View 559 February 23 - March 1, 2009 (original) (raw)
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Thursday, February 26, 2009
A Labor of Moles
Wendy All brought over the printed text of a project Niven, Wendy, and I worked on back in the 1980's. It's called A LABOR OF MOLES, and it's about Avogadro the Mole, a young mole who lives in a mole civilization (no humans around) where moles are intelligent, and badgers are tame and help moles with things that need strength, and the enemies are of course weasels. The mole civilization is complex, and has many rules, all well designed rules but make for static civilization; this is the story of the beginning of Mole enlightenment, so to speak, and the value of curiosity and scientific inquiry.
I've been reading over it, and it's really well done. There were legal reasons why we didn't go on with it back in the 1980's, having to do with where Wendy was working at the time. She's the artist and her illustrations are wonderful.
Anyway that ate up my morning, and I'm not sorry. I find that I don't have an electronic copy of the final draft; only the printed copy that Wendy and her husband discovered recently. On the other hand I certainly do have a copy of the next to final draft with 85% (perhaps as much as 95%) of the story. Turning it into something readable gave me some meat for the next column, too. It turns out that Microsoft "protects" you from early versions of Word, and it takes considerable machination to get around that so you can open and read documents in old Office formats. Interesting. But it can be done. It also turns out I didn't have to do it, but I thought I had to before I thought to look in another place for a copy.
I'm a bit excited about this project because I think this book can do some real good. It's readable, and while it's not at all preachy -- it's a darned good story of moles vs. weasels, with the complex mole civilization in the background -- it very much shows the value of a scientific method: not just asking questions, but how questions are asked; how to think of the questions to ask. I would have loved to read this book in 6th grade or before (Roberta thinks it's suitable for grades 5 - 8). Heck I love reading it now. With luck we'll have it in shape to send to our agents in a month or so.
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Bailouts
If these numbers are wrong someone will tell me. Assume 3 million real estate loans in default. Assume an average of 3000amonthforpayments.That′sninebilliondollarsamonth.Callittenbillionamonth.Thataddsupto3000 a month for payments. That's nine billion dollars a month. Call it ten billion a month. That adds up to 3000amonthforpayments.That′sninebilliondollarsamonth.Callittenbillionamonth.Thataddsupto120 billion a year, a healthy sum, but had that been paid, there would have been no collapse due to "toxic" mortgages and mortgage based securities. In return for taking over the payments the government, through FHA or some such, would own the properties. It could then make deals with the occupants, to let them lease the properties -- indeed to make lease/purchase agreements with the occupants. That could include former owners. Affordable payments could be arranged; there would be no panic sales, no cluster of For Sale signs in neighborhoods, and while the Real Estate Bubble would certainly have been pricked by the news, it wouldn't have collapsed. Of the government's 120billionayear−−makeit120 billion a year -- make it 120billionayear−−makeit125 to include the costs of administration off all this -- at least half is recoverable in that the government owns the properties and they are surely worth at least half what the government will have to pay for them; probably more than that, but say half.
Then for a net cost of about $70 billion a year, we have staved off most of the collapse. Tax revenues won't be in collapse because the market doesn't crash to 50% -- maybe to 75% max?
Of course we will never know, but ten years worth of my plan would cost less than we spent in the first "bailout" and a lot less than the second bailout, and probably less than the third. No institutions would have collapsed, and would have had a chance to restructure and get out of the mortgage based securities gambles and the odd derivatives based on them. And of course it would be made clear that this was it: the government wouldn't be doing this on new transactions after the bailout was in place.
Sure: there would be bailouts for the undeserving, the silly people who were conned into buying houses they could never afford, but then all they get out of that is a few months or even years of low rents; they'll never be able to pay off the mortgages and take possession. Some bankers and financial institutions would make out like bandits, and not much could be done about that, but it's part of the cost of a period of craziness -- and it's still a lot lower cost than we are paying. Revenge on the bad guys may make us feel better, but driving Lehman Brothers out of business was costly to all of us; more got hurt by the collapse than just some greedy bankers and mortgage lenders.
Well, it's all speculation because we didn't do it. My question is simple: did none of the smartest people in the world think of it? If they did, why wasn't it at least debated? The original Paulson plan seems to have been along these lines -- the government would buy up toxic assets -- but that soon went down because the Congress had to wet its beak.
And here we are.
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The president of the Author's Guild on Kindle 2 and what he calls the Kindle Swindle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/
opinion/25blount.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
My view on the audio reader built into the Kindle 2 is considerably mixed. After all, a copy was bought to get it into the Kindle. If I buy a copy of a book and hire you to read it to me, surely that is not illegal, nor does it harm the author; why, then, should it be illegal or unethical to have a machine do it? I guarantee you that I would not prefer a machine read book to being able to read the book, or to have it read to me by a human being, or to have it read to me by a professional as Audible Books and other such services do; indeed, a few minutes of listening to a machine read book would probably induce me to buy the Audible books copy...
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Escape From Hell by Niven and Pournelleis now available. Get yours now!! And we had a very good book signing Saturday. For a picture taken at the book signing seehttp://file770.com/
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There is a lot of good mail including some news on Solar Power Satellites, and a report on the crumbling Global Warming "consensus."
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Meanwhile my thanks to all those who recently subscribed or renewed subscriptions.