Centralized world power and Net censorship

Centralized world power and Freedom of Speech cannot coexist!

We live in a small world where the actual power structure is hidden and centralized. On the other hand, the Net is all about freedom of speech. Clearly, centralized power and the Net cannot coexist. It is obvious that centralized power is well entrenched so naturally it is the Net that has to back off. This backing off manifests itself in many ways such as malware, P2P clogging, complexity and cost of Internet access, sluggish roll-out, non standard components, obsolescence, information overload, lack of customization and so on.

But the most sinister factor is Google's dominance. The lack of competition allows Google to stick to its keyword centric syntactic strategy where it is able to censor websites much more easily. This SIGNAL vs NOISE kind of censorship is able to confuse even the most determined searchers. In any case, Google is more about Ads than about Search.

The only way to bypass such censorship seems to be to search on the basis of authors as opposed to keywords. This is the only way to keep the SIGNAL NOISE ratio from getting out of control. What is more worrying is not ideology, it is spin. This is the reason we should give up even on authors and follow only individual commenters. The logic is that authors are looking for numbers and only spins see propagation.

To follow individual commenters, we can click on their names, which is usually a link to their website or a page containing other comments made by them. We can also try and Google their name. Savvy commenters pick quirky (hopefully unique) screen names for this very purpose.

But never mind, here too, our rulers have found a way out: botnets. The common perception is that botnets are moronic spreaders of spam and some of the less moronic botnets even try and phish out our passwords. To a certain extent this is true because email is the purest form of addressability so our rulers need spam to dilute it. And also financial scams and economic hardship have forever been used to keep people under control. That such actions keep the insurance and security companies humming is welcome too.

In actual fact, botnets are highly sophisticated networks which are not only able to unceasingly dodge detection but also troll ALL forums and add to the NOISE everywhere. Even complex captchas are no deterrents to these sophisticated bots. It is amazing how many of the comments posted are actually from sophisticated trolls that never be exposed because these behave like human commenters and come from innocent IPs. Recent studies have confirmed that botnets use SEO techniques to capture search engine traffic on controversial keywords.

Moral of the story: Suspect anything and everything because PERCEPTION CONTROL is the biggest game in town.

Internet Censorship Alert

Internet Censorship Alert: Alex Jones exposes agenda to 'blacklist' dissenting sites (March 14, 2010) As I predicted, the Obama Administration is trying to shut down the Internet - at least the parts he doesn't like. Barack Obamas regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein has stated that he wants to ban conspiracy theories from the internet. Think about what this means - Every video, every website, every blog, every email, that exposes or just criticizes the government for any reason whatsoever could be labeled a "conspiracy" and taken down. Your home could be raided in the middle of the night, and you could be carted of to jail for criticizing the government. All they have to do is call it a "conspiracy theory". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAWmBLFodE

Thursday, August 28, 2008

How Much Will Government Bailouts Actually Cost The American Taxpayer?

How Much Will Government Bailouts Actually Cost The American Taxpayer?
Richard Benson
Benson's Economic & Market Trends
August 11, 2008

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/benson/2008/0811.html

What is this economic disaster going to cost the taxpayer? Let's try to add it up.

The Federal Reserve: Let's say the Fed gets stiffed for $10 billion, a modest sum. That translates into $10 billion less in profits from the Fed to send the US Treasury, and $10 billion more for the taxpayer to pay.

Student Loans: We estimate that several hundred billion of student loans are outstanding, and the average debt per student is $20,000. Conservatively, put the cost down at $20 billion.

Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation: This government agency insures $2.5 trillion in Defined Benefit obligations. The PBGC covers 30,000 business plans and 44 million workers. The PBGC charges an insurance fee and has $55 billion in assets. Let's put the cost to the taxpayer at a conservative $30 billion.

Federal Housing Administration: The FHA has given insured single-family mortgages to about five million people and 17 percent (or one in six) are delinquent. These catastrophic losses represent the worst of "cash for trash" lending that is crushing financial institutions in subprime. Conservative cost is $20 billion.

Small Business Administration: At the end on 2007, the balance of these SBA loans totaled $235 billion, with cumulative losses of about six percent. But don’t let history of only 6 percent losses fool you. As the economy turns down, many of the businesses with SBA loans will fail. For now, let's put this bill at a $20 billion loss.

Federal Home Loan Banks: The FHLB has over $1 trillion in assets, but what are these assets really worth? Well, a lot of mortgages that went into the collateral are Alt-A loans (interest only, no income verification, principal deferred). The real challenge, though, will be between the FHLB and FDIC as they fight to determine who gets stuck with the losses when the banks, thrifts, and credit unions fail. Either way, we’ll foot the bill. Let's put this one down for $50 billion, which is only five percent of the assets of the FHLB.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: Even if a large portion of the bad single-family mortgage debt can be pushed back into the FHLB or over to Fannie Freddie, total losses on construction, commercial properties and consumer loans will easily cost the FDIC, and therefore the US taxpayer, $100 billion. If the government encourages people not to pay their mortgages and live rent free at our expense, we’ll need to increase the expected FDIC bill to the American taxpayer to $150 billion.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: With a record number of homeowners considering whether to live free for 300 days by skipping their mortgage payments, imagine the cash gap that will open up between the cash that comes into Fannie & Freddie from mortgage payments, and the cash that must go out to cover the GSE security payments. For the government, it is more important to spread the losses into the future than to minimize them. Losses on defaulted mortgage loans at the GSEs will be horrible. Put the bailout cost at $300 billion.
Posted by amolpatil2k at Thursday, August 28, 2008
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