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Category: Commentary (Page 14 of 27)

Commentary on most any topic.

Raise Interest Rates!

Here’s some lateral thinking for you: Since late 2008, the central banks of the world have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the world’s banking and financial institutions in order to stimulate economic activity and head off a recession / depression. This is the right thing to do in a fiat money system when faced with this economic situation. (I’m not going to discuss my views on fiat money, but a fiat money system is what we have so that’s what we’ve got to work with.)

However the worldwide money situation is bizarre right now, upside-down. The stimulus money, which is now some trillions of dollars, has not been stimulating like it ought to. Why? Because banks are not lending the money but are hoarding it. The banks of the world are sitting on well over a trillion dollars and are not lending it out. Why? Because interest rates are extremely low, near zero, and have been low for a long time. The banks are waiting for interest rates to go up which will raise the effective value of the cash they are hoarding and they will start lending again.

I propose that the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates and that this will stimulate lending and thus stimulate the economy. This sounds bizarre but given the upside-down state that the world’s money systems are in, I think it would work.

What do you think?

Boat Names

Hopefully you’ll laugh like I did: (Click for larger images.)

Vitamin Sea

Playbuoy

Cirrhosis of the River

Piece of Ship

Master Baiter

Amy’s Winehouse

Wasted Seamen

Breakin Wind

Bullship

Ship Happens

Titan Uranus

No Supernova Today

An interesting thing occurred early this morning. Shortly after 5 AM, there occurred 05:06:07 08-09-10.

I’m pleased to report there were no major earthquakes, no tsunamis, Yellowstone caldera didn’t blow up, no mass extinction, the methane clathrates at the bottom of the oceans didn’t turn over, the LHC did not produce a planet-eating black hole, the earth’s magnetic poles didn’t reverse, the earth didn’t shift on its axis, and the sun didn’t go nova.

We lived through yet another apocalyptic moment. Imagine that.

Microsoft Bing Is Paying for Users?

Microsoft has now taken to paying people to use their search engine? Is it that bad?

http://www.discoverbing.com/education/searchwithpurpose/?fbid=eU87ehBy_x8&wom=false

It looks a little less blatant framed as a donation but then Microsoft has always been expert at putting lipstick on a pig.

I never did understand why Microsoft would go after the web search market at all. Of all the things they could possibly have done, they chose the one area where they cannot possibly succeed. What were they thinking? I guess the corporate culture in Redmond breeds either blindness, or arrogance, or maybe both.

Look, because of my work I do hundreds of searches every day, often searching for very obscure and hard to find information. I tried Bing. It sucked. From time to time I try it again and it continues to come up less effective than Google. Google is a lean, mean, lightning-fast search engine that almost invariably gets me immediately or almost immediately to the information I seek. It has no unnecessary visual distractions or crap that slows the loading of the page. It’s fine tuned and user friendly. And now Google has added even more cool features that help me a lot such as the timeline search. Fabulous.

Microsoft’s only hope to compete with Google search was to completely clone Google search and re-invent all of the proprietary magic that makes Google what it is, which even as rich as Microsoft is, they cannot afford to do.

Instead I’ll donate three bucks to charity myself and not use Bing.

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