News & Politics

Dr. Mahathir’s comments on fractional reserve banking

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I noticed Dr. Mahathir’s latest outburst on Sunday in The Star. My initial impression was that it was more of his usual anti-Western drivel. A line like, “He suggested that everyone should go back to producing goods and services although the profits would not be that massive,” doesn’t make much sense when you realize that finance is a service industry. It’s also hard to take his anti-capitalistic rantings seriously when he’s done his part while he was Prime Minister in joining the finance bandwagon by trying to turn Malaysia into a regional financial centre. Citing Islamic finance is no excuse either because although Islamic banking should, in theory, be full reserve banking, no actual banks that call themselves Islamic do this.

Once you do get past the irritating anti-Western attitude, the basic criticism against fractional reserve banking is more worthy of close examination. At the risk of sounding like one of the crazies myself, I admit to feeling something sympathetic at times to the skeptical attitudes towards fractional-reserve based fiat money of people like Ron Paul. What Dr. Mahathir apparently doesn’t get is that a full reserve banking system gives less power to governments to influence the money supply, not more.

With the current fractional reserve system, regulators have a wide variety to tools to either increase or decrease the money supply: interest rates, reserve ratios, quantitative easing (printing money) etc. Under a full reserve system that is still based on fiat money, the government would be forced to print money as required in a publicly obvious manner. If it chooses to print money faster than the rate of growth of the economy, it would be explicitly causing inflation. In the inverse case, it would be explicitly causing deflation. This is all wonderfully clear and simple, but I suspect that governments rely heavily on the obfuscation of the current system to achieve their contradictory goals.

Of course, what the libertarians really want is a return to the gold standard, or something similar backed by some other physical commodity. There would no chance at all of money being created out of thin air then, but governments would have also have almost no control over the money supply. Somehow, I really doubt that’s what Dr. Mahathir wants.

Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 4

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space_rangers_5c_reduced

Yay, finally done with Space Rangers 2 in the year 3330. The only way to defeat the Dominators once and for all is to eliminate the three bosses: Keller, Blazer and Terron. The main way to do that seems to be researching them by gathering parts from destroyed Dominator ships and handing them in to a scientific base. The more materials you hand in, the faster the research rate will be. The other way is to confront the bosses directly and defeat them in combat. As you’d expect, this is pretty hard as each of them has a ton of hit points, and the Dominator-controlled planets nearby will spawn an infinite stream of Dominators to protect the bosses.

As seen from the screenshot above, I’d managed to climb to the top of the rangers rating chart by 3324 after concentrating heavily on hunting and destroying Dominators, also becoming the most Distinguished Fighter in the process. It was also at around this time that the Coalition forces managed to whittle down the area controlled by the Dominators to just the three systems occupied by each of the bosses. I made a conscious decision to target the Keller boss first. This was because while the other bosses could only launch attacks against systems adjacent to their own, Keller has the ability to attack systems through black holes, allowing its forces to strike behind the Coalition’s lines, so to speak. This made it very annoying to have to constantly travel away from the front lines against Blazer and Terron to rescue a system attacked by Keller.

Continue reading Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 4 →

Fun, Games

John Dvorak needs to learn “WASD”

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UPDATE: Apparently I forgot to add a link to the article in question the first time around. Added now.

So when was the last time PC Mag columnist John Dvorak wrote something that wasn’t pure idiocy? Here’s a line from his latest:

And when you try to take on one of these games as an adult you soon realize that there is too much weird crud, like “hit the A button while moving the joystick forward while pulling the trigger while moving the mouse with your right hand and left clicking.” That’s just to walk forward!

As someone on QT3 posted in reply, all I need to do on my keyboard is press “W” to walk forward. Perhaps Dvorak needs to get himself a better keyboard. And which game needs you to use both a joystick and a mouse at the same time? Even the use of the word “joystick” reveals how out of touch Dvorak is. It was emblematic of the Atari 2600 days, but now that flight simulators have been relegated to a niche enthusiast community, few people actually use joysticks now. The closest modern equivalent are the sticks that are now selling out due to the recent release of Street Fighter 4, but those are now called “fighting sticks”.

Also, look carefully at the last line of his column:

A game like Garage Band or Guitar Hero isn’t the answer. But what is?

Uh, “Garage Band”? Someone should take this guy to one side and kindly explain to him that he’s just making a laughingstock of himself at this point.

Politics

Who else is sick of Malaysian politics?

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Just adding a link to an editorial in WauBebas.org that I agree with wholeheartedly. I don’t think there’s any need for me to summarize what’s been happening. All I want to add is that in my opinion, the failure is much more on the part of the Pakatan Rakyat than on the Barisan Nasional. The BN is a known quantity. Sleaze on their part at least is expected. The PR however had a chance to make a real difference following the General Elections of 2008 but flubbed badly. Instead of settling down in the constituencies that they did win and trying to do a good job at running them, proving in the process that the PR is indeed capable of governing, under Anwar Ibrahim they’ve been obsessed with winning power at all levels everywhere.

Well, that’s backfired badly on them, and the tit-for-tat attacks and grandstanding have only made Malaysian politics that much dirtier. The PR should have been patient instead and trusted that if they’ve demonstrated their competence and maturity, the Malaysian voters would justly reward them at the next GE. As it stands now, what they’ve done is shown that they’re really just as messed up as the BN. As Wan Saiful Wan Jan wrote:

With so many opposition MPs in the federal parliament and the various state legislative assemblies, Malaysian politicians had a golden opportunity to strengthen the role of the Opposition. But no one seems interested in pursuing this agenda. Opposition parties at the state level, from both the National Front and the People’s Coalition have failed to organise themselves accordingly. Most cannot even form a functioning state shadow cabinet.

It is the same case at Federal level. In the eyes of the public, Anwar’s People’s Coalition, has been focusing more on luring National Front MPs to defect. They continue to fail to form a cohesive shadow cabinet. At times, statements made by People’s Coalition MPs have been at odds with each other, even though they are on the same team.

At the same time, it’s become clearer that the global economic recession isn’t abating anytime soon. Instead of constructively engaging with the public about what’s happening and what the government should be doing to weather the bad economic times, our newspaper headlines are instead filled with sex scandals, who has the right to stay in the official Menteri Besar’s residence in Perak state and whether or not there’s an assassin running around trying to kill the Chief Minister of Penang. It makes for lurid reading to be sure, but it’s not what we should all be really talking about.

Personal Life

A word of warning about Facebook

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In case anyone’s interested, here’s a low-down on a controversy that’s been simmering over the Terms of Service (ToS) of the popular social networking tool Facebook. This started on Sunday when a post on The Consumerist publicized a change in Facebook’s ToS that most people have overlooked. According to The Consumerist:

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg subsequently offered an explanation on Tuesday, saying that the change merely reflected a “fundamental reality” of how services like Facebook work. Basically he claims that Facebook is worried that if a user who has uploaded content subsequently closes his or her account, that content would still be available to the other Facebook users that the original content owner shared the content with. This change in ToS therefore serves to protect Facebook in case of legal claims from users who close their account but are unhappy that their previously uploaded content might be in the hands of other people.

A blog, Razzed, then rebutted Zuckerberg, arguing that Facebook could have used legal language similar to those of e-mail companies who only act as intermediaries to transmit content from one user to another without needing to claim any legal rights over that content at all. According to this view, Zuckerberg’s assurance that Facebook won’t do anything with its users’ content against their will amounts to an empty promise without any legal backing behind it.

My own view: the vast majority of users on sites on Facebook probably don’t care about what happens to their content once it’s uploaded. As the saying goes, once you upload something onto the net, there’s no way of taking it back. Since they don’t have any way of monetizing the content that they upload, the legal status of ownership claims over that content shouldn’t matter to them either. However, those who do have a way of monetizing their intellectual property, or plan to do so sometime in the future, should probably think carefully before trying to popularize their stuff on Facebook. This could include people like artists, musicians, writers, photographers and software programmers etc. It’s likely that uploading their stuff will be harmless for them too, but you probably don’t want to leave this to chance.

Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 3

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Lots of combat in my ongoing Space Rangers 2 game from 3307 to 3312. I’d finally managed to join a proper military operation to liberate a system in the game, but while it was success, taught me to pay attention to which system is actually being liberated. You see, these operations start by docking with the military base organizing the expedition. When you agree to join in, you’re placed in suspended animation until the date and time of the attack, and then the entire base warps into the target system held by the Dominators. Then everyone undocks from the station and proceeds to kick Dominator ass.

The battle itself went well enough, as by that point I’d upgraded to a great combat ship with max weapons slots and a special +15 to shields, which means any incoming damage is reduced by a further 15% in addition to the base defense of my shield generator. I did need to redock with the station for repairs once, but overall, destroying all of the Dominators garrisoning the system was fairly easy, and I happily hopped over to one of populated planets to be properly congratulated and feted.

Continue reading Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 3 →

Religion

Maker of “Fitna” film denied entry into UK

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Remember the post I made a while back about the short film Fitna made by Dutch MP Geert Wilders? In that post, I condemned that film for its amateurish over-simplification of the facts around Islam and pointed out that it’s just as easy to find nasty stuff written for a more barbaric time from the Christian Bible. This time around though, I find myself having to defend him because I do think that this is a free speech issue and hateful as his message is, he has a right to express his views.

As far as I can tell, the British government basically offers two basic justifications for denying Wilders entry into the UK:

  1. Free speech does not extend to shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre and Wilders’ message amounts to that.
  2. Allowing Wilders to enter the UK and express his views would threaten the public security of the country.

To the first justification, I retort that Wilders’ message in no way resembles shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. One of the defining characteristics of the crowded theatre scenario is that it compels people to take immediate action. There is no such immediacy here and all parties will have plenty of time to reflect upon Wilders’ message before making any decisions or taking any action. Furthermore, freedom of speech is curtailed in the crowded theatre scenario only if the speaker is falsely shouting “fire”. If the theatre actually is on fire, the speaker does have the right to shout “fire”. This means that the authorities must actually prove that Wilders is making a statement that is factually incorrect to deny him freedom of speech.

The second justification basically amounts to caving in to potential terrorist threats. The line of thought seems to be that if the UK allows Wilders in to spread his message, it would make the UK a higher priority target for terrorist attacks than it already is. That’s a pretty sad position for a democracy to take. The responsibility for any attacks made by terrorists lies only on the terrorists. As abhorrent as Wilders’ message is, as far as I know, he has never advocated any violent action against Muslims. All that he has done is to try to change the laws of the Netherlands to better respond to what he sees as a threat to his country.

I happen to disagree with his assessment but from my point of view, he has done nothing that would justify depriving him of his rights. The correct response to someone like Wilders is not to prevent him from speaking. It is to ignore what he says. By making a big fuss of Wilders’ attempts to speak in the UK, the British government has simply played into his hand and given him what he really wanted all along: more publicity than he deserves.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living