If Deficits Don’t Matter, Why Does The Government Keep Taxing Us?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 16, 2011 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011I’m taking the same approach to federal budget discussions that I took with the health care bill. I’m hiding ’til they’re over, so I can smugly observe later that nothing has changed.
 This image really has little to do with the article, but we spent a lot of time on it so we like to use it whenever we can. |
I wish I were the US government, or a bank. Then, whenever I’m broke or actually running at a deficit, I could just say “that’s okay, Deficits don’t matter” or “people of America, if you don’t give me exactly the amount of money I need, life as you know it will cease to exist” and everyone in America (and their grandchildren) would give me billions of dollars, which I could share with my other friends who had been frivolous about finances or made some insanely bad investments. Unfortunately, I’m not a bank or the government, so it is mostly with a detached amusement that I sit and read about the shirtless flirts in Washington that we pay so much to sit around arguing about the annual budget. I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised that congressmen spend all their time looking for dates on Craigslist, when the alternative is actually trying to understand monstrously incomprehensible legislation like the health care bill, net neutrality issues, or for the near future, the federal budget. I mean, have you actually ever looked at the thing? Even when the New York Times creates a clever and relatively simple interactive graphic, it’s mind boggling. But definitely preferable to buying the darn thing, I mean, The basic overview is 216 pages and costs 38 bucks, and the Appendix is 6 times longer than that (1368 pages) and costs 75 bucks. If you bought all the available related publications, you’d have 2448 pages to sift through, at a cost of $214.00. And that doesn’t include the CD-ROM, which thankfully is not an audio book read by Timothy Geithner. If you want to learn more about how the budget is put together without spending 200 bucks, the Wikipedia page goes in-depth. Over 13,000 words in depth in fact. Remarkably, the words “billion” and “trillion” are only used 81 and 59 times respectively. Me? While everyone else sits around arguing about taxes, spending, sacrifice, and responsibility, I’ll be kickin’ back, ignoring the doorbell and the phone as creditors continue harassing me. Why? Because deficits don’t matter. And besides, I oddly find myself agreeing with Fox/WSJ writer Paul B. Farrell’s rant Fed dictator Bernanke needs to be toppled – Forget Mubarak, it’s Fed reign of terror that must end. To distract myself while I sit here broke with it not really mattering, I think I’ll play a few rounds of the poverty survival game Spent. Because virtual homelessness is a lot more fun than real homelessness.
Quality of Life vs Quantity of Life
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 9, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, January 9th, 2011Do we really need a growth economy fueled by planned obsolescence? Or are we ready to start living better, rather than living bigger?
I’m no stranger to the emotionally dynamic world of new consumer products. We all know the feelings evoked when you decide you need a new camera, car, washing machine, or lawn mower, and start researching all the shiny new options and exciting innovations. You make your purchase, and there’s a palpable emotion being experienced as the money changes hands. A sense of achievement and ownership, and a childish excitement about getting your new toy home and opening the package, revealing its shiny pristine contents. Somewhere in the checkout process, you may experience a little buzzkill when the salesperson suggests you’d be foolish to not buy the extended service contract. But you’re a smart person. You opt not to buy it. You know they do testing with advanced algorithms that determine the EXACT DAY the product will fail, which will always be approximately 23 days after the the warranty expires. I jest a bit, but it’s well-established that most service contracts aren’t worth it, and for electronics stores, are one of their greatest sources of revenue, with margins that are nearly 18 times the margin on the goods themselves. So in any case, you get your new purchase home, and if you made smart decisions and spent enough money, you may actually be happy with the product for a while. With the emphasis on “a while”; odds are, especially if it’s an electronic device, there’s a store built right into your purchase, imploring you to buy more. Your mobile phone or computer suddenly needs apps and services you’d never dreamed of being essential to life itself until you started using it, and while a company like Apple makes very little on the sale of apps in these little built in shopping malls, they drive device sales, and a $200 iPod was only costing them 4 bucks each to produce once production was ramped up. The fact is, any buyers’ remorse you feel is the least of your worries, because your new toy will probably be your old toy within a year. Not because it suddenly doesn’t do exactly what you meant it to do, but because the maker has built in a dirty trick with some form of planned obsolescence. In the case of computers, this used to take the form of the Wintel duopoly (a partnership soon to be made obsolete itself by quadroid), in which Microsoft’s code bloat required ever more powerful processors from Intel, driving innovation that was arguably unnecessary otherwise. Does your desktop computer do anything it didn’t do five years ago? Probably not, unless you’re editing HD movies or crunching meteorological data in your home office. Other forms of obsolescence will come from products that failed from shoddy outsourced manufacturing, or in the case of the US obsession with SUV’s, a backtracking in fuel efficiency that makes vehicles more expensive to operate than they need to be, driving anxiety over peak oil, which leads to things like the BP gulf spill, as oil companies get careless in their pursuit of locating oil and maximizing margins. Lately I regularly question the current American model of capitalism, in which corporations have more rights than humans, it’s possible for 4 people to have more wealth than the world’s 57 poorest countries, and in America itself, the pie is divided in such a way that out of every hundred dollars, one person has 42 bucks, while most of the rest of us have about 9 cents each. Although you can find lengthy explanations both emotionally opposing and intellectually defending planned obsolescence as an underpinning of successful market-driven societies, I personally think we’ve entered a new paradigm, and with the world’s population growth slowing to a plateau where we will have seven billion people on the planet this year, it may be time to think about what we really need to live well, rather than what we need to do to keep fueling economic growth. Aside from individual greed, the only justification for growth-driven capitalism has been the fear of some Malthusian catastrophe, something that is an absurd projection in era when we produce so much food and technological innovation that we don’t know what to with either. What about you, have you had enough? Or do you still want more? Read the rest of this entry »
BankRun 2010 – Take The Money & Run On December 7
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 2, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010Money talks, bullshit walks. In a circle. With a hand-painted sign. Maybe an intentional run on the banks could send a message that actually gets results.
 A bank run? There’s an app for that. |
With all the all the Commie Central Liberals, Tea Party Wingnuts, and Rand Paul Conservatives running rampant in this country, waving signs and shaking fists at whatever Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann point their fingers at, and with so much excitement about the Palin/Quayle 2012 campaign that marines are getting Sarah tattooed on their bums, it’s surprising that the BankRun2010 movement hasn’t gotten more press traction on this side of the pond. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a grass-roots movement inspired by this video clip (also below) in which French ex-footballer and deodorant model Eric Catona suggests that when a person takes part in conventional protests, they’re really just “swindling themselves”, since they’re using their time and perhaps money to engage in an act that is likely to have little real impact. His idea? An intentional run on the banks. His argument is that since banks hold all the real power in the world, the only way to change the system is by bringing down the banks. To that end, December 7 is the day that has been suggested as a day that we all withdraw our money for a day. Because what, after all, is a wealthy, smug, morally decrepit banker, with no money in his bank? Probably a less smug, morally decrepit person. As a borderline collapsitarian myself, I have to say I think this is one of the best protest ideas since the Gandhi era. On the purest level, there is absolutely nothing wrong with briefly taking your money from the clearly corrupt hands that hold it, simply to remind the bankers attached to those hands that the power is not theirs, it’s ours. In my (obviously opinionated) view, any argument against this as a rational form of protest is predicated on the idea that the banking system as it exists today is somehow of intrinsic benefit to humanity, and must be protected for the good of us all. And is most likely to be presented by the bankers themselves. It will be interesting to see what kind of turnout there really is; a protest with similar motives in Chicago last year had some brief momentum but ended up being a blip in the media. After the videos below, we’ve compiled a list of active Facebook pages for “BankRun 2010″ by country. Read the rest of this entry »
Indian Microcredit Industry About To Collapse?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 17, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010In spite of the feelgood vibe associated with microfunding for the economically challenged people of the world, no-one’s going to be singing “Tiny Bubbles” if India’s massive microlending industry bubble bursts.
 Even with microlending, there are always strings attached. |
Wow. Just when I had stopped worrying about how the collapse of Ireland’s economy might trigger the broader collapse of the global economy (it turns out Ireland’s economy isn’t dead, it’s just resting ), now I have to worry about the collapse of India’s economy. After watching America’s banking system get gutted by smart rich guys loaning tons of money to people to buy houses they couldn’t afford, SOMEONE should have noticed the potential for the same to happen with the massive microcredit industry in India. The parallels are actually rather remarkable, except the consequences are much more dramatic. This Globe And Mail piece politely refers to how the poorly-regulated microloan industry in India has resorted to “usurious interest rates and coercive means” to operate. Meaning they’ve apparently been operating much like the local loan sharks everyone was happy to see them replace. This has led to suicides by microcredit-bankrupted individuals who are now being urged by Indian legislators to “strategically default”. Which then gives the banks a fright, because they’re exposed to the tune of $4 billion on all of this lending. The tragic thing on the human end of this scenario? The worst of these overextended borrowers who are choosing suicide as a solution may only owe as little as $2,000. Too bad the Gates Foundation and others didn’t speak up sooner about how the microcredit model was so flawed. For a refresher on how this sort of crisis can play out, see the graphic below. Read the rest of this entry »
The End Of The World? It’s All In Your Head.
[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 3, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010Yeah, yeah. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, yadda yadda. Maybe all this recent eschatology is actually just taurine scatology.
  Is the end of the world near? Probably not, but talking about it sure sells a lot of books and DVD’s |
Okay, western civilization. You had your shot, and the best you could muster was Lady Gaga, Glenn Beck, mortgage derivatives, and American Idol. So when the hell are you going to end like any other self-respecting civilization? Well, pretty soon, according to the seemingly intelligent people who’ve posted 18 pages of immensely detailed commentary on sites like this. And also according to seemingly intelligent people like Michael Ruppert, former LAPD officer, writer, and founder/editor of From The Wilderness , the popular newsletter and website devoted to investigating political cover-ups and peak oil issues. I recently watched the film Collapse