Three Penny Candy for a Nickel

Responding to a question, Kalam said the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has become useless as cyber war would be more devastating for all the countries with networked financial and economic resources.

Rather than insert an extension into the previous page, I decided to post separately. I've spent a free afternoon trying to follow the ins and outs of our economic system, as opposed to the system of making and selling things. I also borrowed an e-book, Through the Looking Glass, from the library. Guess which one makes more sense. Hint: it also contains some great illustrations of what looks like a fun tea party.

A small entertainment can stand in for the current state of affairs, as best as I can sus them out. Suppose I asked you, the reader, to dig into your pocket and lend me three cents. The understanding would be that I would return your three cents in ten minutes along with an extra penny for your trouble. Now in our part of town, three cents is enough to buy a penny candy and you might assume that that was my plan. Nope. Upon receiving the pennies, I discover that their value is in fact one million dollars. Scoff all you want, but my rating agency has confirmed this fact. (it works real darn quick cuz I'm the owner and have a deadline) Since I want to turn this serendipitous windfall into regular money you can use at the grocer, I insure it with my very own insurance company. This is fine because now my insurance company has a million dollar account in paper debt. Discount the paper by $20 and AIG will buy it and in turn sell it to Uncle Sam. I'm left with an insured, AAA piece of paper, which I sell to the Fed, and still hold your three pennies. I return two pennies and intone the magic words: market swing, front loading, management fees, and of course, Our Way Of Life. Sadly the price of penny candy has gone up because the new millionaire on the block is willing to pay a nickel for them.

In real life, there are more people on the chain, so the individual profits are smaller, and somewhere on the concatenation a spoilsport might call the debt. It crashes, we bail the participants, a speech or two and maybe a baby for the wolves, then back to tending the Engine that Pulls our Economy. Sorry, even when you study, follow the math, look up the numbers and references, and make a good faith effort to understand, it makes about that much sense.

The Bill's Not Virtual

Computerized Stock Trading: Most of those trades aren't coming from trigger-happy day traders and mutual fund managers with billions of dollars at their disposal. It's a flood of machine-gun speed fury coming from an army of computers programmed to obey complicated algorithms that are hyperactively buying and selling.

In other words, the original idea of a stock being a share or investment in a company, i.e. Aunt Mary saving for her retirement or Dr. Tan building a nest egg, has been ditched in favor of a Second Life style virtual game. Producing a product or service doesn't seem to have much to do with anything. All well and good as far as it goes, but add to this lark a Government entity (the Fed) that pegs the value of virtual money to real money, i.e. markers exchangeable for real goods or services , at a strict one to one. An electronic hick-up awards a million e-dollars to Princling, Princling and Lickdicker, the Fed dutifully prints up the cash, and the market readjusts the value of your stash to keep everything on an even keel. Boy howdy, you're in the game without having to lift a finger. Mention the idea of a market determined exchange rate from virtual to real and you too can learn the definition of constructional dyspraxia. (but it sez I produced the equivalent of 60,279 bushels of wheat by clicking this here button. It's right on the screen...) At your next dinner party, try serving a picture of the meal to get a sense of where the problem lies.

Dressed to Sell

Today is the `Opera in the Park` show in Golden Gate. You get to hear some of the best singers of the season, grab a nosh while the glitterati are patting themselves on the back, and lounge in the sun. I'm in. The first set of links relate to economics.

• Understanding America's Class System: For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
• Scott vs. Hayek: And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard.
• Rome is Burning: This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Next a bit of hackery in the Sterling style.

• Hacktivist: The deniable patriot hacktivists who work for Russia, China and India can talk just as patriotically as any Fox News fan. So, if you’re from USA and hammering Russia for underhanded cyberattacks, you’ve gotta figure out what America’s own “citizen hacker vigilantes” are up to someplace. And your answer is, you don’t have the foggiest idea. Not a clue, brother.

Now for the culture portion of the show.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass.
• The OED: Bibliophilic considerations aside, however, the OED Online is my dictionary of choice. This remarkable resource displays both the second edition of the OED, published with great fanfare in 20 volumes in 1989, and the gradually accumulating third edition, begun in 2000 and due to be completed some decades hence.
• Technique and Food: Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. As Jacques Ellul argues in The Technological Society, in such a society the multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient.

I was paging through the TV channels this morning (Sun) while I was cleaning the hovel. In almost every case a talking head was castigating the other media outlets and patting himself (or herself) on the back for the team's nuanced reporting of a report about the influence of an article about a report on a blog that said... In other words, the TV version of a circle jerk. The P.R. department has become a primary news source and some jake, with the approved ethno-signifiers (discrete gold cross nestled in a not so discrete décolleté, refined hint of indeterministic accent), gets elevated to expert status. (as long as you can read the teleprompter) Thank God for the cartoon channel. At least the inside references are both clever and inclusive. This little jeremiad brings us to the last links: politics

• Obama, Anticolonial Hegemonist?: Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. He takes a number of decisions Obama has made on a grab-bag of issues, declares that they are “odd,” and then proceeds to explain the “oddness” he has perceived by cooking up a bizarre thesis that Obama is a die-hard anticolonialist dedicated to his father’s anticolonialist legacy.
• The Tricky New American Moment: Let's take alliances first. Clinton celebrated NATO, ritualistically, as "the world's most successful alliance." Left unmentioned was the growing divergence among U.S. and European politicians—and their electorates—on its ultimate purpose.
• Taming the Tea Parties: All of this is rank nonsense. Federal power has been exploding for decades under Republican as well as Democratic administrations. And it is not at all clear that what George Washington or even Dwight Eisenhower understood as “constitutional limits” on federal power were the ones that still existed under George W. Bush. What Lowry and his crew really want is to neutralize the Tea Party.

Satoshi Kon

Satoshi Kon, a Japanese filmmaker and comic-book artist whose dazzling visual compositions and humane, emotionally resonant stories won him a devoted following in animation circles and beyond, died in Tokyo on Tuesday. He was 46.

Obituary in the NYT and a rememberance by Michael Swanwick here.

Oh Boy, Comics

For comic fans, history fans, and comics history fans, the Digital Comics Museum is offering downloads and scans of public domain comic books from the 1940s and ’50s. There are a massive amount of titles and issues available, from Captain Science to Sherlock Holmes to Frisky Fairy Tales to the chaste Sweet Sixteen Magazine, and many, many more. You can also find the very same horror comics that led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Via: Tor.com

The link is at Digital Comic Museum. Yes, they do have Cow Puncher Comics.
Note: If you download in .cbz, you can simply rename it .zip; if you choose .cbr, you can find a free reader on google. .rar you can use RARfrog, again free on google.

Banana Boat

Via: BoingBoing. No point, rhyme or reason as far as I can tell. It's just a banana boat.

Jerry Lee Lewis

September 29, seventy five years old.