A Brief Thought on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and the Financial System Meltdown 4/20/2010

 [Here starts my journal of my days between arrest and departure for prison. I spent the evening of 9/15/2022 trying to get them into chronological order. Thing is they were not all dated as I would eventually date them, the beginning ones only have the year. Those were all on yellow legal paper, and I have to assume they are close in time. I also noticed that there are missing pieces. Like many of my things left behind, they have disappeared as completely as my crock pot and my fishing gear. I know I wrote down my thoughts on David Hume's essay on suicide. That being a subject on which my interest was even keener 12 years ago. That I had rejected any more suicide attempts, I needed to understand what I should do with the time I remained breathing and come to grips with what I had done to myself. I have not yet seen the piece I labelled "WTF" wherein I started coming to grips with what I had done to myself and the meaning of being a failed suicide. They were written also with the thought that my lungs would quit from my COPD before my release from prison. These notes will be filed under the label "Pretrial Detention." Here begins my education that is the subject of this blog.  I am choosing to omit two notes I wrote - What I Saw Online and More On What I Saw - as I have monitoring software and what I do not want to do again is to write a post that gets me blocked from the blog. sch 10/9/22.]

I remember two different articles in 2009 on the same topic - how spreadsheets helped create the financial meltdown. John Dvorak of PC Magazine wrote one column, but I cannot remember the other writer. (Krugman over at The New York Times?) What they shared was that the idea that spreadsheets put finances solely on number and removed the human context. The result was a bit of GIGO, but no one realized it was garbage.

There always seems a certain finality and impartiality to numbers. They seem immune to human jiggering. That they are not ever really real never takes hold.

The federal sentencing guidelines are just guidelines - no longer mandatory. Still, my lawyer says, they rely heavily on them. Of course, they do. Just as I remember family law judges relying on the child support guidelines  - it was all math and the judge need not think. Federal judges  may get a lifetime job but they also want an easy life.

Which is why I am looking at 14+ months. Math.

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