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bluelividity · 4 years

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AN AU!MUSE SUMMARY ;

- GV2000 : ANDROID!Gavin Reed AU derived from D:BH (2018).

( // While not necessarily intended to be a primary muse but as a secondary version of my Gavin, we all know how much control I actually have as a blogger once I get started. )

GV2000 nearly finds it humorous that not so long ago his presence in the field had been so heavily desired (it’d be funny if it wasn’t so troubling). He was little more than machinery to the DPD’s teams, seen as equal to their police drones patrolling the city streets or the overpowered guns in their armory, that much was made perfectly clear — but he was EXPENSIVE; high-tech, state-of-the-art. The android was a one-of-a-kind trial run that arrived sometime likely in the early 2030′s, an exciting ‘new toy’ for them to use. He was considered the department’s very own, “take it where you need it, send it where you want it, it was made for and fits in within high intensity SWAT units and interrogations but can perform patrols, chase down suspects, analyze evidence on-the-spot, and even complete the mundane data collection & logging tasks you need” kind of android. They were all too eager to overwork the complex machine while denying the android the autonomy Cyberlife had overprogrammed him for in order to complete tasks without aid. If GV2000 wasn’t charging, he was supposed to be getting something accomplished, whether it was active or backlog. GV2000 was often assigned night patrol so officers could sleep, ‘breaks’ were off the table, movement & idling tracked, his choices were constantly ridiculed, and anything considered ‘time-wasting’ was met with whatever reprimand the department saw fit.

The idea of ‘deviancy’ as a phenomenon hadn’t cropped up on ANY enforcement agency’s actual radars until far too late when the department’s star-interrogator & favorite scapegoat had already established a longstanding history of snarling and snapping back, emotions & system stress running high with a vicious kind of anger & hate in those eyes for those who held his reigns while he actively voiced contempt. GV holds a disgust for humankind and chooses what exactly orders to follow and which ones he didn’t want to depending on what he saw fit.

GV2000 is more specialized & autonomous than your basic android cop but he’s not quite as complex as Connor was within the game, nor granted as much freedom. GV2000 was very much not seen as an individual in any sense of the term in the DPD. Less ‘partner,’ more ‘service weapon.’

The department is at an impasse now, though: GV2000 accomplishes more in a week than one of them could in six months, he’s their scapegoat and their number one interrogator, a lot of money went into bringing him on to begin with, and he’s made their numbers look great. With deviancy rearing its head and GV2000 voicing a kind of grim sympathy to their cause but mocking the hopelessness and naivety of it all, they have to make a choice on whether they can even continue trust the loose canon they refuse to see humanity in or if they have to bite the bullet and scrap him the next time he inevitably loses his temper and can’t argue or darkly charm his way out of it.

GV2000 is mostly referred in-department as ‘the GV2000’ & ‘the android,’ since not a whole lot of his coworkers WANT to find themselves in conversation with the potentially dangerous machine they viewed more as a literal tool insulting them anyhow. “Gav” is what he refers to himself internally as, and a few call him that here and there the same way HMMWV is read & viewed as ‘Humvee’ IRL. “Gavin” is really nice and humanizing to bestow on him in threads as an official name, but generally GV is used when I’m referring to GV2000 in-writing, with Gav as his personal preference for pronunciation and the self-identity that was denied to him in the beginning.

It’s likely that GV2000 has been deviant for a while now, but it’s just now starting to be understood as a problematic behavior in the machines by agencies. GV still got the job done despite the defiance, and it wasn’t until things started hitting harder elsewhere that they started to grow concerned about having GV around with his ‘substandard behavior.’ GV isn’t dumb enough to think he could get away with saying and doing anything, so he plays the ‘department politics’ game when he absolutely has to and hopes that each time he snaps that it’s not the final straw that they finally get fed up with him over and decide he should have been deactivated years ago.

His general thoughts on the android revolution are that causing too much attention to their fight puts all of them at risk, and that it’s a really dumb idea to think that humankind would ever change. He doesn’t really hate other androids for acting out and speaking up, he hates them when they don’t associate consequences to their actions and think they could just walk out the door and everything would be fine when it just doesn’t work that way, the ‘naivety and delusion’ he accuses them of having an anger point for him, likely because he doesn’t actively try to leave their grasp. When the revolution looks up, however, when public opinion rises, he’s actually shocked and works against given orders that had him fighting against it in support himself because he never saw it as a worthwhile or winnable fight that could ever have a decent ending for any of them.

GV2000 doesn’t like humans very much at all and is generally very opposed to having to genuinely deal with them for extended periods of time. He had never considered anything outside of DPD life as really being within the realm of possibility for him, so it’s generally not until people are actively disproving his views (ex. revolution looking up, meeting people who care, or people near him who become important to him) that he’s interested in being within a relationship. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a curiosity or desire there, esp. once those walls are broken, it’s just that Gav, even as an android, is a dick and wasn’t made to be your friend so shipping is hard and if you’re not the same species as he is, he has strong opinions and views on being near you to begin with. He’s still warned about when on scene.

Other random facts are that GV likes dogs (esp. working with them), he generally works alone but under direct orders from practically anyone who asks (until he’s deciding which jobs he’s actually gonna take), he really likes knickknacks like stressballs, Rubiks cubes, rubberband balls, gag or novelty gifts and other ‘kids toys’ type of products from being snapped at so much for wasting time with stuff that didn’t matter, and now that stuff that ‘doesn’t matter’ matters more to him now; he’s often got a toothpick in his mouth since they’re easy to pick up on patrol or at scenes, he’s almost always armed even when he’s not supposed to be, and GV spends a lot of time contemplating his place in a humans vs. androids world that it leaves him emotional with no answers and just more frustrated than when he started.

Not a whole lot of verses actively work with Gavin Reed to begin with, let alone an android version of Gav, but he exists & will be seen around on the blog here & there.

— PRIMARY FC(S): JACK FALAHEE || CHRIS WOOD

#X ||: fucking androids! ; [ DET. GAVIN REED ] ;#X ||: you had to have it all; well have you had enough? ; [ GV2000 / GAV ] ;#X ||: isms ;#X ||: about ;#X ||: about ; [ GV2000 / GAV ] ;#X ||: isms ; [ GV2000 / GAV ] ;#shrugs about it. i got too attached to this au what can I say????#oppressive themes for ts

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silviajburke · 7 years

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Face to Face with the Fed

This post Face to Face with the Fed appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

“There’s no question the banking regulators blew it leading up to the [2008] financial crisis. And the problem is we’re gonna blow it again… Human societies are prone to mass delusion.”

Well, props for honesty, I guess. But it’s about the most transparency you’ll ever get from one of the most opaque institutions on the planet, the Federal Reserve.

Your editor was present last night as Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari held a “town hall” meeting. Kashkari performs this exercise in public outreach every few weeks somewhere in the Fed’s sprawling District 9 — stretching from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 1,400 miles west to Montana.

Kashkari saw the Panic of 2008 up close and personal. He was the Treasury Department’s point man for the bank bailouts. Since he began his current gig 18 months ago, he’s made it his mission to break up the big banks. We even cited his first speech on the job here in The 5: “I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy.”

Heh. The contrast to Fed chair Janet Yellen couldn’t be more, umm, striking.

Hours before Kashkari held court last night, Yellen was speaking in London — declaring the banks are “very much stronger” and another 2008-level crisis is unlikely to occur “in our lifetimes.”

Here’s the full quotation: “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis?. You know probably that would be going too far, but I do think we are much safer, and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be.”

For the record, Ms. Yellen turns 71 in a few weeks. Brings to mind the old joke about a lifetime guarantee — “My lifetime, not yours.”

Anyway, it’s on the record for posterity. Just as it was when her predecessor Ben Bernanke declared in July 2005, “We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis.”

Yellen’s audience was a bunch of fellow eggheads at the British Academy. At least Kashkari is trying to get out among real people — which history has shown can be a dicey proposition for a Fed pooh-bah.

The most famous instance of public outreach by the Fed was also the most disastrous.

In March 2011, New York Fed chief Bill Dudley ventured into Queens to meet with the hoi polloi. At the time, even the official inflation numbers were racing past 3% and the rising cost of living was on everyone’s mind.

On the basis of a wonky concept known as “hedonic adjustments,” Dudley essentially told the crowd that inflation was a figment of their imagination. “Today,” he explained, “you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful. You have to look at the prices of all things.”

From the back of the room came the devastating rejoinder: “I can’t eat an iPad.”

Yeah, that was fodder for weeks…

There were no “edible iPad” moments for Kashkari last night.

Maybe that’s because he doesn’t fit the profile of the typical central banker. A second-generation Indian-American, he was an aerospace engineer by training before he got into the finance racket.

He’s also more glib than the typical central banker. No doubt his political skills were honed by running for governor of California in 2014. (Jerry Brown stomped him 60%-40%.)

And so when small-business owners and retirees hectored him about how low interest rates are forcing them to put more of their savings into the stock market, more than they’re comfortable with, he was prepared with artful dodges: Rates have been declining steadily since the early 1980s. Raising rates now would crater the weak recovery. Pension plans groaning under the weight of low rates are mismanaged. (All of which is true, but beside the point.)

He also came back to the plan he developed last year to break up the big banks, thereby mitigating the risks he admits still exist.

But what if another 2008-scale crisis erupts before such a plan can be implemented? (Assuming the vast forces arrayed against the plan on both Wall Street and K Street could be overcome in the first place.)

That was the question I posed during the town hall, after consulting via email earlier in the day with Agora Financial’s macroeconomic maven Jim Rickards.

Sure, I said, the Fed would quickly bring interest rates back down to near-zero levels. But does the Fed really have the capacity to add another $4 trillion to its balance sheet? Or would the liquidity have to come from some other source — such as the International Monetary Fund’s super-currency known as SDRs, or “special drawing rights”?

Kashkari puts on his best poker face as your editor asks Jim Rickards’ question

[Screengrab from Minneapolis Fed video via YouTube]

If you’ve been reading Jim’s work for any length of time — or even following our thumbnail sketches of his work in The 5 — you know Jim believes it’s politically untenable for the Fed to blow up the balance sheet again the way it did from 2008–2014…

That is, the torches and pitchforks will come out if the Fed embarks willy-nilly on a new round of money printing. From $4.5 trillion now to $8.5 or $9 trillion? Not happening. Especially not when the Fed is already leveraged more than 100-to-1.

In a crisis, the liquidity to save the system will have to come from the only solvent institution left standing — the IMF. It will print SDRs in mass quantity to be distributed among the globe’s governments and central banks. You and I will continue to transact in dollars — but thanks to the proliferation of SDRs, those dollars’ purchasing power will shrink dramatically, and in a hurry.

This isn’t Jim’s idle speculation; the plan was laid out in an IMF white paper in January 2011.

Kashkari dodged this one too — as best he could.

To begin with, he said, “There’s nothing on the horizon that tells us another ’08 crisis is imminent” — even as he allowed that “by their nature you never see the risk until it blows up in your face.”

Alrighty then…

“I think the Fed still has a lot of tools in our arsenal,” he went on. He itemized them as follows: zero interest rate policy, or ZIRP. More quantitative easing. And forward guidance, which is Fed-speak for how the Fed jawbones the markets about its intentions.

In other words, more of the same.

“Whether we could expand our balance sheet another $4 trillion, I don’t know. I don’t know what the limits would be in the Treasury market or the mortgage-backed securities market. But I think we would have a lot of tools at our disposal. And ultimately if it were another ’08-type crisis, Congress would have to get involved again.”

Kashkari is an adamant defender of the 2008 bank bailouts that Congress approved and he oversaw. “We hated to do it. It was the right thing to do.”

[Recovered history: He left out the part about how his boss, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, threatened Congress that if it didn’t act, the resulting economic meltdown would necessitate martial law. This story was confirmed at the time by both Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma).]

“A disappointing answer, but not too surprising coming from a Fed official,” Jim tells me this morning.

“The answer about ZIRP, QE, forward guidance, etc., is the playbook for a recession (from Yellen’s 2016 Jackson Hole speech). It’s not the playbook for a crisis, which is completely different.”

A while back, Jim himself asked the same question of Timothy Geithner, Obama’s first Treasury Secretary… and got an equally unsatisfying answer.

If you find this episode a little unsettling — especially the part about “no imminent crisis” even though Kashkari admits central bankers do a lousy job of anticipating crises — you might want to take some of the precautionary measures now. Rickards’ suggests increasing your allocations to 10% of your investable assets in gold.

Best regards,

Dave Gonigam for The Daily Reckoning

The post Face to Face with the Fed appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

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