Well, at least for me (and I suspect many others).

I caught Pete Cashmore's analysis:

There are arguably better video sites than YouTube and better photo hosts than Photobucket, but network effects tend to trump technical prowess in the social networking realm.

Google Buzz certainly isn't groundbreaking, but it will achieve critical mass virtually overnight. Thanks to integration with Gmail, the new tool is in the eye-line of the millions of users who obsessively check their inboxes for new mail. ComScore pegged Gmail at 176.5 million unique visitors in December.

But I think he just narrowly missed the mark, at least for me.  One critical difference is that because Buzz relies on your Gmail contacts, it creates a more focused social network; in other words, these are people that you actually communicate with already and thus content in Buzz seems to be much more relevant and interesting than Facebook.

Consider someone like my sister.  She has 643 friends in Facebook.  The question is what % of those people does she actually communicate with on a daily or even weekly basis?  How many of those people are just incidental contacts?  How many of those people are just sort of there? How many of those people does she actually care about?  How many of those people would invite her to their wedding?  I would guess that it's somewhere around 10-20%.

By integrating with Gmail, Google's big win is that your network is based on people that you actually communicate with.  In my opinion, this makes the social network more valuable and the information much more relevant.  Integration with a mail client will help the adoption rates for sure, but I think that the big win that will carry it forward as a success -- at least for users like me, who don't use Facebook as a network building or discovery tool -- is that the quality of content is much improved over Facebook.

Cool story because Galileo is one of my top 5 scientists:

(CNN) -- Two fingers cut from the hand of Italian astronomer Galileo nearly 300 years ago have been rediscovered more than a century after they were last seen, an Italian museum director said Monday.

Removing body parts from the corpse was an echo of a practice common with saints, whose digits, tongues and organs were revered by Catholics as relics with sacred powers.

There is an irony in Galileo's having been subjected to the same treatment, since he was persecuted by the Catholic Church for advocating the theory that the earth circles the sun, rather than the other way around. The Inquisition forced him to recant, and jailed him in 1634.

The people who cut off his fingers essentially considered him a secular saint, Galluzzi said, noting the fingers that were removed were the ones he would have used to hold a pen.

"Exactly as it was practiced with saints of religion, so with saints of science," Galluzzi said. "He was a hero and a martyr, keeping alive freedom of thought and freedom of research."

Very awesome.

Nathan Alderman has an interesting write up on the effect of a public option on the healthcare industry:

A decade ago, the major record labels were fat and happy, making piles of cash off CD sales. They could use their massive marketing muscle to push manufactured bands onto the airwaves and into listeners' ears. If you had to buy a whole subpar album just to get the few songs you really wanted, well, too bad.

Then Internet file-sharing rolled into town. I'm not arguing that piracy's right, but digitally available tunes did become a real competitor to the established music business. Rather than adapt to consumers' changing tastes by going digital themselves -- which would have meant surrendering their fat margins, and some of their control over what people listened to -- the record labels panicked. They started suing file-sharers, driving their own customers away. In short, the record labels weren't meeting customers' demand; they were trying to dictate what they thought customers should demand, and actively ignoring what the free market really wanted. Does that sound like capitalism to you?

Industry outsider Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) finally had to almost bully labels into offering digital tunes at a fair (or at least fairer) price. Now Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and a host of others compete with Apple's iTunes, a rivalry that has lowered prices, eliminated restrictive copy protection, and generally given consumers better music options. In return, audiophiles bought more music in 2008 than ever before, according to a January USA TODAY article. Most of those sales came in the form of digital downloads and individual tracks.

In my opinion, private health insurers are no less slothful and stubborn than record labels were at the dawn of the digital era. Insurers' defenders say that a rival public option would "destroy their industry." WellPoint (NYSE: WLP) has set up a website to oppose it. But in my opinion, it's more likely that the increased competition would merely reduce their profits, loosen their control, and force them to work harder, smarter, and more efficiently. That may be bad news for health insurers' stockholders, but you can't deny that it's good news for folks who need health insurance.

I tend to agree with this view.  A public option would, like Apple's iTunes, hopefully drive prices down over time and force the private insurance industry to adapt, streamline,  cust costs, and come up with a better product.  This is good for consumers.  The whole debate has been pretty baffling to me given that it's an option. 

Alderman doesn't address two other facets of a public health insurance option that would be good for Capitalism:

1. It would allow people to take risks.  No, not like jumping out of airplanes or something, but employment risks.  People would feel more comfortable seeking jobs at startups and small businesses (or starting their own!), which traditionally have a hard time offering competitive healthcare benefits.  Risk is good since it is what spawns invention and innovation; it would give smart people more flexibility in moving around and brining their ideas with them.
2. It gives employees greater freedom (and employers a greater talent pool).  This is kind of related to the first point in that I think this is important to help spread ideas and innovation.  Employees who are dependent on their employer provided healthcare (like people with young kids, a sick spouse, or with a pre-existing condition) are kind of locked into their employers if they are dependent on employer provided healthcare.  Greater freedom to change jobs without worrying about losing health benefits would seem to lead to better wages, greater spread of innovation, and better options for everyone (employee and employers).  How can this be anything but a good thing?

Alderman's basic premise is spot on, in my opinion, that a public option -- if not a full out single payer system -- would help Capitalism and not hurt it.

Whoa, caught whiff of this just now:

On June 9, the Treasury Department announced that 10 of the largest financial institutions that participated in the Capital Purchase Program (through TARP) have been approved to repay $68 billion. Yes, they had to be approved to repay the money. The companies had to prove they no longer needed the money, because the government doesn't want them begging for more down the road.

To date, those 10 companies have paid dividends on their preferred stock to the Treasury totaling about $1.8 billion, the Treasury announced. Overall, dividend payments from all of the 600 bank participants has come to about $4.5 billion so far. That's commensurate with the 5 percent (annualized) dividend return that was part of the terms of the program.

Bank analyst Bert Ely said while the government may end up losing money on investments in some financial firms, it's likely the entirety of the bank portion of the TARP will ultimately turn a profit.

The 5 percent paid in dividends on preferred stock purchased by the Treasury will certainly outpace the interest rate on money borrowed to finance the program, he said. And the warrants could also prove profitable.

"People think the government gave banks money," Ely said. "They made investments in banks."

So we could still end up losing money, but at least for now, it seems like it was a wise move.

So can we stop the bitter tears for a bit?  Just a little?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30232095

U.S. president signals he won't seek reinstatement of assault weapons ban

MEXICO CITY - Acknowledging a Mexican drug war that is "sowing chaos in our communities," President Barack Obama signaled Thursday he will not seek the reinstatement of a U.S. assault weapons ban but instead step up enforcement of existing laws against taking such weapons across the border.
Despite a campaign promise to see the lapsed ban renewed, Obama was bowing to the reality that to do so would be unpopular in politically key U.S. states and among Republicans as well as some conservative Democrats.

This recent phenomenon of "teabaggin" (lol) amongst conservatives has been humorous on many fronts.  But it's gotten me thinking: are there people really this stupid?  I mean, that's a lot of stupid.  Some of the signs I've seen are pretty creative (creatively wrong).  Let's address some of them and see what we come up with.

I find this one quite humorous myself, as it shows: 1) a total lack of perspective and 2) it's amazing how easily you can get someone to protest against their own self interest.  If this protester didn't know, the highest marginal tax bracket under Reagan was 50%. Then clearly, Ronald Reagan meant 50% slavery right?  So 39% slavery should be an improvement.  Aside from that, what in the right mind of Vishnu are these people thinking?  Do they have any clue on what slavery was really like?  I mean, wow, get some perspective.  On the second point, Obama has already enacted a tax cut (look at your paycheck and you should see it) for 95% of Americans.  Who are the poor, unlucky 5% that have been excluded?  I'm pretty sure its not this guy holding the sign; instead, they're folks making well into 6 figure territory.

There is great amusement to be found in this picture as well.  "ZERO TAXES"?  I wonder how this old lady thinks the roads she is sitting next to were built?  How were the side walks built?  Who paid for those signals?  Who paid for that sign?  I shudder at the thought of living in a country with zero taxes.  Why?  Because it would be a shithole for all but the super wealthy.  Education and literacy rates would drop dramatically.  Commerce would slowly wither as roads and infrastructure weathered and fell into disrepair.  The old would flood homeless shelters and emergency rooms.  Crime would increase as there would be no publicly funded police...only privately funded militia (no better than paying protection to the mafia).  Zero taxes?  Why not relocate to Somalia instead.

Taxation is a necessary price to pay for living under the protection of the federal government.  It is a necessary price to pay for the services and infrastructure which service us all and enable commerce.  It funds education and improves the quality of life of all Americans (after all, the more children we educate and transform into productive members of society, the better off we are tomorrow).  Paul Begala gets it right:

Happy Patriots' Day. April 15 is the one day a year when our country asks something of us -- or at least the vast majority of us.

For those who wear a military uniform, those who serve the rest of us as policemen and firefighters and teachers and other public servants, every day is patriots' day. They work hard for our country; many risk their lives -- and some lose their lives.

But for the rest of us, the civilian majority, our government asks very little. Except for April 15. On this day, our government asks that we pay our fair share of taxes to keep our beloved country strong and safe.

He's right: aside from paying my taxes, the government does ask very little of me.  I'm neither forced to serve in our armed forces, forced to do any work on behalf of the government, nor am I oppressed.  In exchange for 20% of my income (my effective federal tax rate this year), I get to live in a relatively stable and safe society with some of the greatest degrees of freedoms of any first world country.

Of course, let's not forget that silly lady on the left either.  Excuse me miss, but you can't have defense without taxes (lol).

This one is great, too.  On the contrary, Obama's whole platform is aimed a middle class gains.  His tax policy, cuts for middle class Americans while reverting to the top marginal tax rate under Clinton (bear in mind, this is still lower than the top marginal tax rate under Reagan), seems like it's designed specifically to help working, white collar, middle class Americans.  So either this guy makes more than $200,000 or he's just stupid.  I think it's the latter.

lol. Where do I begin with this one?  I mean, what does Christianity have anything to do with this at all?  First of all, we're not a Christian nation.  Second of all, I love the guy's shirt: "Stupidity Offsets for Sale".  I think he needs to buy crate loads of them.

lol.  Still on this ACORN thing?

This one is particularly funny as Wall Street is the epitome of unfettered capitalism. Somehow, our government has been hijacked by both capitalists and socialists...AT THE SAME TIME! Amusing.

Oh, and apparently facists, too. (I rather think that this quote applies more to these teabaggin' protestors than it does to the rest of the public.)  Also: quoting Hitler on your t-shirt?  Always classy.

This one is ironic because this person has conveniently forgotten that we had this thing called an "election" on November 4, 2008.  Yeah, you know, this thing where millions of people from all across the country come out and select the people whom they choose to represent their interests.  Oh yeah, that's right, your guy lost...silly me.

But more importantly, this sign is patently ridiculous simply because it ignores the reality of how government works.  As if "THE GOV'NT" is some entity of the elite, assembled with individuals from some higher class seeking to oppress the people.  Well, I've got news for you: "THE GOV'NT" is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

I think what gets me even more are the cries of socialism, communism, and facism.  Do these people even know what these terms mean?  I mean, do they? I think these people need to have a talk with this guy:

Of course, another fun game to play with all of these tea party pictures is "Spot the Minority".  There's just something really weird that I can't put my finger on...almost every picture of these crowds is 100% white.  What's the deal with that?

What's that you say? You have more questions. Well, let's hear them.

Where's MY bailout?

Well, that's simple: you're already getting tax cut from the Obama administration.  Aside from this, check out his mortgage rescue plan.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Obama administration's loan modification program is finally underway.

The Treasury Department announced Wednesday the first six participants to sign up for President Obama's plan. They include three of the nation's largest banks: JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), which will get up to $3.6 billion in subsidy and incentive payments; Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), $2.9 billion; and Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), $2 billion. The others are GMAC Mortgage, $633 million; Saxon Mortgage Services, $407 million; and Select Portfolio Servicing, $376 million.

Additional loan servicers will be added to the list over time, a Treasury spokesman said.

Billed as helping up to 9 million borrowers stay in their homes, the two-part plan calls for servicers to reduce monthly payments to no more than 31% of eligible borrowers' pre-tax income or to refinance eligible mortgages even if the homeowner has little or no equity. The government is allocating $75 billion to subsidize part of payment reduction, as well as provide thousands of dollars in incentives for servicers and borrowers to participate.

This is a huge bailout of the American Dream; it aims to keep homeowners (or should I say mortgage payers?) in their homes by modifying mortgages to the realities of the current market and economic environment.  Taking advantage of historically low mortgage rates, I've already refinanced and ended up saving some $400/month.  So there's your bailout.

But the national debt is skyrocketing!  Think of the children!

There are a few points to make here.  First, I must direct your attention to the Treasury Department's helpful website on this topic.  Please browse through every date range on the site.  Notice a pattern?  That's right, every generation since 1791 has left a debt. Every.  Single.  One. 

Of course, one of the fun facts is looking at the national debt between 9/30/2001 and 9/30/2008, roughly President Bush's two terms.  Let's see, it started at 5.8 trillion, and, well, looky here, ended at 10 trillion.  Whoa, I thought, like, Republicans were supposed to be all conservative-like.  Guess that's just a myth!  Let's look at another time period.  How about Reagan's presidency, the period between 9/30/1982 and 9/30/1988.  Let's see, it started at 1.1 trillion and it ended at 2.6 trillion. Will you look at that?  Ronald Reagan more than doubled the national debt. 

But let's move on from the numbers; I'm sure you protested when Bush and Reagan were in charge, too, right? 

There's another point to be made that can't be made with numbers and that's the fact that not all debt is created equally.  There are multiple parts to this.  The first is the interest rate on debt.  It has never been cheaper to create debt than it is right now since intrest rates are so depressed. Secondly, consider this question: is borrowing $40,000 to spend on a sports car the same as spending $40,000  on a graduate degree?  If your jobless sibling came to you tomorrow and asked to borrow $10,000 to buy a new motorcycle, would you react the same way as if he came and borrowed $10,000 to go back to school?

Of course there is a big difference.  One is a depreciating asset from which you are not likely to ever see any returns on and the other, an education, has a great potential to generate a high return on investment.  Likewise, spending on education, healthcare, infrastructure, basic scientific research, and developing energy solutions is an investment that is likely to yield a high return on investment.  It is spending that increases our overall capacity for commerce.  You need an educated population for high paying jobs, you need working roads to facilitate commerce, you need a new energy grid for efficiency (cost savings) and security, you need to fund basic research to drive innovation, you need to fix healthcare because it is one of the biggest factors depressing wages in the US.

If there is something that we should spend our tax dollars on, it's things like these, things that willl someday help generate commerce and thus employment and tax revenues.  And of course, keep in mind, our kids will utilize these same roads and infrastructure decades down the line.  The will go to these new schools.  They will be the beneficiaries of increased grants for scientific research.  It is precisely the next generation that will benefit the most from our investment today.

This one comes courtesy of Andrew Sorkin of the New York Times:

Do we really have to foot the bill for those bonuses at the American International Group?

Fittingly, he provides a stupid answer as well:

So here is a sobering thought: Maybe we have to swallow hard and pay up, partly for our own good.

Sorkin invokes "the sanctity of contracts":

...the “fundamental value” in question here is the sanctity of contracts

Welcome to the real world, Mr. Sorkin, where millions of Americans across a broad spectrum of socio-economic classes are employed with transient "contracts".  An NFL player can be cut at any time.  A grocery clerk's job can be eliminated without a second thought.  A consultant can be fired in an act of downsizing.  Long time employees can be terminated without severance.

Mr. Sorkin justifies his belief with another point that he pulled out of his ass:

Here is the second, perhaps more sobering thought: A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.

More like they were trying to build a toy rocket and instead, built a bomb.  In this case, I would say they have no fucking idea how to defuse it because they never realized the dangers of what the created; they never really understood the risks to begin with and thus themselves lacked a fundamental understanding of how their own investment vehicles worked.  I'd say these people are the least qualified to handle this because clearly, they're the same idiots who thought that credit default swaps were a good idea in the first place. 

I'm sure many IT consulting companies would love to have contracts with Mr. Sorkin.  Even if their consultants write terrible, buggy, and unstable code, Mr. Sorkin would be convinced that because these guys wrote it, they would also be the most qualified to fix it.  Mr. Sorkin would be the the ideal IT consulting customer.  Send in your cheapest, least qualified labor and have a guaranteed income stream.  Not only that, Mr. Sorkin would be so ensconced with the sanctity of contracts, that he would feel compelled the keep employing the same guys who wrote the buggy code to the very end.

Sorkin then cites Pearl Meyer:

“The word on the street is that A.I.G. employees are being heavily recruited,” Ms. Meyer says.

Well good.  Isn't this how the free market and capitalism works?  If these guys, who were a part of the one of the greatest failures in free enterprise (dollar wise), can find people willing to pay them to ruin their businesses, then let them go.  I call B.S.; massive steaming piles of it.  The financial sector is shedding jobs at an astounding rate...let them swim and see how many want to jump off the boat.

In actuality, I think Meyer is full of shit.  AIG acquired 21st Century (an auto insurance company) in 2007 and promptly changed the name to aigdirect.  Interestingly, aigdirect.com now redirects you to 21st.com.  I guess that AIG moniker wasn't working out, huh?  You really have to dig around to find any association with AIG on the site.

At the end of the day, I'd like to see if Sorkin and his compadres would be defending the UAW's contracts or how about pension funds which are routinely raided or wiped out in restructuring?

In reality, there are lots of corporations that have figured out that there are loopholes in this bill. ... What those loopholes permit companies to do is make promises to a few sophisticated creditors to lock up all the assets of the business so that if the company ultimately fails, there won't be any sharing of the pain. The sophisticated guys will walk out with everything, and the employees and pensioners will be left with nothing.

The text of the law clearly gives a priority to the banks and the other creditors who protect themselves by contract. They come ahead of all of the employees and all the pensioners. It's been there since 1978; it is in the law today. If Congress wanted to change it, they could change it with the stroke of a pen, but that is what the statute says. ... What has changed over time is how much the banks are seizing in terms of the assets, ... so that by the end of the day, there is less and less and less left over for the employees and for the retirees.

How about you defend "the sanctity" of these contracts first and then we can talk about bonuses?

The comments are the only thing which redeem this otherwise steaming pile of excrement.

This argument would make more sense if the government wasn't forcing automakers to abrogate their contracts with their workers and pensioners. Would the columnist have us believe that those contracts that will be modified or cast away were any less legally binding than those at AIG? Balderdash...it's rewarding poor performance at the expense of the taxpayer.

— agincourt76, Seattle, WA

I don't remember seeing this argument when discussing the breaking of union contracts for the auto bailout. In fact breaking the union contracts was seen as a feature and not a bug.

— JStuddle, Los Ageles, CA

You have disgraced yourself. What have you said that hasn't been said? If anyone wants to hire these guys who ruined the world economy and collapsed their own firms, they are welcome to them. Yeah, they're real rainmakers. And do you think new people can't be hired to unwind the transactions with $165 million dollars?

— Sylvia Ellerson, New York, NY

Nothing in this piece says what it is that makes the bonus beneficiaries so indispensable. Their training? Their brains? They and only they know where the bodies are buried?

In every big company -- but especially in finance -- there are junior personnel just aching for a chance to take over from their superiors. Eventually they do. Why not now?

— donnolo, Monterey, CA

Its really very simple. Without government intervention, AIG would be bankrupt and none of those bonuses would have been paid.

The government breaks contracts in bankruptcy all the time. Of course it does set a precedent for people who loot their companies and the taxpayers. Even if the goovernment bails out the company, they may not get all the loot they expected. I don't know that is such a bad thing.

The truth is, the government ought to be going after many of these employees with criminal fraud charges. Its pretty obvious they sold more credit default swaps than their company could afford to pay off. Those were contracts too.

— Ross Williams, Minnesota

The thesis of this article is we must acquiesce in the millions of dollars of bonuses paid to AIG executives because (1) we must keep the “best and the brightest”and (2) the sanctity of contract must be protected.

The “best and the brightest” bankrupted the largest insurance company in the world. Keep them? They ought be carefully scrutinizer for criminal law violations: their conduct simply does not pass the smell test. Besides, in the financial crisis which AIG is a prime contributor, where are these so called “best and the brightest” going to go? The taxpayers inherited them, but we don’t have to keep them. Remember, AIG has been nationalized. We own it!

The plaintiff cry about honoring contracts rights hollow. Contracts ought to be enforced. That fundamental proposition is undebatable. Why isn’t the same application of the law urged in the case of the United Auto Workers?

These “bonus” given to the recipient of the taxpayers largess ought to be a “pink slip”

— David, Sherman, TX

Congratulations, Andrew Sorkin, you've just asked the Stupid Question of the Day!

The financial ignorance of the Average American is so widespread, that you -- yes you: sitting in your cubicle, making close to six figures at a stable white collar job -- you are probably sitting next to someone who's financially ignorant.

A story from the AP studying American's understanding of insurance yielded some astoundingly bad results:

Health: Fewer than half (49 percent) of those surveyed were informed about the cost of coverage if they leave their job and choose COBRA (Consolidated Budget Reconciliation Act) insurance to continue their health benefits. And just 58 percent were aware that health insurance will not cover their living expenses if they become disabled and cannot perform their job.

Home: Only 19 percent knew that the requirement for private mortgage insurance on a newly purchased home depends on the size of the down payment and lender; almost 30 percent think PMI is required by law.

The shortcomings in awareness conflict with what respondents thought they knew. Before taking the quiz, nearly 60 percent said they felt "very confident" when making insurance decisions overall, with only 15 percent voicing any insecurity about their decision-making abilities.

I'll admit, I'm probably one of those financially ignorant ones as well.  But I'm learning!  The problem is that there is a shocking lack of baseline financial education.  There is no standardized financial education test for high school students, as far as I know, and you know what?  Perhaps there should be and it should be a requirement for high school graduation or a G.E.D.  Perhaps two courses are in order: once in high school to cover basics for college students like credit cards, APRs, banking, paying bills, progressive tax brackets, credit scores, and so on.  Another, higher level course would cover things like renting (and your rights as a renter), mortgages, retirement savings, investing, more on progressive tax brackets, and so on as a national requirement for obtaining an associates degree or a baccalaureate.

(As an aside, one of the biggest peeves I had during the presidential campaign was the shocking lack of understanding of how a progressive tax bracket worked and the difference between a marginal tax rate and an effective tax rate.  I don't think that most people even understood the real effect of raising the taxes by 3% -- rolling back the Bush tax cuts -- on the highest bracket would be and who it would affect...)

Come to think of it, this would be an awesome two pronged approach!  Get kids educated on the basics of finance and put all those laid off Wall Street workers to good use.

But seriously, I think this is one of the biggest arguments against privatized health insurance options as a method of increasing insurance coverage and availability: people just don't know much about these things and people don't want to spend the time to dig into the details while they're healthy.  Most of the time, the materials are just too dense anyways.

There's a story in Time this week, "The Health-Care Crisis Hits Home", written by Karen Tulmuty, documenting her brother's experience with the twisted world of health insurance.  What's shocking are some of the numbers drawn from it:

When we talk about health-care reform, we usually start with the problem of the roughly 45 million (and rising) uninsured Americans who have no health coverage at all. But Pat represents the shadow problem facing an additional 25 million people who spend more than 10% of their income on out-of-pocket medical costs. They are the underinsured, who may be all the more vulnerable because, until a health catastrophe hits, they're often blind to the danger they're in. In a 2005 Harvard University study of more than 1,700 bankruptcies across the country, researchers found that medical problems were behind half of them — and three-quarters of those bankrupt people actually had health insurance. As Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor who helped conduct the study, wrote in the Washington Post, "Nobody's safe ... A comfortable middle-class lifestyle? Good education? Decent job? No safeguards there. Most of the medically bankrupt were middle-class homeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs — until illness struck."

Scary numbers.

An interesting story (with some heated comments) with regards to a recent move by Spansion:

While Spansion Inc. was cutting 35 percent of its workforce, or 3,000 jobs on Monday, the company’s board was restoring full pay to its top executives.

The company had imposed a 10 percent pay cut last Oct. 6 for top executives. But in a securities filing, it said it was returning the executives to full pay as part of an “employee retention program.”

So I guess this is called "taking one for the team"?  Seems more like a cash grab by the executives of a company that's about to go under.

One intrepid (and mildly retarded?) commenter, "Todd Fletcher", writes:

This story is quite biased. Understand that Spansion is in a very tight position right now, and they must remain competitive within their industry. This means not only attracting the very best executives, but retaining them.

Of course, the logical question is what metric are you using to define "the very best executives".  Why are they in a "tight position"?  Could it be because management and these very same executives made some bad decisions?  Perhaps they lacked foresight into the market and the technologies?  Nah, surely, it's the fault of the guys at the bottom, right?  It's always their fault, right?

Some of the better rebuttals include:

Market guy: Todd, I would stop defending these executives at Spansion. They picked the wrong strategy and direction in 2003 and now the NAND Flash Memory guys are killing NOR Flash Memory manufacturers like Spansion. That’s why Spansion is in so much trouble today. Why would you want to reward Executives for steering the boat into an iceberg? Would you invest your money on a sinking ship?

Shamless1: If you want to pay to bring in new talent I say lets pay, however increasing compensation to people who walked you down the garden path is no different then chasing down the guy who just stole your wallet to give him your watch.

OneOfTheConcerned: Having top quality executives means that Spansion can strategically lay people off and reinstate the executive’s pay…all the while ignoring that they owe Travis County overdue taxes. Ah, the ground is quickly approaching those smug noses.

Brett Stroud:  What does this story have to do with retaining top executives? It’s quite clear that the executives they have led them to a position where they have to lay off 35% of their work force. Seems to me like they’re retaining failed executives.

So yeah, let's see how much longer these guys last.  Incidentally, the stock (SPSN) is currently trading at about $.06, a far cry from the $17 dollar range when I sold my shares a few years back.

Heroin in Afghanistan

A cool story on how some enterprising individuals are working to battle the heroin trade originating in Afghanistan:

A former homeless drug abuser from Swindon is the unlikely champion of an initiative that aims to fight Afghanistan’s vast narcotics economy – with fruit juice.

James Brett, 39, who once spent a year living rough before becoming a fruit juice magnate, is behind a scheme that aims to replace opium fields with pomegranate orchards.

Mr Brett’s scheme will begin in March with 100,000 pomegranate saplings in the eastern province of Nangahar. He hopes eventually to plant 175,000 hectares (432,250 acres) of orchards across the country.

This is all sorts of awesome (well, because I love pomegranates :-P)!

Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year! (Year of the Ox)

Work

I've been working through Eric Brechner's I.M Wright's Hard Code.  I'll have more on this in the coming weeks as I continue to digest the awesomeness of this book.  Excellent pieces on software engineering and dealing with the mess of it all.  Highly recommended reading.  I finished this up on my trip to Taiwan...

Family

It's been a long 2009 for me already.

My grandmother passed away near midnight on January 8th.  It's kind of strange, I wasn't all that close to her, but in the aftermath of my weeklong trip to Taiwan to attend services, I feel a sudden sense of emptiness.  It's a sort of spiritual/cultural/familial emptiness...an uncertainty about the future of my ties to Taiwan and to my family there. 

I was quite surprised that my family wasn't as emotional as I would have expected; but then again, to reach the ripe age 88 is not a terrible fate.  It was quite sudden for my grandmother, who was about as energetic and lively as a 8 year hold hopped up on a few bottles of pop.  My goodness, you would not believe the copious amounts of food that she could consume for a frame no bigger than 5' (maybe).

She was from a different generation, a generation that saved every yuan, ate every last grain of rice, and lived simple, disciplined lives.  She was stubborn to the end, from what I heard from my aunts, but it was her way of expressing her love for her family.  I think the following phrase best summed up her view of her matriarchical role:

The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

-- Nelson Henderson

So I've been pretty depressed through all of this.  The Chinese place great emphasis on the family name and as the only son of her only son, it seems that the tradition of the Chen family will end with me as my children will surely grow up as Americans who may never really connect with their Chinese heritage.  I have an itch now to sell my house, store most of my stuff with my mom, and move back to Taiwan for a few years to better learn Chinese (I'm conversational on a 3rd or 4th grade level), get to know my aunts and cousins, and enjoy the awesomeness that is Taiwan.

For now, it's just a pipe dream.

Well, so far anyways:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3981697/Scientists-plan-to-ignite-tiny-man-made-star.html

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

As a side note:

Until now, such fusion has only been possible inside nuclear weapons and highly unstable plasmas created in incredibly strong magnetic fields. The work at Livermore could change all this.

The sense of excitement at the facility is clear. In the city itself, people on the street are speaking about the experiment and what it could bring them. Until now Livermore has had only the dubious honour of being home of the US government’s nuclear weapons research laboratories which are on the same site as the NIF. 

There's a pretty fascinating article over at Portfolio.com by Michael Lewis fittingly titled The End which gives insight into the grimey details of how the collapse of our seemingly infallible financial markets came to be.  Contrary to the right-wing nuttery that lays blame on the likes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and some bullshit idea that minority lending somehow caused all of this, Lewis points the fingers squarely on the greed of Wall Street and the financial corporations that enabled the buildup to the fall.

Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.
...
He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

...Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.
...
That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them.

...when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”
...
He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

“They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.”

...the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. “When things go wrong, it’s their problem,” he said—and obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government. “It’s laissez-faire until you get in deep shit,” he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of the game.

The whole article is worth a read.

One of my favorite quotes from the news coverage:

"[Barack Obama] is the first 21st century president."

- Chuck Todd, MSNBC

What our peers across the pond think:

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world. Though bombarded by a blizzard of last-minute negative advertising that should shame the Republican party, American voters held their nerve and elected Barack Obama as their new president to succeed George Bush. Elected him, what is more, by a clearer majority than one of those bitter narrow margins that marked the last two elections.

Check out the comments, too. 

jigan:

Truly a beautiful moment. I feel like I have witnessed a historic moment that, unlike 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, is actually very positive.

I think in many ways it transcends the politics of Democratic/Republican and race. It's a repudiation of the "spend a little time on the dark side" years of Cheney.

As a Brit ex-pat living in the US, I'm finally tempted into exploring citizenship. Hey, maybe there's even a God...?

sidewaysantelope:

Congratulations, America, I'm truly in envy of your country right now. Oh to be so politically energised, so motivated, so...ready to do something about the world, and not in a Daily Mail, let's sack all comedians kind of way. Positive energy. I'd almost forgotten humans were capable of it, and I don't say that with any exaggeration.

Worth staying up for.

EssemD:

bloody hell... what a country.. after all these years living here as an ex-pat, 28, I actually want to be an American. It's 10 pm.. the kids stayed up to watch Obama's speech... my teen and i just sat there and let out tears flow.. even my 6 yr was moved to tears....

boywithaproblem:

From Adelaide, South Australia I congratulate all of those who voted for Obama. I'm inspired by this and it's made me reassess my perception of the US. I had tears in my eyes today. A historic day for the US and the rest of the world. Wonderful.

Mervo:

Obama's election gives rise to a depressing thought: his brilliance as a candidate is nowhere to be found in British politics. Our election in whenever is going to be a gloomy event.

Nevertheless, today is a good day. Congratulations America.

Holiver:

Sometimes I wish I was an American, in those moments where they seem to stand apart from us. Their endless optimism and their endless desire for change and movement and history. They make history, where as an English woman I feel I am just you know in it. I don't know that much about life, or what it takes to be a successful adult because well I am just a student, full of that optimism and promise and you know I like to watch Jeremy Kyle. I sat up and watched Obama become the 44th American President, I watched Americans cry and I cried and I believed in him and his words and the fact that really, this is going to have an impact on us all and to say that we are not involved is really fruitless.

Derk:

For all the bad things people say about American there are moments in there history where the prove they are the greatest country in the world. When you see that the UK may vote for posh Eton toff as our next leader and their are less ethnic MP's in Parliment than the percentage of enthic people in the country, then the UK can no longer claim to be more developed than the USA.

The USA is changing from a fist to brain. Good choice America.

I think the world just let out a huge sigh of relief; we can finally move forward and really move into the 21st century as a leader not by our might, but by the power of our example.

That the election was only about 6 percentage points apart in the popular vote speaks volumes about the general stupidity of a large portion of the population and the movement towards anti-intellectualism over the last 8 years.

But thank goodness that disaster was narrowly averted:

Your eyes do not deceive you: Fox News, of all outlets, piling on Palin and exposing a disaster in the making.  Come on, not knowing that Africa is a continent?  Not knowing which countries are in NAFTA after claiming bordering Canada and being able to see Russia as foreign policy credentials?  Good fucking lord; I'm not religious, but even I am on the verge of thanking the Heavens that she didn't get elected into office and I hope that America never looks back to this brand of politics of idiocy.

Speaking of religion...

In contrast, check out Obama's stance on the topic of religion and policy:

Nuanced, well thought out, and beautifully centrist (as far as religion is concerned).

Yesterday at dinner, a coworker brought up the election and my support for Obama.  The conversation started something like: "So I can't believe you're voting for Obama."  It diverged into various topics from healthcare to gun control to experience to socialism.  It was a great conversation and it felt good to be able to have such a civil converstation with a friend from a staunchly Republican state.  America needs more dialogue like the one we had over dinner last night; America needs a sanity check against extremism towards either side of the spectrum and understand that divided we fail.

But today, as I was following the news, it struck me that I'm not the one that should be questioned about my support for Obama -- I'm a 20-something moderate liberal from New Jersey, after all .  The statement should really be made to the various high profile conservatives who have now come out in support of Obama, including Colin Powell.

The latest round of conservatives supporting Obama comes by way of Charles Fried:

Reagan Appointee and (Recent) McCain Adviser Charles Fried Supports Obama

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.

This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

Fried is exceptionally thoughtful and principled; his vote for Obama is especially noteworthy.

and Larry Wilkerson:

Foreign Policy: Colin Powell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama this weekend on Meet the Press. How significant was that move for General Powell, and was it something you expected?

Larry Wilkerson: I was stunned. I was ecstatic. I was thrilled, but I was stunned. I thought that he would come forward and make statements about the need to tamp down the hatred and the vitriol that seemed to be surrounding Senator McCain and Governor Palin’s rallies. And I thought he would use the opportunity to make his strong point about Muslims. I thought he would take the opportunity to reinforce that we need to restore America’s reputation and solve this financial crisis. But I didn’t think that he would endorse a particular candidate.

FP: What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of each of the candidates in foreign policy?

LW: Both have strengths. I’m not quite sure what I would describe as Obama’s weaknesses, not because I’m trying to say that he’s perfect but because he’s so unflappable and so far his pronouncements have been so solid.

With McCain, I’m alarmed by the lack of sophistication on issues such as Iran; the bomb Iran [idea] seemed to come out of [McCain’s] passion more than his judgment. I’m alarmed by the people around him; [many] are radicals. They are just like the Wolfowitzes and the Perles of the world. Calling them conservatives offends the title. I have grave difficulty with McCain taking advice from these people. I am concerned with his inability to accept that we have to leave Iraq. Victory is not coming home with trumpets blaring; it is leaving a relatively stable government in place that won’t fall in first five minutes and not resort to civil war. He still thinks that victory was possible in my war, Vietnam, which I know was not correct. Those kinds of things concern me.

and Bill Weld, the former governer of Massachuesetts who supported Romney in the primaries, also voiced his support for Obama:

Weld told the Associated Press that while he has never endorsed a Democrat for president before, his choice in recent weeks became "close to a no-brainer."

"It's not often you get a guy with his combination of qualities, chief among which I would say is the deep sense of calm he displays, and I think that's a product of his equally deep intelligence," he said.

Weld said his decision was not based on McCain's weaknesses.

Weld said, "Senator Obama is a once-in-a-lifetime candidate who will transform our politics and restore America's standing in the world. We need a president who will lead based on our common values and Senator Obama demonstrates an ability to unite and inspire. Throughout this campaign I've watched his steady leadership through trying times and I'm confident he is the best candidate to move our country forward."

It's interesting, to me at least, because I would think that a self professed moderate liberal would be the last person that would suprise anyone by voting for Obama when there are plenty of high profile conservatives who have already voiced support for Obama.  And certainly, each of these folks have the right to support any individual they wish -- be it Paul, Barr, Romney, or anyone else for that matter -- but they have come out in overwhelming support for Obama. 

So the question shouldn't be why guys like me are supporting Obama; the question should be why guys like Weld, Powell, Wilkerson, Fried, Wick Allison, Christopher Buckley, Susan Eisenhower, and CC Goldwater are not just rebuking McCain, but actively showing support for Obama when they can choose neither candidate and/or stay silent on the topic; heck, they could even write in their candidate of choice.

I hope more moderate conservatives around the country start to examine why many high profile Republicans and conservatives have come out in support of Barack Obama.  It's hard to use the "hype", "brainwashing", or "no substance" argument when several conservatives (far more distinguised and more accomplished than myself -- not even the same plane) have chosen to support Obama when they are free to support any alternative they wish.

Is it really that the liberal masses are acting like sheep and overdosing on Hopium?  Is it really the case that Obama is just empty rhetoric and merely an eloquent speaker?  Or perhaps these seasonsed veterans of politics and veterans of a now perverted conservative movement have seen something in Barack Obama to lead them to believe that perhaps, just maybe, there is a slight chance this guy has the potential to be not just a good president, but a great president?

I don't know; I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader to consider these endorsements and votes from several high profile conservatives, Republicans, and traditionally conservative newspapers.

As a closing comment, I'd like to share a story by way of Ben Smith, a story of a guy named Mike who went to the polls with his Dale Earnhardt jacket fully prepared to cast a vote for McCain:

"Obama's going to win, and I didn't want to tell my grandchildren some day that I had an opportunity to vote for the first black president, but I missed my chance at history and voted for the other guy."

Food for thought.

Not that these things mean much in the big picture, but it's interesting to see the sentiment around the country.

Notably, the Salt Lake Tribune (of all newspapers):

A simple choice: The nation needs Barack Obama in the White House

Over the 22 months since announcing his improbable candidacy, Obama has transcended his image as a mere political and racial phenomenon. Though blessed with uncommon skills as a writer and orator, he was mistakenly thought to possess too little political experience, too little backbone, and too little evidence of the tangible and intangible, qualities we ascribe to the best of our leaders.

Still, we have compelling reasons for endorsing Obama on his merits alone. Under the most intense scrutiny and attacks from both parties, Obama has shown the temperament, judgment, intellect and political acumen that are essential in a president that would lead the United States out of the crises created by President Bush, a complicit Congress and our own apathy.

McCain's foreign policy objectives virtually replicate Bush's disastrous course. His disdain for diplomacy is troubling, and his faith in eventual U.S. "victory" in Iraq is ill-defined. We simply cannot afford perpetual war. Obama knows this. And his nuanced approach would help America recover it's global prestige.

And the Houston Chronicle as well:

Obama appears to possess the tools to confront our myriad and daunting problems. He's thoughtful and analytical. He has met his opponents' attacks with calm and reasoned responses. Viewers of the debates saw a poised, well-prepared plausible president with well-articulated positions on the bread-and-butter issues that poll after poll indicate are the true concerns of voters. While Arizona Sen. John McCain and his running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have struck an increasingly personal and negative tone in their speeches, Obama has continued to talk about issues of substance.

Back in the spring, Obama's sentiments seemed more a hope than reality. Since then, we have watched him grow in the roles of candidate and leader, maintaining grace under fire without resorting to political expediency. He is by far the best choice to deliver the changes that Americans demand.

So yeah, what's going out there, Utah?  I expect the editors of the SL Tribune to get a lot of hate mail, threats of cancellation, and cancellations in the next few weeks.  But good on them for having some balls to tell it like it is; it can't be easy sticking your head out like that in one of the reddest states in the country.

If we've learned nothing else about Obama through this campaign and the debates, it's that his is a mind that is always on level ground.  Through all of the ups and downs of the campaign, through all of the attacks aimed to incite a fierce response from him, he has shown a personal stability which says volumes about what type of leader he would be.

David Brooks of the New York Times writes:

We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control. This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness.

There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine.

Through the debate, he was reassuring and self-composed. McCain, an experienced old hand, would blink furiously over the tension of the moment, but Obama didn’t reveal even unconscious signs of nervousness. There was no hint of an unwanted feeling.

... it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. of CNN adds to this:

Make no mistake, Barack Obama is one cool customer. Now, after the last debate, it seems all but certain that the Iceman cometh to the White House.

In this week's match-up, Obama snatched the gloves out of McCain's hands and slapped him silly with them. I suppose the hope was that Obama would get rattled and make a mistake. But Obama doesn't get rattled or make many mistakes.

If nothing else, Obama's intellectual and analytical approach to the issues is a welcome change to the last eight years of George W. Bush.  With the financial crisis still smoldering and tensions abroad in Iran, a resurgent Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and a defiant North Korea, it should be no question who would be more fit to guide us through the gauntlet of domestic and foreign affairs.

Seems like a pattern now.

Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for W's reelection, says:

“They didn’t allow John McCain to pick the person he wanted for Vice President,” Dowd said, referring to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which undercut his experience argument and tethered McCain to the GOP base.

“He knows in his gut he put somebody unqualified on the ballot,” Dowd stressed, “and put the country at risk.”

Dowd also said the Palin pick, in contrast to Sen. Barack Obama’s choice of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate, showed voters which candidate was “serious” about governing.

Also, an interesting case of McCain's campaign twisting the truth and manipulating the context to create a narrative that doesn't exist:

"This weekend," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said today, "a plumber concerned that Senator Obama was going to raise his taxes asked him directly about his plan. The response was telling. Senator Obama explained to him that he was going to raise his taxes to quote 'spread the wealth around.'"

Is that what happened?

Judge for yourself

You'll have to check the link for yourself to see if McCain's campaign is being fair.  Interestingly, as I was reading this blog post, I started to wonder what percentage of the tax paying population even understands how progressive tax brackets work.  To be honest, I never thought much of it until this year.  I don't think most people understand what progressive tax brackets mean. When some people hear that the top tax bracket is going to be at 39% under Obama's plan, they think that someone making $250,001 will be taxed at 39% when in reality, only the $1 will be taxed at 39%.

Brad Friedman has a nice write up on the whole ACORN faux outrage by the Republicans over "voter fraud":

Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

Of course, the outrage is completely unjustified, but what makes it all the more humorous is that McCain has also spoken on behalf of ACORN:

The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups.

McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner.

And how about a video to go with that?

So was McCain for ACORN before he was against it?  So can we stop the faux outrage over this issue already?  It's a non-sequitur; organizationally, ACORN did everything right and by the book.  It hired some low wage workers who created fraudulent registrations, but they filtered those out and flagged them as fraudulent and the workers were fired or disciplined.

Jim Cramer also shares his thoughts on an Obama presidency versus as McCain presidency and what it could mean for the economy:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful. The first step was passing the bank-bailout legislation. Now that it’s done—and if it didn’t get done we would have been looking at a guaranteed economic collapse—the critical issue will be presidential leadership. And while any president will be an improvement over the current one, there is a growing belief on Wall Street that Barack Obama has the capacity to lead us out of this wilderness while John McCain does not. I’ll go a step further: Obama is a recession. McCain is a depression.

Wall Street usually favors Republicans when it comes to managing the economy, but this time around the financial community is skeptical. John McCain has done everything he can to avoid talking about the economy, lest he be tarred with the brush of George Bush’s ineptitude. And when McCain has attempted to step into the fray, he’s been far from reassuring. First, he insisted that the fundamentals of the economy were sound; then he turned around and told us it was the end of the economic world as we know it, and suspended his campaign to scramble back to Washington and save the day on the bailout bill—only to have little visible effect. For all his talk of being a maverick, McCain looks an awful lot like President Bush on the credit crisis: He doesn’t seem to understand Wall Street or Main Street, he is dogmatically anti-regulation, and his economic team is a joke. Carly Fiorina almost destroyed the onetime best technology company in America, Hewlett-Packard, and Meg Whitman took eBay, the best dot-com player, and turned it into a mediocre franchise that has no growth. Both are perceived by Wall Street to be also-rans who are on the team because they have nothing else to do.

Obama is no messiah, of course, but there’s a reason the Street sees him as a more capable manager of the credit crisis. He seems to understand the complexity of the problem, and while he’s nobody’s populist, he’s at least perceived as less tone-deaf to everyday Americans’ problems than his opponent. Obama also has a better team, in the likes of Larry Summers, the renowned economist and former Harvard president who probably knows more about this crisis than anyone, and Warren Buffett, the smartest man in business, period. And Obama is a globalist, in an age where the world’s economies are increasingly interdependent.

Carly Fiorina?  I mean, really, is she the one that you really want to be your surrogate on the economy?  Really?

Conservatives seems to be splitting into two groups over this election: intellectual conservatives and cultural conservatives (well, there's a group of plain old dumbasses like Hannity).

As the Huffington Post reported, RedState co-founder Joshua Trevino couldn't bring himself to vote for McCain when his ballot came.

In the end, I couldn't do it. My California ballot arrived in the mail today, and I opened it fully intending to vote for John McCain. I filled out the state propositions first -- yes on 8, no on everything proposing a new bond or new spending -- then the local offices, straight Republican excepting Kevin Johnson for (nonpartisan) Sacramento mayor. Finally, the vote for President of the United States: an academic exercise in California, where Barack Obama will surely win by a crushing margin. But good citizenship demands voting as if it matters. Do I believe in John McCain? Not as much as I used to. Do I believe in Sarah Palin? Despite my early enthusiasm for her, now not at all. Do I believe in the national Republican Party? Not in the slightest -- even though I see no meaningful alternative to it.

Wick Allison of D Magazine writes in A Conservative for Obama:

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan.

The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Obama's realist and pragmatic world view is perhaps best reflected in his time as a professer of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago, as Alexandra Starr writes in the International Herlad Tribue.

When Jaime Escuder, a University of Chicago law student, was searching for a professor to supervise an independent project on prisoners' rights, he turned to Barack Obama, but not for Obama's politics. As a student in Obama's constitutional law class in 2001, Escuder was impressed by his teacher's ability to see both sides of an argument.

"I figured Obama would respect the stance I took in the paper, whether or not he agreed with it," said Escuder, now a public defender in Illinois.

...the men and women who studied with him at Chicago echo Escuder's observation that Obama was much more pragmatic than ideological. Even as his political career advanced, Obama's teaching stuck to the law-school norm of dispassionately evaluating competing arguments with the tools of forensic logic.

"You could tell from the course evaluations and enrollments that students had really taken to him," [Douglas] Baird said.

Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who lobbies for progressive causes in Illinois, said he thought his former professor was unlikely to emerge as an ideological liberal if he makes it to the White House. "Based on what I saw in the classroom," he said, "my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words: Ruthless pragmatism."

"I don't think he's wedded to any particular ideology," Johnson-Weinberger told me. "If he has an impatience about anything, it's the idea that some proposals aren't worthy of consideration."

These last two points are perhaps what has swayed many intellectual conservatives who have looked at his history and actually read his books and read his policy manual (extensive).  McCain likes to paint Obama as an inexperienced and liberal know-nothing, but the fact of the matter is that such a portrait could not be further from the truth.  His appeal lies in his ability to evaluate ideas without bias and his willingness to hear both sides of the argument. 

It will be interesting to see how the Republican party is reshaped after this election.  It has brought the worst aspects of the party to the forefront of the discussions and I think this has effectively turned away many intellectual conservatives in disgust while the cultural conservatives cheer on ther pit-bull hockey mom, with McCain almost as an afterthought.

By the way, as an interesting note, as I noticed that Jill Biden's name was prefixed with "Dr.": Barack, Michelle, Joe, and Jill all have post graduate degrees (Jill and Michelle have multiple).  In addition, it often goes unnoticed, but Obama majored in political science with a specialization in international relations.

Christopher Buckley straps on his lifevest:

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they?

...Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. [Kathleen Parker]’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

...John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that?

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

As usual, the NRA endorsed a Republican candidate.  But in an unexpected move that no one saw coming, the American Hunters & Shooters Association has endorsed Barack Obama.

Senator Obama has clearly demonstrated his commitment to the 2nd Amendment.

His support of the Vitter amendment to HR 5441, the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations bill of 2007, is particularly telling. This amendment prevents the Government from confiscating guns in a time of crisis or emergency. Senator Obama's vote demonstrated a fundamental understanding of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment which means he recognizes the individual right of all citizens to keep and bear arms.

In addition, Senator Obama's commitment to conservation and protection of our natural resources and access to public lands demonstrates to us his commitment to America's hunting and shooting heritage.

Senator Obama will be a strong and authentic voice for America's hunters and shooters and it is with great pleasure that we endorse his candidacy.

It often slips by that Obama graduated from Harvard Law and was the selected to be the frst black president of the Harvard Law Review.  Not to mention that he taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago.  I think if there's one guy that's going to stand up for your Constitutional rights, it's this guy.

There is some controversy as to whether this group is legitimately pro-2nd Amendment, but the quote from their wiki page sums up their view the best:

"Because the gun issue has recently become a factor in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, I want to share the remarks I made today... [Millions of gun owners] not only wanted an organization that would protect their gun rights but an organization that was also committed to the protection of their communities as well as the protection of our lands."

The "communities" part is the most important, IMO.  Obviously, what is sensible in rural South Dakota isn't necessarily what is sensible in downtown Newark.

What's perhaps a bit more amusing is the Rednecks for Obama group.  A great quote from one of the group's founders:

"I don't care about his beer, I care about his intelligence.  We've had many democratic presidents, and we will still have our guns.  He is brilliant.  And he's not an elitist, though he has the education to be."

-Tony Viessman

Well said, Tony, well said.

And if you are still asking yourself "just who is Barack Obama?" then check out this Youtube video.

That's tomorrow!  It shall be epic.

It's becoming increasingly clear that John McCain's camp has been gaming to move the first presidential debate (today) to next Thursday, replacing the original vice presidential debate and moving that one to an undertermined date and time.

Why?  Kathleen Parker has an idea:

Palin's recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I've been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I've also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there's not much content there.

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we'd all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she's a woman -- and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket -- we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

Chew on that.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for strong, intelligent women.  Heck, I'm part of the cheering section when it comes to women's rights and equal pay after living through what my mom went through as a single mother, raising two kids on her own.  Even if Palin is a great mayor and governer (and by all accounts, most of the news out of Alaska says otherwise), every person must know when they are "Clearly Out Of Their League".

Two great videos of Representative Marcy Kaptur from Ohio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S27yitK32ds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD62gNi9WE

And a great line by Ted Poe from Texas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjhMc5B1my0

On The Topic Of Politics.

It's a touchy subject, I know, but I've been engrossed in it for the last three weeks now.  I can clearly see that this is a pivotal moment in the history of our country.

Let it be known that I'm an Obama guy and a Liberal at heart.  I live in New Jersey, one of the so called "Blue States" which pays out more in federal taxes than it receives back from the federal government (see fuckthesouth.com).  I generally agree with Mark Rosenfelder's assessment of taxes and why people who make more should pay more (summary: because they reap the most benefits (although indirectly) of government spending).  I also agree with his assessment of Libertarianism and the pitfalls associated with it:

The nature of our economic system has changed in the last quarter-century, and people haven't understood it yet. People over 30 or so grew up in an environment where the rich got more, but everyone prospered. When productivity went up, the rich got richer-- we're not goddamn communists, after all-- but everybody's income increased.

Thirty years ago, managers accepted that they operated as much for their workers, consumers, and neighbors as for themselves. Some economists (notably Michael Jensen and William Meckling) decided that the only stakeholders that mattered were the stock owners-- and that management would be more accountable if they were given massive amounts of stock. Not surprisingly, CEOs managed to get the stock without the accountability-- they're obscenely well paid whether the company does well or it tanks-- and the obsession with stock price led to mass layoffs, short-term thinking, and the financial dishonesty at WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, HealthSouth, and elsewhere.

The wealthiest 1% of the population doubled their share of the pie in just 15 years. In 1973, CEOs earned 45 times the pay of an average employee (about twice the multipler in Japan); today it's 500 times.

Ultimately, I'm of the belief that long term prosperity for the nation can only come from government investment into the systems and programs which support the largest base of people instead of relying purely on the free market.

From that perspective, Obama appeals to me because he has the same vision; he understands that we can only prosper as a nation if we increase our shared investment into education, healthcare, and creating jobs for the middle class since these are the foundations of a strong healthy economy.  As Rosenfelder writes, it's not about robbing the rich to pay the poor, it's about getting back to the same principles that allowed the US unrivaled prosperity in the latter half of the previous century.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said,

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Truly, this is what humanity is about and it is one of the aspects that elevate us above other species.

Disappointment.

Anyone who's been following US politics with a clear mind and a willingness to do even a trivial amount of research online knows that this campaign has been filled with falsehoods and lies and, not surprisingly, almost all of them are coming from the Republican campaign.  As has been said of them in the past, the Republicans don't know how to run a government, but they sure as hell know how to run a political campaign.  Their whole platform is based on a series of outright lies and framing the opponent in a negative light (even when they have to distort facts to make it so).

In general, I don't like to talk politics on the job due to various experiences I've had with it in the past (at Factiva during the 2004 election year).  But I couldn't resist this time because most of my coworkers are in Utah, an exceptionally Republican state.  Of course, I was curious because these folks are exceptionally smart, well educated, and connected to the Net where information and data flows freely.  Aside from that, they are Mormons who -- due to their missionary work -- seem like they would be able to connect to that humanistic nature of Liberalism and the Obama platform.

My boss, in particular I felt, should be able to relate to Obama in that like Obama, he is a self made man.  Like Obama, he travelled the world as a youth.  Like Obama, he is well educated (although as I frequently point out, Harvard Law is no walk in the park).  But here he was, in a discussion with me, basically reflecting the message that the Republican campaign had put out there, framing Obama as a know-nothing, do-nothing, wannabe.  It was sad.  Despite the information available at his fingertips and despite his well developed critical thinking skills and despite his intellect, he had bought into the Republican picture of Obama -- hook, line, and sinker.

The Issues.

The discussion started from experience.  His first critique was that Obama lacked experience.  He recited Giuliani's line from the convention.  "Community organizer?  I don't even know what that is.  Does he have any responsibilities?  Does he report to anyone?  Is he accountable for anything?" All fair questions, but let's step back from that for a moment.  Obama was only a community organizer for three years; it was his first endeavor out of college.  Having graduated from Columbia, instead of seeking profit for himself, he sought to serve the public in a volunteer role to help in economically depressed communities as a college graduate.  Aside from this, Obama has never claimed this himself as a credential; it is merely one aspect of his life and the choices he's made which reflect a history of public service.

Of course, back onto the issue of "community organizer", from his wiki, it's clearly defined what he accomplished as a college graduate:

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side.During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.

It puzzled me because I would have thought that this would have resonated well with his Mormon sensibilities of service and faith.

We moved on from this to how Obama has, as the Republicans have been trying to sell, running for president; as if this was his only other experience.  Oddly, Bossman was unaware of the fact that Obama was also an Illinois State legislator for 7 years.  Of course, this still wasn't good enough because apparently, Obama voted "Present" 130 times.  According to Bossman, this was the definition of a lazy politician.  I tried to explain to him that voting "Present" is a strategic move that signified his disapproval with a particular piece of legislation rather than an act of indifference.  As the New York Times writes:

Lawmakers and other Illinois officials said the present vote was devised to enable lawmakers to recuse themselves from voting on bills that present personal conflicts. It can also be used in the routine day-to-day wrangling in the legislature.

Okay, fine.  Even if you don't accept that the "Present" vote was used strategically, it only accounts for a fraction of his some 4000 total votes!  Of course, the Republicans are very good at framing this.  They throw out the 130 number as fact and act shocked!  Shocked, I say!  Without providing the full context of 4000+ votes. 

"Well," he countered, "they don't really do much as legislators anyways; they only meet a few times a year." Fair enough.  But during this time, I pointed out, Obama was a practicing lawyer at a well respected law firm in Chicago as well as a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago...

Seeing that he was making no headway in this direction, he shifted tactics to his critique of Obama.  He pointed out rightly that Obama missed more than 45% of the votes in the 110th Congress and called it a mockery, using it as evidence that Obama's only experience has been running for president.  Little did he know -- as he took the Republican message hook, line, and sinker -- that John McCain missed 63.8% of the votes, thus missing more votes than any other member of the Senate!  Of course, this was still an indictment against Obama because he missed 45% of the votes.  But a cursory look at the 109th Congress shows that Obama only missed 1.7% of the votes compared to 9% for McCain.  Again, I pointed out, it was an issue of context; by using the numbers out of context, the Republicans succeeded at presenting a false image of Obama.  If you wanted to spin it and sensationalize it, you could even say that John McCain missed almost 5 times as many votes as Obama did (in the 109th Congress)!!1!!1

Aside from that, it assumes that every vote is given equal weight.  They're not.  Obama has skipped many votes this session to be sure, but he has been strategic in his voting record and has voted on some of the most important bills which McCain, conveniently, has skipped!

As recently as this morning, McCain again told reporters that he planned on returning to the Senate for this evening’s vote on the economic stimulus, stating that Congress needed to quickly pass legislation.

The measure, blocked by conservatives, fell just one vote short of the 60 needed to end debate. At the “last minute,” McCain decided to skip the vote, even though his plane landed in DC in time. McCain claimed that he was “too busy“

Both Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) were able to return to the Senate and vote on the bill.

And another vote on veterans issues, an area that, surely, McCain would champion, right?

Senate Republicans have broken with President Bush to help Democrats add support for veterans and the unemployed to a bill paying for another year of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The 75-22 vote also added billions of dollars in other domestic funds such as heating subsidies for the poor and money for fighting wildfires to the $165 billion for the military operations overseas.

Both Sens. Obama and Clinton voted in favor of the bill. Sen. McCain skipped the vote (as did Sens. Tom Coburn and Ted Kennedy).

Seeing that he was making no headway in this direction, he started to critique policy, saying that Obama's tax plan would put the US into debt, another Republican talking point that he swallowed hook, line, and sinker.  In reality, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan puts the US in less debt than McCain's:

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next ten years, according to a newly updated analysis by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. Compared to current law, TPC estimates the Obama plan would cut taxes by $2.9 trillion from 2009-2018. McCain would reduce taxes by nearly $4.2 trillion. Obama would give larger tax cuts to low- and moderate-income households and pay some of the cost by raising taxes on high-income taxpayers. In contrast, McCain would cut taxes across the board and give the biggest cuts to the highest-income households.

This is aside from the fact that Obama has a more well defined tax policy and a better plan to increase revenue, but that's a story for another post.  Asked how he would make up for the tax cut, I offered that Obama would get us out of Iraq earlier and thus save huge sums of money (about $10 billion each month).  To this, he quipped: "Yeah right, the Democratic Congress hasn't been able to do anything yet; they're lazy good for nothings." 

Well, again, I thought he was smarter and more well informed than this.  In fact, you can't even really consider the Senate Democratic at all.  The current majority (if it exists at all), is at most 2 members if you count the independents!  It is, for all practical purposes, spilt 50/50.  Aside from this, he completely ignored the fact that from 2003-2007, both houses of Congress were Republican!  Not to mention that the president was Republican and that even 7 of 9 Supreme Court Justices were Republican appointments!  Amazing!  From 2003-2007, the Republicans had control of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the US government!  And somehow, he kind of glossed over this to blame a Democratic Congress which has a razor thin "majority" and has only been in power since January of 2007.  It was a total disappointment since I expected him to know this basic political background.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to the amazing number of falsehoods and misunderstandings that are out there now about Barack Obama.  The Republicans are masters at framing the opponent instead of talking about the issues.  They are masters at making the other guy look like a tool instead of making the issues the primary focus.  And the sad thing is that most Americans buy into their message, hook, line, and sinker.

So Is There Hope?

It would seem hopeless now wouldn't it?  If a college educated, self made business man, and a man of faith and service couldn't buy into Obama's platform of education and public service, then what hope do we have for the rest of America?  What hope do we have for society if the cream of the crop with instant access to the Internet -- the great equalizer -- can be so easily deceived by the Republican message? 

One of our partners in Denmark, Martin, discussed some of these points with me on IM.  He questioned whether American's were smart enough to see through the failures of the Republican campaigns (it's weird, the failures are so apparent to people outside of the US, but Americans are so blind to them...). 

At this point?  It's hard to say.  As I've read somewhere (I don't know who to attribute this to now): the fact that John McCain as a non-zero chance of winning this election is unfathomable.  And indeed, I cannot comprehend it myself; he has run an election completely devoid of policy talks and focused on rhetoric and building up his image instead.  Is this really what we need at this pivotal point in history, when China's empire is once again on the rise and the US slowly falls behind in basic education?  A time when US enrollment in sciences and engineering programs at the collegiate level are stagnating, do we need a man who will focus on warmaking?

Of course, Martin asked if I even believed that Obama could accomplish half the things he promised.  He pointed out that all politicians are alike, promising one thing and delivering another.  I thought about that and my feeling is that no politican can ever deliver what he promises because the reality is that democracy allows dissent and in the US, not every politician will agree with Obama's plans.  It will be difficult to get many of his measures passed by Congress and it will be difficult to address all of the issues he has on his plate within a timespan of four years.  This is the reality of our system.  But the one thing to keep in mind throughout all of this is that he has a well defined vision of what America can be and what we can do (a 15 page, single spaced document just on education policy that every parent and educator should read).  He has a vision of what he will try to accomplish and he has a vision of direction.  This is something that McCain lacks.  What is his vision?  Who knows?

So while I agree that Obama cannot possibly accomplish everything he sets out to accomplish and he will certainly not be able to pass the policies exactly as he has envisioned them, the fact of the matter remains that he has a vision and he has a policy that we can see today and that he will work to make them reality.  That's really all that you can ask of a politician these days.

So is there hope?  We'll have to see, but it's unfathomable that McCain is even still in this race as he's almost completely avoided talking about policy that concerns the majority of Americans.  I can only hope that I've helped Bossman at least consider the possibility that he's been fleeced by this farce of a campaign that is being run by McCain; I can only hope that I've motivated him to do some of his own fact checking to filter some of the BS that's out there now.

Conclusion?

The Republicans have done a superb job of framing Obama as a know-nothing, do-nothing candidate who has no exeperience and is only running because...?  But even a cursory bit of research into his biography and into his policies will reveal that many of the arguments used by his opponents are false and that his opponent, on some issues, has been outright lying to the American public (and doing a fantastic job of getting away with it).

If Obama were to lose this election cycle, I'm sure I would suffer a great bout with depression as we would have been on the cusp of history, the moment that we could have changed the direction of the country and invested in the future of America.

Ultimately, I told Bossman -- only half jokingly -- that he should write in Mitt Romney instead of casting a vote for either Obama or McCain but I sure do hope that he comes around to the Liberal side before November.

Edit: If you like this post, you should also check out my post on a candidate's belief in evolution. It seems more relevant now than ever with Palin on the ticket.

Storm could swamp GOP convention

Planners of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul held emergency conversations Wednesday about what to do if a tropical storm continues on its track as a potential Category 3 hurricane threatening New Orleans.

Gustav’s projected path suggests possible landfall on the convention’s opening day — Labor Day.

The storm could threaten everything from President Bush’s Monday night address to the broader Republican message of effective government management.

Local officials fear a Katrina II — a rerun of the storm that ravished New Orleans and badly damaged Bush’s image.

The liberal group Progressive Accountability planned to try to embarrass Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Friday for his response to the Katrina strike, claiming his was the 40th senator to visit New Orleans afterwards.

Lest we forget: Praying for Rain in Denver

Focus on the Family Action pulled a video from its Web site today that asked people to pray for "rain of biblical proportions" during Barack Obama's Aug. 28 appearance at Invesco Field at Mile High to accept the Democratic nomination for president.

I don't know what this means.  If they really believe in God, doesn't this mean God wants Barack for POTUS?  Oh the irony, delicious, delicious, delicious irony.

Four More Months!

If there's one man who could do this, it would have to be Venter.  Newsweek has a story on how Venter is working to revolutionize the way we view energy:

In a Maryland lab, he's manipulating chromosomes in the hopes of creating an energy bug—a bacterium that will ingest CO₂, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can be pumped into American SUVs

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

People want to bury that CO₂ in the ground or pump it into oil wells or coal beds. We want to use that CO₂ and the carbon in it to make new fuels.

We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

Such a breakthrough would create a sudden shift in the geo-political climate to one where the Middle East becomes nearly irrelevant and perhaps the US dollar rebounds to become king (once again).

Venter also brings up a very intriguing point:

Right now oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion. I envision maybe a million micro-refineries. Companies, cities and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel. This would eliminate a lot of the distribution problems and associated pollution.

Sounds like the days of $0.99/gallon fuel just might be in our future.

I like this Kamen interview:

Outfitting wounded veterans with dramatically better prosthetic limbs has been an emotional and rewarding journey for famed inventor Dean Kamen. But the project that has the biggest hold on his heart is a nonprofit called FIRST. The organization features a series of intellectual and scientific competitions. Students celebrate robotics the same way they celebrate football – complete with arenas, crowds, and cheerleaders.

Kamen says declines in graduating students and qualified engineers and scientists aren't an educational problem -- but a cultural one. When you celebrate sports and entertainment culturally, that's what kids naturally want to become. Solution? He's bringing sexy back to science. In this clip, he shares FIRST's results, and what corporate America is getting out of it too.

It needs a bit more love.  He makes a good point about the "unlimited class" of competition.  Whereas a cheetah can run faster than any human and an elephant can lift more than the strongest human, no animal can out-think humans.  Thus competitions of intellect are truly competitions of "unlimited class".

I like this story:

China is banning free plastic bags common at shops and supermarkets and ordering customers to be charged for any they use, the government said Wednesday.

Shops have been instructed to mark the price of the plastic bags clearly and not fold them into the cost of other items.

Environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, praised China's move, and Christopher Flavin, president of Worldwatch Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said "China is ahead of the U.S. with this policy," AP reported.

The Chinese use up to 3 billion plastic shopping bags a day.

Often, the flimsy bags are used once and discarded, adding to waste in a country grappling with air and water pollution as a result of rapid economic transformation, officials said.

"Our country consumes a large amount of plastic bags. While convenient for consumers, the bags also lead to a severe waste of resources and environmental pollution because of their excessive use and low rate of recycling," the statement at the Web site Gov.cn said. "The ultra-thin bags are the main source of 'white' pollution as they can easily get broken and end up as litter."

I think it's time for the US to do the same.  Not only are they not environmentally friendly, plastic bags are made from petroleum, contributing to the rising energy costs (fractionally).

Seriously, what is this country coming to?

Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.

Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott.

‘‘The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,’’ Malkin yowls in her syndicated column.

‘‘Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.’’

First of all, Michelle Malkin is a fucking idiot; everyone uses "Arabic" numerals every day...guess we need to start a ban of Arabic numerals lest the enemy think that we are sympathizers!  What's next?  A boycott of ottomans?  Gum arabic?  When will the stipid end?  Second of alll, Dunkin' Donuts must be run by a bunch of idiots, too.  Have some balls, especially after you've already paid Rachel Ray for the spot.  And gosh, just use some common sense, people.

Hit the link to see a pic of the supposed keffiyeh (not even close).

The stupidity...it hurts my head.

This story is kind of upsetting.

Like hundreds of young men joining the Army in recent years, Jeremy Hall professes a desire to serve his country while it fights terrorism.

Known as "the atheist guy," Hall has been called immoral, a devil worshipper and -- just as severe to some soldiers -- gay, none of which, he says, is true. Hall even drove fellow soldiers to church in Iraq and paused while they prayed before meals.

 "I was ashamed to say that I was an atheist," Hall said.

"Religion brings comfort to a lot of people," he said. "Personally, I don't want it or need it. But I'm not going to get down on anybody else for it."

I dunno...it's just kind of unnerving that in this day and age, a person should feel ashamed to be known as an atheist (especially one that is respectful of others' right to believe).  In fact, recent polls have shown that atheists are the most distrusted group in America, even below Muslims:

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

It just doesn't make sense.

High property taxes?  Check.  Terrible congestion?  Check.  Exit 13?  Check (for those not in the know, exit 13 on the NJ Turnpike is the location of an all encompassing foul odor from the refineries located in the area).  Overabundance of guidos?  Check.

For all the reasons that NJ sucks, there are a few bright spots like the grease trucks at Rutgers and an interesting little ruling by the NJ Supreme Court:

The justices say that IP addresses are sufficiently anonymous to justify privacy protection because, theoretically, only the Internet service provider can identify who is associated with a specific IP address.

"Internet users today enjoy relatively complete IP address anonymity when surfing the Web. Given the current state of technology, the dynamic, temporarily assigned, numerical IP address cannot be matched to an individual user without the help of an ISP. Therefore, we accept as reasonable the expectation that one's identity will not be discovered through a string of numbers left behind on a website"

Time has an interesting article summarizing a study done at Perdue University on animals and how their bodies responded to artificial sweeteners.  More specifically, how their metabolism responded.  The results are a bit surprising:

When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however — disrupting the sweetness and calorie link — the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows. The study was even able to document at the physiological level that animals given artificial sweeteners responded differently to their food than those eating high-calorie sweetened foods. The sugar-fed rats, for example, showed the expected uptick in core body temperature at mealtime, corresponding to their anticipation of a bolus of calories that they would need to start burning off — a sort of metabolic revving of the energy engines. The saccharin-fed animals, on the other hand, showed no such rise in temperature. "The animals that had the artificial sweetener appear to have a different anticipatory response," says Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University and a co-author of the study. "They don't anticipate as many calories arriving." The net result is a more sluggish metabolism that stores, rather than burns, incoming excess calories.

So does that mean you should ditch the artificial sweeteners and welcome sugar back into your life? Not exactly. Excess sugar in the diet can lead to diabetes and heart disease, even independent of its effect on weight. But it's worth remembering that when it comes to counting calories, it's not just the ones you eat that you have to worry about. The calories you give up matter too, and they may very well reappear in that extra helping of pasta or dessert that your body demands. Your body may actually be keeping better count than you are.

My knowledge of physics isn't that great (most of it has been purged since completing my college physics courses ), but one thing that I do know is that perpetual motion, according to Newtonian physics, is thought to be impossible in the real world.  Thane Heins seems to have come up with a contradiction to Newtonian physics and the first law of thermodynamics :

In an interview with the Toronto Star, [Dr. Riadh] Habash was cautious but matter-of-fact with what he's seen so far. "It accelerates, but when it comes to an explanation, there is no backing theory for it. That's why we're consulting MIT. But at this time we can't support any claim."

It's now Jan. 28 – D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.

Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped – and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."

I'm just as skeptical as the next guy, but I'm going to keep my eye on this and see what comes of it.  It's also a pretty amazing story for Heins if science can legitimize his discovery.

Nothing against the OLPC project, but I like Bill's idea a little bit better.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries and leading the charge for for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs.

"If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women," Gates said.

I'm not much of an anthropologist or historian, but it just seems like common sense that in order to help the most impoverished nations, the right way to go about it is to develop sufficient agricultural infrastructure and supply (and of course, cheap, renewable sources of energy (solar, wind) and clean drinking water).

As much love as Steve Jobs gets from the hipster crowd, I think Bill deserves some dap as well for his truly humanistic altruism.  If anyone can make some true headway in solving some of the most difficult humanitarian problems in the world, it's Bill Gates.

I like how Paul sticks by his principles and doesn't take the bait. Excellent response.

Wow...the "joke" by McCain in that last video just came of as completely ignorant. Once again, Paul lays the smack down on the rest of the field. I'm not clear on the rest of Paul's views, but clearly, the man is the only honorable, principled, and honest guy in the whole Republican field.

If he doesn't win the nomination, we'll know where the Republicans stand in terms of their priorities.  And once again, these videos remind me why I can't watch Fox News.  The response that McCain gave in that third video definitely would not have made it across his lips in say a debate on NBC since he clearly would have come across as a racist and completely ignorant.  But it says something about the audience of Fox News that he felt that everyone would get a good chuckle out of it and decided to give that as a response.

On a recent late spring trip, my wife and I visited Hyannis, Massachusetts.  During some free time, we had a chance to walk down to the beach and take a stroll.  We were greeted at the beach by a thick mist and an unbelieveable wind blowing off of the ocean.

About a week or so later, I was reading some articles regarding how Edward Kennedy pulled the NIMBY card regarding the erection of a massive array of wind turbines off of the coast of Hyannis as a source of alternative energy.

The benefits for the region seems clear:

Environmentalists say the $770 million wind farm -- enough to power 3 out of every 4 homes in New England's most coveted vacation region -- would be a crucial step toward clean, renewable power, without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil, and at a time when scientists are issuing increasingly urgent warnings about the effects of global warming.

But the opposition from the politicos seems to be avid.

Massachusetts' Republican Gov. Mitt Romney and Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, whose family compound in Hyannis would look out at the wind farm -- have warned that the unsightly turbines would depress property values and damage the local economy, which relies heavily on tourism.

I guess some would consider an array of wind turbines to be "unsightly".  But to me, it is a stunning view of progress and scientific achievement of the highest order; it is a beacon into the future in which we learn to live with nature and not in spite of it.

So the question is, how can we effectively tap the awesome power of wind in a cost effective manner without touching a nerve with the NIMBY crowd?

Enter Shawn Frayne's windbelt concept.  It is an idea so simple in its execution and so elegant in its design, that it's nearly indistinguishable from magic (of course, there's solid science behind it as well).

Frayne’s device, which he calls a Windbelt, is a taut membrane fitted with a pair of magnets that oscillate between metal coils. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph slivers of wind, making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines.

Science: It Works, Bitches!

This time, coming from a Yahoo! exec (with a spine), Ian Rodgers.

If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested.  I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value.

Ian highlights perhaps what is the most compelling force behind the proliferation of MP3s:

History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses.

So, when will the industry finally get it?  Meanwhile, it may just be time to dump iTunes for Amazon's DRM free offerings instead (by the way, I'm in love with Amazon Prime).

Check for additional commentary at TechCrunch.

The most puzzling aspect of this whole MP3 revolution has been why the industry has been slow to adopt and embrace it. 

For one, it reduces the physical limitations of distribution and shelf space.  No trucking of boxes of CDs, no need to hire a bunch of teenagers to stock your store shelves, no worries about running out of stock...it seems like it would be a media company's dream come true. 

On a second point, as countless others have pointed out, CDs inherently contain no copy protection scheme in place.  In addition to this fact, the CD is typically a much higher quality source than most MP3s...why haven't we seen the RIAA crack down on the likes of Sony, Teac, Maxell, and the various resellers and manufacturers of CD-R media? 

A third point to consider is that the media companies are absolutely silly in ignoring the potential marketing data that can be mined.  Embracing digital distribution, with the right agreements and systems in place, allows them to track and profile every paying customer!  Make a deal with Apple, Amazon, Yahoo!, other distributors and consumers: we'll go DRM and lower prices, but you must provide aggregate data about the customers that we can slice and dice to repackage for marketing purposes. 

The irony is that the P2P paradigm that started the MP3 revolution that is driving the music and movie industry nuts is likely to also be the same paradigm that will allow them to thrive in the current world of digital distribution.

I've been in a somewhat heated debate with my once CEO and now VP regarding the effectiveness (or rather, the ineffectiveness) of DRM and how the media companies are really just screwing themselves (whilst also screwing customers) by not adapting and accepting digital as this generation's radio.

I've always held the stance that DRM is a useless encumbrance to legitimate users of the content while providing merely a false sense of security to the copyright holders; those who want the content bad enough will circumvent the DRM somehow.  In the end, regardless of how good the DRM is, the simple fact is that the end product must be output at some point in time.  The content can always be captured as output from some trusted system (though some quality may be sacrificed).

Time and again, we've seen that the application of DRM is a fruitless effort in the cat and mouse game with hackers that the hackers have won every time.  Witness:

• DeCSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
• AACS crumbles: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/04/aacs_crack/
• QTFairUse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QTFairUse

In his open letter, Steve Jobs comments on DRM and states:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

I tend to think that a technology visionary like Jobs "gets it".  He understands that it is quite likely that no perfect DRM system can ever be created but in an effort to use these imperfect DRM systems, the only people that are being punished are legitimate consumers of the media by being locked into proprietary stacks of players, online stores, and digital media.

He also touches upon an oft ignored point: the CD, a digital source, itself does not contain any form of DRM.  It's true that the designers of the format perhaps did not foresee a world digitally connected and able to distribute 650MB worth of data in mere seconds (BitTorrent),  but that does not absolve the fact that they're plugging the crack in the dam while ignoring the gaping hole.

It is my view that the actual number of people who actually rip and distribute music from CDs and DVDs are a very small percentage of all consumers.  Meanwhile, there is a much larger percentage of consumers who get their copies illegally from these sources via peer to peer and file sharing networks.  And yet a larger percentage of people are actual legitimate consumers who plunk down the full price of the CD or DVD in stores and take it home with them.

What the music industry should be concerned about is not that marginal percentage of sources (those who hack the DRM systems or use the resultant software to rip and distribute the content - this group will continue to do so, indefinitely), but the much larger portion of the consumer population that illegally downloads the output of these providers even in the face of the minor threat of legal action.  The question of course is how they can reach this consumer (or at least a large proportion of this consumer).

The secret seems to be offering a "fair deal" to the consumers.  I can still remember the days when CD singles cost $5, 6, 7, even 8 dollars!  Of course, what is "fair" is arbitrary and, as my VP would say, "determined by the market" (what he seems to disregard is that the music industry was guilty of price fixing to artificially inflate the cost of CDs instead of allowing for the market to decide the fair price), but clearly, this price seems absurd!  Of course, then the question is, what is fair?  Is iTunes' $0.99 model, "fair"?  It's difficult to say since "fair" is relative to the consumer.  To some, $25,000 is "fair" for a cell phone while to others, $250 seems absurd for a cell phone (obviously different products, paying for brand, etc.; but the essence is that they are functionally equivalent in damn near every way).  Price is not the only factor: consumers, as Jobs noted, expect that once they've paid for the content, they can reuse it (not redistribute it) in their cars, on their cell phones, on their portable music players, and so on.  In the consumer's eyes, DRM is but a nuissance driving them to find DRM free, illegally distributed versions of the content.

Today's news that's buzzing around the Internet community is the upcoming release of Radiohead's next album.  Most of the buzz centers around the fact that this is the first major artist/group to release their music completely independently...no music labels involved.  Not only that, this is the first mass live experiment in determining "fair" pricing in terms of music and media:

From Time:

There's no label or distribution partner to cut into the band's profits — but then there may not be any profits. Drop In Rainbows' 15 songs into the on-line checkout basket and a question mark pops up where the price would normally be. Click it, and the prompt "It's Up To You" appears. Click again and it refreshes with the words "It's Really Up To You" — and really, it is. It's the first major album whose price is determined by what individual consumers want to pay for it. And it's perfectly acceptable to pay nothing at all.

It will be an interesting experiment indeed; the results of which, if shown to be successful, will shake the music industry to the core as other artists start to adopt the model.  The music industry has been put on notice: adapt or die.

Will Radiohead be successful?  Will they earn a dime?  One thing is for sure, they will gain a new audience of listeners who would otherwise not have been willing to purchase a CD for $16.00, but will surely download and sample the new tracks for free or for a nominal price.  But from this, it's easy to predict that Radiohead will surely increase sales of their previous albums as a new set of listeners discover the group because they've opened their content to the consumer.

It is the same with Internet radio stations, where the absurdity over the proposed rates to be paid by Internet radio stations was just recently put on hold.  In the age of HD radio broadcasts and radio-to-computer devices, what sense did it make to treat Internet radio any differently from traditional FM radio and even satellite radio?  Like traditional broadcast radio, Internet radio serves the same purpose in that it allows consumers to discover artists that would otherwise not have been given a glance (every CD I've purchased in the last 5 years has been a result of hearing the artist or group on an Internet radio station first).  It's simply that I'd rather listen to music from my computer than from my stereo.  To the consumer, the nuances of distribution and control of the media are irrelevant: the consumer just wants to listen to the music and it's really no different than an HD radio broadcast.

The media companies need to adapt and embrace technology.  They need to study how consumers want to use the content.  They need to understand that the old models won't work anymore in a connected world where content is expected to be transferrable with little hassle and reusable by the consumer (just as a CD should play in your car, in your desktop stereo, on your computer, or from a portable CD player (do people still use those?)).

A Republican leader with some balls, some heart, and most importantly, lots of humanity.

Well said, sir, well said:

Mayor Sanders: "With me this afternoon is my wife, Rana.

"I am here this afternoon to announce that I will sign the resolution that the City Council passed yesterday directing the city attorney to file a brief in support of gay marriage [with the California Supreme Court].

"My plan, as has been reported publicly, was to veto that resolution, so I feel like I owe all San Diegans an explanation for this change of heart.

"During the campaign two years ago, I announced that I did not support gay marriage and instead supported civil unions and domestic partnerships.

"I have personally wrestled with that position ever since. My opinion on this issue has evolved significantly -- as I think have the opinions of millions of Americans from all walks of life.

(Sanders with lesbian City Councilmember Toni Atkins)
"In order to be consistent with the position I took during the mayoral election, I intended to veto the council resolution. As late as yesterday afternoon, that was my position.

"The arrival of the resolution -- to sign or veto -- in my office late last night forced me to reflect and search my soul for the right thing to do.

"I have decided to lead with my heart -- to do what I think is right -- and to take a stand on behalf of equality and social justice. The right thing for me to do is to sign this resolution.

"For three decades, I have worked to bring enlightenment, justice and equality to all parts of our community.

"As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage -- than anyone else -- simply because of their sexual orientation.

"A decision to veto this resolution would have been inconsistent with the values I have embraced over the past 30 years.

"I do believe that times have changed. And with changing time, and new life experiences, come different opinions. I think that's natural, and certainly it is true in my case.

"Two years ago, I believed that civil unions were a fair alternative. Those beliefs, in my case, have since changed.

"The concept of a 'separate but equal' institution is not something that I can support.

"I acknowledge that not all members of our community will agree or perhaps even understand my decision today.

"All I can offer them is that I am trying to do what I believe is right.

"I have close family members and friends who are members of the gay and lesbian community. These folks include my daughter Lisa and her partner, as well as members of my personal staff.

"I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones -- for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life's wondrous adventures.

"And I want their relationships to be protected equally under the law. In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships -- their very lives -- were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana. Thank you."

Touching, well thought out, reflective, compassionate, and sincere.

A hand for Jerry Sanders.

This is probably the most sensible an informative bit of commentary on the current market conditions (DOW -387):

I love how 90% of farkers don't understand exactly what the crisis is right now.

It's not the fact that the housing bubble "burst". People aren't jumping out of skyscrapers because their house value went down by 5%.

The vast majority of the problem is that the credit market for certain types of bonds has tightened up, to the point that it's almost not even trading at this point. To those that are newbies, the bond market is roughly 10x the size of the stock market in terms of dollar value. It is huge. Bonds get traded back and forth every day, and billions upon billions of dollars worth.

What happened is that mortgage-backed securities are farked up. During the housing boom, lenders would give mortgages to people, then they would package them up and then sell a whole shiatload of mortgages to things like pension funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, etc. The lenders like this because they reduce their risk, and the funds like it because it's a reliable source of income, at least mortgage-backed securities are. Well, it turns out that the lenders were selling the funds investment grade mortgages, when in fact they were more like junk bonds; the people who got these mortgages not only faked their income, but in reality could only afford these mortgages under the best of conditions. Now that short-term interest rates have spiked up, many people have defaulted on these loans. More importantly however, the price of the mortgage-backed securities drop because their price is in part related to how reliable they are as an investment.

Now, many hedge funds invest in MBSs on margin, which really screws them up, because all of a sudden they owe a huge amount of money on worthless securities. This is why 2 Bearn Sterns hedge funds got screwed over and a 3rd one is in question. It's like owning stock in a gold mining company with a certain reported amount of gold, and then finding out that there really is no gold. The price will plummet, and if you bought that stock on margin, you will get a margin call.

The same thing happened with the French hedge fund that this article is talking about. What is worse, however, is that if the markets aren't trading, you can't tell how much the stock is worth, so the French stopped trading the funds until it can get better clarity as to how much their fund is worth.

The submitter's headline is misleading because the govt isn't injecting $12 billion, it's $12 billion more than they usually inject. They are always buying and selling bonds to create liquidity. This is what they mean by the US or Euro governments injecting funds into the bond market. They are going around buying bonds to create an artifical market because regular traders aren't buying them anymore. They are buying these bonds to create liquidity, so that traders will have confidence they can buy and sell bonds again, and once the market recovers they will turn around and start selling them back to replenish their reserves.

This is the real danger here. This MBS contagion has spread throughout the world because every one around the world has invested in US MBSs. We have no idea how bad this contagion has spread, but if this MBS problem takes down funds around the world, and the credit market really tanks and there is a flight to quality, making things like MBS fall even further, it could literally evaporated trillions dollars of peoples investments around the world.

From poster tstoneman.

Opening up the newspaper this morning, I came across two terrible rulings recently passed down by the Supreme Court.

The first has to do with MSRP.  I'm guessing that the majority of American's who are not filthy rich often go bargain hunting for prices below MSRP in hopes of finding that killer deal.  I'm guessing that if you're like me, you're willing to sacrifice some service at the point of sale for a better price.  This is part of principle of what has driven online sales: for the retailer, they save by not needing to have sales people or point of sale service while for customers, they often get a chance to save a huge amount over retail outlets.

From USA Today (6/29/07):

The 5-4 decision overturned a 96-year-old law that prevented manufacturers from setting minmum retail prices.  The majority wrote that lifting the pricing ban could benefit consumers if retailers offered better service or selection.

Wait, what?  How about benefitting consumers by offering a better price?  Why not leave it up to the retailers to choose which model they choose to bring in customers?  If customers wanted service, they could choose the retailer that offered it.  If they wanted to find a bargain, they could choose the retailer with the best markdowns.  Instead, the court has decided that the consumer has no say in this...no freedom of choice when it comes to price shopping.

What I found was completely asinine was a statement by Richard Doherty:

Richard Doherty of technology market researcher The Envisioneering Group agrees, saying the price ruling could lead retailers to use more free products and better services as sales incentives.  "It's sure to be to consumers' benefit this summer and Christmas."

Is this guy on crack?  How about I just want to get a good deal on a HDTV...I don't want any "quote-unquote-FREE" stuff.  I don't care for point of sales services; I do my research on the products I buy and I already know what I want when I go into the store; I want to get the best deal that I can...why not leave that decision up to the individual consumer?

To make matters worse, the article offers commentary from a multi-billionaire:

Bill Gates, of golf equipment maker Ping, says, "Not every consumer is a bargain shopper.  Some consumers are looking for quality, innovation, personalization and customer service when they shop."

That's fine, Bill, if you have the money for all that jazz, but how about the rest of us who are just trying to put away some money for retirement, for our kids, for our families?  We just want to get by with a good deal.  How about this novel idea: let the consumers decide what they value - price or service.

Argh!

As if this wasn't bad enough, the Supreme Court also ruled to strike down school diversity programs on a national level:

The dramatic 5-4 decision throws into legal doubt programs that factor in race, including magnet schools that use race to draw students from different neighborhoods.

Accorind to Chief Justice Roberts,

Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to...race is an extreme approach.

Well then, what would you suggest Mr. Roberts?  How do you overcome the economic hurdles that create defacto segregated schools?  How can you deny that integration - even if it is forced - is to the benefit of our racial diversity and our social fabric?

The fact is, if school children were simply assigned to schools based on location and district, it would in fact create further segregation and slowly reverse some of the progress that has been made.  I think it is true that we fear what we do not know or understand.  We view those who are different from us as outsiders because we do not understand their cultures, their languages, their traditions, and their ways; what better way to overcome the defacto segragation that occurs by township (and economic boundaries) they to help ensure a minimum level of integration?

Such an upsetting way to start the day...

The Washington Post has a great narrative on the VT shootings.

Something about the statements in a transcript from Bill Maher's show is really scary and yet it evokes a "HAHA WTF IS HAPPENING TO THIS COUNTRY...LOL" feeling in my mind.

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word, "liberal," they also have to take back the word, "elite." By now, you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite" media and the liberal "elite," who may or may not be part of the Washington "elite," a subset of the East Coast "elite," which is overly influenced by the Hollywood "elite." So, basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists.

You know, if you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being elite, you'd almost be as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.

I - I don't get it. In other fields outside of government, "elite" is a good thing, like an "elite" fighting force; Tiger Woods is an "elite" golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an "elite" doctor. But, in politics, "elite" is bad. The "elite" aren't down to earth and accessible like you and me and President Shtt-for-brains.

Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush Administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, where are they getting these screw-ups from? Well, now we know. From Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding.

Take Monica Goodling, who, before she resigned last week, because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's 33 years old. And though she never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 93 U.S. Attorneys.

How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College. You know, Messiah, home of the Fighting Christ-ies? And then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said that the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, has a law school.

And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you only have to read one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a Tier Four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook.

This is for people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix.

Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist's diploma mill work in the Bush Administration? 150. And you wonder why things are so messed up. We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college funded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U.? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House?

In 200 years, we've gone from "We, the people," to "Up With People." From "the best and the brightest" to "dumb and dumber." And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school?

The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by "elites." It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And, by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling just hired to keep her ass out of jail, went to a real law school.

Wow...this actually explains a lot. I mean, a certain level of cronyism is to be expected. But I would have much rather have seen appointees from Yale instead...

Perhaps one of the best comments I've read on this:

That totally reads like an Onion article. Pat Robertson School of Law?

Indeed, our government is becoming even more like satire.

The story of how Liviu Librescu, a 76 year old professor, sacrificed his life to save the lives of his students is a must read for anyone following the Virginia Tech shootings.

Students of Liviu Librescu, 76, an engineering science and mathematics lecturer in at Virginia Tech for 20 years, sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said the son, Joe.

He will be remembered as an honorable and courageous man.

So the big news today is that EMI is going DRM free.

A few months ago, in a hotel room in King of Prussia, I had a short debate with Brad and Jim (CEO and CTO of the company I work for). 

One of the technologies that we circle around frequently is Microsoft's Information Rights Management Server.  The gist of it is that it allows administrators to control the actions a user can perform on a document such as printing, emailing, copy/pasting text, and so on.  In short, it is a software solution to controlling distribution of a document, much like DRM when it comes to distribution of digital media like music and movies.

However, to me, this has always seemed like a big sham.  Why?  Because any user that wanted to counter this could do so quite easily.  It only adds a false sense of security, which is doubly dangerous if the documents in question are highly sensitive. 

For example, if printing were to be disabled on a document, the user could still use print screen to capture the image and print that instead.  Disable print screen, and the user can still take pictures with a high resolution digital camera.  Force employees to check all digital devices before entering the building, and the employee can still take notes by hand.

In short, IRM, like DRM, simply presents an encumberance to legitimate users of the digital content while not preventing losses to anyone that really wants the information or content illegitimately.  As we've seen in the DRM space, no form of digital rights management will ever work.  Ever. 

Steve Irwin, Mr. Crocodile Hunter himself, has passed away.

It's the kind of news that sets you back and leaves you kind of lost.  At least to me, Irwin was an icon in many ways.  Here was a man who had made a career--a very successful one at that--doing what he genuinely loved; one could not imagine him doing anything but what he did.  In addition, Irwin's love and respect of Nature, his sense of presentation, and his appeal helped to bring more audiences, young and old, a better understanding of our natural world.

Aside from that, Irwin had an aura of invincibility...as if he could always escape Death himself as he had done time and again on his show.  And with his openness, you felt like you knew the guy...as if the Irwin that you saw on TV was basically the Irwin that you would expect to see in real life: friendly, inquisitive, open, honest, and fun loving.  I think these qualities make this loss even more saddening as we all felt like we knew him personally.

So it was quite shocking (really quite shocking) to read that he had passed.  At least he died in pursuit of what he loved: helping people all over the world explore the natural world from their armchairs.

Perhaps I was being a bit delusional.  I really thought that Team USA could win it all this year.

Alas, it was not to be so. 

Team USA lost to Greece 95-101.  While Team USA only lost by 6, the game itself was never really within reach of Team USA after the half.  Greece held onto their halftime lead for almost the entire second half and even extended it to 14 points on solid defense, great movement by their gaurds, and solid offensive execution.  The Greeks ran the pic-and-roll to perfection and simply relied on the American's stagnant offense to deny posessions.

Growing up, one of my best friends was half Greek.  I can pretty much predict that there's going to be a lot of celebration by the Greek community tomorrow.

The poor shooting really did the team in.  Aside from Carmelo Anthony and Kirk Hinrich, the rest of Team USA was just stone cold from the floor, and most importantly, from the line.  Clank after clank from the charity stripe.  Terrible.

The player I'm most disappointed in is LeBron James.  Anytime the ball touched his hand, the offense seemed to stagnate as teams simply let him dribble it out and played solid defense as he lowered his shoulder to drive.  On the other hand, the player that impressed me the most was definitely Carmelo Anthony who quietly played an excellent tournament, showing amazing versatility, maturity, and range (not to mention his shooting touch).

I also wonder if the offense would have flowed more smoothly if Brad Miller spent some more time in the lineup.  Miller, who, like the Greek big men, is adept at running the pic-and-roll and he has the range to finish inside or out.  Not only that, Miller is a superb passer and a very solid big man.  It's too bad that he didn't get a lot of playing time.  It seemed like Coach K chose to use a smaller lineup for better mobility, but in doing that he sacrificed a great deal of interior defense which allowed the Greek team to get layups almost at will.  While Miller isn't going to give you spectacular blocks like Howard or Bosh, his defensive footwork is excellent and a better outside shooter than either.

The most interesting stat of the game?  Greece had zero offensive boards in the first half.  Jim Durham commented that they made such a high percentage of their shots, there were no offensive boards for Greece to grab.

So what's next for Team USA?  Well, they play the winner of the Spain-Argentina game tomorrow so it's not guaranteed that Team USA will even medal at all.  It can be argued that both Spain and Argentina are better teams than Greece.  Would it be a total disappointment if Team USA didn't medal?  Well, let's put things into perspective; these guys had about three weeks to practice and this team is extremely young.  Let's not forget that they finished 6^th in the 2002 World Championships, so this is a step in the right direction and certainly a learning experience for them.

How can Team USA get better? 

First of all, Team USA needs more no-hesitation outside shooters.  I wonder how this game would have played out had JJ Reddick been available or if Adam Morrison had made team.  "Ammo" is one of those fearless shooters who would have been perfect for this team. 

Second, LeBron needs to watch some tapes of this game.  With him at the helm, the offense stagnated tremendously.  He was Anthony Mason-esque with his over dribbling and use of his shoulder to try to power through people.  LeBron needs to look to make the pass earlier in the posession and make some cuts to get towards the basket.  When he's good, he's good.  But in international play, LeBron was merely so-so.

Third, Coach K needs to spend more time on defense for the next competition.  The US is hindered by the fact that they can only play man-to-man as it would appear they never practiced the zone.  Greece had the luxury of going to either man coverage or zone, depending on how Team USA was doing.  Shooting poorly?  Switch on the zone D and essentially shut them out.  Hot shooting?  Stick to man deny the ball and lock up the shooter.  These are the exact tactics that the Greeks used. 

Fourth, get more defense oriented point veteran gaurds.  Chris Paul had a terrible game and couldn't make any shots; he looked lost on offense for the first time in the tournament.  Not only that, Team USA point gaurds simply didn't command the pace and flow of the game by initiating the ball movement.  But this is an error of youth and inexperience.  With Chauncey Billups at the helm, Team USA would have had a better chance to win this game.

Fifth, Team USA needs some offensive sets in the half court.  I mean, they must have known that they couldn't possibly run every team out of the gym, right?  They must have known that they would eventually have to play some solid half court ball, right?  Well, if they did know, they didn't show it at all.  Nothing fancy; just some easy sets/schemes to break out the zone and get out of a funk.

Well, it'll be interesting to see if they even medal this time around.  Regardless, big props to these guys for playing their hearts out and commiting the time for Team USA.  I'm really looking forward to what these guys can do with a bit more time to gel and play together.

And yes, I stayed up all night to watch this game.

A patriot is a person who loves his or her country.

Who among you loves your country so much that you have come here today to raise your voice out of deep concern for our nation - and for our world?

And who among you loves your country so much that you insist that our nation's leaders tell us the truth?

Let's hear it: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let no one deny we are patriots. We love our country, we hold dear the values upon which our nation was founded, and we are distressed at what our President, his administration, and our Congress are doing to, and in the name of, our great nation.

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating president.

Read the rest of the transcript here.

Man, I don't about anyone else, but I personally cannot wait for these guys to open a can of whup-ass :D Graaaaaawr (I really mean that)!!

The schedule can be found on the Team USA subsection of NBA.com.

I'm really looking forward to this team play as it should be some fast paced, exciting basketball.

The USA has been around for a little more than a mere two centuries. Admittedly, there isn't much history to be had in such a short span of time, at least relative to Old World countries in Europe or the empires in the East which have millennia of history.

But none-the-less, in these two-plus centuries, I'd like to think we've made a name for ourselves, particularly in the fronts of industrial and technical innovation and engineering.

The light bulb, controlled nuclear reactions, mass produced automobiles, microwave ovens, the telephone, and the cell phone to name a few, are all innovations that came out of the US. These are historical advances in the course of mankind that will have a lasting impact for decades to come.

Should we not, then, protect the sites where such innovations originated? Then  should we not place a value on these sites as a sort of historical monument to ingenuity and weave them into the fabric of our history?  These are our Colosseums, our Leaning Towers, our Pyramids; these are historical monuments at  their birth.  Protecting these sites is the logical thing to do as, indeed, the history of the US is one of industrial and technical achievement.

So it is quite sad to find out that the legendary Bell Labs Holmdel facility (right in my backyard) is going to be razed for a new office complex.

If such a legendary landmark is razed for new office complexes, it would be quite a shame as it has indeed generated an enormous wealth of technologies and innovations in the 5 or so decades it was in operation.

Wow.  Just wow.

Bush Blames Iraq's Instability on Hussein

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government.

What?!?  Is he for real?

Generally speaking, I like to keep my political leanings out of my postings, but I'll make a special exception today

Via TheStar.com:

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

So, which were you and what affiliation are you today?

I'd say that I wasn't very whiny; mostly quiet and introverted all along.  Today, I'm left of middle, not by choice, mind you (I don't go out to label myself).  It's more that my beliefs fall in line with more moderate "liberals".

For those that aren't familiar, Nate is the "vertically challenged" rookie point gaurd on the New York Knicks basketball team.

Yesterday, this 5 foot, 7 inch human spring won the slam dunk contest in the unlikeliest twist of events.  Just when it looked like Andre Iguodala was about to coast to a victory in the slam dunk contest, Nate pulled out one of the most flawlessly awesome dunks, EVAR. I absolutely exploded off my chair when he performed the dunk with Spud Webb and completed it on the first try.  Absolutely amazing.  Scared the crap out my wife and cats when I started screaming like a mad man.

I think what's more amazing is Nate's physical and mental toughness.  On that first point, the man exerts a ton of energy to be able to be able to propel himself vertically as high as he does against the laws of gravity (I'm not about to bust out the physics equations).  I give the man a great amount of credit for that as he failed to connect, try after try, on several of his dunks.  And yet, there was no quit in his body; there was no way he was going to give up and settle.  You could tell that this man willed his body to do this bidding.  Absolutely amazing.  On the second point, some people would be mentally frazzled by the failure of the first 10 attempts and accept that it was not meant to be.  On the contrary, you could sense that the thought of failure and accepting said failure never crossed Nate's mind; you could see the determination in his eyes, try after try.

Such determination and physical toughness was electrifying to watch.  I was simply captivated by this slam dunk contest.  The very best that I can recall ever having witnessed and one that will be memorable for generations to come, I think.

I haven't been following the riots in France with any particular interest, but a blog post by a journalist in France caught my attention.   A little snippet, if I may:

The rebellion is spreading spontaneously -- driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It's incredible the level of police racism -- these young are arrested or controlled by the police, shaken down, pushed around, and have their papers checked simply because they have dark sins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them 'bougnoules' [a racist insult, something like the American "towel-heads", only worse], 'dirty Arabs' and more. The police bark, 'Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!' as if they had no right even to look a policeman in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority.

Wow.  Certainly, there are better ways to voice your dissatisfaction with goverment policy, but I can't blame the youth if the picture is really as dark as the blog paints it to be.

For me, I think the most distrubing thing is that I don't see how an resolution can be reached easily as the core issues are not ones that can be changed overnight or through words alone.  I simply cannot answer what the proper course of action is on behalf of the goverment as there is no central figure with whom to negotiate terms of peace.  Further martial action will surely only be met by more resistence and increased unrest amoung the youth.

Could we be seeing the early stages of a modern day revolution?

Perhaps what's most frightening is that, for the most part, none of the current activity has been organized on any large scale.  I think everyone would fear the invovlment of an organized Islamic uprising which may draw upon the vast network of European Islamic extremists.  Aye, this is a Jihadist's dream in the making.

Good news for us CS (computer science) graduates!  Well, at least according to Mr. Gates:

"Gates addressed University of Michigan students Wednesday in kicking off a three-day college tour aimed at getting young people interested in computer science and related fields.

Gates said the global market has greatly expanded the need for technology and innovations and needs young people to create them. Although many computer science jobs are being created overseas, there still are plenty of opportunities in the United States, Gates said."

For anyone that may be interested in CS, stay tuned.  I composed a little mini-map of the CS field (at least according to my knowledge of it) that I think is helpful for those of you thinking of getting into CS.  I think I'll work on that this weekend (if I can find my map (I have a habit of writing random things on random pieces of scrap paper that either end up being recycled by someone or lost in a pile somewhere)).

On a sidenote, I encountered this lovely error message (twice!) yesterday while working on a project:

Yes, not once, but twice yesterday!  Luckily, my computer didn't explode and, to my amazement, the Earth still exists.  Whew!  Here I was hoping for the worst, too.  I started laughing as soon as I saw it and just had to take a screenshot and share

I'm kinda puzzled by the nomination of Harriet Miers for the seat left open by Sandra Day O'Connor.

What has me confused is Miers' background, according to CNN:

"Miers, who has never been a judge, was the first woman to serve as president of the Texas State Bar and the Dallas Bar Association. She also served on the Dallas City Council."

Hmmm.  While I have no idea what the president of the Texas State Bar does, I'm quite certain that the job is entirely different from that of a judge.  Analogously, I certainly wouldn't expect that our CTO be "nominated" as the lead architect on a new software project.

Is it a coincidence that she's from Texas?

I guess that's why I'm not in politics...none of this makes any sense to me at all.

I recently read through an article in Time that asked "How Many More Mike Browns Are Out There?"  It will shock you how many people, in key positions, are lacking in real credentials and experience for the leadership roles that they're in.  One has to wonder whether the correct question to ask today is "How many more Mike Browns are going to be appointed?".

Stumbling across news of JetBlue flight 292, I found it difficult to contain my emotions. It's simply mindboggling to imagine what those passenger were going through in those moments. I started tearing up just reading the article.

Luckily, everyone made it out unscathed thanks in part to the excellent skills of the pilot who makes a beautiful and otherwise uneventful landing (if you can ignore the sparks and flames shooting out from the front wheel landig gear).

Perhaps the most interesting part of this whole ordeal was that many (if not all) of the passengers aboard were watching their own fate via DirectTV satellite feeds (which they shut off 10 minutes before touchdown).

It's quite interesting as it underscores the pervasiveness of information that exists today; not only were they watching their own potential demise, the passengers were texting their relatives and calling their friends. Much like with the firsthand cameraphone accounts of the London tube bombings, we move ever closer to the collective mind of the Borg

Amazing times that we live in.

Took me a while to figure out how I wanted to set up my site.  After dabbling in a little home made CMS and evaluating several other open source CMS/portal solutions, I finally decided on dasBlog.

So far so good.  Setup is a breeze, just copy the files to your webserver and make some minor changes to your configuration XML files and you're all set to go.  Templating is also very flexible, however, there is no UI for doing it at the moment (no UI to select a macro and insert into an HTML template).  Currently, everything has to be done by hand in a text editor, which is sure to turn certain people off to this application.

On the downside, the list of available macros is somewhat limited beyond the standard blog/item macros.  Not only that, the list is poorly documented.  I can't seem to find a complete and up-to-date list of macros.

Well, in any case, I still have lots of work to do in terms of skinning and working on the CSS files.  All of the links at the top are dead for the moment, but I plan on filling them in (eventually).