Tag: images

IC 5067

in may 2009, i spent a night at kitt peak national observatory, the largest on the planet, to take a picture of IC 5067. IC 5067, also known as the pelican nebula, is 2000 light years away on our spiral arm of the galaxy, the orion arm. it is 15 light years across, and an active region of star formation.

the picture was taken on a 0.5m telescope with a SBIG STL 6303E CCD camera, cooled to -15C. exposure time was 40 minutes each for red, green, blue and 2 hours for luminance.

Manba

An underground youth culture in Japan with distinctive music, fashion and make-up, where the skin is darkened using tanning products is spreading worldwide. Young people in the UK have been learning about the intricacies of ‘manba‘ by making friends on the other side of the world using social networking sites and learning how to re-create the style through videos on YouTube.

paging bruce sterling for OMG globalization commentary

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.

Absurd Time Covers

From William Randolph Hearst’s ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the “10-cent plague” comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of “cocaine-crazed Negroes” raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life. No publication has done a better job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that’s dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth.