Geek Heretic

Think you have all the answers? Want to fix the federal government’s spending policy? Up all night worrying about national debt as a percentage of GDP?

Boy do I have a game for you.  Budget Hero is a flash game which allows you to modify the spending of the US Government program by program.  Its an interesting balancing act, as you try to balance spending on national security vs healthcare and social security, just to keep the country afloat.  You pick and choose what cards you want to play (an example would be cut military spending by 10% or eliminate 1/2 of pork barrel projects), and based on that your years till bust meter rises and falls.

The results are pretty grim overall, even playing as a complete bastard libertarian (smaller government, economic stimulus, and alternative energies as my focus) I still was only able to keep the budget going until 2058.  (EDIT - I was able to extend my budget indefinitely by shrinking government by 20% and slashing military spending and social security)

Give it a shot, I would be interested to hear what your best budget is.  Keep in mind that there are some lefty biases built into the modeling. For example implementing CO2 caps results in an economic stimulus since the east coast doesn’t become water logged due to global warming. It’s still and interesting thought exercise and balancing act.

Quite a bit of the mortgage issues, sub prime or no, stems from the premise that you can loan money to people on ridiculous terms, because the value of the home was rising so rapidly, and by the time problems would hit, the increased home value would have lent the person enough equity to refinance out of danger.

Of course we now know that this was a false premise. The first victims of the home value slow down was the folks, and lenders who specialized in ARMS with killer maturity clauses. The second wave of issues is now beginning to crest. Thats the crunch on second mortgages.

Second mortgages are financed out of home equity, and with the values of homes on the slow down, and decline in some area’s, big lenders are starting to bail on this market. Case in point, Chase is shutting down its home equity wholesale lines.

From Blown Mortgage

“First and foremost I would like to thank you for the business you have sent
and I appreciate the opportunity to have worked with you. Unfortunately,
given the market conditions Chase Home Finance has made the decision to
eliminate the Home Equity Channel. Effective end of day Friday May 16, 2008
Chase Home Equity will no longer accept applications for home equity
products. All new applications/registrations must be received by end of
day on Friday (5-16-08) and all pipeline deals must fund by 7/15/08. Rate
lock extensions will not be available.”

I’m not a big book review person, honestly because I believe books (and movies) are such a subjective choice, that a reviewers opinion is rarely pertinent.  At best you can try to find a reviewer who has reviewed several works you have read already and try to mesh up his opinions with yours.

That being said, What I want to write about is the tragedy of the book Reliquary by Preston and Child.  This book is 11 years old, but it stands out as being one of the best reads I have had in a while.  It is the sequel to the novel Relic, and while I enjoyed Relic, this book blows it out of the water.  Here is the science based mystery and suspense of Jurassic park, with the nerve biting action of Aliens.  

It is a tragedy because this book should be made into a movie, and probably never will.  You see Hollywood got its hands on the prequel work and butchered it, into a low brow, average monster movie.  They moved the novel out of the NY Museum of Natural History, into Chicago (which is a shame, because a large portion of the suspense came from the sheer vast maze of the NYMNH), and turned it into a stock monster flick with little originality.   FBI Agent Pendergast, who ties this novel into quite a few others, and Bill Smithback- future NY Post Reporter, are excised completely.

Reliquary is to Relic, like Aliens is to Alien.  Much faster paced, more action, and vaster scale.  It moves the action from NYMNH to the vast train and sewer tunnel network under Manhattan.   The action is nonstop and has been causing me to be short on sleep for the last few nights.  

Read the book Relic just to setup Reliquary, and read the later, when you can afford to miss the sleep.

Iron Man and the Avengers were my two favorite comics back in the day. Iron Man because he was the plausible (to my youthful eye) superhero in the Marvel Universe. Here was someone bending technology to his well, and using it in a heroic manner. Avengers because they had Iron Man and were a truly dysfunctional family.

It was with cautious optimism I went to the Iron Man preview last night. True the trailers were great, and the effects looked awesome, but Marvel had betrayed its fans before.

I shouldn’t have worried. Robert Downey Jr, had a sarcastic flamboyant, attitude which marks the Ultimate Avengers Flavor of Tony Stark, as opposed to the Howard Hughes, reserved James Bond, version of the original Iron Man. Honestly, he rocked the part. I can’t imagine anyone playing the role better.

This is an origin story, so a significant portion of the film, takes place before the suit comes on. This is necessary to walk the character of Tony Stark through a crash course in character growth and responsibility. Thats ok, because Downey is so entertaining to watch, that his initial steps down the path of hero’dom had the audience rolling. The climatic fight was a bit rushed but still a fun battle.

Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane was a fantastic villain. I didn’t recognize him without his hair, but he walks the line of father figure, and evil mastermind with surprising ease, I hope to see him playing the heavy more often.

There is some great fan service in this movie as well. Iron Man fans will love the setup lines for a future appearance of the Mandarin, and if you were warned to stay through the credits, you got to see Samuel L Jackson as the new Nick Fury and the avenger movie setup line. Shield agents are a background presence through much of the movie. Hillary Swank, thought to play Black Widow, did not make an appearance in this movie, supposedly her whole involvement was a bit of misdirection by the producers. My only disappointment is Happy Hogan (cameo’d by director John Favreau) did not have his trademark bowler hat.

The Hulk is out this summer, Captain America is slated for 2009 according to IMDB, but there are so little details about the movie out, I would be surprised if they hit that date. The folks over at AICN say there is a fantastic Thor script floating around, which would be the last principle hero needed to do the avengers. Giant Man and Wasp are supporting characters even in the original comics.

Lets hope the Cap and Thor movies do well enough for Samuel L Jackson to get his chance to play more then a cameo Nick Fury, and for all of us fanboys out there to hear…. Avengers Assemble.

The idea of closed software for voting machines is a scary concept. Like crypto software you want to make sure as many people as possible are looking at the guts of your software and poking holes in it. Otherwise the possibility of manipulation, and unintentional mistakes altering the vote, are high. Of course there are those who argue that this is intentional but lets assume for the sake of argument, they are just being paranoid.

Case in point, Ed Felton, a Princeton University computer scientist, was asked to investigate why the voting machine tally, in Pennsauken District 6, indicated 1 additional vote then was actually recorded and reported by the county clerk. The clerks numbers came from the memory card, the machine tally from a paper tape. In this case the tape showed 95 votes for Obama vs the 94 recorded by the clerk. (H/T to Wired Threat Level for this one)

Sequoia and Diebold have both threatened legal action against academic institutions if they attempt to reverse engineer their code. Deborah Bowen state senator from California has been a vocal proponent of greater viability in the electronic voting systems. First publishing numerous papers regarding the insecurity of the electronic voting machines under review in her districts and also in speeches to her district.

“You cannot maintain a democracy where a significant number of people have doubts about the legitimacy of an election,” Bowen said. She criticized Secretary of State McPherson for certifying on Feb. 17 voting systems made by Diebold Election Systems of Canton, Ohio, whose CEO made campaign contributions to the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign.

“This is not a company we ought to be doing business with,” she said.

Conflicts of interest, she said, abound throughout the voting system, including the ways in which ballots are processed, counted and verified, and in partisan oversight of the system.

From Bowen slams voting systems in S.C. speech

What can you do? Write your local congressmen and secretary of state, and take a look at the Open Voting Consortium.. This is a group dedicated to producing free open source voting software.

This is the movie I want to see. Get ready to kick some ash… 

TPMF and others have blogged about this, so i will avoid reblogging but readers worried about our economy should take a look at both his article at the Slate article.  In essence this problem goes far beyond subprime lending.  The slate artcle documents high deliquencies, and defaults on a group of mortgages where the average credit score was 705.

If what the articles are saying are true, the mortgage industry needs a serious reboot.

If 70 % of america disapproves of the job which congress is currently doing (real clear politics) why would the parties put forth congressmen and women as their presidential candidates? The numbers havent been good for a while, it would seem to me with poor poll ratings like this, maybe its time to start rummaging through the governor bin or perhaps a few top CEO. Hmm… Jesse Ventura is currently unemployed…

The fact of the mater is this election will be between 2 people, neither of whom is really wanted by the American people. If we are given no good choices, do we get to chuck the lot of em and start over?

And a note to all of you folks out there voting for Barack because he’s black, or Hillary because she’s a woman. Get over yourselves. The idea that a woman or black man should be president because they are a woman or a black man, is just moronic. Your pandering to a gross generalization which has little to do with positions or issues and which you would stridently oppose in any other circumstance. Vote for the candidate whose opinions and views match your own.

I have written in the past how Google could theoretically shape a persons perceptions by tweaking the algorithm for search results to promote one point of view over the other. A similar possibility exists in wikipedia. Wiki’s editors are human, and have their own thoughts and opinions about the topics they edit. The democratic nature of the system is supposed to prevent a persons opinion from coloring the articles which they edit.

Then came this article from Lawrence Solomon over at the National Post, concerning the wikipedia article about Naomi Oreskes. Naomi Oreskes claim to fame was the paper Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. This paper reviewed numerous peer reviewed journal articles which supposedly disagreed with the UN stance on Global Warming, and determined that there was no disagreement. Solomon contacted a few of the scientists referenced by Oreskes article and found they disagreed with her assessment of their opinion. Like a good netizen, he attempted to modify the wiki article, to reflect this, only to set off a firestorm of edits and re-edits which eventually caused the folks over at Wiki to lock the article till the mess could be sorted out.

What surprised Solomon was how quickly his changes were undone. So quick, that he questioned whether he had correctly saved them in the first place. This means that certain sections of wiki are constantly monitored for changes, to protect a particular position. Not hard to do, but the diligence of this was surprising to me.

If you wish to promote a particular point of view or remove those embarrassing facts from your past, its not unknown for folks with an agenda to hire people to monitor and modify their articles connected to their interests. Even the Criticism of Wikipedia page acknowledges this with the following:

While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, it is not immune from attempts by outsiders (or insiders) with an agenda to place a spin on articles. In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses’ biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on U.S. Senator Bill Frist and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address which is assigned to the House of Representatives.^[57] In an interview, Wikipedia de facto leader Jimmy Wales^[9] remarked that the changes were “not cool.”^[58]

When you are looking for a quick fact check, or background information, wiki is a seductive solution. Here in one place is a collection of articles and information indexed and cross referenced so you don’t need to do the heavy lifting yourself. However the veracity of these articles, and the bias of the contributors should give a reader pause.

The incredible number of people who hit wiki everyday for information, are largely unconcerned that the articles are not on par with the Brittanica or other volumes of renown. Nor do they concern themselves that the articles they are reading may not represent both sides of an issue. They are just info junkies looking for a quick fix, and their perceptions and opinions are up for grabs by anyone who wants to spend the time and energy to shape them.