Business
Matt Haughey reveals the utter bullshit that is the credit scoring system in the US. While in college, Haughey racked up debt because he was amazed that anyone would give him credit. His credit lines kept growing, as did his credit score, since he wasn’t paying much, if any, of the debt off. Several years later Haughey and his wife paid off all their consumer debt, closing unused credit card accounts, and began using a debit card instead of credit cards. Reducing his use of credit, closing unused accounts, stocking his retirement account, and paying ahead on his mortgage was rewarded with a lowering of his credit score from the 800s to the high 600s because he opened a new credit card account with a lower line of credit. “I had the highest credit score at a time in my life when I was leveraged to the hilt and I lived paycheck to paycheck,” writes Haughey. “Now that I have my own business, a healthy retirement, and can pay for everything I need/want, I have a low score and I’m dubbed a higher risk even though my ability to pay is very high. I used to think a credit score was all about your ability to pay, but it’s clear now it’s more about how profitable you will be to banks.”
Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist since 1991 and the investment bank’s nonexecutive chairman for Asia, told CNBC that it’s imperative to get consumers spending again in the US and that consumer debt forgiveness may be necessary. Roach told a presumably shocked host that while a stronger dollar and higher interest rates would work, he preferred a more direct approach: “… ways to forgive the excesses of mortgage, installment, and revolving credit, as what was done in the 1930s, that will help consumers get through the pain of deleveraging sooner rather than later.” Roach went on to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the bankers: “… they’re the ones who wrote the bad loans and they’re the ones who had the free ride. There’s no gain without some pain and we have to decide who in society has to bear the brunt of that.”
If you thought the housing bubble was a wild ride, buckle up for the coming higher education bubble. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, writing for the Atlantic, published a stunning analysis of the student loan crisis that this fall will close in on US$1 trillion. Middle class families traditionally paid for college educations for the kids with savings, but now two-thirds of all undergraduates carry education debt which, according to the College Board, averages US$27,650. And that’s non-dischargable debt that never, ever goes away. But it took Daniel Indiviglio’s chart a day later to really make this sink in. Since 1999, student loans have grown by an absolutely shocking 511 percent. That dwarfs US household debt that is currently growing at about 150 percent.
Steve Jobs has resigned as Apple’s chief executive effective 24 August 2011.
ESRD
Google has agreed to pay US$500 million to settle charges by the US Justice Department that it published ads for illegal pharmacies. The Justice Department claims it’s one of the largest forfeitures in history. According to Haley Tsukayama, writing for the Washington Post, “The fee reflects the revenue Google generated from the advertising revenue made through Canadian pharmacies, plus the gross revenue the pharmacies made from sales to US customers.” Never mind that the US drug reimportation law is a sham to protect exorbitant profits by big pharma.
Internet
Everyone’s been wondering what Ev Williams and Biz Stone would be up to after co-founding Twitter and leaving. The pair’s first project is a partnership with Lift, an application “for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement.” Because my academic background (both undergraduate and graduate) is in humanistic psychology, I’m interested in the human potential aspects of the app for obvious reasons. I’m also pretty skeptical and somewhat wary — but intrigued, nonetheless — with the “positive reinforcement” bit. Sounds a little Stuart Smalley on the surface. The project is driven by Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby; Williams and Stone will provide funding, recruiting, and strategy through Obvious Corporation.
Law
Harold Feld has an excellent analysis of the BART cellular telephone incident from the perspective of a telecommunications lawyer. “If BART gets away with including ‘we can shut down cell phone service’ in its tool box you can guarantee that other local law enforcement agencies will start copying this –- and all for the best of reasons,” writes Feld. “Because what could possibly go wrong when you pull the plug on a critical piece of infrastructure whenever some local police chief or city council person or whoever decides they need to do something about these ‘flash mobs’ or ‘rioters’ or whatever?”
Media
Bill Moyers may be returning to a public broadcasting channel near you next year. Or maybe not. Moyers’s new show, Moyers & Company, will be distributed at no charge by American Public Television to local public broadcasting stations. But the show will not air on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) nationally. According to Elizabeth Jensen, writing for the New York Times, Moyers had received US$2 million in funding from the Carnegie Corporation, but PBS “couldn’t find an appropriate time slot.” Jensen reports the new Moyers show “will focus on one-on-one interviews with people not often heard on television.” Someone remind me what the function of public broadcasting is again.
Politics
Fed up with the hypocrisy of the US Republican party yet? Really? If they have their way, those who earn US$50,000 will pay US$1,000 more in taxes; those who earn US$100,000 will pay US$2,000 additional tax. Unless you’re self-employed; in which case, you can double those amounts. That’s earned income, not investment income, of course. And it doesn’t apply to annual earned income of more than US$106,800. Republicans want to raise the payroll tax from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent. As Harold Meyerson, writing for the Washington Post, observes, “Unlike the capital gains tax, or the low tax rates for the rich included in the Bush tax cuts, or the carried interest tax for hedge fund operators (which is just 15 percent), the payroll tax chiefly hits the middle class and the working poor.” Unless Congress extends the existing rates, the higher rates will go into effect 1 January 2012. Fed up yet?
In a stunning analysis of the current dance between President Obama, his administration, and Wall Street, Robert Scheer, writing for truthdig, gets to the heart of the matter. Obama and his administration are cutting a deal whereby the bankers will be let off the hook for the banking scandal. In exchange for US$20 billion, the bankers will be held blameless for their actions that have “cost US homeowners US$6.6 trillion in home equity in the past five years and left 14.6 million Americans owing more than their homes are worth.” The only thing standing in the way are a few state attorney generals who can’t quite cotton the banks walking away with “cash subsidies, virtually zero-interest loans, and the Fed [taking] US$2 trillion in bad paper off their hands.” Obama’s administration is intimidating those few state attorney generals, mostly through Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who’s been playing this game for a long time and is up to his eyeballs in conflicts of interest.
Privacy
comScore, the online data tracking service, is facing allegations that it harvests confidential information including passwords, credit card information, and Social Security numbers in a proposed class-action lawsuit. Dan Levine and Jim Finkle, writing for Reuters, reports that comScore also “… scans all files on users’ personal computers and modifies security settings….”
Publishing
MediaBugs received an error report on a Thomas Friedman New York Times column from 2009. Accordingly, MediaBugs contacted Friedman and the Times. Friedman agrees that the column should be corrected. The Times refuses to fix the error, telling MediaBugs that “the error is too old to fix.” The Times editors refused to be quoted and referred MediaBugs to its communications department “for an official statement.” Here it is: “For practical reasons, the New York Times opinion pages do not customarily correct minor errors that are more than a year old.” Friedman reported that President George H.W. Bush (Bush the First) had signed the Rio Treaty while arguing that US “Republicans can claim as much credit for America’s environmental leadership as Democrats.” He didn’t and they can’t; not exactly a minor error for the US paper of record.
Sustainability
Who has a better take on the future of cities than novelist William Gibson? Cities take on the elements of characters in his work. Gibson has written an essay for Scientific American on the importance of cities. An interview about the essay is also available.
User experience
Mike Rohde’s excellent Sketchnotes for An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011 (.pdf; 6.5MB) is available on the An Event Apart website. Sketchnotes are a method of visual note taking and are quite effective for some. Others may prefer straight text; for those, Luke Wroblewski’s An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011 notes are also available.
Sam Tanner nails why paying attention to detail is important: “An apostrophe is the difference between a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it’s shit #apostropheday.”
Stephanie Hay has a great piece on integrating content into the development process by creating a message hierarchy. “What if we all start with a set of primary messages that should be conveyed to users, and then create the visual and interactive experience around those?”
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The blotter: Week ending 28 August 2011 was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Sunday, 28 August 2011 at 2:01 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)