Wednesday, October 29, 2008

new-age linkin

i just recently read the book The New Influencers by Paul Gilliam (sorry the website looks cheezy, but the book is okay) and learned the wonderful benefits of linking.

He says that linking to other websites and articles are good for growing your blog followers and thought community etc. I think linking to other websites is good to remember where exactly i came up with the crap thoughts i have.

so, from now on you can kind of expect me to link to articles and such that i find interesting. The benefit is only half so you can verify that i'm completely not off my rocker and making stuff up. The other half of the benefit is so that i can do the same.
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this blog is now my external hard drive

As you can see from my wide variety of topics in my posts, i think a lot about a lot of things. I have been looking for a way to organize, collect and categorize my thoughts on a wide array of subjects. I have found delicious to be a wonderful way to organize stuff on the web, however, it didn't fit my off-the-cuff thoughts because i couldn't tag books, thoughts and the like. So, what i'll be doing from now on is using my blog as my 'external hard drive' or 'outboard brain' as one Wired writer pontificated.
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Obama on civil rights & equality strategy

I got this from Slate, one of my regular rags. i found a real insightful observation (in bold below) about the different attitudes that conservatives and liberals have on the role of the courts. I relate it to what i learned from the book Who Rules America by Domhoff.

begin quote"
In some states, like California, judges instructed the state to take steps to equalize school funding from district to district. In others, like Kansas and Kentucky, and in ongoing litigation in Connecticut, the court decisions are framed in terms of adequacy of funding—making sure each district has enough, rather than the same amount. Either way, it's redistribution of what's become a rather routine sort. This is what Obama was talking about when he said in the radio interview, "Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks start bringing these claims in state court under state constitutions that call for equal educational opportunity, and you see state courts with mixed results being more responsive to it."

What comes through far more clearly in the interview is a tactical point: Obama thinks it's a mistake to rely too much on courts to further any broad agenda. He says, "I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused. I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that." And then he continues, "Maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know … the institution just isn't structured that way."

This is a whole separate, bitter, ongoing fight in legal circles—over when to turn to courts as a means of change and when to turn to the legislature, which is directly accountable to the voters and so perhaps the safer and more stable route. It's a truism that conservatives favor legislative change and see the courts as an undemocratic end run around it. They especially think that about any push for "redistributive change," Obama's subject here. In this interview, Obama comes down on the traditionally conservative side, albeit for presumably different reasons. He thinks the civil rights movement misjudged the courts' utility—they were good for providing for a right to vote and for black people to sit with white people at a lunch counter, to use Obama's examples, but they're not good for deciding who's entitled to what government benefits or property rights. "Obama is with Bork on this," Cass Sunstein, an Obama adviser, told me, referring, of course, to the arch-conservative, famously not-confirmed-to-the-Supreme Court Judge Robert Bork.
copied from this Slate article
"end quote

What i found interesting was that Domhoff outlines how the 'elite' class influences America, but i don't remember any explicit contrast between the legislative and court-based strategies of getting what you want done. I think if more liberals look at passing laws (liberal majority yeah!) instead of waiting for the courts, then America would be a much more balanced society.
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Saturday, October 25, 2008

oh how we have forgotten

In the past few days, i really get upset for periods of time thinking about how short a memory the media has. It seems that during the bailout blame-game, not many people stop to think about who is the originating culprit of this mess.

I mean sure, wall street messed up. They bought the securities, the seemingly objective rating firms gave the rubber stamp to these securities and then AIG insured them, based on the ratings firms stamp of approval.

So, the blame partly goes on the ratings firms such as Standard & Poors, and Moody's and so forth. They were supposed to be the watchdogs. However, like an article i recently read put it, the watchdogs stopped watching. This led to the quick unraveling of wall street's cohesion, both within individual firms, and across the board.

But, the question begs: who did they buy these securities from? From Countrywide. Haven't heard much about them lately? Because they went belly-up almost first! So, countrywide was pamphletting California with mortgages structured not in the best interest of either the lender nor the borrower. They made their money on the transaction fees! So, their profits came not from the integrity of the deal, but from the transaction of the deal.

For instance, VISA makes money everytime you use your Visa card. So, of course they're going to advocate the use of your credit card, whether you have good credit or not! The same with Countrywide's strategy to make its dough on the transaction, and then get the mortgage, like a hot potato, out of its hands as quickly as possible.

So, the primary blame lies with Countrywide. Secondarily, the blame lies with the ratings bodies such as Standard & Poor's and Moody's who gave their rubber stamp of approval to those shoddy investments.

imagine if the crash-test rating system was flawed and they started giving five-stars to anyone for attempting safety, not for actually creating safe vehicles. Pretty soon the country wouldn't trust them right? There would be a call to overhaul the system. The problem i see is that not many people are asking for oversight for the ratings bureaus, the bureaus that attempt to assure the trust, honesty and integrity of the financial realm. That's who we have to monitor.

Monitor the monitors, then society will start to build trust again.
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Sunday, October 19, 2008

up and running

I've been tooling around with the website (keybussys) by getting a new template (face) and shoring some stuff up on the backend. My current website is like non-functional. I forgot passwords and all that. The reason it sucks is because i blew my computer away and re-installed everything. But before i got the passwords to the website, i deleted the VPC before i got my passwords and website out of it.

In the last perhaps week or so i've been working on the website again cuz i'm trying to do it big. I was gung-ho about it but i couldn't find a good user interface for it. However, i've found a great template (interface) that fits my needs and i can customize it using some of the thrown-together skills that i've accumulated in the past couple months.

I'll be putting it up in a couple days, soon as i remember my godaddy account info!!!

also, i'm running the backend on joomla in case you were wondering
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Saturday, October 11, 2008

the dow tanking

i just made some rough calculations and it looks like the dow lost about 60% of its value in the past year or so. I think this has been the largest percentage decline in history in the course of a year. Moving that cool little chart on finance.google.com it looks like the only other time something like this happened was in 73-74 but that took two years! WOW.

What's MORE IMPORTANT is the S&P 500 which tracks a much wider variety of stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average) DJIA only tracks about the top 30 stocks of the largest companies. The S&P 500 tracks, you guessed it, 500 stocks across a range of industries. That's a better thermometer of what's going on in the economy. Think about it like this, its the difference between measuring in feet (DJIA) or inches (S&P 500). If you're going to build a bridge, you better have some really small measurements. I do think that the S&P has a wider index, but its not followed as much because there are mutual fund indexes that closely follow the S&P 500 (they're called 'spiders' -S&P InDexeRs).

I also think that one of the problems with the market's growth since the nineties was the creation of automated buy-sell programs that fund managers and perhaps enterprising individuals created that would buy stock at a certain price and sell it at another. This enables you to set a rate of return with a long window without looking at the short-term.

I also wonder what has happened to the prohibition on short-selling stocks. The other day i saw a comment about margin calls but i'm note clear as to whether the margin calls are related to short selling, i gotta investigate that.
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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

on writing

Its funny how when writing a book you want to balance everything. I've written the first section (of five) and wanted to 'nail' that section before i get to the next one. So, what i did was wrote it, and edited it. I wanted to nail the first section, then polish it so that if/when i wrote the second section, that builds on but doesn't depend on the first, then i'd have something coherent to refer back to.

But now it seems that i'm in too deep. I've got too many books to re-read, decipher and re-organize than i can manage. I'm also itching to create a phase-by-phase and a step-by-step section so that readers can grasp not just the abstract structure, but the how to do it.

I think i'm just whinning about trying to do three things at once. I figure when i get the second section mostly knocked out (instead of just the one chapter i keep trying to re-write) then i'll sit back and relax.

I think it's hard trying to juggle and shift in and out of the forrest-trees views that i put myself in sometimes
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netweaving

So, i'll merge it all. consequences be damned.

NetWeaving is my likkle coinage for weaving a network. Weaving a newtork is qualitatively different from networking. Networking is the art of making connections so that you benefit from your network(s). Network weaving is the art of making connections so that other people benefit from the network(s). This is what Malcolm Gladwell was pointing to when he wrote The Tipping Point (great book).

So my latest craze in the book (yeah, no backstory) is based on seven books: Emergence, Tipping Point, Keystone Advantage, Never Eat Alone, Why Things Bite Back, The Hidden Power of Social Networks and one or two more that i don't feel like remembering. What i'm doing is creating short chapter-long vignettes of each book, so that at the end of each chapter i can summarize (and hopefully capture) the different viewpoints from each book. I hope that this section of mine will give 'networkers' a larger appreciation of the networks within which they play.
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manage it all?

How do i manage it all. Shoot, how does anyone. I'm typing away at my computer mostly on a book on building networks that i'm writing. In the interim i'm interrupted by thoughts about the other fires i have burning, some out of control, in other areas of my life. Half of me is resigned to the fate i've created for myself, and the other half is content with making small but plentiful contributions to boosting my development, hoping that it will all cascade and crystalize into a whole new beautiful life.

The other more pressing issue of 'managing it all' is that i think i'm really into this bloggin thing, but i've got a few blogs in mind. That is to say i want to talk about anything and everything all in one blog. And of course i want it to be a little popular, so how dost i balance the smorgasborg of ideas churning and rushing through my 3-pounds of grey matter but . . . yeah, that thought kinda just ended.
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Monday, October 06, 2008

Waxman, my new hero

This just in . . . Lehman executives made off with about $10 billion in bonuses as they cried wolf to the feds about how they were going down the tubes. I repeat, as Lehman Brothers asked the Fed to step in and help, they at the same time gave their top executives about $10 billion in golden parachutes, bonuses and other kinds of compensation.

Livid is such a bland word to describe what i feel. Criminal is not adequate to describe the debased morality of those executives.

Now, i'm livid that relationally the kids on my block who get 3-5 years for assault and battery (well, it happens) get way less time than white-collar criminals who get nothing but a slap on the wrist for mis-managing BILLIONS of dollars of other people's money.

Why isn't this a crime again? Why won't they be thrown in Jail? I'm thinking RICO act or something, collusion, market manipulation etc. And when they do go to jail, they should go to county jails with hardened violent criminals, not the 'country club' federal jails that we hear so little about.

I want the head of lehman to be next to a guy named bubba who has tatoos, not a Martha Stewart jail.
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Friday, October 03, 2008

speechless . . . or debateless even.

i want to cry.

i am underwhelmed at the level of disgust and outrage that people don't exhibit about how completely incompetent Palin is to be a prospective vice president.
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