Gaming the Market

Just found a very informative and entertaining $$ site called Gaming the Market. Check out Tiny Tim's latest misadventure titled Geithner's Silent Crisis. You won't be disappointed. Another juicy tidbit shows how sleazy companies avoid paying taxes while scuba diving in paradise, AKA the Cayman Islands.

"You tell me what you know, and I'll confirm. I'll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that's all.
Just... follow the money. - All the President's Men

Web Gems

Just when you think the entire world is going to hell, something comes along to restore a bit of faith in the underlying creativity of man in spite of the madness that surrounds us. To whit, the MIT Senseable City Lab presents a new approach of how to deal with tech and urban reality in ways both logical and visionary in application.

"The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure."

When dealing with organic form and architecture, Paulo Guerreiro, a brilliant young designer from Portugal, uses fractals to create innovative structures designed to work with nature, not fight it. His blog, (Gen)erative Scapes, delves into design with nuanced precision combined with insatiable curiosity. Not a bad place to visit to be sure.

Last but not least is Visual Complexity, a site dedicated to showing how the world works by presenting visualizations that inform in ways not possible prior to imaging and computation. BRT did a piece on VC before but a repeat entry is a must because of the new goodies populating this amazing resource.

"An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.". - Pablo Picasso

The Devil Made Me Do It - Again :)

Wally the intrepid.

Actual News May be Coming

I can't believe it. We may actually get a news source that's for real, unbound by government, banking or corporate interests. One can only hope...

"Roughly half of that philanthropic support has gone to support investigative journalism, and more than $56 million went to three nonprofit organizations: the Center for Investigative Reporting, begun in 1977, the Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, and ProPublica, which started in 2008. But more broadly, and in direct response to the commercial news media meltdown, something historically stunning has been occurring – nonprofit investigative reporting centers are proliferating throughout the nation, a new entrepreneurialism brought about largely by the diaspora of working journalists simply searching for a hospitable milieu in which to do their important work.

Increasingly, the most ambitious reporting projects will emanate from the public realm, not from private, commercial outlets. And if present trends continue, which appears likely, by 2010 the amount of nonprofit journalism funding annually supporting “public service journalism” via these centers may rival and possibly even exceed what America’s newspapers spent on investigative reporting “I-teams” in the apogee of print journalism. And that is a historically significant, tectonic shift in the working dynamics of investigative reporting in the United States."

The Net rules! :)

Daisyworld

No economics talk here. No rants about the fed, security or on why we are being screwed because our future, as envisioned by James Lovelock, presents a far darker scenario then these aforementioned "trivial" events facing the world today.

"The small window of short-term hope he left open in Revenge is closed in this year’s Vanishing. In its place is a long-term hope that humanity in some form will survive the present century, though barely. The result is a dark and contrarian work that seeks to demolish the terms of the climate debate while mocking our response to the crisis at the personal, national, and species level.

Lovelock has not arrived at his views lightly. They are the product of years spent carefully considering the known science through the revolutionary and frequently misunderstood lens he began developing 40 years ago while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena. Gaia Theory holds that Earth possesses a sophisticated planetary intelligence that responds to levels of heat from the sun in such a way as to maintain a climate homeostasis supportive of life. In four decades of research and experiment, the most famous being the “Daisyworld” model, Lovelock has overcome the once-widespread skepticism of his peers to officially move Gaia from a Hypothesis to a Theory."

Everything has a cost, there is no free lunch, period.
As proof, read the Laws of Thermodynamics to see why.

.gov Enters Primetime

A good first step to government transparency regarding the 70 billion spent it spends on IT has arrived in the guise of USAspending.gov.

"Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, on Tuesday announced a new Web site designed to track more than $70 billion in government information technology spending, showing all contracts held by major firms within every agency."

Data Gov, another government site beginning to shed light on datasets ranging from National Science Foundation content to the US Patent Office went live last week. Quite a change from the BA I must say. :)

Now if this tech transparency was applied to Wall Street, the benefits accrued for the US goes beyond description.

Game Changer, Chapter II

We all know what this is. We are now finding out this is shrinking faster than thought possible thanks to the unique properties of ice and the fact the carbon footprint of fossil fuels has pushed the levels of CO2 past the 350 parts per million benchmark long believed to be the point of no return regarding global warming and the impact it will have on our civilization.

Time to either learn to swim or change how we do business on Planet Earth to lessen the enormous change that's coming. The choice is ours to make. The question is, do we have the smarts and guts to do so before it's too late.

"Even if all emissions stopped today, sea level would continue to rise. "The current rate of rise would continue for centuries if temperatures are constant, and that would add about 30 centimetres per century to global sea level," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "If we burn all fossil fuels, we are likely to end up with many metres of sea level rise in the long run, very likely more than 10 metres in my view."

This might sound dramatic, but we know sea level has swung from 120 metres lower than today during ice ages to more than 70 metres higher during hot periods. There is no doubt at all that if the planet warms, the sea will rise. The key questions are, by how much and how soon?"

Under the Wire

"Credit card companies are raising interest rates and fees seven months before new rules go into effect that will limit their ability to do so, much to the irritation of Congress and consumer advocates.

Chase, for instance, will raise the minimum payment required of some of its customers from 2 percent to 5 percent of the statement balance starting in August. Chase and Discover have increased the maximum fee charged for transferring a balance to the card to 5 percent of the amount, up from 3 and 4 percent, respectively. Bank of America last month raised the transaction fee for balance transfers and cash advances from 3 to 4 percent. Card issuers including Bank of America and Citi also continue to cut limits and hike up rates, which they have been doing with more frequency since January.

"This is a common practice and will continue to be common, because issuers can do these things for really no reason until February," said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education for Credit.com, which tracks the industry. "It's what I call the Credit Card Trifecta -- lower limits, higher rates, higher minimum payments."

It's not just the top card issuers making changes. Atlanta-based InfiBank, for example, will raise the minimum annual percentage rate it charges nearly all of its customers in September "in order to more effectively manage the profitability of our credit card account portfolio in a very challenging economic environment," said spokesman Kevin C. Langin."

Another reason why Kucinich & Paul are right.