03 Oct 2010
Credit is not bad - But the way we use it IS!
Edilberto Salazar (name changed), 35, married, with one daughter, is a man that I met over two years ago while working for an IT firm in Mexico. This man owed over $200,000 (£10,000+) pesos to the bank, more than $100,000 (£5,000+) pesos in taxes, plus his mortgage and personal credits at department stores. He is one of those guys that saturates one credit card, then applies for another to which he transfers all his overdue credit from his other card, and so on.
He is just one of many people I have met in several years that has the same problem. Endless calls and letters, harassment, and bad looks from friends and family. The truth is that he is just one in millions caught in the same situation.
Credit was created as a way of obtaining something we want now and paying for it later, at an interest, of course. Interest rates and other surcharges are the building blocks of banks, lending companies and other financial institutions. In fewer words: Banks charge for the “benefit” of lending you the money you need right now.
But it’s not just money nowadays, is it? Back in the old days it was mostly about a means to purchasing the home you’ve always wanted, or paying for a costly operation, or buying something you really need urgently. Nowadays the amount of things you can do by credit is enormous: Clothes, home appliances, cars, luxury items, handbags, mobile phones, phone contract payments, payments for other debt you may have in other financial institutions, education, even a haircut for goodness sake. Just about anything can be “purchased” on credit, and if the store doesn’t have its own credit line, you can probably still pay with your Amex, Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, etc.
But the concept of “free money” is what has started the massive wave of debt. We saw it recently with the credit crunch, but we’ve seen it previously countless times. And it’s not about individual people any more, it’s about entire countries indebted to others.
Why did this last credit crunch occur? Because of the sub-prime mortgages, the ratings of CDO. MRS, ABS and other deals, the lending, selling and packaging of these deals amongst banks and world-wide financial institutions, etc. They thought the gold mine would never end, and when it looked like it was depleting they found another way of marketing and selling the same deals as new products to investors, creating new indexes in the stock market, and eventually tying everything up in a way that a credit crunch became unavoidable.
But it’s not the banks fault, nor the investors, they are just looking for ways to make more money. The fault lies within the general public, as described by Tetsuya Ishikawa in his book “How I caused the credit crunch”. Credit allows you to have a house before you can pay for it, clothes without any money on you, and more importantly, operations and medical care when you do not own enough money to pay for them.
We all need money for certain things in life, but we also ought to have some decency (or put more straightly: intelligence) and analyse all options into consideration. Credit is a tool, an aid through difficult times, it is not free money, and it often results in a much higher cost than what you could have paid originally for it. Interest is a killer.
So if this opened a wound in you, try to sort out your problems, and lay off credit for life unless REALLY needed.
27 Jul 2010
Three days shy of a year ago I published a blog post about my social networks in which I explained a bit about the interconnectivity provided by sites such as Ping.fm which help you keep your status updates synchronised across social networks.
Last year I was on about 10 social networks, this year the number has gone up to 17 (which is really19 as I excluded Google Reader and Wordpress.com for visual purposes). But it seems to me that interconnectivity has still not matured enough, there is no “home” for your social networks, and I doubt this will change in the short term.
Click on the image to see a full-sized version.
21 Jul 2010
George Orwell mentioned all throughout his masterpiece book ‘Nineteen eighty four’ the thoughts and actions of the proletarians, which are described as ignorant people who can’t care less of anything that happens outside their direct daily lives in his book. Ignorance is bliss. Or as “Goldstein” would say, “Ignorance is Strength”.
But I choose not live my life like that. Not now, not ever. Can you? I honestly prefer to lead a life in search for information, further knowledge, and culture, while having the possibility of changing my mood, thoughts, and actions based on this data, instead of living a “normal” life in the safety and comfort of ignorance.
A friend of mine once spoke to me about three kinds of events that open your mind to new ideas, possibilities and information:
- Meeting someone from another country.
- Travelling to another country.
- Learning another language.
In my own opinion, having passed through those three events, I concur with him. They really change your perspective and view of the world, society, and culture.
I would like to add another three mind-opening stages that help you form a sense of identity:
- Adolescence & friendship
- Literature & philosophical talks
- Having a partner
Why do I consider these stages/events as meaningful components of identity, maturity and knowledge?
Adolescence, at least in many cultures, is considered a stage of rebellion, change, transition, problems, questions, and overall madness. But it is in this stage where many of the strong lifelong ideas are formed. It is also in this stage when true friends are found, **friendships **that may last a lifetime. These are vital components of identity. And even if many of the ideas you have while going through this stage may be wrong, it is a necessary step to have these wrong ideas in order to clearly define them and change them further on.
**Literature **opens your mind to understand how others think, and allows you to develop critical thinking. This paves the way to formulating opinions based on facts instead of biased assumptions. The more you learn, the more you know, the more you can speak about, the more you can teach about, and so on.
This also brings me to the point of philosophy, and philosophical talks. These types of talks seem like endless debates about this and that. However, the actual discussion may open your mind to search for more information about specific topics and formulate a better opinion. These talks can then lead to better structured debates, and finally to an idea which may spark a change. That is why I consider the basis of all this, these philosophical talks, such an important issue.
Finally, a partner, may keep you centred on reality. While adolescence many times includes biased opinions and self centeredness, literature and philosophy allow you to form an opinion, and having a partner many times concretes that opinion, removing the egoism from self-centred thoughts formed during adolescence. That is why people who are successful in relationships are often people who stop thinking solely about themselves but think in greater proportion of other people, specifically their partners.
One must be somewhat selfish to succeed in today’s world, but you must never put aside your partner or loved ones, the same way you must never put aside striving for a common good instead of personal satisfaction. There must be a sense of equilibrium, as this allows an easier flow of knowledge, clarity and understanding. Are you ready to open you eyes, ears, heart and mind?
30 Jun 2010
Something about the games played last Saturday led me to believe that in the future there will be no referees, there will only be big monitors, loud speakers, and microphones, placed on the top of a stadium. A knowledgeable team of experts will judge the action live, until these are replaced by automatic systems. Of course, this will only start to happen after a few more world cups, and a dozen more incorrect decisions.
30 Jun 2010
A random thought popped into my head not so long ago: What if we had a universal language that integrated all the common programming language syntaxes, integrating the binaries, engines and function calls for each of them, allowing anything to be written in any language in each file?
.NET made huge progress allowing a single project to be coded with different languages, at file-level of course. But what if we could use several languages in a single file?
I know this would probably represent a heavy strain on the processing part of it, but for web-based technologies it would be an interesting approach. Just imagine, Rails+PHP+Python+Java, a world where we can truly live together. Or not?
Take the following code as an example:
> cout << "Hello world" << endl;
> echo "This is a test";
> System.Windows.MessageBox("And another test");
> print "Just for the sake of it"
I had a talk with a programmer about a month ago, and we obviously reached the conclusion that it would be too bloated and problematic to manage. However, an engine that can handle maybe 2 or 3 languages would be rather interesting. I’d be happy enough to get C#/VB (ASP.NET) + PHP + Ruby.
Assuming you can keep it clean, and standards are adopted, I think it would be great. Things might be simpler in certain languages than in others, and sometimes it would certainly be reflected in the amount of lines as many languages implement built-in functions that perform many tasks with a single line of code.
On the other hand, it could become programming hell, but I’d be interested if such a thing existed, for the mere purpose of having fun. What do you think? Would it be “programming hell”? or does it actually sound viable?