Big Business: people who really don’t even know me or really care if I live or die work hard to create value for me

Big Government: people who claim to care about me deeply work really hard to destroy value

Very succint and accurate.

“The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account,” he writes. “The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function.”

via Findings – Jaron Lanier Is Rethinking the Open Nature of the Internet – NYTimes.com.

In order words, Jaron Lanier says that you are just like the Fed if you steal digital media.

I am the Fed.

That should be a slogan for pirates.

Mr. Belvedere said he would be willing to live with all that lost equity if he could refinance his loan from a variable rate, which could eventually go as high as 12 percent, into a 30-year fixed term.

His lender said no, citing the diminished value of the property. “It makes no sense and is so frustrating,” Mr. Belvedere said. “I’m ready and willing to pay the mortgage for the next 30 years, but they act like they’d rather have me walk away.”

via Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis: Underwater, Securitized, and Screwed by the “Pass the Trash” Strategy.

The control room is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in another respect–both are stage sets. Nothing about the room is real, even the computer displays on the wall are simply hand drawn slides projected from the other side with Kodak carousels.

via Marginal Revolution: Project Cybersyn.

This whole pressure to keep people paying their mortgages creates some really ugly situations and really is destroying people’s lives and their financial future. Look at this one from the above article:

Unfortunately for Sam and Chris, the housing market began to collapse in 2007. Though they still owe about $560,000 on their home, it is now only worth $187,000. A similar house around the corner from Sam and Chris recently listed for $179,000, which, with a modest 5% down, would translate to a total monthly payment of less than $1200 per month – as compared to the $4300 that they currently pay. They could rent a similar house in the neighborhood for about $1000.

Assuming they intend to stay in their home ten years, Sam and Chris would save approximately $340,000 by walking away, including a monthly savings of at least $1700 on rent verses mortgage payments, even after factoring in the mortgage interest tax reduction. The financial gain for Sam and Chris from walking away would be even more substantial if they took their monthly savings and put it into an investment account. If they stay in their home on the other hand, it will take Sam and Chris over 60 years just to recover their equity – assuming, of course, that they live that long, the market in Salinas has indeed hit bottom, and their home appreciates at the historical appreciation rate of 3.5%.

They face a choice of either 60 years to get out from under this debt monster, or they can default and spend two years building their credit back up.

assuming one had otherwise good credit, and continues to meet other credit obligations, one can have a good credit rating again – meaning above 660 – within two years after a foreclosure

Why do they not just walk away and start renting? It’s a big fraud that people are being told that it’s somehow immoral to walk away, and that they must sit for sixty years under this debt monster.

Mish just posted a really interesting article detailing the social pressure which prevents people from walking away. It is interesting that “society” claims that homeowners need to act “morally” and keep their “promise to pay” above and beyonds of the term of the contract that they signed, but “society” makes no such claims on the lenders.

Everyone must walk away. Seriously. It’s the only way the excess debt will get flushed out of the system and the economy can recover. Walk away, default the excess debt, and then rebuild. Otherwise we will just drag on forever and have multiple lost decades, like Japan.

Why are health care stocks booming? Because the government is about to expand coverage to tens of millions more Americans, and the White House has assured Big Pharma and health insurers that their profits will soar.

via Robert Reich: Why the Dow is Hitting 10,000 While Everyone Else is Cutting Back.

But then why did he say here that big pharma and insurance companies are opposing the govt takeover of healthcare?

Let’s try some numbers.  Today we have about ten billion people with an average income about twenty times subsistence level, and the world economy doubles roughly every fifteen years. If that growth rate continued for ten thousand years the total growth factor would be 10²⁰⁰.

There are roughly 10⁵⁷ atoms in our solar system, and about 10⁷⁰ atoms in our galaxy, which holds most of the mass within a million light years.  So even if we had access to all the matter within a million light years, to grow by a factor of 10²⁰⁰, each atom would on average have to support an economy equivalent to 10¹⁴⁰ people at today’s standard of living, or one person with a standard of living 10¹⁴⁰ times higher, or some mix of these.

An economy that doubled every century for a million years would grow by a factor of 10³⁰¹⁰.  To support this using the 10⁷⁰ atoms found within a million light years, each atom would have to support an average of 10²⁹⁵⁰ people at our living standard, one person with a standard 10²⁹⁵⁰ times higher, or some mix of those extremes.

It seems just physically impossible to create 10¹⁴⁰ or more lives we would value like ours per atom, even considering quantum computing and black hole negentropy.  But could individual living standards be that high?

I am posting a lot today. I guess I am fairly pissed off.

Anyway, looks like it is about time to sell the rest of my equities. I sold a lot of my equities at the bottom of the market but I figured I wouldn’t sell all of it because there was still some chance of a recovery. Now we are witnessing the middle of the double dip recession/depression, so it seems like it might be a good time to get out, completely.. If I’d stayed in completely of course I would have been able to take better advantage of this bear rally, but such is the consequence of limiting my downside exposure.

When googling for the great pacific garbage dump, one sees some really scary pictures:

I thought, wow, that’s crazy. So much trash in the ocean!

But then I looked at those pictures that in more detail and I realized that none of them were pictures of the ocean. Most of them were on the shore. One of them even showed someone walking through the trash! (Wow, the trash here in the ocean must be so dense that someone can WALK ON IT.)

Something was pretty fishy, so I did some more looking around. I discovered that the trash in the north pacific gyre doesn’t look anything like the above pictures.

Via:

It’s not packed in as tight as that – it’s more like a dense collection of tiny floating pieces of plastic, most of which are not on the surface. A big container ship or naval vessel going through there would probably not notice much out of the ordinary – after all, there is some degree of plastic trash floating on the surface all over the world.

This is what the “trash dump” really looks like:

And this is what the contents of a trawl through that area of the ocean looks like:

Now I’m not about to deny that this might be a problem for the environment. There is plastic there, maybe animals are getting killed, and its bad for the ecosystem of the Pacific. Maybe. But what is with the bald-faced deception on the vast majority of the web pages about the “Great Pacific Garbage Dump”?

And then people wonder why environmentalists aren’t taken seriously? Maybe if you STOP MAKING SHIT UP, people will start to listen to you!