Month: June 2009

Teacher Rubber Rooms

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

i wonder where we would be today if the republicans had spent the last 8 years doing something useful like union bashing instead of chasing gays and starting wars.

Finance is error-riddled

The review identified “valuation concerns” where “appraisal documentation is missing or incomplete,” or where property-assessment methods were “insufficient/lacking.” Other missing information included employment confirmations, phone numbers, credit reports and rent verification. The review also found “income calculation errors.” Another fine example of 6 sigma in banking. Imagine if Dow and Dupont ran their chemical plants like this. Holy crap. Or Boeing built planes this way. Yikes. But then again, in those industries lives are at stake. Banking. Just money. Ok a few billion 100 billion. But still, it’s not like anyone died. Sheesh.

the banking sector needs an engineering DNA, not a frat boy DNA. how incompetent do you have to be to consider error rates of 10% normal?

Against cash

This would allow the setting of negative nominal interest rates. about time some country does this.
2015-12-27: Some stats

Bills and coins now represent just 2% of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7% in the United States and 10% in the euro area. This year, only 20% of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash, compared with 75% in the rest of the world

2017-12-28: NYT, always the luddite, calls it “jarring”. I welcome this trend.

Cashless businesses were once an isolated phenomenon, but now, similarly jarring experiences can be had across the street at Sweetgreen, or 2 blocks up at 2 Forks, or next door to 2 Forks at Dos Toros, or over on 41st Street at Bluestone Lane coffee. In Midtown and some other neighborhoods across New York City, cashless is fast on its way to becoming normal.

2016-08-20: The death of cash will make a lot of petty crime unviable: good, but it needs to come with radically lower fees.

apart from facilitating crime and tax evasion, cash hampers central banks from setting negative interest rates. In the absence of cash, everyone must keep their money in the form of digital bank deposits. During recessions central banks could then use the banking system to deliberately corrode people’s deposits via negative charges, ‘inspiring’ them to spend rather than hoard.

The emergent consensus among economic and political elites is that this is the direction to go in, but to manufacture consent for this requires a drip-drip erosion of public resistance. Hearts and minds must be shown that the change represents inevitable and desirable progress.

2023-04-21: The decline isn’t fast enough but continues despite stupid posturing like the “payment choice” act. These estimates also only cover POS, not black markets.