Item #3:
If you read only one 1,000-word article on the robo-signing MERS
mortgage/foreclosure mess, read this one. It is remarkably concise and
well-written and lays out the banks' culpability very clearly.
Item #4:
The commercialization of microcredit
Sacrificing Microcredit for Megaprofits
Micro-lending innovator Muhammad Yunus describes the "mission
drift" which
is making the microcredit movement into a global profit center. The
alternative
model to conventional banking--that is, maximize profit
and leverage--is to
make each borrower an "owner" of the revenue stream from the
micro-loans.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the profit motive but
it's
useful to recall that there are competing ways of organizing capital and
lending. Here is one description of such an alternative value
system.
Item #5:
Personal Loans and Online Investing - Peer to Peer Lending
The idea here is to bypass the conventional banking sector by
arranging
loans from person-to-person and enterprise-to-enterprise via the
peer-to-peer
model.
Many people are pursuing extensions of the peer-to-peer model. It
seems
verification and trust are key issues. Some believe that a
self-organizing
oversight such as "Yelp!" might work: if someone cheats someone, they
would be
revealed on a Yelp-type review network and their ability to rip off
others would
be significantly reduced.
Money and legal contracts are both systems of trust. Thus
they
involve some risk. On the other hand, we should recall that Modern
Capitalism was constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries with letters
of credit
that funded trade, as there wasn't enough gold or silver to fund the
rising
volume of trade transactions. Word of mouth probably weeded out the
untrustworthy back then, too.
Item #6:
What Should Food Look Like? (via G.F.B.)
This design piece references an article which made a big splash a
few weeks
ago:
These pieces made me think of Japan's vast snack-food industry in
which
novelty is taken to extremes. There's nothing mysterious in food-snack
novelty:
in mature economies which can easily feed their populace, then selling
carrots
and grains offers little profit margin. But if you can package
those cheap
ingredients into costly tidbits with excellent mouth-feel and a
marketing buzz,
the profits can be immense.
One marker of "class in America" is gullibility.
Upper-class
people know not to trust used-cars lots (alas, a fading business model,
thanks
to online appraisals of used-car valuations), late-night TV infomercials
and the
like. The upper-class perspective is that of the marketer, while that of
the
lower classes is of the consumer, and especially the "aspiring" consumer
who
desires affordable totems and markers of their own self-worth.
One dominant force in American culture is instant gratification.
Foods
which can be purchased, ripped open and consumed on the spot play to the
cultivated sense that if we're eating fast food and packaged food, it
means we
"don't have time" for "real food," and this "busy-ness" is itself a
marker of
our aspirations.
In other words, if we buy pre-sized carrot pieces rather than take
2
minutes to peel a carrot ourselves, it says that we're too busy for such
mundane
tasks: we have places to go, people to meet and things to do.
Healthy "upper class" households keep it simple: there are no
packaged
foods, snacks or fast food in the house and hence no temptations. Opting
out of
the entire consumerist aspirational perspective is difficult, but less
so if
you're in the class which inhabits the perspective of the marketer
rather than
that of the consumer.
Item #7:
Social Media and "Vernacular
Culture"
Reader Jean S. made a number of excellent points in a recent
email:
"You make a crucially important point in today's blog entry.
(
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan11/situational-shared-awarene
ss01-11.html"Situational
Awareness and Shared Awareness")
Your blog and a few others
inoculate a
great many people with situational
awareness, but we have no common
meeting
ground, and hence no
opportunity for development of shared
awareness.
Somehow, we need to
know each other and know how to communicate with
each
other, and I don't
think anybody has yet created a meeting hall
where that
can happen. The
"Reply" appendage to some blogs doesn't do
it. I
despair scanning the
comments following Kunstler's blog entries,
always
beginning with the
incredibly inane "First" and moving on from there
with
petty arguments
over irrelevancies and self-aggrandizing, blathering
dissertations. We
need, somehow, to all be in the same room in
order
to know that
everybody else get's it too to begin to take the next
step to
do
something about it. You have nailed the problem!
Maybe we can
look to
you for insight in creating a solution."
I see social media as in its infancy. Right now it's seen as a
marketing
channel--adverts displaying Hello Kitty toys if you mention "kittens" in
your
email or Facebook entry--or as a private-network channel in which we
each
establish our own networks and distribute "content" about ourselves to
the
channel.
I think social media could become much more useful. For
example:
fellow bicyclist and oftwominds reader Maclean recently recommended that
I
forego the duct-tape repair of my bicycle seat in favor of finding a
local
craftsperson who could refurbish the seat cover with leather or faux
leather.
I would like to pursue this, but the process is arduous now: I have
to sort
through hundreds of listings on craigslist, or place an advert there, or
do a
bunch of web searches.
If social media were developed to aid small-scale commercial
enterprises,
then I would be able to go to a single aggregator of such enterprises
and either
find a craftsperson quickly, or access the collective knowledge of the
network
with a short query.
Craftspeople could share a portion of the revenues
generated by
the network, or the advert income--some "sharing" of both resources and
income
would make it attractive to join multiple social media
"guilds".
As I have noted before, the majority of our income flows to a
handful
of large-scale cartels and the Central/Local State. Local
enterprise
atrophies when mostof a community's revenues flow to global
concentrations of
power and wealth.
Social Media could do so much more leveraging of small-scale local
enterprises. The initial costs of starting such networked guilds would
be
relatively modest; the field is wide open. Yelp offers one model
of
recommendations, but it's not organized in any systemic fashion, nor is
it
operated by local enterprises.
Yelp could overlay a much more directed social media network aimed
at
promoting local small-scale enterprises.
These are just initial thoughts on an enormous and important
subject.
The Chinese have really mastered the visual and musical
extravaganza. This
is a fun few minutes.
Our friends in the Shanghai region reported that the lines were
horrendous
at the Expo, as was the summer heat.
A riveting and wrenching account of the Vietnam War by one who
lived
it, told in a style which evokes the post-traumatic syndrome the author
experienced after his tour of duty as a Marine Corps grunt in Vietnam
circa
1967.
This week's quote of note: (via U. Doran)
"Depressions are when money comes back to its rightful
owners."
J.P.
Morgan
Thanks for reading--
charles hugh smith
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