheet compression and deleveraging: debt elimination, asset liquidation and rising savings rates. When the credit expansion reaches bubble proportions, the distance to the mean is longer and deeper. Unfortunately, as our former investment strategist Bob Farrell’s Rule #3 points out, excesses in one direction lead to excesses in the opposite direction.

He goes into what the public sector, ie: federal government:

If the private sector is a net saver, the public sector must, I repeat must, run a deficit. That’s the law of double entry book-keeping.

About the author.

Gorillamobile tri-pods for mobile devices

I have a buddy who has their Gorillapod & it's addictively fun & easy to use. Now they have one for mobile devices. Super cool.
Hat tip Daring Fireball.

Judge rules Cheney interview must be released

From NPR.org:

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled there was no justification to withhold the entire 67 pages of FBI records documenting Fitzgerald's interview since the Plame leak investigation has concluded. He said that limited parts could be withheld to protect national security and private communications between the president and vice president.

More transparency on ABS proposed, industry trade group opposes

From Bloomberg:

Securities firms may be forced to report trading data for asset-backed securities after the opaqueness of that market helped create the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the U.S. brokerage industry’s main regulator said.

And from the article, an interesting objection:

Brokers represented by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and Regional Bond Dealers Association objected to that expansion in comment letters, saying it would impair market liquidity.

You know, impair market liquidity that could create enough chaos in a "market" that could cause it to crash. In other words, this market crashed in 2007-2008 being opaque and they want to keep it opaque so it doesn't crash again.

How CDS is complicating loans to 70% of small businesses

CIT Group, you never heard of them, provide financing to roughly 70% of small businesses. They've been on the verge of bankruptcy for over a year. Won't bore you with all the details, but under TARP we loaned them $2B to keep them afloat.

They now need more money or they're history. Which would be incredibly complicated for the small businesses that depend on them for financing. More economic chaos would result and one can only guess how these businesses could get alternative financing to help them weather the worst economy in decades.

They have a plan to restructure their debt outside of bankruptcy, but CDS holders have an incentive to have them file bankruptcy.

Complicating negotiations trying to keep them out of filing is the amount of outstanding Credit Default Swaps[CDS].

From FT.com:

They suspect that some of the largest holders still have significant enough holdings of the credit default swaps that they would gain more on the value of their credit protection than they would lose with the loss on the debt if the company filed for bankruptcy protection.

But one of the frustrating things for advisers to companies trying to stay out of the bankruptcy court is that it is virtually impossible to have an exact understanding of the dynamics of the creditors.

From NYTimes.

VF's Q&A with NYTimes' writer Andrew Sorkin about Wall Street meltdown 2008

At Vanity Fair:

VF Daily: In your own words, what do you think is the significance of the new revelations and the excerpts in your book?

Andrew Ross Sorkin: Well, I think this is the first time the public is going to get a true, inside-the-room account of what happened where you actually get to see all of the machinations, all of the interlinking relationships—the sort of inter-web—and even some of the duplicity among the various actors in this drama. It hopefully brings all of it to life for the first time and also helps solve the larger mystery, which is, How did this happen? We have all read the headlines during those harrowing days, but as I got further and further into my research, I realized that news reports at the time only scratched the surface of what really happened.

If you "invest" and don't read enough to understand what happened & what's going on now - you are crazy.

On a side note, don't look at VF's story and slideshow about Penelop Cruz.

FDIC proposes banks pay premiums early

From NYTimes.com:

If adopted, the proposal, the agency’s third restoration plan for the fund in a year, would raise $45 billion from the banks to replenish the fund.

That would almost certainly wipe out the industry’s earnings for this year — in the first half of the year the banking industry reported $1.8 billion in income.

Regulators have told the banks that they will not have to record the prepayments as an expense until the fees would ordinarily have been due, postponing the hit to balance sheets until a time when officials believe the industry will be better able to weather the costs.

Senior officials emphasized that the plight of the fund would have no impact on insurance for bank deposits.

That obviously makes more sense than the crazy idea of the FDIC borrowing needed reserves from the banks floated a couple weeks ago. Previously posted here.

Taking over the zombie banks wouldn't hurt either.
Let the lobbying begin.

What you want to know about social networking sites & your privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted Part 2 that shows how social networking sites help create data bases of your online activity.

This example is about job searches:

Let's start with an example of 3rd party tracking: when we went to CareerBuilder.com, which is the largest online jobs site in the United States, and searched for a job, CareerBuilder included JavaScript code from 10 (!) different tracking domains: Rubicon Project, AdSonar, Advertising.com, Tacoda.net (all three are divisions of AOL advertising), Quantcast, Pulse 360, Undertone, AdBureau (part of Microsoft Advertising), Traffic Marketplace, and DoubleClick (which is owned by Google). On other visits we've also seen CareerBuilder include tracking scripts and non-JavaScript web bugs from several other domains. There are pretty sound reasons to hope that when you search for a job online, that fact isn't broadcast to dozens of companies you've never heard of — but that's precisely what's happening here.

Be sure to check out Part 1 about Cookies and how hard they are to remove and how advance they've become.

EFF wins release of more Telecom lobbying records

From EFF's press release:

A judge ordered the government Thursday to release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the records be provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by October 9, 2009.

Related news from EFF, a new bill was introduced to push this further:

Yesterday, four US Senators, led by Senator Chris Dodd, announced plans to introduce "The Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act." That bill, endorsed by EFF, would repeal the retroactive immunity granted by Congress as part of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) to phone companies that illegally assisted in domestic spying by US intelligence agencies and would revive EFF's recently dismissed lawsuit against AT&T for its collaboration in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

Buy the new $95 homeless doll Gwen to teach, not sure what

Seriously. A $95 homeless doll.

From Consumerist.com:

Gwen is a limited edition toy, so non-homeless girls with the $95 to spare only have a few more months to buy one. Real homeless children aren't a limited edition, and will still be in shelters and on the streets, long after Gwen disappears from shelves.

Go buy Gwen at AmericanGirl.com. I wonder if 100% of the proceeds go to helping eradicate homeless children.

Recovery.gov redesigned & improved

Track the money.

Here's a look at Virginia's info.

Hot link to Report Fraud, Waste & Abuse:

One of the core missions of the Recovery Board is to prevent fraud, waste, and mismanagement of Recovery funds. Recovery.gov gives you the ability to find Recovery projects in your own neighborhood and if you suspect fraudulent actions related to the project you can report those concerns in several ways[.]

Fannie Mae sees single family conventional home loan deliquencies explode

From CalculatedRisk.com:

Fannie Mae reported that the serious delinquency rate for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business increased to 4.17 percent in July... and up from 1.45% in July 2008.

That is not subprime! Those are conventional plain vanilla loans.

Fannie Mae? That's the public/private entity that is basically insolvent that we bailed out last year.

By the way, over 90% of all mortgages made in the 3rd Quarter were touched in someway by the Federal Govt. Wonder how the housing market would have been without that involvement. At Market Place.

Alive & Well at the Wells Theater

Go see it. The End.

Virginia Stage Company:

ALIVE AND WELL
Kenny Finkle
September 15-October 4, 2009
In this funny new play by VSC favorite Kenny Finkle, our country's continuing struggle between the North and South is on full display as a heartbroken Civil War re-enactor and an emotionally desperate New York journalist search for the oldest living Civil War veteran. Trekking through the heart of Virginia, they find more than they bargained for in this irreverent take on modern America. This is the second play in VSC's American Soil series, a new play project exploring the cultural and historical foundations of Hampton Roads.

Some reasons to see it. You:

• like theater
• love great acting & perfect chemistry between actors
  
• are passionate about something and think you're crazy
• are told you're crazy because of that passion
• haven't been to the Wells Theater [lately]
  

Allow extra time, or park in MacArthur Mall as Monticello is torn up due to the light rail construction.

Ken Burns National Parks doc starts tonight baby!

And... for us semi-anti-tv-non-tivo-owners, PBS is putting them all online!

At PBS.org Ken Burns' National Parks America's Best Idea.

At the site, they have sections entitled Full Episodes, Video Clips, Deleted Scenes, & Untold Stories. You can also send ePostCards, purchase the book, DVD, or CD, download from iTunes & of course donate.

PBS also has this groovy Scrapbook widget that:

Create your own personalized scrapbook page! As you view the website, save photos, video, and text passages that you like to your scrapbook for future easy reference

Check out their sample Scrapbook page.

There is also a section where you can Share Your Story. I put the RSS feed in the right column. Submit your story & check out others'.

Member of Netflix? You can also put the DVD in your que.

Contribute more than what you take from the eco system

Patagonia pushing the envelop beyond sustainability.
Learn more at Patagonia's "the footprint chronicles".

Krugman's "How Did Economists get it so Wrong" redux

Reread it. Any one who "invests" or thinks they want a lot of it. Money that is, needs to read this and understand the incredible risks in blindly trusting "professionals" and history. History, as in "the market always comes back".

Two great quotes.

One in relation to behavioral finance:

Probably the most influential paper in this vein was a 1997 publication by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of Chicago, which amounted to a formalization of the old line that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Second one:

...good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”

[Emphasis mine]

Read or reread Krugman's piece at NYTimes.com.
Ignore doing your own due diligence at your own peril.

Circuit Court rules AT&T is a "person" re: a FOIA exemption

Hat tip to Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
From Law.com:

In an appeal before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the FCC argued that when Congress crafted the exemptions clauses of the Freedom of Information Act, it intended the phrase "personal privacy" to extend only to human beings.

But AT&T begged to differ, arguing that the FOIA specifically defines the term "person" to include corporations, and therefore that "Congress's choice of the adjectival form of that word -- 'personal' -- should be understood to refer to that definition."

The FCC lost their argument. AT&T was considered a "person" for the sake of this FOIA exemption apparently intended to protect a person's privacy.

ASF creates code to track home loans through securitization adding more transparency

Could this added transparency with your personal information be abused? Will there be laws in place to make possible abuse illegal?

American Securitization Forum, ASF, created the:

...new global ASF Loan Identification Number Code (ASF LINC™) is a sixteen digit identification code that captures underlying loan type, origination date and country of origin, in addition to randomized alphanumeric data, to create a unique ID for a wide range of loans that may be pooled and sold into the capital markets.

It's intent is to track individual loans to provide transparency to everyone who is a stakeholder in the loan once it's securitized. It's intent sounds noble, & beneficial. One of the critical supremely complicated problems of the housing market, is the lack of motivation of holders of securitized mortgages to negotiate in good faith to help responsible people stay in their homes.

Other factors complicating fixing the housing mess, is the near impossibilty of contacting "owners" of the mortgage for various reasons. Finally, it is clear that the securitizing of mortgages allowed banks & mortage companies to dump decades of appropriate risk analysis out the window as they had no motivation to do so as the mortgage was securitzed and sold off in bundles releasing them of any possible downside.

I wonder if this added transparency could have a downside and if rules should be put in place to stop any possible abuses now.

From ASF:

The global ASF LINC is linked to the CUSIP and/or ISIN number of the securitized product, allowing investors to track the loan throughout its lifespan and provide a chain of accountability between loan originators and investors. The ASF LINC creates standardization and consistency in connecting and reporting monthly performance data of a loan. In addition, it provides a means to connect added value data and information from third party providers like credit bureaus. Assigned at no cost to issuers, the ASF LINC is stored in a central loan data repository administered by S&P FIRMS. The ASF LINC is not designed or intended to replace the primary servicer's loan number, but rather to provide users with a means to track and monitor a loan throughout its life after the loan has been securitized.

Lawsuit against BoA for $1,784 billion, trillon dollars

How can we join in to make it a class action!?!
Sounds far doesn't it?

More at Reuters:

Dalton Chiscolm is unhappy about Bank of America's customer service -- really, really unhappy.

Chiscolm in August sued the largest U.S. bank and its board, demanding that "1,784 billion, trillion dollars" be deposited into his account the next day. He also demanded an additional $200,164,000, court papers show.

Remember how BoA doesn't think it owes us, $4B as it "was an oral agreement".

Credit Default Swap comedy

So one time, there was this really groovy financial instrument that was illegal to regulate, that grew to well over 10 times the US debt, according to the comment at the article in the link below. Anyway, remember AIG ?? The company us tax payers threw a couple hundred billion dollars into since they were insolvent and we came within hours of a planetary financial meltdown if they were allowed to go under since there is no rule of law in place to deal with a catastrophe like that.

This is funny, from Bloomberg.:

“The only market that I know of that seems to have worked virtually every day has been the CDS market,” Eraj Shirvani, chairman of ISDA and Credit Suisse Group AG’s head of fixed income for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told reporters yesterday at the industry group’s regional meeting in New York.

Funny in that Shirvani's comment is close to the dumbest fucking rewriting of history comment one could make.

More pressure on foreclosures from recasting ARMs

From CalculatedRisk.com:

Of the $189 billion securitized Option ARM loans outstanding, 88% have yet to experience a recast event ... Of these loans that have not yet recast, 94% have utilized the minimum monthly payment to allow their loans to negatively amortize.

And:

Resets are not a problem with low interest rates. The potential problems are from loan recasts.

New FASB rules for sales of products like the iPhone & Palm Pre

This seems to make sense & simplify the accounting as the "product" that is a bundle of software & hardware obviously has to work together or either part is essentially worthless.

From WSJ:

Currently when a company sells devices like these, it gets the cash up front, but can only book the revenue and profits from the sale over time, typically over the length of a product's life.

Under the new rules, companies will be able to book much more of the revenue when the product is sold. A company that has strong sales in a quarter would likely record higher profits under the new rules than the old. The old standard helped smooth out the differences between good and bad quarters.

And:

A person familiar with the thinking of a FASB task force that approved the accounting switch earlier this month said it was "trying to align the accounting better with what the economics of the transaction were.

The new rule is expected to pass Wednesday. I'm calling this now - watch as people see a spike in sales/earnings, once the accounting has been implemented, & they don't do the appropriate due diligence on the value of the underlying stock & the stock will explode up for a period of time.

Planet Better car - the right chicks will love you for it

From better place, the electric car company:



From my man.

My man? On Flickr.

Fun with accounting or Banks could bail out FDIC

This should simplify things.

Highlights from NYTimes article:

Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors.
-
The plan, strongly supported by bankers and their lobbyists, would be a major reversal of fortune.
-
Bankers worry that a special assessment of $5 billion to $10 billion over the next six months would crimp their profits and could push a handful of banks into deeper financial trouble or even receivership. And any new borrowing from the Treasury would be construed as a taxpayer bailout that could open the industry to a political reaction, resulting in a wave of restrictions like fresh limits on executive pay. Any populist furor could be avoided, the thinking goes, if the government borrows instead from the banks.

And if anything goes wrong, what's the worst that could happen?

I made a mistake and now I'm suing

From Wired:

A Wyoming bank sent an e-mail containing sensitive customer data to the wrong Gmail account, and now wants Google to reveal the identity of the account holder who received the data.

Google declined.
Hat tip to Va Coalition for Open Government.

Kids should learn their lesson & pay out of their allowance

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

OpenInternet.gov & mission to ensure net neutrality

YEAH!

At OpenInternet.gov:
[If you do anything right now - hit their site, join it, become a Fan in Facebook, etc!]

President confirms he was black before elected

I'm getting back into following football

It's a great sport that builds athleticism, team building, etc but the NFL sure seems to have not been that great in the last "x" number of years for me.

Finally, as football was intended. I'm starting a fantasy football league too.

Restoring the golden rule with a Charter for Compassion

What a timely idea.



Heard her again on Fresh Air.

At Wikipedia:

Karen Armstrong MRSL (born 14 November 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire) is a British author of numerous works on comparative religion, who first rose to prominence with her highly successful A History of God. A former Catholic nun, she asserts that "All the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences." They each have in common, she says, an emphasis upon the overriding importance of compassion, as expressed by way of the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.

Why I love Apple! Cuz they're great, great, great...

Microwave your laptop & sell it on eBay for charity

Bids start at $26,001.



Proceeds donated to one laptop per child.

Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

At eBay.
Originally saw post at engadget.

Bank of American won't repay $4B to us taxpayers since it was an "oral agreement"

From Forbes, not from The Onion:

...has argued that it doesn't need to pay the Treasury back because it was simply an oral agreement.

Things looked differently nine months ago.

During the company's fourth-quarter conference call, which was held on Jan. 16, Chief Executive Ken Lewis announced BofA received a federal guarantee for $118 billion of toxic assets, most of which were accrued in its acquisition of Merrill Lynch, in addition to the $20 billion it received to complete the deal. (See "Ken Lewis Is Getting Lonely.") Lewis said the guarantee was worth $4 billion and that it was essentially insurance protection.

Gimmie a B. Gimmie a O. Gimmie a Y. Gimmie a C...

New ad from Change-Congress.org against Democrat Rep. Mike Ross

Join Change-Congress.org and drive special interests out:

Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

There is a bill in congress being pushed by Change-Congress.org that has 85 sponsors to give the country back to the people by changing campaign finance law.





There is a case pending in the Supreme Court that could allow corporations to spend unlimited money in campaigns. Unlimited.

From NPR.org:

NINA TOTENBERG: At issue in the case is whether the century-old ban on corporate spending in candidate election violates the constitution and whether the court should reverse decades of its own decisions that explicitly or implicitly have upheld the ban on corporate and union spending.

Yesterday, there appeared to be five conservative justices on the verge of saying the ban is unconstitutional. If so, that would dramatically change campaign finance law as practiced since 1907 when Congress, for all practical purposes, first outlawed corporate spending in candidate elections.

This can be traced back to a case in 1886 about "corporate personhood".
More at Wikipedia. How many "rights" should a corporation have vs. a person.

There isn't much of a leap to make to have the scenario of an illegal immigrant, "an enemy of the state", etc, forms a corporation, is allowed to exercise their "rights" as a "person" under the 1st Amendment, with a ruling from the Supreme Court allowing...that corporation can spend unlimited money "campaigning" undoubtedly affecting the outcome of an election. We, the people, would clearly loss more of our voice and our vote.

CEO of International Swaps & Derivatives Association says trust us

From the Bond Buyer:

But Robert Pickel, the ISDA’s CEO, told members of the House Agriculture Committee yesterday, “Not all standardized contracts can be cleared.” Pickel said that derivatives contracts that are infrequently traded, even if they have standardized economic terms, “are difficult if not impossible to clear” because a central counterparty clearing facility’s ability to clear a contract depend on such factors as liquidity, trading volume and daily pricing. This “makes it difficult for a clearinghouse to calculate collateral requirements consistent with prudent risk management,” Pickel said.

“End-users are not systemically significant and ­regulations intended to improve stability and decrease systemic risk should not ­apply to them.” Jonathan Short, senior vice president and general counsel of the ­IntercontinentalExchange Inc., also said Congress should focus regulation on the segments of the market where risk is greatest. “Mandating that interdealer and major swap participant trades be cleared would eliminate the bilateral counterparty risk that was central to the liquidity crisis that occurred last year,” he said. Pickel also argued against mandatory exchange trading of OTC derivatives, warning it “would undercut their very purpose: the ability to tailor custom risk-management solutions to meet the needs of end-users.” Dan Budofsky, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, who testified on behalf of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, agreed that “it may be more appropriate for products that trade less frequently to trade over-the-counter.”

Witnesses also challenged the Treasury’s plan to impose capital requirements on cleared swap transactions. This would require the end-user businesses to post collateral for the swaps, Budofsky said. Collateral requirements for corporate end-users “would create a significant ­disincentive to use swaps to manage risk,” he said.

I have a business proposition for you.

Send me money to insure your house. As long as nothing goes wrong we'll be fine. If something does go wrong, that's ok, I'll be fine cuz I've collected the premiums from you. You'll be screwed if you have any losses since I never set aside enough collateral to cover anything . [Think: AIG.]

What's in your wallet ?

Apparently only ious.

From CalculatedRisk.com:

According to the Fed, household net worth is now off $12.2 Trillion from the peak in 2007.

That's not even the "downside". The "downside" is:

After a bubble, the value of assets decline, but most of the debt remains.

As a percentage, from NYTimes.com:

...household net worth remains about 19 percent below its peak in the third quarter of 2007, before the recession began.

I'll be there in 15 minutes, I mean 6 days, no 30 seconds

From xkcd.com:



I love his cartoons.

In terms of income growth and poverty reduction, Bush performed worse than any two-term president of the modern era

According to David Frum.
David Frum was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and is a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. More about him at Wikipedia.

From Marketplace where you can also hear his commentary:

In terms of income growth and poverty reduction, Bush performed worse than any two-term president of the modern era. Even in the best year of his presidency, 2007, the typical American household still earned less after inflation than in the year 2000. The next year, 2008, American households suffered the worst income drop since record-keeping began six decades ago.

In my Republican party, there is worryingly little discussion of this damning trend. We do criticize ourselves for over-spending in office. But economic management gets much less, almost zero, internal discussion.

And:

The more plausible culprit is the surge in health care costs. Over the years from 2000 to 2007, the price employers paid for labor rose handsomely: on average, 25 percent. Yet for the typical worker, none of that extra cost translated into higher wages.

In other words, we've wasted far too much time in fixing health care in America. It needs fixed now and it's dangerously foolish to waste time making up crap about why we shouldn't fix it, vs. having intelligent discussions on how to fix it.

62% of doctors support PUBLIC & private options for health insurance

According to a survey published at The New England Journal of Medicine:

Overall, a majority of physicians (62.9%) supported public and private options (see Panel A of graph). Only 27.3% supported offering private options only. Respondents — across all demographic subgroups, specialties, practice locations, and practice types — showed majority support (>57.4%) for the inclusion of a public option (see Table 1). Primary care providers were the most likely to support a public option (65.2%); among the other specialty groups, the “other” physicians — those in fields that generally have less regular direct contact with patients, such as radiology, anesthesiology, and nuclear medicine — were the least likely to support a public option, though 57.4% did so. Physicians in every census region showed majority support for a public option, with percentages in favor ranging from 58.9% in the South to 69.7% in the Northeast.

Saw it first at NPR.org.

Trouser wearing woman fined not flogged

From NPR.org, an update to this story:

A Sudanese judge convicted a woman journalist on Monday for violating the public indecency law by wearing trousers outdoors and fined her $200, but did not impose a feared flogging penalty.

And:

"I will not pay a penny," she told the Associated Press while still in court custody, wearing the same trousers that had sparked her arrest.

Hussein said Friday she would rather go to jail than pay any fine, out of protest of the nation's strict laws on women's dress.

"I won't pay, as a matter of principle," she said. "I would spend a month in jail. It is a chance to explore the conditions in jail."

Celebrate Park(ing) Day this Friday

Make a public park:

PARK(ing) Day is an annual, one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks.

Google's new FastFlip

Nice. Check it out:

...is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

Facebook screws up once & Google could keep info permanently online

At reddit.com:

Facebook FAIL: A misconfigured webserver has leaked notes for 16,000 accounts with privacy settings turned on. (Mine was one of them)

One would certainly hope Google would delete this info permanently.

An example of how privacy laws have not kept up with technology

Did you know:

Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. If you live in the United States, there's an 87% chance that you don't share all three of these attributes with any other U.S. resident.

And:

But research by Prof. Sweeney and other experts has demonstrated that surprisingly many facts, including those that seem quite innocuous, neutral, or "common", could potentially identify an individual. Privacy law, mainly clinging to a traditional intuitive notion of identifiability, has largely not kept up with the technical reality.

Read entire Technical Analysis at EFF.org.
Be sure to join to.

Life settlements being securitized

This should work out well.

From Wikipedia:

A life settlement generally refers to the sale of a life insurance policy by a policyowner for less than the face value of the policy to third party investors.[1] The third party investor(s) plans to profit at death of the insured by collecting more in death benefits that were paid out (e.g., the purchase price, the transactions costs, and premiums). This translates into higher profits the sooner the policy holder dies.

From WSJ:

The product, known as a life-insurance settlement, has come under greater scrutiny following the financial crisis. In recent months, Wall Street firms have begun securitizing the products by slicing them up and selling bundled pieces to investors.

Regulators are concerned about the securitization of these products and whether those who are selling their life-insurance policies and those buying them know exactly what they are getting, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some see echoes of the residential-mortgage market, in which pieces of mortgage-backed assets became widely distributed among financial firms and few people had a good grasp of the value of the underlying mortgages.

This is kinda funny.

When checking LISA, The Life Insurance Settlement Association website to learn more about the industry, they have a page that beckons "LIFE SETTLEMENTS SIMPLIFIED Understand the process." Check out the link so you can learn more. This is what comes up for me:

Depending on internet speed, this page may take a few minutes to load

Simplified eh? And that's before securitization.

I got an idea.

We should let Wall Street do this without any regulations and keep the rule of contractual law fuzzy, re: securitization, to make settlement as complicated as possible in case something goes wrong. Then in a few years we can check back to see how it's worked out.

Juliette Binoche, Charlie Rose & a conversation about love

Thank you U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff

From WSJ:

A federal judge threw out the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed settlement with Bank of America over its disclosure of controversial bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees, in an unusual ruling that casts doubts about how the agency handles probes of major U.S. companies.

From Huffingtonpost.com:

Rakoff, in his ruling, found that the settlement "suggests a rather cynical relationship between the parties: the SEC gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger, the bank's management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators. And all this is done at the expense, not only of the shareholders, but also of the truth."

Last year Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch & others were on their way to insolvency, some getting bailed out by us tax payers, others being taken over and yet others being allowed to crash and burn.

BoA bailed out Merrill Lynch by "buying" them last year. There is apparently enough evidence to hold a trial to determine the truth that hopefully, will ultimately hold people accountable.

Thanks to Judge Rakoff's ruling, the real truth behind what was later revealed that Merrill, with the knowledge of Bank of America executives, paid Merrill employees $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the deal closed on Jan. 1.

That's $3.6B in bonuses paid to executives of a firm that lost over $27B and was basically insolvent just before getting "bought". The SEC's fine of $33M, as in million, is what the Judge threw out. Thank you!

Hear the health care bill

Hear The Bill, We Read...You Listen...We ALL Decide

Many voters have been questioning whether their Congressional representatives have read the entire health care reform bill, HR3200. Now, they don't have to - they can listen to it.

Pretty darn cool. You can download the audio and listen to it on your MP3 player like your iPod so you stay informed and have an intelligent debate about the health care bill.

Secret government plan to take over health care

There is a government take over of health care going on. It's called sticking with the status quo. The VA. Join the Military to defend your country, and work for an organization that has a proud history. One of the benefits you get is health care. Depending on time served, even for life.

Everyone knows one of the great benefits of working for a government, whether it's a local city or town government, the Post Office, Civil Service, etc, knows it's health care. Even elected officials in a government large enough to provide health care has it.

You have a job that provides health care, great! As long as you keep the job, and as long as the business is large enough to negotiate to keep the same benefits you had years ago the same today and in the future for the same cost you're ok. If. One example of what's probably happening for most employer based plans, again, is our health care went up 30% vs. last year. It's with a Fortune 500 Company and we have no "conditions".

Lost your job and/or your health care? Good luck affording COBRA. Have a pre-exisiting condition? You'll probably be dropped if you haven't been yet thanks to existing law and reality.

Conclusion?

Unless you are very wealthy to afford your own health care, sticking with the status quo you will likely lose your job sponsored plan, or significant benefits from it in "x" number of years. If you're fortunate enough to work for a government that provides you affordable health care you are part of the secret government plan to take over health care by having everyone work for government to get health care.

Dave Page the Cobbler does great work

It's true. A manager at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports recommended Dave Page, Cobbler to repair an old pair of Alp styled Teva's that had both blown out. They were super comfortable sandals and I missed them. Tossed in the back of the closet I stumbled on them one day hoping to revive them. Dave answered questions in email quickly & let me know when he received them & when the work was done without asking. I'm glad they're back. They're super comfortable. Thanks Dave.

Repo market at lowest since 2003

That sounds like it's going in the right direction.
What's the Repo market? It's where:

An investor places its money with the custodian bank, which in turn lends it to another institution, and then assets are pledged as collateral for the loan.

Repos are used to increase leverage. They also usually have incredibly short terms, like one day, or even hours. As such, they are typically viewed as "cash".

In the past, US Treasuries were used as collateral. Obviously very, very safe.

In the last "x" number of years, almost any "asset" was used as collateral. Which increased risk. If the "asset" pledged as collateral become less valuable, and/or less liquid, more collateral had to be pledged or, the position had to be unwound. Either way, that put downward pressure on the value of the underlying "asset".

Add fear, too much risk and massive leverage and you get everyone running for the door to protect their money/portfolios at the same time. While you were watching your Mutual Funds & stocks dropping last year, virtually every asset was dropping like a rock at the same time. Including "assets" that were used as collateral for Repos.

Imagine you loan money to someone who pledges collateral to back up the loan. You view that loan as good as cash. Then their collateral loses value. You get nervous and either want to call the loan or get more collateral. At some point, you find out you can't call the loan as they can not repay and they can not post more collateral as they don't have it, or can't do it. You feel you have to cut your loses now, so you get out of the transaction.

Now imagine that happening with billions & billions of dollars. Now imagine one company going bankrupt causes another to go belly up, etc, etc,etc.

That deleveraging of all assets including repos, while a good thing that will help us get back to reality, can also be catastrophic as it's almost impossible to stop once panic sets in.

The consequences for the repo market are best highlighted by the plunge in dealers financing corporate securities. A common transaction during the boom involved investors lending out Treasuries and then using the pledged cash to borrow corporate securities. They made money on the difference between the higher rate for corporates than Treasuries. This daisy chain collapsed when investors lost faith in using corporates as collateral and the relationship between Treasuries and corporate securities changed sharply.

Standards for collateral used in repo remain much higher and traders say reforms for the repo market, which are still being discussed by dealers and the Fed, should focus on making sure that continues.

The reasons you should care are you want tighter regulations on the repo market and the more intelligent use of risk so the 2008 blowup has less chance of occurring again, and to understand to some extent, how much you risk you take in thinking the stock market will "come back" like it always has. "Come back" to "where & when"?

Read article at FT.com.
Repo, or Repurchase Agreement explained at Wikipedia.

Congressman Joe Wilson of SC, you are a disgrace to your country and your party. Resign now.

During President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress tonight regarding health care reform, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) yelled out "lie" when the President said his health care bill would not mandate coverage for illegal immigrants.

Yes, you could here him yell during the speech.

Julie, Julia and a plan

Saw Julie & Julia yesterday. Really good flick! I'd highly recommend taking someone you know who is an amazing cook, then buying whatever ingredients they want to cook after the flick.

Meryl Streep was perfect. The rest of the cast were just really, really good.

The flick at IMDB.com.
Watch Julia Child at PBS.org.
The blog that was made into the movie.

A speech to kids on their first day of school

From here:

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

Playing with GrooveMaker

A cool groove I made using the iPhone app GrooveMaker is, well, groovy. It's so groovy, you export your track or complete song from your iPhone/iPod, type in the http link you're given and wala, it's on the interwebs . I think. your machine.

Not sure if the link for my groove works for you. Just started messing with exporting late last night. Enjoy. I think.

How economists got it all wrong

Lengthy, readable, excellent article by Krugman:

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

Short version:

I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH
II. FROM SMITH TO KEYNES AND BACK
III. PANGLOSSIAN FINANCE
IV. THE TROUBLE WITH MACRO
V. NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED . . .
VI. THE STIMULUS SQUABBLE
VII. FLAWS AND FRICTIONS
VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES

This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”

A translation?

If you don't understand there are tectonic shifts going on in the field of Economics and you are still investing like you did "in the past", you risk losing far more than you realize. Not being negative. Just sayin'.

Vegitarian yet?

Chooseveg.com.

What's the analogy of fire ants building a life raft out of themselves?

I'd like to think it was all of us "workers" doing what we need to do to resolve our minor, petty differences and to protect our government. That also means our government needs us to stick together, to protect the larger colony so we can continue on another day.
Hattip for the vid to kottke.org.