Categories
FinTech

So What does the Federal Reserve Do?

I like to listen to economic news at night and recently heard this lady, Nomi Prins, who was a Goldman Sachs manager, then journalist, talk about the history of the Federal Reserve in America. Her book, All the Presidents’ Bankers is a telling of the relationships between US Presidents and powerful bankers from 1907 to the present.

In 1907 there was a potential stock market meltdown, (caused by some bankers (some people are always trying to game the system)) and Teddy Roosevelt called on his friend J.P. Morgan to fix it. That led to the creation of the Federal Reserve in America. So basically the Fed (the US version of a “Central Bank”) acts as a bridge to do what the Government wants in the economy, via handling Government money. Unfortunately, it seems that printing money (called “fractional reserve banking” and “quantitative easing”), and thus devaluing the currency, is what the Fed tends to do, because it’s easier to flood the economy with money than it is to actually solve the economy’s root problems.

And right now, in 2018, it seems like the US is in the middle of a bigger bubble than it was in 2008 when the banking bubble burst, because the US is over 20 trillion in debt, and is at the point of not being able to make interest payments on the debt if the bond market rates keep going up. So buckle your seat belts!

Categories
Education

How to Prevent World-Destruction?

In order that world-destruction be prevented, the “late-time” ego-culture must be stopped in its tracks. The pond-water into which Narcissus is gazing must be stirred to deep.

–The World-Teacher, Adi Da, from Not-Two Is Peace, the essay “You The People: On The Necessity of A Global Cooperative Order of The All of Humankind”, page 157, 3rd edition.

Basically everyone-all-at-once must feel the “Depth”, the prior unity, in order to stop dramatizing egoity. The first thing  to do is to assert you’re a human being, you’re part of the human race:

First and foremost, people are members of the totality of humankind. Therefore, everyone should actively participate in the global cooperative. That is how it ought to be.

Prior Unity is the native state of humankind.

–from Prior Unity, The Basis For A New Human Civilization, by the World-Friend, Adi Da

Best to read the essay… or buy the books and read them both!

Categories
tech

The Mobile Internet Is The Internet

Think back to the mobile phone you had in 2010. It could access the internet, but it wasn’t such a great experience. On average, people only spent 20% of their time online on their phones back then, according to Zenith, a media agency. Today, by contrast, we spend around 70% of our time on the internet on phones, based on estimates and forecasts for more than 50 countries covering two-thirds of the world’s population. By 2019, Zenith says this will rise to close to 80%. What used to be called “mobile internet” is now just the internet.

Categories
Participation

Warriors Basketball & The Urge to Participate

I’m taking some quotes from a basketball story and an essay from my teacher, Adi Da. The Golden State Warriors are a basketball team that I enjoy watching because their style of passing and cooperation on the court is fun to watch.

Quotes are from the article: The Charcuterie Board That Revolutionized Basketball

“There’s a makeup in every player who’s ever played,” Kerr says, “that if you get to touch the ball and you get to be a part of the action — whether it’s as an assist man, ball mover, shooter, dribbler — the more people who are involved in the offense, the more powerful it becomes.”

Kerr had played four seasons (and won two titles) under Spurs coach Gregg Popovich and had admired how the Spurs’ passing helped foster a selfless, team-first culture.

“It wasn’t just play your best five guys to death,” Kerr says. “It was play everybody. You go deep into your rotation, even if it means losing a couple of games in the regular season, just empower everybody. It’s kind of the beauty of basketball, the old cliché about the total being greater than the sum of its parts — I believe in all of that.

Here’s a short essay from the booklet, Prior Unity, The Basis for A New Human Culture, by the World-Friend, Adi Da, page 61

The Urge to Participate

The fundamental urge in humankind-as-a-whole is to participate – not to be shut down, not to be thrown back on themselves, not to be treated merely as consumers who want this, that, and the other thing.

People want the opportunity of participation.

All over the world, the energy of participation is what should be tapped.

Instead of addressing everybody in terms of their problems, their “self”-interest, their consumer mentality, their egoity, address them as people who are patterns of energy wanting to participate.

The human world is an energy of participation.

Therefore, it needs a pattern by which people can participate.

The pattern must be provided.

Categories
tech

Summary of The Coming Software Apocalypse Article

Abstraction Astronaut (Joel Sposky mentioned "Architecture Astronaut" in his blog posts.

A small group of programmers wants to change how people code—before catastrophe strikes. — from the Atlantic Magazine

  • Basic Premise: Code is getting too complicated–how to make it work better for humans?
  • Example: Problem with 911 calls going out due to simple counter bug
  • Software is “eating the world” but unexpected complications create havoc
  • Engineering is 1950s state of thinking: simple failures.
  • Problem with code is that the complexity is invisible.
  • Example of hackers remotely taking over a self-driving car.
  • John Resig, creator of javascript, tech lead at Khan Academy, wondered why learning programming is so tough. He watched a talk by Bret Victor in Montreal in 2012, (Inventing on Principle), about how programming is broken, and how to fix it.
  • Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
  • Bret wants to work with images instead of abstract text.
  • Programming should be visual like WYSIWYG programs.

Example Pic:

Demo of WYSIWYG program
Demo of WYSIWYG program: slider on right controls animation on left.
  • Airplane engineering has dealt with complexity by writing SCADE product family (for safety-critical application development environment)
  • Think: MDE (model driven engineering), so you write logical templates, not hand-written code.
  • Documentation is another area where what people want can differ from the code that gets created.
  • “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.”
  • Programmers tend to be pragmatic and distrust the theoretical, ivory-tower stuff, which also works against programming improvements.