"Live" Bus Departures from TFL

Nice concept: each bus stop in London has a unique number on it. Text it or enter it onto a web page and get ostensibly realtime information on when buses will be swooping in to pick you up. Unlike the system NYC is trialling, there is no realtime map information. Which would be useful. But ETAs all by themselves would be useful. Except they're not because they are way too inaccurate. So they can't be relied on to judge when you should leave your house or leave work or duck out of a shop and into the rain. The system kind of works as a comedic diversion. We've been trying it every day this week. One day I checked every minute or two between 07:11 and when the bus actually arrived. According to the estimated time remaining, we should have expected a bus at 07:21, then 07:20, then 07:25. It eventually arrived at 07:27. I was mystified as to what happened between the 7:20 and 7:25 estimated times of arrival, as within a span of 2 minutes the bus got 5 minutes farther away. Was it going backwards?

Today was arguably funnier. If you're not familiar with London transit you might not realize how ludicrous this is, but you'll have to trust me -- seven #26 buses arriving within a 25-minute window is about as likely as the Queen giving me a lift to work in her Rover.

Not to worry, a few minutes later, a couple of those buses had vanished. And no, not by virtue of having arrived and then departed from the stop in question. Sigh. I hope I never find out how much it all cost.

Debt, Money, the Bartering Myth

Read a fascinating interview with an economic anthropologist who's written a book on the history of debt. I've not yet read the book but have ordered it. The interview, though, just by itself is well worth reading. Sample quote:

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.