Free Credit Fuckup

From the Economics of Contempt:

Look, I know these S&P guys. Not these particular guys — I don’t know John Chambers or David Beers personally. But I know the rating agencies intimately. Back when I was an in-house lawyer for an investment bank, I had extensive interactions with all three rating agencies. We needed to get a lot of deals rated, and I was almost always involved in that process in the deals I worked on. To say that S&P analysts aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer is a massive understatement.

Naturally, before meeting with a rating agency, we would plan out our arguments — you want to make sure you’re making your strongest arguments, that everyone is on the same page about the deal’s positive attributes, etc. With S&P, it got to the point where we were constantly saying, “that’s a good point, but is S&P smart enough to understand that argument?” I kid you not, that was a hard-constraint in our game-plan. With Moody’s and Fitch, we at least were able to assume that the analysts on our deals would have a minimum level of financial competence.

Now remember that the guys that go to work in the personal credit agencies are the ones that can't make the cut for S&P, and consider how much power they have stolen over everyone's lives.

Steamy Days

Well, each summer here we've found June hot, July extremely hot, and August unbearably hot and sticky. This year, June was extremely hot, July was unbearably hot and sticky, and god knows what August holds for us.

Normally in August, when I step out of the car or house or office, my spectacles would fog over immediately. This has been happening for the last 6 weeks, this year. Ominous really. How on earth did people survive this climate before aircon of some sort? Oh, thats right, mostly they didnt.

Meet the new world, same as the old world

From the inimitable Eric Blair*:

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to’, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first
mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap.



*aka George Orwell of course

Devolution

For 50-odd years, Israel was the only true democracy in the middle east. It appears, this has gradually ceased to be true. Consider, as of the moment in Israel, it is:

- Illegal to call for a boycott of goods manufactured in the occupied territories
- Illegal for a citizen to marry a woman from the occupied territories and bring her to Israel (if she's Arab)
- Illegal to commemorate the expulsion of Arabs from Israel in 1948
- Illegal for Arabs to serve in the army (and to enjoy the privileges that this service subsequently brings)
- Anyone convicted of 'assisting terrorism' has their citizenship stripped from them
.... and more beyond.

Sic transit gloria populi

Orwell, right again

Is it inevitable that anything will decay into its' opposite? Contemplating the violent racism of Israel, it's hard not to conclude so. To quote one of its founding fathers, Uri Avnery:

THE ARCHBISHOP of New York announces that any Catholic who rents out an apartment to a Jew commits a mortal sin and runs the risk of excommunication.

A protestant priest in Berlin decrees that a Christian who employs a Jew will be banished from his parish.
Impossible? Indeed. Except in Israel – in reverse, of course.
The rabbi of Safed, a government employee, has decreed that it is strictly forbidden to let apartments to Arabs – including the Arab students at the local medical school. Twenty other town rabbis – whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, mostly secular, including Arab citizens - have publicly supported this edict.

.Welcome to America

We are ruled by charlatans and cowards. Our economy is in the tank, we know what to do about it, and we're just not going to do it. The charlatans prefer instead to stand by and let people suffer because that's politically useful, while the cowards let them get away with it because it's politically risky to fight back. Ugh indeed.

Credit Scoring - Satanic worship or just active evil?

Credit scores are a protection racket. Your credit scores are not accurate. Your credit scores were not designed to be accurate. It’s not that the credit rating agencies deliberately insert errors into their scores, but rather that they calculate them with a deliberate disregard for accuracy. To calculate them accurately would undermine one of the primary revenue streams of the credit rating agencies’ business model. You’ve seen the ads, you know the jingles. Credit rating agencies make money by charging a monthly fee to “allow” consumers to do their job for them. Pay a monthly fee to each of the three credit rating agencies and you will be permitted to attempt to ensure the accuracy that they cannot be bothered to attempt to ensure themselves because, if they did, then they couldn’t get you to pay them each a monthly fee.
The racket is exactly that transparent. And please note that this isn’t something I am accusing them of, this is something they explain themselves, explicitly, hundreds of times a day on the radio, on television and in advertisements all over the Internet. If you don’t pay them, they will not guarantee the accuracy of the credit score on which your ability to borrow or to purchase — or perhaps even to earn a living — depends. “Nice credit score ya got there. Shame if anything happened to it.” That’s exactly what they’re saying, brazenly, in all those ads.

(part of an excellent exposition at the Slacktivist)