Aehso’s Output

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”

Kenneth Boulding

If you want to understand how the global economy got into the mess that it is in, you could do worse than spend 45 minutes of your life re-learning more about how money is created. At the very least, it will remind you of some of the fundamentals you may have learned in Economics classes of old. Be warned, you’ll probably get a distinctly queasy feeling @ about 22 minutes in.

(see Money As Debt site for references)

New word of the day for me: Usury

This story just gets worse - now BOI admit they have lost over 31k records. BOI need to answer a few more hard questions openly and honestly in order to stop me from closing my last remaining account with them:

• Is/was it routine for bank employees to bring laptops containing unencrypted data off bank property? Can you guarantee me that your employees never copied data off your laptops onto another machine at home or emailed it via SMTP servers in unencrypted email messages? I don’t really care what official bank policy (meaningless) is, I just want to know if your employees technically could do this.
• If the above is routine, how do they know that only 31k records were lost? After all, you don’t actually have the laptops so how would you know what is on them? Right now trust is gone out the window and you don’t have to give so much information that you would potentially compromise the security of live systems. Technical details on the auditing capabilities of your laptop/mainframe data synchronization tools would be great - just to give me that warm fuzzy feeling.
• If the above is routine, how many of your employees recently sold, dumped or gave away PCs that they might, at one stage, have been editing bank data on while working at home?
• When was the last group hardware audit completed and are any other laptops unaccounted for? Not necessary stolen, just not where they are supposed to be

Lastly, and this question stands, even if I do close that last account. According to the above referenced news story

In the unlikely event of a fraud arising as a direct result of the theft of these laptops, the customer will be fully compensated.

(also stated here though I can’t find an official statement)

What will BOI do if my credit history is destroyed by someone who steals my identity via the data you so kindly made available to them? What if that person is never caught and therefore I can never prove that their data source was the hard drives in those laptops? What was that? Did you say ‘nothing’ or was that ‘prove it’? I thought so.

Data is such a genie in a bottle isn’t it.

Weirdly, that does look about right…

Johns-MacBook-Pro:~ joshea$ history | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
100 ./client.rb
82 svn
65 ./script/backgroundrb
61 cd
57 cap
32 ssh
20 ./script/server
18 mate
17 telnet
15 pwd

From an interesting article that Eric Janszen wrote for Harpers:

Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion.

[Emphasis mine]. He was talking about the US and I can’t see why Ireland will be any different - obviously the total € amount to pull our FIRE economy will be different but ‘de fundamentals’ are just not sound any more. His suggestion that alternate energy research could be the next big(ger) bubble seems to ring through, necessity is the mother of invention and invention these days is an expensive business.

(Wired also have an interesting interview with Janszen)

I’ve just realized I can’t make it to/speak at Creative Camp this coming Saturday as I am already booked into a pre-marital course in Dublin on the same day. I had, for some reason only know to me, thought Creative Camp was on Sunday and in my own little plan it was going to tie in nicely with an overnight visit to the home town to congratulate my brother on his recent engagement.

Doh! Apologies to Ken and Keith for the late notice. Next time, I swear…

Pat Phelan: Irish taken as fools as O2 Ireland iPhone package comes with attached “Paddy Tax”

Irish company Cubic Telecom today blasted the prices that people will have to pay for the iPhone when it’s introduced in Ireland on March 14th. Cubic Telecom CEO Pat Phelan, speaking on the packages said:
“There is no excuse for paying such high prices and getting so little in return. The minutes, the text bundles and the data package are completely inappropriate for Irish people and the massive difference in what Irish and UK and Northern people get for the same price suggests that they’ll throw any old scraps at the stupid Paddys. ”

Phelan is calling for a boycott of the phone until o2 rethinks their charges. “It’s time for us Irish to tell O2 we’re not going to accept this. We have Apple’s European HQ here in Ireland, the iPhone itself is fantastic but there’s no way we should buy this phone until O2 cops on and looks after their very loyal customers here. We should get the equivalent package they’re getting in the UK and Northern Ireland

Too fucking right. I don’t even want an iPhone - I just want affordable mobile internet access. Irish consumers are and have been gouged by a mobile network oligopoly in this country for years. It is the giant elephant in the room that everyone knows is there but nobody in power has the balls to do anything about. O2’s latest ‘product’ is yet another “up yours” to us stupid Paddies, our inept government and communications regulator. Hey, we’ve put up with with it for so long, why would anything change now?

A boycott of high end packages like the iPhone plans or broadband dongles won’t work. You’d need to get every soul in the country to stop sending SMS messages in order to get attention of these boyos.

Big switch in direction from Microsoft, it would appear they are now planning to use AtomPub instead of Web3S for Windows Live service APIs they’ll formally be announcing at Mix’08.  As usual, Dare has all the details.

This is a huge endorsement for AtomPub - I’ll bet Bill is delighted (hey, I can even tell him in person at his IWTC talk in an hours time…)

Ken McGuire and Keith Bohanna are amongst the organizers of an upcoming barcamp event called CreativeCamp in Kilkenny on Saturday March 8th. From the Facebook Event page:

A free one day gathering of people interested in how to blend technology and creativity for use in their businesses, organisations or to promote their creative work.

There are lots of interesting talks are already lined up, one of which is on Building and working in a distributed startup which I’ll be giving/leading based on the ‘process’ (if that isn’t too scary a word to use) we use inside nooked. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more added on the day in true barcamp “user generated conference” style.

If you are around, come along, it’ll no doubt be a nice desert after the veritable breakfast, lunch and dinner of events that are on this week in Dublin - IWTC - shaping up to be a big event, the ISA Annual Conference, xCellerate 2008 and of course the Irish Blog Awards. I’ll be popping in and out of both the IWTC and ISA events, if you wanna meet up give me a shout.

It would seem I spoke too soon about Iarnród Éireann’s internet seat booking system. In practice you can reserve seats using this system but when you get onto the train there may be no indication to other passengers that the seats are reserved. This happened to us coming back from Galway to Dublin last Sunday and rather than arguing with the hen party that was already encamped in our seats we just moved to the next available seats.

We had the luxury of doing this because we were pretty early. Of course the seats we ended up in were probably reserved too so there were some very puzzled looks when later passengers arrived. The only explanation we could offer was that everyone else seemed to be sitting where they pleased. BTW, this wasn’t a one off - the last time we got a train back from Galway to Dublin the station we had also reserved seats but the staff instructed us to ‘just sit anywhere’.

Meanwhile, most of the station staff were busy loitering on the platform not caring less about the confusion and frustration throughout the train. Well done lads, great job, very helpful.