Andrew Busey: My Musings

Wow, this is the kind of stuff that scares the crap out of me:

Schumer calls for subprime bailout (New York Democrat wants funds to help subprime borrowers.)

What we should be doing:

• Borrowers: If someone took one of these loans and they can’t pay, there should be a foreclosure. However, I’m all for allowing them some kind of class action against the shaded mortgage brokers and banks who gave them the loans. But really it should just make them whole and it shouldn’t come from other tax payers. The mechanisms for this already exist and I am sure there is no shortage of shady class action lawyers looking to jump on this bandwagon.
• Lenders: The government should crack down on these clowns.

There are two principles near and dear to me at play:

• Responsibility: If people are too stupid to read their loans or do some simple calculations they probably shouldn’t be buying a house. This country already lets people abdicate personal responsibility way too much. Buying a house is a big responsibility, people shouldn’t be rewarded for being stupid in the way they do it. It’s not fair to all the people who were. The problem is politician’s love to position themselves as “helping the little guy” when in fact they are just letting people shirk responsibility for being stupid.
• Wasting Money: Anytime my tax dollars go to fix someone elses mistake IT PISSES ME OFF. What a waste, I don’t pay taxes to fix other people’s mistakes - I pay them for infrastructure, security, and advancement (ie: science, research, etc.). Of course our government pisses away a lot of money on stupid stuff. But this is really stupid. Let the system sort it out.

Schumer and everyone else behind this: Stop grandstanding and shut the fuck up unless you are going to actually do something reasonable to fix it.

/rant

COPA:  Child Online Protection Act

Now I’ve felt for a long time that COPA is yet another example of misguided, stupid legislation coming from Washington.  It’s purpose is noble:  protection children from the Internet.  It’s purpose is also misguided.  How do we protect children from the Internet?  Well, in my opinion, you can’t easily do that at a macro level withouth pretty much breaking the Internet (the web specifically) as we know it.

As an entrepreneur I found COPA particularly annoying becuase it creates a substantial amount of overhead on anyone who is starting a site.  In theory you are supposed to verify someone is over 13 anytime they register.  Really, it is when you “collect personally identifiable information” I think, but since that includes an e-mail address (although everyone who knows the Internet is not made from TUBES knows that e-mail is hardly personally identifiable - any moron can get 100 e-mail address that are not remotely traceabe unless you work for the NSA or FBI).   That’s why all these stupid agreements ask if you are over 13.  Although some lawyers argued that wasn’t enough.

I once got a bill for $10k for COPA compliance work.  WTF.  We ended up ignoring 75% of what the lawyers said anyway because if we had one it no one would have every registered for the site.  So we did mimicked what Google did, which according to our major law firm was not enough.  I’m not going to kill my site because of legalese, but it did worry me a lot.

Thankfully it has been mostly beaten down:  Net porn ban faces another legal setback

I really like news.com but this title really pisses me off.  COPA is a lot more than a porn ban, but I guess that doesn’t make a good headline. 

And NO my site was not a porn site.  COPA messes a lot more crap up than just porn sites.  It basically forces webmasters to maintain all sorts of checks to make sure kids don’t access the site.   Some of them are virtually impossible.   But of course no one in Congress thought this crap might make live difficult on web entrepreneurs.  Do it for the kids!  Keep your kids safe!

I’m not a parent, but I’m going to solve this problem for Congress.  Here is how you keep your kids safe from the Internet:

1. Don’t let them have unsupervised access to the Internet!  (ZOMG, this might require parenting!)
2. Assuming that is that is to inconvenient, install a filter.  You can buy a ton of good filters that will stop your kids from going to almost all inappropriate sites.  (ZOMG, this might cost $50 and require a parent to “install” something on their computer.)
3. Assuming visiting bad sites is only part of the problem, you can also configure your router (which you almost certainly have) so that access to the outside world is only available during certain times.

Wow!  Three easy steps and your kids are safe!

Oh wait, parenting isn’t a requirement.  Soundbites are good.  We must protect the children.  What the hell.  Yet another example of the failure of personal responsibility / accountability in the United States.  Sad.

Anyway, I hope they don’t bring this albatross back.

/rant

So people have been talking a lot about “game addiction recently.  This Blogma post (from C|Net):  Subliminal rescue for game addicts? kind of scared me.  Two things about this scare me:

1. Subliminal shit that makes you not want to play games… Seems like it could make you not want to do anything.  Mind control stuff is just creepy.  I mean who verifies that all it is doing is making you not want to play games?  Soon we’ll need a “subliminal verification agency” that makes sure all this crap is only doing what it says it’s doing.  And can we really trust the agency?
2. Games addiction…. uhm yeah.  I wish people would get their heads around “personal responsibility.”  Sigh.  I’m not going to get started on this.

 

From CNN.com:  Pat Robertson: God told me of ‘mass killing’ in 2007

Some fun quotes:

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday that God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a “mass killing” late in 2007.

“The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

It’s good to know that he can fill in the blanks for the “Lord”.   Anyway, the article also discusses his previous predictions, some of which have come true.  However, since most of them are vague it hardly matters.  Anyway, my favorite part is when he says:

“I have a relatively good track record,” he said. “Sometimes I miss.”

So, excuse me Mr. Robertson, but your God is supposed to be omniscient.  So if you “miss” at least one of the following must be true:

1. Your God is lying to you.
2. Your God does not exist.
3. You are making this all up.
4. Your God is not omniscient or makes mistakes.

I’m going to steer clear on 4.  I believe it is either 2 or 3 (or both).  I’m open to being convinced on option 1.  If I were God I don’t think I’d be spending much time chatting with Mr. Robertson.  But that’s just me.

So, uhm, I predict the following for 2007:

• The housing bust will continue.  (So, to be clear, I’m right as long as it doesn’t dramatically improve.)
• There will be a terrorist event against the U.S.  (I hope I’m wrong on this one, but statistically it’s pretty low risk.  However, if there isn’t a major “terrorist attack” I’ll claim that attacks on U.S. troops on Iraq counts.)
• The U.S. will lose more troops in Iraq.   (Free…)
• The U.S. won’t pull out of Iraq in 2007.   (This is the low risk bet too.  See, even if they pull out some, I’ll still be right.)
• The stock market will make a major swing.  (LOL, now I’m being dumb.)
• Amazon will have its BEST CHRISTMAS SEASON EVER.  ( ;-) read this post.)

Ok, enough of this.  Predicting the future makes me ill…. and makes me feel kind of slimy.

Anyway, it’s morons like this that give religions a bad name.  I do, however, love the picture CNN picked for this article.  ROFL.  Nice sleazy smile and all.  Although it makes me sad that this got above the fold coverage on CNN.

Oh and in honor of this, and I’m sure the plethora of articles I will now blog about, I have created a new category:  Religious Nuts.

Well that’s what this article says 83% of people surveyed believe:

 The average 12 year old knows more than your Congressman about the Internet / web.   

I believe it.  They certainly know more than Ted Stevens.

Speaking of delusional politicians.  This article is even better:  Reality check: 95 percent of Americans had premarital sex.  My favorite quote: 

However, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group which strongly supports abstinence-only education, said she was skeptical of the findings.

“Any time I see numbers that high, I’m a little suspicious,” she said. “The numbers are too pat.”

While I do agree that statistics can be pretty heavily manipulated, I think this is pretty close to accurate.  What I think this quote highlights is the fact that we have a sub-section of the U.S. population who lives in a fantasy land where tubes deliver the Internets (that thing most of us call e-mail) and where people don’t have premaritial sex.  

I love how they always have someone to contridict everything though.  There is always some Executive Director of some random association who is totally convinced of their weird view.

Some good news:  School board abandons evolution sticker case.   The key point:

“The settlement brings to end a long battle to keep our science classes free of political or religious agendas,” parent Jeffrey Selman said in a statement

A few more notes on politicians:

Church and State:  Lawmaker won’t apologize for ‘Islamophobic’ letter

I don’t think this guy gets the separation of church and state idea.  I think we should get rid of Bibles and Qurans for this kind of stuff.  Religion (any religion) should have no place in government.  [Plug:  Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Being an idiot:  Senator questions judge’s role in lesbian wedding

Neff has said she attended the commitment ceremony as a friend of one of the two women, a longtime neighbor.

She insisted in an October 12 letter to Brownback that the ceremony had no legal effect and would not influence her ability to act fairly as a federal judge.

Wow!  She went to commitment ceremony (I guess that’s a gay marriage?) and now this guy is running her through the ringer?  I like how the article says “role” like she had some important role in it and wasn’t just a guest.  (I don’t know since I wasn’t there, but all I can see is that she just went because she was friends with one of the women.)  So it’s not like she presided over it or was in it or anything.  She just went and boom! this guy is all over her.  That’s a little out of hand.

/rant

 

I envision a world ten years from now where no one talks to anyone else because they are afraid to hurt someones feelings.  That all entertainment is happy pink bunnies that dance around, but never touch or talk to each other - because, well, that might be offensive or encourage someone to do something they shouldn’t.  You’ve read about this world before in books like George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. 

Well, we’ve seen a lot of moves towards control of distribution of video games here in America.  Personally, I don’t see why they are any different from movies.  So if R rated DVDs require that the buyer be guarded, I would be ok with M rated (see ESRB ratings) games getting the same treatment.  Why should they be different?  (Other than that the MPAA probably has more lobbiest and movies have been around longer.)   Promoting ESRB ratings and parental responsibility are good things.  What we haven’t seen, yet, is a move to actively censor games.

Germany looks to be moving in that direction.  This article, German gamers face jail for acts of virtual violence, discusses proposed legislation that would impose fines and up to a year in prison for “promotion or enacting in-game violence”.  They quote the law as saying:

“cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters”

What is a human-looking character?  Are undead creatues human looking?  Hmmm, seems like a problem there.   But, let’s continue.  My favorite part is this quote:

“It is absolutely beyond any doubt that such killer games desensitise unstable characters and can have a stimulating effect.”

Which attributed to Gunther Beckstein who is apparently the Bavarian interior minister.   Of course, scientifically speaking, this is open to a lot of debate as there is no concrete proof of this.  But, that is not what I like the most.  I like “densistise unstable characters“…. Let’s think this through - if they are unstable, a lot of things could set them off.  Because they are already unstable.   That’s just dumb.  I mean, what if the unstable character watched Hostel?  (Which from what I understand is a pretty disturbing movie.  I’m too chicken to see it.  Although I do enjoy a good game of Unreal.)  I bet that would set him off too.  I won’t even mention all the violence in books from Harry Potter to, ahem, the Bible, that are open to all ages.

Anyway, this was all set off when an 18-year old kid, that not surpisingly played violent video games, shot and wounded 37 people in his old school and killed himself.  Just like America.  A high profile event and some jackass politician jumps on it and starts spewing out non-sensical crap to grab headlines and fuel the fire.  One high profile event caused by a psychopath and boom, it’s the fault of games.  What about the millions of other people that play violent games that don’t do this?  Ah ha, no mention of them because that isn’t a good media story. 

Well, soon enough all these politician who are too old to understand computers (and think the internet is made of tubes) will be out of there and maybe we’ll get some people who are connected to modern reality in office who won’t make such stupid grandstanding comments.

Sometimes politicians scare me.  Uhm, I mean most of the time.

/rant

This is a really interesting little case study on government waste. I know the $500 hammer is old, but looking at this makes me want to scream. I wish the people in government would look at things in this way:

How many taxpayer dollars am I wasting today?

So in an attempt to find what the average American pays in taxes every year… well Google failed me. Anyway, here is the closest thing I could find:

Source (home page, I can’t find the original page again… but check this out)

OK since I couldn’t find anything else, I’ll take $13,789 to be the average American’s average annual tax burden for the purpose of illustrating my plan.

So, to illustrate how my proposed system would work I went digging for pork examples and found this site that talks about government waste. They have a porker of the month award (hilarious IMO). So in this example some Congressman from North Carolina grabbed a $750,000 earmark for signs at bus stops in Chapel Hill. (I picked this one because well, I went to Duke and our archrival is UNC in Chapel Hill.)

So a quick calculation of $750,000 / $13,789 gives us 54.39. That’s the number of taxpayers whose taxes got wasted on this project. Now how depressing is it that 54 people’s entire taxes for the year went for signs at stop bus stops in Chapel Hill, NC. That stuff should be collected locally (the press release about this has more info).

So the Citizens’ Against Government Waste should take their 2006 Pig Book (hilarious name) and next to all the waste they should put a little person icon and a number showing how many people’s taxes were wasted. At least then people might think a little. Instead of oh, it is just another million dollars here or a million dollars there, they should think about the people whose money they are spending.

This is crazy. Admittedly I’m pretty small government oriented, but how can anyone look at this and think it is reasonable?

Here is what I have to say:

Dear Congressman,

I work hard for the money I make and I pay my taxes. I’m happy to pay them because I think the U.S. is a great country and taxes are an important part of enabling any government. However, the amount of waste in the system is extraordinary. Next time that you insert an earmark or add some pork - or vote for them - please think of me and every other American. The individual taxpayers. And say, would they want me to spend their money this way? Is this really helping the country? Could this money be better spent?

Thanks,

Andrew

/rant

I’m not endorsing or saying I support the views of any of these sites, I just found them as I was writing this post and they had the info I wanted. It’s interesting to see where you end up as you start meandering while doing research. Originally this was going to be a short post with just that $500 hammer case study. But then I got sucked in.

An interesting article from Time:  So, Should You Buy a Diamond?

Since writing the Culture of Trust post, I’m now seeing a fair amount of interesting stuff about the diamond trade/industry so I’ll just use this post for links that I find that are interesting.

With Leonardo DiCaprio staring in the soon to be released movie Blood Diamond, a lot of negative attention will probably be brought on various African nations (CNN story on blood diamonds).  In reality the problem of a few people exploiting natural resources while the rest of the country suffers is nothing new.  But the few commercial successes that have helped make changes on broad (national scale, even though some of these nations are small) represents at least some chance for optimism.  I’ll site two recent examples.

This article from CNN about how Botswana did a deal with DeBeers to mine its diamonds and now offers free education (all the way to a doctorate), AIDs drugs, and general healthcare, to its entire population is pretty uplifting.  I also like the discussion of building a culture of trust (my term).  I think this is a very important concept.  If you ever want a true democracy and to order through the rule of law I think this is critical.  (Which is why I think perjury is a very serious crime and the lack of attention to it in our country may eventually weaken the entire justice system.  But that’s a rant for another day.)

The second event (article from CNN) that I think is great in this regard is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.  I think the microcredit (micro-finance) model of the Grameen Bank is very powerful on many levels and has had a clear impact in Bangladesh and beyond.  Not only does it enable people to help themselves, it also creates an incentive for people to work together and help each other be more successful.  It helps and inspires them to build a culture of trust.  What Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank have done is brilliant and I hope it sees wide adoption.   I think helping people be successful, develop themselves, help each other, and to find dreams, are the things that can end poverty and terrorism.  For a long time I have been somewhat cynical about what could be done to actually encourage that, but the fact that Grameen Bank has figured out a way and it has been successful I’m excited about the possibilities.   Congratulations on the Nobel Peace Prize!

I’ll preface this with the fact that I have no kids.  But I read a lot of stuff about people whining about different things that I find really annoying and wasteful.  We have a professional class of politicians that have to always be making noise about something.  We have a professional class of whiners who constantly have to be complaining about something.  And we have a billion 24/7 news outlets on TV, the web, and everywhere else that need something to talk about.  Whiners and politicians are good that way.

BTW, the irony of the fact that I’m whining about whiners is not lost on me.  And I don’t think all politicians are bad.  Just most of them.

So this article:  Court rejects Illinois video game law is short, but good.  And I love this quote they pull from the ruling:

 ”As we have suggested in the past, there is serious reason to believe that a statute sweeps too broadly when it prohibits a game that is essentially an interactive, digital version of The Odyssey.“

Brilliant!  I’m glad a rational judge got a hold of this.  Personally, I think trying to legislate taste is a really bad idea.  Parents should decide, or even better help their kids make informed decisions, what their kids look at.  There are movies, books, etc. that some might find inappropriate for kids.  I’m sure there are a ton of parents that think Catcher in the Rye is bad for kids.  And Amazon.com or the brick and mortar Barnes and Noble don’t card people before they buy it.  In fact, I wonder if Best Buy or Circuit City has to card kids before they buy R movies - I doubt it, but I’ll check.  There are a lot of R movies that are a hell of a lot more disturbing than most games.  Things like The Ring.

Anyway, I guess I just get frustrated seeing all these articles about people legislating what people can and can’t do.  And I’m pretty sure (at least in hindsight it seems this way to me) that at about 16 people should be able to make their own decisions.  I mean if we trust them enough to go 70 miles per hour in several tons of steal we should be able to trust them to make other choices. 

/diatribe