Finally finished it...

Following up on KT's post, I feel compelled to assure people that I have read more than Wheel of Time books in the last month. I have finally finished a short book by Paul Krugman called "The return of depression economics." It was a short book, as I said, but it took a long time to read because, frankly, I didn't follow all of it. I got the broad themes, and gleaned a lot from it, but this style of thinking and writing is still new enough to me that I didn't track it as well as I'd like. That made it slower to read but also made me less enthused to read it - I hate doing things I'm not doing well, including reading a book.

But if you have a smattering of economics background, my opinion, uninformed by a lot of economic knowledge, is that it is a very informative and interesting book. Whatever else you can say about the guy, he's smart and he's well informed. I've probably mentioned that he's won the Nobel prize for economics, specifically I believe his macroeconomic work, with which this book was loaded. A few of the factoids I picked up are that 1) we're in an economic situation when "the normal rules do not apply" and if we don't realize it we're going to get in a lot of trouble, 2) situations like this have arisen before, not just in the Great Depression but also in Asia in the 1990s, Mexico, and other areas, and 3) that a "tight" fiscal policy at this point could be disastrous (such as an insistence that spending rates be sharply curtailed - thinking like that was partly responsible for the depression).

One of the interesting facts discussed was the "shadow banking system" that has arisen in recent decades. This is a system of credit that performs functions that used to be performed by consumer banks but that evolved to perform them cheaper and better. It includes things like the auction-rate security system. These parts of the shadow banking system were profitable because they were not regulated by the Federal Reserve system, which let them operate with less capital on hand and also take much larger risks. As long as nothing goes wrong, this works great and everybody makes money. But if something does go wrong then 1) the system is very vulnerable to problems because it takes big unregulated risks, 2) it cannot be directly bailed out by the Federal Reserve because it is not a normal bank so is not ensured by FDIC and so 3) you can have "runs" on this system just like they used to have runs on banks prior to the establishment of the FCC. This shadow banking system took a huge hit when the housing bubble burst, and was a huge source of credit that essentially dried up. That actually helps explain why TARP had such limited effects on credit - the deposit banks that are regulated by the Reserve were not the only, or even the major, sources of credit. The "shadow banking system" got no TARP funds and is still not lending. An obvious implication, pointed out by Krugman, is that anything that performs the functions of a bank, including this shadow system, should be regulated like a bank - to avoid exactly this sort of thing happening. This is not stuff I've seen covered in the news!

So, if you're up for a little work, I'd recommend Krugman's little book. It's not as fun as Freakanomics, but it's just as fact filled, and probably, sadly, more pertinent.

I Do Read, Honest

So this year I made a resolution to try to read more. I love reading, and I tend to just go home and sit on the sofa, then I go upstairs and read about a paragraph before I pass out, which means it can take a long time to get through a book. On weekends I make up for lost time, but generally, I figured it would be a good idea to turn off the TV and read a bit more.

And I have been doing that. I just haven't been updating the little photo widget. For one thing, I've been reading the collected works of Jeffrey Deaver. I wasn't super impressed with the first book I read by him, which was one of the Lincoln Rhyme books. It was okay, but I didn't really appreciate the difficulty of producing multiple books where your protagonist is in a wheelchair--imagine Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart in a body cast and Thelma Ritter as a man, and you're on the right track. Well, all I can say is that I'm a convert. I've read nearly everything he's written over the past few months, devouring many of the books in under a day. Yeah, it's cheesy reading and it's not developing my mind like all the econ books and history that Shifter's reading, but they're well worth reading. My favorite Deaver book so far is The Vanished Man, which I think has an interesting perspective on predators and why some of them are so successful.

I've also read two of the Dexter books. They're a little less satisfying than the Deaver books, but the dark humor of the TV series is obviously well-grounded in the original book, it's an eerie pleasure to observe Dexter's weirdly alien perspective up close and personal. I really appreciate the audacity of taking the flawed detective trope to its logical conclusion. It all started with Holmes's cocaine habit, and alcohol and broken marriages have been standard accessories for any really serious detective ever since. But writers danced for years now around the idea that detectives need a little of the beast in them to beat the baddies, and it's admirable satire to take that all the way. For me, the TV series offers a complex and nuanced commentary on what it is to be good and even what it is to be human--TV-Dexter is almost an ontological Ulysses, and that dimension is pretty flat in the novels so far. Then again, TV-Dexter has had something like 50 episodes to develop him--these things take longer in novels, and hopefully the character has a few years ahead of him.

Finally, I've been reading Sway and A Perfect Swarm. I'll try to give them a blog post of their own at some point--both books encourage random dipping into, which is both an asset and a hindrance, in that I don't feel finished with them even though I'm not sure I haven't read them both in their entirety by now.

So I haven't actually just quit at one book.... I just never said to myself, "there, I finished Sway" and got on with the next thing.

My Android Phone--The Ultimate Timewaster

I'm loving the Eris. It is all I can do to stay off it while I'm at work and to add apps slowly enough that I'll have some traceability if something crashes my phone--I don't exactly want to come home from software testing all day at work and have to painstakingly try to figure out which of the 30 apps I added in the last 3 days is causing relentless rebooting of my phone. Not that I've experienced that. I have had a couple of reboots, but they all occurred when the battery was spectacularly low (I'm trying to drain the battery completely before I recharge the first few times).

I probably won't write about all the app coolness for a while because a) anyone who was really all that interested in cool phone applications has probably had an iPhone for years, and b) I'm really starting with the basics, and there are thousands of reviews out there, all of them better and more informed than any blog post I could write on the topic. But there is app coolness, and it is cool.

On the one hand, I am very sorry that I waited so long to get a new phone--I really underestimated how much I would enjoy it (at least, so far--any technology toy runs the risk of decreasing awesomeness over time). On the other hand, AT&T actually did me a favor by sticking me with my sad old free Nokia for an extra two years, because the thrill of an Android phone is probably sweeter when contrasted violently with technology half a decade old.

There is a very small Luddite part of me that occasionally reminds me that it is insane to be this obsessed with a phone. But then I show it an exciting app and it shuts up for another 3 or 4 days. I'm sure in a few weeks I'll have beaten it into submission altogether.

One little thing I forgot to mention about the tri

Today on my run I remembered something about the tri I should have included in my report post. I almost flashed the entire aquatic center. I don't think I mentioned it, but for the past 4 months I've been telling myself I needed to buy a new swim suit. But suits are hard to find in the middle of winter in the Frozen North, for some reason, and my old suit was still servicable. It had started out as a dark blue and after many years and a whole lot of chlorine was now no color at all. It was maybe a bit thinner and a bit more shapeless than it had been, but it covered all the right bits and it was in no way a Speedo so I was happy with it. I do believe it was the rattiest suit of anyone I saw at the event, and I was kind of proud of that. I may blow zillions of dollars on linux boxes (this post hosted by LB2TR, btw), but I'm quite frugal when it comes to things like clothing. Mostly because no matter how carefully you dress me up, there's still me underneath, and it that's good it's good anyway and if it's bad well I'll just look like an idiot who is trying not to look like an idiot by dressing up. So I did the swim and all and was just climbing out of the pool, ready to go to the locker room and change into my running/biking gear, and riiippppp. I looked down. And uhm, I looked right back at myself if you know what I mean. Oops. I quickly squished my legs together which had the effect of hiding the really big rip right at the crotch of the suit, and kind of waddled off to the locker room. Very lucky me - the locker room was very close to my lane. Nobody seemed to see, or if they did they were too polite to point and stare, so it didn't stand out in my mind as a Most Embarrassing Moment, but it certainly went into the Near Miss category. It's also interesting to note that in the middle of an event, when you're working hard and focused on a goal, you don't embarrass very easily. I'm not saying I wouldn't have freaked if my suit had fallen off, but I only would have freaked with part of my brain, and the rest would be thinking that I only have 10 minutes to pick up the pieces of the suit, get changed, and get to the bike before the next event. One of my friends said that I had gone so fast in the swimming that it shredded my suit. That is vaguely true. In the same way that you can run so fast your shoes fall off your feet, if your shoes are made of wet toilet paper.

I did buy a new suit after that, by the way. It was, and so far still is, blue.

A Poem By Taylor Mali

I love this, even though a jury armed with the text of this poem would lock me up and throw away the key.

I learned at some point fairly early in my life that if you speak in a grammatically correct and articulate way, two things happen. One, people find you insufferable. And two, nobody listens to you. I have, I know, overcorrected, and it's tragic, because my flabby brain no longer knows any interesting nouns, adjectives, or verbs, and I can't help but feel, every time I have to spend more than twenty seconds finding a word that got lost in my subconscious by the age of 14, that it's the equivalent of being morally bankrupt.

But that's a beautiful poem, and a lovely visual to go with it.