Prosper - 4 month setup review

Well back in February I decided to experiment with Prosper - an online loans/borrowing service to test the premise whether it could pay higher than a savings account. After having played with the site (as a lender) for a few months now, I have somewhat of a mixed opinion.

First - I've made approximately 60 loans since I started with Prosper and over time I've developed my own portfolio criteria for 'automated' bidding on loans. This leads me to the biggest drawback of Prosper -- not that people are crooks/don't pay back the loans, but that its -really- time intensive to bid on loans.

The site itself is not as speedy as one could wish, and as a result searching for loans manually is a slow and slightly cumbersome process.

Separately, I would estimate that 1 out of every 3 loans I bid on falls through for some reason after the bidding has closed. This is a pain because (including the time for the loan auction) it can take 5-6 days for a loan to close and be reviewed, only to have to start back at square 1. In the meantime, your funds are not accessible for bidding on other loans and they don't earn interest while 'idle'.



Second, the ability to craft a truly custom criteria for loan bids (eg. only bid only loans over 10k IF the borrower has answered at least 2 community questions) is nonexistent. Instead portfolios are crafted on objective criteria such as credit rating/delinquencies etc. Since its too arduous to actually manually bid on loans (unless you place the value of your time at 0), your automated portfolio invariably wind ups bidding on loans whose objective criteria look great, but loan description strike you subjectively as fishy.


For example, one of the first loans I automatically bid on via portfolio management was 27715 -- this was a person with AA credit, no delinquences etc who was willing to pay 11% interest. Except the person in question wanted the loan to go on a religious sabbatical in Israel. Not exactly the rationale that would lead me to believe I'd get my money back. Interestingly this loan was paid off after around 10 days, so even though it did turn out to be fishy - it wasn't exactly what I expected.

Of the 60 or so loans I've made, 3 have been paid off within 2 months, 1 was 3 days late in payment and all loans are current. Currently my 'interest rate' is averaged around 16% but unless I'm extremely lucky, this should fall as some loans turn bad.


I'll revisit how the portfolio is doing at the end of the year, but for now its kicking off enough funds to fund a new loan every 2 weeks. I figure I'll let it compound its way to double the value or total loss. If it does double in value then it will be a nice model for future retirement funds when more aggressive investments (stock market) are sold off.

The Oil Bubble. When Supply and Demand has no effect on price.

There is something fundamentally unstable about oils price when increasing supply and decreasing demand (growth) doesn't result in a cheaper price.

Side Bet: We will look back at May, 2008 and recognize that while Goldman Sach's analysts were calling for $200 oil, their traders were shorting/buying puts on oil futures.

Oops -- our bad

So we kidnapped and tortured you because we mistook you for someone else.



No harm no foul right? Right?





The funny thing is that this sort of behavior by the USA would provoke such a shitstorm if say China/Russia did it to one of our citizens.

The madness of crowds

So over the past few years, there has been various stories involving some form of public shaming on the internet -- from dog poop girl, to that chix who stole someone's sidekick, people all throughout the tubes have gotten on their high horses and felt comfortable issuing death threats, harassing phones calls while others have abetted the process by posting personal information about the "target du jour".



This particular case that the Consumerist is covering is a sample troubling example.



Its all fun and games until someone gets beaten up/killed from one of these posts. I think Consumerist is well, well, well within their rights for their comments so far -- but people who have followed up on their postings and made death threats should be prosecuted. That sort of behavior deserves to be chilled with a few prosecutions.

Vista fallout begins

Looks like I'm not the only one who had graphics problems with Vista. News sites are beginning to pick up the fact that certain graphics cards simply lack vista drivers />



I think the larger problem will lack of support for the Nforce3 chipset, Nvidia already announced that they would not be supporting Nforce2 but the fact is that Nforce3 drivers still are missing as well.



Here is the thing: Even this plays out with Nvidia (eventually) releasing drivers/fixes, its a huge black eye on them and will steer their most profitable customers (people who build their own rigs and buy their high end cards) to AMD/ATI.



I think the fact that a lot of AGP stuff is broken under Vista will come as a rude surprise to many people -- there is a huge installed base out there (myself included) which see no reason as yet to switch to PCI.

Vista Bugs and Solutions I've discovered

Even although Vista is now officially released, there are still a variety of critical bugs I've noted in Microsoft's new pretty OS.

The main one which affects me is the error code 43 bug which prevents AGP graphics cards from working properly on dual core machines. You could run dual core without the benefits of your graphics card, or you could turn off one core and have pretty graphics but slow programs. It took 3 months of investigation but I finally figured out that what was necessary was to update the AGP system device -- if you have SiS, or Uli chipset (I have Uli) you are in luck. Otherwise if you are rocking with Nvidia's Nforce3, (or worse 2)...so very sorry.

Install the AGP Patch, reboot and your windows experience index should go from a 1 rating to something far more reasonable.


The second big bug comes on installation -- even when doing a clean install, Vista has a tendency to use drives OTHER than the boot/OS drive to store system files (such as ntldr). To avoid this you need to make sure that you are loading all your drivers from a USB key/CD and NOT from a separate hard drive in the system. Failure to do this will result in your system relying on two separate drives to get started. If anyone can tell me a shortcut to moving the system files over to the boot drive/partition I'd much appreciate it.


The third problem (and its something I'm still troubleshooting) is integration with firefox. If you set firefox as the main URL handler for Vista, many of the core OS referral functions breaks. For example typing an url in the Address links on the taskbar does not pull the page in firefox...rather the request goes nowhere. No solution for this other than using IE as the default browser for link handling.

Speaking of IE (and this is not strictly a vista problem), IE7 does not seem to work with Citrix. Anyone have any solutions for this?

Why Chase Bank USA Sucks

A few months ago I was doing a bit of pasalubong (gifts for friends/family when you go visiting them) shopping on Amazon when the site offered a cross-promotion deal with Chase Bank USA of a $30 credit if I signed up for a Chase Amazon business credit card.

What the hell, I'm a sucker for free money and since I never carry a balance anyway, I sign up for the card.

Some time later I get a bill for the items I purchased, the offered $30 credit, and a $79 charge for Amazon Prime membership. Weak. Still no big deal..I call chase to tell them I dispute the charge and ask them to take it off.* Chase's customer service transfers me to their "dispute" center..and the call promptly goes to dialtone.

Rinse and repeat 4 times.

Finally I call back and immediately ask for not only the charge to be reversed, but the card to be cancelled as well. Incompetence and poor customer service I can do without. The customer service agent agrees to reverse the charge and puts me in touch with what I assume is a retention specialist who begs me to give Chase another chance and apologizes profuseful for the call drops. Somewhat mollified by the agreement to get the charges removed, I forgo card cancellation and consider the issue closed.

Until a month later where Chase sends me a new statement for a balance of $79 brought forward, $15 in "late fee" charges and $1.81 in Finance charges. The finance charges is a nice touch..charging me interest on a charge I didn't authorize.

So fine..I call back up Chase and immediately enter the Twilight Zone. No one has any record of my calls and any agreement to remove the charges. So I ask for a transcript of the previously recorded call conversation...they say they don't provide that and have no access to it. [Why bother recording the calls then?]
I'm told "its impossible that to remove the charge nor can I dispute them"..I'm also threatened with a subpoena for making false statements in regards to charges (the very one that I can't dispute).

A few escalations later, I'm still getting nowhere. Chase refuses to acknowledge that I ever called in to discuss the bill, refuses to reverse the charges and refuses to accept my dispute of the charge over the phone.

To make a long story short, a conference call with Amazon was setup (with me involved) and they (Amazon) agreed to credit back the account -- exactly what I had asked Chase to do from the very beginning.


At this point of course I'm beyond pissed at the poor customer service I've received and decide that I not only want to cancel this particular credit card, but every chase bank credit card I/my family has. I ask to speak to someone who can get that done..and surprise...dialtone. Now I'll admit that there is no way that they Chase would retain me as a customer, but I think its symbolic of their poor customer service that they drop my call before I can cancel my cards.

I estimate that lifetime Chase has forgone approximately 200-300k worth of net profit from myself and my family. This of course doesn't include all the friends whom over the next 40 years or so I will steer far away from ever doing business with this corporation.

I've noted that corrupt banks never really die, they just get merged into larger banks. That said, the least I can do is contribute towards the outsourcing of every customer agent that Chase uses once the corporation inevitably goes through a "restructuring" due to their poor service.

Whats that smell? Smells like a police state.

This just sucks.

Hacking Online Banks

The Washington Post covers a pretty nice attack which allows the bad guys to steal two factor authenication credentials. What is not so well covered is what banks are doing about it. The answer is  risk based authentication.

For example: You as the bad guy, login to megabank.com with the right credentials you have stolen from a valid customer.

If the bad guy is coming from an IP in say Russia when the customer usually logins in from Ohio, that might trigger a "challenge" question. [The question changes at random].

If the bad guy tries to do an ACH transfer or wire transfer of funds, that would definetly trigger a "challenge" question.

Meanwhile, once the bank detects that the account has been compromised, it will then flag the IP and or network of the bad guy as a place compromised logins tend to come from -- thus triggering even more challenge questions at the login phase.

The point is that the systems security is never fully compromised - but instead additional layers require circumventing. Given a virtual environment, there will always be the possibility that someone (eg. a spouse) can pretend to be someone else.  However risk mitigation is the name of the game. With risk based authentication AND two factor authentication, banks can reduce the fraud and customer impact to negligible levels. The better banks will simply offer to reimburse customers from any negative financial impact.

Barack Obama on Religion and the Public Square

Sen. Barack Obama recently gave a speech on how religion and politics mixes in the public square.
The whole thing is worth reading or listening to but the highlights for me were these statements:

...we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90
percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an
organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians,
and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do
in evolution.


This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful
marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In
fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that
goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

In so far as Sen. Obama attributes people's religious tendencies to an innate hunger, I agree with him. Human beings are pattern seeking machines. It irritates the mind to ponder that there is no plan, no god, no afterlife. The culture that arises from humans coming together inevitably produces some form of explanation that answers the big meaning of life questions.

However, just because 90% or even 100% of people believe in a supernatural diety, doesn't make that diety exist. The fact that religious tendency exists does not make it an appropriate framework on which to set public policy. In fact -- creating public policy around religious tendency in the modern age is a recipe for disaster. Its far too easy to wage a crusade/jihad over issues not based in any factual reality.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're
looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a
recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and
confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that
somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they
are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards
nothingness.


Just because someone likes it when sweet nothings are whispered into their ear, doesn't change the reality of their situation. The poor still wake up poor despite going to church, the sick are still
sick despite fervent prayer, and the dead contribute nothing towards the betterment of this world.

Faith is a seductive pathway which blinds many to things as they are. Faith causes people to translate their reality into a context which fits their framework. Hurricane destroyed your home? It was God will that you survived. Your child killed in Iraq? God works in mysterious ways. Trillions donated to charity, and people are still poor? Well the meek will inherit the Earth.

Faith creates a purposeful disconnect between cause and effect. If shit happens, then there is a higher plan. Reconciling religion within public policy is akin to re-introducing a cancerous growth into someone  whose body has not quite developed an immunity to it. The crutch that religion offers is itself the source of infection.

While I respect Sen. Obama and consider his thoughts well worth considering, in the end he is wrong.  People have a right to their opinion, but not to their own facts. Religion causes people to feel entitled to their own facts -- whether it be Creationism or 72 virgins. The inherent dissonance between reality and religion's perspective of reality will always cause conflict. This conflict is something which the public square can do without.

Crazy..or Batshit Crazy? An examination of right-wing logic.

Ok so Dennis K over at the "the Flying Monkey-Right" blog believes that a recent New York Times story which published

the fact that both Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld have homes in the village of St. Michael's, Maryland is actually a call to assassinate these officials.


Yes..I know...Glenn Greenwald does a good job at showing the fallacies in this but lets walk through the right-wing logic tree.


Supposedly publishing this story is providing info to terrorists to act on and so as a solution, Dennis K is now advocating that the locations of the homes of the editors and reporters also be published. Here is the problem: IF Dennis K truly believes that the NYT article is an implicit call to assassination and or is intended to endanger the VP/Defense Secretary, then it naturally follows - by his own argument, that his posts are intended to harm the NYT workers and their families.


WTF? What kind of madness would prompt someone to a) believe the original "story as call to harm" theory and b) then explicitly write your own "call to harm" as a counter-argument?



Update: It seems that Dennis K has deleted his blog. I guess thats one way to concede a point.

A false sense of security

A day in the life blog has a neat tip on how access your gmail mail account via https (thus encrypted) rather than http (unencrypted). I can't help thinking however that ultimately this tip provides a false sense of security to those who use it. Certainly those people who are on your LAN or on the pathway between your internet connection and google are now unable to sniff your mail -- but if you accepted mail sniffing as a valid threat, then its key to realize that the email when it is sent/received is being transmitted unencrypted.

Its somewhat similar to sending a postcard via public mail and then reading it in a secure room because you have concerns that someone might look over your shoulder.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

In Defense of American Express

So Ben McConnell over at  Church of the Customer Blog  is complaining about American Express jacking his interest rate ever so often to an offensive 29.9%. Just for grins lets call it 30%.

Personally I'm a HUGE fan of American Express and a loyal customer. Then again - I pay off my credit card every month; I don't think Amex has ever gained any money from me through interest payments, but they certainly get a lot of revenue from the 3% they charge to merchants that I buy from.

One of the biggest reasons I'm a fan of Amex is their easy customer service. Questionable charge on my account? Immediately they will credit it back to my account while they investigate. Best of all however is their Purchase Protection Policy. Lose or damage what you bought within 90 days of the purchase date and american express will give you back your money!* I recently had call to use this after buying (and then immediately losing at the beach) prescription sunglasses. The knowledge that purchase protection policy was there, prevented me from getting too upset/frustrated while on vacation.

So charge away exorbitant interest rates Amex. Ben might not be subsidizing people like myself, but I'm sure others will.

*Up to 10k per year.

Freedom is on the march.....away from the USA

So while we're assiduously investigating illegal tribunal cases in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military is also "investigating" whether US soldiers raped a woman and killed her entire family in Iraq.


Happy 4th of July, 2006. With news like this I'm sure the insurgency is in its last throes.

Incompetent or Liars?

An Afghan man is held as an unlawful combatant in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for 2 years. When brought before (a now declared illegal) military tribunal, he calls four witnesses from Afghanistan.

The tribunal reports back (months later) that it cannot find them sending the man back to his cell.

The guardian investigates and finds the witnesses in..wait for it....3 days.

So here's the question - do you think the government even looked or was it just incompetent at looking?

Parker or Webb for VA Senate?

Having decided to not for Sen. George Allen, I decided to take a look at the other candidates.

The libertarian party does not seem to be fielding anyone in the Senate race (normally libertarian candidates will get my nod), but Jim Webb's (the democratic candidate) campaign website and commentary seem to skew towards libertarian values.

Unfortunately the website for Gail Parker the independent candidate is a bit sparse and beyond her favoring rail in VA (something I approve of) and better pentagon accounting (ditto), there is no mention of the "big" issues that I think Senate candidates should address -- the Iraq War being the most notable.

Unless her platform is fleshed out further, Jim Webb has my vote.

Tracking Reason #1 to vote against George Allen in the next VA election

 Sen. George Allen (R, VA) voted for amending the U.S.  constitution to prohibit the "desecration of the U.S. flag".

Enforcing patriotic fervor, Clockwork Orange style, not only harms the constitution but is generally an asshat attitude towards running a free country. Its the "Terry Schiavo" approach to government which Republicans used to disdain.

Virginia can do better. Heck the country can do better. Every senator who voted for this amendment ought to be subject to serious scrutiny the next time they come up for election.

Got a warrant? No need to knock

The new Robert's supreme court has tossed out the requirement that police must knock before serving a warrant.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police armed with a warrant can barge into homes and seize evidence even if they don't knock, a huge government victory that was decided by President Bush's new justices

Whats the big deal? Well aside from scaring people to death, its a significant assault on people's privacy. This Slate article illustrates the problem quite vividly.

These raids are often launched on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants. Rubber-stamp judges, dicey informants, and aggressive policing have thus given rise to the countless examples of "wrong door" raids we read about in the news. In fact, there's a disturbingly long list of completely innocent people who've been killed in "wrong door" raids, including New York City worker Alberta Spruill, Boston minister Accelyne Williams, and a Mexican immigrant in Denver named Ismael Mena.

Oh well..if you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide right?

Immigrants as Seccessionists

David Flores is making the argument that the USA has betrayed the principles of the nations founders by allowing the government wide leeway in its treatment of non-citizens. Said leeway including indefinite detention based on religion, race, national origin, and probably even a musical affinity for Tatu.

... [Judge Gleeson] continued,
the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that Congress and the executive
branch, in exercising their broad power over naturalization and
immigration, can make rules that would be unacceptable if applied to
American citizens.In the judge's view, the government has the right to
detain people indefinitely as long as their eventual removal is
"reasonably foreseeable."

I suspect that the Judge is right on the interpretation of the law. Which just goes to show that the law is flawed. The whole ruling falls apart on the "reasonably forseeable" clause since its not exactly compatible with indefinite detention -- unless one "reasonably forsees" that the prisoner will eventually die.

Still appealing to the authority of the founders is a weak argument in my mind. These are the same people who came up with the 3/5 human human ideology. Better to lay the moral framework for opposing this philosophy separate from the supposed hallowed inspiration of the founding fathers.

Its worth keeping in mind that had the revolution failed, they would have been labelled acccurately as traitors and executed.

Dutch Muslims support 1st Amendment far more than US citizens

So one of my favorite "right-wing" sites LGF is running a story about how "40% of Young Dutch Muslims Reject Democracy" with the key hook being the results of a study that says

 "The majority are opposed to freedom of speech for offensive statements, particularly criticism of Islam."

Sounds pretty bad eh? Then again I remembered this study from back in 2002 where 49% of American citizens thought the First Amendment went too far.

"Many Americans view these fundamental freedoms as possible obstacles in the war on terrorism."

Shh..don't tell LGF.