Just How Big Would a Trillion Dollar Coin BE, Anyway?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 6, 2013 by admin in Politics
The web is buzzing with silly talk of fixing the economy by minting a trillion dollar coin. So just how big would that coin be, if it were made of gold?
 Yup. That’s a football field. Details below. |
You’ve probably heard about the “Trillion Dollar Coin” by now, and maybe even taken the time to take in the experts’ predictably confident and just as polarized positions on the topic. The fact that the idea is even being discussed seriously is rather telling. Can you imagine the same conversation occurring before the bailouts of 2008? It seems unlikely. And that’s ONE angle on this whole thing that especially intrigues me. As much anger as some of us may have experienced as a result of the bailouts and their aftermath, I for one am thankful for them. Partly because it was probably the only way to avoid a replay of the great depression, but more importantly, because it was probably the first crack in a centuries-old paradigm that has far outlived its usefulness. Talk to someone who has studied economics, and the conversation will rapidly fill up with elaborate terminology that tries to express the incredible complexity of global markets and speculative investment. But as much pride as economists or financial experts may take as they display their head-spinning depth of knowledge on the topic, they are usually overlooking one stark, annoyingly simple fact. At the foundation of it all, their elaborate constructs are all based on a rather simple social contract, i.e.: the tacit agreement on the part of large numbers of people that a piece of paper is worth what someone says it is. It’s tragic that millions of people suffered through a decade of poverty and that perfectly functional factories sat idle after the crash of 1929. And the tragedy was compounded by the fact that it was primarily because pieces of paper had lost their perceived value. That was the magical thing that occurred in 2008; Paulson & Bernanke’s Bailout Bankster Brigade basically “broke capitalism”. That has only peripherally sunk in for people, but every passing day, more people get hip to concepts like fictitious capital, and we live in an era of some of the most innovative thought in human history. About the only thing the archaic entity called a “bank” is good for these days is laundering drug or war money, and centralizing power. That paradigm is not long for this world, in my opinion.
That’s why I don’t find the blogsplosion about the Trillion Dollar Coin particularly interesting. As Matt Taibbi, the pop media journalist the Goldman Bankster Gang loves to hate most points out in his most recent piece: “The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme”. A paper version of the Trillion Dollar Coin was created in 2008, and we’ve been gleefully spending imaginary money since long before that, it’s just that the average person doesn’t understand why THEY don’t have any. They’ll eventually figure this out, and that’s when the feces will really hit the fan. So what really intrigued me was this silly question:
What if we still had to back currency with a real-world asset, and we were only allowed to mint this trillion dollar coin out of GOLD?
Here’s the rough result. I explain my admittedly sketchy methods below.
I’m no genius when it comes to volumetric geometry and 3D imaging, so this graphic may be a little off. Feel free to correct me in the comments! I used yesterday’s price of gold, which was $1661 an ounce. Dividing a trillion with that figure, I determined it would take about 181.23 tons of gold, and according to Wolfram Alpha, that would require a cube that’s 65 meters on each side. I tried to approximate the dimensions of a quarter (24.26mm x 1.75mm) to create the cylinder/disc dimensions. That ended up being a disc about 418 meters in diameter and 2 meters thick. The football field isn’t perfectly to scale, but you could obviously fit four football fields end-to-end on a 420 meter disc, so I roughed it in.
What Does a Yellow Traffic Light Really Mean?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 5, 2013 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
When you approach a yellow light, do you slow down, or put the pedal to the metal?
When I was in kindergarten, Miss Luftkopf said a few things to me with great regularity, presumably because I was an ignorant five year old with a poor attention span. One was of course “you’re a GOOD helper Ian”. But one that stuck with me long after I learned that helping the teacher made the bully beat up and call you “teacher’s pet” was “Red means stop! Yellow means slow! Green means GO!” I don’t recall exactly when that middle part changed, but as far as I can tell, yellow now means “Gun it you idjit! I gotz places to BE”. I was reminded of this recently when I read that China is changing traffic laws so that a yellow light is now – for all practical purposes – the same thing as a red light. They appear to be reacting to the same problem that has evolved over time here in the states, but predictably, their “solution” is resulting in all sorts of fender benders and additional ticketing. The absurdity of this approach of course reminded me of the Simpson’s episode from season ten
Oddly, Professor Fink’s solution wasn’t too far from reality; although there has been a tremendous amount of sophisticated research dedicated to the timing of the yellow light, it has mostly been implemented to increase ticket revenues, not improve safety. I personally find that last bit to be quite telling. I mean, I really believe that this is not just a traffic phenomena, but a profound metaphor for our cultural ills. And I actually DO recall when that change I mentioned at the top occurred; it was during the era when the “me decade” 70′s slowly mutated into the “greed is good” 80′s, when the slithery Gordon Gekko character in Wall Street somehow suddenly became the American male’s idea of a hero figure. It probably doesn’t matter at this point how a yellow traffic light is timed, our culture pervasively sees it as meaning “accelerate”. Or does it?
What do YOU do when you approach a yellow light?
What If You Never Had To Buy Insurance Again?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 4, 2013 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
If you take the time to read the book “Deadly Spin” by a former Senior VP of CIGNA, you may decide not to!
For a long time, I’ve said (among other things) that “buying insurance is like giving someone money to protect you from something that’ll never happen so that they can not protect you when it does.” A lot of friends and acquaintances look at me as if I’m either ignorant or insane when I suggest that the single biggest thing wrong with America is the insurance industry. But finally – after the publication of Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans – I feel vindicated. One of my key assertions for some time has been that insurance is pretty much the sole reason that health care is as expensive as it is, which – given its tidal-wave-like ripple impact on the economy – should be reason enough. But it goes much deeper. The insurance industry as a whole is a ridiculous con game rife with greed, corruption, and deceit, and if you don’t think so, you probably haven’t had to make significant legitimate claims on a policy. Or don’t pay attention to the news. If the personal experiences that I’VE been involved in were the only stories out there, I might think that I and my small circle had just had bad luck. But the horror stories of insurance companies are everywhere.
Love or hate Michael Moore (I lean a little to the latter, for the record), his movie Sicko was a fact-based eye-opener mostly focusing on the now-common insurance industry “innovation” called rescission. Which in a nutshell can be defined as “hiring a bunch of people to figure out how to not pay on policies you’ve sold“. If you have doubts about the veracity of Sicko’s stories, read in Deadly Spin about the PR panic it caused at the highest levels of the insurance industry. The author was right there on the inside working on damage control.
My personal stories range from a hospital charging almost a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS A WEEK for a standard room during my now-deceased mother’s hospital care, to a series of attempts by companies trying to weasel out of paying for business associates’ obviously legit claims, to a few stories from friends who had adjusters showing up while they wept over their smoldering homes, with a check in hand to help them out. How thoughtful! Unfortunately, they were checks for a third of the legitimate value of the claim. That’s a classic industry technique. Look like the good guy up front while you screw the customer from the other side.
Even former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had a run in with the industry. And lost. Like many homeowners in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Lott was shocked to find that his insurance company didn’t think wind had destroyed his house, but that water did. That meant they didn’t have to pay. Lott played the “Don’t you know who I AM?” game, and lost. We’ll never know all the facts there, but we DO know that when he tried to wield the power of Washington and Homeland Security, the industry didn’t flinch. And that appears to have riled him up so much that he may have resorted to behind-the-scenes intimidation and bribery.
So if the power of a senate leader doesn’t scare the insurance industry, what will?
Pretty much nothing. Although different reasons are typically offered for Lott’s eventual resignation, the real reason probably is that by stepping down when he did – two weeks before new legislation that would have prevented him from becoming a lobbyist took effect – he was able to get into the business that he’s now in, i.e.: lobbying. Apparently Lott learned where the REAL power in this country is the hard way.
But I’m rambling on all pitchfork-and-torchy here. Don’t take MY word for what an appalling monstrosity the insurance industry really is, let an old man who worked at the top of it for decades and couldn’t live with himself any more tell you. You’ll probably be stunned at some of the things you learn, and even if you you don’t care about the immorality of it all, Wendell Potter serves up a lot of simple facts about the history of insurance in America that will probably surprise you. It was once a brilliant idea for spreading risk amongst many, and has become a bizarre tool for enhancing the extravagant wealth of a very few.
A Drone of Your Own: The Booming Personal Drone Market
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 3, 2013 by admin in Technology
Who watches the watchers? YOU can, if you get ahead of the game. Why let Homeland Security and the NSA have all the fun? Here are three affordable personal drones you can buy TODAY.
 Just don’t get carried away like this fellow in New Zealand, who was eventually shut down by the government. |
Remember the good old days, when a US Military drone was something we shot at for target practice? Probably not. I only do because as a kid, I had dreams of being an aerospace engineer, and actually built a functioning model of the Air Force XQ-4 target drone. In any case, guess what! Times have changed, and now, as you probably know all too well, military drones shoot at US! Yes, even “us” as in American citizens. But stop pouting in the corner like some liberal peacemonger about how Skynet and Terminators are just around the corner and we’re all doomed. The fact is, the military has no monopoly on drone technology; in fact non-military drones already outnumber military ones by about 2-1, according to this March 2012 Washington Times piece. Probably just as scary as surveillance and attack drones in American skies is the fact that FEDEX, for instance, is eager to convert ALL their air transports to unmanned vehicles. Ever experienced the minor chaos that ensues when Google Docs or Gmail goes down? Well, imagine every cargo aircraft in America “going down”. But don’t fret, get on board! There are plenty of pretty amazing personal drones on the market, and frankly, the smartest innovators these days are anti-war hacker types who are more likely to be members of Anonymous than the military. So if it comes down to “The Drone Wars”, we have the smarter people on our side. We’ll probably do a more in-depth piece soon; there’s something of a drone boom going on. But rather than, um, drone on about my personal theories on the topic, for now we have a roundup below of drones you can buy TODAY, and prepare for the NEXT trendy end of the world scenario, the Drone Wars. Read the rest of this entry »
John Boehner Tells Harry Reid “Go F— Yourself”
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 2, 2013 by admin in Politics
Or did he?
A lot of news sources are alleging that John Boehner told Harry Reid to “Go F— Yourself”, right outside the Oval Office. We think it probably played out a little differently.
