Author: Brian

There’s heaps of issues snarled here.

A conversation with the estates unit at Bank of America:

Paul: Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.

Bank of America Estates representative: I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?

Paul: I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.

BOA: You mean you’re not going to help her out?

Paul: I wouldn’t be helping her out — she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.

BOA: Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.

[link]

Notstalgia:

Lehman Brothers: “Where vision gets built”

AIG: “The strength to be there”

Wachovia Bank: “We’re Wachovia, and we’re here”

Bank of America: “Bank of opportunity”

Merrill Lynch: “We’re bullish on the future”

Citigroup: “Citi never sleeps”

Washington Mutual: “Whoo hoo”

IndyMac: “You can count on us”

Capital One: “What’s in your wallet?”

via AdAge

The auction of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Some items here.

It’s our money.

Bill Moyers has been thinking about these issues for a long time.

“Oligarchy is an un-American term.”

The blood we walk upon knew that. But what have we done?

Since Nixon, since Reagan, we’ve been sold a bill of goods and we tolerate still more. Coddled insiders are celebrated by coffee shop consorts while the unbridled ambitious prove Game Theory has run amok.

Simon Johnson, Professor of Economics at MIT and an International Monetary Fund chief economist, worries we will not be tough enough on the politically powerful banking lobby.

“Weakening the big banks and their bosses should not be seen as an unfortunate side effect of beneficial medicine. It is exactly what we need to do under these circumstances.

Unless and until these banks’ economic and political influence declines, we are stuck with too many people who know exactly what they can get away with….

“We should change the leadership of the major banks.”

Shades of Argentina!

Tell me what ideas need additional explanation or substantiation to convince people on the depth of our predicament and to further the debate regarding a real exit strategy.

Average full-time workers made $41,198 in 1973 and $37,606 in 2008, adjusted for inflation. CEOs make more than 300 times as much.

The top tax rate was 70 percent in 1973 and just 35 percent now. The top rate for capital gains was 36.5 percent in 1973 and 15 percent now.

The richest 1 percent have increased their share to the second-highest level on record. The only year higher was 1928 – on the eve of the Great Depression.

The richest 400 average more than $5 million a week, are taxed under 17 percent, and cheat more on their taxes by understating incomes an average of 21 percent.

Republican tax cuts for the top 1 percent in 2008 was more than the budgets of the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency combined. McClatchy-Tribune News Service

“And what did I learn?

“I learned that if I was to survive in life, I should take care not to involve myself in any activities that I would not want The Nun to know about!

“If something would make me ashamed, were anyone I loved or respected to find out about it, then it’s probably something I shouldn’t be doing in the first place. So I don’t.”

Some are saying the World’s Most Luxurious Coffin: Flat-panel television, a telephone… carpeting, shoes!

I don’t know what to say, but the Little Pharaoh on my shoulder is whispering gravely.

It’s not an easy task for architects and builders. The engineering is daunting. The liability is a Pandora’s Box in an insurance market already burdened with litigation and institutionalized avoidance. Delivering adequate water during a firestorm is nearly an impossible challenge for public agencies.

Australia’s Calair Pipe Systems makes a variety of nozzles for outside or external sprinklers to protect homes and buildings from wildfire. Their Fire-Pro System includes heat engineered polymer pipe, nozzles and activation sensors.

The intense heat of a storm of fire may overwhelm any system, but risk is most often from embers flying through miles of neighborhoods not merely proximity vegetation.

An automatic sprinkler system might be the breakthrough homeowners are looking for, but there’s much work ahead. Wet helps, but winds of fire at 50 or 70 miles per hour can boil water away in mere seconds.

Extensive Flash slide shows are here at LA’s CBS TV and another at LATimes.

This is a re-post.

Since 1980 GM and Ford blew through $465 billion…

With that $465 billion, GM and Ford could have shut down and acquired all of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen.

I think it will be awhile before we invigorate U.S. leadership. There’s a longgg road ahead because it’s a dismal crowd needing much repair.

From the President’s Middle Class Task Force:

It used to be that the middle class was able to achieve the American dream of owning a decent home in a safe neighborhood with a good public school, having access to affordable health care, saving for college and retirement, and enjoying the occasional meal out, movie, and vacation.

Go fix it: www.astrongmiddleclass.gov

Saving up for a new yacht? Calvin and Hobbes know how it’s done. Click panel for the full strip.

Unusual or what? The Russian Army tested alternatives to napalm inside cavernous brick buildings. The high temperatures melted the walls and ceilings forming ‘icicles of red brick’. more pics at the EnglishRussia blog.

Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist:

Call it, then, the death of all we once held dear, if what you held dear consisted of seven McMansions and three trophy wives and five revolving psychiatrists and four personal trainers and regular spa treatments for the Wheaten terriers, along with blatantly rubbing your aging genitalia against the stiff leather of your fleet of Porsche Cayenne Turbos after drunkenly nailing your mistress in your corner office at Goldman Sachs. Ahh yes, that’s more like it.

Whatever you call it, there’s a bitter tang in the air, a nasty streak of anti-Everythingism, a collective bullet of disgust and frustration that’s most violently aimed at the most precious American commodity of all: the rich, the overly entitled, the uberwealthy, the manicured bankers and CEOs and Wall Street cash jockeys we used to cherish like royalty but who now smell vaguely of death and foreclosure and Bernie Madoff.

What a strange phenomenon.

The Nation reports that America is an angry place just now.

“People are furious, all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, most of which are good and sufficient, if not always prudent and well thought out, but they’ve used, gamed, duped, lied to, betrayed, ripped off, conned, humiliated, scammed, cheated, plundered, rooked, screwed over, hosed, dissed and dishonored.

“Americans, left, right and center, have had it.”

And, to add insult to injury, research by Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley found that the rich are rude and inconsiderate, displaying snootiness like a peacock’s tail, only to say “I don’t need you”.

Portfolio.com addresses ‘The Number’, how much does it take to feel rich? Oh, you mean ‘Fuck you’ money,” a veteran Wall Streeter said.

Dear Valued Client,
You’re screwed. You’re poor. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

To control toxic e-waste, the British Columbia government invoked “producer responsibility”, shifting the cost of recycling from taxpayers to producers and buyers.

“It has become part of our culture to drop stuff on the curb and have the city take it away when we don’t want it anymore.” says Zero Waste Vancouver. “But now there is this cultural shift, where recycling is a cradle-to-cradle extended warranty by the producer, as opposed to a free public service offered by the mayor and council.”

Consumers pay a fee. Business sets up ethically-audited programs to ensure computers, TVs and a limited list of electronics do not enter the municipal dump or ships to China. A 75% recovery rate is the target.

To roll the economy, electronics will not be reused.

You don’t need the current banks.

If they won’t lend, let them go under.

Banks exist to be intermediaries between central banks and those who need credit. They are given the ability to create money through fractional reserve money (yes, create) and they also have the right to borrow money at rates that no one else can receive. If you could take your money, multiply it by 10 (that’s not the exact number, but as an example) and lend it out, think you could make a profit? If you could borrow money at 1 to 5% and then lend it out for more than that, in some cases 15% more, think you could make money?

Banks thus are given by governments an incredibly valuable privilege. It’s really hard to overstate how easy it is to make steady returns as a bank as long as you don’t get greedy. In exchange for the right to create money and borrow it at rates no one else gets, banks are expected to add some value to the equation. Specifically, they are expected to figure out who is a good credit risk, and where money should best be loaned and used.

There are two sides of this – money should be loaned where it has a high return. It should also be loaned to folks who can pay it back. It should be invested in the same way—return averaged with risk. Banks haven’t been doing this.

They have been seeking out the highest return, but they haven’t been taking into account risk. Instead they have been seeking out high risk for high returns.

They haven’t been adding value. They also haven’t been performing the tasks of getting money to the people who can use it best.

James Dyson, The Guardian: “…the young are innately curious about how and why things work.”

“Yet what happens between childhood and adulthood? We stamp it out of them.

“Engineering gets stigmatised and we encourage our kids to become “professionals” – lawyers, accountants, doctors. … engineers are not accorded the status they deserve.

“And the snobbery extends to education. Design and technology is struggling to shake off a dreary image and is lumbered with a perception that it is secondary to so-called academic subjects.

‘We need to rediscover that fascination with that train set of our childhood.

”We’ve built our modern economy on the service sector, loans, banking and the dot.com bubble. Now that’s collapsed, we should seek to base it on something long term with solid foundations. If we don’t, we risk losing an already weakened position for good.

‘Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.”

Clay Shirky on media: “We’re not going from a world of Business Model A to one of Business Model B. We’re going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z.” more here

Guile and corruption is the mark of our era. Perhaps it’s time to flex other muscles.

“We can no longer ignore the improper business practices of health insurers who decide to play by their own rules without regard to patients, or the legitimate costs required to care for them,” said AMA President Dr. Nancy H. Nielsen. AP story

The Animal Health Institute reports that almost 12,000 tons of antibiotics were sold for use in farm and companion animals, an increase from 2005. But the routine use of antibiotics to promote growth is going down about 5% per year. [story]

Bacteria develop resistance just by being bacteria and learn to resist our arsenal of antibiotics whenever they are exposed. Keeping antibiotics away from bacteria is a good idea. If we save our chemical swords for when truly needed, we extend our capability to kill bacteria when we truly must.

If we keep resistant varieties from spreading, such as monitoring staph and cleaning waste water before it leeches

genes found in hog waste lagoons are transferred – “like batons” – from one bacterial species to another. The researchers found that this migration across species and into new environments sometimes dilutes – and sometimes amplifies – genes conferring antibiotic resistance.

The new report, in the August issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, tracks the passage of tetracycline resistance genes from hog waste lagoons into groundwater wells at two Illinois swine facilities. [story]

Happy bacteria, doused in Prozac and pharma, [story]

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
                               ~ T S Eliot

Among folks to follow in the engineering & art of website design is Douglas Bowman at Stopdesign. He executes, explores and keeps us informed about technology and its quirks. And he knows talent.

Here’s talent. Nathan at FlowingData. Nathan says he can’t sleep, so he builds ways to improve our perception and understanding. For instance, convert data into maps. “Over the weekend, I mapped the spread of Walmart… starts slowly and then spreads like wildfire… Click, and voilà.

Torture is a form of terrorism:
there are no justifications for it

2003 editorial from the British Medical Journal.