Monthly Archives: July 2011

A New Original Song “Silent Serenade”

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[audio:http://stephenpickering.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Sserenade71611.mp3|titles=Sserenade71611]

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“Silent Serenade”

Lyrics and Music Stephen Pickering – Creative Commons 2011

All is calm
I can’t go on
Leaving love behind
In the still summer night

There’s a pain over there
That the rain won’t spare
And a piece of the sky
That my heart wants to climb

Chorus:

It’s been a while
It’s been a long one
Since we’ve been apart

I could’ve sworn the pieces had fallen
Leaving motionless the stars

But I know there’ll come a day
for our silent serenade.

Here comes May
The Sun after the rain
We swim through flowers all day
And found a bower to lay

You’ve got your call
Feels as cold as rain in the fall
Where’s the peace of the night
Where our love used to hide?

There’s a thief who stole
All the diamonds and gold
Where the soul used to hide
When I had you by my side

Chorus 2:

It’s been a while
It’s been a long one
Since you’ve been a apart
They could’ve made up the same lines
A little closer to the heart
I would’ve shown what I made
In this silent serenade.

Creative Commons 2011 – Stephen Pickering

Google+: A Threat to Tumblr?

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In response to John Battelle’s blogpost: Google+: If, And, Then….Implications for Twitter and Tumblr, I wrote the following: (Note such posts harken back to one of my blog posts about blogging itself: That is, if you find something you are interested in, and read blogs about the topic, often times your replies become long enough to qualify for blog posts. Also, by replying and leaving a link to your blog, it drives a little traffic as well.)

That was one of my first thoughts when I experienced Google+ that Tumblr was in trouble

Still they have a community. I’m on it. My impression of it is more of photo and gif sharing, but not personal photos as much as interesting photos, magazine like photos, that people are posting from somewhere else. To get attention on a Tumblr to post, the photos need to be striking, extremely funny, or otherwise “headline” grabbing.

Like Twitter, not a lot of personal feel to it, but fun, and I like Fred’s attitude that companies don’t kill other companies as much as companies kill themselves.

But my main takeaway from Google+ is not so much the service itself, although it is great, as like you say, it’s integrated with all of Google’s other services. Google may be Germany, but the seem to be the one company of all of these that has all the pieces. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that will be a powerful value proposition.

It almost reduces Twitter and Facebook to applications on this vast Cloud OS, rather than platforms in and of themselves. And Apple, for all it’s wonder, doesn’t have a Cloud Syncing OS, much less a Social Network. I think Apple should buy Twitter and Facebook should merge with MSFT.

The deep integration of Google+ with Android will be compelling and I don’t see the “app” for the iPhone as being as robust an experience as it will be on Android. This could be a long term threat too Apple as well if they don’t get their Cloud Offerings together.

The Only Part of the Equation that Ron Paul is Missing

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Ron Paul is correct that gold is important. It’s very important. The only part of the equation that Ron Paul is missing is the demand for money. Inflation is caused by two factors: how much money is printed and how much demand there is for money (growth increases the demand) If you had enough growth it would soak up the excess liquidity and there wouldn’t be inflation.

The reason Gold is so important to this picture is because it’s intrinsic value (for a variety of factors) is the most resistant or stable to economic or political factors. So what we need is not necessarily a “Gold Standard” but rather a de facto gold standard that uses the price of gold to indicate how much cash to print. In another words, the Fed’s policy should be to keep gold in a very tight trading range. When the price of gold goes above that range, that indicates that there is more cash in the system than the system can handle or demands (like now!) and the fed should sell bonds to soak it up. If and when the price of Gold goes below the target, that’s when they should print, because that indicates the economy is demanding more liquidity.

When the fed does the opposite, which it usually does, because it ignores the gold signal, then you get the worst of both worlds: too much liquidity and no demand for it, which equals “stagflation”

Growth is stimulated through fiscal policy (lower taxes, regulation) and inflation could be controlled through a correct monetary policy, which would be to target gold. So there is no reason at all for inflation, even during tough economic times. You can’t print your way to prosperity. You have to increase productivity and add real value.

A “De Facto” gold standard would not deprive the economy of the liquidity it needs to grow, as the the opponents of such a policy argue as a scare tactic against it. Instead, it would give the economy exactly the amount of liquidity it needs to grow without any inflation. So, in a sense we could get rid of the Fed, or at least downsize it. (No more billion dollar Fed buildings needed!) Because basically it would only take one guy and a computer to effectively execute and maintain such a monetary policy.