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We Are All Gonna Die! (But Before You Go…)

June 17, 2013    Leave a Comment

no-noNone of us are going to get out of here alive (meaning life overall) and ignoring the fact that you are going to die is never a good idea. But since you could very well live into your mid-80s—and be retired for 20 years or more—not planning for those 20 years is a huge mistake.

Over the past several weeks I’ve been examining our retirement portfolio in order to decide on when we could/should/probably-will retire. We’ve saved all of our lives (even when we didn’t have two nickels to rub together) and thankfully are in great shape, but it turns out that most people are not and the recent economic downturn didn’t help (though investment assets and 401ks are rebounding).

A few weeks ago Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, Inc (a wealth management firm), had his “radical retirement recommendation” discussed in this CNNMoney article. 

BlackRock Inc. chief executive Larry Fink said during a speech Tuesday that longer life spans and underfunded retirement plans are the defining challenge of our age, and went so far as to recommend that the U.S. consider making retirement savings mandatory.

Radical? Probably not, especially if someone 25 years old expects to get anything out of social security when they retire. Yes, Fink has a vested interest in sparking interest in retirement funds management, but he’s not the only one talking about this as a crisis.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness
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I.T. Crowd Emergency Number

June 14, 2013    Leave a Comment

My son and I started watching I.T. Crowd several years ago and, in Season 1, they had this change to the U.K. “999″ emergency service number (999 is the U.K. version of the U.S. 911). Since I just had to set up our home voice over internet (VoIP) and register it for 911 service, it made me think about this segment which my son and I both thought was pretty humorous. Mainly because a geek would remember!

Filed Under: Technology
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The Ends Justify The Means?

June 10, 2013    Leave a Comment

TEJTM101Was at two high school grad parties yesterday and found myself having disheartening conversations with several young people who had just graduated high school. We talked about what they’d be doing post-high school, their visions about their future lives and whether they thought what they wanted to do was achievable, and what kind of world they thought they were inheriting from those of us were close to passing it on to them.

I was not prepared to hear their sense of sadness, fear, pessimism and, especially, their true befuddlement that the BIG lesson they had been taught by those in power was that:

  1. It was OK to lie to the world to start a war and no one is held accountable
  2. If you are a huge financial institution and instrumental in facilitating a global economic meltdown, not only will you not go to jail but your company is saved and it’s back to business (and bonuses) as usual within a year or two and no one is held accountable
  3. That a “terrorism Pearl Harbor” is excuse enough to spend trillions abroad while at home our infrastructure fails and our country embarks on the largest runup in mass surveillance while trampling on our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and no one is held accountable (at least not yet)
  4. The richest and most powerful nation on earth has the highest incarceration rate in the world, while many of the crimes (especially ironic compared to no jail time for those in #2 above) are petty in nature.

While I tried to continually steer the conversations toward a more positive note—and part of their funk might have been partially attributable to our crappy, rainy weather yesterday—they continued to be gloom-and-doomsters about the state of our country and how uncertain they felt about the future.

gordon-gekkomother-theresaThe lessons taught to (and learned by) these young people? The ends justify the means. Makes me wonder if the next several decades may make many of these young people look more like a Gordon Gekko character than a Mother Theresa, and that our country’s ethical decline is now systemic and most of the skids-are-greased to make it easier for the United States to become a totalitarian country.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, Security
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Thoughts About the Secret Police

June 7, 2013    Leave a Comment
stasi

The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. (More here at Wikipedia)

All last evening, and over lunch today, I’ve been reading dozens and dozens of articles on the shitstorm going on with respect to the National Security Agency and their scooping up data about Verizon phone calls and how the NSA has access to major companies (see U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program) to collect our emails, photos, tweets, chat logs and more. Last night and today the aggregator Google News displayed links to over 2,000 articles (and that doesn’t count all of the blog posts) about this ongoing issue. 

But it was a post today that crystallized the FEAR about what’s going on in a way I’d not yet read from anyone or any news outlet.

Your iPhone Works for the Secret Police, from Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth, recapped our fear about what the NSA mass data vacuuming means for all of us. As someone whose ancestry hails from Prussia and Germany — and that I’ve spent alot of time in Germany, especially just a few years after the Berlin Wall fell — I can tell you that the effects of the Stasi repression was still palpable. Allworth points to the Stasi as an example of an intelligence service run amok and what it could lead to:

The infamous East German secret police, the Stasi, managed to infiltrate every part of German life, from factories, to schools, to apartment blocks — the Stasi had eyes and ears everywhere. When East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was reported to have over 90,000 employees and over 170,000 informants. Including the part-time informants, that made for about one in every 63 East Germans collaborating to collect intelligence on their fellow citizens. You can imagine what that must have meant: people had to live with the fact that every time they said something, there was a very real chance that it was being listened to by someone other than for whom they intended. No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi did in East Germany. In large part because of that, those two words — “East Germany” — are indelibly imprinted on the psyche of the West as an example of how important the principles of liberal democracy are in protecting us from such things happening again. And indeed, the idea that it would happen seems anathema to most people in the western world today — almost unthinkable.

President Obama, Congressional leaders and any others are defending the subversion of our Constitution and the 4th amendment as “legal” and “sanctioned”. But when everything is secret, how can we do what President Reagan said about our relationship with the former Soviet Union “Trust…but verify”? The answer is “we can’t” and what’s going on right now in the present-day United States would have been a Stasi leader’s wet dream back then.

If you read nothing else about this important issue, take a few minutes and read Allworth’s article here. 

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Internet, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness
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UNREASONABLE Search & Seizure: Why *Don’t* You Care?

June 2, 2013    Leave a Comment

UPDATE Thursday, June 6: The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reported Wednesday evening that the National Security Agency has used a secret court order issued in April to collect the records of all phone calls made on the Verizon network. If that isn’t bad enough U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program including Google, Apple, Microsoft (and Skype) and others.

4th-amendment-hilarity

The acceleration of the surveillance state accelerated almost immediately in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. There have been so many erosions of our civil liberties that I hardly know where to begin even thinking about this issue, let alone trying to determine why so many of my family, friends, social media connections and colleagues seemingly don’t give a shit and exhibit no outrage.

Remember when President Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden and millions of Americans stood up to cheer? Well I remember that too but continue to hear the echo of rhetoric by government officials and Congressional politicians who have continued to say, “But there hasn’t been another (Al Qaeda) terrorist attack on American soil so see how we have kept you safe!?! Aren’t you pleased at the more than $1 trillion dollars expended on the Dept of Homeland Security and our various wars because you do feel safer now, right?“

ben-franklin-liberty

I’m with Ben. I feel NO safer and am certain that if ANY terrorist attacks had been stopped—or any data could point to the return we’ve received on our security ‘investments’ to date—that our security agencies and Congress would be tripping all over themselves to make certain we all knew how incredible they are and that they’ve nearly bankrupted the country to fund it all was worth it. Instead, notice how over the last twelve years there has been basically zero release of data on any thwarted terrorist attacks? Instead of feeling safer I can count dozens and dozens of ways our essential liberties have been taken away from us, all with the justification that they are keeping our nation “safe”.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness
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Why Higher Education is Dead

May 30, 2013    2 Comments

stormyThe storm is coming and half of the higher education institutions in the United States will be dead in the next 15 years.

While it would be easy for me to pontificate about higher education and its failings, I’m not qualified other than I’m a father of a recent college graduate and have a second child who will be entering his second year in the fall. That is why I look to experts and watch trends in order to connect the dots, all while feeling anger toward the higher education “industry” who keep building structures and trying to out-compete each other for students.

My recent college grad in sociology is struggling to find a good job in human resources for a good company. She is now second-guessing the wisdom of investing in education in her field and is seriously wondering whether or not her sheepskin “was worth it.” I know several other twenty-somethings who feel exactly the same way (and two of them are living at home with their folks in order to save money and pay off student loans).

Though I’m not qualified as a higher ed industry expert, I don’t need a weatherman to tell me if the sun is shining outside (I can just look out a window). That said, it does take a much larger view and more data to be able to forecast coming storms in the next several days or week—which is what satellite imagery and sophisticated computer models perform and enable meteorologists to be fairly good at predicting what’s coming next.

The storm clouds are already overhead. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education, Internet
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Geeks vs. Norms

May 20, 2013    Leave a Comment

My son and I love the I.T. Crowd (and they’re coming back for an encore show!) but this snippet always made me realize how most people are clueless. They’re not stupid, but they have yet to learn:

Filed Under: Computing, Current Affairs, Technology
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Howard Kurtz: A Turning Point in Media

May 6, 2013    Leave a Comment

You might have heard the brouhaha about CNN’s Howard Kurtz and his handling of the Jason Collins story, the supposed first major sports figure who came out publicly as gay. This is the seven minute segment where Kurtz sets up how he botched the story and gets grilled by two other journalists.

Why is this a turning point? Because in a day when any of us who blog, are on social media or are otherwise connected online we can comment and bring forth a shitstorm of opinion. By doing what Kurtz did this is the only way he could potentially save his career, maintain credibility at CNN itself, defuse the irony that he runs a show where he analyzes the American news media called “Reliable Sources,” and to do the right thing. Give it a watch:

Filed Under: Media Shift
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Where is your OUTRAGE!?!

May 2, 2013    2 Comments

hulkWhile many of you are outraged over anything that might control guns in the United States—and anger over criminal behaviors like the Boston bombing, armed robberies and physical crimes—hardly anyone is getting mad over the global financial industries who are rigging the game against ALL OF US.

I know most people don’t read the newspaper, watch TV news or read more than a headline or couple of paragraphs in an article. Maybe that’s why there is no outrage. Or perhaps it’s just a bit too complex for Joe SixPack to grasp. My gut tells me that people not paying attention is why the global financial industry is getting away with rigging the financial game while the masses get all pissed off about Obama, gun control, the Boston bombing or other things that distract us from paying attention to the real crimes.

Just over one year ago the Libor scandal broke. Turns out traders were in direct communication with bankers before the rates were set, thus allowing them an advantage in predicting that day’s fixing. According to this article at Wikipedia (my emphasis), “Libor underpins approximately $350 trillion in derivatives. One trader’s messages indicated that for each basis point (0.01%) that Libor was moved, those involved could net “about a couple of million dollars”.”

Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi

Now comes this article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and still there is no outrage: “Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix.”

Taibbi points out how huge scandal #2 is as he describes the manipulation of interest-rate swaps (again, my emphasis), “Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.” Now the banks are manipulating THAT market too. (Sigh…)

We all know the ‘players’ in the stock market have enormous advantages. In Las Vegas I don’t mind 1-2 percentage points going to the ‘house’, but when my 401K, home value and business revenue drops like a rock because the big banks, hedge funds and brokerage houses are rigging the game, you bet I’m pissed.

If you do nothing else, read Taibbi’s article and think about it. If you start to feel anger welling up inside of you, go and read a few of Taibbi’s blog posts and other articles here. He’s one of the few consistent voices who call out the financial industry’s hucksterism. Taibbi wonders out loud why, for example, NO banker has had so much as a token fine or any jail time after the biggest fraud perpetrated on the global financial system in history that caused the 2008 crash.

Filed Under: Current Affairs
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North Dakota’s 7.5 Billion Barrels of Oil Means We Have All We Need, Right?

May 1, 2013    Leave a Comment

bakkenWhat if reducing our dependence on foreign oil wasn’t just about renewable and alternative energy sources—wind, solar, battery-powered electric vehicles—but also meant harvesting our own fossil fuel sources here at home?

N.D. oil is more plentiful than previously thought in this morning’s Minneapolis StarTribune also pointed out that, “The government has sharply increased its estimate, and some think it is still too conservative.” Though the U.S. Geological Survey estimates 7.5 billion barrels, “Continental Resources, the largest acreage-holder in the North Dakota oil patch, estimated in December that the basin contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 4 billion barrels of liquid natural gas.” 

Wow. That’s a lot of energy. There is no question that there is a huge oil boom in that region of the country and my family is benefiting from it, even though my own personal focus is on being ‘green’ and finding ways to optimize my own energy use.

My grandfather, Martin Wolla

Martin Wolla

As a young man my maternal grandfather and his pals acquired mineral rights to areas around Tioga, ND, right in the heart of the Bakken Formation. These rights were split between my mom and her brother and, after mom passed in 1994, they went to my dad and ultimately will be split between my three sisters and me. While the royalties are laughingly diluted by the time they’ve made their way to us (now worth a couple of decent meals at a restaurant each month) the amounts are rising little-by-little and it will be interesting to see if they become even remotely meaningful to our incomes at some point.

My biggest concern, however, is that the government, automakers, oil producers and others will take their eye off the ball when it comes to developing alternative energy sources. Why? That StarTribune article said it best when discussing the new 7.5 billion barrel estimates and whether or not companies could safely ‘invest’ in the region: “The new estimates should give potential investors confidence that the oil boom could have decades to run. At the current rate of production — 22.5 million barrels in January — it would take 27 years to remove 7.5 billion barrels from the ground.“

27 years. Seems like a long time, right? The point is that even this new, substantial source of energy will run out. 

Filed Under: Earth
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