intuitive ink

Was your student loan debt acquired illegally?  How malicious is KwikPay?  The $133 Billion Dollar Questions... If your student loan balance is going nowhere, and if you use or have been enticed by your loan "servicer" to use a little piece of software called KwikPay -- you may wish to read ahead.  Especially if your intentions are to minimize the actual dollar amount of interest (or interest + principle) paid.  See:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/04/cfpb-student-loan-payment_n_4726052.html Background: doing a little research on something only tangentially related to student loans, I happened across a couple intriguing posts on reddit... have a read  here, here and here .  Immediately my intuitive hackles went up:  something is not right.   And thus the "little" research led to more research, and some pretty interesting discoveries.  First and foremost: be informed that any company that uses KwikPay or Renweb is, ...

"You're rocking the boat.  They don't like that."   A comment I heard just this week... one woman chatting with another woman about how she did it... how was she able to overcome the overwhelming gender bias in this industry and join a team with an employer who actually cares? How did she do it?  By not rocking the boat. I've had this ... I guess we could call it a "conversation" with myself at various points in my life.  Usually it's when I'm getting washed ashore and clinging to dear land, gasping for air:  Oh, geeze. I rocked the boat too hard, again!  And everybody, like, freaked out.   They threw me overboard!  How dare they! ?   Why did they do that?  Because I rocked the boat. Yes, rather than risk their boat getting toppled by little me, they decided that the smartest thing to do is just throw the boat rocker overboard.  Gee thanks.  But the interesting thing is that never has any team membe...

Crowdfunding IS too expensive The payments processing cartel everybody needs to know about  Crowdfunding is kind of a broadly-generic term.  As a recurring topic and point of discussion among hackers, startup entrepreneurs and "the biz guys", it deserves a special teasing-out.  Just what are people talking about when they talk about "crowdfunding"  ... is it like a Kickstarter campaign for a snazzy newfangled electric skateboard?  Is it a plea for funds that takes the form of a "donate now" button or post on Facebook to help that friend's doggie after it was hit by a car? Her dog needed emergency surgery - it was expensive and urgent.  Or, is crowdfunding some sort of "offering" of equity, like a stake in a potentially-profitable company that dangles future lucrative payout for some initial investment? For the purposes of this post, let's define crowdfunding specifically as: Any effort by an individual, group, or organization to...

Where did the information asymmetry in stock options come from?  "Bill Clinton in 1992, one of his campaign causes, was that no company should be able to deduct the cost of executive compensation in excess of $1,000,000. But when it came to actually implementing, the treasury department decided:  As long as CEO pay is linked to company performance, you could deduct over a million dollars. Well, that was a signal to a lot of these executives and to their boards of directors to make more and more of executive pay into stock options. That's where the whole stock option thing came from. It was a kind of a perversion of Bill Clinton's promise in the 1992 election."  -- Robert Reich,  Inequality for All   ~ :47 minutes  Executives -- especially unethical executives -- thrive on information asymmetry. In fact, many will go out of their way to create as much asymmetry as possible and to prevent employees from being able to access or get the data...

photo credit:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/42621781@N08/ Seed money.  Angel investing.  Venture capital.  Funding start-ups that aspire to be "big business" has become a strange beast.   Today is the official effective date for Title II of the JOBS Act, which many are hopeful can kick off a New Great Era of fundraising.   But in many ways, this is a huge red herring. Once upon a time pretty much any company that wanted to could raise money according to a broad array of " blue sky " laws which varied by state: Blue sky laws developed in the frenzied years leading up to the Great Depression, in response to fact that more and more ordinary investors were losing money in highly speculative or fraudulent schemes promising high investment returns, such as oil fields and exotic investments in foreign countries .  But after the hype, boom, bust and onset of the Great Depression, thinking changed a bit.  The passing of the Securities Act of 193...

Part II -- Closing Compensation Loopholes In Part I we established that for this thought experiment, we need a new way of thinking about our be- loathed tax system.  It just doesn't make sense to keep gluing new doodads (exclusions / extensions) onto the old one; the best thing we can do with the rusted old contraption is to toss it out and start over from scratch.  Starting from scratch, we can implement 21st century concepts, materials, and thinking applicable to our 21st century economy. Because this new system of taxation is being designed specifically to encourage businesses, organizations and/or entities with excessive profits to more generously reward the "low men on the totem pole," the progressive tax bracket system makes the most sense.  A business can choose to minimize total tax payments by paying its workforce more, or it can voluntarily pay more in tax than it must to when it chooses to keep profits concentrated among the few at the top.  This s...

Part I:  Income Tax One of my favorite time-killing activities is fairly nihilistic. It involves thought experiments where obviously broken systems are annihilated: figuratively blown apart, sending all the blazing, broken, smoking pieces careening into smithereens.  No more  WD-40 hastily applied to the rusting, booby-trapped secret compartments designed for special circumstances almost two centuries (or even two decades) ago. Indeed, the defunct system we're talking about here is the US Tax Code.   Not just income tax (which gets most of the attention), but sales tax, property tax, the death tax, etc -- the whole shebang.  We need to re-engineer the very framework underlying concepts and philosophy of tax. In Part I today, we'll focus on the Income Tax, because income is the source of all the grease in the wheels in our economy.  After studying and pondering the current tax code, which starts taxing AT 25 PERCENT ($70,700 for a married couple), ev...