Coffee Art

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Power

I had all but the first 10 editions of Nintendo Power. I gave them away to a young man from Spokane. His mom drove across the Cascades to pick them up. For several years Nintendo put a little slice of a picture on the spine of each edition and if you put them together you could see the picture. (The red one in the middle was a special Spider Man cover.)

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Mechanism

Hammering Man seems sad that I can see his mechanism.


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40K

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Turtles

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Sinking Feeling

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W

W Hotel Lobby, Seattle, WA

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Christmas in Seattle

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Parking lot

... from a Stephen King novel ...


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Crystal and Stromberries

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Stromberries

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Vancouver

I'm running Picasa 3.5 over my 50,000 photos. As I'm tagging faces I'm tripping over some old pictures that seem interesting. This is the Vancouver, CA skyline.

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Deflation is good!

I posted this response to a post by Gordon Ludlow about fraction reserve banking.  His original post is worth reading.


[I've made small edits to this version to fix typos.]   I wrote:

You certainly understand the reasoning behind a central bank. The idea is that by printing extra money the central bank will promote "price stability" and this is in fact the charter of the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately, there is no need for price stability. What would really happen if you planted a potato and then dug up 20 and sold them is that the price of potatoes would go down. The first year, if potatoes were in demand, you might only get $.95 per potato. You'll still make a lot of money but the increased supply of potatoes will probably lower the price - although it's just as possible that potatoes become some kind of fad and you're in the right place at the right time and the price of potatoes goes up!

More likely in the long run is that lots of people will see an opportunity in potato farming and the long term price of potatoes will go down, just as the long term trend of the price of computers is down.

What's wrong with that? Do you want the price of potatoes to go up? Do you want the price of computers to go up? Or even stay the same? No, you want the efficiency of making computers or potatoes to go up which brings the price down and makes the product more affordable for everyone, especially the poor.

Suppose you save the money you make. With enforced monetary inflation, you have to invest or your money will lose value - according to the Federal Reserve, 2-3% a year, which is their inflation target. If you have to invest, you have to take some risk, no matter how small. Why should you have to take a risk just to maintain the value you already earned? Why can't you just keep your money and let it grow in purchasing power as production becomes more efficient? Inflation is a tax on savings and it is particularly brutal to those near retirement age.

Price deflation is portrayed as evil when in fact it is the most honest pricing system there is. Price deflation after a bubble can be brutal - but that's only because of the price inflation that preceded it. The inflation was the problem not the deflation. Deflation is generally good and represents increased efficiency in the economy.

Thanks for the link to my blog, BTW. And thanks for taking the time to think about our economy. It's very important!

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Limits

Fed Considers Bank Pay Limits - NYTimes.com:

"The Federal Reserve is preparing what would be the most sweeping rules yet to regulate the pay at banks across the country, people close to the discussions said on Friday.

The rules would apply not just to the compensation and bonuses of top executives but also to traders, loan officers and other employees. But rather than focusing on the specific amount employees are paid, Fed officials will be scrutinizing whether the structure of compensation, like the use of bonuses based on the volume of loan origination, encourages excessive risk-taking."

This is so stupid. The easiest way to keep anyone from excessive risk taking is to raise interest rates. The source of all the excessive risk taking was the low interest rates created by the Federal Reserve itself.

But you won't hear the Federal Reserve take any responsibility for the meltdown even though they are the source of the original bubbles that cause so much pain and suffering.

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Worms!

This is some of the coolest procedural code I've seen:

worms in a bowl! from blackpawn on Vimeo.

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Inflation required for fractional reserve banking

Web of Debt author Ellen Brown on debt money, why money is collapsing and why central banks need adult supervision:

"Taking the long view, it's the end of a 300 year Ponzi scheme. Virtually all of our money is created by banks as loans; but banks create only the principal, not the interest necessary to pay their loans back. More is always owed back than is created in the first place, and new borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to create the money to pay this extra interest. After 300 years, the whole world has been locked in debt, and the parasitic pyramid has run out of its food source."

(A Ponzi scheme is basically an inflationary system were fake money is created and put on the books (as a result of fake investments); and if someone wants some real money, a small fraction of the money that has been collected is returned. But you knew that already.)

This is the same thing I was trying to say in this article on fractional reserve banking and inflation.

And the Mogambo Guru put it this way in The Big Payback of Nonexistent Money:

Well, the only thing he wanted to talk about was how I was going to get my Fat Mogambo Butt (FMB) up off that stool and get out and not come back, which I did, but not before telling him that another parabolic curve is provided by Darryl Robert Schoon at drschoon.com, who says, “What people do not understand is that bankers loan money which doesn’t exist and then receive compounding interest and repayment of previously non-existent funds in return.”

Most descriptions of fractional reserve banking get hung up on details about how a bank will keep a certain portion of the money that it loans out in actual cash in case someone wants it and how bad it is if the bank uses up all this cash.

But now, thanks to the Federal Reserve, which has effectively lowered the fractional rate to zero, it is not necessary for the bank to keep any of the money that people deposit.  None of it.

So this makes it much easier to illustrate the point that banks make money out of thin air.  They loan this imaginary money out and then receive real money back as interest.  You know this is imaginary money because if you go to the bank and try to take out a loan for $100,000 and tell them you want it in cash you'll discover that they won't give it to you.  You can only write checks against your loan.  Or they will issue you a bank check you can deposit at another bank and you can try to the the $100,000 out of that bank.  I'd like to see someone try.  Instead, you write checks against your loan, which other banks will cash (possibly including the bank that gave you the loan!) and this imaginary money circulates.  At no time is there any actual money - no dollar bills, no gold, no coins ... no nothin'!

So when you heard that the banking system might have collapsed, you would have heard Federal Reserve and Treasury officials talking about imaginary money.  To fix this problem - that is - that the banks didn't have enough imaginary money - the Federal Reserve issued them some extra imaginary money that it created out of thin air.  The Treasury Department also forced the banks to take some imaginary money as part of the TARP program.

There is a continuing argument - are we facing inflation or deflation?  Both, technically.  It depends where you look - inflation and deflation are not uniform across an economy.   However, I maintain that most of the deflation is the removal of imaginary money from circulation while much of the inflation is in day to day items that I want to buy, like food and gasoline; there is also currently a great deal of inflation in stock prices.  The price to earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is 130 or some ridiculous number; a more sane ratio is 10 to 15.  So the S&P 500 stocks are inflated 10x over any reasonable price.  The reason is that the imaginary money that the banks received was sitting with nothing to do; so the banks bought stocks.  Right now, they seem to be buying each other's stocks, which bids the prices up, and let's them sell those stocks for more imaginary money, which they can put on their balance sheets, which are filled with imaginary asset values such as commercial real estate loans at 100% when the most that could possibly be paid back is 50%.

Our currency is going to collapse.  Nobody knows when and few will offer any predictions.  How would you predict when Bernie Madoff would turn himself in?  How would you predict when the SEC would have found him out if he hadn't turned himself in?

When our currency collapses a great deal of imaginary wealth will disappear.  Just as people who invested with Madoff went from rich to broke in a matter of five minutes so too a great deal of imaginary wealth in the US and around the world will disappear.  People will be forced to switch to some kind of currency that has some value.  I don't know what that will be.  In the worst ( non-violent) case we will all barter; in a lesser case perhaps the states will issue some currency with an inflationary cap.  I don't know.

All Ponzi schemes end and they end badly for many people.  The only safe thing is to not participate and that is really hard in today's world.  It's just not practical for most of us to live off the land.  I wish I could tell you how to survive the collapse but I don't even know when it will happen!  (Sometime in the next two years, methinks ... but who knows?)

Nonetheless, I would say it is better to go into this crisis with your eyes open; when the currency collapses it will happen quickly.  Maybe the powers-that-be will con us all with some new currency - a world currency - and the day of reckoning will be postponed yet again.  Who knows?  More likely, I think, is that the US dollar will be abandoned as a safe store of value by most foreign governments.  When that happens prices will go through the roof because we import so much.

Cripes, what a nightmare.

Here:  watch Debbie Downer; it will cheer you up.

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Calculated Risk: A Moment with Minsky

Calculated Risk: A Moment with Minsky: "He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse."

 
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Underlit

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Succumbed

I succumbed. I bought the Red vs. Blue DVD set.

The guy handling the money says, "Do you want it signed?"

"Sure," I say, "who's signing it?"

"The guy who plays Sarge," he says.

I yell, "Simmons!", doing my best Sarge imitation.

"No," he says, "Sarge." He stares at me a moment and says, "Debit or Credit?"

I give him my Yoda credit card and he doesn't notice!

"Hey," I say, "Just a moment, check out that card."

"Debit or credit?"

"No, the picture!"

"Hey, that's cool! I didn't know they had those. So, debit or credit?"

"Credit. Hey, get him to yell 'Simmons!'"

He says, "Simmons isn't here now."

"No," I say, "Get Sarge to yell 'Simmons!'"

He says to the voice of Sarge, "Hey, yell 'Simmons!'"

Voice of sarge says, "Simmons isn't here now."

"No," the cash handling guy says, "Just yell 'Simmons!'"

"What? Is that all?"

"Yeah, just yell 'Simmons!'"

"Okay," voice of Sarge says. "SIMMONS!"

Awesomeness.

And then cash handling guy says to voice of Sarge, "Hey, check out this guy's credit card! It's Yoda!"

Double awesomeness.

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Seriously

... what is the deal with this guy? He's at every conference. I mean, okay, he could pilot a starship better than any human, but still ... what is the deal?

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Pax 2009

"Hey, it's George Lucas!"

But not for long ...


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Wienies!

Wienies!

"All [previous] park operators contended that Walt's concept of a single entrance was faulty... Walt remained firm. He reasoned that people became disoriented when they entered by different gates. He wanted everyone to be channeled in the same way, to have their visit to Disneyland structured as part of a total experience.

"Throughout the planning [of Disneyland], a familiar Disney word, 'wienie,' was used. A wienie was a lure, an inducement, in the same way that an animal trainer used a frankfurter to evoke tricks from a dog act. In Disneyland, the castle served as the wienie to draw the people down Main Street. Then, when they reached the hub, two other wienies would attract them to the right or to the left. In Tomorrowland, it would be the towering Rocket to the Moon; in Frontierland, the Mark Twain steamboat."

From Walt Disney, An American Original, by Bob Thomas, page 263.

Some parts of Disneyland are more wienie-like than others, e.g., the rock formation above.  According to Disneyland lore, an earlier version of the mountain was a too wienie-like, if you get my drift, and had to be remodeled.

Anyway, check out my article on Disneyland Wienies and then put lots of tall pointy things into your next game.
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