Human value: March 2009 Archives

" How much is a trillion dollars? If you would have spend a million dollars every day since the birth of Jesus, you still would have hundreds of millions left today."

Wired News dives into the issue of the rating agencies that gave AAA-ratings to toxic products.

When the CD was first introduced, plenty of record company execs hated it. One says, even now, "I thought [the engineers who designed it] could have done something to stop piracy."

Looking back at the CD era, though, it's clear that those little plastic discs were a goldmine. People loved the new format, many repurchased their collections on CD, and prices for recorded music went way up. How did the industry respond to this windfall? By screwing the artists.

Knopper describes how the labels wrote new contracts to cover the new format, contracts which featured larger "packaging reductions" and "free goods allowances." In addition to the deductions, artist royalty rates were reduced. "After labels factored in these newfangled deductions," Knopper says, "typical artists received roughly 81 cents per disc. Under the LP system, artists made a little more than 75 cents per disc. So labels sold CDs for almost $8 more than LPs at stores, but typical artists made just six cents more per record."

Such practices fueled a CD boom that ran from 1984 through 2000, at which point the bottom began falling out of the industry. After two decades of expensive music--and little support for cheap singles--labels had grown fat on pumping out albums with a couple of hits. 

This puts a different perspective on the cries of the record companies that illegal downloading is hurting culture because artists will not get paid for their efforts. Breaking the habit of an addiction to windfall profits is hard but why should have enyone have mercy on them? 

Yes, one can always find someone who prediceted the future correctly in hindsight. But this one is impressive, especially the ten years estimate... Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota said in 1999, after the Congress passed the bill to erase a lot of bank laws: ''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010. I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''  I am thinking of contacting him for some stock-market advise ;-)

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn't the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city's voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the "Detroit Unreal Estate Agency" and, with Mitch's help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it "a new way of shaping the urban environment." He's particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs.

"Pamela Anderson has more prosthetics in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled."

Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said.

In our series of cool (motor)cycle designs here is the next contestant: The Movito Electric Scooter which recently won NASA's Create the Future Design Contest. From inhabitat. Two bases can be aligned in parallel to form a two-seater vehicle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An expert on risk management told me some interesting statistics on the amount of money people in different countries had stored in Icelandic high-interest accounts. In the UK and The Netherlands a significant amount of people had much more than the government guaranteed limit of money in their account. With the risk of losing this. In Germany, less than 1% had this. Anyone who claims there are no cultural differences in Europe should think this over.

The current crisis has given us new words, billions and trillions. Numbers so large they lose their meaning.  A report of the Asian Development Bank (identified by the analyst at Telco 2.0) puts it in perspective.

As Wall Street firms prepare 2009 technology budgets; a good portion of spending will undoubtedly be focused on reducing data latency. Faster processors, refurbished data centers, new routers, more bandwidth and greater capacity are all needed to manage the industry's growing data volume and the requirement for lower latency. With data latency now measured at millisecond intervals and trading strategies for different asset classes -- options, futures and FX -- now moving aggressively toward algorithmic trading, technology organizations are searching for the best and brightest multi-thread developers to program the fastest and newest technologies in order to stay ahead of the markets. Hardware acceleration, multi-core processing, complex event processing, virtualization and every type technology in the data-latency sensitive lifecycle are being squeezed for every last millisecond of speed.

In the category  "Lies, damned lies and statistics".

Wikileaks is a website where leaked documents can be found. An internal presentation of the Carlyle Group (a large private equity investment firm) on the global crisis was published over here. Looking back it is stunning nobody wanted to see the signs. 

As Robert Pirsig once wrote in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", we humans have an innate ability to recognise quality when we see or hear it. In art, love, music and many other aspects of life. The amazing thing is that we all sense more or less the same, but have a hard time trying to define this quality: words fail us.