Saturday morning with Daneille and Óðinn

I recently bought a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera, and these are some of my first shots, using Ilford HP5 film, developing in the kitchen and then scanning the negatives. Danielle had just woken up and came to hang out with Catherine, Óðinn and me.

Supply and demand?

Monopolies are bad. Everyone knows that, yet it seems like our societies are remarkably bad at preventing their existence. I am certain that this is quite deliberate and not a coincidence - that powerful interests benefit from the monopolies´existence and thus allow them to operate and thrive.

One such example are cable and internet providers. Where I live in Brooklyn, the only cable provider we have access to is Cablevision, while in other parts of Brooklyn, people can only deal with Time Warner Cable. There are no alternatives where I live. The companies seem to have carved the borough between themselves, not unlike colonial overlords and the users are stuck with companies where all normal rules of supply and demand, quality of service and consumer choice simply do not apply.

What I don´t understand is why on earth these companies are allowed to operate in this way. They should be required to compete with each other. The result of this system is a cable operator like Cablevision which has left us with no service (no tv, phone or internet) for a week now, and they know that they can get away with doing nothing and providing incredibly poor service it since we cannot take our business elsewhere. This seems to be pretty common. We´re either stuck with them or we can simply go back to dialup, which, by the way is starting to look pretty tempting.

Too big to fail

Why were the banks, insurance companies, car makers and others allowed to grow to such sizes that their failure could bring down whole national economies, if not the whole world financial system? Isn´t it obvious, given that there seems to be a consensus about the obligation of the government to save these companies, that government should also be responsible for restricting their growth, to prevent such companies from ever becoming too big to fail in the future?

More film

I developed my second roll of film yesterday after work, which was shot on our brief trip to Iceland. Ilford SFX 200. I like these two shots of my good friend Óli and "uncle" Jói.

Developing film

Yesterday I developed my first film at home and scanned it this morning. Kodak T-Max 3200.
The high iso makes the film very grainy but also allows low light photography without a flash.

Change we can believe in?

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, President George H.W. Bush said that "the American way of life is not negotiable". In his inaugural address in 2009, President Barack Obama said "We will not apologize for our way of life".

Something tells me that the current financial situation may be a cause for reconsidering this policy.

The revolving doors

As usual, I listened to NPR this morning while making my first coffee of the day and one of the stories was about a Congress hearing on the failures of financial regulators to act on information that might have exposed the Madoff ponzi scheme a long time ago. The Financial Services committee listened to Harry Markopolos who had informed the SEC 10 years ago that Madoff was cheating his investors, yet the SEC did nothing, despite repeated writeen submissions by Markopolos. This sounds awfully familiar to us Icelanders, where whistleblowers seem also to have been ignored by the bodies charged with regulating the financial sector. It seems like, in both countries the primary reason is that the regulatory bodies are simply too weak, staffed by inexperienced people and completely lacking any systematic way of dealing with information provided by whistleblowers. They seem to be both unable and afraid to take on the big banks and other powerful actors.

In Iceland I heard that it was not uncommon that staff from the financial regulating body were recruited by the banks which offered much better salaries. If that is true, then why would you go out of your way to investigate the very banks that may one day offer you the job you always dreamed of?

This reminds me of what has been called a revolving-door practice, as is seen for example with people who move freely between legislative bodies and government, lobbying firms and sitting on boards of big corporations, where the potential conflicts of interest are obvious. Concerns have also been raised about personnel moving between state minsitries, international financial institutions and multinational corporations.

Back after a while - this time in English

I´ve decided to revive this little blog, not because I have anything more interesting to say, but because things have changed. My son, Óðinn is born, and I´d like to post some photos here every now and again. Also I´ve become very interested in photography recently so this will be a venue for me to post some of the more personal photos, which I´d rather not put on my flickr page. I´ve also decided to switch over to English, seeing as so many of the people I care about don´t speak Icelandic.

Anyway, we just got back from a short visit back home in Iceland which was lovely. Great to meet the family and friends and good to get a break from work. It was Óðinn´s first time back in the home country and the first time he met the family, with the exception of my mom and dad who came to Brooklyn shortly after he was born. As was to be expected, he and Hildur got along well.



The visit was also interesting for the fact that the government of Iceland finally resigned after weeks of protests and just before we left, we got a new left wing coalition government. This is the first time in 18 years (or is it 17? it feels like a hundred years) that the conservative party is not in power. Irrespective of political views, it is never healthy for a country to be governed by the same party for such a long time. I hope the new government does well. At least they´re off to a great start by appointing Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as the first Icelandic woman to be prime minister. She´s also the first openly gay head of government in any country, but in Iceland that´s less of a big deal, and more of a private matter. I just wish her well.