Oh ya

New Lindstromm & Prins Thomas album!!
Also Prins Thomas - Live @ Robert Johnson mix
Meanderthals - Desire Lines <--super balearicish, actually all three of the above should be
A-Trak - Infinity + 1 <--could be good party mix, could be horrible blog-house

I have not bought or downloaded any new music in a least a month! Well except for RA podcasts...that Culoe de Song one was pretty good. But really! Stupid moving has thrown me way off.

Also to check

Was just listening to this song, that I got from, I believe, the DJHistory forum's "Top 25 Balearic Tunes" list, and I was pretty excited to discover she had an album back in '88, so let's add Mandy Smith - Mandy to the list of albums I should check. But more importantly, have you seen the outfit she's wearing on that record cover?? It's INCREDIBLE! Gigantic tasseled shoulderpads and no pants is totally a boss look.

OH NOES MAN EATING LOBSTERS!!

Ok let's start this game again: Music to check

Pheonix - Wolfgang Amadeus Pheonix --could be annoying over-compressed indie-electro, could be very enjoyable dancey pop
Juan Maclean - The Future Will Come --it's got Happy House on it, what more is there to say?
Kris Menace-Idiosyncrasies --should be hella dope big room electro-house
Was gonna say the new royksopp but thankfully dan has that now! So there's that issue fixed.

Damn, as always, I could have sworn that there was more but I just can't remember.

+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+

Anyway, posts have been thin on the ground here recently, which I would excuse because I've been doing moving related things, but then I realized that I post most while at work so this story hardly holds now doesn't it? I guess work has been busy too. How lame are those excuses? It is very, very easy to move through time.

(ps. no man eating lobsters were hurt in the writing of this post, except for OH GOD NO IT'S TRYING TO EAT ME DIE DIE DIE YOU SLAVERING CRUSACEOID HORROR!!!)

"Deep into the bowels of house music..."

I never did a "best of 2008" list, much to my own chagrin, and now I can't really remember what I would have said was my favorite album of year was. But the more I listen to it, the more DJ Sprinkles's Midtown 120 Blues, released late 2008 and not heard by me until 2009, has become quite possibly my favorite album of last year. The most intelligent house album, about house music, i have heard, possibly ever? And beautiful, deep lush piano, warm warm beats, not so much for dancing as for inhabiting a mindset where dancing is assumed to already be happening, and instead you can sit there and think about why people would dance in the first place. But that's not fair either, because this is not a cold, cerebral album, it is warmth and caring, soothing the pains and cares of the world. When you're tired on a Monday morning after moving boxes and furniture all weekend (as I am, as I did), this music is pure balm for the mind and body.

I would go on, but I am tired and my ability to write is negligible right now. But get this album. A beautiful house album made with intelligence and insight.

Informational black holes

The thing about places like Sudan and Somalia or the North-west regions of Pakistan, is that the US and other nations claim that due to their lawlessness and general lack of outside access, they are perfect breading grounds for terrorism, where the ever elusive forces of the worldwide islamist jihad can gather together in secrecy to plot the western worlds demise. But the thing is, this same lawlessness, same lack of access is also used as cover by western nations to perform acts of aggression that they could never get away with in countries with a more developed infrastructure. Case in point, Israel's bombing of a convoy of trucks in Sudan, or any of the recent US drone attacks in pakistan. The same factors that make it hard for Western nations to know what's going on in these regions makes it hard, well, for Western nations to know what's going on in these regions! The Israeli attack occurred about 2 months ago, and it wasn't until a complaint from the Sudanese minister of highways that news of these information slowly leaked into the western world.

Point being that both sides of these conflicts are knowingly using the informational black hole of these regions to perform some very criminal acts.

Capitalism Today!

So let's try and parse the latest Obama bailout plan. Bad debts, these bloody mortgage back securities and the like, are auctioned off by this program, whatever the hell its called now. And who knows how it's decided which securities get auctioned off and which don't, let's just assume lot's of political back-room influence peddling and, if we're lucky, some outright bribes. Anyway, so private investors are making the bids at this auction, setting the price of these securities through "the magic of the market" so that they get valued somewhere below their face value but above zero. But here's the thing, though they are setting the price, they are not actually footing all the cash to make the purchase. Oh no not at all. They are, in fact, footing 1/14th of the cash, aka ~7.14%. Where does the rest of the cash come from? Well the US Treasury foots another 14th, part of the leftover cash from TARP. The rest of it is covered by miracle of "leverage," a loan guarantee of the remainder of the amount from the FDIC (so essentially, the Federal Reserve Bank).

Now this all works out okay if the these securities never fall apart and mature at par. In fact everyone makes money that way. Hooray! Of course, the fact that the party setting the price of these securities (through the auction) has so little money at risk will likely drive up the prices to unnatural levels, but that's alright, cuz it just mean the banks will get more money from this, right?

But what happens when it all goes tits-up? Well the private investor loses his/her money first, since apparently this whole thing is structured like a CDO, with different tranches at different risk levels, and the private investor get the riskiest tranche. This is supposedly to ensure that the prices investor pay for the securities aren't inflated because the investors are insulated from all the risk. Which is questionable, because in a way they ARE insulated from all the risk, or at least most of it. The Fed has the lion's share of the risk. And that's how it goes, next the Treasury is hit up for cash, and then the Fed, which is really just another arm of the US Gov't. Which means it all ends up in the taxpayers lap, resulting in higher taxes and/or inflation. Especially since the reason why these mortgage backed securities would have defaulted would be because the economy would have continued to decline == less tax revenue for the gov't == no money for them to pay for any new debt.

Long term then, this plan sinks or swims on whether the assets that are these securities are based upon are actually worth what they say they are, or are, in fact, worth much less. Now recall that not long ago I was writing about how the model the mortgage-backed securities were based on assumed unlimited housing price growth as extrapolated from the last ten years-worth of housing boom, and that the housing prices themselves were inflated due to the fantastically shit-storm-creating feedback loop of the securities themselves. So let's just say that the prices may have been a bit skewed towards the high-end.

In the short term, there is also a good chance of fucked-up-ness. These auction will be interesting to see. Because if the banks sell their 'toxic' assets off for less then they are currently valuing them on their books, then they will have lost significant chunks of cash which they will then need to recoup somehow, either from the still largely frozen credit markets, or more likely from the government again. AIG in particular seems to be essentially insolvent, so even the smallest of losses could set of a serious chain reaction.

Really, just nationalize the fucking banks already.

What a complete and utter asshat

 Just another Bush factoid re: how horrendously evil a president he was (from the NYT):

Mr. Bush frequently used signing statements to declare that provisions in the bills he was signing were unconstitutional constraints on executive power, claiming that the laws did not need to be enforced or obeyed as written. The laws he challenged included a torture ban and requirements that Congress be given detailed reports about how the Justice Department was using the counter-terrorism powers in the USA Patriot Act.

Dating back to the 19th century, presidents have occasionally signed a bill while declaring that one or more provisions were unconstitutional. Presidents began doing so more frequently starting with the Reagan administration.

But Mr. Bush broke all records, using signing statements to challenge about 1,200 bill sections over his eight years in office — about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined,[my emphasis] according to data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Many of Mr. Bush's challenges were based on an aggressive view of the president's power, as commander-in-chief, to take actions he believed necessary to protect national security regardless of what Congress said in federal statutes.

Asshole.

When good intentions really just ain't enough

Maybe charging the president of Sudan with war crimes wasn't such a great idea after all (via the always on-point lenin's tomb)

damn

Slipped up on posting again. It's hard damnit, trying to be witty or intelligent. But that's at least part of the goal, to keep writing, keep the ideas flowing see what pops out.

So I guess...speaking of writing I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest which is amazingly well written and impressively agile in its ability to jump between narrative styles, points-of-views, dialects and ideas. Yesterday I read an  extended riff on telephones and the way people always doodle and only half-pay attention while talking on the phone yet somehow believe that the person on the opposite end of the line is paying them rapt attention, and the consequences therewith that would occur upon the widespread use of videophones. It was impressively conceived and written. And funny. Did I mention the books quite funny?

But...(there had to be a but) it all gets a bit tedious sometimes, the constant long winding witty monologues from desperate stoners or obsessive tennis players, indepth descriptions of quebec separatist movements or other bizarre fixations. Eventually it all starts to collapse a bit under the sheer monotonous weight of the thing; for realz, the book is hardcover size (though softcover) and over a thousand pages. Mostly this is due, for me at least, to a lack of narrative pull to the novel. Most of the reason for continuing to read on is just to see what other inventive situations Wallace thinks up, but the piecemeal, unconnected pick-n-mix style results in a sense that you could just start reading anywhere and not have too different an expereience. It's just more of the same, though it's a pretty good same. I figure at some point in time some over-arching theme might evolve, or some things will happen in succession that will build causally to something else, but right now I'm not seeing it. And it's taken me maybe 2-3 weeks to get 150 pages in and I don't know whether I'll be able to hang on long enough to see it.

The Big O

So I've known for a while that my opinion on Obama's policies has a distinct ordering, from best to worst:

1. Domestic Policy
2. Political Policy (aka what to do with the republicans)
3. Financial Policy (aka what to do with the banks)
4. Foreign Policy

Actually 2 & 3 could be swapped, I'm not too sure about those. But 1 & 4 are clear: I'm not at all pleased with the continued drone attacks on Pakistan, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, or the continued broad support of Israel's occupation of Palestine. But his just announced budget proposal is fantastic. Better healthcare, cuts to the military, increased funds for new energy research (and money to beef up the energy grid, which is a 100% necessary precondition for a lot of new energy types), carbon cap-and-trade initiatives, and increased taxes on the wealthy! I agree with every single one of these things. Of course he could go farther, but even these policies are so far removed from the previous administration's agenda one wonders if it's even the same country we're talking about here. Sometimes I am really happy that man is POTUS.

Also: hi Katy!

Mind = blown

Crucial article on how the financial collapse occurred. The crux of it being that apparently, the model that they were using to calculate the likelihood of defaults in a given mortgage-backed security really did assume that house prices would only ever keep going up! This is because the historical timescale that they were using to predict the likelihood of default only covered the last ten years, exactly the timespan of the housing boom. In other words the housing boom was used to predict the housing boom! That's incredible. And the fuckers knew this or else willfully ignored the warning signs, because they were making too much money selling mortgage-backed securities not to mention the CDS's that were used to model the fucking things in the first place. As you can tell, I'm kind of astounded by this, both by the stupidity of the whole thing and by the fact that this absurd feedback loop entirely makes sense.

Several parts of this relate back to what I was saying a couple posts ago: the power and danger of abstraction, the difficulty of keeping a complex software system stable. Because in one sense, this whole financial meltdown can be seen as a bug in the complex interconnected software system that is the global financial system. The system became too large to be easily understood as a whole; and then Li's equation entered, was quickly integrated to the point of total pervasiveness, but was subject to insufficiently rigorous testing and analysis. I guess, if there's a moral claim to made about where fault resides in this fiasco, it is there, in the lack of rigor and scrutiny that the interlocking system of mortgage-backed securities and CDS's were given. No one wanted to stop the money that was being made from these things.  It's almost capitalism's problem in a nutshell! The bankers, the modellers, the ratings agencies and the government regulators were unwilling to see past the massive profits to the massive pitfalls that lay ahead. Goddamn it was greed.

Fuck those fuckers if I lose my job because they couldn't admit to their own goddamn mistakes.

XXVII

It's my birthday! (he shouts through a large cardboard tube)

Signs that I'm now "of a certain age":
-My cooworker Chad says to me today, "By the time I was 27, I had a wife and kid!"
-Patrick Batemen, the psycho-killer/wall street big-wig played by Christian Bale in American Psycho is the same age as me
-A week ago my friends and I had an extended conversation about hair-loss.
-I have a real adult job and spend more time then I'd like to admit thinking about buying a condo.

The funny thing is you always end up growing older, so I'm sure in a few years I will look back at my concerns as a 27-year old and laugh at my innocence and envy my youth. C'est la vie. You can't really ever come to terms with aging because it isn't a neutral process that you can try to disengage yourself with. It's almost by definition a negative, subtractive process: one year closer to the grave, one year more of wear and tear on your body. All you have to measure against it is learning & wisdom; thankfully the brain works on a slightly longer timescale then the rest of your body, but even it too will begin to disintegrate eventually. And women have it even worse, let there be no doubt. At least we men can look up to people like george clooney who are allowed to grow old largely naturally and still be praised for his salt-and-pepper good looks. Women are done after about 21, if we're to take the pages of Us magazine seriously (which we all do on some level, much to our own horror).

The best we can do is accept the unacceptable because it's innevitable. We grow old, our bodies break down and we die. Sweet! That sounds awesome! :)

Google mapping

They should make up a name for obsessively scrolling around through google maps checking out sweet places in the satellite view. Cuz it's a real problem of mine, sometimes. Did you know they have the underwater topography as part of it now? It looks really sweet when you scroll out over the ocean and plus it makes it really easy to find ultra-remote random islands in the middle of the pacific ocean and such. So many candidates for the Lost island! Jeez Widmore, it's not that hard to find the island, just use google maps!

Workin' for the Man

So I work for a bank, right? I like to say I work for a software company owned by a bank, but since it's a wholly owned subsidiary of said bank then really, who am I kidding? I work for a bank, a big bank. A fuckoff big American bank. The kind of bank that gets called up in front the US Congress to explain just what the fuck they think they're doing with all that goddamn money. I'm not gonna name names just to avoid random bad-luck googling (especially given todays Metro front page story about a bus driver fired for keeping a blog), but if you know me you know the bank, and if you don't know me...wait you don't know me and you're reading my blog? Who the fuck are you?

So yeah, the bank thing. It's weird, reading about your company in the news, following random internet people speculating on your company's outlook on Google finance, or for that matter, watching your company's stock plummet or rise on a daily basis. Weird because it's so amazingly far removed from my day-to-day work life, completely detached from my influence, yet at the same time very real in it's influence. News story about layoffs...yeah seen those before...then the guy down the hall get's layed off. He's got two kids and a wife.

Sometimes I read things and it sounds like we've got our fundamentals a lot stronger then other banks (we, our...simple pronoun's and then all of a sudden you're identifying with an abstract legal entity, a bundle of business interests? No weirder than identifying with a sports team or a country, and hey at least these are my employers. The relations pretty direct really, but nonetheless, so easily is my linguistic allegiance bought.) And then other times I look at this whole mess, I see countries across the world scrambling to plug holes in their sinking economies and no two countries are plugging the same holes the same way and I think "all these economic oracles got us in to this mess in the first place, and they're expected to get us out?" The say 09 will be rough but after that it'll get better but most of them also thought 08 would be great and that didn't really turn out so well.

Just as few really understood the complex, layered securities that started this current crash, I don't think anyone has a true grasp one what our current economy has become. Particularly in the financial sector, abstractions have been based on abstractions, then split apart, wagered upon and insured, and then abstracted again. These are the hallmarks of extreme technologization. The wonder of abstractions is that each layer need only understand the layer below it. The weakness is thus that each layer is completely dependant on the assumptions of the layer below, such that if one fails, they all fail. The financials already have a name for this in their catalogue of risks: Systemic Risk. The inevitble stupidity in the face of unanticipated errors by computerized systems is only exacerbated by the difficulty in anticipating errors as systems become increasinlgy complex and interconnected. Computers are only as smart as the people who design them, and right now our world economy is essential a vast interconnected software system written by the highest bidder to feed the howling maw of unending quarterly growth.

I vacillate between confidence in my banks overall stability and horror at the blind mutant beast that is our economy, thrashing wildly while we prod and plead, suckle and suffer.

Today in music

This thread is cool, and it led me to this excellent thread: techno history from a germanic/continental european history is not something you get a lot of due to the predominance of american and (especially) british music journalists. All they ever want to talk about is detroit/chicago and the bloody "hardcore continuum." Guess Oliver Lieb is on my list of artists to check out.

Also I'd like to hear this

Also also the Fontan, Frak & D. Lissvik stuff on Information. Studio's West Coast being pretty much my favorite album of the last 2-3 years. Speaking of balaeric stuff, I was listening to the A Mountain of One album this morning and thinking to myself that I really need to listen to it more, especially on hung over weekends. It seem particularly apt for such a state of woozy languor.

And thus ends my day in music. Unless I download some tunes when I get home, which could well happen!


ps. About half an hour ago I forgot what letter came after 'v' in the alphabet. Fuck!