Brainbows in the Dark

Best Sports Stadium Name Ever?

( Forget the Citi part! )

Matt Yglesias finds a funny screenshot.

"Today: Obama will address economic woes. President Bush to pardon turkey."

Rich cutting back on gifts to mistresses

( Curtailing all unnecessary spending. )

Why CNN Struggles to Cover the Economic Panic

( Insightful stuff on how the mainstream media is failing us. )

Credit Cards exploit a flaw in the brain

"Whenever my will to live gets too strong, I read Peter Watts." Thus wrote james_nicoll several months ago while commenting on the book Blindsight. I've been re-reading Blindsight and man, that is truly one of the most depressing, best-written first-contact novels I've ever read, it truly sends shivers up my spine every time I read it.

Because what Blindsight is mostly about is the jury-rigged all-sorta-moving-in-the-same-direction collection of just barely functioning mental parts that is human consciousness, about all the funny hacks and gaps and holes in our consciousness that exist to be exploited or avoided.

I thought of Blindsight and Siri Keeton, the main character, today when Jonah Lehrer wrote:

one of the reasons credit cards are such a popular form of debt is that they take advantage of some innate flaws in the brain. When we buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss - our wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that we don't really feel the downside of spending money. Brain imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings. As George Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist at Carnegie-Mellon says, "The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anaesthetized against the pain of payment." Spending money doesn't feel bad, so you spend more money.

Now, credit cards have some other incentives that justify their use: if you're willing to trade your privacy to corporations for the convenience of your own tracking, you also get the government's promise that you won't be on the hook for more than the first fifty bucks if someone steals your wallet. Which, by the way, allows you to justify using the credit card, and racking up credit charges, instead of using cash.

Which makes me wonder if I should switch to using only cash under almost all circumstances. Or find some way to make using credit hurt. Because, the funny thing is, Omaha insists that I take every receipt, carry it with me, and enter it into our household accounting software. And that's the only pain I face, but it's a pain suffered by someone else, the Elf of next week. I wonder how I could make it more immanent.

I wonder if it would even matter.

Original paper: Neural Predictors of Purchase.

Now Omaha and I can Get Back to Killing One Another!

Death and Destruction!

After a couple of months where for one reason or another neither of us had a head-to-head first person shooter installed on our desktops, I finally got Quake 4 back up and running last night. There was one final goof-- my headphone jack was still down at Tina's campaign office. I found a pair of old headphones with a very long cable but missing a foam cover (for some reason, those items have entered my vocabulary as a 'pid'; does anyone have any idea where that came from?), so I ripped one off another pair of headphones with a much shorter cable and got them to work.

We tried a space-based arena first, but kept falling off the edge, doing so badly that we were both in the negatives when we decided to go with a more traditional closed space. That was more fun. The first battles, though, gave Omaha the warm-up she needed and she blew my ass away all over the battlefield. She's just nasty with that rail gun.

The girls find a new way to torture daddy.

The girls were pretty good last night. Kouryou-chan had dance class and did pretty well. Yamaraashi-chan is, unfortunately, developing into a "sit in front of the computer IMing friends all day" girl, and she's a bit young for that, so I'm being more strict about how much screen time she gets per day.

My colorblindedness also makes me susceptible to severe headaches when exposed to certain wavelengths of light, mostly high monochrome blues. It's one of the reasons I'm nearly allergic to neon. Yamaraashi-chan, when not on the computer, was running around the house with her sister, playing with a blue toy sonic screwdriver a'la Doctor Who, and it has bright blue monochrome LED flashlight at one end that's exactly the wrong wavelength. We've warned her not to swing it around the house.

Omaha made a pretty damn good dinner of chicken and veggies with cous-cous on the side. Naturally, Kouryou-chan didn't eat it. What does she live off? Air?

My veteranarian is twonky

I'm getting a little suspect of my veterinarian's in-house pharmacy. Every three weeks I get the same prescription: two liters of lactated ringers, one line, twenty-four needles. There's almost always something wrong with the order. This time I modified the order slightly: no needles. The twenty-four is for twenty needles plus the possibility of two bad sticks or accidental contaminations per liter, so over time I've built up a reserve.

You know what I got this time? Two bottles (good; still sealed with the prescription sticker on the outside, better), two lines (wtf?), and a box of 50 needles (wtf wtf?).

Sometimes they unseal the bottles and put the prescription sticker over the volumetric labeling. Sometimes they put an extension line in with the main line. Sometimes they prep the line, sometimes they don't (I don't really care either way; I can do that myself). They've filled this order for Dinah every three weeks for a year now, you'd think they'd have some consistency.

Poor Dinah. She's found a food brand she really loves, and now she gives me this look at night when I give her her meds: "Do I really have to eat these?" She's doing okay, but her arthritis is getting much worse; she's avoiding climbing up on her favorite chairs the way she used to.

Oh. My. God. How the econopocalypse happened

Porfolio.com has a long article that explains, in excruiating, on-the-ground detail, how the econopocalypse came upon us: The End of Wall Street's Boom.

If you read nothing else about the stock market, read this. It helps to make sense of it all. It helps to understand how the movement of money through Wall Street, with each layer taking its cut, encouraged the submerged and "shadow" layers to create money on the books out of nothing at all, creating asset futures that they knew would never come due.

It's told from the point of view of Steve Eisman, a manager at hedge fund FrontPoint. Eisman was famous for being a doomsayer, for harassing people looking to deal with the question, "How are you going to screw me?" If the answer satisfied him enough he'd go ahead with the deal anyway. Eisman's company was heavily leveraged into credit default swaps, cheap-shorting the expectation that CDOs would fail. The thing was, Eisman admitted that for the two years his hedge fund rode this wave, he didn't understand where the money was coming from. After laying into a particularly loathesome example of a CDO dealer, the dealer replies:

"I love guys like you who short my market. Without you, I don't have anything to buy."

That's when Eisman finally got it. Here he'd been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche [the lowest-rated, highest-risk/reward band of a bond investment vehicle - Elf] without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren't enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren't satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"