from the hip

The US believes itself to be a - or perhaps even the most - technologically advanced country in the world. This is a myth, blatantly false. Internet usage, Internet speed, mobile telephone use, Internet phone speeds, and so on, are all among the many areas where the US is increasingly lagging behind the most advanced countries in the world. So is banking and financial services.

I am astonished by the lack of efficiency and the poor customer service of American banks. Here are some real life stories that really shock me, from banks that are all among the top 5 US banks. Here are the cases:

1. Electronic transfer between two customers in the same bank

A friend transferred 1200 dollar to my account. In Scandinavia, the money would have been on my account instantly, as it is a within-bank transaction. Here the bank took 24 to take the money out of my friends’ account, then printed a check and mailed it to me. So, 3 days instead of instantaneously. And unnecessary paper and mail service and postage, all of which, I am sure, customers pay for.

2. Electronic transfer between banks

I paid for something using Paypal. And there wasn’t enough money in my Paypal account, so Paypal withdrew money from my banking account, as they should. However, it took 4 days for this to be processed by the bank. Again, I guess, a check. In Scandinavia this would have taken 1-4 hours, as it is an interbank transfer.

3. Deposit lost by the bank

A friend of mine deposited 800 dollars in her bank. She got a receipt. After a few days she noticed the money weren’t there. She calls the bank. They could not find the deposit, but would investigate. Six weeks 5 long calls, talking usually to two or more people each time, she finally gets the 800 into her account. Now she finds that in two separate cases the bank had given her overdraft fees of 35 dollars that she would not have gotten had the money been where they should. Again she calls. Two calls later the fees are dropped. During this ordeal, the bank never contacted her - she always had to initiate contact.

Now - how it is possible to lose a deposit? How is it possible to not honor a customer’s receipt immediately? Why didn’t be bank get back to her quickly and fix it all? Who made the mistake here - the bank or the customer? It is simply the worst customer service I have ever heard about!

These tales, and others, are so shocking that I wonder how US banks can get away with it? Are American banking customers totally undemanding? Or are they ignorant - don’t know how things are done outside the US and what they should rightfully demand from a modern bank? Do regulatory agencies and consumer organizations not care? Are American businesses unconcerned with banking efficiency? And especially about the banks - do they not care about efficiency? Do they not care about customer service?

It’s easy to fix! Send some guys on a plane to study how it’s done overseas. Buy the software. Do the changes. Get with it! You are lagging by at least a decade!

Or do you just not give a shit?

The little, otherwise relatively liberal country of Denmark, known perhaps especially for its liberal attitudes towards pornography,  may well be one of the most control-oriented states  in the world as far as the Internet is concerned.

Since 2005, the Danish state has monitored everything everybody has been doing on the Internet. The Danish newspaper Politiken writes:

According to metroxpress, the state is monitoring everyone’s behaviour on the internet as a result of legislation that requires all user names and passwords to be lodged with the State and University Library and the Royal Library. The libraries file everything from children’s scribblings on Arto.dk to love letters and profile pictures on Dating.dk.
The technology is known as Internet Harvesting and the Net Archive currently harvests all Danish sites four times per year.
However, some news, dating and other social network sites are harvested daily, according to Eva Fønns-Jørgensen of the Net Archive at the State and University Library in Århus.

Code release
“Danish sites have a legal duty to provide access codes and we have been harvesting text, pictures and audio since 2005,” she says.
At the moment, researchers are the only ones allowed to see the extensive personal material grabbed through Internet Harvesting. But 70 years after the death of, for example, a person with a dating profile, all information comes into the public domain.

The thinking behind this is that people themselves have chosen to place materials on the Internet, and that once it is one the net it is publicly available.

So there we go. Public nudity and liberal rules about pornography. But Big Brother is watching. And letting others watch as well!

1984 has come and gone.

See also: Inventor of the Internet warns against ‘Big Brother’ systems that track the sites you visit

I have downloaded and  tested Chrome. It is fast, has a number of great features, and looks great. However, it has bugs!

Chrome is not fully CSS and HMTL compliant. Like Internet Explorer it does not display all settings like they should be displayed. For instance, Chrome does not take into consideration “max-width” and “min-width” settings. This means that web pages that are fluid, but has set max and min widths so as to limit line widths will not display properly.

There may be other bugs as well, but those were the ones I noted.

This means that web programmers now have to find and implement “fixes” and “hacks” for yet another non-compliant web browser if they want pages to display properly.

Ouch!!

Biofuels have been hailed as a major solution to the challenge posed by high and rising oil prices. However, lately there have been more and more indications that this may not be the case.

Rising food prices (and rising futures prices on food as well) is one such indication. A rise in demand for food, resulting from among other economic growth in some rising economies, such as China, is another.

Now a World Bank report has been leaked (to the Guardian) that indicates that

biofuels have driven up global food prices by 75 percent, according to the Guardian report, accounting for more than half of the 140 percent jump in price since 2002 of the food examined by the study. The paper claims that the report, completed in April, was not made public in order to avoid embarrassing US President George W. Bush.

This is somewhat at odds with an US analysis recently that came to the conclusion that just 3 percent of the food price increases could be attributed to biofuels. The World Bank numbers seem high, but even so I have more confidence in them.

No doubt we will much more on this issue in the coming month. To me, however, it seems pretty clear that using land that could have been used for food to instead grow biofuels must be wrong. Thus, only to the extent that biofuels can be grown elsewhere, do I think they should be permitted. Also, seems to me, we need new types of plants that are much more effective than the ones currently used.

To me, this is a field that requires much more pondering as well as more research. Far too many politicians around the world have jumped on this train much too fast!

See also: Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis and
Poverty: 260m driven into hunger by push for biofuel

The high oil prices may well be with us for a long time to come, if senior analyst Gioavanni Serio in Goldman Sachs is right. In an energy seminar in Oslo he told participants that the oil industry moves in 20-year cycles.

The world is now in a period of sky-high oil prices that will last a long time—probably until 2020, according to the world’s largest investment bank.

The price for American raw oil rose to a record-high USD 112 per barrel this week after new figures revealed a surprising decrease in storage the week before. Brent oil from the North Sea also rose to new highs, selling for USD 109 per barrel.

“In the long-term, oil prices reflect marginal costs to the oil industry,” said Serio at a yearly energy seminar held by Wilhelmsen at Lysaker outside of Oslo. “The oil price and marginal costs stayed low in the 1990s. Now that it has become far more expensive for the oil producers to retrieve oil, the price is going to rise correspondingly,” he predicted.

The Goldman analyst does not think oil demand will increase significantly but he pointed to “bottlenecks everywhere”. He said: “Oil companies are lacking professionals and rig rates have exploded from around USD 100,000 per day in 2002 to USD 500,000 per day this year.”

However, not everyone shares Goldman Sachs’ bullish predictions. Italian oil giant ENI’s CEO Paolo Scaroni said last week he believes oil prices will fall as a result of increased production.

“We expect the oil price to fall to USD 50-60 per barrel, a price that will provide for global growth,” said Scaroni in an interview on Italian TV.

I am shocked by the lack of efficiency and the fees charged by American banks! Having lived mostly in Europe, and now residing in the US, I am completely unable to understand American banks.

Checking is costly

I have stopped using checks years ago. But in the US they are still used! Even though debit and credit cards are accepted everywhere, people still use checks. But checks are much more costly for banks than electronic cards. They also take more time to write and control whenever they are used. So the costs as well as the transaction costs are higher. But still there are tens of millions of checks written every day!

This is wild. But I have started to notice why. The first thing is that banks in the US are extremely bad when it comes to electronic payments and transfers, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of the costs (or the fees they impose on users). So the incentives for discontinuing the use of checks for consumers are small.

This is a sad state of affairs. Both the banks, the customers and the US economy lose out on this. Loss of efficiency in the end translates into higher costs for users and hurts the competiveness of American businesses.

Electronic transfer efficiency

I am used to a transfer from one of my own accounts to another of my accounts taking no time at all. Here in the US it takes a day. Transfer to somebody else’s account with the same bank, I am used to taking 1-2 hours. Here it is one to two days. Transfers to other banks I am used to taking 1-4 hours. Here it is 3-5 business days.

But electronic wiring and computers are just as fast in the US as in Europe. So the explanation for this is not technical. It’s simply the banks keeping the money for a while to profit from the float (the accumulated interest of all funds being in “limbo” on the way from one account to another). But this kind of greediness slows down business and imposes business costs on others! And it makes customers angry all the time.

Fees

The cost for an electronic payment is microscopic. Yet in the US the charges for some transfers are dollars instead of cents! How is it possible? I pay 3 bucks to use an ATM to take out money from an account in Europe. Bank of America, which charges this fee, has a cost on this transaction which is unlikely to be higher than 5 cents. How come they are allowed to charge this outrageous amount?

According to CNN money American consumers actually paid more than $36 billion in various fees in 2006! They write that a

.. government study on bank fees released Monday revealed that consumers are ill-informed about the fees they are paying on their checking and savings accounts.

The report, published by the Government Accountability Office, found that some fees assessed by at banks, thrifts and credit unions have steadily increased in recent years - in some cases by double digits.

Overdraft fees, for example, rose 11% between 2000 and 2007, according to the study. Other charges however, like monthly maintenance fees, have declined in recent years.

Regulation

Philosophically, I am a liberalist. I want the market to take care of things. But when markets fail, they need to be regulated. I will write more about the American banking industry later. But to my mind this is an industry in dire need of regulation. It’s really shocking to see that this is possible in the country that really is in the forefront technologically as far as Internet, computers and software is concerned.

It is truly remarkable, isn’t it, that the country with Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Facebook and Google is at the same time at the level of a third world country when it comes to the quality of its banking system?

A new, little cool gadget is quietly conquering the US. A camcorder. Not produced by any of the big name manufacturers. Not a brand name at all, actually. And not conquering the market by means of huge marketing campaigns. In a year, it’s captured 13% of the US market. And it’s a bestseller on amazon.com.

Actually it is less advanced, rather than more advanced than its competitors. That’s not all that common as far as electronic gadgets are concerned, in our day and age.

It’s a sweet little story actually. This little device, the Flip and its successor, the Flip Ultra, produced by Pure Digital, is winning in the marketplace in the old-fashioned way: It’s very easy to use - anybody can use it and have fun - and it’s real cheap.

You want to know more? From New York Times:

Now, understanding the appeal of this machine will require you not just to open your mind, but to practically empty it. Because on paper, the Flip looks like a cheesy toy that no self-respecting geek would fool with, let alone a technology columnist.

The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.

Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.

There it is: the entire user’s manual.

It is point and shoot. It’s simplicity incarnated! It is “less is more”.

The video and audio quality is surprisingly good — not as sharp as a tape camcorder or even digital still cameras, but far superior to cellphone video. It has TV resolution (640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second), with softer images than you’d get with a real camcorder.

The shocker is the Flip’s low-light abilities, which trump even $1,000 camcorders. Not only is the video grain-free, but recorded dim scenes actually look brighter than they looked to your naked eye.

Once you’ve shot a few scenes, you slide a button and — sproing! — a U.S.B. jack pops out at 90 degrees to the camera body. This, too, is part of the Zen of Flip. You’re spared the hassle of storing, tracking and finding a U.S.B. cable.

…. “Look what my first grader did with it all by herself,” one guy told me. “We’re using them in schools to teach narrative structure,” said a teacher at a conference. “I bought two of ‘em: one for my 80-year-old grandmother,” said a neighbor, “and one for my 5-year-old.”

Pretty neat, is what I think! No cables, no fuss, ok pictures without 200 pages and manuals and advanced computer programs. And real, real cheat. What do you think?