Peer to Peer Lending with Lending Club

Inspired by Mr. Money Mustache, I've decided to add peer-to-peer lending to my investment portfolio.  I opened an account with Lending Club and just invested in my first two notes today.

The way it works is that Lending Club acts as a loan originator and servicer for consumer loans.  They then allow investors to fund a portion of the note (minimum $25).  The interest rates run from approximately 7% for A borrowers up to 24% for G borrowers.  The low minimum investment lets you spread the default risk across a portfolio of notes instead of taking a risk on any one borrower.

Basically, you get to be a credit card company.

I started with $1,000 and will post periodically on how it's going.

Square Foot Gardening Update

After some scares with late season snow storms (like May 2 late), the seeds I planted in April stayed alive for the most part.

This past weekend, Ruth and I planted the warm weather seeds like zucchini, beans, and flowers.

Here's a couple of pictures showing the progress to this point.

Registration Leads to Confiscation

As Brian Doherty recently noted in Reason, officials in California are using that state's gun registry to "visit" known gun owners who may no longer be allowed to own guns. They're not going to take everyone's guns, just the ones from those people who are no longer allowed to own them.  It's not like they're seizing all guns.  At least not now.  But they know where the guns are, because California has registration.

If the government has a list of where the guns are, then they can take them. 

They can take them if they think someone is a felon.  Or they can take them if the person seeks mental health treatment. Or they can take them if that person lives with a person who seeks mental health treatment. Or they can take them if the legislature decides that that type of gun is no longer legal to possess. 

The point of background checks is to have a list of people who aren't allowed to purchase a gun.  When someone tries to buy a gun from a firearms dealer, that dealer checks the list to make sure the purchaser isn't prohibited from buying a gun. 

However, the point of registration is to know where the guns are and who owns them. 
  
To be able to take them.

Trying Out Square Foot Gardening

I've decided to give gardening another try even after last year's abysmal results (about 4 small zucchini, a couple of beans, and 3-4 tiny tomatoes).  The soil at the house sucks and the previous owners did very little to care for the overgrown yard.

This year, I'm going with a square foot garden. The concept is that, rather than rows of the same plant, you plant in raised beds, divided by a grid into 1-foot squares.  Each square is planted seperately with different plants.  It's all described in this book:

 

The other big shift is that you don't try to fix your soil.  Instead, you fill the 6-inch deep beds with a 1:1:1 ratio of vermiculite, compost, and peat moss.

It's a bit of work to build the beds and mix all the soil ingredients together.  Also, the soil is expensive (Vermiculite is $21 for a 2 cu/ft bag here), but those should be one-time outlays.

I got the beds placed today and planted some of the early start seeds like peas, beets, spinach, etc.

Here's what it looks like so far:

Hopefully all the investment in soil and building the beds will pay off.  Now if I can just get the lawn to grow.

The perils of not using your credit cards

  A credit card company just sent me a letter informing me that:

We have closed your AT&T Universal Rewards Card due to the length of time that has passed since it was last used.  Please destroy all cards and convenience checks in your possession.

I guess it's cool that I have my life together enough that I can avoid using a particular credit card for years, but it's still kind of sad that they closed my account.

Why the Redskins Shouldn't Change the Name

The Washington Post is once again on a quixotic crusade to make the Washington Redskins change their name.  Leading the charge is columnist Mike Wise, but the paper has been devoting tons of space to the topic.  The core of the argument is that the term "redskin" is a slur against Native Americans.  We would be offended by a team named after any other racial slur, so we should be equally offended by a team called

But the difference is that "redskin" has virtually no currency as a slur.  It's an anachronism that is unused except in the context of the Washington NFL team.  It's more like having a team named the Washington Blackamoors or the New York Mooks. Yes, you can go back in time to find a point where the name was used as a racial slur, but it's so far in the past that it has no relation to the modern age.

There is a very small, but vocal, group of people offended by the name Redskins.  According to a 2004 poll of Native Americans, 91% of respondents were not offended by the use of the name.  The charge to change the name is driven by vocal activists and liberal guilt.  And the Washington Post.

Hail to the Redskins!

Update (3/12/13): A friend who used to live in the upper Midwest informed me that she has heard people in Minnesota and Wisconsin use the term "redskin" as a racial slur. 

Also, I found a very good article on the Language Log on the Origin of Redskin.  It's worth reading if you want to know the actual linguistic history of the word.

Government Benevolence is a Lie

There is a common myth that government is generally run by people who are concerned for the public interest over their own.  And there are some examples where this is true.  I work for a salary significantly below the market rate (and that has been frozen since 2009) because I care about defending people from the government's efforts to convict and imprison them.  But on the whole, it's a giant lie.

The fight over the sequester is revealing the lie.  As soon as budgets are threatened, the government threatens to furlough air traffic controllers, causing huge travel delays, furlough food inspectors, threatening that the food we eat will no longer be safe, and various other plans to cut most needed services first.  In other words, give us more money or we'll make sure to hurt you in the application of the budget cuts.

That's not public service, that's extortion.  It's a clear willingness to hurt the American people if that's what it takes to get more money for their agency.  A benevolent public servant would work to make the budget cuts impact the citizenry as little as possible.  Our government prefers to threaten to make the cuts hurt the citizenry as much as possible.

Public choice theory says it will always be this way.  We can't change the nature of people, but we can acknowledge it and stop buying the big lie.