Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, BoingBoing, Emergency, Failure, Feedback, Government, Guns, Kindle, Marketing, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Society
An update to this post… In the four days since the site went public, we’ve had almost 75,000 hits. That’s more hits than I’ve had to the Communion of Dreams site this entire year. I’d say it’s off to a good start. Interesting that it has already started to propagate beyond the usual gun forums and whatnot – we got a lot of hits from a link on SomethingAwful, and we’re seeing some links from people’s Facebook and Myspace pages.
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Did you see this post in the NYT about the future of publishing? I was going to write about it, but have been occupied with other matters. Then I saw this piece by Clay Shirky in response, and figured I’d just tell people to read what he said. An excerpt:
There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick’s logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we’ve read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It’s the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!
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Got a note from a friend in response to yesterday’s doom & gloom report. He asked what my advice would be for anyone wondering about how to handle some modest investments (and acknowledged that I am not a financial advisor in any professional way). My reply:
Warm clothes and sturdy shoes.
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Well, I have other matters to attend to. Have a longer post working in the back of my mind, perhaps for later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Emergency, Failure, Flu, Government, movies, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Writing stuff
Sometimes I wish that I listened to my own advice. For literally decades, my mantra of advice for friends has always been “trust your instincts”. This isn’t just some mystical mumbo-jumbo: a healthy, functioning human brain with a decent amount of education and experience is an amazing data processor, with multiple layers of analysis always going on – and one of them is what your subconsious is considering that kicks up to your conscious awareness as a “gut feeling”. This is the premise behind the book Blink (which I haven’t read, but have read enough about from the author and others to have a decent understanding of).
OK, so what am I going on about now?
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
Just this, when I originally conceived Communion of Dreams, I was writing a book about . . . wait for it . . . the aftermath of an economic collapse. Yeah, the bulk of the book you see now was pretty much the same. But the backstory was more about how a series of severe but not pandemic flu epidemics lead to the collapse of the world economy around 2011 – 2012. And how that collapse would lead to a significant downturn of the human population worldwide, as the carrying capacity of the planet changed. Yes, I still had the extant plot device of the Fire Flu there, but it was to be what Diabolus became in the current version – a terror threat that played off of the memories of what happened a generation previously.
But I was writing this initially around 2000 – the economy was just too good, things seemed like they would be smooth sailing forever. Trying to get people to think about, let alone believe, that an economic collapse could occur was just too difficult. Most people only understand the functioning of the economy when it smacks them in the face – and in spite of the brief downturn following the 9/11 attacks, few people understood what was building on the horizon.
So I went with the current revision of the book.
I should have trusted my instincts. They have only very seldom let me down. Because now there is a growing awareness of the precariousness of our economic situation. Most people are still only thinking that we’re in for some “rough times”, which I gather they think will be a limitation of how many new plasma televisions they can buy. But even that level of understanding would be enough for them to understand what I was (or, rather, would have been) writing about in that earlier version of Communion.
And yes, if you look at what I said above, you can conclude that I think that things are actually going to get a lot worse for a lot longer than what the current awareness believes. It really depends on how foolishly our government and business leaders act – right now I am not optimistic. Will it mean a global economic collapse? As one of my favorite actors in one of my favorite roles said:
Personally, I’d give us one chance in three. More tea anyone?
Jim Downey
(With apologies for having my Monday doom and gloom a day late – it was a busy weekend launching Ballistics by the inch.)
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
Forget what I said two weeks ago – we’re now up to $7.7 Trillion:
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
That comes out to something like $24,000 from every man, woman, and child in the country.
Wave bye-bye to your money.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Failure, Government, Politics, Privacy, Society, Terrorism, Travel
Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have set forth the “One Percent Doctrine” following the 9-11 attacks. The basic premise is that if there is just 1% chance that an enemy is planning a serious terrorist attack, we have to treat it as though it were a certainty, and respond accordingly.
So, I suppose it really is no surprise that all the absurdity of “behaviour detection” that the TSA employs at airports leads to just a 1% arrest rate, and that they proclaim this as “”incredibly effective.” No, seriously:
TSA’s ‘behavior detection’ leads to few arrests
WASHINGTON — Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.
A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said.
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TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said the program has been “incredibly effective” at catching criminals at airports. “It definitely gets at things that other layers of security might miss,” Howe said.
Sure it does. Because people who are carrying drugs or using a fake ID are really the terrorist threat that you say you are protecting us from. And to achieve that, they had to have over 99% false positives.
It’s just more Security Theater, of course: the illusion of ‘doing something’, not any kind of practical prevention. I’ve written about this often, and in looking back through those posts it is clear that the real effect of this whole bureaucracy is to make us more and more inured to the systematic destruction of any sense of privacy at the hands of our government. As I wrote just over a year ago:
Over the weekend, news came out of yet another “Trust us, we’re the government” debacle, this time in the form of the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying that Americans have to give up on the idea that they have any expectation of privacy. Rather, he said, we should simply trust the government to properly safeguard the communications and financial information that they gather about us. No, I am not making this up. From the NYT:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.
Little wonder that they’re happy to define 1% as “success” – it gets them exactly what they want.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.)
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
I have a friend who complains that when he goes to check his usual blogs on Monday mornings, he has to brace himself about the bad economic news I’ve written about on Sunday. I hadn’t really realized that I had this weekly schedule, but what the hell. In that spirit, if you want another insight into just how f*cked-up the Wall Street financial crisis really is, spend some time with a long piece by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker. Here’s an excerpt from The End:
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.
I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
He’s talking about his experience on Wall Street over 20 years ago.
It’s long. It’s fairly dense in places. But it does a phenomenal job of explaining how we got to the point we have, and how the situation is actually much more grim than most people realize.
OK, I’ll try and post a nice cheery travelogue later.
Jim Downey
It looks as though there will indeed be some manner of bailout/loan package for the “Big Three” automakers, now that the Bush administration is joining the cries from Democrats. And I’m really not sure how I feel about that, since there are good arguments pro and con, and given the mountains of money we are already throwing at the financial industry why the hell shouldn’t we also help out people who actually make something real?
But it comes as no surprise to me that the automakers are hurting. Sure, there’s the well understood economic forces at work – the ‘legacy health costs’, the lack of financing availability, the volatility of the cost of gas – but there is something else, too: buying a car is a major pain in the ass.
Yeah, I know, everybody knows this. Everybody has written about it. The lack of popularity of car salesmen is a cliche. But that’s exactly my point – it has been like this forever, and there has been no real effort to make any changes in the system. That, right there, tells you that there is something fundamentally wrong with the entire industry.
A case in point. A couple of weeks ago a friend decided that the time had come to get a new car. That with the economy being the way it is, she’d be able to get a decent deal. She did her homework, knew what was the fair market value of the model she wanted, and that there were models with the options she wanted, and in the color that she wanted, in our vicinity.
So she called the local dealership. Said she wanted thus & such car, and that she knew five specific versions of that car was available in the surrounding area. “Yup, we can get that,” said the dealership, “here’s what it will cost. Financing will be zero percent, keeping with our current promotion.”
“Let me think about it,” said my friend. She did, ran the numbers, everything looked good. Not great, but the price was fair. She called the dealership back. “I’ll come in tomorrow (Wednesday) on my way to work, and we’ll take care of the paperwork.”
She was assured that everything would be ready, wouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.
OK, now, complete the story. No, no, go ahead – tell yourself what happened. Got it?
And that’s my point. You *know* what happens next. My friend went in at the appointed time. Of course, there “was a problem.” The “sales manager said we can’t do that price with 0%.”
“What if I just write you a check for the car?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“What would the price be if I just wrote you a check for the car I want, right now?” (My friend was dead serious about this.)
Salesman goes off to confer with his manager. Comes back. “Well, the car you want . . . ”
Go ahead, finish the sentence. Yeah: “. . . isn’t here on the lot, so we’d have to have it brought in, and there’ll be transport charges, and the other dealership will need something for their trouble, so . . .”
“Wait. We had an agreement on the price of the car. I just wanted to know what the taxes and whatnot on it would add, so I could write the check.”
“But we can’t sell it to you for that.”
My friend got up, walked out. Within an hour she had an agreement from a dealer in a neighboring state for the car she wanted, at a specific price. The manufacturer’s website showed the car in their inventory, so there’d be no problem. They’d hold it for her to come pick up on Saturday.
She and her husband drove up Friday night, stayed with friends in the area. Saturday, they went over to the dealership.
Yeah, you guessed it: Much the same initial song and dance.
Yes, my friend did come home with the car, after telling them that she had left one dealer’s showroom when they tried to pull this crap, and she was perfectly ready to do so again. But it is simply ridiculous that she had to do so.
And yet, this story (all of it true), comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has had to go through the hassle of buying a car anytime in the last four decades. Maybe longer – I’m only aware of it that far back. Even people who live here and who have never bought a car from a dealership know to expect this kind of bullshit. It is absurd.
Now, you can say that such a system continues to exist because the profit derived from it for dealers is great enough to overcome the alienation that buyers feel. And besides, everyone else does the same thing. I’ll say instead that this system is proof that car makers in the US do not care about consumers, and are just looking for a way to screw them over at each and every opportunity.
And there’s a big part of me that says payback is a real bitch.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Daily Kos.)
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
Why, yes I did!
OK, this is basically S&L Crisis, Part II: Revenge of the Greedoids. You, and me, and every other US taxpayer are now on the hook for trillions of dollars of bailout money. Why? Deregulation and unwise real estate lending.
That was Sept. 7. And someone in the comments at UTI called me on it, saying that I was grossly overstating the case.
$2 Trillion
Total Fed lending topped $2 trillion for the first time last week and has risen by 140 percent, or $1.172 trillion, in the seven weeks since Fed governors relaxed the collateral standards on Sept. 14. The difference includes a $788 billion increase in loans to banks through the Fed and $474 billion in other lending, mostly through the central bank’s purchase of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds.
OK, I’m not just posting this because I want to say “I told you so.” Rather, take a look at this opening passage from a long piece in today’s Washington Post:
The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration’s request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.
But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.
The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.
“Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no,” said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. “They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks.”
OK, it’s a long piece, so let me summarize: This provision of the tax law limited tax shelters which would arise during a merger of large banks. For over two decades conservative economists and lobbyists for the banks wanted to repeal this law, which would make mergers more attractive (and thereby push consolidation of the banking/financial industry). But Congress – even a number of Republican stalwarts such as Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa – refused to budge on this. So, under cover of the financial crisis, Sec. Paulson just got rid of it by fiat – had it murdered quietly in the night. The result was to make a number of the mergers which occurred in September and October more likely, because the tax liabilities for the resulting larger banks would be much smaller.
This may have actually been a good move in terms of helping to save the financial industry, but it was very bad governance. And that gets me to the point of this post: when I said that the US taxpayer was on the hook for trillions of dollars of our tax money, I was saying so because I understood all too well the prevailing attitude of the Bush administration: “Ignore the law. Trust us, we know what is best. And yes, you will pay for it, whether you like it or not.”
When we have seen the actions and behaviour of the Bush administration in action for almost 8 years, it was fairly easy to conclude that they would use the panic in the financial markets to do just whatever the hell they wanted, and that the initial sums being talked about were likely just the tip of the spear about to skewer the American taxpayer. As I said, these actions may actually have been the right ones – when you come across a car crash, you don’t worry about breaking into someone’s vehicle, you just get the people away from the burning car. But given the ineptitude and crass violation of law demonstrated by the current administration, it was also fairly easy to predict that even if they got through the crisis there would be all kinds of extraneous extra-legal stuff happening to further their own goals and please their friends.
Damn, sometimes I just hate being right.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Comics, Google, Government, Humor, Politics, Predictions, Society
That quote from Havelock Ellis somewhat captures my mood this morning. The Onion‘s take on the election results captures another aspect of how I feel: we had to see things descend to the point where we were ready to make a significant change.
I am too old, too cynical, (and this morning too hungover), to think that the election of Barack Obama means that everything is going to be perfect in the coming months and years. Nor do I believe that our politicians will be able to completely resist the urge to return to type and put their own power above the needs of the nation. The mindset of “screw the other guy” is just too entrenched.
But I have just enough optimism – yes, just enough Hope – to think that we may be lucky enough to see real progress. Obama may be able to get enough pols to do the right thing enough times, even if it isn’t in their immediate self-interest. It will come in fits and starts, and, as the mixed results of yesterday’s elections show, there will be significant setbacks. But building little by little, moving ahead bit by bit, will be like the only solution I know to escaping depression: one step at a time, just putting one foot in front of the other and walking towards the light.
We’ll see. For now, this xkcd strip resonates:
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Fuck. I didn’t think I’d live to see this.
Not just eloquent, but he writes his own stuff. Gotta respect that.
Jim Downey
Then go vote. As I told a friend earlier, doing that will make you part of something historic.
More later.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 