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.

Marketcetera CMO, Roy Agostino, says his company’s hosted services offer users an approximately 81% savings per month over in-house proprietary systems (Marketcetera’s platform can also be deployed on-premises, and service and support plans are available if desired). There are, of course, the traditional open source benefits as well. Any customers who need the platform modified are able to do so, either on their own, or through Marketcetera’s development community.

via OSS Could Be Key in Leveling Stock Market Playing Field.

“Approximately 81%” huh? not 82%? You’re sure?

The army and the Marines have an ongoing dispute (the army is much bigger and probably isn’t much aware of it) with respect to which is better, the army’s Blue Force Tracker or the Marines’ C2PC via EPLRS. Like any software made by the Marines, C2PC is clunky, slow, and hard to work with. But it is encrypted. The army system is easy to use, fast, handy and it works right all the time. The problem is that BFT isn’t encrypted (this was several years ago, I had heard they were changing that, let’s hope so). So, if you knew how to get at the BFT data you could see where everyone is all the time.

via The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » It’s Cheap to Hack a Drone.

This is in the comments to a post about the fact that drone video streams are not encrypted. Amateur hour. And in the comments they say that the blue force tracker isn’t encrypted either? WTF?! We’re broadcasting our troop locations out there for everyone to see… wow, these people deserve to be shot. Instead, it’s our Marines and soldiers who will be shot, while the idiots who put this system in place will get promoted and lucrative private sector jobs.

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?