Barclays just got fined $453m for manipulating the electricity market in the US, following a £290m fine for fiddling Libor while HSBC is off money laundering with seeming impunity.

A $453m fine for Barclays is equivalent to $600 for the average US household, although if the average US household got caught manipulating markets they'd probably be in jail.

These relatively small fines aren't enough to really change behavior.

Unless we change how the fines are used. Put $453m in an incubator that funds banking startups and you can have 40 scrappy well funded companies trying to take the banks down. A handful of those will succeed and really do some damage. Every time a bank misbehaves it will be sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

Previously

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(Published to the Fediverse as: HOWTO: Punish Banks #politics #banks #barclays A cunning idea to use corporate fines to fund startups that will be the eventual demise of the corrupt but too big to fail miscreants. )

The Institute of Economic Affairs has announced the 'Brexit Prize', a competition for the best blueprint for a UK exit from the European Union. First prize is 100,000 Euros, so it's worth a shot.

My plan: Beat Puerto Rico to becoming the 51st state.

I was just about to send this in when I read the instructions:

"At both stages, potential entrants should ask Amelia Abplanalp on [email protected] – for an entry number, preferably at least seven days before the closing date. Entrants should create two pdfs. One of those documents should only have the entry number as an identifier. The other document should have the entry number, name and contact details of the entrant on the cover page..."

It goes on like this and sounds like some EU directive relating to banana curvature. And don't you contact someone at an email address rather than on one? Must be an early April Fools' joke...

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Brexit Prize #politics #eu #brexit My (strangely losing) entry for the Brexit Prize, make the UK the 51st state! )

A quick question for the two thirds of Americans who see gun rights as being protection from tyranny. Your government has just refused to rule out killing you by drone in the US without due process (never mind that US citizens outside the country are already fair game). If not now, then when?

You realize that by the time ATF has seized your weapons and you're all locked up in internment camps for gun enthusiasts it will be too late, right?

If the Attorney General deciding that under circumstances he won't reveal it's OK to kill you without a trial doesn't cross the line then what does? Seems like the dictionary definition of tyranny to me. 

I've got to admit that I wouldn't like to try taking down the government via violence. They've got drones. Not to mention aircraft carriers, nukes, F-35s and whatever it is that's festering on Plum Island. Personally I'll stick with voting and blogging. 

So if you're not actually going to overthrow the government can we drop this ridiculous 'need' for guns and move on?

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Drones and Gun Control #politics #guns #drones At what point would you actually use those precious second amendment rights to fight off tyranny? )

Code.org wants every student in every school to learn how to code. The have an inspirational video of software luminaries saying how easy it is to do and then somewhat contradicting themselves by saying they can't hire enough engineers. If addition, subtraction and ten minutes on a web tutorial was enough then Facebook and Microsoft could hire just anyone. The project comes off as being just a little bit self serving. Sure, we need more skilled software engineers but we also hardware engineers and biohackers and makers not to mention doctors and lawyers and accountants.

Rather than getting everyone to code, how about just stopping Oklahoma from banning science teachers from failing students who fail to learn science: “but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories,”.

I'm not in any way against learning to code. But you can't code without a reasonable grasp of mathematics. And you're not going to be successful as a professional developer if you can't communicate. And when your code inevitably goes horribly wrong then debugging is the very essence of the scientific method. Maths, literacy and science come first, are relevant to many careers and the US isn't doing a particularly great job of delivering the goods. 

Get the basics right and plenty of students will become developers. 

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(Published to the Fediverse as: NailMathAndScienceFirst.org #politics #education #code.org #evolution It's very popular to insist on every student learning to code, but in fact they'd be better off mastering some basic math, English and science first. )

I'm not the biggest fan of banks. Not content with crashing the world economy my own bank took the time to personally defraud me. The EU is currently planning to cap banker bonuses and this is just nuts.

It feels like an attack on the UK, where the lions share of our economy is banking and people coming to see the Queen. 

It feels anti-capitalist - why bankers? Why not footballers or movie stars or orthodontists? 

But mostly it feels like the wrong form of revenge, too easy to circumvent and ultimately likely to be toothless. Banks may say they have to pay outlandish bonuses to attract the best talent, but really it means the industry is ripe for innovation. Regulators should figure out and then remove barriers to entry (and throw up barriers to unfair competition, and hold competitions to encourage innovation) so that startups and software can eat the financial services sector.

Too big to fail all at once, but not too big to be disrupted into irrelevance. 

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Instead of punishing bankers why not disrupt them? #politics #banks #eu Instead of ignorable fines why not punish bad bank behavior by sowing the seeds of their eventual irrelevance? )

I've supported the SHIELD Act before, which would force patent trolls to pay legal bills for unsuccessful shakedown attempts, but a TechCrunch article today made me think this through some more. 

SHIELD would be a serious deterrent for trolls who have their eye on large companies with the means to defend themselves. But trolls eat startups first and a startup is often unable to fight through the courts and get to the point where SHIELD would help. If the troll is after something like $1,000 from every company using a scanner then not many businesses are going to risk going to court. And if the troll isn't interested in any reasonable settlement then the legal fees and management distraction can kill you. 

SHIELD is well intentioned and would certainly help. But we need to stop examining patents before issuing them and do the job properly for the few that ever get used in anger. 

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Bringing a SHIELD to a conker fight #politics #patents #uspto #shield #trolls SHIELD might help patent reform but what we really need to do is stop examining patents altogether. )

I’d love to not care what the Church of England thinks about allowing women to become Bishops. But sadly it’s the established church of England and we allow Bishops to sit in the House of Lords (which needs a complete overhaul, that that’s a different blog post).

The Government’s position on the vote is to be “disappointed”:

A Downing Street spokesman said the prime minister thought there should be women bishops and was disappointed at the result of the vote, but that it was “a matter for the Church to decide”.

Nick Clegg is disappointing. Which Book of Prayer to use is a matter for the Church to decide. Excluding women from the upper management of the official state religion when those managers also play a role in Government is a travesty.

Unless we’re going to allow Jedi in the legislature it’s time to kick the Bishops out of the Lords. It’s also past time to disestablish the Church of England and have proper separation of Church and State in the UK.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Bishops #politics #politicalreform #bishops It's time to disestablish the Church of England for at least this reason. )

Following yesterday’s post on the California 2012 Propositions here’s a shorter post on how I’m planning to vote on the San Francisco (PDF) ballot initiatives:

A: City College Parcel Tax

Yes, happy to pay another $79 a year to support City College.

B: Clean and Safe Neighborhood Parks Bond

Yes, park improvements for a littler over $50 a year.

C: Housing Trust Fund

Yes, a modest amount of money to include affordable housing in a city that desperately needs it.

D: Consolidating Odd-Year Municipal Elections

Yes, because there are too many elections already.

E: Gross Receipts Tax

Yes, makes more sense than taxing payroll and doesn’t tax businesses until you’re over $1M in revenue (whereas the payroll tax hits pre-revenue startups).

F: Water and Environment Plan

No, this is a study on draining the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Which is just crazy. I might not support building it today but it makes no sense to look at getting rid of it now. Plus that water is really nice.

G: Policy Opposing Corporate Personhood

Yes, because a San Francisco policy will totally reverse hundreds of years of legal precedent. More seriously, corporations are not people and while a policy won’t reverse the malign influence of unlimited corporate spending on elections it doesn’t hurt to whine about it a little.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: San Francisco 2012 Propositions #politics #election #sanfrancisco #propositions Official ITHCWY voter guide to the San Francisco 2012 Propositions )