The Illusion

A few years ago, I worked for a company that appeared to be a real financial opportunity. Everyone thought so. However, I looked at the overhead costs and never felt that way. I felt uneasy about it and often made suggestions for projects that would increase efficiency and lower this overhead. Management always rejected these ideas, feeling that they were unnecessary. When I explained that we were operating at a loss; that it costed us more to offer our services to customers than the market would be willing to pay for, their resposne was "we'll make it up in volume".

Make it up in volume?

Are you kidding me?

All that means is that we go deeper and deeper into debt and only appear to be doing well. They, like many companies, could do some creative accounting and put things on the books so that it would appear that with our ever increasing revenues, that the company was strong and had a great future.

They made it look as if even though we weren't profitable, that with increased revenues, we soon would be. And of course, it was all an illusion.

That company, in the wake of the realities revealed with Enron, soon went Chapter 11, just as Enron did. Hundreds of thousands of 401(k) plans took the brunt of the losses. It was a horrible thing. It was a preventable thing.

All that said, this is the same thing that we are doing with our economy. And the saddest part is, the people in charge, Democrat and Republican alike, have no clue that they are going down the same paths. In fact, they plan on using trillions of your dollars to make the problem worse. Essentially, they hope to "make it up in volume".

Cutting past the shell game that they've turned this all into, the fact is, it all boils down to spending more than you bring in. All roads regarding this economic disaster lead back to spending more than you make.

Sub-prime mortgages; bottom line is that people were buying homes that couldn't afford them. As long as we were "making it up in volume", in essence, keeping the collective spending going, the illusion kept everyone happy and things could continue on. Underneath though, the fact is that it was an illusion and the money wasn't there. The value in the economy wasn't there. It was a myth.

And contrary to just blaming all the Wall Street guys, the fact is that these bad loans were packaged and sold as mortgage backed securities. Those securities were bought in good faith on Wall Street, as they were valued according to rules that Congress set up. Congress allowe these worthless pieces of paper to be valued as if the mortgages were those of people able to actually make the payments. Those worthless pieces of paper made victims of a lot of Wall Street guys too. They bought paper that everyone should've known they were bad, yet they were valued according to "the rules".

People say that regulation would've fixed this problem, but they're wrong. It might've fixed some of the problem, but the fact is that regulations existed, but just didn't apply to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Government wanted them unfettered by regulation, and now they're blaming those that want to deregulate, as the ones that created the problem. The fact is, most of those in government are guilty even if they claim they're not.

People can point at the business men and say "greed". That greed was the issue. Well of course it was, but it was greed on every front. There were people in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that got huge bonuses for makingt hose ridiculous mortgage deals. However, they did so from encouragement from Congress, who were greedy for re-election and they didn't care that people couldn't afford those homes. It was all about votes. The greed was with government. The greed was with the people taking out mortgages knowing there was no way they could pay.

The government was greedy in another way, with overall spending, spending so much more than they brought in with tax revenues, and as a result, rather than to cut spending, just printed more money to pay for their ridiculous spending. Their spending was for things that would get them re-elected; that gave them power. There was greed there too.

And all that government spending ... the printing of money to pay for it ... just devalued the dollars that were in your pocket, and throughout our entire economy. It made the economy overall less valuable, although no one (except a few of us) realized it.

The "experts" on economic affairs, were schooled on the theory that debt didn't matter, and that with a consumer driven economy, that all they had to do was to keep consumer spending up, and things would be okay. But they never stopped to realize that this was still just another way of saying "we'll make it up in volume". You could never keep this thing going forever. There would come a day of reckoning.

During the Clinton Administration (and I'm not blaming Clinton) they reformulated the way that calculate the overall output of the economy (what we used to refer to as the GNP (Gross National Product). They came up with a new name the GDP, or Gross Domestic Product or the GDI (Gross Domestic Income) and with this new formula, was able to make everyone think that the economy was doing better than ever. Of course, no one considered that a part of this "new" economy was the DotCom bubble which burst in those years. That in itself, should've been a warning, as it showed that the Dot Coms were a false economy. How could people not see that a lot of the rest of the economy was built on false illusions as well?

Part of the calcuation for GDP includes government spending, including the spending into debt. So it's an indicator of output of our economy, when in reality, there's a major portion of the calculation that is actually losses. How can you be telling how strong your economy is by counting losses as value? There's no value in a loss. PERIOD. You can play with accounting rules and suggest depreciation and all sorts of creative accounting, but the bottom line is that a loss is a loss.

It is not a benefit. It is a loss. It is not a value, it is a liability. And that's what our economy has been built on.

So to try to remedy this most recent economic upheaval, the geniuses in government, still drunk with spending our money, wont admit that they might've been a part of the problem, want to spend more of our money, to try to get the economic spending machine (the consumers) to buying again. The theory is that if they can just restore consumer confidence, that they can get the charade moving again, and we'll be back in the mode of "making it up in volume" without having to pay attention to the fact that there is less and less value to the economy.

The spending the government is looking at, is in the trillions. It will essentially, devalue what money we have left, even more. So our economy will be worth even less than it is now, but people wont realize it because there'll be revenue flowing

in the economy. They will continue to calculate GDP and tell everyone "look, we fixed it". But they didn't fix it. They made it worse.

Geotagging Photos

Ever since I first heard about geotagging photos, I have been intrigued with the idea.  This was especially so after being on sites like flickr that allow you to associate each photo or a series of photos with a position on a map (geotagging).  The thing is, this association was being done manually by selecting a series of photos, and then placing a link on a map position.

I kept reading that eventually, cameras would have built-in GPS units capable of doing this geotagging automatically.  In addition, I found that the EXIF data that is available in most jpg files include longitude and latitude, although most are blank because this information isn't available unless the EXIF is manually edited.

Well, I recently bought a Amod AGL3080 GPS Data Logger.  This little device is only a couple of inches in size.  It's light and inexpensive.  I clip it to my camera bag, but some photographers clip it to their belt.  It is a GPS unit without any screen or read-out capability.  It merely makes a GPS log that can be later retrieved via a USB interface, to get the logs onto your computer.  Then with the help of some software provided with the unit, the photos will be matched up to the longitude and latitudes from the log, via their timestamps; this works if you make sure to set the time in your camera within reasonable accuracy.  The software will make a reasonable approximation and match with the GPS log.

I read about the process and figured that it was too good to be true, but it isn't.  It actually works and it's pretty seamless.  The only thing that would be simpler is if it were built in and plugged the EXIF inside the camera.  Until that day, this process is working fine for me.