Scientists turn ‘bad fat’ into ‘good fat’ BBC
Leaked Doc May Have Forced US To Speed Up Bin Laden Raid Slashdot
An IP Address Does Not Point To a Person, Judge Rules TorrentFreak (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
NightWatch 20110503 kforcegov (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Here’s Your Daily Dose Of UK Economic Disaster Clusterstock
Bahrain bank flight, quantified FT Alphaville
Oops. Does he or doesn’t he back Warren for CFPB? Philadelphia Inquirer (hat tip Adam Levitin)
Overnight Polls Find Muted Improvement in Obama’s Approval Rating fivethirtyeight
Senate Report Accusing Goldman of Deception Referred to DOJ, SEC Bloomberg
Imagine If the Unemployed Helped Run the Fed Jon Walker, FireDogLake
How bin Laden died: Psy Ops in action? McClatchy (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Barclays, RBS, Goldman sued over US mortgages Independent (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
U.S. Regulators Face Budget Pinch as Mandates Widen New York Times. This is pathetic:
On a recent trip to New York to tour a trading floor, a group of employees from the commodities watchdog [CFTC] rode Mega Bus both ways, arriving late to their meeting despite a 5:30 a.m. departure. The bus, which cost $30 a person round trip, saved the agency roughly $1,000 over Amtrak.
William Black interviewed on Le Show New Economic Perspectives
Antidote du jour:
48 comments
Comments are closed.
Re IP addresses don’t point to individuals:
A rare bright spot in the black sky of the IP offensive, which is really a corporate domination and censorship offensive.
The modern IP regime is meant to impose monopoly strangleholds on the economy and eventually to censor political discourse. Read Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution and you’ll see that today’s regime violates both of the explicit provisions of Constitutional “exclusive Right”: It does not promote progress in the useful arts and sciences but suppresses such progress, and it is not for what any reasonable person would call a “limited Time”.
Therefore, modern IP laws and enforcement are unconstitutional.
(Where’s the tea partiers and libertarians on that one?)
an IP-address does not equal a person.
If corporations can be “persons” for whom no particular flesh-and-blood individual is responsible, why not IP addresses? Make them live up to their own logic.
Umm..it’s a bad practice to use one abbreviation to stand for two different things in the same comment. Internet Protocol /= Intellectual Property. I would certainly agree with Lessig’s assertion that the extension of existing copyrights are indefinte copyright on the installment plan.
You’re right, and I didn’t even notice that. Now I can see how it would be confusing to someone who didn’t know how the same abbreviation is used for two different things.
I hope the context makes each one clear enough.
Actually given that every government needs revenue, and that the folks with intellectual property want a service from the government, there is a simple solution charge a fee. You get say the first 56 years free, then say $10/year for 20 years then $100 for 20 years and $1000 for 5 years and $10,000 and up there after. If you are Disney you get to decide how much your IP is worth and pay the fee or let the IP go into the public domain. It is not a tax but a fee for the right to sue, which all seem to regard the government having a right to require.
So we should sell “unnatural monopolies” as well as natural ones. Actually its a good idea, in that right now these entities are exploiting their consumers already. So we might as well get something back from them. However I fear the process would not stop. We could sell other unnatural monopolies. Such as the right to be abusive to strangers, or the right to pee on other peoples front doors. Or even the right to have a cake monopoly? Imagine a cake monopoly? What would that be worth to the right company? Consider all those “cake” addicts.
Intellectual property and IP addresses have a very close relationship. Systematic government repression of peer-to-peer filesharing has the convenient side effect of suppressing Freenet and related efforts. A peer-to-peer Internet like Freenet is perfectly feasible and it would curtail government censorship and surveillance. So one current attack on peer-to-peer Internet is depicting it as a dangerous state of nature with child molesters and terrorist behind every tree. The other attack, I think, is to harass all peer-to-peer traffic as a prima facie intellectual property violation.
As if IP address means anything with botnets, VPNs, TOR, open WiFis, etc. And who says an ISP’s IP address logs are accurate? What do they have to lose by getting it wrong?
As happy as the decision in this case made me, I presume this is an outlier.
What will it mean if/when we go to IPv6 with network-level security? Can technology stay ahead of legislation? Unfortunately, IPv6 alone can’t hide the sender and recipient, and if IP addresses are enough for convictions then this nonsense will go on. At least IPv6 will make a lot of passive sniffing pointless.
Therefore, modern IP laws and enforcement are unconstitutional.
(Where’s the tea partiers and libertarians on that one?)
Ummmm, the Mises Institute is probably producing more scholarly anti-IP writing than any other source right now.
link correction: Senate Report Accusing Goldman of Deception Referred to DOJ, SEC
http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1377-at39r3ijnkeE-43CR1OIELRL1P0IGM0EOJLJKJF
On the Clusterstock article — check out the comments. They’re all in the direction of how much ‘pain’ the Brits were willing to take — as if such pain was a virtue. Why am I reminded of that scene in Bergman’s ‘Seventh Seal’ when Jof and Mia’s performance is interrupted by a crowd of creepy religious fanatics who believe the end of the world is nigh? http://bit.ly/kVptJr
Preview of Atlas Shrugged P. II (hehehehe…) — A revolutionary move away from ‘Collectivist Film-Making’: http://bit.ly/li0FdO
Irish banking system — Still f*#ked: http://bit.ly/k8QYUm
Huh… not from that scene, but still:
JONS
That looks terrible.
PAINTER
It certainly does. He tries to rip out the
boil, he bites his hands, tears his veins open
with his fingernails and his screams can be
heard everywhere. Does that scare you?
JONS
Scare? Me? You don’t know me. What are the
horrors you’ve painted over there?
PAINTER
The remarkable thing is that the poor creatures
think the pestilence is the Lord’s punishment.
Mobs of people who call themselves Slaves of
Sin are swarming over the country, flagellating
themselves and others, all for the glory of God.
JONS
Do they really whip themselves?
PAINTER
Yes, it’s a terrible sight. I crawl into a
ditch and hide when they pass by.
That’s certainly a very Nietzschean view of Christianity. As Michael Allen Gillespie writes in Nihilism before Nietzsche:
In his mature thought, Nietzsche sees the preeminent form of passive nihilism in the thought of Schopenhauer and especially in his doctrine of resignation. This asceticism, in Nietzsche’s view, is the final manifestation of the European devotion to the Crucified. In this will to nothingness….
But Gillespie argues that Nietzsche got it wrong, that in addition to this side of Christianity, which comes down to us through the tradition of Platonic and Neoplatonic rationalism, there exists an entirely different tradition, the competing tradition of Christian nominalism. The Platonists had the upper hand from Augustine until Aquinas, who crafted a moderate synthesis—the Thomistic compromise—-which held until Occam’s nominalist revolution in the first part of the 14th century. Since then it’s been a war, with an intensity that ebbs and flows, within Christianity.
I don’t think poor Augustine would have endorsed self-flagellation. Original sin or not, I don’t think he’d have taken it so literally.
Saying that I don’t think Augustine would have supported modern neoclassical economics either. I wrote something about this a while ago — I’m still not sure why… But its about a strange cult that Augustine was once a part of that used to worship the predictive power of numbers — I think they’re remarkably similar to the neoclassicals… http://bit.ly/lOu6EM
In reference to that piece I’d only point out that the debt-deflationists seem to appeal more to Manicheanism as Augustine characterised it, than they do to Augustine’s ethics. The Manichean — like the debt-deflationists of today — oscillated between ignoring the things they’d done wrong and shrugging their shoulders at the problems they’d caused by ultimately saying that everything is hopeless because the world is an evil place. You know you’ve heard this before — the wealthy fatalist who worships pain and unemployment (usually the pain and unemployment of others)…
Since neoclassical economics takes Christian morality and turns it on its head, I don’t believe Augustine would have supported modern neoclassical economics either.
The only Christian theology that could possibly be reconciled with neoclassical economics is a Christian theology that has been thoroughly corrupted. One can see how this could easily happen with nominalism and its emphasis on materialism and individualism.
As to a consistent theology or philosophy, I don’t see the neoclassicists as having one, other than greed. If one were looking for a historical precedent, I don’t think one could find a much better one than this:
The popes, emperors, cardinals, kings, prelates, and nobles of the time sorted through the snarl and, being typical men in power, chose to believe what they wanted to believe, accepting whatever justified policies and convictions and ignoring the rest.
▬William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance
It seems to be hardwired into the human mind to believe that pain and sacrifice are virtues in and of themselves that are recognized and rewarded by the god(s). That’s why this mentality appears in pretty well every religion ever seen.
Austerity economics is every bit as much a religion as Roman Catholicism, so it’s no surprise really to see this mentality raised to the level of a religious virtue that will be rewarded by the gods of the economy, i.e. the bond market and the invisible hand. Evidence doesn’t matter to Austerians any more than it matters to the religious. It’s always about faith, or ‘market confidence’, to use the Austerian term for faith.
noob,
Maybe what is hardwired is the awareness of the advantage for oneself that accrues from persuading others to undergo hardship and sacrifice.
Phil
Ha! I love it!
This seems like it could get interesting. First did the banks that made these margin calls receive any benefit from ‘setting this house on fire’. Also it brings up the issue of fraudulent conveyances and transfers by the banks.
Barclays, RBS, Goldman sued over US mortgages Independent (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
You asked two days ago whether Osama Bin Laden’s death meant reelection was a sure thing for Obama. I realized today that I had already forgotten about Osama Bin Laden’s death and only the link reminded me, and it’s only been two days.
Just a tiny data point for ya.
RE: Wiki leak
According to document he was arrested by Pakistan may 2005 and transferred to Gitmo Sept 2006. Presumably the info was obtained by Pakistan before his transfer and if not certainly at Gitmo in 2006.
There was an obvious possible link between UBL and Abbottabad by 2007 if not well before.
So Wha happened that it took til 2011?
Exit strategy for Afghanistan. On to Pakistan.
Any other ‘stans we haven’t been to yet?
“Any other ’stans we haven’t been to yet?”
Richistan: Some say therein lie the budgetary salvation of the US.
He! He! ;-)
Oh, how I wish.
I like it!!!! Richestan
Can the technology to turn bad fat into good fat be used to turn bad guys into good guys?
Probably. We’d first have to what is “bad” though. Oh wait, I guess that applies to the fat too.
Whoops. An “identify” busted out of the prison that was the second sentence and made a break for it…
Some Nobel-hungry smart guy will reverse-engineer that and come up with a way to turn good guys into bad guys.
Wait, we already have that. That’s called greed.
>> The bus, which cost $30 a person round trip, saved the agency roughly $1,000 over Amtrak.
I wonder whether DOD staff have to scrimp like that…not.
Gee, maybe we could “defend” our markets from crooks, by paying for regulatory agencies’ reasonable expenses? Unbelievable.
Although probably not the case here, if it’s a multi-day trip and you didn’t have to leave at 5:30AM (!) and you could guarantee a seat at the right time (yeah, a lot of ifs), it’s not unreasonable to take MegaBus to save some serious coin.
But for a single day trip, it’s 4.25hrs NYC to DC one-way by car and at best 2.75hrs by train. Nice idea in theory to take MegaBus, but brutal for any employee on a single day trip.
The most appalling thing in the story is the underfunding on total budgets–not even mentioning the crappy pay and lack of teeth these regulatory bodies have. If you pay me enough, I’ll take Greyhound.
It’s all part of the plan to make the best employees leave, demoralize those who would like to stay, while making sure the tax code and the earmarks goes to fatten the wallets of the profiteers and rear echelon MFers that should not receive any penny to begin with.
As long as politicians keep playing this stupid game, this country will head south. You can’t tackle the problems of the 21th century with regulatory agencies that are beyond crippled.
The GOP must be sent in exile from power for at least a generation or two.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/04/nadine-dorries-teenage-girls
I’m not fundamentally against the legislation — but still, I can’t resist…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ0jRuASVEQ
Regards the document release speeding up the Bin Laden raid – the linked blogpost blames Wikileaks for it when this batch of docs was released by NPR and the NYT working independent of Wikileaks. It was widely reported that they scooped Wikileaks and there is much speculation about how they got the docs.
The Bank
OOPS! JP Morgan is in a wee bit “O” (big) trouble again. There goes the last 5 cents in the pension accounts. All they have left is monopoly money, backed by the full faith and credit of … ethanol, wind, solar, gas, batteries, and GE. Can you smell the toast burning (rising margin call volatility)?
The global IC chip has to borrow more than its income, irrespective of the deficit required to get that income. That’s negative quantum leverage for you. At this point, you should have sufficient income property to ride out 5 years, which will bankroll you regardless of what kind of currency they roll out. Just watch who you rent to, your rental policy, to adjust the feedback loop in time.
If you have excess physical silver, by all means hold onto it, regardless of whether they push the price to $100 or $0, with the leverage of silver paper, and they will, because they are desperate. The reason I pushed so hard on adaptive skills is because they can’t take those away, and you don’t have to worry about burying them somewhere.
The human flesh machines have been collecting data on systems, organizations, and individuals for the last three years, so, if you are a borderline sexist, now would be good time to step out of that circle and maintain your distance. You are better of liquidating everything you don’t absolutely need and getting a $10/hr job to practice real performance skills; the shake out at the top is going to be nasty, and increasingly irrational, as if it isn’t already. Just ride the tsunami; don’t get cute with cuts. Make your gates and rest in between. The system is going to accelerate again quite rapidly in August.
For the guy worried about my sex life, I just happened to win the genetic lottery. Even at my advanced age, there is no time when I do not have my choice of women, of any kind, anywhere, even as a homeless person. If you want Family Law, you are welcome to it, but keep it to yourself. Do not f**k with my kids again. Is that un-cryptic enough?
Next up, the collapsing circle enters Brazil again. The sub-humans never learn; they can only know. Once you are playing with the constants in the second integral, with an intelligent trial and error algorithm, the legacy institutions are toast. The error most technicians are making is expecting the past to repeat itself exactly, which is the trap, instead of working together to make the entire coliseum/circus the trap. Containment, containment, containment.
(There is not sufficient gold, nor is it sufficiently useful, and it requires constant monitoring, which reduces the amount of time spent on actual adaptive skill development. Best to leave it to the professional speculators.)
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’ve been married twice, and just took a third out for a test run, but if you want lots of sex, be the guy travelling through town. The feminists use travelers, then tell their boyfriends/husbands that they are faithful. Or get into the town sex-buddy system. Same principle. If you want young, get a job at a university. The feminists are actually teaching each other this BS. Funny, they have to learn sex from a book/magazine, instead of learning as they go in their relationships, hence why they get bored so quickly with entertainment sex, become addicted, and are never happy. May as well be having sex with a doll. A friend of mine (hairdresser) sits on the board of a sex club. Same problems as any other artificial supply and demand system.
Have a nice day.
Hmmm, looks like this “plant” got short circuited
watch your net shorts, and think about what happens when absolutes have to be rendered. sooner or later, the piper has to be paid, and the future is very quickly becoming the present. all the players are dumping their “paper” back on JPM’s desk.
Funny, the regulators didn’t scream when it fell vertically overnight.
They must maintain control; closed system; no traveling salesmen.
Of the three ‘penguins,’ one is really an embedded reporter.
Which one is it?
Thanks for pointing to the Bill Black interview on Le Show. Like your interview on that program it deserves a wider audience.
Here’s Bill Mitchell on Brit Austerity as yet another Debt Bubble Scam:-
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=14325
Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, testifed to the Senate Foreign relations committee yesterday morning on Afghanistan (btw, Haass was on Colbert Monday night promoting his latest book). Suggest reading the whole thing but have excerpted the most relevant bit.
Critical But Difficult Questions for Afghanistan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-n-haass/critical-but-difficult-qu_b_856860.html?ir=Politics
Take the above info as well as these recent article at STRATFOR and the US geopolitical strategy becomes clear.
The Death of bin Laden and a Strategic Shift in Washington http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical_diary/20110502-death-bin-laden-and-strategic-shift-washington (subscription firewall)
To recap:
1. Petraeus moved out of Afghanistan and over to CIA
2. Osama bin Laden taken down/no longer useful (when and where Osama was taken down does not really matter here, though it’s fun to speculate)
3. Afghanistan draw down (now of less interest to the empire) in order to send soldiers to other places in the world where Pax Americana has an agenda
Tragedy of the commons
Cows on Selsley Common. The tragedy of the commons is a useful parable for understanding how overexploitation can occur.
The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was first described in an influential article titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968.[1]
Hardin’s Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming.
Central to Hardin’s article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s example, it is in each herder’s interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result, through over grazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed to the detriment of all.
Tragedy of the commons
“The Tragedy of the Commons,” written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968.[1]
Hardin’s Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming.
Central to Hardin’s article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s example, it is in each herder’s interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result, through over grazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed to the detriment of all.
Commons worked because there was a community attached to the commons and social rules that had evolved over the years. Our current nakedly capitalist system lacks those rules for most situations. This is a lack in our current system, not in the commons.
I am also skeptical of any theories about commons that fail to mention that commons often ended not because of any problems among the members but because some elite privatized it into their own property or because the national government nationalized it.
It is also worth noticing that in some situations, excess privatization creates a tragedy of the anti-commons. A good example of this is when technology is impeded because of the involvement of so many different patents that satisfying them all is impractical.
Does that FT Alphaville article on Bahrain banks strike anyone else as post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning? (I like to think of this class of that reasoning as molestus hoc, ergo propter hoc “It honks me off, therefore it causes..”) It looks to me like the numbers they highlighted had been going sideways for quite a while.
I don’t view Saudi occupation of Bahrain as a good thing, but still…
Should losses related to fines (for scams) be tax deductible? This thought is triggered by the latest Lloyds data.
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/05/05/560086/antonio-horta-orsorio-clears-the-deck-at-lloyds/