Wesley Howe

I haven’t been getting these for a while. As you can see, someone would have to be very reckless to trust someone that cannot compose any better letter than this. Whatever happened to glib con-men?

Dear Sir/Madam,

my name is Mr. John Eze, I work in the credit and accounts
department of African banking in co-operation,Lagos,Nigeria.
I write you in respect of a foreign customer with domiciliary
a/c number 2590074169. his name is Mr. Erick board.

he was among those who died in a plane crash here in Nigeria
during the reign of late general sani abacha.sir,since the demise
of this our customer, Mr. Erick board ,who was an oil merchant
/contractor, i have kept a close watch of the deposit records and
accounts and since then nobody has come to claim the money
in this a/c as next of kin to the late Mr. Erick board. he had only
$28.5mllion in his a/c and the a/c is coded.it is only an insider
that could produce the code or password of the deposit particulars.

as it stands now, there is nobody in that position to produce the
needed information other than my very self considering my
position in the bank. based on the reason that nobody has come
forward to claim the deposit as next of kin, I hereby ask for your
co-operation in using your name as the next of kin to the deceased
to send these funds out to a foreign offshore bank a/c for mutual
sharing between myself and you.

at this point i am the only one with the information because I have
removed the deposit file from the safe. by this doing, what is required
of you is to send an application laying claims of the deposit as next of
kin to the late Mr. Erick board.

you can as well send your info…….
1)your name……………..
2)age……………………..
3)home address…………….
4)occupation……………..
5)your cell phone number…..

finally I want you to understand that the request for a foreigner as the
next of kin is occasioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner
and for that reason alone a local cannot represent as next of kin.

When you contact me, then we shall discuss on how the money will be
split betweens. Trusting to hear from you, I remain. You can call me on
this number: 234-80-368-350-20

respectfully yours,

Mr. John Eze

Bernard Madoff has made his name as an infamous swindler, running the largest Ponzi scheme ever, some $50 Billion Dollars. Oh, wait, I guess that is the largest Ponzi scheme that collapsed to date. There is an ongoing one that dwarfs Mr. Madoff’s results.

Unlike the Madoff scheme, few of the participants in this scheme are wealthy investors. And few people get any choice about investing in this scheme. The size of the scam is enormous, and while precise numbers are hard to find that do not have some level of estimation in them, they range up to over 200 times the size of Madoff’s haul. That would make the previous record just 0.5% (half of one percent) of this scheme. Even if the deficit comes in at one-tenth of this, it is still huge beyond belief.

Oh, some of you may have guessed the name of this scheme. It is commonly called Social Security, although it has a more legal name as the Federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Act. The scheme is a simple one, like a Ponzi scheme, where the contributions of current participants are used to pay benefits to prior participants. Like any Ponzi scheme, as long as the pool of investors keeps growing, the scheme remains viable and does not collapse.

Because of the number of years of participation and minimum age requirements to collect benefits, the funds collected from all of the promised future beneficiaries are greater than what is required to pay benefits. But all this extra money just gets skimmed off and spent on other things, replaced with paper promises of repayment later from general revenues. The impending risk of collapse of the scheme is because at a point not too many years from now, the pool of investors will start shrinking when the rate of participants becoming eligible as new beneficiaries is greater than the rate of new participants that come into the system.

Not only will revenues start to decline with the shrinking labor pool, causing the excess funding currently used for other government services be consumed, but the government will have to dip into general revenues to start paying back all of those paper promises in place of the excess revenue collected. So the issue is that this may not be sustainable, as fewer workers are required to pay more in taxes to support the system. The danger is one of real or political revolution because of conflicts between those taxed and those benefitting from the tax, combined with the very real possibility that benefits from other governmental programs may be cut. And if the government just prints more money, rampant inflation will result (you don’t need to study ancient history to learn this, just study the last few decades of events in Argentina).

While everyone can see the problem, no one knows if the breaking point will be hit one of these days. But history tells us that people revolt on their stomachs, and either those who will be excessively burdened from increased taxes or those whose promised benefits get cancelled, or some combination of the two, will have less to eat as a result of the higher taxes, reduced benefits or strong inflation. None of the choices look good, which is probably why nothing ever seems to get done about the problem.

In a recent event, a large quantity of coal ash washed into a stream. There was some testing performed that detected higher than allowable levels of arsenic and other elements in the water.

What this tells me is that drinking from a stream that has had coal ashes dumped in it is inadvisable. However, as a general rule, drinking water from any stream unless it has been treated is inadvisable. I cannot comment directly on the chemistry, but an EPA comment on this noted that these elements are routinely filtered from drinking water. I know the allowable arsenic levels for dirinking water was a recent battleground, and a number of areas had natural levels of arsenic in the water greater than the proposed standard.

Certainly, creating piles of any substance, such as dirt, sand and other materials (including coal ash) that are subject to being washed away into a stream is a problem. Allowing silt and other substances to be washed into waterways has been outlawed for a long time by the Clean Water Act.

I am now seeing plenty of other news reports triggered by this incident bemoaning a lack of regulations to deal with the “threat”. I think any general danger from coal ash is greatly over-hyped. People have been living alongside coal ash for centuries. Coal was, and still is to some extent, used to heat homes, and the ashes disposed of by the homeowner. Coal is also used to heat schools and hospitals. Coal ash is placed in piles, has been used as a filler under poured concrete in homes, has been mixed with sand and used to pave driveways and a host of other uses.

There are probably better materials for all these uses, but reusing something that has to be disposed of is usually cheaper than processed materials, like asphalt. But the real point is that people have been doing this a long time, and no ill effects have been attributed to having coal ash in close proximity to people before. If there was a long term danger from contact with coal ash, it probably would have been an epidemic a long time ago. So I look at these articles and think there is a little hysteria mixed into the reporting.

Coal ash is probably an unwise substance to consume. People have noted this for a long time, and while I never tasted coal ash, I was never tempted to see what it tastes like. Coal ash has been regarded as nearly worthless for a long time… when I was a child I was told if I wasn’t good, Santa would bring a “bundle of switches and a stocking full of ashes”. They didn’t mean cigarette ashes.

In the latest chatter is a proposal to bailout newspapers, many of which are failing right now. But this proposal isn’t about freedom of the press, or maintaining public access to information, its about keeping some rich families from losing the remains of the fortune their grandfather left them before they can finish squandering it, and to protect some CEOs that loaded their business with debt when the economy was booming and advertising revenues were up, and now can’t make the payments on their loans. No reason in either case for people of more modest means to have to fork over more cash. They should reap what they have sown, and the weak need to be eliminated by natural market forces.

We are in no danger of the public losing access to news and information. We are overloaded with news and information, even before you pick up a single newspaper. And were a large city paper to close, you can bet that several small startups will begin the process of  competing to grow and replace it.

This is the right way to do it, it is the American way, free-market. While some essential public services may be exceptions, a business with open entry, like newspapers, should be left alone to cope with market forces. As conditions change, the dinosaurs will go extinct and new creatures will appear, bringing innovative new features.

No one ever proposed bailouts for slide-rule manufacturers when calculators appeared. And the internet alone will not kill newspapers as a business, just as Kindle will not kill the print book business. In all cases, business methods will have to change to cope with changing conditions. It’s just the economic version of Evolution.

I have dreamed that one day your newspaper will be printed right in your home, delivered electronically to a slightly improved printer over what we have today. You pick it up in the morning, or the evening edition, according to your preferences. No soggy paper on a rainy day, no trip top the curb and the printer could buffer pages in the event of a paper feed or supply problem.

I like sitting at the table and reading my paper. And booting the computer, downloading articles from WSJ Online, and hitting print would do pretty much everything I described, but not automatically. I still want to sit at the table and read the paper, so I subscribe to the print edition.

We should just let market forces take their course here. It’s bad enough that we are blowing Billions on banks and car companies… the pot is not big enough to pass money to everybody, and all a bailout does is push current problems into the future. The U.S. bailed Chrysler out once before, and now they are back, along with GM. At least Ford, which still has a large founding family stake in the company, has passed on the “free” money. Perhaps they are in better shape because their cars (and especially their trucks) “work good, last a long time”. Hey, what a unique idea, giving people what they are looking for instead of trying to trick them into getting something less by offering 0% financing or such… maybe I could patent that idea as a business process.