We’ve just completed our very first trial run of the Standby Task Volunteer Force (SBTF) Satellite Team. As mentioned in this blog post last week, the UN approached us a couple weeks ago to explore whether basic satellite imagery analysis for Somalia could be crowdsourced using a distributed mechanical turk approach. I had actually floated the idea in this blog post during the floods in Pakistan a year earlier. In any case, a colleague at Digital Globe (DG) read my post on Somalia and said: “Lets do it.”
The banks aren’t required to mark down most of their holdings of government debt to market prices. If they did, some would be forced to default or seek a bailout.” (“How Long Can the ECB Prop Up Europe’s Sick Banks?”, Businessweek)
Are you kidding me? The banks are sitting on a mountain of garbage paper and EU regulators haven’t even forced them to write down the losses. Is it any wonder why public confidence is at all-time lows?
. . . . . . .
Doomsday Scenario seems to be on the mind of central bankers at the ECB, too. According to CNBC: “The Sunday Times in the UK reported that policy makers in Brussels are drawing up radical plans to offer central guarantees over certain types of debt issued by banks. The move is reported to be a direct response to the sharp fall in U.S. funding for Europe’s banks. If true, this is clearly something the boss of the ECB can’t be discussing in public….” (“Trichet Gives Master Class in Saying Nothing”, CNBC)
Indeed, how can one publicly discuss their intention to disregard the democratic process altogether, overstep their mandate, and underwrite hundreds of billions in garbage bonds held by thieving bankers? That’s hardly the kind of policy that would elicit a riotous display of support from the people.
So, it’s a mess, and it’s going to get a whole lot messier because EU banks need to roll over more than $4.5 trillion in the next two years and the funding flywheel is already gummed up. So, if there’s not a political solution to the trans-EU fiscal issues in the next few months, the eurozone is toast. When the credit markets start to groan, bad things can happen fast.
First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist threats. That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does. As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress — contrary to popular opinion — is not “broken”; it is working perfectly for its actual owners. Or, as he puts it, “Washington isn't broken — it’s fixed”:
Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more and nothing less than a handsome return — deficits be darned — in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government contracts.
The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending “inefficiencies,” have the causation backwards: fighting Terrorism isn't the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it. For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.
It isn't surprising that Obama and his economic advisors' predictions have been so wrong.
EXTRACT
Experts — in politics, economics, climate — are very, very bad at telling people what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year or the next century. How many of the economists who tell us what to do now failed to see the mortgage debt crisis coming? Nearly all of them.
Philip Tetlock's 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, documents that the predictions of even the most credentialed and experienced experts are often worse and very rarely better than random guessing. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization,” he writes, “there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals — distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on — are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading' emerging situations.”
The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified.
We are moving towards a reality where the web just is. It surrounds us, it’s in our pockets, and it can provide us contextual information about the world around us. Below are a few trends towards a location-aware web:
1. The Move Towards Mobility
2. Smartphones Become Digital Wallets
3. An Information Layer on Reality
4. Gaming Goes Social
Phi Beta Iota: This is true, at best, for the top third of the one billion rich. It is nowhere near true for the five billion poor, who will be lucky to have the basic mobile phone with digital cash, and call centers to educate them and monetize their aggregate knowledge. There is a great deal to be done, and most of it will be about harnessing and harvesting Human Intelligence (HUMINT), not about technical gadgets and back office web sites.
Shadowy Figures: Tracking Illicit Financial Transactions in the Murky world of Digital Currencies, Peer-to-Peer Networks, and Mobile Device Payments
John Villasenor, Cody Monk, Christopher Bronk
Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings and James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Rice University, August 29. 2011
EXTRACT:
Scale enables vanishing low transaction costs, which are an essential element in the ability to hide larger movements of money by conducting many smaller transactions. A movement of $900,000 using 100 different electronic transfers might be easy to spot. If, however, the power of a large, distributed online networks were used to move this money using 100,000 transactions with randomized amounts generally in the $6 to $15 range, detection would be much more difficult.
Phi Beta Iota: As considerable as the illicit transactions are, we cannot help but observe that it is the licit transactions, the legalized crime by the financial industry, that have destroyed the global economy. It would be helpful if the authors of this reference were to turn their attention to the obserse.
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