Thursday 21 October 2010

What Do People Say About the iPad?

They rave about it!

http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-100-day-review-2010-8

Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.

Partial Costing of Help to Banks Omits Many Costs

I would like to see a full costing and who benefits from this massive infusion of money:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/21/AR2010102101941.html?wpisrc=nl_natlalert

Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.

I met a man on Portabello Road who was concerned about cruelty to animals in large farms

He referred to American farming methods that were arriving in Britain on the wave of credit creation designed to promote jobs in America.

Does Obama's money mean monster farms in Britain one might ask? Is a farm of 8,000 plus cattle financed in US dollar credit seem right to you?

Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.

Micosoft's Catch up Operating System for Smart Phones Doesn't Appear to Catch Up

In typical Microsoft fashion, it's operating system for smart phones appears to have major deficiencies that don't quite get you there, but require an update later on. Some of these deficiencies are major, at least for me.

The weaknesses in the Microsoft strategy to meet the challenges of the new age in computing reflect the problems of any overgrown organization languishing in the world of it's past successes, which incidentally we have all suffered through.

http://online.wsj.com/video/mossberg-microsoft-phone-7-omits-key-features/76893D75-246C-4B56-9D02-D301A946A8A9.html?mod=WSJ_Article_Videocarousel_2


Washington Post


Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.

Is the Banking Systems Penchant for Credit Creation Responsible for an Excessive Decline in Competition?

Normally, the question is put that credit creation promotes competition. Because it allows new entrants to have access to credit and so finance innovation.

Put another way, however, that banking systems allowing hedge funds to determine which innovators succeed may not be the best way to promote effective competition.

As regards the economics, one of the major weaknesses in Keynes General Theory was that it failed miserably on the question of innovation. Schumpeter's theory of innovation and business cycles equally failed miserably on the question of credit and banking within a managed economy that has an effective central bank.

Today, economics as a field and central banking as a subset of this field has failed miserably to understand the complex processes of growth, innovation, competition and inflation.

It is no good governments or central banks throwing more credit into a system or doing what is called financial easing. This process of reflation does not help create jobs, nor improve the chances of innovation, nor reduce the risks of inflation. What it does do is take the politicians off the hook. It seems like a solution, but it is a pipe dream of weakly understood economics. We are thrown into a destructive world of economics that the political do not really understand and follow accounting conventions rather than the economics of business cycles under the unsound influence of central bank credit creation weakly understood.

The economic policies during the past decade of Gordon Brown, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank were seen in hindsight to have been massively destructive. Rather than money going into job creation money went into the most destructive aspects of capital financing, over-investment in the business of speculation in property and stocks, highly suspect hedge operations that reduced effective competition and forced the closure and relocation of real economic activity much sooner than it would have occurred.

The reality is that credit creation and lax competitive policy spawned by poor understanding of risk financing can accelerate all the negative aspects of an economy at the expense of jobs and security. We see it with the ownership and fortunes of Manchester United football club and Harrods. Do we have to watch the economy micro-self destruct over and over again?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304023804575565712776857050.html?mod=djemalertDEALS

Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.

The World has Changed - The Challenges of Population Growth and Risk Taking

We know that world population has grown so fast during the last half century that we now are experiencing the stresses of relatively high population density.

The world in effect has become much busier and we have become busier. People are more actively engaged as a whole whether peacefully or not.

In addition, we are communicating more and more through travel and for want of a better words, what I would call interpersonal presentations: talking, writing, painting, fighting, and a multitude of interpersonal behaviors, such as smiling, chatting, laughing, stroking, dancing, bumping, viewing, touching and so on.

The number of medias for communication has grown rapidly as has our incentive to communicate.

To enable us to be busier, our per capital incomes have also grown, nevertheless, there are enormous gaps between what the fortunate are enjoying compared with the unfortunate.
Our business is directly related to the access that we have to incomes and credit directly and indirectly. The influence of banks has grown in our lives both directly and indirectly.

The world because it is busier has a more direct dependency on banking as an institution. Thus, it is ultra important that we make sure our banking institutions are sound and our deposits with banks are both secure and valued.

The key word here is valued.

One of the big problems the world faces is the undervaluation of deposits. This happens when the amount of credit has grown too rapidly relative to our joint busy ness or business. When credit grows too rapidly business rather than growing slows down. The reason is because too much credit leads to lower valuation of savings, and lower valuation of savings leads to unproductive and wasteful investment or to ballooning of the valuation of goods relative to money.

This running away from the appropriate valuation of money is our major problem. It happens because credit growth in the past has been too rapid and as a result money has lost it's value and people buy stuff instead of money, and the stuff they buy is not real stuff but imaginary stuff, dreams that cannot be fulfilled.

Gambling is a direct result of the loss of value of money. When people decide to gamble they are taking a risk based on an imaginary payoff and winning more money. The money they already have is devalued to the point that the imaginary wealth arising from the dream of winning is more important than the building of sound deposits in a bank.

What has happened is the lower valuation of saving relative to gambling. It's not that risk taking per se is something we should not do, but risk taking is destructive if it is not based on an appropriate valuation of the odds. The problem is compounded when the mathematics of risk taking bear no relation to the taking of the risk and the risk taking is just a bad habit.

Habitual risk taking is not healthy and is destructive in a world where people are already struggling to make ends meet.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.

YOU HAVE REACHED WOOH'S STREAM
The Internet User's Best Kept Secret

Sketches from scratches is a provocative blogspot that has grown out of the Wuh Lax experience. It is eclectic, which means that it might consider just about anything from the simple to the extremely difficult. A scratch can be something that is troubling me or a short line on paper. From a scratch comes a verbal sketch or image sketch of the issue or subject. Other sites have other stuff that should really be of interest to the broad reader. I try to develop themes, but variety often comes before depth. ... more!