The title conscious blog

DC

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sat, 29 May 2010 19:02:00 +0000

Roaming around DC on memorial weekend w/bikes (not in pics).

The Oracle said what?

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:11:00 +0000

BUFFETT: Well, from everything I've seen of the Abacus transaction, which was the one the SEC put out the complaint on, I do not see a problem with that transaction. We're a bond insurer, ACA was a bond insurer, MBIA, FGIC, Ambac, and all those companies started out insuring municipal bonds and then the profit margins got squeezed in the municipal bonds and they started drifting over and insuring other structured deals and so on.

Full Transcript: http://www.cnbc.com/id/36915020

Will somebody tell me why the person who called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction" is defending the making of a shitty derivative CDO that did cause destruction? Calling the very kind of derivative he was against "bond insurance" is something I'm not buying.

While driving

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:59:00 +0000

Mobile blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:50:00 +0000

It works!

Edit from my stationary computer: The picture is from the church near my apartment, and meant to be made fun of after the election.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Pickens who?

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:45:00 +0000

Once a Texas oil man, always a Texas oil man.

Update: Something for those who like to read.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:37:00 +0000

I see your updated maxims, and raise you a diatribe. Which leaves me wondering why this used to be so hard not too long ago...

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:11:00 +0000

Haha

This is a phone I could buy now that it will work on T-Mobile and 3rd-party apps are popping up like well, they should. Oh, that and the phone is actually Competitive with other smart phones (atleast as far as the T-Mobile network goes).

The media has an Apple bias!

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:57:00 +0000

It does, and you cannot convince me otherwise!

Now, on to the disturbing part:
The media has a conservative bias too,
and I dislike conservatives,
ergo, I dislike Apple as well.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:42:00 +0000

It isn't enough that the food supply has been reduced to this (the whole NYT article is worth a read):

"So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight? ... Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend ... [he] found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice."

Now they have to go after chocolate!, apparently, the demand for chocolate isn't enough for a profitable and satisfied Hersheys:

"The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining 'chocolate' to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk"

You can submit a comment to the FDA by tomorrow, this website has everything you need.

Pirates and Emporers

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 22:04:00 +0000

"pageinistas"

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 18:57:00 +0000

Wikiality can't seem to get it's own page on Wikipedia or Wikitionary (My account or my IP are banned from the latter from further editing), and for what reason?

1) There is no verifiable printed source which used the term.
2) The term won't be remembered.

I like the wikipedia editors as much as the next guy, but they need to take a more "if it doesn't hurt anything else, we'll allow it" view of this. The word is describing some sort of consensus reality (the idealist kind) prevalent on wikipedia because of it's anyone-can-edit nature and as I said, adding a Wikipedia page on it isn't going to hurt anything. In fact, there is nothing in the general rules laid out that says it can't be allowed. If the best place they can put it in is the Vandalism of Wikipedia in popular culture section of Wikipedia in popular culture, the term is being misunderstood.

Consensus will probably happen once someone uses it in print to describe the uniqueness of creating/changing/getting formal or informal information from Wikipedia. I'm not flaming, and I don't really care that much. :)

The Euston Manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 08:24:00 +0000

They're for open source! Where do I sign up?

"14) Open source.As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries."

Set it, and forget it...

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 04:12:00 +0000

This is why the The Daily Show wins Peabody's and Emmy's. Showing the ridiculous parts of the debate like no news show has. It's beyond irony. It may be because the show doesn't have a pretense like news shows do to be unbiased towards individuals or the story...

Slateiness is next to Googliness

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:08:00 +0000

Put simply, reading Slate clarifies things in a way I have yet to see a newspaper do. Starting with good writers (Daniel Gross, Fred Kaplan, even Hitchens), great guest writers (Henry Blodget), great conversations, great cartoons, and with little things like using hyperlinks. It's fascinating to me how online newspapers still get away without linking to obvious online sources, government websites, research papers, other news websites (for those stories about a single scandalous quote). Slate is different in a lot of ways, and what says it perfectly to me is: A Slate writer never wastes a readers time. I don't know if I can say that for any other news source, apart from very few blogs, and one monthly news magazine (Harpers).

After The Washington Post Company bought Slate from Microsoft (1 out of 1.5 good things the company has started), and sqished the Business and Technology section into one, it's hasn't changed much editorially, which is good. The website sadly still looks the same since I regularly started reading Slate in 97-98 maybe. The search function could use some Googleiness. I have no complaints otherwise.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 04:31:00 +0000

Prototype racing is good for you, especially on the radio.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:04:00 +0000

I just drove my bike 90 miles, 30 and 60 miles continuously, and I've re-discovered something I already knew... I'm a weakling. Fuck, I'm tired! My knees are about fall off, but not nearly as fast as my two shoulders and elbows will. That's right, one arm - two pieces. Hitting cold-fronts and warm-fronts going 70 MPH is no good either. Eh... first time, it'll get better.

It's funny because it's true

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 07:14:00 +0000

Here's a page (208) from America: The book:

Here's an article from Armed Forces Journal, Before:

and After:

Bonus: Here's an article from Coming Anarchy about Central Asia:

Memorize This...

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:02:00 +0000

Thanks to the Economist's View for the nice example:

...assume taxes on the Poor are 10% and taxes on the Rich are 30%.

Scenario A: GDP is 1000. Rich (a small number of people) receive 600, Poor (a large number of people) receive 400.

Taxes: Rich pay 180, poor pay 40, total is 220, Rich share is 180/220 = 82%

Now do nothing more than redistribute income from Poor to Rich:

Scenario B: GDP is 1000. Rich (a small number of people) receive 800, Poor (a large number of people) receive 200.

Taxes: Rich pay 240, Poor pay 20, total is 260, Rich share is 240/260 = 92%

Some people have found a way to argue that because the share of taxes paid by the wealthy is higher under B, 92% instead of 82%, and because the Rich pay more, 240 instead of 180, the burden on the Rich has risen. I'll take that burden if they don't want it.

It's also possible to cut taxes. Starting from scenario A once again, let taxes fall to 25% for the Rich and 5% for the Poor, and redistribute income in the same way as in B:

Scenario C: GDP is 1000. Rich (a small number of people) receive 800, Poor (a large number of people) receive 200.

Taxes: Rich pay 200, Poor pay 10, total is 210, Rich share is 200/210 = 95%

That's the rich paying 95%, up from 92% in the same economy, after a flat tax cut. I'm very soon going to start calling our tax system regressive, I am. So... the Democrats can't explain this in english because... I'm sure Krugman has eluded to the GDP as the bigger factor, construing the taxes, but an example just makes things so much clearer.

Robert Reich goes to the core of the problem, growing the economy "progressively", through a progressive tax system, which automatically leads to better social mobility if I understand him correctly.

broken windows

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Fri, 12 May 2006 17:42:00 +0000

This article on a new Rudy Guliani-bashing (Guliani Time) documentary begs the question: How many of our our politicians are civilized?

It's a very good read, because it doesn't do the sort character assassination usually associated with politics, but is still, unusually personal. Here's an excerpt that has little to do with the rest of the article:

Now, to me, the word civilized has always conjured up a certain urbane coolness. Being civilized is a condition, not a destiny; it's no more endemic to a people than fanaticism or terrorism. As a state of self-imposed and self-policed grace on the part of the very lucky, it is both very artificial and very fragile. A total freedom from hysteria might be another way of putting it.

I have to agree with the author's definition of civilized, sipping coffee and typing on a laptop, nothing -absolutely nothing- could make me realize just how fragile my reality really is, yet, how fast could hysteria creep in? I don't want to guess, but I'm sure surprising me and making me act uncivilized wouldn't take a lot.

Now that I've beat that point to death, are politicans any better at handling hysteria? Let me re-phrase that, are politicians capable of merely not causing hysteria, given their positions in society? When they can't even seem to respect empirical facts, which is the main point of the article...

Combine broken windows , with straussian politics (A stretch, and repulsive in it's own right, but I'm sticking to it), and throw in some policy doo-doo (not my words, but I will gladly lift them) with occasional Orwellian naming, and not only do you start to understand why there are movies like Thank You for Smoking, and why satire can't compete with our obscene reality, but also explain the reason why I find conservative ideology genuinely repulsive. While liberalism may not be much better (fat chance), at least it isn't blatantly disregarding of reality, and well, repulsive.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Thu, 04 May 2006 03:38:00 +0000

Drive it like you stole it!

There's just no other way to say it :)

Net Neutrality

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 00:46:00 +0000

This is important, now that the internet is a widely used medium, and has increased it's value exponentially, the telecom's want more control over it. No thank you. If the telecoms want QoS for Video, they can overbuild the networks first, and provide service (45 Mb/S, Synchronous, over fiber) worth the alleged $200 billion stolen from tax-payers.

…an unfettered open road is directly at odds with the broadband business plans of AT&T (formerly SBC), Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon. The cable and telephone industry see enormous revenues as operators of a private Internet toll-road.

Save the internet has everything you need, including a list of the congress members who aren't acting right. It is a coalition which includes Vint Cerf, and Bob Kahn after all... that's the father of the Internet and the main engineer behind it for the rest of us.

CryptoKids™ America's Future Codemakers & Codebreakers

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 21:43:00 +0000

Ok, so maybe the NSA isn't all that bad.

All you need to know...

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 21:01:00 +0000

Truthiness hurts.

And as far as presidential approval rating polls go with the glass is half empty analogy: "the last 1/3 is usually backwash." You can thank Stephen Colbert too.

I think it's safe to say that the biggest challenge for Stephen Colbert after his show started was, could he distinguish himself from Jon Stewart and The Daily Show? I've watched almost all episodes of The Report so far (and TDS :)), and there are times where he comes off as a parody of Chris Matthews more than O'Reilly, because he does take certain arguments to exhaustion, but the rest of the show is unique and has loads of comedic value (Go fightin' Pacifists! of non-violence preaching Universities). I saw more of that at this dinner (even if some of the material was old :)).

The Washington Post has wide coverage.

noreply@blogger.com (Devang) — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 22:44:00 +0000

A couple of good Slate articles about the whole, forget taxing the oil companies, let's give them tax breaks instead logic. It really is an obscene world we live in.

If 150 million barrels could be extracted a year ago for $46 a barrel, it shouldn't cost much more than that to extract another 150 million barrels in 2006.
...
The oil industry refers to this as "production," but a more accurate term would be "extraction." Nature produced the oil and charges nothing for it.
...
Let's round off a bit and say that American oil extractors are getting an extra $25 a barrel. For 150 million barrels a month, that's $45 billion a year. And that's just for the oil that's extracted. The oil that remains in the ground is also about $25 a barrel more valuable. And other energy resources—used and unused—are more valuable by a similar amount.
...
Ordinarily, we shouldn't want the government to decide when profits become "excess." But the case of huge profits from the run-up in oil prices is different for two reasons. First, it is unusually clear that these profits have nothing to do with productivity. Diverting them to the U.S. Treasury would have no effect on the incentive to extract more oil from American ground. Second, some or all of these profits are directly related to a situation that is imposing huge sacrifices—financial and otherwise—from others; that is, the Iraq war.

and...

What none can acknowledge is that higher gas prices in the United States are a good thing. To be sure, oil at $70 a barrel causes hardships for working people and delights some of the world's worst dictators. But cheap gasoline imposes its own costs on society: greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and its attendant health risks, traffic congestion, and accidents. The ideal way to cope with these externalities would be with higher gas taxes or a carbon tax. But these are politically impossible ideas at the moment—Democrats lost control of Congress in part because they passed a 4-cent-per-gallon tax increase in 1993. The next best solution is the one that has arrived on its own: a high market price for oil, which spurs conservation and substitution. Sustained high prices will bring about behavioral and political changes: energy conservation, public transportation, less exurban sprawl, and eventually the economic viability of alternative fuel sources such as biomass, fuel cells, wind, and solar power, which may one day undermine the power of the oil oligarchs. Are politicians too stupid to understand this, or just smart enough not to say it aloud?