Treasury Department responds to oversight panel - BailoutSleuth

Treasury Department responds to oversight panel - BailoutSleuth

So I skimmed the full document of the Treasury Department's response. Except for one reference to the LIBOR it's all "sure, it's working!" bullshit. But more importantly is how utterly LAME the questions posed by the oversight committee were. Good lord - ask some hard questions! What a bunch of fucktards.

Happy New Year!

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Schiff speaks truth to power

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Azurik to the rescue

I was forwarded the following story by a guy in the Amaze Console Studio:

From: Marcus H...

Sent: Wed 12/24/2008 2:41 PM

To: Amaze - Console Team

Subject: Azurik to the rescue

I thought people might get a kick out of this. I wasn't gonna come into work Christmas Eve because of the snow and ice. But I had to pick up a bicycle for my daughter that my wife had ordered and it finally got to the store. It was a matter of life or death for her that I get this bike for Christmas morning. I stopped off at work after I got the bike. There was a delivery truck in front of the building, I noticed he was stuck. He couldn't get any traction due to the snow. Being Christmas and all I thought I would give my fellow man some help. So I told him I would try to find a shovel or something to dig him out. Of course I couldn't find anything in the back, not even the light switch, couldn't find nothin. But a flicker kept catching my eye. I knew what it was, but kept ignoring it. I kept on looking but not even one little trowel could be found. I thought to myself something had brought me here today, and that was to help this man. The flicker could be ignored no longer I went over and picked up the mighty Azurik trident, spear whatever the hell it is and headed outside. The driver of the delivery truck was like what the heck you got there, I told him this is all I could find. I took the mighty blade [and] broke up the snow and ice. The truck and driver were soon on their way. He thanked me and as I walked back to the building I raised Azurik's trident into the air in triumph. Redemption finally.

Marcus

[The 'trident' is called the Axion.]

The Richter Scales: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

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State of the Blog

It's almost the end of 2008 which means it is time to look at my web site and blog logs!

Far and away my most popular blog page is this one about low-light photography posted in 2004. The picture "Japan At Night" was downloaded over 47,000 times this year (2008).

The most popular article at my web site is an article by Alvin Lowi called Andrew Galambos and His Primary Property Ideas.

Almost 3,000 people have listened to Jingle Bell Rag this year.

I agree with Jason Calcanis that blogging has changed a lot and will change more in the future. Toward that end I converted my web site at Above the Garage Productions to a Wiki which supports creating a truly hyperlinked corpus better than anything I've used so far.

A couple of people have asked me how I have time to blog. The answer is ... I type fast! I really spend very little time on it each day - maybe 5 or 10 minutes. (Maybe that shows - I don't know.) One great thing about using MediaWiki is that it allows for direct editing (as does Blogger) but it encourages rewriting and refinement and intertwined linking via a straight forward interface. (Plus, we use it at work so the more I learn about it the better.)

It will take a long time to move the interesting stuff out of the blog and into the Wiki in workloads of 10 minutes a day, but I think the result will be worth it to me even if no one reads it. It helps me organize how I think about things and I view it as exercise for my brain.

Thanks to everyone who has visited me in the last year and let's hope that American ingenuity can outpace lunatic politics in the coming years.

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Nrrrd Grrrl

Nrrrd Grrrl

Nerd girl, I don't deserve you
I don't get the references you refer to
I love your Lipsmackers and your lack of perfume
I hope to get you home by curfew
WORD UP!

...

You can't resist Chris 'cause he helps you de-stress
While you play Animal Crossing on your Nintendo DS

AWESOME!

NSFW picture of the Nerd Girl

Scroll down. She's Number One!


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More Jobs!

The president-elect bulks up his economic-recovery plan. - By Roger McShane - Slate Magazine:

But if Obama thinks he can create 3 million jobs, why not create more? After all, his advisers believe as many as 4 million jobs will be lost in the coming year. The LAT is the one paper to inject some skepticism into their reporting, noting that some economists 'say Obama's new job goals may be rooted in salesmanship. It is virtually impossible to quantify jobs saved, so the figures have little meaning, they said.'

Nice! A little common sense! And from the LA Times!

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snopes.com: Christmas Superstitions

snopes.com: Christmas Superstitions

Oh my.

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Snow Particles

We're in the middle of a "blizzard". The wind gusts are pretty strong (40 mphs?) but it's not insane. Plus we still have power!

I shot this video an hour ago and uploaded it to YouTube. The original was in DV format and 100 megabytes! YouTube did a good job compressing it.

You'll notice the wind is having a hard time choosing what direction to blow. Kind of like a lot of politicians.



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The Reckoning - Bush’s Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire - Series - NYTimes.com

The Reckoning - Bush’s Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire - Series - NYTimes.com: "

“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”"

Seriously? Really? You think?

The article goes on to lay a lot of policy decisions that got us into this mess with Mr. Bush. He was so enamored with people owning homes that he removed every impediment possible. He was alerted multiple times to the problems that were brewing but was in favor of the credit bubble because he helped his position.

Luckily for all of us, this blew up on Bush's watch, and he will get the blame.

Not that others are blameless ... But Mr. Bush's leadership pushed us to where we are now and continues to push us into huge debt.

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More credit! Uh, NOT!

Deflation: Nothing to Fear - Jeff Bonn - Mises Institute: "You would not suggest giving a teen who has just maxed out their first credit card more credit so they could somehow spend their way out of the financial hole they have made, nor will this approach work for a business or a nation."

Somehow people think it is okay for the government to be in debt. I know some Republicans who don't mind the huge increase in debt because somehow higher taxes were avoided. I guess the debt is harder to see and an increase in taxes is easier to see, so the thing that is harder to see is somehow less evil.

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Fred Thompson says what I just said, except sarcastic

It's nice to know that at least a few people recognize how We-Todd-It the government money managers are.

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Regulation that works

http://mises.org/story/3260:

It seems that everyone wants to know how anyone could be so clever as to run a fifty-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme without the SEC — which has seemingly limitless power and resources at its disposal — ever noticing. After all, if the government couldn't protect people who could? The answer is simple: the free market.

This is not a case in which free-market proponents are forced to theorize countless what-if scenarios regarding a solution that would not involve the government. The free market did spot the problem; it even reported it to the SEC. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the warnings were ignored by the SEC, which failed its fiduciary obligation to investors.

Due to the lack of government intervention and regulation with respect to hedge funds, consumers demanded some sort of policing of hedge funds in order to protect investors who lack the knowledge or resources to properly investigate the funds in which they plan to entrust their money. The free market responded to the consumer demand and so-called "due-diligence firms" emerged. Individuals seeking to invest in a hedge fund frequently pay one of these due-diligence firms for their opinion about specific hedge funds.

Due-diligence firms use the fees collected from their clients to hire professionals to meticulously review hedge firms for signs of deceit. One such firm is Aksia LLC. After painstakingly investigating the operations of Madoff's operation, they found several red flags. A brief summary of some of the red flags uncovered by Aksia can be found here. Shockingly, Aksia even uncovered a letter to the SEC dating from 2005 which claimed that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. As a result of its investigation, Aksia advised all of its clients not to invest their money in Madoff's hedge fund.

Private regulation works. Government regulation works once in awhile but very rarely.

What really doesn't work is pretend government regulation. When the regulators don't regulate everyone gets screwed.

I want to invent a term: defensive capitalism. You must assume every transaction could be rigged, every deal could go sour, and that in every instance you must take defensive measures.

This is the only way capitalism can work. It doesn't "just work" as if by magic or the "invisible hand of the market". It works because people exercise care and due diligence when they know they are taking risks. It's when we get complacent and think that the markets "just work" without our own individual involvement that things go sour.

What about the bond rating agencies? Wasn't that private due-diligence?

Indeed it was but with one key difference. The bond rating companies were paid by the people creating the bonds. That's called a "conflict of interest." So you can't just trust anyone who claims to be doing due-diligence. You need to understand where they get their money. Underwriter's Laboratories doesn't take any money from anyone who has a product they might test. The UL seal has value. But just because it's reliable today does not mean it will be reliable tomorrow! UL might start taking money from the companies whose products they test.

Bernie Madoff had a stellar reputation. But you have to be like W.C. Fields: "Trust everyone but always cut the cards." The bond rating agencies were reliable until they started taking money from the wrong people.

The biggest risk of all is allowing the government to print money.

http://www.slate.com/id/2205574: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has used similar language before, explaining in a 2002 speech—when he was a governor on the Federal Reserve Board—that "the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."

Unfortunately Mr. Bernanke is wrong - there is a cost and the people that pay that cost are the ones at the end of the supply chain. The people that benefit from the printing press are those that receive the money first. By the time that money reaches you and me it has "trickled down" so much it has lost value. This is inflation - prices go up faster than your wages go up and you end up way behind the curve.

I don't know if you remember, but it was not always the case that it took two wage earners to maintain a family. The reason that is the case now is that inflation has gone up 100% since about 1984. Wages have not gone up 100%. Instead, most households have two income earners.

I know talking about money sounds very hypothetical and perhaps even nonsensical. Money is just money, you think. We have to have money, and obviously it has to be controlled by the government! It just seems like common sense. Unfortunately it is wrong.

There is a long history of government failure caused by simply printing too much money. It appears to solve some problems in the short term but the result is always another bubble and as each bubble pops there is less and less real value in the money you hold.

Inflation encourages people to borrow - let's buy something now before the price goes up. I've heard this statement so often recently that it is taken for granted that this is somehow a good thing - that it stimulates the economy. Well, caffeine stimulates you, but you'd better catch up on your sleep later. You can't just keep taking more and more caffeine and the economy can't just keep having money pumped into it.

If it was true that no one would buy anything without the threat of the price going up in the future then the computer business as we know it would not exist. Computer value per dollar goes up at least 100% ever 18 months and still people buy computers even though they know the price will go down. Nobody has to trick anybody into buying a computer.

If the Fed or the Treasury or the Congress is creating money (primarily by allowing huge amounts of leverage) then it is inevitable that some de-leveraging must take place, just as you can't keep breathing in without breathing out. The people close to the money printers don't much care what happens until they get killed by deleveraging. Then they want a bailout. And they get it.

This is wrong and you should be outraged! I know you're not. It all sounds esoteric. I don't want a crash - who does? But would you rather crash your car going 10 mph or 60 mph? The Fed wants to increase the velocity of money. This sounds good but it is bad. People in markets trade at the rate that they feel comfortable. If some people are artificially stimulated to push money around then we get an artificial bubble. It's that simple.

I have no way to end this rant ... except to say ... inflation is not good! Don't believe it when someone tells you that it stimulates the economy in a good way! It's not true.

It's just not true.

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Transformer Costumes

(Thanks Austin for the link.)

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LOLFed » Dr. Doom Weighs In On The Madoff Debacle

LOLFed » Dr. Doom Weighs In On The Madoff Debacle:

Granted, Marc Faber lost the official LOLFed Dr. Doom Poll to Nouriel Roubini, but I will continue to refer to Faber as Dr. Doom until someone can suggest a better pet name. Found this gem on the Lew Rockwell Blog:

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital in New York, also raised concerns about the SEC’s auditing of the firm. “Of course, the fact that the SEC routinely audited Madoff’s investment company and found nothing wrong is further proof that government regulation of the securities industry is ineffective and has done more harm than good,” he said. “Rather than protecting investors, it merely lulls them into a falls sense of confidence. If government stayed out, private-sector due diligence would do a much better job of ferreting out such massive and poorly conceived scams.”

That's what I said! We had alleged auditing and regulation and then it was quietly turned off by Bush administration policy.

Since no one shouted from the rooftops that there was no more auditing going on and therefore everyone was on their own people just kept going along with complete bullshit because they assumed someone must be checking on this crazy ass complicated stuff.

*Sigh*.


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Teut's World: Fiction Book on Nano Tech

Teut's World: Fiction Book on Nano Tech: "a pretty neat book"

Check out other reviews at Amazon: http://preview.tinyurl.com/6ecyh5

More information at http://NanoPlasmBook.com.

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Kindle books sorted by price

Here's a very handy link: Kindle books sorted by price, with cheapest ones first, which means you can see what's free or very cheap!

http://www.amazon.com/s/...

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Boyer-Moore pattern matching

I was trying to remember the name of the cool pattern matching technique that takes less than linear time. I thought it was by Knuth but his version is the simple, obvious way.

Boyer-Moore is genius - it works through the text by making big jumps based on the content of the search string.

I found this cool animation (which just happens to be from my alma mater, UCI). Test it once with the Knuth-Morris-Pratt version and then again with Boyer-Moore.

Interactive Pattern Matching Animation

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Fiat Money - What?

Going the Way of France (1790) - Cyd Malone - Mises Institute

Fiat money - what is it? It's money the government prints "backed by the full force and credit of the United States." Our fiat money is better than other countries, in spite of everything, which is amazing, but none-the-less, fiat money is a bad thing.

Follow the link to read why.



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Jim Vos detected Madoff - good job!

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "Not every potential Madoff investor was fooled. Jim Vos, who runs due diligence firm Aksia LLC, said he spent several months probing Madoff’s firm on behalf of clients, only to recommend against investing in it. Vos said eight “feeder funds” invested about $15 billion with Madoff. Vos declined to name the clients.

Among the red flags, Vos said: Madoff’s auditor, Friehling & Horowitz, operated from a 13-by-18-foot office in Rockland County, New York, a small operation for the auditor of such a large firm. Vos had an investigator stake out the office. A call to the New City, New York, office of Friehling & Horowitz after business hours wasn’t returned.

“I’m shocked by how investors turned a blind eye to returns that were too good to be true, constant steady small positive monthly returns,” Vos said. “When something is too good to be true, it probably is.”"

(It turns out he told the SEC about his concerns and they ignored him.)

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An interactive guide to the bailout trillions. - By Chris Wilson and Karim Bardeesy - Slate Magazine

An interactive guide to the bailout trillions. - By Chris Wilson and Karim Bardeesy - Slate Magazine

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All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

The link is to an essay about how Edmund Burke's quote has been rewritten across the Internet. It then proceeds to dissect what it might actually mean and how the various versions make subtle changes to the meaning.

I was reminded of this famous quote while driving. I was trying to decide if I should listen to The Portable Atheist audiobook or some Christmas music.

As I considered the famous quote, and Christopher Hitchens' compendium of agnostic and/or atheist literature, a modification of Mr. Burke's quote came to me:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for an omnipotent being to do nothing.

I think that about sums it up.

BTW, I chose the Christmas music.

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The Home IT Guy (Updated)

Since everyone in the house has at least one computer and I have the most experience opening up computers that makes me the home IT guy.

Interestingly, I typed SIS 760lv into Google and it came up with a forum post on the exact problem my twins' computers have: A heat sink fell off.





I do have the thermal adhesive and I hope it will do the job, because the little doodads that lock the heat sink down are goners.

I think most of my Thanksgiving break is going to be taken up with home IT tasks.

[two weeks later ...]

Well, it turns out I had Arctic Silver 3 thermal gel which is not the same thing as thermal glue. So I put thermal gel on the heatsink and the Northbridge part and left the PCs on their sides. I had to order Arctic Silver Thermal Glue from NewEgg. That arrived, but by then it was obvious that only one of the machines was fixed - the other one had too much thermal damage to the Northbridge and would lock up when doing a lot of video (2D or 3D). An internet search found the exact motherboard from HP ... in Hong Kong! The price was quite reasonable including shipping and the motherboard arrived intact a few days after that. Today, I tore one of the machines down to the bare metal, installed the new motherboard, and then powered it back up. So far, success!

I used to be afraid to play with the hardware in a PC. I'm a software guy! Then one time I put a SCSI controller into a machine when I had forgotten to turn the power off! There was a big spark and the machine crashed, but after I powered it down and restarted it, everything was fine! PCs are actually pretty resilient.

For the HP Media Center machine, I disconnected everything, swapped the motherboard, reconnected everything, powered it up, and it worked the first time.

So I'm no longer afraid of the insides of PCs. W00t.

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Tim the Charr Chaot: Wintersday Edition

Tim the Charr Chaot: Wintersday Edition

Originally uploaded by ArenaNet

Bad-ass fan made "Tim the Charr Chaot" - now with Christmas clothing.

Gordon Ludlow is curious about himself and thinking about turkey leftovers

http://game-coder.livejournal.com/5859.html

I felt sure you wanted to know.

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Amazon Kindle Sold Out For Holidays

The Book of Kindle: Amazon Kindle Sold Out For Holidays

I'm lucky I ordered mine when I did - which was a couple of days before the Oprah discount expired. I ordered next day shipping but it actually took five days - but that's better than the 11 - 13 weeks now being quoted!

If you have a Kindle, you can download a sample of my book Nano-Plasm - just visit http://NanoPlasmBook.com. And if you like it, you can buy it with just a couple of clicks!

I worked on my book for over seven years. Why did it take so long? Because I didn't work on it very much! Just a few weeks each summer. Finally, earlier this fall, I ran off some copies at LuLu.com and gave them to friends for feedback. I made some revisions based on their comments and decided to declare the book done.

The first few chapters are the roughest, in spite of the time I spent polishing them. I noticed I was really anxious to get the story going and so I think the early chapters move too quickly (although I improved that a lot). Once I got to chapter 10 (the chapters are small, so that's relatively soon for most readers), I think I started to hit a certain stride.

One problem with taking seven years to write a book is that other people also write books. Some of them are good writers like Michael Crichton, who wrote Prey. Prey had the same basic concept - nano-technology and people. While the books are quite different there was one problem - Mr. Crichton had used the ending I had planned! So I dropped that and made up something which I think is better.

In fact, as much as I love Michael Crichton, and in spite of my first (slightly) rough chapters, I like my book better. I'm sure Crichton is a better writer, but I like my story a lot more. And I like how fast it moves. And I like the clever things I came up with nano-tech wise.

The most rewarding feedback has been that most readers have read the last third of the book in one sitting.

Now that the book is declared done I'm pretty excited at what I accomplished - even if it took seven years. I've ordered a bunch of copies to give away as gifts, and I've even sold a few - mostly on the Kindle.

So, all in all, writing the book was a pretty good experience.

I probably won't have time to start on another one for a year, because I expect to be quite busy as the project I am on at work gets closer to shipping. But I already have a story idea and this time I won't be quite so impatient with the first chapters.

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