Bynamite idea!

This New York Times link about a start-up that proposes to pay users for their personal information might be hidden by tomorrow, so I'm cherry-picking quotes here:

“Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

...

Every search on Google, Mr. Acquisti notes, is implicitly such a transaction, involving a person “selling” personal information and “buying” search results. But people do not think about, or are unaware of, the notion that typed search requests help determine the ads that Google displays and what its ad network knows about them.

Bynamite, Mr. Acquisti said, is “simply trying to make these kinds of transactions explicit, more transparent to the user."

...

In essence, the company has a libertarian, free-market ethos. If consumers have more power and control, it says, personal information should flow more efficiently to the benefit of both consumers and advertisers, who will be able to more accurately aim their ads.

...

IF Bynamite gains momentum, Mr. Yoon predicts that individuals will be able to use their portfolios of interests as virtual currency. He calls the idea a “consumer’s preference wallet.

I've said several times that Facebook can have, resell, and use my personal info for the low, low price of $20. Let's make it $25 because I'm a good capitalist.

That number should be way higher, because Zuckerberg knows they're making way more than $25 off each user. But I like to play nice, and thanks to scarcity rules, I don't have a lot of bargaining power. So 25 bucks for my name, email address, and marketable interests. I've never heard or read on the whole wide Internet anyone else making that kind of claim, and I'm surprised about it.

I normally acquiesce to charges of curmudgeonly behavior. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes it's accurate. But this quirk doesn't belong in that category. This is one of those rare instances where I'm right and everyone else is wrong for some reason.

You should expect a cut of the money when someone uses a resource you provide. I doubt this will be a pure, beautiful, cash-based transaction that I want. But it shows me I'm not completely alone in my thinking.

Buy Nothing Day 2009

I haven't decided yet whether I'll participate in BND this year, but I'll promote it here like I do every year.

I 've heard that In This Economy, you need to take advantage of every sale, and retailers will be giving babies away with every purchase, and you don't want to miss that. Hell, I saw one major retailer who claimed to be open today, on Thanksgiving, to try to pick up a few more dollars.

And I don't know who you are, maybe you have a real need, and if you do, friend, go buy something tomorrow.

But if you're closer to my situation, you could stand to take a day and think about the stuff you already have in your life. New stuff will neither improve your condition, nor make your relatives love you more.

The act is only symbolic, but symbols have power when you give it to them. And you're probably going to give that power to some symbol. Why not make it a symbol you choose instead?

Kiva: complex transactions continue to be complex

Remember a while back when I tried to get you to join my Kiva team? Well you still can, but a story in today's New York Times reveals that the money may not be hand-delivered by trained monkeys riding rhinoeroses straight into the wilderlands as I had hoped!

More likely, it goes to a microfinancer, who then throws our money into a big pile that funds a bunch of people:

Mr. Ogden goes so far as to question Kiva’s role in the lending process. “Kiva’s new documentation explains, if you read it, that Kiva is a connector not of individual lenders to individual donors, but of individual lenders to microfinance institutions,” he said. “If Kiva’s users want to be connected to an individual borrower, Kiva doesn’t do that, and so the big question is, do Kiva’s users want to be connected to a microfinance institution — in which case, why do they need Kiva?”

This is disheartening, because you to like to feel you're giving your $25 straight to Mr. Abubakari to help expand his grocery business, when you're really giving it to Sinapi Aba Trust, who, for all you know, might have given the cash to him six months ago, and now SAT has used your money for some other purpose altogether.

Ultimately, Kiva still appears on the level, and the funding you want to get done is still happening. It just appears to be less direct than the fiction we want to spin. I can live with that. Maybe you can too when you join the Quickstart group and we fund some other charitable microfinance group?

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

Adventures in junking: Watch the birdie

My new favorite hobby is walking the dog on trash day. I always find something interesting in other people's garbage. Occasionally, it's interesting enough to bring home.

About a month ago someone left an Apple IIcPlus and a Macintosh SE on the sidewalk. I know! I sold them on Craigslist for $10 a piece, and found out later that I way undercharged for the IIcPlus.

A couple days ago, I was almost done with a walk and had found nothing worth bringing home. I was feeling a little sad about it when I wandered by a TV and a blender box. I wish I knew what to do with old TVs, because people junk them regularly in my neighborhood.

While Autumn nosed over that, I looked in the blender box, wondering if there was actually a blender in it. There wasn't.

It was incongruously full of mid-20th century cameras!



Here's a Brownie Hawkeye:



Here's an Argoflex Seventy-Five:


Here's a Kodak Duaflex III. (It has its original flash and instruction manual.):



Here's a bunch of plastic shoe inserts that were also in the box:



According to Internet, there's a community of photographers who use these to do Through the Viewfinder (TtV) photography, hooking up their digital cameras to take pictures through the viewfinders of these old cameras. I've clicked through a few galleries in Flickr, and I love that people are doing this! Hooray for people!

These cameras are not super-duper rare or expensive. But they might bring a few bucks. Plus, they're neat. If you know someone who might like to have one of these for a reasonable price, email me, k?

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

We think intelligent people are kings in modern America. Even nerds in high school don't have it quite as bad as they used to, because everyone recognizes that nerds can grow up to become filthy rich. In America, even the classic "jocks" understand the brute strength available to the rich.

Interesting thing about making money though -- you don't need to be smart. Smart might even be a hindrance. A business canniness exists independent of intelligence, the kind that makes used car sellers wealthy and college professors lower-middle class.

(Business canny is related to, but separate from business savvy. Savvy is a practical understanding of business. Canny is a knack for working the angles. Both are different from being "smart.")

Here's a New York Times editorial from Calvin Trillin on the topic, entitled Wall Street Smarts.

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” ...

I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.

I've spent a lifetime being smart, and that's only gotten me partway to where I want to be. I'm going to talk about this some more tomorrow.

Kiva.org microlending

My sister-in-law, Alison, gave me a gift certificate to Kiva last Christmas, and I've enjoyed it a lot. If you haven't heard of Kiva, here's my plug.

Kiva is a charitable microfinance organization. You put, say, $25 into the system, and choose a borrower to lend it to. A bunch of other people throw in some money too, until together you reach the amount the borrower asks for. A few months later, the borrower has invested the money, seen a return, and pays you and your co-lenders back. Sweet!

I've been doing this all year, and it seems to work great. I've already made 3 loans, mostly with the initial gift certificate moolah. In fact, it works so great, that I decided to start a lending team! And you can join!

If I were to send you an email inviting you to join, this is what it would say:

I want to recruit you to my lending team, Quickstart, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you're a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team's impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team's collective portfolio, so our team's overall impact will grow!

I wouldn't try to replace conventional giving with this (some people don't have the wherewithal to pay you back, even though they still need help), but I love being part of it. Join Team Quickstart, and start loaning money today! Like, now!

Wealth

We read and discussed the book of Proverbs last night in cell, and I was struck by the tension of wealth in it. This ancient collection of wise aphorisms simultaneously tells you that wealth is worth pursuing, but that it's also horrible, and in some cases, it's just better to be poor.

Wealth is rarely my main goal when I strike out on some venture, but it's always a side goal. I've been thinking lately that I'm great with money, but terrible with wealth. And wondering how to change that, or if it's worth bothering. Writing for a living generally doesn't make you rich, especially if you're slothful. If you're fortunate, it doesn't make you poor.

I wouldn't know what to do with wealth if I had it. Sometimes I think that almost has to be a precedent for obtaining wealth (barring lottery winnings). If you don't have a plan, you'll never do the things necessary to get it.

Student loan forgiveness gains traction

Someone else has hit upon my idea of the federal government covering student loans, according to the Baltimore Sun:

But as the economy still sputters along, Robert Applebaum thinks he has a better idea: Cancel all the outstanding student loan debt. The impact would be immediate, he says, as people paying hundreds of dollars a month on their student loans could instead spend that money elsewhere.

Applebaum estimates student loan debt about 12 times higher than I do. (Psst Rob! Use my math, and it looks even BETTER!) And he has a Facebook group with a zillion members, which means about as much as an online petition does.

Still, this is a really sane idea which frees up our best-educated, most motivated citizens to invest in other things, while returning liquidity to the responsible lending institutions that made these loans in the first place.

The arguments posted against it are pretty weak. I can't believe someone even bothered offering up the argument that it's unfair to some people. We left "fair" bleeding in a ditch 'round about October. Also note, I paid off my student loan aggressively after college, and I'm out. My wife has some student loan debt, but nothing debilitating. This doesn't benefit us really. It's not "fair" to us, but it's still a good idea.

See, I just want something that works, and playing chess with bankers? That's not working.

Jim Cramer on Jon Stewart

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart is typically acerbic in his segments, but gentle in interviews. This is because the guy is genuinely uncomfortable with conflict. You would think this a strange trait for a man who professionally mocks powers and principalities.

But nobody ever got funny by being good at confrontation. You get funny by thinking around things, not through them. Listen to Stewart talk about himself; you consistently hear him mention discomfort at creating or withstanding awkwardness. Certain issues get Stewart to come out of his congenial motley though.

What got us here: Stewart recently did a segment on CNBC show hosts making bad calls on investment, mocking their self-proclaimed expertise. Standard, cutting Daily Show fare, which the powerful and noteworthy routinely ignore four days a week. Jim Cramer, one of several skewerees, took particular umbrage at this and (no doubt backed by the network) began an NBC tour of programs defending himself.

Of course, this peacock display prompted an invitation to appear on The Daily Show. The segment that appeared on the show yesterday was 3 minutes. Forget that.

Instead, view this unedited version, about 25 minutes total, and watch a man held to the fire from the knees down.

Having swum in the American TV journalism pool for so long, I'm used to interviewers playing catch and release. They ask a pointed question, the savvy interviewee deflects it, and because there are only 3 minutes allotted to this segment, everyone moves on. (For that reason alone, I have virtually no use for television journalism.)

I'm amazed at how this fails to happen here. Every time a normal TV interviewer would be done, Stewart keeps going. He has not just a tenacity, but a clarity of thinking that refuses to be sidelined by mealy-mouthed interview subjects.

Stewart is tricky, because he jumps around a lot in the interview. But his thrust is: As a member of the media, you have a responsibility to promote truth. You may not be complicit with the corrupt and powerful.

Cramer behaves in a chastised manner, but see, the guy's on TV in his normal TV costume.* ("My sleeves are rolled up really high, because I'm ready to WORK!") By the end of the interview, when they're both making their preparatory closing remarks, it strikes me that Cramer hasn't even fingered, much less grasped, Stewart's point.

So we don't get reform in the media. The best we get is a vision that this is how somebody should be doing journalism.

===

I've started to think of The Daily Show as the 5th estate, our current best answer to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? He is the feudal-era jester, the guy who hung around important people and pointed out their flaws with a yuk and remained untouchable for it.

Therefore, it is wrong to call Stewart a journalist. As he himself will remind you (and as Cramer repeatedly crowed in the beginning stages of this dust-up), he's a comedian. But in the process of satire, he does journalist work. This is the distinction that people fail to make, and it's why young people and stoners (and some other notable demographics) love him like a folk hero. He's whipsmart funny. But if more journalists were doing journalist work, The Daily Show would be a footnote, not a keynote.

Link to full, uncut interview


* Compare his TV costume to the polo he's wearing in the clips Stewart runs -- watch how his persona is different out of his work clothes.

Bailout solution

I figured out how to solve this credit liquidity thing. The treasury doesn't bail out investment banks directly. They bail out the debtors, putting money into the system from the bottom up.

First, the U.S. government pays off all student loans. That's about $45.6 billion, as derived from figures found here.

Next, we selectively pay people's credit card debt. Everybody with a credit score over, say, 700? Your debt is effectively gone.

I have no legal way to know how much money that is, but somewhere I read that $2.2 trillion in the U.S. was charged to credit cards in 2007. Using WAG figures, I'll say that only 75% of that was carried as a balance, and of that number, perhaps 20% is held by people with credit scores 700 or above. That's $330 billion.

Here's why this is great:

• Banks that made bad decisions face consequences for their bad decisions. No bailout.
• However, there IS liquidity now in the hands of lenders. Not the same lenders that were in action before, but please see point 1.
  
• Some of these student loan lenders can now get competitive commercial interest rates for their money rather than the federally mandated lower student interest rates.
  
• About 3 million young, bright, educated people, the people who were willing to take on debt so they could do better in the future, the kind of people you want to give flexibility -- basically, the top 3 million of the next generation -- suddenly have more options.
• The most responsible citizens (as measured by credit rating) are given similar boosts. Thus, people who are wiser with money are given more money to be wise with.
  

With these two groups relieved of significant debt, there's roughly $375 billion back in the system, in the hands of existing credit agencies, who already made the choice to loan money to reputable borrowers, and now have the ability to make further judicious loans to commercial concerns.

This also frees up millions of Americans to spend new money that would have been going to debt repayment. Some will go back into debt. Many, I think, will invest the newfound flexibility.

There are problems with this system. Mainly, it absolves the least risky debt in America, when the problem is with super-risky debt. The super-risky debt is still in the system, and will continue to drag. But maybe that's okay.

As always, Mr. Paulson, my email address is in the right sidebar, and my consulting fees are quite reasonable.

Mr. McCain, please proceed to Mississippi to attend tonight's debate.

Lunchtime

Craigslist does not make as much money as it could. Like, $475M less than it could, sez the Wall Street Journal.

This article is from a couple of weeks ago, but it took me some time to put together what I had to say.

In Mr. Buckmaster's view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street's demands for continually "goosing profitability" and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster's view, from losing sight of that essential goal.

After we've retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there's a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: "It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. "Now, there's something wrong in the reasoning there," he admits. "You can't run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company" -- more points for understatement. "But still, it's a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible." As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist -- and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me -- sometimes seem to come close.

The article says Craigslist employs about 21 people, and makes $25M a year. It's safe to assume that money isn't split evenly among all the employees, but I bet nobody's doing badly either.

The idea that you look to be helpful, and make plenty of money (the Buckmasters live in a nice house, after all) but not as much as you could, is very like what I was talking about when I said we make the economy, the economy does not make us.

You don't take money just because you can. You take a generous amount and leave the rest, because there's just no good reason to have more.

Here's the new scheme: Rather than concentrate the money in a vicious oligarchy, a business takes a fair amount and leaves the rest for other businesses who are also taking a fair amount and leaving the rest. This increases the overall pool of viable businesses, which generates more work for more people, and lower costs on the goods and services that already exist (due both to suppliers taking less than they could, and increased demand).

It wouldn't even be communism. Capitalism would thrive because there would be less punishment for failure. You could recover from a business failure in a fraction of the time it takes currently. It seems counter-intuitive to capitalism as we know it that this would work, but it easily could.

The reason it won't is that a significant number of us won't buy into it. We don't even ALL have to buy into it. Some miserable number of us can still be greedy bastards. Maybe even a miserable majority can continue. As long as a significant minority are willing to run this way, we'll see the rewards.

There might not be any free lunches. But expensive lunches are entirely optional.

O Sole Mio

There's no indie cred for this kind of thing, but I've been an alternate energy goob since the '70s, when we really could have started working on alternate energy and had it make a difference by now. NOT THAT I'M BITTER. Solar energy in particular has always been a big deal to me. It's also always been too expensive.

I'm going to take the scenic route through my economic theory before we get back to solar power.

I've always found Mr. Smith's invisible hand of capitalism suspect, the idea that people acting in a consistently self-interested manner creates a suitable economic equilibrium. This is a pretty idea from 10,000 feet. On the ground, there's a hella lot of misery before equilibrium makes the scene.

In general, economists and mathematicians seem to treat economics as some great, mysterious ocean where we bob like tubs. That's bogus. The economy is what we all do. We can make the economy do whatever we want it to. There is no invisible hand. There is predictable consequence for our choices.

This is not a top 1% thing. This is everybody. Do we want to create more jobs? Then those of us who own businesses can choose to forgo some profit and hire more people. Do we want to slow down inflation? Then we all agree to charge each other less for our services.

This is simplistic, but not very. We just need a common vision and our decisions from there will cause everything else to fall into place. It's happening now. Right now, our common vision is that each person optimally amasses resources for him or herself. This is called "enlightened self-interest" and assumes that we'll all choose to be greedy.

However, we can also choose not to be greedy. We can decide to amass fewer resources as individuals, and give more to other individuals or community purposes. I'm not talking about charity, I'm talking about mutually finding another base assumption besides, "Everyone will be greedy because that's how people are."

Many people would cheat and act greedy anyway, sure, but many people also steal. We can have common behavioral standards which many people break, and retain a functional society.

Yet a number of people draw a weird, crooked line that says, "We believe theft is bad, even though many people steal anyway; however, we won't believe greed is bad, because everybody's greedy, right? Right?"

I'm not making an airtight argument, I know, but stay with me. My point is that we make the economy every day; the economy does not make us. To think differently is to allow yourself to be controlled.

Okay: solar power.

To run your house on solar energy currently costs about 2-5 times as much as buying electricity through your local utility (solarbuzz.com). The argument has been that photovoltaic (PV) cells are too expensive, and it requires open, unclouded sky, and you pay all the infrastructure costs yourself, and a bunch of other reasons. Therefore, common sense economics tell us that solar is nice, but no one will do it because it's too expensive.

If you slogged through my opinion on economics, you can tell I think this is horsefeces. Not because I think we can all magically decide to charge less for solar. Rather, because we've put 250 years and unknown trillions of R&D dollars into making fossil fuels work, whereas we've been working on solar energy seriously for maybe 20 years, funded mainly by government grants. We decided to make fossil fuels more important.

Solar power is not inherently more expensive. Solar power is more expensive because our common vision has valued fossil fuels over solar power. We choose to make solar power more expensive.

Just in this decade though, a small number of us (mostly science-types and venture capitalists) are choosing to find ways to not make solar power more expensive. Newly discovered technology is showing up that makes the whole deal cheaper. Two examples:

• Prism Solar Technologies is making holographic solar collectors to feed PV cell. No big mirror banks, just a rainbow array of holographs that steers light into PV cells. Non-technical explanation here.
• Spheral Solar makes "denim-power," flexible solar cells that look like denim, and use recycled silicon -- silicon shortages become irrelevant.

As more people decide to care about solar power, it will become cheaper. In the next 10 years, solar could replace fossil fuel energy. It won't. We're in for mixed use for a long time. But if we found a common vision, we could be green by 2015. I know that's crazy fast, but it rhymes. Sounded like a nice slogan for somebody, maybe. "Green by 2015!"

It would be very, very hard to do, but not impossible. It's just that we're going to choose to not do it.