Retroactive Name Justification is the new Name Recursivity

Remember acronym recursivity?

An example of acronym recursivity is the name of Wine. Wine stands for "WINE is Not an Emulator". WINE is, of course, a form of emulator (or is it?) to run Windows programs on Linux.
Jason and I created such a thing, once. We made a website called JASON. After naming it, we decided it stood for Jason and Andy's Super Oliphaunt Nubian.

In 2009, acronym recursivity is passe. I propose a new awesome kind of naming: Retroactive Name Justification or "RNJ". Recursively, it could be "RNJ is Name Justification."

bgiga is my newest startup venture. It's actually named bgiga because I happened to already own that domain name.

However, since then, I've come up with several reasons "why" our business (which is about job seeking/candidate discovery) is called bgiga:
1) bgiga is short for "better gigs for all."
2) bgiga means "billions of jobs."
3) bgiga makes for cool slogans like, "bgiga: go big" and "bgiga: get big."

There is a more scientific purpose behind retroactive name justification as well. Lately, I've heard a lot of bad names for startups. Many of them survive, but they are nonetheless suboptimal. The reason they are suboptimal is that they are hard to spell, are confusing, or have alternate readings. For example: http://www.expertsexchange.com/ or http://www.gottgame.com/). For http://www.flickr.com/, it has been documented that they lose as many as 150K hits in a single month to "flicker.com." There are tons of other examples. Even Google is only a decent name by accident. L&S meant to name it "googol" but they didn't know how to spell "googol." Lucky for them, everyone else tends to misspell it in the same way. So, being able to choose a good, easy to spell, easy to remember name FIRST, and then decide what it means (if you're clever enough to do so), has certain merits.

RNJ is the new acronym recursivity.

What's in a Name?

Names are just the common nouns of yesteryear, adorned and obscured by the stained looking glass of history.

GDP and the recession

I have made a graph that shows "recessionary" periods (according to Andy's new definition he just made up) in grey boxes during the post-war period, on a graph of "% Change in GDP from previous quarter, seasonally adjusted, annualized rate" based on data from The Bureau of Economic Analysis, via Economagic.com.

Note that recessions have become less frequent in the last 20 years, less severe, and have been of "average" length. Also note that GDP growth has generally been far more stable. The average % change in GDP for this data is 3.244%.

The Stimulus Plan

I have reserved judgment for a long time about the stimulus plan, and now I am finally ready to comment on it.

Fundamentals:
There are a few important things to point out about stimulus plans in general...

1. Stimulus measures must happen fast to work.
2. Stimulus money must be put into places where it will be consumed or invested. Where it will be consumed or invested depends on the marginal propensity to save (if it's saved, it isn't consumed or invested). Let's say that you and all your friends make up an economy. I give you $100. Let's say that you typically spend 95% of what you get (you save 5%). So, you buy $95 worth of goods and services from your friends. Then, they have the $95. Each of them saves 5% of that, and spends 95%, etc... So, whether that "savings" percentage is 1% or 10% makes a big deal after you've kind of multiplied out all the economic activity.
3. Whether the stimulus should target boosting consumption or boosting investment is not obvious. Both things can be good, and no one can tell you what the "optimal" ratio is. The optimal ratio probably changes over time, anyway. The US is currently "consuming" more of its GDP than it has historically, on average, so a case can be made that stimulating "investment" right now is better than stimulating "consumption."

Bad things about the stimulus plan:

1. The US economy has had a very, very low (or negative) savings rate and too much borrowing. Only just recently (since the economy broke down), have Americans started saving. Too many things in the stimulus plan are simply designed to jump start borrowing and spending of the exact same types we had too much of before.
2. The stimulus plan doesn't give employers enough incentives to raise employment. The stimulus plan should lower the payroll taxes, because this helps employers hire more workers and/or means people take home more of their paychecks, and it also helps small businesses and self-employed people immensely.
3. The stimulus plan doesn't do enough to help states. The states spend 2x as much money as the federal government does. They (the states) have no money. In order to raise money, states raise property, car, excise, and sales taxes, for example. These kinds of taxes directly and negatively affect the exact kind of spending the federal government is trying to stimulate (such as buying cars). Instead of simply having state and federal taxes offset one another, the federal government should cut out the middleman by making up state tax shortfalls, so they don't have to do things like raise sales taxes.
4. Much of the stimulus money will be too slow. The building of schools, bridges, etc... will happen too slowly to stimulate the economy. The economy will likely be out of the recession in a year or two, but most of the money spent on a new bridge will trickle into the economy slowly over a 5 year period or so.
5. The stimulus does nothing to address certain causes of structural unemployment and weakness in the economy, such as screwed up tax incentives, over-investment in houses (it actually further encourages this), illogical industry subsidies, broken labor union contracts, etc...
6. The stimulus plan doesn't adequately encourage "creative destruction." Rather than propping up ailing industries, we should be easing the bankruptcy process, encouraging business formation, and incentivizing business investment.

Good things about the stimulus plan:

1. If you're going to "waste" money in a stimulus plan by having it come too slowly, at least "waste" it on things that have long term value, like infrastructure construction. That's better than simply spending it on transfer payments. If you're going to do transfer payments as stimulus (transfer money from people with high savings rates to people with low savings rates) do it fast so it can stimulate the economy now.
2. The stimulus plan does increase unemployment benefits, and gets us a step closer to a working national wage insurance scheme.