• It’s rare that I blog in the evening, much less that I assemble a list of bullet points in the evening, but I haven’t had a moment to slow down today.
• The economy may be slowing down, but business is heating up at work. We’ve had several really solid sales days. If we could keep that up — by getting the salesmen to actually be on the road selling things! — we’d be rolling in it. Part of our current success is several new contracts with Bombardier and Heroux Devtek. Our tooling is knocking them dead. Though not literally, I hope.
• Listening to Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm is an exercise in noticing they used to be fun and interesting to listen to but are no longer fun or interesting. Several big producers and big albums later and they’re just well-coordinated noise. Remember “Positive Tension”? Great song.
• Nathan was playing a Collective Soul song at work today. It reminded me of a more innocent time, when the Mix 99.9 played actual music, and I was dating Laura #1. Not a particularly great time in my life, but still, a more innocent time. I drove a blue Saturn! (Was it blue?) It had those seatbelts that automatically sealed you into your seat but annoyingly required the lap belt to be done up manually. In any case, the point of this point is: Collective Soul sucks. They always have, and they always will. They aren’t innovative. They’re bland. They aren’t interesting. They’re stale. If you like them, that’s fine; just don’t expect me to share your excitement.
• How I Met Your Mother is in the download queue! Yes!
• It strikes me that morality is, after all, innate. A priori. Arts and Letters is right on that count.
• Part of me wants the US government to bail out the banks. Another part of me wants the US government to nuke the banks from space. I’m torn.
• Cats can really smell up a place real quick. Especially younger cats.
• I’m reading “Dune” again right now. It’s a lot more interesting than I remember. But it’s still ruined by its surrounding novels, the prequels especially but also the sequels. Neither Herbert’s continuing vision or his son’s diving into its past have added anything to “Dune” but taken much away. It should be the only book in the canon.
• I got something like 4 hours of sleep last night. I rather hope some of my friends’ sleep problems aren’t catching or anything like that.
• People using the laptop on the toilet really freaks me out. What if, right now, you were talking to someone and you had no idea they were sitting on the can? That’s uncool!
• I’m making a main course for a thing our church does. It’s called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and it’s a basically a way for people to meet other people they might not know. It’s pretty much awesome, but I haven’t the foggiest clue what to make for it. Do you people have any good recipes I should make? Keep in mind I can do multiple dishes!

The banking industry has, in the last year, lost something like a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars.

This is more money than the banking industry has earned. Ever. And they collectively lost it in a year.

That’s… horrific. But it underlines a bunch of problems with economics today. I’ll list a few of them:

• The separation of commercial and consumer credit put in place after the Depression (remember that trifling episode in economics’ sordid history?) have been eroded. This means that high-risk consumer loans suddenly become feasible, and even desirable.
• Economists and bankers trust models that look into the past to predict the future. Of course these models, no matter how elegant or sophisticated, can’t and don’t predict the future. The nature of the future they’re trying to predict doesn’t fit into a bell curve or a predictive model of any kind. Thus the blind lead the blind and we all suffer for it. This banking crisis seemingly came out of nowhere. The models didn’t predict it. The soothsayers were wrong, and horrendously so.
• Losses in the banking industry are nationalised, but profits are privatised. This is to say that those people who caused this — from the mortgage brokers to the banking CEOs to the economists and their blind faith in radically faulty predictive models — are going to walk away virtually unscathed. These people, all conspiring without their knowledge to lose a trillion dollars, still have their commissions, still have their bonuses, still have their golden parachutes, and still get paid to build ever more beautiful and flawed predictive models. Losses, on the other hand, are under-written and subsidised by the Federal Reserve, and politicians hand out tax cuts and consumer incentives that the will only contribute further to a federal debt that’s already out of hand. The wrong people — you and I — are paying to avoid complete financial disaster and in the meantime subsidising those very people who cause the problem in the first place.

The mortgage brokers, lenders, financial instrument sellers, predictive modellers, CEOs, risk assessment managers, and all those people who contributed to the current financial situation are not getting what they deserve. They are incentivised in the wrong direction. Risky decisions are paid for by the public, except for when the risk pays off, and then private interests benefit.

I know this should trickle down somehow, but how much wealth do we have to lose before we collectively realise something is wrong and stop bailing out the people that are causing the problem.

Maybe we should go back to public floggings. Some bankers and economist scared shitless would be a good thing right now.