08:11 – Oh, great. Not only is North Carolina among the nine “swing states” for the presidential election. An article in the paper this morning says there are about 100 “swing counties” nationwide, of which a dozen are in North Carolina. And we’re one of them. So I guess the flood of spam political phone calls we’ve been getting is likely to get even heavier over the next couple of weeks.
And the IMF is proposing a plan that would wipe out a large amount of the world’s sovereign indebtedness, proposing something I’ve favored since the 1960’s: eliminating fractional-reserve banking. For those of you who don’t follow banking esoterica, fractional-reserve banking is both simple and fundamentally dishonest. It amounts to private, legalized counterfeiting.
When you deposit money in your bank, you deposit it in one of two types of account: a demand-deposit account, AKA a checking account, or a time-deposit account, AKA a savings account. So let’s say you deposit $1,000 in your checking account and $100 in your savings account. With the demand-deposit account, you are not lending that $1,000 to the bank. They are holding your money for you, in a fiduciary role, and you are entitled to reclaim that $1,000 at any time. You pay a fee to the bank for holding your money safely. With a time-deposit account, you are actually lending that $100 to the bank for a specified term, typically six months (check the fine print). The bank is then entitled to lend that $100 to someone else.
Fractional-reserve banking corrupts that system, which had worked very well for hundreds of years. In fractional-reserve banking, the bank lends out not only the $100 you placed in your time-deposit account, but most of the $1,000 (typically $900 or more, depending on the reserve requirements in effect at the time) you placed in your demand-deposit account. In other words, they’re misappropriating money that isn’t theirs to lend. The effect is that the bank just creates $900 out of thin air. The result is difficult to distinguish logically from the bank simply counterfeiting $900.
Now, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard gets a lot of the details wrong. Adam Smith, for example, propagated no myths about this. He nailed it completely. AEP is also confused about how money worked in Sparta and Rome. There’s no evidence that Sparta used iron coins, for example. They probably did use iron ingots as a value store, but AEP ignores the relative value of iron then and now. At the time he speaks of, Europe was just transitioning from the bronze age to the iron age, and an iron ingot had significant inherent value. It could, for example, be turned into a sword. But Evans-Pritchard gets the broad-brush issue right. It’s long past time that we eliminate fractional-reserve banking, which is simply institutionalized theft on a gigantic scale.
13:07 – There must be some way to sue political parties for harassment. So far today, I’ve received eight–that’s EIGHT–political calls. It seems to me that despite their free pass from the DNC regulations, political parties should establish a DNC list of their own. That list should be propagated downward to every candidate running under the auspices of that party, from the president to local candidates, and severe penalties should result if anyone violates it.
13:51 – I don’t know why inflation continues to surprise me. Perhaps I’m more aware of it than most people, who aren’t likely to remember exactly what price they last paid for a specific item. But just now I cut a PO for sticky labels and other stuff from iBuyOfficeSupply. To do that, I copied the spreadsheet for the last PO to them, which I issued on 1 May. I ordered two of the same items this time as last time: sticky labels for chemical bottles by the box of 7,500 and sticky labels for running postage labels, by the box of 100. In 5.5 months, the price of the small labels had increased by just over 12.5%, and that of the larger labels by about 13.1%. It’d be interesting some time to go back and compare our Costco receipts from months ago to the most recent one. I’d guess food prices are increasing at the same rate, give or take. This really can’t go on. Of course, the official government inflation figures are grossly understated, much like the official government unemployment figures. Do they really think that no one notices that prices are going up much faster than they admit or that a boatload more people are without jobs than they admit?
Saying the IMF is proposing this is somewhat of an overstatement. In reading the linked article, they simply have a staff paper that looks at elimination of fractional reserve lending. It’s not likely to go farther, since the IMF is dependent on US funding in large part from our banks.
I’m on a mobile phone, so I’ll be brief. The proposal sounds like a great way of destroying modern banking. Scorched earth may be too much of a good thing.
What bugs me most is giving such a huge gift – and even more power – to the governments. Imagine, the governments of the world have been utterly profligate, and now you give them a way to force their massive debt onto the private sector? More, as I understand it, governments will be unable to borrow except by minting currency, but will have no real reason not to mint as much as they like.
I’m no banking expert, but this does not sound like a good idea..
I think it’s just another academic research paper, but I think Brad’s concerns are valid. That isn’t to say that the idea shouldn’t be considered. There would need to be careful considerations made of the consequences of the change.
That said, I think there is entirely too much reliance on debt throughout our economy. There is a widespread belief that bonds are much safer than stocks. Yes, bondholders of a failed enterprise will receive first consideration over stockholders, but owning stocks and bonds of companies that are anywhere near that state should be considered speculation not investing.
I’m not sure how you got on such a list. Mary and I have received only a couple of calls this fall. Those were polls. I’m not sure we’ve actually gotten any from candidates.
Mail, on the other hand…
See, they’re taking you for granted. We get phone calls AND junk mail, although fewer junk mail pieces than phone calls by a long shot. I hate Obomney. At this point, there’s no way I’d vote for either of them.
You might just set the handset down when you get a robocall. It won’t do you any good, but it’ll tie up their hardware and their lines for a little while and spare someone else.
If you have a live person talking to you from the start, do what I do: Insult them. Swear at them. Try to seduce them. Pretty much anything goes because they called you. If you can get them to hang up on you, give yourself a point. If a supervisor calls you back to say they really don’t appreciate what you said, it’s two points.
On the banking proposal: It would be a good thing to reign in the speculative nonsense that goes in in so-called “investment banking” (read: how banks can steal your money through high-frequency trading and other shenanigans). As I said, my main objection is putting even more power in the hands of the government. If one could find a way to put the power in the hands of individual citizens, that would be extraordinarily useful.
On the political calls: apparently those people in the swing states are really in for it. However, surely beyond some point it becomes counterproductive? Eventually, some number of people will get so fed up with the calls that they will vote against whoever called them the most. Or just stay home in disgust.
In any case, it sounds like an excellent reason to put on a message (with no ability to leave a message) for the next several days. Anyone who really, really needs to reach you could always send an email. In fact, that’s what the message on my phone says: I am hard to reach by phone, please send me an email. I dislike being interrupted by the phone at any time…
I was in Florida until Saturday. The political commercials were annoying. President Obama seems to be making a great deal of fuss about Romney’s plan to end all funding for Unplanned Unparenthood. Is that really the biggest issue that the President can come up with as to why the American people shouldn’t vote for his opponent? The idea that Unplanned Unparenthood should have to rely completely on private funding sounds like a great idea to me. I’m going to vote on the candidate who seems to be most credible on economics and foreign policy.
I tell political callers to put me on their do not call list. I tell them that I keep track of repeat calls and that I will vote against their candidate or measure if I receive another call from them. I ask telemarketers for their home number so I can call them and interrupt their dinner to discuss what they’re selling.
I’m not in a “swing” state, so I don’t get the calls on the presidential race. All of our calls are for local candidates and ballot measures.
The only non-robocalls we’ve gotten have been for polls/surveys. All of the direct political calls have been robocalls, even the ones for local candidates. Some of those have been really cheesy-sounding. The voice quality, I mean, in addition to the content.
Over the last few weeks, I’d guess I’ve gotten at least a dozen calls each from both presidential campaigns, a couple of dozen from various PACs, several from each of the candidates for governor, maybe half a dozen each from the two candidates for US House, and probably another couple of dozen from various local candidates. And it’s gradually been ramping up, from two or three calls a day a few weeks ago to nine so far today.
I almost hung up on a call I got a few minutes ago from the US Postal Service, thinking it was another political call. It turns out they’re still holding out hope for my two lost packages. She says they aren’t really lost. They’re somewhere in the system, and may be delivered. She said she’d just closed the case on one Priority Mail package that had been mailed on the 11th and just arrived today.
We started early voting here in the Great State of Texas today. The early voting near me is in supermarket break room. I’ll bet that there is over 100 political signs in front of the super market (we have a law that you can not do any politicking within 200 feet of the voting center). Maybe 200 signs. All local heavily contested races in a super majority Republican county.
Is it just your land line getting called? They are calling my land line once per day to ask for money. Never on our cellphones.
Off topic, I added a new item to my top ten list of all time gross things to do. I removed a decomposing roof rat from the drain pan of my refrigerator last night. When did they start bolting drain pans to the bottom of the refrigerators ? We had to use socks soaked in bleach on a stick to remove the stuck body parts. The smell was awesome.
I assume it’s just the landline. I don’t turn on my cell phone from one month to the next. It’s basically only for outbound calls and occasionally when I’m out and want Barbara to be able to get me.
This blog post: http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/ is an example of why DRM is evil. I have a bunch of Kindle books. Most of them I got free from Amazon but I paid for a number of them. I hadn’t got around to removing the DRM. This gives me an incentive to do so before Amazon does the same thing to me.
“The smell was awesome.”
You haven’t lived until you’ve imbibed the delightful aroma of bodies left lying around in the tropical sun for a while, mixed with the smoke from shit-burning barrels and local yokels roasting whole garlic cloves over open fires for miles around, with a whiff of rotting jungle vegetation and decaying mud and whatever creatures died and are part of it now.
OK, that warn’t hardly fair; not everybody gets a nice tropical vay-cay tour courtesy of Uncle.
Domestically, though; gotta be, for gross things to do, trying to remove a rotting woodchuck cadaver from the garage along with the hundreds and hundreds of feasting maggots, this on a sweltering August afternoon a couple of years ago. Mrs. OFD left the property and went for a ride until I was done and had fumigated the place. Even I gagged, having been home from Uncle’s fun and games for forty years by then and long since not used to it.
As for the election, that makes me gag, too; Intrade over in Ireland has Nosferatu II up over Bishop Mittens by fifteen points; their record of presidential elections and other stuff is astounding for its accuracy. It ain’t political hack polling; it’s betting…with real money.
http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/
As for human bodies, I have a simple policy: I make the bodies. I don’t clean them up. If someone has a problem with that policy, well, that’s their problem.
As for InTrade, can you actually dig up their numbers? A quick web search found me many, many bland statements that they’re “remarkably accurate”, but no hard numbers that don’t look cherry-picked. I wasn’t able to find a source of all of their pools and results since they were founded.
Yo! You steenkin scientists better watch out!
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/1022/Earthquake-predictions-and-a-triumph-of-scientific-illiteracy-in-an-Italian-court
Unbelievable!
Yep. If Italy had intentionally tried to drive off scientists, they couldn’t have come up with a better way.
“I make the bodies…”
God made the bodies; you rendered them null and void. Or, if you like, Nature created the bodies; and you rendered them null and void.
I am not seeing anything particularly scientific and I have also not found any concise track record of their numbers since they began doing this.
http://www.intrade.com/v4/misc/howItWorks/theBasics.jsp
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/20/dont-jump-ship-over-intrade/
And now I forget where it was I first saw mention of them and their accuracy regarding a series of elections. It may come to me if I stop thinking about it…
SteveF wrote:
“You might just set the handset down when you get a robocall. It won’t do you any good, but it’ll tie up their hardware and their lines for a little while and spare someone else.”
A few years ago I read a letter-to-the-editor of the local paper by a guy complaining that a robocall just kept trying after he hung up. Again and again. Eventually the only way to get rid of it was to put the handpiece down (not hang up) and let the call run its course.
They could have threatened the scientists with death, torture, and/or excommunication.
Oddly, I can’t find a definitive source (one that I can recognize as definitive, anyway) for what the Church threatened Galileo with. I found plenty of pages claiming that it was one of the above and that people who claimed it was one of the others were mistaken. (And, per usual for the internet, many of the pages had word-for-word copies of information on other pages, and I have no idea which, if any, was the original source.) I’ve got my Encyclopedia Britannica, which I’d accept as definitive, just feet away, but they’re all boxed up and buried underneath other boxes of books and office supplies; too much work to dig out.
The “official” inflation numbers EXCLUDE things like energy and food, which are going UP, and INCLUDES stuff like computers and electronics, for which the prices are plummeting. So they could be accurately calculated – it’s the method that is flawed!
Official inflation calculation also includes real estate, which is plummeting, and excludes taxes, which are rising. It’s almost like the official announcements coming from the government are completely worthless. But that cannot be the case, because that way lies anarchy.
It seemeth to me thusly: most of the advocates and apologists for atheism and scientism tend to claim that Galileo was threatened with all kinds of dire stuff; in reality the Church authorities gave him the basically meaningless house arrest and only that because they were peeved at him for his stubbornness and unwillingness to be reasonable. Hell, by then they knew the same truth about it anyway. Bunch of stubbornness on both sides at the time and they ended up having to demonstrate to him who was in charge for public consumption.
“…almost like the official announcements coming from the government are completely worthless. ”
You know they’re lying when you see their lips moving. We are being lied to constantly, by the State, the corporations, the MSM, our teachers and professors, etc., etc. But the State has the firepower behind its lies.
Hey OFD, this will take your mind off of Nosferatu II (who was I ?) for the duration:
http://dog-shaming.com/
Warning, that site is totally addictive.
The IMF and World Bank are nothing more than sales tools for primarily US banks to force reckless loans on countries least likely to repay them, but which make the books look good in the short term. When those loans turn out not to be the solution, just like in the Greek case, the poverty of the people and politicians turns their hatred to the US and its money and demands. Most of the US never sees that, because their knowledge of the world stops at the US border. Brazil is a perfect example: a couple decades ago, its economy was really hurt by both those organizations, and one of their fearless leaders (I forget which) took extra effort to repay the loans quidkly, then forced IMF and WB offices out of the country and told them never to come back. Big business and big money—the real US religions—are truly a mafia.
As far as banking goes, modern banking has been off the rails, and the Mitt Romneys and Ben Bernankes of the world want to drive them further down the their trackless train path by relieving them of even further regulation. You folks who rail against government regulation are going to get the results of that–poverty for you and me, as more too-big-to=fail banks and businesses have their inevitable nothing-to-lose losses transferred to taxpayers, exactly like Lehman and AIG did. On top of that comes the inflation caused by aggressive and successful efforts by Bernanke and the Fed—applauded by almost every economist alive—to devalue the dollar.
I get no phone calls from candidates—probably because I only have a cell phone; no landline. Made the mistake of giving Walmart my number for the purpose of texting me when my prescription was ready while I was shopping. Now I get text ads from them a couple times a week. Adding me to their list was instantaneous, but removing me has not happened after 3 months and them doing something on the computer 3 times to supposedly remove me from the list.
I am going to begin employing Brad’s method of ‘send me an email’ in the message. The older I get, the more I consider a phone call an instant demand for attention. The phone almost always interrupts me from more important things, but hardly anyone but me sees it that way. Most everyone will drop everything and even run to answer the phone.
Spent a very long day with the radio station computer. Got everything resolved but drive sharing on the LAN and scrobbling to the website. We have one more guru to call on, and if he cannot resolve the networking issue, then I am going to get a copy of Win7 and trash the previous installation. I believe the guy who built the computer has somehow prevented drive sharing—he is permanently out-of-the-picture. All I can say is that I CAN follow instructions, and M$ instructions for drive sharing over the LAN do not result in the proper dialogs and warnings being shown, nor does local security policy match what M$ says should be on an XP SP3 installation. Looks like he has managed to prevent drive sharing, then hide how he did it. He was a strange guy, and insisted that the computers be set up with stuff we told him we neither needed nor wanted. I am afraid he satisfied himself on security issues, and did not consider station needs.
On drive sharing with Windows 7 x64, I had to disable the internal firewall of the server pc in order to keep from extreme slowness and weird problems. I still have problems writing files to certain areas of the server pc from the client pc, such as the root area of the drive, v:\.
I do have common login names and passwords between all the linked PCs so I do not have a clue what is going on here. I suspect that if I was running a domain controller on Windows Server that I would not have the problem but I am not interested in that at all.
“…Nosferatu II (who was I ?”
From a 1922 German film, his image has been used a few times on the net and photoshopped as Barack Hussein, the Prophet, many blessings be upon his name.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uf9Ad2uoZ2Q/UGooWFfxosI/AAAAAAAAACA/ZHvEiNlnMQw/s1600/Nosferatu_doorway.jpg
Lynn:
That Dog Shaming site is hilarious!
Robert
I got an attaboy from the wife and daughter for the dog shaming site find. Those attaboys are few and far between, gotta store them for the tough days.