His musings in the Nation are good reading. An excerpt:

Far be it from me to question the desire of Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else, or to reject their aspiration to be the next Asian Tiger, or freeze them in memory as icons of selfless revolutionaries. Gentrification and consumerism, after all, have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen. It seems the way of the world. As I walked through the busy Christmas streets, however, I was gripped by the question of why the Vietnam War was necessary in the first place. Why kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer wonderland approved by the country’s still-undefeated Communist Party? The whole wretched American rationale for the war, that Vietnam was a dangerous domino, a pawn in the cold war, seemed so painfully wrong. Was there any connection between destroying so much life and causing the Vietnamese to go Christmas shopping? Would the same outcome–a one-party socialist government leading a market economy–have occurred in any event, without the destruction? Now that US naval ships were paying peaceful visits to Da Nang, this question nagged at me: is it possible that Marxism and nationalism won the war but capitalism and nationalism have won the peace?

A very False Profit topic will be discussed at this week’s “Journal Club”: the idea that capitalist patterns can somehow be applied to eliminating poverty at a higher rate than capitalism in its current incarnation. It starts in about fifteen minutes; I’ll post notes here, later. For now, here are links to our required reading:

• An essay by Muhammed Yunus
• Bill Gates’ speech at Davos (or, watch it on Youtube)
• there’s also a William Easterly critique of the Bill Gates speech that I’ll link to, soon

Update: I may or may not be able to write more about this. David Grosof, our extremely overeducated presenter, rattled off ideas and manged discussion at a rate that I didn’t even try to capture in note form. Most likely, interested parties will have to catch me in person to start up the discusison. I’ve included his initial prompt for discussion, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tata unveils its new, sub-$1000 car for the domestic market. It gets 50mpg, due to its tiny 33hp motor, but there will be a projected 10 million cars similar to this sold over the next five years in India, as incomes rise.

Most people on this planet are getting richer, which is great. At least for those people, and for now. We’ll see how it goes in the long run…

Photo from a BusinessWeek article about the Nano.

Here’s a satirical site by Parsons MFA student Dan Provost, a faux listing of Facebook’s upcoming privaliciously-helpful features. For example:

Facebook Image Scan

Facebook Image Scan uses a sophisticated computer algorithm to filter through every image in the user’s Photo Album, identifying brand markings and products and tagging them with links back to your homepage.

The awesome thing about this is that I wouldn’t put it past Facebook to consider such a feature, were the technology feasible. Rather, I should say that I don’t put it past Facebook to consider such a feature when the technology becomes feasible. Maybe sites like FBS will help inoculate us against business practices that insinuate themselves this far into our lives, by highlighting their absurdity before-the-fact. Talk to me again in five years.

To round out the awesome creepiness of the site, you can actually log in from this page. I inspected the source, and the login goes to Facebook (at least as of this morning.) But it could easily phish for your username and password, too.

Nice work, Dan. This is a killer media hack.

via The Art of the Prank

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

This is cool: Progressive auto insurance has a program where you can get discounts on your annual premiums, depending on how safely you drive. They send you a little sensor that you attach to your car’s diagnostics port. It tracks speed and acceleration every ten seconds (but, importantly, not location.)

At the end of the year, you view your data and decide whether or not you want to submit it for your discount, which ranges from 5%-25%. Check it out: TripSense.

It’s insurance that gives drivers another financial incentive to drive less and to drive more safely.

A new microfinance site just went live (Microplace) and it bears some similarity to Kiva, but with some important differences. I thought I’d outline those differences and point out that both offer an opportunity for ordinary people of privilege like ourselves to make a huge, sustained impact on the lives of the “working poor” around the world.

In a nutshell: Kiva is more personal, and some would say more interesting. Microplace, on the other hand, is safer and allows for larger, hassle-free loan-making. There’s a place for both. Kiva has made over $14 million in loans, already, breaking ground for average people to consider microfinance as part of their investment portfolios. It has connected tens of thousands of people all over the world who would never have any interaction, otherwise. Microplace, on the other hand, has the potential to grow the market enormously. Kiva’s $14 million (and growing exponentially) is nothing to sniff at, but Microplace could bring in many orders of magnitude more.

A potential Kiva investment

A potential Microplace investment

I have a longer explanation, after the jump; click through to read on.

I encourage everyone to try out Kiva and Microplace, as both make it really easy to invest. I’ve signed up for both, in fact, and will be putting a chunk of change in each. In a year or so, I’ll report back on my experiences.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe you’ve been following the option grant scandals. Primarily technology companies are under investigation, including my recent favorite fallen angel, Apple. The gist is that the companies used their control over the dating of incentive stock options to hand executives the ability to purchase their stock at the lowest possible price from the previous quarter/year etc. Thus, cheating investors by depressing share prices, and counteracting the ‘incentive’ nature of the options by decoupling their value from the performance of the executive during the period after the grant.

If you’re like most people, that probably sounds a little scummy, but relatively minor. Well, there’s a new twist. The Wall St. Journal today contained a little-noticed article on a new twist in the scandal: Incentive option grants for September 2001 were 2.6 times greater than any comparable period in the surrounding five years. So in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, these executives chose to raid their own companies when they were at their weakest moments. Inspiring.

Hedge fund manager, financial analyst, and contrarian-pundit-at-large Barry Ritzholz sums up well:

What makes this so pathetic is that corporate executives could have stepped up AND BOUGHT STOCKS IN THE OPEN MARKET if they believed they were so cheap. It would have been reassuring to a nation to see the leaders of industry voting with their own dollars. It might have made the subsequent economic slow down and period of tense aftermath less painful. Instead, these weasels decided to loot the treasury at the first opportunity. America was smouldering, the WTC lay in ruins, and this group of classless pigs decided it was time to pocket some cash.

Two interesting pieces of housing and housing finance-related data reported today. First, 40% of houses sold nationwide last year were ’second’ homes: vacation (12%) or investment (28%). This is significant because in theory the owners of non-primary houses are more sensitive to fluctuations in market price, and more likely to cash out or at least stop buying when that price peaks.

The second piece of information sheds some light as to exactly how close to reality that theoretical prediction is. As it turns out, the bulk of profits (in one case 62%) reported by savings and loan banks in the past year is due to ‘noncash income from deferred interest.’ This is a polite way of saying that the banks are reporting profits on income that doesn’t actually exist. What they are doing is the following: Given a negatively amortizing loan, (one for which the principal balance increases over time because the minimum required monthly payment is below the amount necessary to service the interest) the banks are reporting as profit the additional deferred interest on the now increasing principal. In other words, they are claiming as income potential future payments from customers whose ability to pay is already at the absolute minimum, and whose debt obligation is steadily rising as a result. Throw in the continued upward march of interest rates (to which adjustable rate mortgages still have a couple of years to catch up) and, well…

So we’re left with banks whose income stream is primarily dependent on payments from real estate speculators who are banking on the value of their properties not just holding ground, but increasing faster than their interest can be recapitalized. Meaning if the prices don’t increase, they’ll have to foreclose to recoup their investment, and sell off the collateral at whatever price they can get.

And housing inventory is steadily rising.

tick, tock…

The star of the 2006 Philadelphia auto show was an impressively stylized sportscar that goes zero to sixty in four seconds.

Boring, I know.

Oh, and it runs entirely on soybean oil. At fifty miles to the gallon.

Concept car, five to seven years from production? nope. Six-figure pricetag? nope.

Here comes the best part.

It was designed and built in a high school garage, by five dropouts or near-dropouts, one of whom is named “Cheeseborough.” They used primarily spare parts and a high school shop teacher’s know-how.

And you can’t fool these kids as to the uniqueness of their accomplishment, either:

“We made this work,” says Hauger. “We’re not geniuses. So why aren’t they doing it?” Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies. “They’re making billions upon billions of dollars,” he says. “And when this car sells, that’ll go down — to low billions upon billions.”

So what now, GMFordToyotaDaimler? Fuck around with half-hearted hybrids and promises of hydrogen highways in two decades, or run off of something we’re paying farmers /not/ to produce, today? How soon before a team of VCs picks up these designs and starts up real competition, something you haven’t faced in a quarter-century?

Clock’s running. Get to it.