Feds cut discount rate

So the Federal Reserve cut the discount rate yesterday. That's the amount of interest banks have to pay eachother in order to borrow money across the board of international finance. Alan Blinder is quoted in the New York Times (Princeton economist) this morning saying that while the move may be seen as providing a bail out for hedge funds and the big players in the market, it is a necessary move to save the economy from sinking into recession. My take is that such a move, if it indeed quiets things in the higher reaches of market activity, is only to 'push the credit bubble further along' and not really solve anything in the long term.

Apple wishes

One of my deepest regrets in the past 20 years has been to wait so long before switching from Windows to Apple. From 1995 to 2004 I endured the difficulties of Windows, via Gateway and Dell, such as malware, spyware, adware, pop ups, and those frustrating security dialogue boxes. For the past three years I've been free of those nagging issues; although it was tough to re-learn an operating system to be sure. Now Apple is riding high, and the apple iphone was released today. Wish I had one!

Here are the ways that I see society breaking down, in the course of my every day life. Today I was at work at the hospital, leading the regularly scheduled Monday morning treatment team meeting where the nurse, the doctor, myself (social worker) and others review some of the patients on the ward. I got a call on my cell and saw my daughter’s school in the display. Her teacher was calling me back in response to the message I had left for her in my daughter’s school agenda. I got up abruptly, left the meeting, and took the call outside. Derelict in my duties, I felt badly for leaving but I didn’t dwell on it, for I understood, if not how precious the teacher’s time was, that she wouldn’t likely try me again. We talked on the phone for about 10 minutes, while I looked anxiously at the time throughout. When I went back in to the meeting my coworkers were waiting and giving no sign of impatience, having inevitably filled the time appropriately or not. 10 years ago such an interruption would not have been technologically feasible for one thing, and even if someone came in to the room to say, “Brian, you have a call at the front desk…” it would have been for something urgent and business specific. Today, however, nothing seems to be as important as the minutia of the lives of our significant others. Especially when it comes to our children. Simple access makes it so.

That was only one of the events that brought to my mind the decay of social order in modern life. About 10 minutes back into the meeting I had to conference-call in another staff in another office. She picked up on the first ring, a good sign. I asked if she could talk now, never knowing nowadays whether one is driving or not. She said yes, so I put her on speaker and we all discussed the patient for several minutes until it was time for me to have the patient come in to the room, which was the most critical part of her telephonic participation. But she said, “Well, I really can’t stay on the line, I had to step out of my 10:00 meeting to grab your call, so call me later if there is anything I need to know”. And I said, without hesitation, “Sure, no problem, bye”. She did what I had just done, namely, break the professional protocol of staying until a job is done. I couldn’t help imagine a day in the future when everyone will be so hyper-connected to family, colleagues, friends, etc. outside the work arena that normal business will simply collapse because no one will be left who is “mentally in the presence” of any given business for more than a few seconds at a time. By that time, hopefully, nanobots and quantum computers will have taken up the slack of humanity and do all the tasks that we are no longer willing to do. And business can go on in spite of ourselves. I recently read of a futurist’s prediction (Ray Kurtzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines), that by around 2040 only 5% of the world population will need to be employed to serve all the needs of themselves and the remaining 95%.

Nothing remarkable

Today is Sunday, and after a nap my wife and I took a bike ride to a Starbucks. I picked up a New York Times, and held it under my arm while ordering our drinks. As we sat down at a table and read the paper I realized, as we were about to go, that I hadn't been charged for the paper. Well, I had pretty much reviewed all the parts of the paper that I usually do, and found there wasn't a lot of interesting material in it, so there was no point in paying for it. Or dragging it home for that matter, free or not. I asked my wife, "Well, what's worse, to steal a paper or put it back all messed up?" She laughed and said that obviously the answer was not to steal it, that if our daughter were with us it would be a bad example. So I put all the sections back together as neatly as I could and slipped it back on the rack.

Sundays are good for doing what you've been meaning to do for the past six days. I've decided to sell my trusty old Raleigh Professional bicycle and buy a new bike, one with modern features like bar mounted gear shifters, carbon fork, new componentry, etc. So I took a picture of it and posted it on Craigslist. This bike has been in my possession since the mid 1980s, frame and all; and prior to that everything but the frame was on the original bike that I bought in the mid 1970s. The original frame was vandalized one night while locked to a parking meter in Kenmore Square, in Boston, where I decided to leave it for the night (after drinking heavily in a local bar) and take the bus home.