In the progression of elegant ways to skin the problem of making money, making money from those that do not have it is a good trick.
Loaning money to buy a house someone can't eventually pay for brings debt money into existence. Private gain as long as the poor pay so maybe they were not so poor after all even when interest goes up and they have less to spend elsewhere. Public loss when they don't.
Make side bets on whether or not the loan will be repaid.
Bucket Shop?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
Rachel Maddow: Can you find somebody to talk me down on this? Maybe that guy behind the curtain?
It was not the mortgage loan that caused the problem but the bucket shop bets it enabled and the winners of the bets now want to be paid?
Paid in bailout money?
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Elegant Money Making
There are various degrees of elegance in how to make money.
The old fashioned way is to work for it. Not very elegant but honest production of something of value.
Gaining it by taking it from someone that already has it is really a no brainer approach to making it. That is why bank robbers rob banks and Bernie Madoff robs the rich. It is where the money is at. This method doesn't display much imagination and has some risk.
Pan Handling: Some guy on the street in Key West had a rather slick way of getting people to give him quarters. The problem was that he only got quarters but did it in a rather ingenious manner. I appreciated the manner and commented on it to a guy standing next to me watching the artist part people from their quarters for nothing really in return except for his appeal. We talked about the technique but then I finally said: He's good at it but his problem is his low aspiration level. He couldn't get more than a quarter at a time and once gotten there was no more getting from the same giver.
Maybe that guy now has beach front property if he discovered that the way to tap millions with his method was through the internet. TipJar?
Making money by giving away things for free rises on the scale of making it elegantly. Razors and razor blades. Cameras and film. Printers and printer ink. I got my last printer free. Google and.....nobody has figured that out yet. Google has the secret locked in a vault like the formula for coke. I know the google secret.
Finding money: That is just luck, no skill unless it involves an ingenious method of finding it that that no one else has thought of yet. Otherwise winning the lottery is low on the elegant scale unless there is a truly ingenious way found to make the right numbers come up. Finding money is therefore not elegant. Finding a surefire way to make it look like the money found was lucky money is elegant to the extent that anyone but the finder doesn't know it was luck. Otherwise it is money made by hard work to find the way to find it. That is simply variation on the old fashion way.
Making money out of nothing has got to be the most elegant way to make it. The holy grail of making money. One step better than the midas touch that turns things into gold. Midas needed a thing to start with. Making money out of nothing is the purest elegant way to make it. It is like God making the world. How'd he do dat? Pretty elegant.
Bankers make money out of nothing and are the elegant money making masters of the universe. Their greatest elegance is gilded by the fact that people do not know they make it out of nothing, let alone how they do it, even when the secret is no secret.
How they do it is explained in video form here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4020719354420953428&hl=en
and here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
There are some fine quotes contained in one of the videos that are extracted here:
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/references.htm
And more pertinent quotes here:
http://www.barefootsworld.net/banking-fed-quotes.html
Look at who made the quotes and when they were made in our history.
These are famous people saying things at critical points in our economic history. Some are the very ones that so elegantly conjured money up from nothing. What they describe is no secret yet as far as common knowledge goes it is because it is so simply.......unbelievable.
Making money out of sheer nothing.
Most Elegant.
Doing it and nobody sees it is pure elegance when the secret is no secret.
Causing catastrophe as a result of making money out of nothing and getting more money to solve the problem is pure elegant genius.
It is as if the guy panhandling so slickly for quarters on the street in Key West with a low aspiration level suddenly raised his aspiration level to infinity and became a Central Banker.
It is not "Plastics, my boy". Its the Federal Reserve Bank.
The old fashioned way is to work for it. Not very elegant but honest production of something of value.
Gaining it by taking it from someone that already has it is really a no brainer approach to making it. That is why bank robbers rob banks and Bernie Madoff robs the rich. It is where the money is at. This method doesn't display much imagination and has some risk.
Pan Handling: Some guy on the street in Key West had a rather slick way of getting people to give him quarters. The problem was that he only got quarters but did it in a rather ingenious manner. I appreciated the manner and commented on it to a guy standing next to me watching the artist part people from their quarters for nothing really in return except for his appeal. We talked about the technique but then I finally said: He's good at it but his problem is his low aspiration level. He couldn't get more than a quarter at a time and once gotten there was no more getting from the same giver.
Maybe that guy now has beach front property if he discovered that the way to tap millions with his method was through the internet. TipJar?
Making money by giving away things for free rises on the scale of making it elegantly. Razors and razor blades. Cameras and film. Printers and printer ink. I got my last printer free. Google and.....nobody has figured that out yet. Google has the secret locked in a vault like the formula for coke. I know the google secret.
Finding money: That is just luck, no skill unless it involves an ingenious method of finding it that that no one else has thought of yet. Otherwise winning the lottery is low on the elegant scale unless there is a truly ingenious way found to make the right numbers come up. Finding money is therefore not elegant. Finding a surefire way to make it look like the money found was lucky money is elegant to the extent that anyone but the finder doesn't know it was luck. Otherwise it is money made by hard work to find the way to find it. That is simply variation on the old fashion way.
Making money out of nothing has got to be the most elegant way to make it. The holy grail of making money. One step better than the midas touch that turns things into gold. Midas needed a thing to start with. Making money out of nothing is the purest elegant way to make it. It is like God making the world. How'd he do dat? Pretty elegant.
Bankers make money out of nothing and are the elegant money making masters of the universe. Their greatest elegance is gilded by the fact that people do not know they make it out of nothing, let alone how they do it, even when the secret is no secret.
How they do it is explained in video form here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4020719354420953428&hl=en
and here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
There are some fine quotes contained in one of the videos that are extracted here:
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/references.htm
And more pertinent quotes here:
http://www.barefootsworld.net/banking-fed-quotes.html
Look at who made the quotes and when they were made in our history.
These are famous people saying things at critical points in our economic history. Some are the very ones that so elegantly conjured money up from nothing. What they describe is no secret yet as far as common knowledge goes it is because it is so simply.......unbelievable.
Making money out of sheer nothing.
Most Elegant.
Doing it and nobody sees it is pure elegance when the secret is no secret.
Causing catastrophe as a result of making money out of nothing and getting more money to solve the problem is pure elegant genius.
It is as if the guy panhandling so slickly for quarters on the street in Key West with a low aspiration level suddenly raised his aspiration level to infinity and became a Central Banker.
It is not "Plastics, my boy". Its the Federal Reserve Bank.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
WarandPiece is the first of 8 sites I go to each morning to start my information day. Today, Laura Rozen links to a new site: Progressive Realist . It is a metablog that is about American foreign policy. It explains itself as an edited aggregator that selectively presents posts from a number of blog sources on the subject.
While Laura does an individual aggregation of links on her own "War an Piece" site as well as add comment, Progressive realist is a collaboration of editors to do essentially the same. Laura recently joined another collaboration of editors at ForeignPolicy.com with her own seat at that table called The Cable.
Self organizing systems and stigmergy are at work in this example of collaboration effort. It is the manner in which things are increasingly coming together and doing so with increasing speed.
Aggregated collaborative thought as a product of a self organizing system is the manner in which our problems will be solved. It is the means and process by which change will be accomplish in the new system.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Football and Basketball
One way to look at the change in presidential leadership is to consider the change of game. Essentially, football is a contact sport. Basketball is a non contact sport. Football is play by play. Each play based on a plan with implementation modified to some extent in execution. Basketball is continuous with play implementation based on the situation as it develops. A game that more or less plays itself.
Bush style was contact football. President Obama style is non contact basketball. In Cat Skinning terms, Bush style uses a an instrument, the bigger the better, to skin the cat where Obama style is to skin it without touching it. The more elegant style.
A more abstract way of looking at the difference in styles is to compare them to life and computing. This linked here: "Both life and computing have evolved two forms of complex information media: the meaning of one is what happens when it is 'executed' and the meaning of the other is up to the receiver to decide."
Bush style was contact football. President Obama style is non contact basketball. In Cat Skinning terms, Bush style uses a an instrument, the bigger the better, to skin the cat where Obama style is to skin it without touching it. The more elegant style.
A more abstract way of looking at the difference in styles is to compare them to life and computing. This linked here: "Both life and computing have evolved two forms of complex information media: the meaning of one is what happens when it is 'executed' and the meaning of the other is up to the receiver to decide."
Monday, January 26, 2009
The Juice Wasn't Worth The Squeeze
Karen Greenberg writes in the Post on Guantanamo's beginnings.
Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert demonstrates his honor by his actions. The lack of action to do the right thing stains the honor of many senior military officers. Those who are shamed by their inaction or wrong actions will read about Gen. Lehnert and hopefully be inspired. Those that are not should not be in a position of authority.
Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert demonstrates his honor by his actions. The lack of action to do the right thing stains the honor of many senior military officers. Those who are shamed by their inaction or wrong actions will read about Gen. Lehnert and hopefully be inspired. Those that are not should not be in a position of authority.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Cat Skinning
The most elegant way to skin a cat is to induce it to jump out of its own skin.
How is that done?
Cause it to be so full of fear, so afraid that all that is necessary is to sneak up behind it and say:
Boo!
Much more elegant than separating it from its skin than with a bloody butcher knife.
How is that done?
Cause it to be so full of fear, so afraid that all that is necessary is to sneak up behind it and say:
Boo!
Much more elegant than separating it from its skin than with a bloody butcher knife.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)