Stoicist

For a while now, I’ve been floating around the idea in my head that the capacity for humans to conjur fictitious creatures is a result of personification of other organisms.  I know personification literally refers to inanimate objects or abstract ideas - but I couldn’t find a better word to replace the notion.  What caused us to create giants, leprechauns, aliens, and cryptozoologic creatures?  Basically, we can dream of giants because we understand how humans must appear to an ant.  We dream of extraterrestrials because we understand that distant planets can be visited by men or machines from other worlds.  I’m not sure how to tie this idea in with cryptozoology, but I’m sure there’s a connection there as well.  I’d think about it some more if I was writing a dissertation for a master’s thesis in psychology, sociology or literature.  But I’m not.  It’s just one of those things I think about from time to time.

Just finished alpha development for kscrfriends.com.  As usual, I went with the wordpress publishing software because it is both powerful and flexible.  Learned a lot about PHP/MySQL implementation of a web page.  Also learned that I’m not very good with aesthetics.  At any rate, I’m pretty proud the functionality I was able to implement.  If you’re a KSCR alum, please take the time to register at the site (and donate to the station if you have the means!).

Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I have absolutely no representation in the U.S. Congress. This year I get to choose between three “characters” for the House of Representatives.

A breakdown of California’s 35th District:

1) Maxine Waters (D) (incumbent)
One of the most corrupt members of congress, according to a Citizen’s Ethics organization.
Out of the twenty-seven members of Congress named as “most corrupt” during Waters’ two years on the list, she remains one of only five to both remain serving in Congress and to not have been the formal target of a federal investigation. ~wikipedia

On a personal note, she never once responded to any correspondence I ever sent her. That alone would make me vote her out.

2) Ted Hayes (R)
A Rastafarian pimp. Organized a hobo shantytown in downtown Los Angeles in 1985. Though I think it’s pretty neat that he got shot by the police with a rubber bullet during the 2000 Democratic Convention, he is the co-founder of the “United American Committee” which educates Americans on the “dangers of Islam”. He’s also a supporter of Bush’s foreign policy.

3) Herb Peters (Libertarian)
A guy who thinks America’s best year was 1898, paper money is the cause of the financial collapse, and that Switzerland is the pinnacle of foreign policy leadership.

Tired of all the rest? Now vote for the best! Write-in me, Justin Evans, on November 4th… the only somewhat viable candidate who is not a complete whack job.

I wrote that last post before I saw Mr. Bush’s Presidential Address (which I’m watching right now) and he said exactly what I wrote.  Only I took it one step further to explain why the $700 billion bailout will not work.  We’ll see if history vindicates me.

Ron Paul issued a pretty good commentary for why we are in this current financial mess and what it will mean heading into the future.  It’s a shame more people don’t listen to him.  I’ll write more about this subject a little bit later.

…and now it’s later…

I’m not an expert on our financial system, but the people in charge can’t even get a grasp of what’s going on - so what I am offering is my opinion on the matter and try to dissect the way I see it and how it affects someone like me.  The fed is currently proposing a $700 billion bailout of financial companies, and congress (being the people in charge of the budget) are debating whether to go through with the bailout, and if so, to what extent.

Let me begin by saying it upsets me as an American citizen that those in charge are not divulging all the details of what they know, and why throwing $700,000,000,000 at a problem will have us all holding hands and chasing rainbows.  I think the reason may be simple: they know there’s a problem and they know something has to be done about it.  Instead of starting from scratch and entertaining fresh ideas, the easy answer is to proceed with a “business-as-usual” attitude by propping up a failed system.  The post gold-standard era has had a good run.  It’s seen its share of successes, minor troughs, and now what I believe will be a serious depression.  This is all assuming that we stay on this path.

Under the gold standard financial system, there was a somewhat finite amount of money to go around.  I’m not saying it was perfect, and I’m not saying we should go back to it either.  The current financial system that creates wealth by creating debt can’t stand on its own anymore.  I’m going to take a crack at dissecting how we got in this mess.

Banks (used to) lend money to people with the intent of being paid back over time, and making money with interest.  “Duh!”, you may say.  It’s a brilliant concept.  It works.  It allows people to purchase assets out of their price range that will appreciate over time, creating wealth.  Obviously this is good for financial growth for both consumers and national strength and solvency.

At some point, financial institutions lost their basis of reality.  Money that they had created as debt wasn’t just a low-risk “asset” to be held and grown at interest rates over time.  Someone, somewhere, decided that this debt money promised to them was as good as cold hard cash.  So banks start trading loans, and investing promised debt money that doesn’t actually exist anywhere outside their balance sheets.  Every dollar promised (debt) that is made to a bank is as good as gold.

Looking to capitalize on this newfound way to make real money through investments of fake money, bank personnel were most likely given incentives to create as much fake money (debt) as possible.  This allows a bank to invest more money, create more assets, and increase their bottom line - which in turn, drives up stock prices based on an artificial reality.  To accomplish this, banks had to come up with uniquely crafted “sub-prime” loans.  This, in my opinion, is what created the housing bubble.  These ingenious loans only work under two assumptions:

1.) That real estate market will appreciate faster than your interest rates reset (read: rise exponentially) &
2.) That people will want a sub-prime loan to make quick assets due to number one.

So banks took advantage of these two factors working in concert, created artificial money as debt, and the inflation of “good times” was spread throughout the financial world.  This of course includes the stock market.  Banks were in error for giving bad loans to people they probably knew couldn’t pay them back.  Prospective homeowners were in error for signing loan contracts they knew they couldn’t pay back.  My assumption is that most people wanted to get in on the gravy train.  Buy a home with no down payment where the mortgage increases after the first year?  How could I lose?!  I’ll have sold the house for 15% profit by then!

So everybody bought houses they couldn’t afford, assuming that they could off-load them to some other sap for a huge profit.  All the while, the banks were laughing all the way to… the bank.  The construction sector (often considered an index for financial growth) was building houses faster than people could sign the dotted line.  Everybody was assuming that the housing market wasn’t a “bubble” and that it was reasonable to buy a 1- bedroom fixer-upper in Compton for 1.75 million dollars.  Something had to give.

And give, it did.  Reason decided to rear its ugly head.  All the people that wanted to flip houses had already flooded the market.  Rational people who realized there was a bubble occurring were holding out for the burst so they could buy a modest home at a modest price.  People aren’t buying houses as quickly as they were.  Construction stalls.  People who signed up for loans with outrageous terms aren’t able to find buyers.  Home”owners” can no longer afford their outrageous mortgages when the interest rates reset.

People start defaulting on their loans.  This fictitious money promised to the banks is gone in a flash.  The money the banks had promised to their investment firms no longer “exists”.  The bottom line decreases, stock prices start trickling down.

The government steps in, and they realize the root cause of the latest recession.  I should note that it may not have been a “recession” in its strictest definition, but anybody with any sense knew that things weren’t right.  The whole system could sustain itself as long as homeowners don’t default on their mortgages.  Debt money will still exist and the whole system will continue moving forward, albeit at a slower pace.  The government proposes a bailout for homeowners who signed unique mortgage contracts.  The promise of keeping people “at zero” without creating promised growth to banks would cause a ripple throughout the system.  This was the first sign of impending doom, and stockholders knew it.

Sell sell sell! say the stockholders.  If a government bailout of homeowners is necessary to keep some of these banks solvent, then there is some underlying issue not being addressed.  Banks are not as mighty when a large portion of their assets are in jeopardy of being defaulted on.  By now, mortage interest rates reset even higher, and more people are defaulting.  The cycle continues.  Some banks have stock prices that approach zero and go out of business.  It’s almost as if stockholders finally realized that banks were basing their business model entirely off of promised money that may or may not exist over time.

The two biggest loan approving, financial holdings institutions in America are in jeopardy of becoming insolvent.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are *the* game if you want a loan in America.  They are basically the right arm of the Fed, and they keep non-existent money flowing.  They keep credit going.  If the two biggest institutions fail, then we have a *serious* problem on our hands that will spread past the financial sector and seep into virtually every aspect of our American lifestyle.  The government bails them out.  It’s doesn’t work.  Again, if it’s necessary to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while letting Lehman Brothers (an institution that’s been in business for over 150 years) sink, who knows which companies the government will let live, and which they’ll let die?  Stockholders are wary, and the market plummets several hundred points in a couple days.   It’s not over.

Alan Greenspan is notrious for claiming that we’re “in a mental recession”.  That is to say, that people buy and sell stock because other people buy and sell stock.  If there’s a big run on financial institution selling, other people will follow suit.  The government takes this to heart, so to avoid more selling by stockholders - they announce the huge $700 billion bailout.  Take taxpayer money (again, that doesn’t exist because we already have a hundreds-of-billions of dollars defecit), throw it at all the financial institutions that are losing fake money because of mortage defaults, and everything will be hunky dory!  What they’re basically saying is this…

All the fake money (or at least a portion thereof) you have amassed by selling bad mortgages is now real money.

The only thing is… it’s NOT real money!  It’s money that only exists on the federal balance sheet, and a debt that all taxpayers will have to answer to in the future.  They’re just transferring debt!  It was the irresponsible homeowner’s responsibility.  Then it was the irresponsible bank’s responsibility.  Now it’s OUR responsibility.  But WE are governed by an irresponsible entity that spends more than it receives!  WHERE DOES IT END?  There is nowhere else for this to go.

And that is why throwing money at this problem will not make it go away.  Money *is* the problem.  We the people, our businesses, and our representaties need to think long and hard about a free-market money-as-debt system that allows this kind of thing to happen.

The gold standard failed because there was no opportunity for growth.  The money-as-debt system can’t survive because of just this type of situation.

Or maybe I’m just pissed because supply/demand doesn’t work when the government takes it upon themselves to prop-up a bubble.  Home prices won’t come down to where they would be in a truly free market because that would mean a huge loss of wealth to anyone and everyone who has a stake in these institutions.  Of course I can look at this objectively since I have no assets, and I’m furious that people who received their assets through unethical means will avoid having to face the music (for now) as long as this universal bailout deal goes through.

I want to live in an affordable house, goddammit.

After reading an article in the hardcover copy of the latest National Geographic about the Neanderthals, I came up with a theory.  It seems scientifically factual that Neanderthals shared 99.5% of mitochondrial DNA with modern humans.  Chimpanzees share 97-99% mitochondrial DNA with modern humans, depending on who you ask.  I say that there must be a minimal divergence number that two species must contrast; in which they are able to co-exist.  Too close a number, and they will fight for the same resources and one will invariably die out.  Too far a number, and they will be like comparing polar bears to plant life.  After a google search I found no such research on the topic.

Patent pending.

I won’t lie to you.  I really did intend on posting to my blog more regularly than every 7 months.  Soon after starting stoicist.com, I realized why I abandoned my first blog a few years ago.  SPAM!  I used to get 100+ spam comments per day.  No matter which plugins I tried or blacklist sites I invoked, I couldn’t get the spam down to a tolerable level.  I started receiving wheelbarrows full of spam soon after my first post on this site, got frustrated, and essentially disabled my account.  I recently stumbled across a plugin called askimet which has since kept my inbox free of solicitations for prescription drugs and camwhore sites.  However, that really wasn’t enough to motivate me to start blogging again.  What was motivating enough, you may ask?  Another customer service horror story, that’s what.

This year, with ever-rising fuel prices, I decided the prudent thing to do would be to purchase my Christmas airline tickets early.  The earlier the better, as I figured fuel costs will only go up throughout the year.  That proved to be untrue for whatever reason (speculator death?… China doesn’t want oil anymore?), and is another post in and of itself - but I digress.

I’m a pretty prepared (read: anal) person when it comes to planning things well in advance.  I did the math on a Christmas trip to Tucson and weighed the pros and cons for driving vs. flying.

Details by Car:
Los Angeles to Tucson Distance: 500 miles
Estimated Cost of Gasoline: $4.50/gallon
Acura RSX Fuel Economy (Hwy): 30 miles/gallon
Total Round-Trip Cost: $150
Total Round-Trip Travel Time: 16-20 hours

Details by Plane:
Total Round-Trip Travel Time: ~5 hours

I love the occasional road trip; but it’s pretty much a wash when you consider the advantages of the personal freedom of an automobile vs. the time-savings (but greater headaches) offered up via aero.  This time around, the decision came down to was “how much is my time really worth?”.  Somehow I rationalized to myself that if I could find a ticket under $230 I would fly to Tucson.  On June 12th, I found that ticket for an eye-boggling $196!  Too good to be true?  In a word, Yes.

On July 10, ExpressJet (a regional airline under the Delta umbrella) announced that they were no longer going to be servicing Tucson.  I hadn’t heard anything about this until my mom caught it on the local news and relayed the information to me.  Out of curiosity, I later checked my Delta itinerary online and saw that my flight had not changed.  Perhaps Delta was going to pick up the slack for ExpressJet’s shortcomings?  Not on your life.

Weeks pass and somehow I am reminded that I should check my itinerary to see what ever happened to that situation.  Sure enough, my non-stop flight was now a one-stop flight, routed through Salt Lake City.  The one-hour, 500-mile flight just became a three-hour (minimum / including best-case-scenario layover time), 1200-mile ordeal.  So there goes any time-saving advantage I had utilized in making the decision to fly instead of drive.  There are two even better points to this travesty:

1.) Delta didn’t feel the need to inform me that they had changed my reservation.
2.) The flight from SLC to Tucson was scheduled to depart before I was scheduled to arrive!

Time goes by, and on Tuesday September 2, I decide to give a little ring-a-ding to Delta.  Despite all of this, I was still willing to give them a shot to try and remedy the situation.  Hell, maybe SLC airport bars are a good scene.  (*cough* 3.2 beer *cough*)  The nice man from an unnamed subcontinent was eager to clear up my reservation affording me the possibility of reaching my destination.  After getting off the phone with him, I was confident that I would be getting to Tucson and back over Christmas break.  What he was telling me and what he actually did; however, were two very different things.

Note: soon after hanging up I checked my e-mail and saw my itinerary change incrementally as follows…
In his first attempt, he “fixed” my departure snafu.  No longer was I having a negative layover in SLC.  “Success!”, I briefly thought to myself.  Then I noticed the airline numbers for departure and return were identical… and the times were identical.  I thought to myself “that’s odd, why would a plane have the same ID and depart at the same time going in both directions?” - but I shrugged it off thinking maybe it was a dedicated plane that grounds itself at alternating airports every other night.  Then a second e-mail came across.  Again, no negative layovers.  Only this time he had me leaving Tucson on Dec. 23 and returning to Tucson on Dec. 27.  Substitute the word Tucson for Los Angeles in the previous sentence and you’ll have my original itinerary.  I was now going the wrong direction on both travel dates!  Since I had just spent over an hour on hold to end up worse off than when I had started, I had decided to allow myself some time to simmer.

Despite Delta changing my itinerary without telling me, I was still willing to allow them to make things right.  After Tuesday’s disaster I flat out wanted a refund and would accept nothing less.  This afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with “Orchid”.  When she asked how she may help me, I replied with a refund request.  Naturally, she informed me that my ticket was non-refundable and said that if I wanted a refund I had to do it within 24 hours of September 2nd!.  Note that this was not the original date of purchase, but the date of the backwards itinerary change.  I explained to her the complete story as I’m telling it to you now, informed her that the first customer service guy gave no mention of a 24-hour refund window, and so on.  I also alerted her to the ridiculousness of a 24-hour refund window after an itinerary change and proposed to her that if she denies my refund request I will once again change my itinerary (back to the original itinerary) and request a refund 5 minutes later.

After putting me on hold twice more to speak with a manager, I finally got them to grant me a refund.  She transfers me to the refund department.  All I have to do is give the nice lady my confirmation code and my credit card will be reimbursed!  Score one for the little guy!

..and then I remember.  The credit card I bought the ticket with was cancelled shortly after because Citibank had a security breach exposing customer card numbers.  Is Citibank smart enough to credit my new account?  I’ll write about it when I find out, but I’m not holding my breath.

So here I am again, establishing an online presence after an absence of nearly four years. I used to be the proud owner of internalforce.com, which was basically a collection of stories from my daily life with a few insights into my thoughts and observations of the day. I decided to let it die a quiet death in 2004 when my posting frequency became virtually nil. I managed to archive all my posts to my hard drive, but that was subsequently lost to the abyss in “the great hard drive crash of ‘05″. My journal, written during my college years, has been erased from existence. It’s not entirely a bad thing, as I was a young adult back in those days and would probably cringe if I read some of the things I wrote about publicly back then. I’ve since adopted the virtues of tact and discretion. Unfortunately, I lost all my music and photos at the same time, and I am infinitely more morose over those losses.

The internet is a great tool, and a lot of my free time is spent on it for a multitude of purposes. News, public opinion, entertainment, work, thought, socializing, and creative media are just some of the things that I feel I should keep documented for posterity. I’m not entirely sure who will benefit from this site other than myself, but I feel like I need a little slice of teh intarwebs to call my home. It’s a series of tubes, you know. God, I hope I get that reference thirty years from now when I come across this, the online journal I am keeping from age twenty-seven onwards.

So welcome to Stoicist.com. I realize that it is not really a word. In attempting to come up with some clever (but short) name, I found that damn near every word in the English dictionary is taken as a domain name. Most two-word combinations are taken as well. In recent months, I have been reading up on different philosophies that I may identify with. As humans, we’re always trying to find the answer to the question “why are we here?”. Also, as humans, we like to place ourselves into categories that align thought processes, ideals, and how we identify ourselves as individuals. A person that practices Determinism is a Determinist. Someone who believes in Fatalism is a Fatalist. Recently, I came across Stoicism. A person who believes in Stoicism is a Stoic. Stoicist is a little play on words, and I actually think it’s kind of fitting. Evidently, it has been around since the 4th century BC, and ironically squashed by Justinian I for being “Pagan”. Well… I’m resurrecting it in my own benign way.

I guess the basic tenet of Stoicism mixes Buddhism with Determinism. It’s a clever little combination of releasing oneself from extreme emotion, and at the same time, understanding that the universe itself is God and there is a causality between past, present and future - all based on reason. That is to say, everything that is made is meant to be made. Thus, Stoicist.com exists. I would elaborate, but wikipedia was invented for a reason.

So in the future, I imagine I will post my thoughts on news stories of the day. Lately I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about such topics as Technological Singularity, Simulated Reality, and a bunch of “big picture” “futuristic” ideas. I can’t claim to be an expert on virtually any topic, but it’s my intention that after reading my posts, I hope the reader comes away with a new perspective and new understanding on something he or she may have never thought about before.

I’m fairly confident I won’t always be this same person. My thoughts, ideas, opinions, and categorical bubbles will invariably shift over time. I just hope I can provide insight into new topics previously unknown, or help the reader understand the inner workings of my mind. I spend about 16 hours every day talking to myself. Stoicist.com shall contain the highlights of that endeavor.

This will also be a repository for all my digital creations. After all, if I made it, it was meant to be made. It doesn’t necessarily mean I will have an audience. So if you came across this site and dig it, good for you! Let’s be friends. And to the billions of people who will never experience the joy that is Stoicist.com, I will see you at the Big Crunch.