Category Archives: Preparing for the worst

Geek Stuff, Politics, Preparing for the worst

Internet ‘kill switch’ bill reintroduced as Egypt remains dark

Sen. Collins said the bill would not allow the President to deactivate the Internet in whole or in part during times of political unrest or protest – just during a “cyber emergency,” according to Wired.com.

“My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency,” Collins said in an e-mailed response to Wired.com last week. “It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.”

via Internet ‘kill switch’ bill reintroduced as Egypt remains dark.

Any bets that a time of political unrest or protest won’t be labeled “cyber emergency”?

I think it would be more appropriate to up a domain where the folks afraid of cyber-terrorists can hide and if the cyber emergency happens then they can be unplugged, leaving the rest of us bereft of their presence.

Geek Stuff, General, Preparing for the worst

Yay!

Thank you!
World Community Grid is pleased to announce the completion of the first phase of the “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together” project. It took only two years to complete, even though the project was halted for 17 weeks due to the destruction of the University of Texas Medical Branch research facilities as a result of Hurricane Ike.

In total, members provided nearly 12,000 years of computer processing time to this project. Your computer run time contribution was 6 days of processing time to “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together”.

Completing this phase of the project is a significant contribution to the research of not only Dengue Fever but also Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses.
More details about the conclusion of Phase 1 and the upcoming Phase 2 may be viewed by visiting: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=26618
Economics, Politics, Preparing for the worst

Can we start here?

I keep hearing about people trying to shout down health care discussions- and most of the shouters don’t appear to understand what they are talking about. Can we start with this article by Paul Krugman and work from there?

A friend sent me  a link to HR3200 (all 1017 pages) and to a short 35 page summary of the bill (more of a short explanation of each section). Or is it fair to get into a complicated discussion with an informed base?

I don’t see anything on ‘death panels’ in the bill, but maybe I don’t know the right codewords to read it correctly – could:

A BILL To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.

be the sinister code words we are looking for? What are those ‘other purposes’? Oh, they appear to be revising the tax code, providing credits for small businesses, and improving Medicare and Medicaid.

I think I found the sinister part that  is so disturbing the American Citizenry :

The bill would prevent foreign multinational corporations incorporated in tax haven countries from avoiding tax on income earned in the United States by routing their income through structures in which a United States subsidiary of the foreign multinational corporation makes a deductible payment to a country with which the United States has a tax treaty before ultimately repatriating these earning in the tax haven country. (from section 451 of the explanation)

Yes, this is decidedly sinister.

Economics, General, Preparing for the worst

Being Lazy

I just came across this site that gives some guidelines on developing worry-free investment portfolios. They make sense to me and I think I am following them with my own retirement planning.  I do like #5 – If you’re not saving 10%, you’re spending too much.

I wonder about this quote:

Albert Einstein put it very simple: “There is no greater power known to man than compounding interest.”

I checked on Snopes and it is undetermined that Einstein really said anything like that. So he probably didn’t. Even though the sentiment is right on.

I don’t worry about what my portfolio is doing these days and I keep telling Elaine not to worry. We have set up a portfolio as best we could and we will see what it looks like in a few years.

My concern about the current state of the market is for the overall state of the US and Global economy. We have to live with the macroeconomic fallout of this meltdown and I don’t see any reliable hands the helm at present. But what do I know? Maybe paying dividends to shareholders of failing financial institutions is the best way to go. Not.

Economics, Politics, Preparing for the worst

A Privatized Social Security

Recently, I have been seeing or hearing a few references about privatizing Social Security, and how it doesn’t seem to be an issue this election. I wonder why?

If people really wanted to go about privatizing Social Security, I would suggest that we build on the existing scheme. Leave the current SSA accounts in place and then allow the individual to set aside some completely voluntary amount into an account that they, personally, can manage. They can select the funds to be invested in, or the stocks or bonds to be purchased. I imagine a lot of brokerage firms like Fidelity and T Rowe Price and Merrill Lynch and Charles Schwabb and others will be glad to set up structured plans to aid the novice investor in directing the growth of these future retirement accounts (all in exchange for a very small percentage, annually, of the account’s net worth).

We can call them Individual Retirement Accounts, since they are for an individual to build up a retirement nest egg. And we can motivate the reluctant citizen to invest in their future with all sorts of tax reliefs and incentives. It’s hard to see any down-side to this plan. If everyone invested 10% of their income every year, in not too long a time everyone would be millionaires. Just think of it, a nation with 300-Million+ millionaires. And they would still be getting Social Security checks! This is such a no-brainer, I’m surprised no one has thought of it before.

Politics, Preparing for the worst

Please explain how participatory democracy is bad, again

The Washington Post has an article on some folks complaining about millions of Americans donating little sums of money to their preferred political candidate.

Sen. Barack Obama‘s record-breaking $150 million fundraising performance in September has for the first time prompted questions about whether presidential candidates should be permitted to collect huge sums of money through faceless credit card transactions over the Internet.

I don’t know how the credit card transactions can be so faceless. When I try to use a credit card online, the name and mailing address I provide is supposed to be the same as the one on the credit card company’s record, or they won’t process the transaction. Makes it very difficult for a “Mickey Mouse” to anonymously donate to anyone.  Of course, I suppose that a donor can request to be listed as “Mickey Mouse”, for whatever reason, maybe to avoid donation caps, but the campaign has the legal name of the donor in its records and should be able to refund anyone who has exceeded the cap. More than likely, someone doesn’t want to known publicly as supporting a candidate. If the campaign publishes its list of donors with the name on the credit card and not some pseudonym then there is some immediate transparency.Or maybe list the real names of donors that exceed a certain limit in order to protect the donor that doesn’t want to be publicly associated with a candidate.

This is democracy in action – 3 million citizens donating $50 each to the candidate of their choice. It is poetry in democracy.

I would think a bigger issue would be the folks that are donating large chunks of cash in person to campaign reps, but that sounds like the way it has been done in the past and will continue in the future. We keep track of those donations, don’t we guys?

Me thinks that the party that couldn’t raise a pittance online is going to be a whining pain, until they figure out how to game the system, or what online means.

Politics, Preparing for the worst

Building a House on Shifting Ground

When I build a house, or have one built for me – I don’t have the time, energy or money to learn and master all the skills necessary to build a house and still keep the job that will pay for building the house – I don’t expect to have to be constantly monitoring the foundations for cracks, the walls for squareness, the rafters for support, the duct work for leaks, the basic integrity of the house. There are some basic expectations that someone has about the initial state of a house. A lot of these expectations are defined in building codes. The foundations are deep enough that the house doesn’t immediately start shifting. Rafters are strong enough to support the weight loads. Septic lines are sealed to prevent gasses from escaping within the house. Electrical outlets are properly wired to prevent fires and electrocutions. There are basic expectations that society has learned over time and codified, so that I don’t have to learn the same lessons all over again.

Expectations are lessons learned from the past. Why don’t I grab an iron frying pan handle that’s on the stove before checking to see if it is hot? because past lessons learned have taught me that iron retains heat for a while and it is worthwhile to see if it is still hot before grabbing. But a frying pan on a fire is rather simple compared to the overall complexity of a house. Even individual systems in a house can be relatively simple – the water system is just a bunch of pipes and faucets tied together. The electrical system is just a bunch of wires running from a fuse box the outlets (actually let’s simplify it further and get rid of the fuse box and just run the wires straight the to pole in the street.) The structural walls, floors and ceilings are just wood boards nailed together. But putting those three systems: water, electrical and structural, creates a very complex system. You probably don’t want an electrical outlet in a bathtub – my expectation is that it wouldn’t be healthy – and where one system can or can’t go dictates where other systems can or can’t go. You probably want the walls to be where the electrical outlets are but not where the toilet is (by the wall, on the floor – yes. wall running through it – no.) Putting a bathtub in the middle of a bedroom floor might look really neat (especially if it is one of those clawfoot Victorian tubs, colored with a dark red enamel and with gold trim and fixtures) but there are some practical problems with having a tub in a bedroom. The problems are left to the reader’s expectations.

I do expect to monitor the condition of my house periodically, maybe every few years. Foundations will shift over time and corrections can be made before the damage becomes too great, if caught in time. Pipes and seals will degrade over time and will need to be replaced. The one that I have to stay on top of at my place is to stain the exterior siding every two years because we have strong UV year round that will break down the cedar siding rather quickly if it is unprotected. Materials degrade in time, gravity is unrelenting, the laws of physics are unrelenting. I need to monitor the changes and effects on my abode periodically – not constantly, because I have some basic expectations of how things work.

We learn through life what our expectations should be. It seems that some expectations we learn are not realistic. I mean,if you run off a cliff you will start falling right away, you won’t stay up in the air and not fall until you realize there is no ground under your feet. (I think that image has warped some folks expectations of how gravity works, but it is a learned expectation.) A lot of expectations I have are not personally learned but have been transmitted from the society around me, via osmosis, to me.

What brought on this rant of houses and expectations? I was thinking about the current financial mess on Wall Street, our euphemism for the financial industry, and what my expectations are. I don’t have the knowledge or expertise to comprehend and manage my assets across the width and breadth of the financial system. So, I have to entrust the care a feeding of my assets to strangers and to trust in the kindness of strangers – because I have some expectations.

I expect the financial system to be built on a solid foundation with interlocking fail-safes to prevent a collapse of the overall structure. Why did I have this expectation? Because the American economy has ridden through several financial storms before and has almost sunk before and we learned some lessons along the way and codified them. And then 50-60 years later, after things have been relatively stable, we removed those codes based on lessons learned and the almost immediately the system collapsed.

Going back to my house analogy, you are supposed to go around periodically and review the state of infrastructure, fix and patch what may be leaking, maybe shell out some big bucks to replace the roof that has been pounded by 10-20 years of hailstorms, in general do what is needed to maintain the function of the house. You don’t go around saying ‘this wall is in our way, let’s take it down’ without considering it is a load-bearing wall.

My expectations on the financial markets are that I should be able to:
invest in the growth of the economy,
have a long-term retirement fund,
plan to have growth in the long-term fund.
have knowledgeable functionaries to run the fund,
know that properly managed securities are a known entity,
assume that the functionaries know what they are doing,
assume that assets invested in will still exist after a period of years,
assume that I am not being invested in securities that will disappear into a bankrupt pit,
expect that funds will fluctuate over the short term but will grow over the long term,
expect the Republicans will do everything in their power to undermine my long-term security.

Overall, I know that investing in securities is fraught with peril and risk. But, I expect that the fund managers I am using will be doing their fiduciary duty to minimize the risk. And that fiduciary duty includes wandering around the house and looking for cracks in the foundation and leaks in the pipes and the roof. And moving my stuff away from the leaks and the cracks until the repairs are made. The SEC is the repair group to fix the leaks and cracks. If the cracks are being caused by a shifting foundation then they will need to jack up the rafters and shore up the foundation to keep the stability. Expensive project. Or they can let the foundation collapse, clear it and everything that fell with it away, and rebuild the damaged section on a new foundation. Probably an even more expensive project.

Am I being naive in my expectations? Are they realistic? or are they the cartoony “I am still safe until I look down and see that I am standing on thin air.”?

Building on Shifting Ground

Politics, Preparing for the worst

it is still a lot of money…

$700 Billion, $700 Billion, $700 Billion.  Now matter how often I say it, that is still a lot of money.  Maybe if I try $.7 Trillion, $.7 Trillion, $.7 Trillion. Yeah, that’s not as bad, but it is still a lot of money.

Let’s see, about a week ago the Bush administration proposed buying up a lot of ‘toxic’ debt from various institutions to help free up the engine of the US economy. We, the American People, are being asked to bail out a bunch of de-regulated institutions who went and did what the lapsed regulations were meant to prevent.  $700 Billion. And we are being asked to blindly follow the dictates of the very people who created this mess and to decide very quickly, like by tomorrow, before we even know what the full scope of the problem is.  $700 Billion. I don’t think so.

But let’s say the idiots in Congress decide to further mortgage the future and attempt some sort of bailout. I would suggest that we don’t pay more that $.10 on the $1, and that we don’t buy any derivatives*. This purchase should only limited to base mortgage securities.  With Fannie Mae, et. al. we already have half the mortgages in the country.  Then once we have all these sub-prime mortgages, we can renegotiate with the original mortgage holder for $.50 on the $1.  And We, The People, can make a bit of profit and maybe let folks keep their homes.  Of course, the drawback is that it will take 30+ years to close the books on this.  Maybe once we have restructured all these mortgages from sub-prime to prime, we can bundle them up as security instruments and sell them back to the free marketplace?

And we will take our national debt from $9.7 Trillion to $10.4 Trillion. When you say it that way, maybe it isn’t a lot of money. Oh, but wait, don’t we still have another $400 billion to add to the debt in the next budget? $10.8 Trillion – let’s round it out to $11 Trillion –  we can live with that.

Or maybe the institutions that are going to sell these securities to us at $.10 on the $1 can avoid the middle-man, take the write-offs and renegotiate with the mortgage holders directly for $.50 on the $1.

*Whatever we do, we should not buy derivatives, at least not until a majority of the country has passed an introductory calculus course.

Economics, Liberating Thoughts, Politics, Preparing for the worst

Whose Economic Policies Work Best?!?

Personally, I consider the National Debt to be the greatest threat to the future well-being of the United States. Followed closely by deficit spending. Given the economic news of the past week, with the Federal Government doing its best to socialize losses, I expect the debt will continue to grow. (Did you know the National Debt is about to hit $10 Trillion? That’s Trillion, with a Tr.)

Avedon compiled a review of past administration economic results that Dwight Meredith studied “Just For the Record” – covering 1962-2001.

The link has some specific numbers and links to other interesting pages.

A bit of Summary:
Continue reading Whose Economic Policies Work Best?!? →