Today’s woot.com write up is a parody of the (very, very painful) Stewart vs. Cramer interview. How likening Cramer to an automatic marinader is not funny is beyond me.
In a short speech, PM Gilani officially announces that Iftikhar Chaudhry will be reinstated as the Supreme Court Justice. He also announces that Section 144 will be lifted throughout the country. He congratulates the people of Pakistan on this historic occasion.
In other news, convicted rapists are congratulating women the world over on declaring their vows of celibacy from their prison bunks.
Horrible flash-only site, but a worthy mission. Put your money where your repugnance was.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
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At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.
What an experiment. Very moving. The idea behind Twistori:
There are so many fascinating people on twitter.
I wish I could think of the perfect things to say to them.
One of the better presentations on the credit crisis enveloping the world. Notice the centricity of the interest-based banking system in all these transactions based on non-existent money.
What we have instead is a system called fractional reserve banking. We allow banks to magically conjure "money" to lend out of thin air, in exchange for an I.O.U. from you.
As long as they have a required small percentage of the money they have loaned out on hand in cash, they are free to create money and loan it out with impunity. It’s how the system works. This is why they continually hound you to deposit more money with them, because each deposit increases the amount they can loan out.
Once you have the money the bank created for you in exchange for your I.O.U., you will give it to somebody else in exchange for your chickens, or you enterprise resource planning software. That person then deposits that money in their own bank, where the bank uses that money as the basis to create yet more debt money. The second bank is allowed to loan out slightly less than the original loan because of their own reserve requirements. That loan is then redeposited and used as the basis for another loan, and so on.
The result is that every dollar of I.O.U.’s you write to a bank blossoms into about 100 dollars in the banking system.
Bankers are generally in favor of this system, because they get to charge interest on every loan along the way, which makes them fabulously wealthy.
There is one glaring flaw in this system: the interest on the loan doesn’t exist. In order to repay the interest, more money must be created. To create more money, we have to create more I.O.U.’s. This is called a vicious circle.
The entire post is excellently written and well worth the read.
Aziz also had a chime in some time ago which I hadn’t gotten around to reading until recently:
It’s also worth pointing out that the crisis as a whole is a direct consequence of the central role that interest plays in the economy. The less reliant you are as a consumer on interest, the more you are insulated from the effects of the crisis. Abiding by Islamic principles and avoiding interest is easier said than done, but it is still possible - for example, there are schemes whereby the lender actually buys the home outright and then sells it back to the purchaser in a rent-to-own kind of scenario. The truth of the matter is that it will take longer to own your own house this way, and you won’t get as big or fancy a (first) house as you’d like, either. But living frugally is a virtue in and of itself… at least until you outgrow the first home and trade up.
There is no doubt that a lot of the people losing out in this credit crisis are hard-working, honest and responsible individuals and families, but a lot of the problems presenting themselves could’ve been avoided if people simply used a bit of common sense and avoided getting themselves into transactions they could never afford on their own terms. Moreover, if bankers and their ilk tried a bit of honesty and refrained from egregious greed every now and then, most of them may still have a job.
I make people bleed.
(When they let me.)