obviously I didnt go back and publish the unfinished posts

rant: credit scores.

I just heard somebody on a news program, obviously talking about personal financial responsibility/success, say that they thought it was a shame that you have to pay to see your credit score, but that at least you can see your credit history and if you can clean that up your score should get better. and another commentator made the comment wouldnt it be great if the government could give you that number.

my eyes went red with rage.

My first thought was, no, it would be great if there wasnt an artificial monopoly in the space of credit scores and if another company could come in and create a score that more accurately predicted the rate of defaults.

My next thought, was, why does anybody think that the government should be involved with lending money to the general populace.

My next thought was, why does our government operate at a significant deficit. and then I just closed my eyes, wrote a few sentences and got back to work. Let the world work its magic.

I have an assload of old unfinished posts

so, at some point, there may be a flurry of random not polished not complete statements just to clear out the edit posts page.

I was planning on writing a tirade about fiat money and the world economy and things, but I will let it ruminate.

progess

lets assume we have exponential growth, and that as we grow we put safegaurds in place as we realize flaws and risks associated with our growth. growth drives growth. safegaurds are behind by some time, lets ignore that most safegaurds are legislative and thus naturally wouldnt be able to keep up as bottlenecks clog. Even permitting that there will still be a lag of time between preventing catastrophe.

this is something Ive thought much about, and yet another things Ive just determined is a risk we have to live with for progress. at some point risks arise, and there is no ideal way to mitigate them. so we live with it. its funny.

side by side comparison of facebook to google. thought it would be at least mildly interesting to think about since with buzz google is now trying to link in all their services which compete directly with facebooks features.

facebook photo albums, versus picassa

facebook events versus google calendar

facebook news feed versus buzz

facebook notes versus blogspot

facebook chat versus gchat

facebook has applications, but the internet has better applications, and google owns search. ... not to mention that google has app engine http://code.google.com/appengine/

now, facebook has a more tightly integrated set of features, but google has an advantage in that it obviously leads as a mail and search giant.

what does facebook do that gives it the advantage. What aspects of the social network are better? what aspects of the search giant are better

had more to write up about this, but ended there and dont mind it as is.

incompatible systems

my(old) new interest area,

interaction between incompatible systems (e.g. men women, various cultures, various political systems, various political parties), what makes some destroy one another while others tend to subjugate one another while others strike up a balance that entertains new entrants and others balance but destroy new entrants.

still interested in this topic, but need to find a route for thinking about it framing it, such that similarities can be drawn across diverse subject matter

google wave

I personally think that google wave is going to be the coolest thing ever, and Ive been thinking about it a little bit, and Ive come up with a couple ideas, and I feel like I will eventually be thinking up more, about how google wave could be extended to make it even better than it already is.

so yeah .... a few ideas I have had for google wave.

first, implementing sms alerts for everybody in a wave, since Ive started consolidating my contact lists I feel like when you get to some consensus in a wave it makes sense to be able to alert everybody via the easiest method. Obviously, the future of the wave is such that updates will be displaying on their mobile device via the internet, but for the time being, it makes sense to have a push system, such that some section of the wave could be highlighted and sent out as a text to all the people currently involved in the wave. allowing some way to unsubscribe from this makes sense, but implementation details clearly arent ironed out yet. so, probably a list that you need to join within a wave, possibly just a gadget. also need to have some way to prevent spamming in case somebody wants to just be a jerk. time limit between updates, or something, so that people could go into the wave if they are bothered by a couple in a row,

second. making a group of waves a programming project. start a new account, and share waves that are associated as classes with that way. this account, via some formatting method of comments at the top of any given wave, could act as the central repository for a code base. given a waves ability to roll back, it would allow for a robust method of testing and checking code in, would allow for simultaneous collaboration in code and would allow for rapid development. Things to consider involve security, if this account is compiling code that is entered in a wave, all collaborators of any class need to be trusted. but that is pretty much true with any coding project, so it just becomes a matter of having a priviledge system in place, who can grant access and who can revoke and such. Other things to consider are language support, how the waves are exported, what type of syntax to use for committing, how to roll back to a former stage, although a copy of the whole former stage and a paste over the whole wave, with a notification of who performed it and an update of the version number seems to be sufficient.

thidly, integrating waves. say I wanted to have a business wave, with public announcements, announcements for only executives, and things for all managers and above. could segment things, and then have a method of dropping a segment into a lower level. would be useful for a number of situations, could have different rules. could be allowed to move people between levels of access with different rules, x people in group a need to approve a person from group b before they are allowed access, or single person vetoes, anything is possible. who knows.

Entitlement

I read something today that I found rather interesting.   

"Merrill Lynch & Co Chief Executive John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million" 

I responded in my away message with the quote and "its kinda sad that this isnt the craziest thing Ive heard about this whole economic crisis."  

But is it really that crazy. Thain's own justification was that he helped to orchestrate the buyout of merrill lynch by BOA, and that this buyout created the differnce between the company going under and the company staying alive in some form.  

Now, that means his decisions were probably worth more than ten million dollars, but to be honest the situation was at least partially his own fault, so, directing people to rowboats and to get life vests on a sinking ship shouldnt really warrant a bonus if you were the guy crashing the ship. (although I guess it would be worse if you didnt and just let everybody die) 

But this brought attention to the fact that people in my own company were talking about entitlement for their own bonuses and other pleasantries afforded by my working condition (flexible hours, free lunch on occasion and snacks in the kitchen with a small donation jar).  

Now is where I am getting into the actual thinking that I am undergoing. 

Should people be paid for the effect of their decisions? I am currently imagining a system where benefits of decision making processes on large scale are tracked and traced up and down trees to assign blame or reward. Thus if you were the HR director for marketing and one marketing division failed, but the majority of the people responsible for poor choices were appointed by your own decisions you would be to blame.  

But, doesnt the CEO deserve some entitlement? There must be some level in the company or some distance from events that leaves somebody immune to its effects. Yet if the company goes under because of a few people's decisions everybody is negatively effected.  

Also, who decides what the strength of all the connections are? If I am in HR and hire a super genius who doubles our profit in two days how much of that do I deserve? There needs to be distinction between what the person in the position did versus what somebody else would do, and how valuable their expertise in the situation was at the point in time.  

Clearly the methods of compensation are gray at best. But asking for a 10 million dollar bonus from a company that just sank and was only righted because it was worth so little to the open market that competition swooped in to buy up the rest at wholesale seems a bit ridiculous.  

After finishing school I felt entitled to a job that paid what I thought was industry average. And to be fair, it seems about right. But I dont think my salary should have been set until some level of productivity had been determined about how much money I should be making based on how much money I was making my company.