Oh, Too Bad ... It's Illegal

In my last post I proposed a life insurance scheme with which to bedevil our plutocratic overlords and make a little money on the side.  I got a few comments to the effect of, "Good idea, let me know if you implement it," so I did some research to see what it would take to set it up, and found out that it won't work. It turns out that about 10 years ago people started noticing that companies were insuring their employees without telling them or giving their heirs any part of the payout. And then other people started doing pretty much what I'd hoped to do: buy insurance on people they'd never met and had no direct interest in (and often inflated the earnings figures on the policy in order to get larger coverage).

So, several associations of insurers started lobbying campaigns to get the state governments, who have jurisdiction and regulatory power over the insurance business, to pass new laws to prevent what they felt was a kind of fraud.  The result is that since then, most of the states (including the state where I live and most of the surrounding states) have outlawed what they call STranger Originated Life Insurance (STOLI). Interestingly, the corporate behavior is still legal in most states, what they've outlawed is insuring someone whom you have no "direct financial or familial interest" in. So if the insured is your employee or your relative, even if they don't know you, it's OK as long as you don't sell the policy to someone in order to make money for the sale. But if the insured is a batshit-insane billionaire set on destroying the economy and society of America, and not related to you, forget it.d

Oh, well, back to the drawing board.  Maybe I'll come up with something else that will work.

A Message the 0.1% Might Not Like (but the rest of us would)

Are you angry about the increasing inequity of income and wealth in the Western world, and especially in the USA? Does it piss you off that our Galtian Financial Overlords have privatized the profits from crazy pyramid schemes with convoluted financial instruments and socialized the losses from their risky bets? Are you tired of playing heads-they-win/tails-we-lose?

I think I have a way to get back a little of the money they stole it from us, while also publicly making it clear what we think of them. And not only is it legal, but they've been using the same technique in their corporations for years, and never could understand why we objected to it.  Well now they'll know, and so will you if you go below the cut.

Geometry As An Interactive Design Space

I've been somewhat coy about the software project I'm working on; that was exacerbated by my having to take a break from working on it for some months to deal with other aspects of Real Life ; now I want to talk about it in some detail, and show you why I'm interested in it, and what I hope will come out of it. If you haven't yet read my previous post on "The Geometry of the Many-Angled Ones", please follow that link and read it; there's a very basic description of Geometric Algebra there, and that's the basis of the software I'm designing. When you come back, jump past the cut for the rest if this post.

If You Want War, Prepare For War.

I realize it's been a long time since I posted an entry in this blog.  There are a lot of reasons for the silence, and most of obstacles have gone away now so I was planning to start posting again in the next couple of weeks.  This morning, however, I read this article on wired.com and I have to comment on it.

The gist of the article is that the US Air Force is deploying aircraft in the region around Iran with the ability to rapidly destroy Iran's anti-aircraft capability in order to allow either bombing of nuclear facilities identified as possibly involved in the nuclear weapons project that Washington alleges Iran to be working on, or, less probably (I hope), an invasion of Iran by US and Israeli forces.

The first thought I had was of deja vu: shades of 2003 and the preparations for invading Iraq while the US government lied to the US people and the world about the non-existent Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons programs. Now that the US military involvement in Iraq has finally ended, and the conventional military involvement in Afghanistan is scheduled to begin winding down, the US military is in danger of not having any wars except the drone wars the CIA and the Defense Department's Joint Special Operations Command are waging in Yemen (where the drone war has just been escalated), Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. So it's not surprising that they're hoping to start another one in Iran.

After the cut I'll talk about why this is an extremely bad idea, and why the American people should demand that it not happen.

Stop SOPA Before it Stops the Internet!

Steve Jobs: Say What you Want About Him, He's Left the World Changed.

Steve Jobs is gone now, but the engine of change he built is still there, and still changing the world.

Two Movies: of Beauty and Evil

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie called Water, and a couple of days later I watched another one called Never Let Me Go. Although they're very different movies in many ways: Water was made in India, and takes place in Varanasi on the Ganges in 1938, and Never Let Me Go takes place in an alternate history late 20th Century England, they are visually and dramatically beautiful films made with great craft. and they are both about societies which accept, even profit from, great evil. I was deeply moved by both films, and couldn't escape being seriously disturbed by the evil in both. Strangely, I had not heard of either one before watching them (I usually at least read a review in the local paper of any new movie, though I've been missing them more lately because we've been going to the theater perhaps once a year), but after watching the second one I immediately thought of their similarities. I'll talk more about the films and why they are alike after the cut. Caution: there are spoilers for both movies.

Snarks in a M*****F****** Text!

Via Pharyngula, a generator for Lorem Ipsum babble text in the mode of Samuel L. Jackson.  After the cut, because, after all, it sounds like Samuel L. Jackson.

Congratulations Are In Order!

I just got an email from my older son, telling me that he and his wife were both unanimously voted tenure by the members of their department at LSU.  It's not official yet, there's lots of administrivia yet to be done, but that was the most critical step in the process.  This has been one hella summer for them: first the baby and now a major step in both their careers.  We're incredibly proud of them.

More Pictures of Ellie

I've uploaded all the pictures I took last week of Ellie to Picassa.  There are two albums, "Ellie #1" and "Elllie #2". Link here.