John Rynne's weblog

Robert Reich gives a concise explanation of why the US economy is in trouble: Americans have run out of ways to maintain their living standards. Check it out at Guernica

Courtesy of the ever-excellent BoingBoing, an amazing parody of Hopper’s Nighthawks

Beautiful. Sad. True.

The Mona Lisa is great, too!

I’ve just signed the Amnesty International petition support of the Tiananmen Mothers. Check it out. Go ahead and sign. And buy some roses while you’re at it.

And in South Africa, Freshly Ground are playing a gig tomorrow night at The Assembly in Cape Town (a bit far away to attend :-(. It’s in aid of “people who have been displaced due to violent acts of xenophobia”. Great idea!

Kiva is a site which enables you to provide microloans to people around the world who need start-up capital (mainly a few hundred euro) for a small business, such as a shop, or to buy agricultural implements or the tools of their trade.

I made a loan to an entrepreneur named Anna Popelnuk in Ukraine . She has a shoe shop.

It works like this:
People looking for finance post a photo and a description of how much they need to raise and what they plan to do with it. The borrowers are vetted by local organisations so it is not a scam.
You choose to lend to someone (minimum $25). The mechanics are handled by PayPal.
As the borrower repays, the money becomes available to lend to someone else.
You get regular updates about repayments and the borrower’s business progress.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look at the “dark side” of the idea: people who fail to repay. The site is very transparent and you can easily pull out a list of all the borrowers in default.

Interesting facts about defaulters on Kiva:

• Just over 200 borrowers have defaulted. That compares very well with over 13,000 people who have paid back in full and over 45,000 loans granted in total. Many banks would kill for that sort of loan-loss ratio!
• Interestingly, most of the listed defaulters paid back part of the loan (i.e. they didn’t just disappear with the money).
• From what I can see, most defaults are actually due to problems with the local organisation failing to fulfil Kiva policies (such as not passing full amount of loan to borrower), war (Gaza Strip), etc.

Consider joining Kiva – it sounds like an excellent way to contribute to economic growth in less fortunate areas of the world.

Great little short story about time travel, couched as a Wikipedia edit war. Very funny.

Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel.

The basic premise is that, once time travel is possible, the first thing everybody thinks of is going back in time to kill Hitler.
(Courtesy of BoingBoing).

In other news, Arthur C. Clarke has just died at the age of 90. Though I agree with other bloggers that some of his later stuff was crappy (particularly the co-written books such as the “Rama” series), his early stuff blew my teenage mind and helped retain my sanity through adolescence (along with Heinlein, Asimov and others).