Billionaire

The bombings in Paris: political football of the lowest order, on the part of the Republican candidates for President of the U.S.A.; possible repercussions to the absorption of Syrian refugees by the E.U. (the U.S.A. has never been about to take any significant numbers, so nothing really changes even if Trump whines about not taking any -- too expensive to bring them here, on strictly utilitarian grounds, obviously); what might someday look like the beginning of ISIS's endgame.  Urban terrorism in the West has always been really terrifying but not in any way an existential threat to our existence as a mass of nearly a billion relatively rich people.  Urban terrorism triggers technological and legal responses that ultimately reduce its effects and get the killers, at some sacrifice of liberty and decency -- but did I mention those aren't the values I bring to my analysis of our national interests?

Anyway, in the meantime I'm playing with increasing obsessiveness this marvelous little mobile game called "Billionaire," which requires the player to trade off risk, labor, and time for return in fairly intricate ways that fairly in my mind mimic real economic decision-making.  Time enables one to generate income from a variety of investments, but there is little compounding effect from any one investment: upgrades yield only marginal improvements to return, pretty much like real investments in mature industries.  Risk is represented as legal risk: the more criminal an investment option in the game, the higher its risk.  A high risk profile pretty much ensures that one will spend most of one's time in prison, not able to do anything to generate additional income (though it appears one's investments continue to accumulate in the meantime); and there is an upper limit to the amount of risk one can take on, in absolute terms, so ultimately investments have to be allocated.  Risk can be mitigated by contributing to philanthropic "social" investments with negative risk profiles.  Labor allows one to accelerate, by repeated finger taps that would resonate with any animal psychologist, the building of either money-making or philanthropic investments in order to maximize the value of one's portfolio.  The velocities of the game are two: the accumulation of cash, always slow relative to one's total wealth or ability to invest in new things; and one's personal attention to the game, making sure that not too many investments "max out" and stop accumulating, and rebalancing based on the aforementioned considerations.  It's a lot like managing real money, although there's absolutely nothing to spend it on but more investments...

Feast of All Saints (Saint Paul)

My noon Highlights tour last Sunday (November 1) had "Saints" as its theme in honor of the feast day.  I didn't mention my own atheism to the marvelous group of people who did the tour with me, certainly not wanting to influence their response to the art or my thoughts with what might be reasonably interpreted as a twist of the knife.

We started the tour with the work above, Lorenzo di Niccolo's fourteenth century image of Saint Paul holding sword and book.  The web image does no justice at all to the luminosity of the red, orange and gold of the painting, which could have been painted yesterday rather than six hundred years ago (and I don't know the extent of recent restoration, so some of that luminosity might be a result of that rather than sheer survival).  Both the coloring and the intensity of Saint Paul's face and gaze call the viewer with a kind of personal reach quite different from neighboring paintings of the Madonna or Christ.  I asked a question of the group, something to the effect of "What does this painting convey about sainthood?"  The answer of a young man matched mine: the saint is looking at me, reaching out to me, attesting to his humanity.  The paintings of saints in the collection, even in this semi-medieval period, are all portraits of a sort, meant to imagine human beings with certain capabilities or meanings, but to really imagine them, to identify them as real individuals at the same time that they are categories or types or characters.

Startups

The Wall Street Journal story on February 19 about startups valued at more than a billion was pretty fascinating (I thought).  There were a lot of stories I was already aware of -- in particular, I'd heard the founders of DocuSign, Eventbrite, and Taskrabbit (the first two in the billion dollar club) speak engagingly at a "Tech Founders Forum" event sponsored by Fortune magazine a few weeks back.  In the "fascinating" category was the claim that Jessica Alba's company Honest Co. was among those valued at more than a billion.  I had that info-bit in my mind when having a really enjoyable and inspiring conversation with the founder and owner of Magic Fairy Candles, flying from Colorado back to Oakland last Thursday, hearing her story about how her business had grown and her initial statement that she was far from that startup world, and then realizing that her business was in fact part of that "eco-system" because she's in fact part of the same world (natural beauty and spa supplies) as Honest.  Maybe the distinction that's been drawn between sole proprietor retail small businesses and the rarefied air of startups is not so hard and fast anymore, and maybe all it takes is an openness to possibilities to be part of the disruptive wave that's happening in technology, commerce and capitalism.  I'm wondering, anyway.

I don't see Greece going anywhere good...

Greece can't finance its public expenses internally on its own (at present, and given a famously corrupt system of tax collection).

But Greece isn't willing to take the actions demanded of it to enable further external lending from the eurozone.

Further lending by the eurozone, while it would improve conditions for the Greek public which is clearly hurting so badly it'll vote for anything, won't do much of anything to make Greece better able to finance itself later (through real economic growth or real reduction in corruption).

Ergo, the eurozone shouldn't lend to Greece unless Greece does take the actions required of it.

If the eurozone doesn't lend to Greece, no one else will (look demonocracy's graphic of Greek debt over the past few years for a truly sobering view).

If the Greek government has no other sources of funding, it must either default on its promises to the population, or confiscate wealth internally (and this follows logically even if somehow Greece were to continue putatively to be a member of the eurozone).

If Greece leaves the eurozone, the Greek government will be required to confiscate wealth in the form of bank capital simply to make a conversion back to the drachma possible, in addition to any confiscations required to keep their dreamy promises to their voters.

Now I understand how communist and socialist governments wind up where they do, in complete economic dead ends, even if they don't want to (and I don't think most of them do want to).

I got up this morning

And maybe it was because my laptop was probably destroyed when I spilled a dollop of beer on it, losing all the work I've not backed up on it in the past three years, but somehow I felt free enough to check into my blogs and add to them.  For multiple years I've been staring at them occasionally, wondering how best to deal with them -- pick up a thread? delete them? start new projects as futile as the past ones?  This morning I realized these are just places to put notes to myself, relevance not known in advance, and let the connections if any happen as they will.  Which doesn't mean the connections will happen.  Nevertheless, here I am again.