Archive for January, 2010
Firefox Add-On BookerFox now available for download at Mozilla.org
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Technology
I have been using it for months, but it is now available for download at Mozilla.org. It’s still in the “experimental” stage but once I get a few reviews I’ll submit it for review. The page for the add-on is here. It is called BookerFox and is intended to aid certain repetitive tasks for people who sell books on a wide range of online markets.
It provides the following tools in a toolbar at the top of the browser:
- A quick calculator to find 15%, 20%, or 50% of any number in those cases when a seller needs to issue a partial refund.
- An input box and drop-down menu to paste in order numbers and navigate straight to the order page (bypassing the home page or search page), on numerous markets, so long as you are already logged in.
- An input box and drop-down menu to paste in USPS or UPS tracking numbers and jump straight to the tracking page without first bringing up the parcel service’s home page.
- A bookmark menu of market site login pages.
The Economy Tanks, The Fed Makes Off Like a Bandit
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Economics, News
While Main Street starves, the Fed feeds Wall Street what’s left of America’s wealth.
The Washington Post reports that the Federal Reserve pulled in $45 billion in 2009. In 96 years of operation, the Fed never made so much money in a single year.
From the article:
Wall Street firms aren’t the only banks that had a banner year. The Federal Reserve made record profits in 2009, as its unconventional efforts to prop up the economy created a windfall for the government.
With unemployment climbing to Great Depression levels, businesses shuttering and too-big-to-fail getting by only by government life support, exactly what was the Fed doing that was such a grand profit center?
It might have something to do with this:
This hockey stick graph should concern you a lot more than Al Gore’s. Federal Reserve loans to banks have jumped astronomically. It would be crazy if the Fed didn’t rake in monstrous profits. The Federal Reserve has the unique privilege of not only originating the money, but also of collecting interest on loaning it out.
That is the source of the “record profits,” which are not so much profits as they are stolen property. Neil Irwin, who wrote the article at MSNBC.com, got it wrong when he said that “The Fed, unlike most government agencies, funds itself from its own operations and returns its profits to the Treasury.” It does indeed give money to the treasury, but the way it makes its money is not fundamentally different from tax-funded agencies. The arbitrary printing of money is just a stealthier tax. It’s a tool of wealth redistribution that simply debases the dollars rather than taking them directly out of your paycheck. When the government bailed out AIG, FNM and FRE, when they bailed out Citigroup, Bank of America, GM and Chrysler, it was all with stolen funds. Conservatives are fond of saying our children and grandchildren will have to pay that debt, but we also pay it right now. The economy could have recovered by now, but instead, the resources that would have gone toward recovery were shifted without our permission to the most worst-performing businesses in the market. Those companies should have simply taken their losses, declared bankruptcy, and let the rest of us get on with life.
Since the Fed spent 2009 redistributing your hard-earned wealth and mine into the balance sheets of the Wall Street gang, collecting a hefty fee along the way, of course both of them are going to have “a banner year.” Enron had a banner year in 1999.
Ron Paul Challenges Ben Stein to a Debate
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty, News
Two men I respect and admire had a little spat on Larry King not too long ago.
Ron Paul, I admire for his merciless grip on economic reality, and his commitment to ending some of the worst policies of Washington. Stein, I respect for his mountainous scholarship and his willingness to say the unpopular in order to defend science from dogmatic theist-haters. Anyway, here’s that exchange:
Ron Paul’s response in a Campaign for Liberty video:
As always, Ron Paul is way too nice. Stein is clearly gobsmacked that anyone could possibly think of terrorists as anything other than psychotic animals, and he can only categorize Paul’s attempt to humanize people we might hate as “anti-Semitic.” I can only explain this in one of two ways:
- He is convinced that terrorists aren’t human. In other words, they have no motivation. They are simply mad dogs that need to be put down.
- He is unable to distinguish between the so-called Israeli “occupation” in the Middle East from the American occupations in several Middle Eastern countries.
It sounds like Stein believes both, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he isn’t so hateful as to subscribe to #1.