Rubenerd

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21:09 – The very lovely Nicole Kidman's awkward interview on David Letterman's Late Show (YouTube link); an official apology for Rubenerd Show 258; the joys of insomnia; missing my MadPlayer and Armada M300; DavesPhotoGallery.net; my back hates my MacBook Pro; amazing detail exposed with flash photography (ha!); unscrupulously punching holes though property; automatic bright orange snow shovels; Google Reader and curious white powder on recycling bins!

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Photo of the letter I got this morning

I keep using the word "ironic" in posts here, I'm starting to sound like a broken iPod. Get it, I was going to say broken record, but then I remembered my dad and I have an extensive vinyl collection and that a broken record would be far more painful to think of than a broken iPod. Especially since I use an iPhone now. Anyway, it's particularly ironic that this nonsense would trickle down to me so quickly after posting about the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial crisis and the bailouts of financial institutions here, and how the corporations were receiving assistance while good people lost their jobs and houses.

This morning I opened my mailbox here in our temporary rented house I'm sharing with my sister so we can study in Adelaide, only to find a letter from our landlord's realty company. It was clearly too thin to be a cake, some fresh bikkies or other baked good thanking us for our business, so I was intrigued. Upon opening said letter, I couldn't believe my eyes.

(I would have scanned the letter in to show you exactly what they were talking about, but there was far too much personal information on it, and I'm not sure as to the legality of duplicating a document like that and publishing it).

FORM 2 – Residential Tenancies Act 1995
NOTICE BY LANDLORD TO TENANT TO REMEDY BREACH OF AGREEMENT — NOTICE OF TERMINATION

THIS BREACH IS AS FOLLOWS
Rent not paid in accordance with the terms and conditions […]. Your fortnightly payment due on 24.11.2008 has not been made. You are currently paid to the 23.11.2008

To remedy the breach, you must make payment for four weeks in advance […].

Yes ladies and gentleman, I was late in paying the rent by one day. ONE DAY. As a result of this I am required to pay a month's worth of rent now instead of a fortnight. I can pay it, no problems, it's just that I won't be eating for the next few weeks. Okay I exaggerate, but it still makes little to no sense whatsoever. Alas they are completely in their power to demand this.

I wonder how much this realty company has lost on the Australian share market in the last few months? I wonder if they've started penny pinching their customers to make up for a shortfall. Because the important thing is to treat your customers like absolute crap when times get tough, because only by doing that do you secure your wealth. Maintaining good relations in the hopes your customers will stick around when things improve is hippy speak.

Don't you just love it? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my credit union to withdraw some cash. I like credit unions because they treat you like human beings. It's not that I loathe banks as much as I just… loathe them.

This post documents a simple little trick I learned by accident in the iPhone's and iPod Touch's Notes application. By default Notes uses the "Marker Felt" font for its interface which lends itself well to the illusion that you're writing on a notepad rather than typing on a computer screen, but the letters are quite thick and I've found they tend to run together outdoors when the screen is bathed in sunlight.

If you've enabled an East Asian script such as Japanese Katakana or Korean Hangul on your iPhone keyboard, if you tap on the little sphere button to change to it and add one character, the text on the note you're editing transforms into regular, clear, easy to read sans-serif font, including the heading when you return to the main Notes menu. Beautiful!

I suspect it has something to do with the character set changing that triggers this. For example bloggers know Lucida Grande on Mac OS X and Lucida Sans Unicode on Windows NT-derived systems have excellent support for regular Roman letters as well as Japanese characters. It's likely Marker Felt on the iPhone does not have such character support; and for good reason! I couldn't imagine trying to read East Asian characters in such a thick, fuzzy font.

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15:19 – The show title says it all. One of the most comprehensive, well researched, intense, respectable, accurate, relevant, without peer, hard hitting and to-the-point episodes ever recorded. Music from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC1 News service.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

It's official, the Citigroup has become the latest financial institution to receive US federal government assistance. From the CNN International news site:

NEW YORK (CNN) — The U.S. government outlined a massive rescue package for Citigroup early Monday that would inject another $20 billion into the banking giant, shares of which have plunged in the past week.
Banking giant Citigroup has announced it is cutting a further 50,000 staff as the economic crisis worsens.

Banking giant Citigroup has announced it is cutting a further 50,000 staff as the economic crisis worsens.

[…] the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will backstop some losses against more than $300 billion in troubled assets.

I really do feel for the people who've lost their jobs. I've read commentary in my Google Reader feeds that says workers for companies are responsible for their company's actions and that if they don't agree with what the company is doing, they should just quit. Perhaps people in more senior positions have the luxury to consider doing this, but alas for each of these people I know there are scores more who simply can't afford to. There's also a disturbing parallel between this line of reasoning and the idea that you're responsible for your country's actions as well, but I'll leave it at that for now.

What bothers me about this pattern of bailouts, after bailouts, after bailouts, is that the head honchos and senior management of this latest sinking ship will probably not even receive a slap on the wrist, pay cuts or anything else. I know it's been said by more people and more often than Sarah Palin said "you bet'cha!" and "uuuhhhh….", but it boggles the mind that these gigantic corporations that wouldn't bat an eyelid while clearing a family out of their home when they default on one payment, can be bailed out when — to put it simply — they default on hundreds of thousands of payments.

As an economics student I've learned about the reasoning behind these bailouts and emergency governments investments. By bailing them out, these companies can keep employing people and lending money which allows the economy to continue to function. It's the classic "trickle down" approach where $1 of government investment ends up snowballing into so much more as it is spent, used to buy, spent, used to buy and so on. The problem I have with this rosy line of reasoning is: what's the definition of "continue to function". Was it functioning properly before?

Has this whole experience exposed a flaw in this flavour of capitalism? That such huge and critically important entities are supposed to be run like businesses, but can't be because if they fail the consequences are too dire to contemplate? I'm not arguing we give up capitalism, but clearly letting it run unchecked and shift to fundamentalism like this is just as bad as completely going the other way (oh no, he was going to say "communism"!). Capitalism that screws the average Joe and Jane but that turns into socialism when the companies themselves fail is simply not fair, and it's simply not sustainable.

My other point is, if banks are so central to the health and well being of a productive society, should they really be operated as businesses at all?

In any event, it makes my post complaining about Citibank Australia's misleading advertising look particularly poignant now (Misleading late night Citibank commercials), even if what I was talking about is an insignificant problem by comparison to the problems the banks themselves are facing.

Or is it? Is it time to admit that our current financial system is simply broken, and question why banks are allowed to act like indestructible predators like this in the first place. Is this more of the problem than we realise, or is being reported? Will it be reported by mainstream media any time soon? Will a spade be called a spade? Because last time I checked, a spade ain't a diamond or club, though for the sake of disclosure I must admit I do have terrible myopia.

ASIDE: See, all this bad news is impairing my ability to even tell jokes! Okay, I could barely crack a good joke before, but that’s beside the point. I need a hug. And a grilled cheese sandwich. And a nice hot cup of tea :).

I love clouds, and taking photos of clouds because no two skies are ever the same. Some have said it's a silly thing to do, but having my hobbies labelled as silly hasn't stopped me in the past and that's not going to change any time soon!

I never used to upload my cloud photos on my Flickr gallery because I figured most people wouldn't be interested in such images, but I've caved in and started an I Heart Clouds gallery. Here are the two I took earlier this afternoon in Adelaide:

Given it's just another manic Monday over here (and in short order in the rest of the world) I figured I'd post another 10 Rubenerd Fun Facts to help us all get through it a little easier. As I've mentioned previously, all these facts are irrefutable and 110% true.

If you missed them, feel free to refer to the first Rubenerd Fun Facts post and my post where I ecstatically reported my purchase of David Letterman's Late Show Fun Facts book. And as usual, feel free to take notes.

1. People who wear socks that don’t match are statistically more likely to trip on their own shoelaces.
2. Maybach lost its court case with Chrysler to advertise as the company that produces the world’s ugliest vehicles.
3. Artist Jim Gleason has himself suffered numerous bad starts.

   

4. No two letters are more than 90 characters apart in the Roman, Greek or Cyrillian alphabets.
5. The words interchangeable and exchangeable are.
6. The first belt sander was peddle powered.

   

7. A salt water crocodile has never been Minister for Foreign Affairs.
8. Under a Queensland state law passed in 1921, gherkins cannot be hollowed out and used as pens to sign government documents.
9. Due to a glitch in Satan’s Windows Server systems in mid 2005, Hell briefly sent non-Wiccans to heaven.

   

10. The F6 key is the second most pointless key after FN according to Swiss productivity experts.
11. Ruben Schade once flew on the wings of love but was arrested for not lodging an appropriate flight plan or possessing an aviation licence.
12. People with blue hair are more likely to have used dyes.

    

They can actually get away with distorting the facts like this?

With the current financial crisis gripping the world's banks and other financial institutions, it's a real concern to me that predatory lending and unsustainable credit is not only being encouraged but is actively being advertised… STILL! While they're awaiting government bailouts to resolve their own incompetent behaviour, it seems banks are more than happy to continue the practices that got them into this mess in the first place.

All this at the cost of unsuspecting consumers who I'm sure they'd be more than happy to come down on like a ton of bricks the instant they're unable to make payments. It's nauseating.

While watching late night television (or very early morning television depending on your definition) I saw an advertisement by Citibank Australia for their new line of gold and silver credit cards. Their argument, presented by a friendly person in simple English, was that credit cards charge ridiculous amounts of interest — sometimes as high as 18, 19 or 20% — and that their line of credit cards offer a very low 2.9% on balance transfers. This fact isn't mentioned once or twice in this longer than usual commercial, but three times.

Another screenshot from my EyeTV tuner from last night

The problem is, while the low 2.9% on balance transfers is presented in bold red text numerous times, only once and in extremely small text at the footer of the screen is it mentioned that the actual credit interest rate for regular payments is a whopping 20.74%, higher than the figure they're advertising for balance transfers and higher even than their previously stated examples of exorbitant credit interest rates.

Balance transferral allows you to withdraw borrowed money from one account such as a Citibank credit card, and deposit it into another account. With this functionality you could save money by paying a credit card bill which may have a high interest rate with money transferred from an account with lower interest. Balance transfer interest rates on credit cards though are not the same as the interest charged if you use the credit card like a… credit card. This Citibank advertisement does not explain this, or even mention it.

Now I'm not saying that people are stupid and won't know the difference. What I am saying is that these advertisements are intentionally misleading and is clearly intended to entrap people. They entice people with seemingly low interest rates to pay off their high interest credit card bills, then lock them in with their own high interest credit.

False advertising laws prevent Citibank from claiming 2.9% interest without having the 20.74% real interest in fine print, but the laws also state that misleading advertisements are illegal. Citibank should have defined balance transfer and displayed the general credit card interest rate alongside the balance transfer rate in the same font size.

With Citibank losing more than 90% of its value in the last year and seeking government assistance, they should be held even more accountable now for such advertisements. They won't be, but they should.

Later this week, I'll be writing a formal letter to Network Ten the Australian Consumer and Media Authority.

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21:05 – Freak weather in Australia (torrential storms in Brisbane, fluctuating temperatures in Adelaide, snow in Victoria a week before summer!); my cheesy slogan from primary school; my dad's plant designs in Pinkenba; the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.2 update (still no copy/paste, the amazing street view feature, the new weird MobileSafari layout); Toronto, Adelaide and Dublin; the IntoYourHead show; and utopian science fiction writers!

UPDATE: I referred to the CEO of Microsoft as Steve Jobs not Steve Ballmer! The blasphemy! Please forgive me!

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Flinders Ranges, South Australia from my Flickr gallery

I was direct messaged on Twitter this afternoon about what I meant when I said I was a spiritual atheist. I couldn't explain it in 160 characters or less, so I decided to elaborate here.

The idea behind spiritual atheism is that you can meditate, have life changing experiences, alter your perceptions of the universe, heighten your senses to become aware of things you weren't aware of before, and that none of this needs you to presuppose anything on insufficient evidence. What this means is that you can be spiritual without believing in celestial dictators/gods or believing things to be true without facts, logic or common sense, and allows you to remain rational.

We find it a shame that religion has a monopoly on spiritual discourse, and feel it is about time spirituality should be decoupled from it and properly explored without religious baggage. Imagine if we had a field of scientific study on spirituality, and how much more we could understand. For example, when we applied science instead of mythology to alchemy, we got chemistry. When we applied science to astrology instead of mythology, we got astronomy and a greater understanding of physics. Imagine what we could achieve with a similar approach to spirituality and to perhaps an even greater extent psychology?

As for the claim that I may as well be an agnostic: there is a clear difference between spiritual atheism and agnosticism. Agnostics on the whole assert that large claims about gods, spirituality and the universe can't be proved or disproved either way.

Spiritual atheists are the same as atheists in this regard: we assert that something isn't true until there is sufficient evidence, and that the fact you can't disprove something isn't evidence in it's favour! For example, you can't disprove the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Russel's Celestial Teapot, or the fact you could have an invisible unicorn in your bathtub.

That's what it means to be a spiritual atheist :). I guess I won't be invited to a large number of houses now:

“If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.” (II John 10-11)