Incoherent ramblings

Kiva, a fun alternative to standard charitable donations.

November 17, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , ,

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This year, when I was still at IBM, I had opted out of the IBM Employee Charitable Fund (ECF) and chose to put cash into Kiva microloans instead.  I was tired of just blindly dumping money into some big charity like United Way.  I don’t really have any idea what United Way or any other charity is doing with the money I provide.

At the time I had no idea that I wouldn’t be working at IBM for much longer.  When I left IBM and started working as a contractor for LzLabs in the spring, having made this switch already made it easy for me to continue doing so.  The only change I made I was increase the amount that I was making for my monthly Kiva funds topups.  I’m now an employee of LzLabs Canada (3 of 5 at the time of the incorporation), but since we don’t have an IBM style employee charitable fund, I am still putting funds into Kiva that I used to put into explicit registered charities.

I quite like Kiva as an alternative to standard charity. For one, it isn’t straight up charity, since I can choose to fund people who look like they are trying to improve their condition.  That’s a sustainability difference that I think is very important, and part of the trap of the welfare system.  If you reward welfare recipients by providing it unconditionally as we do, you create the welfare state.  Most of my Kiva loans have specifically targeted individuals who have some sort of business venture that they are trying to improve.  My preference has been for people that want tools or livestock (example: a milk producing cow) that will continue to provide value long after the loan is paid.

Its fun to be able to specifically choose who my funds are going to, and when the loan repayments come in, I can often recycle those repayments directly into a new loan without even waiting for my next top up period.

I don’t think that the default overhead that Kiva wants for each loan is reasonable ($3 on $25), so I lower that significantly each time.  Note that if the loan that you try to fund doesn’t get the backers required, Kiva keeps that overhead donation amount.  When I recycled funds after such an unfunded loan into a new loan, I explicitly set the corresponding Kiva donation amount to zero.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I can get a Canadian charitable tax credit for the sort of permanently recycling Kiva loans that I am doing, but it’s fun enough to see my loan portfolio grow that I don’t care too much about the tiny little tax kickback Uncle Trudeau and Aunt Wynne “give me” in exchange for me financing their spending sprees.

Home office progress.

November 13, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

We’ve had a giant cavity the room that that is now my home office space. It had been cut into the garage by the previous owner of the house to mount a CRT TV in, made the garage a lot less usable, and also let in a lot of cold. Last weekend we took it out completely:

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and on Tuesday I framed in a new wall support, and got it into place:

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Then sealed things up again:

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I happened to have a sheet of water resistant board kicking around the garage, so used that:

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and today I did the rough coat:

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While I had some compound mixed up, I filled in a few other things in this space. Quite a while ago I fished ethernet and coax cable into my home office space, so I got the box in place for these:

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and did a rough plastering fill of all my fishing holes:

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It will be nice to get this space completely in order, but we’ve now made some good progress on that front.

New book arrived in the mail today

November 11, 2016 Incoherent ramblings ,

Usually, I’m really eager to open a package containing a book. This time I wasn’t so sure I actually wanted to open this mail item, since I knew exactly what it contained:

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I’ve got work to do related to C, PL/1, and COBOL.  I don’t have the courage to buy myself any sort of COBOL book.  I saw COBOL once and my eyes burned.  My eyes are watering even thinking back to that day.  Unfortunately, at a glance, PL/1 doesn’t look much better than my nightmares of COBOL.

TPP sales pitch from Bob Saroya, my “representative” in parliament.

November 2, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , ,

My “representative” member of parliament, Bob Saroya, is busy wasting my money my sending out TPP sales propaganda, apparently believing that I’m stupid enough to fall for this bit of fear mongering.

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My response was:

I received your TPP sales pitch.  I’m not surprised to see a member of parliament attempting to sell Canada to unaccountable corporate tribunals, using a misleading attempt to disguise this as a “free trade”.

This is of course the function of government “representation”, to take resources from people who actually work for them, and channel them into the hands of power elite.  Your letter demonstrates that you are serving this purpose admirably!
Of course there’s a chance that you are just spouting the party line without actually believing or understanding what you are writing.  Even if that is the case, it is disappointing and frustrating to see taxpayer resources wasted on such empty propaganda.

Interesting tidbits in a Hillary Goldman Sacks wikileaks transcript.

October 16, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here’s some notes on a read of the first of the wikileaks transcripts of the Hillary Goldman Sacks talks.  There are three transcripts in total:

 

The main takeaway is that the State deptartment role is certainly not about diplomacy.  There’s lots of mentions of stirring up crap as part of the routine game.  Chaos is a desired end goal, so long as it’s controlled or directed.

page 7: North Korea:

We don’t want the North Koreans to
cause more trouble than the system can absorb. So
we’ve got a pretty good thing going with the
previous North Korean leaders

What an interesting statement.  The corollary seems to be that they do want North Korea to be stirring up trouble.  It serves to distract and limit China for example, a point made in other parts of the speech.

page 13: Syria:

So the problem for the US and the
Europeans has been from the very beginning: What
is it you — who is it you are going to try to arm?
And you probably read in the papers my view was we
should try to find some of the groups that were
there that we thought we could build relationships
with and develop some covert connections that might
then at least give us some insight into what is
going on inside Syria.

It is well known now that the US has been arming the “Free Syrian Army”, funnelling weapons in through Turkey via the Saudis.  Here Hillary is discussing exactly this process.  She actually expresses regret that the US isn’t as good at this discrete covert warmongering as they used to be.

page 14: Libya:

In Libya we didn’t have that problem.
It’s a huge place. The air defenses were not that
sophisticated and there wasn’t very — in fact,
there were very few civilian casualties.

A psychopath in action.  I hear of Hillary’s carpet bombing of Libya discussed as one of the most brutal and destructive campaigns in near history, and she describes it as “very few casualties”.  I don’t actually know the numbers, but it’s certainly interesting to see how casual she is with respect to the death of civilians.

page 15: on Iran? (or perhaps Syria):

Well, you up the pain
that they have to endure by not in any way
occupying or invading them but by bombing their
facilities. I mean, that is the option. It is not
as, we like to say these days, boots on the ground.

Causal talk of bombing other countries is so disgusting.  Notice how the word facilities is very vague.  Decoding this a bit, if you are simultaneously talking about “upping the pain” and bombing facilities, this is probably theorizing about bombing targets that have the most terror inducing and hardship effects on the civilians (water processing, energy production, schools, hospitals, …).  But that’s okay so long as it isn’t perceived as “boots on the ground”.

page 36: Russia:

And finally on Afghanistan and Russia.
Look, I would love it if we could continue to build
a more positive relationship with Russia. I worked
very hard on that when I was Secretary, and we made
some progress with Medvedev, who was president in
name but was obviously beholden to Putin, but Putin
kind of let him go and we helped them get into the
WTO for several years, and they were helpful to us
in shipping equipment, even lethal equipment, in
and out of out of Afghanistan.

Russia was a useful ally when they helped with covert wars.  Now that those covert wars are knocking on Russia’s door, the relationship has soured.  It’s hard to imagine why that relationship has deteriorated.