I've had an Apple IPad foisted on me at my company. I wanted Android tablets, but all the C level positions have Apples. (There might be something about that; I wonder what the correlation between intelligence, Android and IOS is.) Anyway. I'm playing with this App called Siri. It's pretty good about recognizing NFL, MBA stuff. It is fairly atrocious though at pulling soccer information. It needs help distinguishing the Champions League, The FA Cup, The League Cup, etc. It's also pretty bad about International matches, world cup qualifiers.

It's also not good about patching together previous phrases. When it constructs a response, it should reference the previous phrase, if spoken within 30 seconds or so. That seems obvious, but I notice other chatterbots are not good about that either. I wonder if there's a patent issue.

There's been an issue over the last several years of banks improperly foreclosing people's houses. Some years ago, this process would not have been called mistaken foreclosure, but rather claim jumping. Claim jumping was not a phenomenon unique to the various mining rushes, but rather stems from one party or another using the law to force a rightful owner off property. Now of course claim jumping is a bad thing to do, and once upon a time, Americans knew how to deal with claim jumpers. The question is, what's the difference between using a far-away land office to steal someone's hard worked land, and using a far-away (and expensive) judge to repossess a home?

The answer, of course, there is no difference. Claim jumpers are miserable no-good wastes of human flesh and were run off. If they came back, they didn't leave. So what should we do with a bank that mistaken forecloses on someone's property?

When I see an infinitive for my axe I reach.

I've been listening to wall of sound style songs / albums lately. They really sound good from my computer speakers. There are some decent songs, River Deep Mountain High, Waterloo, Be My Baby. Not heavy fair, but decent for a warm summer's day.

Anyway, it occurs to me that three quarters of the Beach Boy's popularity likely comes from how good they sound out of bad speakers. Pet Sounds, although a somewhat decent album, is nowhere near deserving the accolades it receives - until you consider how good it sounds from bad speakers. It's the perfect outdoor album.

It looks like ADP lost an HR related database. Again.

A targeted attack against ADP customers occurred yesterday.

I went into the barber today.

It requires government interference to turn a recession into a depression. That is to say, a government must interact with an economy, changing the fundamental landscape of that economy in a negative manner to cause a depression. The First Great Depression started because of land speculation. It turned into a depression when the various nation-states of the world enacted tariffs, reducing the complexities of the overall global economy. The Second Great Depression started because of housing speculation. It turned into a depression due to the high cost of education, drastically shrinking the overall adult population of the country capable of borrowing credit.

There's discussion about the necessity for new banking regulations in Congress today. Of course, all this would be easily resolved by the elimination of banking regulations. Specifically the 1999 Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA). GLBA is the reason why Too Large to Fail Banks are making Too Stupid to Succeed Gambles. Companies and people will always act to maximize their benefit. When a bank (or any business, such as GM) is too large to fail, it leads to moral hazard. In the case of a bank, this moral hazard typically results in poor investments and misleading consumers. For an auto company, this might lead to poor union negotiations or mismanagement of long term production.

Gramm Leach Bliley overturned the 70 year old Glass Steagall Act of 1933. It was an effort to make the United States more competitive internationally, allowing the CitiBanks and the Lehman Brothers to form massive conglomerates, mixing Wall Street and Main Street banks. Of course, it was precisely this mixing that led to the 2007 Financial Meltdown, AKA Second Great Depression.

If Congress was serious about fixing the Second Great Depression, it would start by reworking and reinstating Glass-Steagall. It would heavily subsidize community and state universities. It would legalize marijuana. It would end the wars overseas, then shrink and make transparent the military. It would create a Service to Eliminate College Debt program. It would heavily restrict and pull back on the outrageous EPA and ADA. Until these things happen, the Second Great Depression will continue.

Fixing immigration would strongly help. This would be accomplished by streamlining legal immigration and punishing through creating an expensive path (either through service or through monetary fines) to legality.

Education pays enormous dividends. An educated populace is a productive populace. Although we as a nation require manufacturing jobs, these jobs can be filled by educated and productive engineers. Decrease the costs of engineering and science degrees.

Millions are needlessly in jail due to buying and selling marijuana. A plant that easily grows and harms little cannot be outlawed. For comparison, firearms are infinitely more complicated to create and maintain. But attempts to outlaw them have failed in all societies but one island nation, where even this only lasted due to borders closed ala North Korea. These is no need to waste money incarcerating for marijuana crimes, nor waste the incarcerated man's free market labor.

The people who have already contracted debt for a college education cannot have this debt forgiven. Under no circumstance should the US Government ever participate in a debt forgiveness program for debt voluntarily entered into. Instead, a not very onerous program should be created to substitute labor for debt relief. One weekend a month, two weeks a year, though this program should not involve carrying weapons.

The EPA and ADA have created so many regulations that creating and maintaining businesses is difficult. This is an anchor on the economy. Although most small businesses are poorly planned and poorly executed, these drags should not be there to exasperate a bad situation. The EPA and ADA are commendable goals, but have generally moved into extreme areas that they were never intended to be in. Most government programs will do this in an effort to justify growth. This tendency must curtailed by Congress whenever possible.

Most importantly, the financial backbone of this country must be fixed. To do this, a Glass-Steagall separation of different financial regulators must be implemented. The free market works with many small businesses competing with each other. As a country, the too big to fail banks are good when they provide commercial services to other banks. But these banks cannot also create mortgages, sell these mortgages, insure these mortgages, and place a value on these mortgages. Information disparity will necessary lead to corruption, both of the buyer and of the Congress itself through lobbying efforts.

These small steps will fix the financial disaster. Greece will be able to topple and other nations in Europe too. But by increasing the size and complexity of the global economy, the United States can insulate itself from the worst of the shocks and make itself stronger when she emerges.

If I have a boy child, and when he pops out and I decide I don't like him, I'll name him Skyler.

The other thing that Active Historians are recruited for is disease resistance. But not in the way you might think. By the late 20th century (the most targeted recruiting era), penicillin has been both invented and rendered useless by overuse, mostly on cattle. So imagine the chaos that would be created if someone went back to 1850 with a drug resistant strain of athlete's foot. Yeah, fungus, bacteria, whatever. The process of resistance is still the same. When recruiting, it's just easier to find someone with natural disease resistance than make a laundry list of questions: have you had an ear infection in the past two years? Have you ever had a yeast infection that was not immediately cured? Does amoxicillin work on you?

So anyway. This guy, err fellow, Phil. He had an assignment he just could not pass up. He also had the sniffles. Rather than pass up the chance to visit his hero Wolfgang Mozart, he just toughened up, took a bunch of Tylenol Cold and hopped back. We lost eight operas, over a dozen concertos, and a really funny joke involving a Cardinal, a goat, and Maria Theresa. Also, the common cold? "Immune to penicillin." Yeah, whatever.

I would like to that was the worst thing we ever did with diseases, but that's clearly not the case. All I have to say is this. If you're going to sleep with some random sailor, wear a condom. It's just plain common courtesy to the late 20th century. So uh, yeah, sorry about that whole Freddie Mercury thing. My bad. Well, that and Rent.

The massive amounts of Student Loans are perpetuating the mortgage crisis. If we assume that debt is a substitute for debt, then the large numbers of student loans are driving out mortgages. Debt is clearly a substitute for debt, as loans are not made when a large amount of debt exists. There are many people graduating from college with large quantities of debt that they are not allowed to default on. These people have no way to purchase a home. This shrinks the population that can buy homes, thereby reducing demand. When demand is reduced and supply is static, then the price of the good will fall. In this case, the value of homes declines.

Basically, young people have their mortgage debt replaced by student loan debt.

The solution is to increase government subsidies of university education. Wiping out current debt will only contribute to the moral collapse of the nation by creating yet more moral hazard. The US Government, by jacking up the price of education, jacking up the price of student loans (through not allowing default), and essentially requiring student loans, has effectively destroyed Generation Y.

I get slightly nervous when I leave the Mississippi drainage basin. I know and like the flora and fauna there. The people aren't terrible either.

I'm watching this television show called the Big Bang Theory. Having heard it was good, I've watched four episodes in an effort to make sure that my impression is not mistaken.
Impression the first: Not a good laugh to minute ratio.
Impression the second: Rather insulting to the people I call friends. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what it means to have a higher IQ and interacting with people. Basically, there is not much difference between the cowardly insults I associated with primary school and many of the jokes on this show.
Impression the third: There seems to be some racial / bigotry issues. The Jewish and Indian characters are insulting caricatures.
Impression the fourth: The plots are unimpressive predictable. Every episode began with a strong consideration for a throw-away pop culture reference to sub-cultures associated with "nerds", followed by mundane action.
If not for the first impression, the other three would be acceptable. I find the critics who endorse this television program to be contemptible fools or manipulative liars.

I came across a subject this evening called Situational Ethics. Basically, it means that ones decisions should not be based on what is necessarily moral or ethical, but rather that with perpetuates agape. The pitfalls of Situational Ethics are obvious. Namely, who decides what best perpetuates agape. It is the duty of the man (or woman) on the spot to make the best decision based upon the ultimate creation or protection of love, rather than a predetermined set of morals or laws.

The main argument consists of situational ethics being used as a means for ignoring convention, law, and morality for the purpose of promoting individual happiness. Other arguments against situational ethics are derived from its religious background - namely that the word of God is inherently good and therefore immutable. This second argument against can be safely ignored for obvious reasons.

It's the first argument against that should attract our attention. It seems an unfortunately dim view of humanity that subscribes to the premise that ones neighbors should be feared, rather than trusted or even respected. Of course, our neighbors (and we) are fallible. Many times we have been stolen from, our reputations infringed, etc. But this argument also assumes also that human culture is stagnant. It is not. Education has created a morality in the 20th and 21st centuries unknown in any earlier time period. People are better capable of making decisions for themselves and those around them then at any point in earlier times.

(I might continue this later.)

From Elizabeth MacDonald, Jackwagon at Fox News:

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said in a recent interview that the U.S. is suffering from an unproductive youth movement in the labor force, and that companies dont want to hire these young folk. Greenspan also said that U.S. companies would be better off hiring immigrants.
I yield the floor to FOX Business Director of News Ray Hennessey:

Apparently the problem with the American jobs picture is the American worker.

At least thats what Alan Greenspan thinks.

We are, he says, too young, dumb and unproductive as a workforce. The Baby Boomers were better, finding ways to do more with less, but they are retiring in droves. As they hit the links, their ranks of replacements dont measure up.

Here are his [Greenspans] words, in an interview with The Globalist:

"Baby boomers are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in international educational match-ups over the last two decades. The average income of U.S. households headed by 25-year-olds and younger has been declining relative to the average income of the baby boomer population. This is a reasonably good indication that the productivity of the younger part of our workforce is declining relative to the level of productivity achieved by the retiring baby boomers. This raises some major concerns about the productive skills of our future U.S. labor force."

There is, sadly, much truth in what he says. The degradation of our educational system, thanks to a lack of accountability and a general resistance to innovation, is well-documented.

It has been difficult for American students to keep pace with those from overseas when viewed through the lens of quantitative, objective metrics like standardized tests.

But the lack of productivity Greenspan frets over can arguably also be set at the feet of our growing entitlement culture, which we explored in some detail several weeks ago for Entitlement Nation Week. Being a productive worker means having a commitment to honest labor.

That has eroded as more people have relied upon the federal government for the growth of their household wealth. That, in turn, has led to a troubling change in attitude in this country.

As [Pulitzer prize winning syndicated columnist] George Will put it, Americans, endowed by their solicitous government with an ever-expanding array of entitlements, now have the whiny mentality that an entitlement culture breeds.

The question then becomes, How do we fix this? To Greenspan, it is to Go West, young man. Or East, North and South for that matter. Just go anywhere else but here and find someone who is willing and able to work:

"Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States, Greenspan said. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow."

Think of that last line for a moment. We need to import labor intelligent, skilled labor to guarantee that Americans standard of living is maintained.

Have we indeed fallen so far?

What MacDonald does not acknowledge, or even potentially understand, is that America has always benefited from incoming labor to maintain the American standard of living. From Germans, to Irish, to Italians, to Hispanics, to Asians, we have always used imported labor. All Greenspan is doing is pointing out that if we are going to import labor, import the best. (And fix the schools, especially math.) So damn the torpedoes, damn MacDonald, and damn Fox Lies. Full Speed Ahead!