Filed under: Art, Emergency, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Society
So, last time I borrowed money from a bank, for a Federally-guaranteed Small Business Loan, it was a bit of a nightmare. They wanted to know everything down to my shoe size, with a fair amount of documentation to support the claim that I wear an 11 wide. And, needless to say, they wanted to know exactly what I was going to do with the $50,000 I wanted to borrow – complete with a detailed business plan, revenue forecasts, et cetera. Given that I wanted to borrow the money, I didn’t find this too onerous; rather it seemed to be a reasonable expectation, if a tad tedious.
But don’t expect that street to run both ways.
Where’d the bailout money go? Shhhh, it’s a secret
WASHINGTON – It’s something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where’s the money going?
But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation’s largest banks say they can’t track exactly how they’re spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.
“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,'” said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”
The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest?
None of the banks provided specific answers.
Well, no, of course they didn’t. It might lead to somewhat awkward revelations, such as this:
AP study finds $1.6B went to bailed-out bank execs
Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.
The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.
Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.
Your tax dollars at work.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and dKos.)
Filed under: Constitution, Daily Kos, Emergency, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
The radio said 13 degrees. It’s cold enough that the cats have left taking turns curling up on my lap, and have parked themselves on radiators. We’re fortunate that we can afford to heat this 125 year old house, at least enough to keep us warm if we wear layers.
And the news is as cold as the weather: 533,000 jobs cut last month, over one and a quarter million in just the last three months. Take a look on how Yahoo! news titled that link – it’s very telling. As I have written previously, I think we’re in for a long haul, something akin to a true depression rather than just a bad recession. All the elements are in place, many are already playing out just as they did during the Great Depression. And, as bad as it is, I think this is also a time of potential – potential to make some changes which would normally be resisted by entrenched interests: reregulation (intelligent reregulation) of the financial sector; revamping transportation to create an infrastructure supporting mass transit; introduction of single-payer health insurance; elimination of our insane War on (Some) Drugs.
75 years ago today, during the great Depression, Prohibition ended. It is time to do the same thing again, but with marijuana. Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. Treat it like alcohol. Pardon or commute the sentences of everyone in prison for using it or selling small amounts. Quit funding para-military squads in local police departments in the name of “stopping drugs”. It’s a waste of people and resources to fight this pointless war.
It’s been well over 20 years since I last used pot. If it was legalized tomorrow, I’m not sure I’d ever use it again. I don’t have a dog in this fight, from that perspective. But as someone who loves liberty, who hates to see government empowered through fear-mongering, who thinks that we will need all of our resources to deal with *real* problems rather than artificial ones, the time has come to end Prohibition again. And I hope that the new president will have the balls to do so.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.)
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: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Guns, Predictions, Promotion, RKBA
Just a quick note: So far, the response to the ballistics project mentioned in my last post has been very positive. It is already propagating beyond the first couple of contact points, as people cross-post the information. We had almost 500 unique visitors to the site yesterday, some 3,000 page views. So that’s exciting!
More (not firearms related) later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Art, Ballistics, Guns, Predictions, Press, Privacy, Promotion, RKBA, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I’ve mentioned several times recently the ballistics project I’ve been involved with over the last year or so. Well, last night we migrated the temporary site over to its own domain, and except for a few tweaks it is pretty much done. Sometime probably this weekend I will post a comment promoting the site to a couple of the forums devoted to discussing firearms, and then all bets are off as to what happens next. (I’d ask anyone reading this to not spread the word to such forums just yet – please let me do that when we’re ready.)
For those who are not interested or knowledgeable about firearms, this whole thing may seem a bit silly. Actually, it is a huge project which will significantly add to the information base available to shooting enthusiasts, and as such will likely gain a great deal of attention both online and in the print media devoted to firearms. I’ve cautioned my two cohorts in the project to be prepared for a bit of a whirlwind of interest. I doubt that it will penetrate into the general media the way that my Paint the Moon art project did, but in the gun world it could very well be just as well known.
And the anticipation of that is kinda fun. As private a person as I am by nature, I enjoy doing things which are interesting or innovative enough to gain some level of attention, to povoke people to think about something in a different way or to expand their awareness of what is possible. I think that is a big part of the reason why I blog, and why I wrote Communion of Dreams – to help shape the world. This new project will do that in a very tangible way.
So, we’ll see what happens. Wish us luck with it.
Jim Downey
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: Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, Marketing, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Survival, Writing stuff
Yeah, I know I said I’d try and get a nice cheery travelogue up next. Oh well. This has more relevance to Communion of Dreams, which is ostensibly the focus for this blog, anyway, right?
Right. So, here: seems that researchers have for the first time clearly determined the extinction of a mammal to have been caused by disease.
In 1899, an English ship stopped at Christmas Island, near Australia. Within nine years, the island’s entire native rat population had gone extinct, and scientists have wondered ever since what exactly happened.Now, researchers led by an Old Dominion University scientist think they have unraveled the mystery – and, they say, the lessons of Christmas Island apply today to issues such as disease, invasive species and the law of unintended consequenceTurns out, says ODU biology professor Alex Greenwood, that a British black rat had stowed away on the ship in a bale of hay. Upon reaching the island, the rat – or several rats – escaped on land and spread a “hyperdisease” among the native population.“Anyone who has ever tried to kill a rat – let alone a whole population – knows how hard that can be,” Greenwood said in an interview Monday. “That’s what made Christmas Island so fascinating for so long. Imagine, a whole species – especially one as tough as a rat – gone within 10 years of exposure!”
OK, for those of us who are non-biologists, this may be something of a surprise: why wouldn’t extinction occur due to disease? But the prevailing theory has long been that it was virtually impossible that a disease would wipe out all members of a species – and that any survivors would pass on their immunity to their descendants, thus continuing the Darwinian arms race. To determine that this has happened – and to a robust and fast-reproducing species such as a rat – is real news.
Which touches on an older item I came across recently:
Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction
Jason G. MathenyAbstract: In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.
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3. Estimating the Near-Term Probability of Extinction
It is possible for humanity (or its descendents) to survive a million years or more, but we could succumb to extinction as soon as this century. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. President Kennedy estimated the probability of a nuclear holocaust as “somewhere between one out of three and even” (Kennedy, 1969, p. 110). John von Neumann, as Chairman of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee, predicted that it was “absolutely certain (1) that there would be a nuclear war; and (2) that everyone would die in it” (Leslie, 1996, p. 26).
More recent predictions of human extinction are little more optimistic. In their catalogs of extinction risks, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees (2003), gives humanity 50-50 odds on surviving the 21st century; philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that it would be “misguided” to assume that the probability of extinction is less than 25%; and philosopher John Leslie (1996) assigns a 30% probability to extinction during the next five centuries. The “Stern Review” for the U.K. Treasury (2006) assumes that the probability of human extinction during the next century is 10%. And some explanations of the “Fermi Paradox” imply a high probability (close to100%)of extinction among technological civilizations (Pisani, 2006).4
I haven’t spent the time to look up the entire paper and read it, though I have followed this topic in the (popular) scientific news for most of my adult life. It is, in fact, one of the reasons why I decided to write Communion of Dreams – to explore the idea of humanity on the brink of extinction (as well as to examine Fermi’s Paradox, as I have written about previously). Just as most people seem to prefer ignoring their own mortality, we as a species seem to prefer ignoring the possibility of our own extinction. Even the vast majority of Science Fiction (including my own) written with humankind facing the possibility of extinction is resolved with some kind of salvation – it’d just be too bleak for most readers, otherwise.
And that doesn’t sell.
Jim Downey
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
Communion Of Dreams 