entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

At first, when friends shared stuff from Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe, it was an entertaining read.  His show seemed pretty good, too.  But after a while, his common-sense aw-shucks shtick wore thin, and i unsubscribed.  Then, a few weeks ago, he wrote something in which he compared voting to gun ownership, and how, just as some people shouldn't be encouraged to own a gun, some shouldn't be encouraged to vote.  Well, that sure as hell didn't sit right with me.

This clown tries to hide his elitism, expressed through his concern trolling that some people simply aren't equipped to understand the complicated issues behind our domestic and foreign policies and as voters pose too much of a risk, by painting his friends in Hollywood as the real out-of-touch elitists.  It's cute to say that there ought to be an intelligence test to vote in this country, but we already know that this would just be another way to keep marginalized populations out of the ballot box.  It is, not to put too fine a point on it, un-American.  And we already have a tremendous amount of uninformed voters who are already participating, and will continue to participate, on election day.  So fuck off, Mike Rowe, you sad Romney stumper, with your shitty attitude about people who can't be trusted with the vote.  And your enthusiastic recommendation of "Economics in One Lesson" can go sit in the corner with all of the Austrian economics crackpots, too.

The so-called horror genre is wasted on me; Halloween is not spooky, slasher films are jejune and boring, and eldritch creatures from another dimension are about as scary as a nerd dressed up as a dwarf holding a plastic axe.  I suspect that it has to do with my complete inability to lend any credence to anything supernatural; gods, auras, chakras, astrology... it's all the same.

Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" is a character-driven anthropological story about the one true source of horror: people and their astounding capacity for denial and delusion.  And like a good horror book, it had the hair on my neck on end, made me make my "oh shit" face often, sometimes screaming "OH!  OOOHHHHH!" like Sam Kinison, and occasionally clutching my head and moaning softly.

Imagine, if you will, a system for rating food where the food is delivered by enormous corporations to the rating companies, who depend on the goodwill and money from the corporations to live, and who are staffed by people who weren't talented enough to work for the corporations.  The corporations then package the food in a way that the good food is on top and the bad food is on the bottom, which proves to be a popular way to sell food; but because it's a good way to make money, they decide to repackage the bad food in the same way and pass it off as a regular good-bad food package.  The ratings companies sign off on this, because it's bad for business to say, "Hey, that food is bad," and that assumes that they could even tell that it's bad in the first place.  Then the corporations start making packages of packages, so it's impossible to tell which of them has the bad food, and where it is, and in the meantime, banks are telling farmers to grow more bad food.  And all this time, nobody stops to think that, hey, if people keep eating bad food, they're going to eventually get pretty fucking sick.  That is a pretty decent analogy, if i do say so myself, for the 2007-8 financial crisis: massive food poisoning featuring projectile vomiting and liquishits.

Lewis definitely has his bias as someone whose first-hand experience as a Wall Street cog left him bewildered and feeling slightly dirty, but the stories told within the book are chillingly plausible, and the whole world is still struggling through the wreckage left behind.  The book puts the lie to the idea that a market free of regulation will regulate itself; centers of power, unchecked, will continue to accumulate power.  It would have been nice, of course, if the SEC had bothered to so much as glance in the direction of the CDO clusterfuck, because that's their fucking job.  But the true problem came about when the greed that fuels Wall Street was funnelled through the magical thinking of "real estate never drops" translated into "this scheme has no risk and never will," and nobody in the money-making machine ever checked their assumptions.  That's not science; it's bad business.

Consider the site stocktwits dot com (not linked directly to deny them any sort of "Google juice").  Not only would it be a fantastically stupid idea at any given moment, but given the current financial milieu, it exudes an extra special miasma of stupid, aided in no small part by the cleverly stupid domain name which goes past the "so stupid it's clever" hipster irony of cool all the way into the heart of "so clever it's stupid" territory all over again.

Needless to say, neutering the people involved would be a public service.

Michael Lewis is a very good writer.  I loved Moneyball, but i'm a big baseball fan.  palecur loved it even more than i did (he read it in a day or two), and he's not.  Lewis's writing is compelling and cogent, and he has a knack for getting great conversation from his subjects.

Lewis has written a follow-up to his first book, Liar's Poker, in which he talks to people to find out how our current financial crisis happened, and why it was, perhaps, unavoidable.  It's a fantastic read that will probably leave you clutching your head like a stunned monkey at times.  It's longer than your typical article, but it's worth reading.

This is over five years old now, but it's amazingly entertaining.  Bernie Sanders pummels Alan Greenspan for being, well, Alan Greenspan.

palecur and i determined yesterday over lunch that the current financial crisis could have been avoided if only the people responsible had been brained with hardbound copies of skzbrust's Orca and Terry Pratchett's Going Postal.  Because it's all right there, because, oddly enough, this isn't the first time that this has happened.

... please consider this summary, which shows that you have little to worry about unless you make over $600k a year.  And if you do, you probably have little to worry about anyway, you rich fuck.

I don't know about you, but i'm looking forward to heating my home with Weimar dollars.

<muzzy> It's always good news that OPEC is favoring throwing away the dollar.
<todd> Is Ecuador dumping the dollar yet?
<ronebofh> not yet.  they probably feel a certain nostalgia to have a currency that's devaluing before their very eyes.

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Oh, and another question: why twenty dollars?