All posts by Jack

General, travel

A World Record Setter in the Family!

My sister Cate recently participated in a World Record Attempt for Wingsuit Formation Flying. And they succeeded! As I understand it, they used the first four days to get folks use to formation flying and then 71 of them made the formation happen on Nov 12.

Why my sister Cate wants to throw herself from an airplane with nothing more than a wing and a prayer is a story from another day.

Congratulations Cate!

Why have the UK papers covered it so well?

The Telegraph

The Daily Mail

The Sun ( with a picture Slide Show, but it is The Sun)

Economics

The end is just the again beginning

I found this interesting article by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, discussing a bit of what’s been happening on Wall Street in the twenty years since he left. I liked Liar’s Poker when it came out and find it disturbing that the next generation of Wall Streeters found it to be a useful how-to manual.

There is an object lesson somewhere in all this involving doom-sayers, pessimists, and people trying to see the dreams all the while ignoring the nightmares. How to make reality the nightmare? Ignore it for a while. Wall Street seems very good at ignorance.

Eisman was appalled. “Look,” he said. “I’m short. I don’t want the country to go into a
depression. I just want it to fucking deleverage.” He had tried a
thousand times in a thousand ways to explain how screwed up the
business was, and no one wanted to hear it. “That Wall Street has gone
down because of this is justice,” he says. “They fucked people. They
built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I
come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a
crisis of conscience.”

Even I, an uneducated fiscal novice, could see that a house of cards was being built with my, and everyone’s, money for the past decade. And it was being built in an earthquake zone. And I was asking at every chance “how can I protect my investments?”  And knowledgeable folks couldn’t help me. Even those that agreed that an earthquake was coming didn’t have any viable alternatives. Now I see, I should have shorted the mortgage/CDO/CDS market.

via:

Politics

What do I want in a new Administration

· Habeus Corpus

· National HMO

o All citizens automatically subscribed.

· Sunset Laws – All Federal laws expire after 20-25 years.

· A more representative Democracy – 1 representative per X citizens: X = 100,000 – 150,000 – 200,000 – TBD

· One basic Income Tax deductible – poverty level for your category/location.

o No Itemization

· Linear progressive income tax – up to 40% for income in excess of presidential salary – details TBD.

o Maybe another 10% for every multiple of the President’s Salary?

· A National Service Education Bill, similar to the GI Bill I used through college in the ‘70s

o 3-4 Years of Military, Community, National, Service Qualifies

· Pay for medical school in exchange for 10+ years of service in National HMO or other Public Health Service

· National Guard not activated and deployed outside of US Territory without declaration of war or declaration of National Emergency – by Congress.

· Reserve Forces not called up to active duty without declaration of war or declaration of National Emergency – by Congress.

· Reserve Forces and National Guard not deployed into combat zones without declaration of war – by Congress.

· Recognition that the President is NOT a king, that the president does NOT represent the People, that the president executes the instructions of Congress.

· Anyone with more than 15 years legislative experience in Congress can not hold a committee or sub-committee chairmanship or a speakership.

· No monetary foreign aid to non-democracies, kleptocracies and countries in civil war.

· No military aid anywhere.

· Only registered voters are allowed to donate to political campaigns.

· Revision of Capital Gains Taxes

o No tax paid on selling one stock/fund/security to reinvest in another stock/fund/security

o Tax only when stock/fund/security is sold and is not reinvested

· Revision of Estate Tax

o No tax on physical property, e.g. land, art, heirlooms, private businesses, etc.

o Tax on money/stocks/funds/securities overseen by SEC or its international equivalents.

o Tax on physical properties only when sold. e.g. you inherit a Renoir and don’t sell it in your lifetime- you are never taxed for it – and you can pass it on to the next generation. If they sell it they are going to pay a lot of taxes on it. ($0 cost basis)

o Tax inheritance (as noted above) at something like 60-70% for any estate worth more than 10 times the president’s annual salary. Less than that can be treated differently

· Corporations are not persons – legally

· Corporations must subject to regulatory oversight

o Regulatory oversight requirements reviewed every 5-10 years

§ Regulations shouldn’t be a straight jacket

§ More protection against gaming the system

o If an individual wants to run a business and doesn’t want to incorporate, they are not subject to the regulations that govern corporations, nor the protections.

· If a Federal Agency has certified that a product is safe for public use, then the Federal government is liable for any suits brought against the product

o Strong Inspector General office to ensure against collusion

o Strong certification process – who cares if it takes 20 years to evaluate.

o Vendor may release with preliminary approval but without protection

· Any compensation dispensed in excess of the President’s annual salary is considered corporate profit

· FEMA should set up Emergency Distribution centers at the various large military reservations around the country and pre-stock emergency supplies. Consumables can be rotated through with various international relief efforts. Trailers may be aired out before they are needed.

· President’s Annual Salary equal to ten times the median household income.

General, Liberating Thoughts

Dinner Party

I was listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour this past weekend and the question was asked about what four people Thomas Jefferson would have for a dinner party. The select party was Isaac Newton, John Locke, Francis Bacon and Maria Cosway. An interesting group to be sure.

That leads me to wonder who I might invite. I think I will start with a longer list and then try to trim it down.

    Plato
    Socrates
    Confucius
    Eleanor of Aquitaine
    I Newton
    F Bacon
    J Locke
    T Jefferson
    M Twain
    C Darwin
    A Huxley
    GB Shaw
    J Maxwell
    A Einstein
    O Wilde
    T Roosevelt
    E Roosevelt
    B Cosby
    B Fuller
    F Nietzsche
    FL Wright
    HG Wells
    Cleopatra
    Hammurabi
    Sun-Tsu
    L Da Vinci
    C Sagan
    I Asimov
    D Parker

Start a list like this and there is always someone else bubbling to the top. Time to stop it and trim

Economics, Politics

Let me see if I have this straight

Let us say I am making $200,000 a year and paying 10% tax on that. My take home would be about $180,000.  So I wouldn’t want to exert myself a little harder to make, say, $300,000 because I would be in a higher tax bracket. For $300,000 I would pay the same 10% on the first $200,000 (Take home $180,000)  and, say, 20% on the next $100,000 (Take home $80,000). Because then I would be taking home only $260,000 instead of $180,000 and there isn’t any incentive in the world that would make me exert that extra effort.

I wouldn’t want to move into the top 2% of earners in the US because I would have to pay more taxes for making more money. Nevermind that I am earning such a comfortable income because I am using the social infrastructure this country has developed with tax dollars. No, I have gotten to this level on my own and nobody gave me anything along the way and they shouldn’t expect me to give back to some imaginary community that makes it all possible.

Yeah, that sounds straight enough.

Economics, Politics

This is not looking any better

The Nation is tracking how the bailout is proceeding.  It continues to ring so wrong.

This bit

But, if you look more closely at Paulson’s transaction, the
taxpayers were taken for a ride–a very expensive ride. They paid $125
billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5
billion. That means half of the public’s money was a straight-out gift
to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

is very irksome, but the private investor they are invoking is Warren Buffett, who was only putting up a few billion into Goldman-Sachs. And then they extend the analogy of the deal Buffett made with GS to cover all nine institutions, something I don’t think is quite fair.

But the upshot is that we appear to have the wolves in charge of the foxes in charge of the chicken coop. And the wolves are preparing for one last plunder before they retire. I don’t trust the administration to monitor and manage the bailout, I don’t trust the Congress to provide oversight on the wolves. I don’t expect the Justice Department to initiate criminal prosecutions in a timely fashion. I don’t trust the Republicans to do anything other than plunder the US treasury as best they can. And I don’t trust the Democrats to provide any ‘check and balance’ to stop the Republicans. (Hell, they may even join the bandwagon.) It would be nice to be pleasantly surprised.

Economics

How do you prevent someone from sharing what you want to sell to others

I don’t know if this would work, but what if you sold something digital to someone and hashed it with their credit card information such that it would be perfectly usable on any system?  Anyone could use it anywhere at anytime. They could pass it around and share it with everyone in the world. But, if they shared it with others, they would be passing along their credit card information at the same time.  So maybe they wouldn’t want to share with others so readily.