The-Asterisk

Fairness?

2012-01-29T23:53:00.002-05:00

This morning I was ranting on Twitter and I tried to make my point through several consecutive tweets. 140 characters is not a lot of room to relay a big thought and one follower, @dogwalkblog took me to task on this point. He is a great blogger, but he has a history of media experience behind him. I have passion, this blog and 8000 tweets behind me, and I think I have become a better blogger for having gotten "out there" and expressed myself.

So, with that said, I will make my point about how I disagree with the President in what is fair.

President Obama opined in his State of the Union address earlier this week that he wants to make things fair so that all people have a fair shake at whatever it is they want a fair shake at. Jobs? Income? Health? Free throws? 4 minute mile? Marriage? I don't know...

Let me start out by saying LIFE IS NOT FAIR and thank God for that fact. If it was fair, virtually no one would push to exceed and succeed, because there would be no reward for doing more than is required to just get by. Fairness in results means that no one stands out from any other.

But, if he was talking about fair play, I might just have to agree with him. Rules are created by societies to act as boundaries for behavior. Rules are also constantly changing. Some rules are not fair. Some rules are created by leaders to "guide" individuals toward a desired result and some rules are made to be beneficial for one group and unfair for another. Forty or fifty years ago, there were a bunch of unfair rules for minorities and women. Now, most of those rules have not only been overturned, but have even gone further toward unfairness to the "majority" that benefited in previous generations.

One statement I made on Twitter is that business is pretty much fair for those just starting out. The rules for new businesses are quite well defined in the US and just about anyone can start up and make a go at it. I would argue that it is easier now to start a business than at any time in the past. With everyone having access to a computer, a phone, email, fax and credit cards, there is little that can stop a determined person from owning a business.

Some would make the case that trying to get a bank loan to start a business is unfair. I would imagine that any poor and/or minority individual would think that the deck was stacked against him/her because they asked their banker for a $50,000 loan to expand their business. When the banker turned them down, it had to be because the borrower is a (fill in the blank) and the banker is prejudiced.

Well, I am a white male and it took me putting together a large business loan years ago to realize that banks don't take risk. They may do risky things, but they will not take a risk on YOU without collateral to back up every penny of what they lend you. I was taught, like I suspect most of us were, that banks loaned money just like your Mom and Dad might lend you $1000 to buy your first car. WRONG. The only way that would happen is if you put your $1000 baseball card collection up for collateral. Today, if you cannot get a loan, it is probably because you have nothing to back up the amount of the loan.

Truism: you have to have money (assets) to borrow money. In other words, most of the people that can quickly borrow money don't really need it and the laws are written such that it is advantageous for them to do so. Not fair is it?

(Recession exception: currently banks are so uptight because of regulations, fear or lack of capital, that even if you are creditworthy and have collateral you may not get a loan and that just isn't fair.)

Even if you are really smart, you can fail miserably at business. If you have little education, you can still make it in business. Is that fair?

After 3 years of preschool, 12 years of primary education, 4 years of college and 2-4 years of post-graduate work, you can still wander around looking for the right job. Sure, you could work for something beneath your education and preparation, but that wouldn't be fair would it?

I could go on and on with examples of fairness, or lack thereof, but you get the drift.

The key to my argument against Barack Obama helping make things fair is that I don't really trust those that will be assigned to make the new rules. Do you? It is one thing to come up with a game and write down a page or two of rules then start playing the game. It is another thing to stack layer upon layer of rules and new rules followed by exceptions and carve-outs, then being told "Enjoy the game" knowing that if you violate the rules you could end up in jail or with a huge fine. How fair is that?

I will close with this immutable truth: there will always be a small group that sets the rules and those rules will usually favors themselves. When a disaffected group rises up and unseats the ruling class, they will soon become the privileged ruling class and the cycle will continue. You can NEVER depend upon benevolence to temper power, especially in groups.

If your primary method to achieve fairness is to take from one group to give to another, the haves will not be happy. They will do all they can to stop the taking (including changing the rules in the middle of the game.) However, if you raise yourself up and earn what you make or accomplish, you may soon find yourself in the good company of the haves and your closely held view on fairness may change whether you want to admit it or not.

Changing your attitude, outlook and opinion as you mature? That just isn't fair to others, is it?

Newt

2012-01-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich won Saturday's South Carolina Republican Presidential primary with 40% of the vote. Mitt Romney came in a distant second with 28% of the vote. This was a big win and it underscores the roller coaster season that this primary has given us.

Many of the pundits on the right are coming out against Newt. Conspicuously present in this attack is Ann Coulter and S.E. Cupp, but they are just the most verbal. Most in the punditocracy are decidedly anti-Newt. This puzzles me. Do they know something that I don't know, do they fear that Newt cannot win against Obama, or does he threaten their turf?

I have liked Newt for a long time. I remember distinctly the night that the Republicans took over the House in 1994. The Rs had been out of power for so long, they had gotten comfortable living in the shack behind the big house. Newt riled them up, got a whole new crew elected and they stormed the mansion. This move affected politics in DC for the next 10-15 years.

When I heard Newt was running for President, I was excited. He is an idea guy. So am I. Not all of my ideas are actionable (or practical). Neither are his, but at least he puts it out there. If one is timid and never floats an idea for fear of it being ridiculed or shot down, then we will be stuck with the status quo. Guess what? We are stuck with the status quo. By this I mean business as usual. No matter who is in power, the wheels turn in the same manner with the same grease. The party in power and the President steer the beast, but the inner workings are pretty much the same as they always have been.

Side note: there are those who say that Barack Obama has not accomplished anything in his presidency and has kept none of his promises. BS! The problem with BHO is that he has kept most of his promises, except for the one about reaching across the aisle to the opposition. He reaches across alright, only to slap the Republicans up the back of their heads just to keep them in their place.

My attitude toward Newt since he announced has been about as up and down as that roller coaster. He has moments of brilliance, followed by gaffes or by circumstance (such as his second wife Marianne's interview with Brian Ross of ABC News.) Romney, however is "steady as she goes". Romney is DC, Newt is AC. But like electricity, AC gets the job done over the long haul. DC just powers the small jobs.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that a lot of the pundits don't want the boat rocked. Newt was cast out as Speaker of the House just four years after he took the job. Was he that bad of a leader, or did he want to take them where they did not want to go? I don't know the inside scoop, but I suspect the latter. You only have to look at the Arab Spring to see a similar trend. The genuine revolutionaries knock down the walls and storm the castle, only to have the 'elites' push them aside and take over when the heavy lifting is done. Isn't that the deal, let someone else fight and die for the cause, then swoop in and grab the reins?

What scares me about Newt is he desperately needs a Dick Cheney-type to run the day-to-day. He needs a brilliant Chief of Staff that knows how to work with him. He must come out immediately and identify his team. Show the country that he is ready to get it done. But is there anyone there? Is "Team Newt" just an Army of One?

People in the know are scared that it will be all Newt, all the time and you can't run it that way. In many ways he is like Bill Clinton, but Clinton had some competent folks behind the scenes. Where is Newt's backfield and his team and coaches on the sidelines?

Yeah, he is calling audibles, gaining yardage and winning a few games, but he still needs a great team to go all the way to the Super Bowl.

If I ran Barnes and Noble

2012-01-07T12:05:00.000-05:00

Barnes and Noble has something that Amazon.com doesn't have... presence in most metro areas. If I ran B&N, I would look at allowing online purchasers to have an option of picking the book up at their local store, even if the person ordering it was standing in the store while he ordered it.

I would offer a "Pick it up in 30 minutes" deal. You would have to wait the 30 minutes to pick it up so that if someone tried to game the system, it might be a little more inconvenient, but really, does it matter? If I have Amazon Prime, I can have the book in two days with free shipping or I can have it tomorrow for $3.99 shipping. When you factor in the deep Amazon discount on books, the $3.99 shipping charge is trivial.

Sure, a B&N "picker-upper" would have to pay sales tax, but they do already (which may be why bn.com is much less successful than Amazon.com.)

This distribution scheme could potentially decimate the shelf inventory at your local B&N, but, so what? With the size of that company and their advanced distribution system, they could have them restocked the next day.

What better way to compete against "get it cheap and have it the next day" than to "get it cheap and have it before lunch"? B&N's cost structure with all of their existing brick and mortar stores is fixed and long term, so why not leverage it? Plus, there is always the possibility that the picker-uppers may see something else that they need, adding to the profit potential.

One other item I would look at that Amazon does not do, is leverage the total media experience of the Nook. Amazon.com owns Audible.com (audio books), Kindle (e-books) and Amazon (paper books) but does not integrate any of the three. If someone would drop $9.95 for a Nook book, I would allow a $12.95 option to get the audio version with it. Also, if someone paid full freight ($36.95) for a paper book, I would fix my computer system to automatically give that account the Nook version and the audio version for free. (Personally, I finish 100% more books on audio than I do with the dead tree version.)

I mean, what is the long tail cost? Nothing. "Oh, but there is value in the audio production" one might say. Well, compare the value of a $36.95 book to a $16.95 copy of the same book delivered in two days to your door. I see no difference, except for the act of getting it when you want it. Is that worth $20 plus tax? Value valuation changes. Get with the program...

While these traditional companies spend millions of dollars protecting their old-school flanks, they are getting killed on the forefront.

In the words of Earl Pitts, "Wake up, Uhmerika!"

Serendipity, new-style

2011-12-02T03:08:00.001-05:00

Back in October, Andrew Breitbart, the much-maligned purveyor of BigGovernment.com and several other 'Bigs" posted this tweet:

I am one that likes to check out different styles of music so I followed his link. Here is what I found.

Give it a spin. Who knows, you may like it.

It snagged me with its catchy beat, peppy tune and those whiny vocals (yes, Andrew, it is emo.) After I watched the video, I clicked on several others that came up and decided that I would put Grouplove in the plus column, although I secretly wondered if they may have been involved in Occupy Wall Street (just kidding, guys.)

So, tonight I was at a local concert. It was a festival-style show where there are multiple bands. I had purchased the ticket because I wanted to see @GavinRossdale and the newly re-formed Bush. There was a room called the Budweiser Lounge where a poster in the hallway indicated that at 8:15 the featured band would be Grouplove.

Grouplove? Hmmmm. I remembered the name, but I couldn't remember any of their music. Instead of heading for the main stage area, I hung out in the lounge and grabbed a spot right up on the front rail. Soon, the sound check was complete and the band came out. I must say, the sound guys forgot that we were in a small indoor room. I almost lost an eardrum.

Suddenly, I remembered their music after I heard the first few notes. It was a great twenty minutes, though I had to move to the back of the room to conserve my hearing. (For those of you who know me, you know that this is a rare move for me, but pain is pain...)

This sort of musical serendipity started about 12 years ago for me when Napster first came out. I had been 'borrowing' music from other people, mainly through UseNET newsgroups. This was tedious and slow. Back then I had a 56K modem (it might have been a 33K modem) and the songs were broken up into multiple chunks which had to be reassembled in the proper order after downloading. There were newsreader programs that would do this reassembly automagically for you, but you still had to download a sequential list, beginning to end, or it wouldn't work.

When Napster arrived, all of this changed. You could search for music (actually you searched for files, but what the hey), then click on a sharing host computer that looked promising and watch it download. Napster would tell you what the download speed was and what folder the music was in on the host's computer. It would even let you look at the directories of the contributor. THIS WAS HUGE. It allowed me to look for a specific song, find it on someone's computer, browse their computer and see if there was anything else I might be interested in. After all, if they had one song I wanted, they might have others.

In doing this, I was able to discover numerous artists and songs that I would have never found if I had been stuck with FM radio or if I could borrow a friend's mix tape. Some artists were good. Some totally sucked. Sometimes I would find out about a show coming to town featuring a group I had never heard of. I would then search Napster to see if I might like it. Many artists benefited from my ability to 'try out' new talent by my concert attendance and purchase of their CD (remember when people bought CDs???)

The music industry didn't get it back then and they still don't get it now, but it is too late for them. They threw themselves under that bus, but I digress.

This new-style serendipity consisted of social media, Twitter, YouTube, Band of the Day app on iPhone, on-line ticket ordering and a little bit of luck. You gotta love the internet.

Life is good...

What IS a bailout?

2011-11-29T00:21:00.000-05:00

The latest news is that Germany is being told that it must act quickly to save Europe and to stave off the impending apocalypse. The plan now is for the European Central Bank (which is prohibited from purchasing sovereign debt of member nations) to loan money to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Then, in a money-laundering quid pro quo which would land any legitimate (or illegitimate) businessperson in prison, the IMF will, in turn, loan money to these nearly bankrupt states.

But, here is the kicker... by doing this little transaction, the burden of risk shifts from the ECB and the EU nations, and falls upon the members of the IMF. The United States comprises almost 18% (if I read this chart properly) of the risk and the EU members are in total about the same. The money still needs to be 'printed' by the ECB and the Federal Reserve, but now we (US citizens) are now on the hook for a sizeable chunk of the debt that will NEVER be paid back.

Why do I say NEVER paid back? Well, historically, very few countries ever pays the US back for anything. Most of these loans end up being grants or at the very least rarely paid back in full without the lenders taking a serious haircut. Why should they pay it back? What is the penalty for default? Could we foreclose on their natural resources? Doubtful in this day and time. Hell, we haven't even taken oil from Iraq (which the left swore was the reason we invaded that country.)

[Let me digress for a moment. The jihadists claim that the great Satan rapes and desecrates their land by stealing their oil. Last time I checked, oil was trading at $100 per barrel and we were stroking some seriously large checks for that oil. Perhaps what they really mean is that they aren't getting a cut of the action. That sounds like a domestic political issue to me, not a reason for global jihad.]

Let me cut to the chase. Any money loaned to these bankrupt countries will be like pissing in the ocean. None of the countries (with the possible exception of Spain) have done anything to make a serious cut in their expenditures. Recently ABC News spotlighted a Greek man who retired at 48 years of age with a $45,000 annual pension. The next week ABC also described the retirement benefits of a US Congressmember with 20 years of service. This amount was purported to be just north of $40,000. Sure, the former Congressman may get the gold plated health care, but compare that to the Greek. I doubt he pays for his health care either.

If a nation is paying 48 year old healthy men to go into retirement for 30-50 more years at a pay rate that exceeds the average salary of a currently working US citizen, and if they are powerless to reduce this amount SIGNIFICANTLY, then they will never get out of debt. Period.

Think about it. Say you have maxed out your credit cards and have gotten all of the equity out of your house. You make X dollars, but you spend 150% of X every year and reducing next year's 5% increase in projected spending to 4% is viewed by your spouse as a draconian cut, what good would it do to give you a loan for half a year's salary? Would it fix anything?

The only way out of this global crisis is widespread hyper-inflation. For some miraculous reason, we have avoided inflation so far, but with several trillion new dollars (unbacked by any real assets) having been pumped into the economy in the past three years, it has to happen. It has to. No way out of it. When it hits, the collective debt becomes proportionally smaller as the dollar becomes less and less valuable. Debtors win. Everyone else loses. Perhaps holders of gold, silver, other precious metals, real estate and commodities will do OK, but the economy around them will be devistated.

So, anyone up for a bailout?

How Egregious Does It Have To Be?

2011-11-22T08:37:00.000-05:00

I just read in the Wall Street Journal that MF Global, former Senator and Governor Jon S. Corzine's investment firm, took $1.2 Billion from customer's account, more than double that which was previous estimated.

A couple of days ago I tweeted that the ex-Guv/ex-Sen must have forgotten that only government can play fast and loose with money (both theirs and other people's) in that manner without suffering the penalty of illegality.

Now it appears that they have stolen (there is no other word for it) a HUGE sum of money. What will the penalty be?

At what point does over a billion dollars become a big enough sum to warrant swift and harsh retribution by the authorities? At what point does the management of that company forfeit everything that they personally own in order to make investors whole? At what point do these people spend the rest of their lives in jail?

A long, long time ago I sat on a jury which convicted a ghetto guy of grabbing 10 cartons of cigarettes from a 7-11 and dashing out the front door. Yes, he was a repeat offender, but he did not threaten the clerk with a firearm, nor did he hurt anyone in the process. He had gotten off easy with his earlier offenses and I think that our jury wanted to teach him a lesson.

Can someone explain to me how MF Global is any different from the ghetto dude, except that MF Global has upped the stakes by 10,000,000X?

What if the 99% got ALL of the 1%'s money?

2011-10-18T00:45:00.001-04:00

I am still stuck on this Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) phenomenom. I listened to a bit of Randi Rhodes on XM Radio today and Nicole Sandler was filling in for her. Nicole was talking to John Nichols of The Nation magazine about the growth of the Occupy Movement. It was quite funny listening to them talk about how the "Occupants" are willing to stay out there throughout the winter. These people are so righteous that they are willing to suffer to make their point. Awwww.....

I thought about starting my own Occupy movement, but then I remembered that I have to work the rest of the year. Damn...

So, they talked more and more about the income inequities and how the 1% have all of the money and the two of them actually said that the reason that the 99% are so bad off is because the 1% took all of the money. Seriously, they said that on the air.

Rather than discuss macro-economics and how wealth is both created and destroyed by the whim of the market, I was curious if I could be wrong about how the 1% has sucked all of the oxygen out of the corpus economi of the 99%.

I went searching for statistics on the internet. Median income is a number that jumps out, but is pretty much a useless figure for what I needed. Median means that half the people make more than this number and half make less. If 99 people made $100 and one made $1,000,000, then the median income would be $100. That is an extreme example, but useful.

So I finally found this chart on the Financial Samurai website:

SUMMARY OF FEDERAL INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX DATA, 2010

I used these figures for my calculations. The numbers look about right, but I cannot vouch for the accuracy of them. If you find better numbers, let me know.

Here is what I pulled from these data:

In 2010, 139,960,580 taxpayers made $8.426625 Trillion in income.
This number is reported income, not just wages, etc. Wealth, which is a measure of one's assets is not counted here. It is just the amount of money that individuals 'took in' last year.
If you subtract the number of taxpayers in the top 1% and the amount of money they made from those two numbers you have the lower 99% making $6.741153 Trillion for an average of $48,651 per taxpayer. (Yes, there may be more than one taxpayer per household, but that doesn't matter for this illustration.)
If you take the total amount from the top line, the average for all Americans was $60,207 in 2010.
Subracting the 99%'s average from the 100% average, you get $11,556.

If we were able to confiscate the total amount of 'excess' revenue that the filthiest of the rich made and redistribute it amongst the least of us, every taxpayer would get a windfall gain of $11,556. For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that every household has two taxpayers in it. That would add roughly $23,000 to each family's annual income.

Would that amount allow every American to have a significantly better life? You think? Seriously...

The unintended consequence of this equality is that the rich would no longer be compelled to pay most of the taxes. The bottom 75% would see their taxes increase by about 10% which would consume over half of the windfall.

Additionally, the myriad of things that the rich pay for because of our 'bought and paid-for' tax system would largely go away. Such things as art galleries, Nordstrom's, 5th Avenue in New York, Mercedes-Benz dealerships, almost all pleasure boating, exclusive resort destinations, medical research from foundations, huge numbers of service jobs, university endowments, museums, sponsorships for races, marathons and non-football, basketball and baseball sporting events. The list goes on and on and on.

No one would be able to invest enough to create dynamic businesses. Without the possibility of making big sums of money, many big ideas would remain just that... big ideas.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to be seen as taking up for the fat cat hedge fund brokers. But, think about it. Could Steve Jobs have become so rich if people like me had not been willing in 1977 to purchase an Apple II for well over $2000 (close to $5000 in today's value)? I really couldn't afford it, but actually I could, because I did. That was back when NO ONE young had credit. That computer was paid for by my wife and I with cash, the cold, hard variety. (If I had not purchased that computer, I probably would not have created a business that is almost 30 years old, either...)

Those iPads and iPhones that all of the #OWS Occupants have that allow them to amplify their impact and importance brings Apple a 40% profit margin. Do you think that is enough? I should hope so. By comparison, Big Oil makes about 9%. Who is ripping off who? Plus, where is the iPad and iPhone made? China, of course. Why not in Cupertino? I think you know the answer to that one.

Back to the bankers and Wall Street types, the ones that attract the ire of the Occupants. If these big money guys want to buy and sell real and unreal products, let them. It is almost all gambling anyway. Derivatives, hedge funds, CDOs, all of these instruments are just the financial version of building a new kind of slot machine in Las Vegas. Let the federal government build a huge wall around it and let the boys play. Let them win big and let them lose big. No one bails out losers in the casino and they shouldn't on Wall Street either.

Just make sure that wall is tall enough to keep legitimate retirement funds and 'inexperienced' investors out.

Wait, didn't I write a blog post about that last year? Yep, here it is (and it is a good one, too.)

Nothing frosts me more than hypocracy and inuendo. These #OWS protestors (at least the ones that kicked it off in the beginning) I believe are really frustrated and hurt by what has happened in the past two decades. These people fundamentally had more in common with the Tea Party than they care to admit. But once the fruits and nuts took over, it became Bizarro Woodstock, losing all legitimacy.

Unless a seller is cheating by price fixing, no buyer needs to pays more for a product than it is worth to them. It is just that simple. $499 iPhone? $139 jeans? $89 Oakleys? $149 Ecco boots? No one put a gun to anyone's head to make them overpay for these products. Wal-Mart has similar products for 1/3 the price. And if anyone of the Occupants bought a $499 iPhone or paid $90 for a share of Enron stock (before it plummeted to $0), remember; it was because they WANTED TO.

Sometimes free will sucks.

What American Dream?

2011-10-17T00:39:00.000-04:00

Asterisk note: Each blog posting I do, I swear that it will be short, then it ends up looking like a manifesto. So, here is another attempt at brevity (maybe that is why I tweet and blog... sort of the yin and yang of modern communications.)

Much has been said of the American Dream lately, especially in light of the Occupy Wall Street protests that are sweeping across the country and the world. Sweeping every place, except apparently, where these protestors are encamping.

I spoke in an earlier posting about the American Dream and what it is. I then read a piece in the DogWalkBlog about the haves and the have nots. It has made me reconsider what qualifies as the American Dream.

Using the same logic that I use to mock the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who deign to represent ALL of the black Americans, who am I to foist my idea of what The Dream looks like upon all Americans? Like the song Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, is The Dream still a house, a white picket fence and two cats in the yard?

Wasn't it presumptuous for Clinton, Bush 43 and just about every politician over the past 25 years to pimp home ownership? Why have we allowed home construction to become the de facto core of our nation's economic engine?

Let's get over ourselves and allow the People to decide what their dream looks like... even if their dream house is a cardboard box under an overpass with a nice shopping cart full of recycled possessions.

That, my friends, is freedom.

What happens when you ask the government to "help"

2011-10-11T10:19:00.000-04:00

Recently in the US there has been quite a controversy over the issue of debit card transaction fees. These fees are the money that the "system" (Visa/MasterCard, banks, clearinghouses, etc.) charge to process a transaction at the point of sale.

Previously, it involved a rather complex set of rules to apportion the amount that the system would charge to move money from the purchaser's bank account to the business' account. Take a look at this page which describes some of what is involved with a merchant account, then try to figure out what a transaction will cost you if Visa handles the transaction.

On that Visa link, don't you just love the term 'reimbursement'? It sounds like you are getting something back, doesn't it? Actually it is the amount that Visa reimburses the card-holding financial institution for the transaction. Also, it looks like a complicated government tax form, doesn't it? So complicated that you can never actually figure out what it will cost you, as a merchant, to take the card as payment. You just wait until the end of the month and you pay the fees.

There is HUGE money in transaction fees. The dirty little secret is that the customer almost never pays for any of them. (Rarely, you may see a four or five cent per gallon discount for paying cash for fuel at a gas station, but other than that, most credit cards disallow this practice.)

As a merchant, I have had to play this game for decades. When my company was in retail, we would sell a lot of big ticket items (computers, printers and service.) We would cringe if a customer reached into their wallet and pulled out an American Express card. "Oh, no!" we would exclaim. If we wanted that money deposited into our account the next day, that transaction would cost us around 5%. So, if someone bought a $3000 computer system (not atypical back in the 1990's), $150 would go directly to Amex.

The customer would feel great, because they just extended their one year warranty to two years, and they got some protection from a bad purchase from American Express.

What did we get? Well, we saw our profit margin (which averaged 20% at the time) immediately go to 15%. So, now we pocket $450 instead of $600. "Wow", most would say. $450 is a lot of money to keep just for delivering a computer system. How a merchant has to dice up that 15% profit is the subject for another post.

Suffice it to say, merchant fees for credit cards have always been a touchy subject for retailers. The recent dust-up in Washington concerns debit card fees, but these fees are twin sons of different mothers.

There has been an uneasy peace between the banks, the interchange companies (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), the merchants and the cardholders for decades.

What, I believe, has caused the fee system to come to a boil is the fact that many people do not use cash anymore. So what happens is that every one of their purchases goes onto a debit card or a credit card. So, in my previous example of the computer system, if a customer purchases a $1000 computer system, between $25 and $30 goes to credit card clearing house and that gets divvied up between the bank, the card company and the interchange company. I can live with that 'tax' in order not to have to worry about bounced checks, or even worse, extending credit to someone.

The cardholder gets their product, a few airline miles, an extra year's warranty, some peace of mind from buying a lemon and it costs them 12% to 30% interest (assuming they do not pay the card down each month) plus some annual fee which they just close their eyes and pay.

Everyone's happy, right? Well, no one is ever really happy. Everyone wants more for less.

The trouble with the current situation is that each transaction has a transaction fee. In the case of debit cards, it was usually about 44 cents. On big ticket items like my computer systems, that is a rounding error. But, when you pop into 7-11 and buy a Big Gulp for $1.49 and swipe your debit card instead of giving the clerk two ones, the store owner (usually a small businessman, often an immigrant) loses 30% of his sale. Right off the top. If you look at business that live off of small transactions (convenience stores, fast food, street vendors, craftpeople, etc.) these fees become a huge tax on their profit. Talk about regressive. And the purchasers are none the wiser... they just buy more, because it is almost like play money. They never see the cash leaving their wallet.

So what is a merchant to do? The "system" isn't going to give in. They like how it works. It requires a huge infrastructure to support these transactions, but once built, it is like the golden goose, laying them golden eggs.

Like often happens when the little guy has no clout against the behemoth, where else can the little guy turn but to the government for help? And if you want to fight big business, who better to enlist in your battle but the Democrats?

The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was created and enacted while the Democrats held majorities in the House and Senate, and also held the Presidency under Barack Obama. It was a response to the sins of the 2000-2009 decade and (IMHO) was largely punitive while it tried to dial back the ability of banks and investment firms from going crazy again. During debate, Sen. Dick Durbin (D, IL) inserted an amendment aimed at reforming interchange fees. Originally targeted at an average 12 cents per transaction, they settled on an average 24 cents per transaction, down from a prior 44 cents.

Of course, the banks lobbied hard to keep this out of the final bill, but failed. So, last month, several banks announced monthly fees to make up for the estimated $20 Billion they will lose annually by not collecting the prior amount. Notoriously, Bank of America stated that they would start charging $5 per month if a cardholder used their debit card at least once per month (ATM transactions excepted.) Wells Fargo and SunTrust have also begun to charge $3 to $4 to their customers.

Like squeezing a balloon filled with water, it just starts sliding around, but the amount doesn't change. There has been a big hue and cry over this, with many saying that they will just start using cash again, or start using their credit card instead of their debit card. I doubt much will change in the long run. People like the convenience too much. If you think about it, $60 per year is the average annual fee for credit cards and people have many cards in their wallet. This fee effectively becomes an annual fee to use a debit card.

It has shifted the burden of transaction costs somewhat off of the merchants, back onto the consumer, where I believe that it really belongs. The goal of Sen. Durbin of punishing the banks isn't going to meet its goal, because banks will make it up elsewhere.

Similar to the argument surrounding the Fair Tax, will the consumers see a slight drop in the cost of goods because the merchants will no longer shoulder the full burden of interchange fees? I doubt it. Cumulatively it is a lot of money, but on an item-by-item basis, it is pennies.

The point of this whole blog posting is that the best (or worst) of intentions ~~often~~ usually spawn unintended consequences. The unintended consequences are ~~often~~ usually worse than the problems they were intended to solve.

Am I proposing that nothing be done to cure the ills of society? No, but our economic and social structure is delicately balanced and whenever the heavy hand of government gets involved with its one-size-fits-all approach to problem solving, strange things are bound to happen. Just remember the water balloon.

Life isn't fair. There are going to be winners and losers, but it all eventually comes around. Remember how insanely worked up we were about Japan in the 80's? Remember how Wal-Mart was going to ruin America in the 90's? Remember Global Cooling in the 70's? Remember the Hunt brothers and how they were going to ruin the silver market?

It is funny... I find myself almost feeling sorry for banks and health insurance companies as they battle onerous legislation and regulation coming out of Washingon. I have to pinch myself occasionally to remind myself how much I hate banks and health insurance companies. I have to remain cognizant of the fact that bankers (in relation to loaning ME money) don't take risks. Every penny they loan me is collateralized, so the notion that bankers are supposed to support new businesses by loaning them several hundred thousand dollars is a fantastic myth (unless the business owner has that amount of assets to put up as collateral.)

Similarly, every August when I get the estimate for next year's health insurance costs for my small business and the rates jump by 25%, but the agent can negotiate them down to an 18% rise, am I supposed to feel good about that? Can I raise my prices by 25% every year and get away with it? Why can't I charge huge amounts of money to provide IT support to medical practices (after all, isn't it they who are driving up the cost of health?)

Needs and wants cost money. The more needs and wants, the more it costs. Period. It is an immutable truth. Write it in crayon on your bathroom mirror. You are going to need to remember it.

And also remember what happens if you ask the government to help.

Is TV in for a heck of a ride?

2011-09-25T00:24:00.000-04:00

Apologies to GigaOm for 'lifting' a bit of the title of this posting. I just read a piece by Habib Kairouz in the NewTeeVee section of GigaOm entitled "Buckle up: Tratitional TV is in for a heck of a ride"

The gist of the article is that TV has for the most part avoided the disruptive effect of the internet on its business model in the manner that it has affected the print media world. (Please read the article for a much more in depth analysis.) And thanks to @feliciaday for linking to the article.

A few points came to mind for me while reading it. Here they are:

From a social point of view, people will still need to watch their shows at the same time. Nothing is more bizarre than watching someone tweet about something on TV when they are time-shifting with a DVR. I like pausing shows while I step away for a few minutes or when commercials come on so that I can zip past five minutes of them. I also like to pause while I comment/rant about something so that I don't miss anything in the show. If social was important to me, I wouldn't be able to timeshift. The biggest part of social is the interaction between viewers in real time via the comment feed.

Commercials embedded at the beginning of video clips which CANNOT be fast-forwarded through may make lots of advertisers happy, but it really pisses me off. The number of ads you get assaulted with watching TV clips is insulting. Fifteen to thirty second ads to watch a 2:30 video is redonkulous. I won't do it.

I am an 'older' person, or as the politically correct crowd (of which I am a total outcast) would say, "a person of age" and I still prefer to watch my TV on a, wait for it... a TV! Especially if I am watching with others, it beats hovering around the computer screen. Of course, you can run cables from the computer to the 50" on the wall, but that is kludgey. Also, in many cases, the quality of the videos off of the internet is vastly inferior to broadcast TV. Yes, yes, I know there are products that provide an interface to TVs and there are TVs with Netflix, YouTube and other media built-in, but none of them are as simple to use as a TV remote and/or a DVR.

Advertisers need to face the fact that few people actually watch commercials. With the short attention span of most <40 year olds being the stuff of legend, what makes them think that the viewers are even watching the show? When I zoom through the commercials at 3x on my DVR, I still see the brand but I don't hear the message. Many commercials don't even have a message anymore, it is just flash and imagery and brand. As an alternative, maybe they could start playing the show, flash a 2 or 3 second sponsorship slide where the commercials would normally go, then PiP the commercial while the show plays on.

I can see in the not-so-distant future having a feature on your PC/Mac/tablet/phone where you can take a video on that device and 'sling' it to your network-connected TV screen. Your TV would go directly to the video feed and start playing what you were watching and your remote would allow you to stop/start and control the playback. Now that would be cool. (Hey, why couldn't we do that with music as well???)

Subscription model for video. Everyone wants to get paid for their work... I get it. I am not a tightwad, but I just cannot bring myself to pay Apple $2.00 to watch a TV show I could have seen for free. I know some people do, and maybe it is because I am a "person of age", but that doesn't sit well with me. Now, I will admit to having borrowed music back in the Napster/Limewire/Soulseek era. I still don't see the serious harm this does, but that is a discussion for another day. Today, I am a recovering musicaholic who gets his fix using Rhapsody. (I have recently signed up for the free version of Spotify, but I still like Rhapsody.) Just about any song I want is on Rhapsody. I can put it on a portable player for a limited time, I can even download it on the fly with my iPhone. $14.95 per month. Does Avenged Sevenfold care if I have played Welcome to the Family 10 times? Do Givers care if I listened to Up Up Up twice, with ten other songs on their album that I haven't even listened to? Why can't I have a Rhapsody for video? Play anything at anytime as long as my account is current. Simple. (The-Asterisk note*: because it is so simple and makes so much sense, this will not happen for a long, long time.)

The cable companies, cell phone providers and other ISPs (including FiOS) have long fought the ability for you to get unlimited internet to your device. Especially if the bandwidth is consumed by streaming video. They see this as you raiding their refrigerator. I do not know the economics of the MSO, but if you just look at the numbers, you see that you get 100+ TV channels for, say, $44.95 per month plus if you get all of the premiums, you can be pushing $100 per month. Just how much TV can you consume? Assuming you have a job and something of a life, you may see five hours of programming per day and I bet most of that is spent on the same few channels. (So, if you could just pick 15 channels and reject the rest, would your bill go down? Hmmm. I had the same question about buying an album and only listening to two songs, but that is also another blog post for the future.) Back to the numbers... paying for top end internet speed can run you more than $70 per month. What is the monthly recurring cost of that service to the MSO (I am not talking about the infrastructure here)? I do not know what it costs to connect to an OC-192 ring, but if you spread it out across all consumers on their network, I bet it is a pretty low number; and probably a lot lower than what the MSO has to pay TV content providers. So save the crocodile tears for another day.

It is a shame that we consumers have to wait decades for the old ways to die before we can get what everyone will eventually have... a virtually unlimited pipe to the internet delivered to their device. Hell, South Korea has the fastest internet download speed followed by Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia. Freaking Latvia has over twice the average download speed as the US, which is in 26th place. Plus there are HUGE swaths of the US that have absolutely NO option for high-speed internet except for satellite (HughesNet or WildBlue). Just think, over a trillion dollars (that is $1,000,000,000,000) spent in the past two years to stimulate our economy and I still have no broadband in out the country and I am only 10 miles from the nearest town.

I bet Latvia does.

To China, we are Comedy Central

2011-09-19T00:15:00.000-04:00

I recently read the book "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future," by Robert Bryce. In it he discusses how China has pretty much cornered the world market on the rare earth elements that provides the raw materials for essential components of Lithium Ion (L-ion) battery cells and extremely strong magnets used in electric motors and generators.

China's approach is that these materials in the unfinished state are worth a lot less than they are as part of finished goods. Well, this makes sense. These goods are valuable as well as strategic.This is also why China is taking a proactive stance in Africa to endear themselves to various poor countries that also hold reserves of many of the materials that they need.

(China's human rights reputation, as well as their lack of any aversion to doing "what it takes" to do business with third world kleptocrats is the subject for another blog post.)

So, yesterday in the Wall Street Journal there is an article titled "Log Exports Hammer Mills." It is a story about how lumber mills in Oregon cannot find any wood to saw because the Chinese are paying a premium price ($600 per 1000 board feet) for raw timber. The highest price that a mill owner said he could afford to pay is about $475 per 1000 board feet. What self-respecting businessperson is going to ignore a 25% premium on as much product as you can produce?

In the piece, one freighter heading to China had just loaded 30,000 logs. That is a LOT of logs and keep in mind that is just one ship. So far, as of June 2011, the Chinese had imported 204 million board feet of U.S. timber compared with 141 million for all of 2010.

Instead of exporting sawed and finished lumber, we are exporting the logs themselves. Not only are we cheating ourselves out of the value added profits from producing finished goods, we are disallowing hundreds of mill workers to go back to work.

Is this a corporate decision to sell this valuable commodity to China at the expense of neighboring American businesses? Or should the government through its foreign policy make a decision to restrict exports? If the government did it, wouldn't many (loggers, timber companies, shippers) complain that it is restricting trade? If the companies got together and decided not to sell to China, wouldn't they be accused of colluding and creating a cartel of sorts? And if we did restrict exports, couldn't China metaphorically flip us the bird and go elsewhere to purchase the wood?

These are interesting questions, aren't they?

So, in the end I ask, Hu is laughing at who?

What is Obama's endgame?

2011-09-16T00:23:00.000-04:00

This is pure opinion on my part, but I believe that Obama is trekking happily on the political equivalent of the Bataan Death March because he has something to prove.

You have seen people like the "crazy" preacher on the street corner in the tenderloin district, or others with a Quixotic air about themselves, who seem to revel in the fact that people don't like them and look down on them. It is almost a self-perceived badge of courage and honor. "If I piss off the right people, then I must be doing something meaningful" they seem to think as if that gets them a little bit closer to their promised land.

I truly think that he is brushing up his Bona Fides, proving that he can put it out there saying "Damn, the torpedoes... Full speed ahead."

But what is he aiming for? What is his goal?

President of the World.

That's right. Head of the UN. Bill Clinton wanted it, but never got it. If BHO got it, he would have bested a Clinton twice...

Remember, Obama is still a young man. He has many years ahead for himself, and he certainly doesn't want to have to 'work' for a living. He is proving that he can pretend to be for economic growth while camouflaging his lust for taxes. He can act like he wants to balance the budget, but he really wants to give the rich a 'haircut'. In other words, he is proving to the right people that he is a chameleon and can morph to blend in, yet stay true to his core beliefs.

Yes, even with control of all branches of the government, he still had to deal with the pesky legislators. If he was Sec. Gen. of the UN, he would have free reign with all of the easy votes he could get from despotic regimes and third world backwaters. The only thing he needs to worry about would be the permanent five members of the Security Council, specifically the US. I am sure he has a plan to change the charter, but first he has to be elected.

His four years in Washington is really an encoded message to the world letting them know where he stands and how much heat he can take.

The rest is easy...

What CAN we do?

2011-09-06T00:46:00.000-04:00

I was recently perusing the DailyKos and I came across this video. Take a look...

It all sounds so convincing, doesn't it? Great artist, patriotic pictures, hard working Americans just trying to do what is right and, of course, evil businessmen trying to scarf up everything good about this country for themselves. What could be wrong with that story?

I grew up in the 1960's. I can remember, through the lens of a naive kid, how things were. We were pretty happy in our lives and things were pretty simple.We seemed to have enough money, but we really didn't... or did we? My dad had a 'good' job at the railroad, but he worked his butt off. Outside. In the heat. In the rain. In the cold. Nasty work, but he had a job. We barely had enough money to make ends meet. I remember milk was 4 cents at school. If we took a nickle with us to buy a carton, we had to bring the penny back. Seriously. Did we know we were poor? Not really, and there were others a lot worse off than us.

Patches on pants and torn clothes were not a fashion statement, it was just part of growing up. My mom would mend them, which was OK. My teeth are still crooked because kids didn't get braces back then. We didn't have the money for braces and there was no peer obligation to get them.

When school started, we bought our books and meager supplies ourselves. No one made the other kids show up at school with extra supplies to share. We bagged our lunch since there was no free lunch program. Incredibly, we were able to learn without the use of whiteboards and dry erase markers, computers on every desktop, projectors with touch-screens in the classroom and security guards at every entrance.

And what about those great jobs everyone reminisces about? Were they really that good? I don't think so. Factory jobs were not an object of people's lust. Factory jobs were routinely derided as human abuse, with people lined up at their machines doing mind-numbing, repetitive work in oppressively hot workspaces, day in and day out. What was the answer to this misery? Unionize!

After unionization, wages went up and work rules changed. Some workers started making more money. Good for them. Manufacturers saw their costs starting to skyrocket, and dealing with workers became such a hassle (between union rules and OSHA rules), they put more emphasis on automation. Workers subsequently had less "work" to do and less workers were needed, so those that remained demanded more money by striking (which you must admit, striking is extortion in it's rawest form). Life was finally getting sweet for the proletariat.

Meanwhile the evil corporations were seeing foreign competitors eating their lunch (can you remember how we maligned the Japanese in the 70's and 80's and it was a common belief that they were going to eventually own the USA? After them it was the Mexicans and now it is the Chinese as the bogeyman.)

So businesses started "shipping our jobs overseas". I love that term. While it is true that some factories were literally shipped overseas, more likely it was that instead of refurbishing and upgrading the US factory for the next generation product, they just retooled and built new in China or some other Asian country that had less burdensome OSHA and EPA restrictions and the labor force would work for pennies on the dollar.

At this point, those crappy jobs that everyone liked to complain about and strike against to squeeze more money out of the captains of industry were starting to look pretty good. It seems that the Golden Goose had gotten cooked.

About the time that the whole manufacturing contraction should have caused a catastrophic collapse of business in the US and in the world, the Internet came along. WOW!!! Who could have predicted that? Suddenly value and riches were being created out of thin air. President Clinton likes to take credit for that boom time, but Khrushchev could have been president and the economy would have done well.

Almost overnight, there were gobs of money sloshing around. Like water from a swollen river filling a reservoir, the money had to go somewhere. Coincidentally, the government had recently forced banks to relax their lending standards for home mortgages, threatening them with penalties and prosecution if they didn't help un-creditworthy minorities purchase homes and be able to participate in the American Dream.

And these weren't just any homes. Many were McMansions, homes bedecked and bedazzled with the latest cool features. Loans were worked and reworked to get buyers to qualify for interest-only loans, but no need to worry, just re-fi in a few years when the equity has built up (due to the bubble, of course.)

To put the cherry on top, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were waiting there to gobble up bundles of these mortgages, stamp them with a tacit US Gov't Seal of Approval and sell the bonds to willing masses awash in the overflow from the tech bubble.

Then, 10 years ago, 9/11 disrupted everything. The market was already trying to correct, but the government expanded greatly to meet the threat, military spending blew up (pun intended) and various stimulus packages were tossed out like aid packages from relief helicopters.

Finally in 2008 the levee that had been holding back all of the bad economic voodoo burst. You all know what happened next. Credit shut down, banks almost went bankrupt, many nations teetered on the brink of insolvency, businesses pulled back and started laying off hundreds of thousands of workers.Millions started collecting unemployment insurance.When that ran out, it was extended and extended and extended again (rumor has it that Obama wants to extend it for yet another year.)

What a mess!

So, let's see where we are now. Minimum living standards compel the average American to have cellphones for everyone in the family, an apartment or home equipped with air conditioning, a dishwasher, a microwave, a refrigerator and cabinets full of prepared food, cable or satellite TV, Internet, several computers, several cars and several bathrooms. People feel entitled to full medical coverage. People of lesser means expect their children to be cared for before, during and after school with meals, books, and various forms of daycare. It is almost considered child abuse if you don't enroll your kids in soccer, T-ball, dance, karate, cheer or a host of other rather expensive activities. I could go on, but you all know the drill.

Over the course of 40-50 years we have priced ourselves out of our simple existence and like a junkie needing a fix, it is not easy to do without. In fact, there is no one that would even consider going back to the way things were. But this exposes a dilemma. We (the collective 'we') have pushed all of the undesirable employment opportunities off-shore, we have gotten used to working in service jobs (but not the really menial service jobs that are best left for legal and illegal immigrants), and we have gotten used to employers being willing to pay decent money for us to have those jobs.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing credit crisis... after massive layoffs (done under the cover of the crisis and the fact that every other company was laying off huge numbers of people), employers found that they really didn't need all of those people after all. Efficiencies and automation have obviated the need for a whole cohort of workers.

So, now we have massive unemployment of unskilled, under-skilled and even highly skilled people. Some of these people are living in homes they cannot pay for and which no one will/can purchase from them. Lifestyle 'requirements' have exacerbated their cash flow needs.

Even with all of this credit ugliness, the majority of the unemployed are just 'victims' of a naturally occurring phenomenon that happens in regular cycles. Unfortunately, this latest cyclical downturn was delayed for about two decades while fortunes were made, and in many cases, lost.

Looking at this situation on Labor Day 2011, it should be obvious to anyone who wants to take a serious look at things, that most of the lost jobs are not coming back... ever. The tech revolution of the past two decades slowly and silently used computers, software and the Internet to do the heavy lifting for companies so that when they laid off their 'excess' workers, the company continued to run.

So, what CAN we do?

Those people who have the fire in their bellies that compels them to do something will find something. They will leverage new tech and use it to fix old problems. Some will hire others while some will continue to work alone. The economy is not a zero sum game. New jobs and new value can be created out of thin air... it just takes effort and that old trait, gumption.

I don't have much hope for the masses who are running out of year #2 of unemployment coverage. Unemployment checks, food stamps, WIC, Section 8 housing, etc. is not what makes an enviable existence, but it does allow you to exist. The wait for someone to hand someone a job is going to be a LONG wait.

If you take an honest look at the history of labor you will realize that the prosperity that we had between 1946 and 2008 was an anomaly. Before that time, much of the workforce in the world was agrarian and those that were off of the farm and into the cities were semi-skilled laborers. People that did basic work have never, in the history of mankind, done well for themselves. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has always been huge. The gap narrowed in the 20th Century due to technology, labor unions, activist churches, government rules and pressure, and in many cases it was financed by credit with future generations being responsible for the debt service.

Most of the new jobs are going to be truly knowledge worker jobs. Sure, there are going to continue to be skilled, physical labor jobs and the people that can do the tradework will do well, maybe even better than before. High tech jobs are going to be in demand, but even those jobs are going to be involved in wrenching re-definition.

What I worry about the most is the people that held low-skill or semi-skilled jobs. What are they going to do? After 2-5 years on the dole, will they be willing to retrain themselves to do something that is completely foreign to them? Will being out of work for so long "poison" their desire to find work?

What this country needs... actually, what this world needs, is the next Internet-style disruptive technology to occur. And when it does and the visionaries who were involved with the development become extremely rich, the people that were invested in the plantations of the old ways will develop a little three and a half minute piece protesting the new way and they will invariably use the new way to get their old way word out.

My Ride on the Tide - Light Rail comes to Norfolk, VA

2011-08-27T00:18:00.000-04:00

Monday afternoon, my wife and I took our first ride on Norfolk's new light rail system, The Tide. I won't go into all of the details of the massive cost overruns and the fact that the train's maiden voyage was close to two years behind schedule. That is past.

The Tide actually began official passenger service at 6AM on Friday August 19, 2011. Hampton Roads Transit (HRT) had originally announced that they would allow passengers to ride for free that weekend, from Friday to Sunday. Wisely, they extended the free trips through next weekend.

Before I describe my experience, let me first preface my comments by letting you know that I am a huge rail fan. I have always enjoyed riding the rails. My father was an Norfolk and Western RR (now Norfolk Southern) employee and each summer as a child, I would get an employee's pass, board the Pocahontas or the Powhatan Arrow and ride it to Narrows, VA where my grandmother would meet me for a week at her home in West Virginia. Even then (mid-1960's) it was obvious that passenger traffic was unimportant for the nation's railroads, as the passenger train would pull onto sidings waiting to be passed by faster freight trains. Stops in Crewe, Petersburg and Roanoke were interminably lengthy and the stations were old and tired (they had not yet reached the stage of nostalgic quaintness.)

I was even on that fateful Employee Appreciation railfan trip with the Norfolk & Western 611 steam locomotive when it derailed on the N&W main line while running though the Great Dismal Swamp on May 18, 1986.

Whenever I would visit cities I would ride their rail-based mass transit (I have never been a fan of buses and I find their schedules a bit unwieldy.) Some places I have ridden include Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Tampa, San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, London, Paris, Zurich, Prague, Tokyo, Oslo, Brussels, Vienna and this doesn't consider funiculars or cities I have misplaced in the corners of my mind.

So, I think it is obvious that I like trains.

We boarded at the Newtown Road Station, the eastern terminus of the line which is conveniently located within a mile of our home. The parking lot was half full and we just missed boarding a train that was just leaving. We stood on the platform for about 15 minutes awaiting the next train. When it arrived, a few passengers disembarked, but for the most part the train stayed quite full. A good number of us boarded and it was standing room only.

(We had originally intended to ride the train to Harbor Park for a baseball game on its inauguration day, but the line for the train wrapped part of the way around the Newtown parking lot and was reported to have taken over an hour to get on board, so we waited a few days.)

As we boarded on Monday, we saw a significant number of small children taking up seats. Yes, I know children are people, too, but when you are joy-riding for free, the parents could have put the kids on their laps to give the other non-paying passengers a place to sit.

Each stop added more people to the cars as we made our way into Downtown Norfolk. The din got louder, too, when we picked up pax at the Ballentine Station which is near Norfolk State University. Most kids (even the older ones) have forgotten where their vocal volume control is.

We got off the train at the MacArthur Square Station just because we wanted to get away from the crowd. The platform at most of the stops is a bit confusing. The driver announces the station and tells you to "Exit to the right" or to the left, but no one really listens. Because the platform walkway is so narrow, people tend to bump into each other like ants on a picnic table as some scramble to get on board and other head off of the platform.

I fully realize that this has been an opportunity for lots of people, some whom have never ridden on a train, to ride the train for free and to check it out, so our inbound experience should not be indicative of the situation when the fares go into effect.

We took a leisurely stroll down Granby Street and eventually chose a restaurant. After our meal we left the restaurant and made our way to the Monticello Station just one block from the NorVa. Waiting on the platform, a westbound train approached, so we decided to board it and ride it past the York/Freemason Station to the terminus at EVMC/Fort Norfolk. Just before the train left the station several boys came on board. Loud and jumping around, these kids couldn't have been much more than 10 years old. Because the time was around 9 P.M., I remember wondering where their parents were, but that is not the subject of this piece.

It was about a five minute ride to the end of the line. When we arrived, the driver exited the control cab just in front of where we were sitting (and where the boys were hopping around) and walked the length of the double-car to an identical control cab at the opposite end. We were ready to go.

Between the two stops, the driver made an announcement that the last stop for this train would be the NSU Station. Just beyond the elevated NSU Station platform is the train's maintenance garage, so I assumed that they were putting this train car to bed for the night. He also stated that another train would be following this one by about 5 minutes.

We waited and waited for that train that was 5 minutes behind. We noted that we had not seen another westbound train which would have had to have passed us in order to make the return trip. Almost 20 minutes later we heard an approaching westbound train. We opted to not get on, but several people on the platform did.

Like the watched pot that never boils, the only thing boiling was my wife's ire at this situation. "OK. This is the last trip we make", she said. "We could have driven down here, parked at the MacArthur Mall garage for $2, gone to dinner, walked back to the car and we would have been home in 10-12 minutes. If we were paying for the train, it would have cost us $6 and we would have added an hour to our evening in transit." I couldn't really argue against her logic.

The eastbound train finally arrived with many of the people still on board that had hopped onto the westbound train. Making our way east, we picked up a good number of passengers until we got to the NSU Station platform. There were probably 40 or more people waiting for the train. It was almost 10 P.M. I recognized several of the people as having been on the same train that we were on before we bailed out at Monticello, so it was obvious that there was no "5 minutes later" train.

What was most frustrating was that until 10 P.M., the Tide is supposed to be on an "every 15 minutes" schedule. This was clearly before 10 P.M. and we waited over 30 minutes for the next train. Is this typical? Was there something wrong with that vehicle that made them take it out of service? We don't know and were not told. Having trains make express runs, or having certain trains end early is not unheard of but the situation is usually made clear before the doors close and it pulls from the station.

Giving HRT the benefit of the doubt, there may have been issues with the train. The driver should have been more accurate (but we would have done the same thing had he been more informative.)

We are taught to learn from our mistakes, so here is what I would like HRT to learn and to do to make us want to come back and Ride the Tide: Post the times the trains are scheduled to pull into the station. Post these times clearly on the inside walls of the platform shelter with arrows indicating direction. Simple. Also post a feeder bus map and schedule adjacent to the train schedule.

If I am going to go downtown for dinner or a show, I am NOT going to want to show up at the station for the ride home at :14 when the train was scheduled to arrive/depart at :13. Waiting 15 or 30 minutes for the next train would be especially annoying in the winter or if it was raining.

We have all become creatures of comfort. Riding light rail is an option for almost all of us. It can be fun and convenient as well as rewarding in the respect that we are not clogging the highways or using more gasoline, but it is not a necessity like public transit is in cities such as New York. We need to be able to depend on the train coming to the station at its appointed (and known) time. It would be really cool to have a mobile smart phone app that would show you exactly where the train is and which way it is headed to help you time your arrival at the platform.

There have been overwhelming numbers of passengers this week and I applaud HRT for allowing a large number of people to get their feet wet a couple of times for free before introducing fares. I have held the opinion for a number of years that public transit should be free or close to free. This week's experiment with free underscores the fact that if you give something away for free, people will line up to get it even if they don't need it. I still think it needs to be cheap (maybe $1), but not free.

The comment I have heard the most from people I have spoken to this week is "... it really needs to go to the Oceanfront, ODU and the Naval Station."

I am proud of my city, Norfolk, VA, for having the guts to go ahead and build this train in spite of Virginia Beach's years-long wavering, and then their bailing out altogether on a commitment to extend the line. I think the Beach now realizes that it made a mistake, but they will never admit it.

My hope is that the train is a success in spite of its limited coverage. I know that a Virginia Beach extension could not get completed for at least 15 years. Norfok could take it to the Naval Station in 5-7 years if they could find the funding. Both of these time frames are too long to be able to leverage the good will and reward the patience of riders who wish to be able to commute between ODU and all points east.

There are a few things that need to be tweaked about the service and the schedule, but I think it is fundamentally a good rail line. I invite you to give it a run, come downtown for dinner or shopping, and I may just see you on the train heading home after a show at the NorVa.

Funny numbers that aren't so funny

2011-07-17T12:29:00.001-04:00

As much as I want to not watch them, I still am drawn to the Sunday morning news talk shows. Today, as can be expected, the top subject is the debt ceiling deadline coming up in just 16 days.

There is always a Democrat and a Republican on there, trying to "not negotiate the deal on TV." I am watching Rep. Chris Van Hollin (D-MD) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Fox News Sunday.

Democrats almost always argue by pointing to the absurdity of the Republicans' stance. The Republicans almost always argue from a heartfelt, pragmatic point of view that the system is f'ing broke and needs to be fixed NOW.

As I listen, I keep thinking that this argument is not congruent. We should remember that just because one can argue convincingly and well, that the argument is not necessarily sound.

I must be a little slow, because, it really just came to me listening to Van Hollin justify raising taxes to match the "framework" (I love that term) of the Clinton years, when everything was balanced and peachy.

So I came up with a story... an analogy of what is actually going on in DC. I think I have decrypted the BS to show you exactly what is happening.

For you to understand my analogy, you must remember that in government, once something is budgeted, it can NEVER be removed without inflicting a mortal wound on the body politic.

Here is the analogy:

You work and you have a decent job. Every year your employer gives you a pay raise whether you deserve it or not. You get used to this pay raise and treat it like an obligation. You are doing so well that you get a few credit cards and you start buying yourself stuff. You go out to eat twice a week, you vacation in the Caribbean every year. You buy a really nice house and furnish it well. You are making payments on your house, but you also took out an equity loan on the increased value of your house. Instead of paying down the credit cards, you took the equity money and bought yourself a big 32' boat. Since you now have a boat, you need to use it and it costs $600 to fill it up each time you go fishing every other weekend.

One day your employer calls you into his office and tells you that not only can he not give you your expected annual raise, he tells you that you are going to have to take a pay cut. "*$#%@" you say. He can't do that to me. But he does.

So, you run out and get a few more credit cards. You still have good credit since you have been making your minimum payments and banks really, really like it when you pay back very little principal. Ahhhhh. That's better. Now you have some money.

Because you have a lifestyle and you deserve it, you keep doing what you are doing, but you start doing even more. You go out to eat three times a week, fill up the boat four times a month, you send the older kids to the best colleges and let them intern in Europe over summer vacation on your dime. Life is good.

One day, all of your cards are maxed. Your equity loan is drained. Your house is worth less than all of the debt you have attached to it and your checking account is empty. NOW, WHAT DO YOU DO?

Simple. Demand a pay raise from your boss. A really big pay raise. So, you march into his office and demand your raise. Your boss says no. You are pissed. You put a sign in the front lawn of your employer telling everyone that your boss is a tightwad and won't give you a raise because you have debts that need to be paid. He needs to do the right thing. You go on TV and say that he needs to eat his peas and broccoli. You stomp out of your next salary meeting with him.

Your boss really likes you so he puts you into counseling and wants to help you get out of this mess. He tells you that he will co-sign a new credit card for you on one condition. You must quit spending so much money. You balk. You tell him that everything you spend money on is important. He says that in the past two years you have run up four new credit cards to the max and that you are spending more now than before he hit you with the salary cut.

You tell him that if he agrees to increase your pay every year for the next 10 years that you won't increase spending much more and that you will use most of the extra money to pay off some of the credit cards (and oh, by the way, you will need three more credit cards to get you through.)

Your boss tells you to just cut your spending back to what it was two years ago when you were eating out only twice per week and boating only twice per month and you kids were going to an in-state university. You are incensed. The nerve of the man. You can't cut back. The restaurateur expects you to visit him every week. The marina really needs that extra gas money that you spend. Those professors at Yale can't do without your generous payments.You just CAN'T spend less.

Maybe, just maybe, you can not spend more, but you surely cannot cut back.That just wouldn't be fair. Besides, you are going to agree to quit spending more on some 'stuff' in the future. Isn't that good enough?

Your uncle steps in and says that maybe the employer could let you keep working, and you can get the three new credit cards if you promise on your mother's eyes that you will cut back in a few years. You think really hard and after much groaning and whining, you kinda, sorta agree.

SO. Here we are on Sunday July 17, 2011. What do we do? The President (you) won't cut anything without a promise of new credit cards (increase debt ceiling) AND a pay raise (tax increase). Your boss (majority of taxpayers/TEA Party Republicans) won't agree because he knows that he can't trust you as far as he can throw you. The credit card companies (T-bill holders) are going to turn on you like all creditor do if you stiff them, unless you pay them back. (At least they won't break your knees like the Mafia would do.) Your uncle (Sen. McConnell) wants to cut a deal so that the house of cards doesn't fall, but EVERYONE knows that it eventually will. If not now, then in a few years.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

What have we gotten for $14 Trillion?

2011-07-13T09:20:00.000-04:00

As most of you know, the United States federal government's Executive Branch (that is the President's part, for those of you who have recently graduated from public school) is in a fight with the Republicans in Congress to raise our debt limit ceiling. This is a statutory limit on the amount of money that the government is allowed to borrow... the government equivalent of our credit card's credit limit.

At this date (July 13, 2011) the Republicans are hanging tight in their negotiations to disallow an increase in the debt limit until the President and his allies in the Senate agree to cut spending by a significant amount. Also, as of this date, no one knows how it will end up. This debt ceiling increase requirement is not uncommon, but finally the Right has put their foot down to say "No more."

The howlers on the Left claim that it is just posturing so that the "rich" don't have to pay any more in taxes. Funny, how the TEA party is populated by normal, everyday people, not just rich white guys. Heck, there aren't enough rich white guys around to create any movement beyond a strong lobbying effort.

But, I digress...

My point is, what have we gotten for the $14 Trillion that we are in debt?

As late as the early 1980's we had less than $1 Trillion in national debt. Now, just 30 years later we have 14 times as much debt? The value of the dollar is about 2.5 times less valuable now as it was then, but what do we have to show for it?

As someone who is sneaking up on 60 years of age, other than some technological advances like computers, cell phones, computers in-everything and advances in the fringes of health care, not much has changed for me in 30 years.

My house is the same, highways are virtually unchanged (except they fall apart much more quickly, now), the Space Shuttle program was just getting off the ground 30 years ago. We are flying virtually the same airplanes, cars are just a bit nicer, cities look the same, trains are the same, etc.

Yes, we are mired in a very expensive war and that has cost a lot of money. But other than the war, I don't feel any significant difference from 30 years ago. And most of the significant advances that I enjoy came from the "eeeeeeevil" private sector.

The left will tell us that the middle class has gone nowhere in 30 years. Yes, some rich have gotten richer, but you have to admit there are a LOT more rich people now. I must note that the middle class has a lot more 'toys' per capita than they did 30 years ago. Heck, everyone has a lot more gee-gaws that they don't really need.

My point is that the federal government is the same way. Ask anyone if they have enough money and you will find that 99% are just a few dollars short of having what they really need. Even the super, filthy rich seemed to be compelled to accumulate more. I guess it is just the hoarder in all of us. The government is run by people. And people always want more.

Like the whiney brat at the checkout counter at the local grocery store screaming for a candy bar, the people that give out goodies from the government neeeeeeeeeed everything they have and reeeeeeeeeeally need more.

All in all (including most of the war) it all has been a collossal waste and where has it all gone? We are not that much better off from $13 Trillion of government spending.

Let's ALL suck it up and let the Republicans be the adults in the room, but hold their feet to the fire for the long term. Every time they have done it in the past, the predicted doom and gloom does not come to pass and we enjoy a few years of respite. This time will be no different, but we MUST prevent future Congresses from going back to the same old same old.

I am just tired of all of the whining. If I want to hear whining, I can go to the grocery store...

What has the Taliban proven in Kabul?

2011-06-30T07:48:00.000-04:00

After the horrific attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan (peace be upon that God-forsaken country) by Taliban 'insurgents', a Taliban ~~spokesperson~~ spokesman stated that this attack proves that the Allied forces have not been able to secure the country and have therefore failed.

What it actually proves is that if you are willing and expecting to die to make your case or prove your cause, then nothing can be secure. Period.

When people are willing to work months and years to insinuate themselves into a job, a community, an organization under a false pretense; when they are willing to endure the mental anguish of living a lie for a very long time; when the culmination of their life is to make a bold statement that actually is more like taking candy from a baby then it is a Rambo-like hero action, then YES, it proves their point.

But that IS the point isn't it? When a warped, irrational group of people casts aside 10,000 years of civilized, societal growth to make certain death a goal (more about this in a moment), it is virtually impossible to stop them. All that the civilized society can do is help them achieve their goal of certain death as quickly as possible before they can do much damage.

The ugly back-story of the likes of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah and the other mostly Muslim groups is that there is one significant portion of their group that does not adhere to the "Death as a Goal" mantra. That group would be their leadership.

As with 99% of political leaders (and don't kid yourself, these clowns are political, not religious leaders), they lead from behind as a "Do as I say, not as I do" authority figure. Their fiery rhetoric along with peer pressure drummed into the heads of the willing foot soldiers for years and years will cause their adherents to give the ultimate sacrifice.

Of course, the leaders must live on to plan, organize and strategize the next struggle against the great Satan, right?

Without these human bombs, these leaders know that they would have no chance against 10,000 years of societal progression.

To paraphrase General George Patton, "The object of Jihad is not to die for your cause, but to convince someone else to die for your cause."

Let's Repeal the Electoral College (and get this country back on track)

2011-06-17T09:50:00.002-04:00

I just read this piece by Charles Krauthammer about how beholden the Democrats are to unions with their rabid support and how Obama is quietly putting up roadblocks to our trade deals with other countries to protect these unions, all the while touting the need for more jobs and more exports.

It sickens me to imagine another four years of Barack Obama.The thought of his reelection makes me think of that religious group that would rather let their sick child die than allow professional medical help, since medicine violates their 'religious' sensitivities.Well, our dear President is allowing his 'religion' to stop him from doing what is right for our great nation.

My hope to cure this 'problem' shifts to the November 2012 election which, while still early, is starting to heat up with competition between Republican challengers. I will withhold comment on the current field. Who knows if any of these people can cause Obama to be a one term President like Jimmy Carter?

Obama is pedal to the metal to put the country in a Carter-like situation where the people have no other choice but to give him the boot. The question is, does he have enough time between now and November 2012 to totally jack up our collective situation to where the solution is crystal clear?

Back to the subject of this post. What worries me the most is that someone like Sarah Palin or Donald Trump or any one of the high fliers of the current field of challengers that does not get nominated would mount a third-party campaign for President.

Because of the Electoral College this would spell disaster for the rebel cause. For those of you who have recently graduated from public school and don't know how it really works, when Americans vote for president, they are actually voting for electors. These people meet for a statewide Electoral College in December where they formally cast their vote for President. The number of electors for each state equal the number of Representatives plus two for their Senators. So, for Virginia with 11 Congresspersons, we would get 13 electoral votes.

The problem with this situation is that for most states, it is winner-takes-all. Let's say Obama gets 38% of the vote, Romney gets 37%, Palin gets 22% and all others get 3%, then our 12 electors would cast all of their votes for Obama. If you count the left vs. the right, it is obvious that the right wing candidate should garner the votes, but it doesn't work that way.

I am here to say that all thinking US citizens should demand a Constitutional Amendment doing away with the Electoral College and replacing it with a popular vote by individuals. Additionally, the Amendment should require a majority, not a plurality to win. Therefore, if the person with the most votes does not get more than 50% of all votes cast, a run-off election between the top two vote getters would occur on the last Tuesday of November to finally decide who will be our next President. There would be NO write-ins. Just mano-a-mano.

Spoiler candidates, like Ross Perot in 1992 who singlehandedly put Bill Clinton in office, or established third parties, such as Libertarians, Socialists, Greens, etc. should not be able to throw elections by siphoning off votes for similar-minded candidates.

In the general election on the first Tuesday in November, people can express their true views and vote for the candidate that best extols their governing philosophy. Most likely, neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate will receive 50% of the vote, but they will probably be the #1 and #2 vote getters. We can suss out the true winner in three weeks. Meanwhile, if the results shows a Romney candidate that a Palin candidate or a Trump candidate got huge numbers, he would have to govern toward that side of the tacit coalition to win.

There are those who are deeply invested in the politics and gamesmanship of the elector system. It is easier for a candidate to game the system by focusing on states where he/she is electorally weak, ignoring the states that are 'in their pocket'. Tough. Our world is infinitely different in 2012 than it was in 1787 or even in 1968 when Nixon defeated Humphries and the last serious attempt to fix the system was taken. Most of us have probably never seen a candidate on the stump unless you live in New Hampshire or Iowa. So what? All of us have the Internet and 24/7 news on cable or satellite. If we cannot make an informed decision, we should not be voting anyway, so let's just get on with it.
Because there is no check box on the ballot for "Holding nose but voting for XXXXX" this amendment would fix the inequities of the elector system and also provide a valuable, tangible indication of what the voters REALLY think.

Republican Platform if I could do anything about it

2011-06-14T00:29:00.001-04:00

The first real debate amongst Republican candidates for President was tonight on CNN. I couldn't watch it.

Oh, I watched about 10 minutes and saw how every question was an opportunity to run out their elevator pitch and I just had to turn it off. Even Herman Cain was saying the same thing he said on Neil Boortz today. I guess there is only so many ways to say the same things 1000 times.

If things were a little more organized, there should be a Republican Platform and all candidates should buy into it with registered exceptions and their differentiators should be style, charisma, competence and ideas.

Presidents don't really come up with the answers, they just decide which option is best, so why pop a spontaneous question, give them 30 seconds to answer, then make them act like they just invented the next iPad killer and they are talking through a Powerpoint presentation without the projector?

The modern political 'debate' really is retarded. There. I said it.

Now, to the platform:

Platform Item #1 - NO SOCIAL ISSUES.

Each candidate can have their own personal thoughts about gay marriage, abortion in the case of rape or incest, legalization of pot, etc. but except for Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the issue of portability of gay marriage from a YES state to a NO state, most of the issues are either personal or a state's rights issue. Let it go...

Platform Items #2 - #2000 - Hash it out, write it down and get on with it.

I have my opinions and I would guess that if you removed the social issues, probably 95% of my inclinations would align with other Republican's leanings.

There you have it. Let's have a Social Issue free zone for at least two election cycles. We can win if we deal with real issues. Arguing about social issues is a slippery slope and conservatives always come off looking like fools and prudes compared to the 'anything goes' liberals.

Considering the divisive state of the nation, none of the social issues are going to be settled anyway, so why pontificate about it? Take a page from the Democrat playbook. WIN at any cost. Losers can't legislate.

(Full disclosure: I went back and watched some of the debate on my DVR. I skipped over T-Paw and Santorum, blew thru Bachman and lightly touched Romney. I played Cain, Gingrich and Ron Paul because they are succint and actually have something to say.)

My take-away from Weinergate

2011-06-07T23:15:00.000-04:00

Now that a day has passed and the Twitterverse is beginning to suffer from an acute case of weiner-withdrawl, I would like to reflect on the past 10 days and talk about what I have taken away from this latest episode of viral humiliation.

First, the press conference in New York City was as surreal as it gets. I was at work trying to find an internet connection to watch the presser at 4pm and Twitter starts buzzing with "I don't believe it, @AndrewBreitbart is on stage taking questions." Other than the fact that the tweets were coming from respected journalists at ABC News (@RickKlein and @JakeTapper), I wouldn't have believed it.

Breitbart was there (coincidentally, according to him) and was getting bombarded with questions, so he stepped up on the podium at the invitation of several of the reporters so that they could hear him better. His jist was "Where do I go to get my reputation back?" Unfortunately for the Congressman, he was fashionably late allowing Mr. Breitbart to say his piece and then some, live, in front of many people that have only heard of him through the filter of others (and heard badly of him I would venture to guess.)

Eventually Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) came to the podium looking very solemn and contrite. His statement of admission and then apology for what he had done and for whom he had hurt was quick and to the point. He admitted that he had acted 'irresponsibly' by posting lewd pictures of himself and carrying on an 'inappropriate' on-line relationship with at least six women.

What he also apologized for was lying to the press, the public and his family. Herein lies a lesson that we ALL should sear into our conscience.

Remember the LIES.

As his admissions were rolling off of his tongue, I kept thinking about those interviews he gave to the five journalists he invited into his Congressional Office (key point for the Ethics Investigation), the interview he gave to a fawning Rachel Maddow, the follow-up tweets, his indignation, his brash put-down of a journalist when he asked the reporter "Is that a fair question to ask?" I even thought about the CBS-2 reporter from his home district whom the Capitol Police reminded that if she was asked to leave his office and she didn't, she could be arrested.

Notice how convincing Mr. Weiner was in all of those cases. Look at the fire in his eyes. See the veins in his neck pop out. Hear his voice dripping with that righteous New York indignation that you would even think to question his veracity. He is SO convincing.

I have never liked the man, thinking him a bully... a sort of Jewish chihuahua. Always barking and getting in your face. You just want him to go away or go bother someone else.

How it all started.

I saw the original tweet from @AndrewBreitbart right after he posted it Friday night. I originally thought that someone may have figured out Weiner's Twitter password, but not that they hacked his computer. Vastly different things. As time went on, I listened to his non-denial denials and I thought he was guilty of something. I just wasn't sure of what. Then over the weekend I tweeted this:

He had left to be on Rachel Maddow's show Friday night and then had a regular tweet when he got back home from the MSNBC studios, then a few minutes later the Tweet Heard 'Round The World was sent. As he said at the press conference, he accidentally sent a regular tweet, not a DM and then he panicked.

(For those of you who do not use Twitter, if the first letter of your message is a D followed by an address, then if that person follows you (meaning they subscribe to your messages), they will get a private message from you that no one else can see.)

Back to the LIES.

The more this played out, the more I watched how convincing he was and how well he was pitching his story to whomever would choose to believe him.

And then, during the presser, it really, really struck home:

YOU CANNOT BELIEVE A WORD THAT PROFESSIONALS LIKE HIM SAY UNLESS YOU CHOOSE TO BELIEVE.

Go back and look at the rants he has given in the past year over health care, the budget, Glenn Beck's advertising sponsor Goldline, or 9-11 payouts to first responders. Now, look at his press interviews on Wednesday. Notice the similarity? The believability? The arrogance? The chutzpah?

I believe that you will never be able to listen to anything he says with that pseudo-conviction and believe him, because you know that he can sound convincingly sincere when he isn't. If you can't believe him, can his colleagues in Congress?

And that, my friends, is why he needs to resign. He has zero credibility.

Time for a new paradigm for a Presidential campaign

2011-06-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

This will be a quick post.

I think that it is time for a new way of running for President of these United States. Someone should run for President as the leader of a management team and say that if elected, he/she would bring in this committed team to run the nation.

For instance (and don't take this as any endorsement)

The Presidential candidate (who shall remain generic) would announce

Secretary of Technology (combines Energy, Transportation, EPA and Trade) - Newt Gingrich
Secretary of Debt (combines Treasury, HHS and Budget Director) - Paul Ryan
IRS Commissioner - Herman Caine
Secretary of Labor - Chris Christie
Secretary of Commerce - Donald Trump
Press Secretary - Andrew Breitbart
Council of Economic Advisors - Arthur Laffer
etc...

The president is important, but he is really just the decider and sets the tone. He doesn't even really set the agenda. The people on the team are the ones that gets things done and can be more important in the long term than the President.

Also, the part should be agnostic on major social issues for a decade. The candidate can be pro-this or anti-that, but the Republicans need to be focused on national policy of the economy and foreign policy. Abortion, gay marriage, gun control are all diversions and make little difference in the big picture. Push it aside and give it a rest.

That's just my opinion and it is my blog.

I'm Sorry, Joplin

2011-05-26T00:35:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry, Joplin... and Vicksburg... and Tuscaloosa... and Fukushima... and West Texas... and...

The list could go on and on and on.

Saying "I'm Sorry" is an apology and shallow apologies happen way too often these days. I cannot apologize to the folks in those cities and towns for tornadoes, floods, wildfires and tsunamis because they were not of my making.

What I can apologize for is feeling put out by some strong winds at our home, a few broken tree limbs and losing power for almost 24 hours yesterday.

It is so easy to be put out by inconvenience and to feel sorry for ourselves when things like this happens. We may lose some food in the freezer, or miss the finale of "Dancing With The Stars", but in the long run does it really matter?

What about this? This is a photo of an IT support company's office building in Joplin, MO after Sunday's tornado cut a swath right through town.

Does this matter?

This sort of destruction makes some water damage or downed trees seem awful trivial. And speaking of water damage, how does my soggy carpet compare with tens of thousands of homes in northeastern Japan which just disappeared or with submerged homes up and down the Mississippi River?

So, I am sorry I may have felt a little sorry for my own lot. Abnormal is the new normal.

We Baby Boomers and subsequent generations have become, I feel, spoiled by a blip in the timeline of earth's history. This blip has bestowed upon us relative calm relating to weather. It is like when you are swinging on the big swing at the park and you get right up to the peak of the arc where you are weightless and relaxed, then it comes back down fast and furious. The good weather we are used to is that little momentary peak in the arc.

Nothing defines the norm better than our own, personal recollection of "how things should be". The earth's massive tectonic plates shift a few meters and a tsunami destroys a coastline like a massive windshield wiper. A heavier than normal snowfall, some extra rain and levees built for flood control combine to raise water levels 60 feet. Meanwhile, drier than normal weather causes unstoppable wildfires and where these two patterns (hot and dry, cold and wet) meet, you get explosive EF5 tornadoes.

What do we do? We adapt, we prepare, we move and sometimes we have to clean up.

So, yeah I'm sorry for feeling sorry. At least we have something left to clean up.

Social Security: Investment, Welfare, Ponzi Scheme or JPN?

2011-05-15T23:36:00.000-04:00

Today while watching Fox News Sunday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) was on with Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ). Durbin is one of my least favorite politicians because of his pathological refusal to give a straight answer to any question. Chris Wallace was asking the two senators about deficit reduction and the debt ceiling.

I don't even remember what was said, but something sparked an idea in my head to see how much money I could have/would have made if I had invested all of my Social Security money in the market using the S&P 500 average for each year.

To figure this out I would need two groups of information: How much money I had 'contributed' (along with my employer) and what was the annual return for the S&P 500 for each year I have been employed. Well, it turns out I actually needed three pieces of info.

I had recently scanned my latest Social Security Statement, so it was readily available. All of you US workers get an annual statement that shows what your retirement and disability benefits would be and it also shows your annual earnings record, but what it doesn't show is how much you contributed. So, to figure this out, I needed to find out what the annual FICA tax was over the years.

My first "real" job was in 1971 and according to my statement I was taxed on $150 in eligible FICA earnings. Now, I needed to know the rate. Google helped me find a pdf on the SSA.gov website that gave me those figures. That year the rate was 5.2% (OASDI), but 0.6% of it was Medicare (HI).

Next, I needed to know how much the S&P 500 had returned. I found this website which shows the CAGR, or compound annual growth rate, of the S&P. I could have looked for a Fidelity fund or such, but I chose to use this table. Also, a no-load fund would have charged a small percentage management fee and would also have had capital gains to report as stocks went into and out of the fund, but for sake of illustration, I pretended it was in an IRA and I did not consider the fee.

So, how did it work out? I created a spreadsheet and pulled the amount of taxable wage off of my SSA statement into the first column. I then looked at the SSA pdf file and pulled the FICA rates from 1971 through 2010. These varied from 5.2%/0.6% in 1971 up to 7.65%/1.45% in 1990 which surprisingly is the rate it remains today. I put these two numbers in the next two columns. I then subtracted the Medicare from the Old Age number and then doubled that to include the employer match as my multiplier to get my total dollar contribution.

Finally, I pulled the S&P CAGR number for the next column. This number varied between -37.22% in 2008 to +38.02% in 1995.

My calculation went like this: (EOLY+TY+((EOLY+TY)/100*SP)) where EOLY = balance at end of last year, TY = total contributions this year (which is taxable wages/100*FICA rate*2) and SP = S&P 500 CAGR. All percentages were normalized by dividing by 100.

So, not including Medicare, my employer and I have contributed $211,920 to the fund in the past 40 years (have I been working that long??????) That is a lot of money, but if I had invested every penny of it in the S&P 500, I would have $845,405 in my account. And if we could forget that 2008 happened, I would have way over $1,000,000 saved up. (The 37.22% market loss in 2008 caused my balance to drop from $876K in 2007 to $558K in 2008... a $318,000 dollar loss in one year!)

I am not going to debate the whole Social Security vs. privitized investment argument.I am not even going to discuss the "lockbox" or the fact that the federal government buys its own securities with this money as an "investment". Looking at the GM buyout as an example of what happens when the government invests in a private company, there is no practical way for the US to grow this money other than to create a sovereign investment fund and put the money overseas. Or they could just stash it in a very, very large mattress in Ft. Knox.

All I will say is that my choice from the options in the title of this blog post is JPN.

Just Plain Nuts.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I - A Review

2011-05-06T00:08:00.000-04:00

This review will be a little bit different from many other reviews you may have seen. I read recently that only 8% of the critics liked the movie and that one reviewer, Jack Hunter, contributing editor to The American Conservative, opined "If you ask the average film critic about the new movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” they will tell you it is a horrible movie. If you ask the average conservative or libertarian they will tell you it is a great movie. Objectively, it is a mediocre movie at best. Subjectively, it is one of the best mediocre movies you’ll ever see."

This movie was sort of like waiting to see a group like Chicago live in concert. You love their music and you have been waiting for a long time to go see them. Finally the day arrives and you make your way to the venue. There are 12 other people there with you. The band comes out and plays a bunch of stuff that you kinda know, a few new things and then a hit or two. They sound good, but they didn't move you.

When the show is over, you still like the group, you would probably go see them again, but you aren't going to grab a megaphone to let others know about it.

If I had not read the book (actually, I listened to all 50+ hours of the Audible version on my iPod) it would have been an incoherent mess. As it was, I knew most of what was going on. It reminded me of speed dating. Things went by so fast that I hardly noticed what had happened. Ayn Rand's book is so deep and the story so big, that to expect a faithful rendition of it in 97 minutes is a tall, tall order.

Some of the characters in the story that had a major part in the structure of the book were relegated to nothing more than walk-on status in the screenplay. The intricately woven relationships between the 'moochers' was left untold. The overt sexuality between Dagny and Francisco or Hank (or anyone that happened to get near her) was also left untold. In fact, the steamy bedroom scene between Dagny and Hank at Ellis Wyatt's Colorado home was reduced to three gauzy vignettes.

On the plus side, Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart was perfection in casting. Her understated beauty sizzles beneath the surface of her take-no-BS attitude. Grant Bowler as Hank Rearden was quite acceptable. I must say that Jsu Garcia as Francisco D'Anconia just didn't do it for me. (Check out the complete cast at IMDb.)

The high speed train and the tracks made of Rearden Metal on the John Galt Line, along with the beautifully filmed Colorado landscape were better developed than were 90% of the characters.

To be fair, I don't know if I could have done much better with the movie, myself. It would actually be better produced as a 30 episode miniseries on HBO than a full length feature film. Having said that, I will probably see the Part II and Part III sequels (scheduled to be released on April 15, 2012 and 2013 respectively) just because I like the story.

My recommendation: go see the movie if you liked the book. Skip it if you didn't.

Amazon tells South Carolina to Go Pound Sand

2011-04-30T09:41:00.000-04:00

I usually have a well formed opinion about just about everything, but this one vexes me.

This week, the South Carolina legislature voted to not allow a sales tax exemption to Amazon for Internet sales to South Carolina residents. Amazon promptly halted construction on their 500,000 sq. ft. facility already in progress and removed the hiring notices from their web site.

Yes, there are states that have no sales tax, but have income tax. And some states have no income tax, but have a high sales tax. As much as most of us hate taxes (well, at least we all hate paying taxes), the states have to make money somehow.

I am actually pro-FAIR Tax, where we all pay a consumption tax of 20-something percent but have no corporate or personal income tax liability. This way, we all pay our "fair" share. If we purchase $10k per year our tax is $2500 dollars. If we purchase $1Million per year, our tax is $250K The more you make (and spend) the more you pay taxes. If you don't spend it (and assuming you don't stick it in a mattress), then that money is working and helping the economy. We all need to contribute to the well-being of our state and our nation.

(A major component of the FAIR Tax is that imbedded corporate taxes will work their way out of the supply chain, causing actual prices to fall significantly. I think that this will happen but probably not to the extent that Neil Boortz and other proponents imagine.)

Having said that, as a retailer it is my opinion that it really isn't fair for any mailorder or Internet company to get out from under the whole collecting sales tax deal. The difference in price of ordering from the Internet is partially offset by shipping costs, but there are so many free shipping deals, that this differential is negated. Internet prices are usually lower than local companies.

Here is another twist. What if I, in Virginia, purchased something from Amazon, or Zappos, or whoever, and sent it to someone in Texas. Who would get the tax? Afterall, it is a SALES and USE tax. I bought it but someone from Texas is using it.

Oh, and what about all of the personal sales on eBay? Who is collecting that tax?

Probably the only reasonable way to make it equitable for all and not a total administrative cluster would be to declare a 5% "state reimbursement fee" that is collected on ALL internet sales and sent to the state of the Sold To address. If the Ship To and Sold To are different states, then split the difference.

Gosh, I feel like King Solomon when he is about to decide who gets the baby...

The Case for Trump

2011-04-19T00:55:00.007-04:00

"Here a Trump, there a Trump, everywhere a Trump Trump."

I feel like singing that "Old MacDonald" tune. Donald Trump is everywhere these days. He is even back on Doonesbury.

Sunday, I was sitting in an airport waiting for my flight with the ubiquitous CNN on all the screens and Candy Crowley was interviewing "The Donald" for the umpteenth time. Fortunately, he was not being drawn into the birther discussion. Rather, he was talking about Aretha Franklin's favorite subject: R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and how the US gets none.

This morning I was thinking about Trump and why he is picking up so much interest. His detractors say that he is just upping his brand and promoting his TV show. This weak argument is like saying that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt do their thing to up their brand so that people will watch their movies. Nah. Don't think so. Then it hit me, like a two ton heavy thing: It's just business.

Mr. Trump claims that he could negotiate with the Chinese or the Arab League and that Obama has no one on his team that even thinks in those terms. He said that we are into the Libya thing for $1.5 Billion so far and he suggested that the Arab League could have written us a $5 Billion check in a matter of seconds so that we would fight their war for them.

He's probably right.

Here is the business angle: Most of these 'problem' countries are governed by a thugocracy and they run their countries like a business. Sure, their business would be a sole proprietorship, but it would definitely be a "for profit" business. "Profit" for themselves, that is.

The countries that we get along with, like Canada, Australia, EU, Japan all run their countries like a government, not a business. You really cannot negotiate with a government without dancing that patronizing Kabuki dance called diplomacy. All 'civilized' countries speak that language.

Contrast that with attempting to negotiate with the likes of Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez, Hu Jintao or the Castro brothers. These guys play hardball and we show up with badminton racquets. That is why the US gets its clock cleaned by these guys everytime we sit down at the negotiating table. Their negotiating table is a playing field.

Trump says that he knows how to negotiate and I believe he does. He also pretty much says what he thinks and people like that. (We all know that once anyone becomes president, he will have that Oh, $#%& moment when he gets his first real briefing and realizes that everything he said about the current President was a bunch of crap. And you gotta know that Obama was completely clueless when he walked into 1600 on Day One.)

Bottom line, it is a breath of fresh air to have someone that is willing stand up for this country and not be lashed down like Gulliver with protocol when it comes to dealing with our enemies and our 'friends'.

Plus, if you want to compare pre-election, real-world experience I don't see how Barack Obama could ever trump the Donald.

The Great CFL Lie

2011-04-12T08:22:00.003-04:00

Turned on the light in the bathroom and one of the two bulbs in recessed fixtures was out. Both are CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps). I reached up and unscrewed the unlit lamp. On it, written in Sharpie, is "8/19/2009 5yr fm GE".

Well, it went out on 4/07/2011, so we didn't even make it to year two. I noticed this tendancy, so several years ago I started writing the in-service date on all CFLs that we use. I have found that none of them last very long and the ALL tout their long life as part of their ROI (return on investment)

Will I send this off to GE and fight them to get a coupon for a new bulb? Probably not. My time is more valuable than that. But hopefully this blog post will put light onto the lie.

You save energy but waste money.

(Hmmmm. If this tendancy is true, then maybe I CAN sell solar panels.)

Open letter to the Republicans and Rep. Paul Ryan

2011-04-04T09:53:00.005-04:00

Open letter to Rep. Paul Ryan and the House Republicans

KILL CORPORATE WELFARE!

There, I said it. If you want to have even a shred of dignity and a snowball's chance of getting your much-needed budget-cutting ideas through the House, the Senate and then signed by the President, you need to remove the most egregious and hypocritical-appearing part of our current spending regimen.

Is there some good done by corporate welfare, AKA "Targeted Tax Policy"? Sure. Every tax law (except some by Barney Frank, Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel) started out as a sincere attempt to cause something beneficial to happen. Same with welfare and entitlements. But as so often occurs, the Law of Unintended Consequences trumps all other laws and no good deed goes unpunished.

If the Federal Government wants to cause things to happen, why don't we come up with a better way than bribing corporate entities or people by allowing them to keep more of their own money if they do what you want them to do? Just give them the damned money! Get it out in the open. Create a grant system that say "If you do so and so, we will cut you a check." Then create a website that publicizes all of the grants that have been issued so we all know where the money went. Simple. (Do it for all grants and credits, and you might find that not as many grants are requested...)

Rep. Ryan, as soon as you start hacking away at Medicare and Medicaid, the Left will throw corporate welfare in your face. Start by disallowing them the use of that issue as a cudgel. Show them that you are a better man. You and the Republicans know that some businesses will get hurt by this decision. The Democrats know that some deserving, disadvantaged people will get hurt by your cuts. We all know that there are a lot of people on both sides getting benefits that they really do not deserve.

Whatever you decide to do is going to cause someone some pain. Spread the pain around (to paraphrase then-candidate Barack Obama). Isn't it funny how something that has been in the budget only a year or two becomes a life or death proposition to remove?

You have my sympathy and support for your task of slaying the Medusa we call our tax code. If I had designed a piece of software that looked like that, I would just hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and start over.

But then, you would be hurting the lawyers, accountants and lobbyists.

You just can't win, can you?

Electrical work: an antique profession.

2011-04-02T20:21:00.004-04:00

I am pretty handy. I can do plumbing, light carpentry, lay carpet glue-based tiles, repair walls and then paint them, put up crown molding with mitre joints and do just about anything around the house that needs fixing. I can also do electrical work.

I understand electricity, wire gauge, amperage, breaker sizes, GFI and how to choose the right size of wire nut. Having said all of that, I really don't like doing electrical work. As a computer professional, I feel a little hypocritical by doing this work myself instead of hiring someone to do it, but in reality, the way I plan/do my jobs, I could never get a realistic up-front bid. Plus... if I can do it myself, I do it. (I do make an exception for yard work, though.)

Today I was in my detached garage which is probably 40-50 years old. I needed to hook up a quartz light that I had mounted above the driveway about 10 years ago, plus I needed to run an outlet for my old refrigerator that we moved into the garage, so that I didn't have to plug it into extension cords which is not a really safe way to power an appliance of that size.

I went to Lowes today and picked up 50' of 12/2 BX cable (this is the wire that is enclosed inside of a metal sheath so that it can be mounted outside of the wall and stay protected.) I also picked up a square metal box, two outlets and an outlet cover. Pretty simple stuff.

I came back and got to work. I shut the power off to the garage, drilled a few holes in the header above the junction box and dropped my wire down the hole. Next, I cut the metal sheathing from the end of the BX to expose the wires, then I pushed and prodded until I got the wires into the junction box and secured them down with a screwdriver.

Now, I had to unreel the cable up to the peak of the garage, over the rollup door and then back down. Each 16 inches or so I had to nail a wire staple over the wire to hold it to the joist. I am happy to announce that I did not smash any of my fingers. Any of you who have had to nail wire staples know what I mean, especially if you are holding the wire up, the staple in position and hammering it in whilst you are on a ladder with your hands way above your head in a dark spot. (This is the kind of work usually done on HGTV during the commercial break.)

I finally got the cable to the destination on the wall. Now, I had to use a screwdriver and hammer out a 1/2" knockout plug from the steel box so that I could install a little, awkward device called a cable connector. This thing has an oddly shaped nut that holds the connector in the hole and it is tightened in a strange kabuki dance type manuver where you try to hold the connector steady and you use a screwdriver to turn the nut. You can also use pliers, but either way works and either way is frustrating.

Next we thread the wire through this connector after we peel back the metal sheathing from this end of the BX, trying to not draw blood on the sharp edges and also trying not to pierce the insulation around the 12 ga wires.

The next 20 minutes was dedicated to securing the two duplex outlets to the box cover and wiring them in parallel in such a manner that the screws that connect the feed wires to the outlets are not obscured. (Yes, in a previous wiring attempt, I found that I had not connected both outlets together properly before mounting them on the cover. Fortunately, I remembered it this time.)

When I got all of the wires on and the outlets mounted, I had to hook this whole assembly into the square box. There is only about 4 inches of wire available from the BX feed and I had to hook up the ground wire first. I had to wrap two 12 ga wires around a little screw and tighten it down. Then I connected the white and black wires to the proper terminals on the outlets (made a bit easier because I purchased outlets that have back-mounted wires that do not require looping the wires around a screw terminal except for the ground wires.)

For those of you who have never done electrical work, 12 ga wire is pretty stiff. It is hard to bend in small radiuses (radii?) and it is hard to stuff the slack into the tight confines of the electrical box. I have done work with 10 gauge wire and that is even more challenging. Your fingers get sore from futzing around with the bends and the stripping and twisting of wire nuts.

As I walked back into the house to turn on the breaker and do a 'smoke test', it occurred to me that with few subtle differences, what I just did for the past three hours was the same thing Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse did after they invented modern electrical circuitry around the turn of the last century.

Sure, the back-mount outlets are nice and the plastic insulation is a lot nicer than the old style paper and tar-cloth insulation, but after over a hundred years, don't you think they could come up with a better way to do wiring? The house I live in was built about 55 years ago. Except for possibly having a breaker panel instead of a fuse box, nothing that came with this house when is any different from what you will see walking down the electrical aisle at Home Depot.

In 1956 radios had tubes, cars weighed two tons and there were only about 12 to 15 wires under the hood, hospitals and medicine was almost primitive, and computers... well, we all know what has happened with computers.

But, check out electrical work. We are still using the same type wires, same plier-like tools, still screwing down terminals with slotted screws, still prying out knockout plug from electrical boxes (or at least wrestling with those awkward tabs in the plastic boxes), still running too few outlets in a room so that you need power strips and extension cords in almost every outlet.

You would think that someone would have created a standardized, modular electrical outlet system where you could run your cable into a slotted hole, clamp down a lever and push in a special jack. Done! You can see some of this type of thing in modular office furniture, but the fit and finish leaves something to be desired and no one has moved this technology to building construction.

I am sure that the inventor of this new system would try to make a killing off of the invention until the patent ran out, and slowing down adoption because of the high price, but there is really no compelling reason for this to be. If all of the major manufacturers got together and worked with the National Electrical Code, a new system could be designed in a year or two. Think of the number of hours that could be saved on every single job.

Can you tell me that electricians actually like doing this kind of work, or is it some quasi-purgatory that an apprentice and journeyman electrician must pass through as a right of passage to becoming a master electrician because everyone before them did it that way? I don't get it.

In my 30 years of working with computers, we have gone from discrete memory chips and circuit boards with sockets for every integrated circuit to high density motherboards with everything but the processor already installed. Memory is on easy to pop in modules. Hard drives are plug and play compared to external controllers, dual cables and hand-entering bad sector tables prior to low level formatting the old MFM drives. Operating systems come with most drivers or the OEMs will include a 2CD that preloads all the drivers you need. Patching used to involve loading and rebooting after each one. Now you can run Windows Update and get over 100 patches installed at once before you reboot.

Meanwhile, my grandfather would feel comfortable fixing any wiring problem I might have in my home electrical system using his own tools.

C'mon guys, you electrical manufacturers can do better. Reinvest some of the profit you have made off of 50 years of producing the exact same product. You should all be embarrassed.

Libya, Libya, Libya as his Label, Label, Label

2011-03-28T22:59:00.005-04:00

Now that President Obama has gotten "the speech" out of the way, we can try to look objectively at where we (the US) is in our foreign policy, now. The speech sounded almost like one President Bush would have given. Of course, turnabout is fair play, so the right is justified in excoriating Obama while all but the most fervent left remain mum, or at least muted.

Where does The-Asterisk come down on the intervention scale? Well I am right about at 75%. Let's get real, here. If you are walking down the street and some dude in front of you starts mercilessly punching the woman he is with, or you come across some street punks mugging someone for their shoulder bag, should you do anything? If you get right down to it, it is in your best interests to avoid any involvement in the situation. Keep right on walking. Don't look back.

Lest we compare it to the murder of Kitty Genovese, there are major societal reasons why you should put yourself into harm's way to assist the victims in the above example. In fact, if you did nothing, and people found that out, you would be ostracized relentlessly, especially in this era of YouTube and social media.

So, how does the situation in Libya differ from helping out a woman getting beat up by her boyfriend? Is it because there is a national border around the killing field? Is it so bad that we in the civilized world want to perfect the more uncivilized among us? Many would say "Well, who are we to cast judgement against a sovereign state?" Well, who are we NOT to?

At this very moment, there are elements of unfriendly folks who are trying to perfect our society in a way that mirrors their own. We fight them off constantly. If we all took a laissez-faire approach to protecting our way of life, it would not be long before we see things start to crumble. (The-Asterisk note* I believe this is already happening, but I digress.)

Punks on the playground, thugs at the union organizational level or brutes at the dictatorial level thrive on one thing: lack of a good challenge. Most of us hope that these assholes will just go away or that they will at least bother someone else and leave us alone. Sometimes this works out, but not very often. These people continue to plague us until they are taken down or outgrow it.

Playground bullies usually outgrow their anti-social behavior and act like bullies because it makes them feel like the BMOC. Union thugs usually do their thing until they get their way in spite of what the rank and file want, then they settle down into a position in the leadership. But dictators see their behavior as the means to the end. Why would someone in a position of having everyone in their country kiss their ring and everyone in most other countries kissing their ass want to change? Negotiate with Chavez? Hah! Ahmadinejad act nice? Why? He is at his zenith. His goal is to stay there. It doesn't get any better than this.

My point? Just like in your school, your church, your neighborhood or your business, you want to have a peaceful existence and be ridded of assholes (I use that term because there really is no better way to describe this personality.) Why should the civil and normal world community be any different?

Would we invade Burma because we don't like saffron robes? Would we invade Laos because we don't like how they treat elephants? Should we have attempted regime change in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge were purging the country of 2 Million souls? You betcha.

Sometimes we may end up with a mess because of prior screw-ups, like bogus borders around illegitimate countries (see: Yugoslavia). Some might say that since 'those people' have never governed themselves, they won't be able to do it once freedom is handed to them. This probably would have been true 50 years ago, but with the modern age of communications and immigration/emigration of citizens, this really doesn't hold water.

"But, they are a tribal people," some would say. Fine. We all were once. Let them get on with governing and forget about the tribes. One generation will erase that anomaly if it is truly not needed for their society. But if they stick with he tribes and the desire to kill each other, then maybe we need to send some of our liberals over there to teach love and peace to them. Let Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do something useful since their usefulness here in the US has long passed.

Bottom line: as the world grows smaller by the day, it becomes incumbent upon the civil people of the world to rid ourselves of these oppressors. We can start with the worst. That will keep us busy for a while. As we make our way through the list from the bottom up, the really annoying assholes (like Hugo Chavez) might just get the message that they are next, and shape up. If not, get rid of them.

If you look back over all of recorded history, someone ultimately decided who the winners and who the losers were. The Romans, the Incas, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Allies in WWII. All unabashedly decided they were going to win (until they were defeated.)

For this narrow swath of history, it might as well be us doing the deciding.

GE's Fantastic Tax Deductions

2011-03-27T20:43:00.003-04:00

Isn't GE saying that all of it's "tax treatments" are perfectly legal, like a man taking the word of his young date that she is "18 years old, honest...", even though both of them know that they are hearing exactly what they want to hear? In the man's case, he is paying all expenses for his date and GE paid a lot of the expenses for their tax deductions and rulings. But, is it legal? I would bet the man has a better chance of taking a legal hit than GE. It is these huge corporate giants that create fodder for the anarchists, the Marxists and the Socialists. None of us want to pay taxes. We all want someone else to pay them because what we are doing is GOOD for society, right? Show me ANYONE and I mean ANYONE that truly wants to pay taxes, to the point of taking no deductions and even paying a little more because it is a good thing. I will believe it when I see it. When I say no one wants to pay taxes, I mean it. If this was not true, then tax incentives would not work. Ask Charlie Rangel. He wrote the rules, but he didn't want to abide by them. As a small business owner, I used to want to make a tidy profit and have some money left over at the end of the year. I have since been schooled in the fact that a "profit" is your mortal enemy in business. Any money you make (especially as a S Corp, LLC or other non-C Corp entity) goes right to YOUR tax return and YOU have to pay the taxes whether you have the money or not. And if you do not have the money, you will have to pay more taxes to take the money out of your business to pay the taxes, with interest and penalty. Sweet. Gee (or is that GE?), I wish I could afford to buy a few tax loopholes from my favorite Congressman. Hey, let's have an AMT for corporations! Or better yet, just get rid of taxes on corporations all together (but this would really piss off a bunch of attorneys, tax accountants and some politicians, PLUS it would remove a huge advantage of being a BIG corporation.) Note: I am smart enough to know the Golden Rule: Those that have the gold, rule. But it makes me feel a little bit better by complaining about it.

The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Have Solar Panels

2011-03-20T22:36:00.007-04:00

Have I told you lately how much I like Twitter? Yes, I am on Facebook (I actually have two Facebook pages plus one company fan page), but Twitter is where I hang. I use TweetDeck which is a great way to manage my feed. All in all, I have about 10 columns set up. The first is where I watch about 100 of the 1400 people that I follow, the next is where I filter for mentions about me (no, this is not vanity... I just don't want to miss any non-direct messages to me) and then I track conversations for a few notable people that I follow.

One of the people for whom I have carved out a column of my valuable screen real estate is Tom Peters (@Tom_Peters) of Search for Excellence fame. Tom always comes up with intriguing, thought-provoking comments and he will actually tweet back if you say something that is interesting. Today he made this comment:

That comment caught my attention, since I am VERY interested in solar power. I tweeted back and asked him to cite his source. He replied that it was from Bloomberg Biz Week, so I started looking. Fortunately, Bloomberg Business Week didn't throw up a pay wall when I found the article.

In the piece, Charlie Rose talks to Ray Kurzweil about technology, immortality, AI and humans merging with technology. He brings up an interesting perspective where he states that we humans are running on software that was designed for the efficiencies of life several thousands of years ago and that our software is in need of a serious upgrade.

I never thought about DNA that way, but DNA is our operating system and it really could use some upgrading and fixes. Of course, this brings up huge issues with quality control as well as the typical ethics issues. I have no doubt that we will solve the ethics questions, since literally any attempt at changing our physiology can be construed by some as "playing God" and we have been moving progressively along this track for over 100 years.

Being a computer technologist, and having written many thousands of lines of software code myself, I get very nervous thinking about tweaking the human software code. Unlike computers and processors, which can be switched off or rebooted if the software goes awry, troubleshooting out attempts at human engineering will have a much longer timeline and create many more serious consequences if mistakes are made.

Finally, as almost a throw-away question, Rose asks Ray K what excites him the most and what about his fascination with exponential growth? Mr. Kurzweil then makes the statement that solar power output in watts is doubling every two years. If this is true, then this solar version of Moore's Law would allow solar energy to power 100% of our current power needs in just 16 years.

But here is where another 'law' comes into play: the Law of Unintended Consequences. If he is correct in all of his assumptions (and I have no doubt that his predictions will come true sooner rather than later) then there is going to be a LOT of people who just won't die. What condition will we be in at that point? We probably think that we will all be verile 18-35 year olds in the prime of life, but what if we all blow through youth and then just hang on as 70, 80 or 90 year olds; exhausted and disinterested? That could be a fate worse than dying.

Here's the deal... if we are all going to be living much, much longer lives, we are going to absolutely need more energy to sustain ourselves and our burgeoning society. Both aspects of Ray Kurzweil's future need to happen for this to play out successfully.

Still, a Ball of Confusion

2011-03-05T18:39:00.007-05:00

They say a generation can be defined by its music. I spent my teenage years in the late 60's and the early 70's. I bailed out of being a typical teen by joining the Navy at age 17, but still there was a lot of good music during my "formative" years. Yes, some of the music was 'poppy'. Current teens have Justin Bieber, we had 1910 Fruitgum Company. But there was some awesome music and there was also a lot of protest music. For us naive teens (most teens were naive since there was no cable TV and no Internet), the music was just tunes. The words were interesting but didn't have as big of an impact on us as it did on the college students of the time, who were just coming into their "I know everything and all adults are stupid" age.

Hippies were everywhere and the Summer of Love was still fresh in everyone's mind. Vietnam was still raging and most of the youth were either protesting or at least non-supportive, probably as much out of fear of the draft as they were of the inhumanity of the war. Another interesting feature of the counter-culture of the 60's was that they were pretty much against ALL government. Compare that with our current counter-culture which is primarily against conservative government. (I think that the love of liberal, progressive government by radicals is a marriage of convenience... the enemy of my enemy syndrome, but that is the subject of another blog post.)

What got me thinking about the juxtaposition of a great song with strong, protesting lyrics is the song Ball of Confusion by the Temptations. It was a huge hit from Motown when Motown actually released good music. I am currently listening to the book Return to Prosperity by Arthur Laffer where he is listing all of the ways that recent administrations have meddled with the economy to the point where it is almost a basket case. That song immediately popped into my mind. Here are the lyrics:

Ball of Confusion

People movin' out
People movin' in
Why, because of the color of their skin
Run, run, run, but you sho' can't hide
An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
Vote for me, and I'll set you free
Rap on brother, rap on
Well, the only person talkin'
'Bout love thy brother is the preacher
And it seems,
Nobody is interested in learnin'
But the teacher
Segregation, determination, demonstration,
Integration, aggravation,
Humiliation, obligation to our nation
Ball of Confusion
That's what the world is today

The sale of pills are at an all time high
Young folks walk around with
Their heads in the sky
Cities aflame in the summer time
And, the beat goes on

Air pollution, revolution, gun control,
Sound of soul
Shootin' rockets to the moon
Kids growin' up too soon
Politicians say more taxes will
Solve everything
And the band played on
So round 'n' round 'n' round we go
Where the world's headed, nobody knows
Just a Ball of Confusion
Oh yea, that's what the wold is today

Fear in the air, tension everywhere
Unemployment rising fast,
The Beatles' new record's a gas
And the only safe place to live is
On an indian reservation
And the band played on
Eve of destruction, tax deduction
City inspectors, bill collectors
Mod clothes in demand,
Population out of hand
Suicide, too many bills, hippies movin'
To the hills
People all over the world, are shoutin'
End the war
And the band played on.

Copyright 1970 Jobete Music Company, Inc.

Here is the video:

Recognizing that the more things change, the more things stay the same, I thought I would modify the words to bring the song up to date, especially for the chilluns that may not know the nuance of some of the original phrases (especially since most of this year's American Idol contestants didn't know any Beatles songs.)

Listen to the video while you follow these lyrics

Ball of Confusion (redux)

People movin' far
People movin' wide
Why, because of the name of their tribe
Run, run, run, but you sho' can't hide
An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
Vote for me, and I'll give it for free
Rap on brother, rap on
Well, every one's talkin'
'Bout love thy brother but the Imam
And it seems,
Nobody is interested in learnin'
But the home school teacher
Segregation, determination, demonstration,
Integration, aggravation,
Humiliation, obligation to our nation
Ball of Confusion
That's what the world is today

Patriotism's at an all time high
Young folks walk around with
Their celly close by
Cities aflame while they Tweet and die
And, the beat goes on

Global warming, coarse speech warning, gun control,
Sharia law
Shootin' teargas in the crowd
Kids chanting way to loud
Politicians say more taxes will
Solve everything
And the band played on
So round 'n' round 'n' round we go
Where the world's headed, nobody knows
Just a Ball of Confusion
Oh yea, that's what the world is today

Fear in the air, tension everywhere
Unemployment rising fast,
Bieber's new record's a gas
And the only safe place to live is
In a bunker in Montana
And the band played on
Eve of destruction, tax deduction
City inspectors, bill collectors
iPhones in demand,
Population out of hand
Foreclosure, too many bills, old folks movin'
To the hills
People all over the world, are shoutin'
Start the war
And the band played on.

Great Googa Mooga!

Got Gas?

2011-02-21T09:15:00.003-05:00

This posting is going to be overly simplistic, since I don't have the time to thoroughly suss out the details, but I really think I am on the right track on this one.

I think that the US ought to nationalize the ownership of oil, gas and other energy resources on public land. Yes, I know the US owns it all already, but what the government does is auction off rights to drill or explore. Then, if a well is productive, the oil company pays a nominal fee for the extracted oil and the rest of it is theirs. So if the price of oil jumps from $50 per barrel to $100, as far as I know, the oil company gets to keep the extra $50.

As a free-marketer, I fully understand incentive, but I also understand dumb luck. When an oil company makes a business decision to invest the money to pull oil out of the ground at $50/bbl, they have already calculated their ROI and it is sufficient. Are they hedging and hoping that the price goes up? Of course. But the nation's energy policy should be based on more than price speculation by ruthless energy executives.

As for the drilling rights, it is not like we are auctioning off the rights to graze on 10,000 acres of grassland. Oil and gas are non-renewable resources held under publicly owned land and we, the people, should benefit in the run-up of oil prices as much as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, or the stockholders of ExxonMobil. Drillers could be given a percentage of any price increase above some benchmark price to make it worth their while.

I know that other countries do not allow oil companies to extract oil and not benefit themselves richly on the upside. Why should we act differently? This isn't socialism or fascism. It would just be the US contracting out the drilling of our precious resources to third parties. We would own the product and they would get paid for drilling. Kinda like janitorial services or red light cameras.

If I were king, my energy policy would go something like this:

Start extracting in areas that have previously been placed off-limits while maintaining strict (but not restrictive) environmental controls.
Streamline the approval process for new energy facilities and get them on-line. Any state or locality that does not want to participate will end up losing out big, by not attracting these new facilities. Let them wallow in their own self-righteousness.
Allow the price of domestic oil and gas to track worldwide pricing (smoothing out peaks and valleys caused by speculation and daily fears) so that market forces will push development of new energy sources.
Stop subsidizing ethanol. Period. It is such a waste of money, land and resources. Just write a $250,000 check to small farmers to buy their vote. Tell the large agribusinesses to find something else to grow.
Allow new nuclear facilities to be fast tracked and to get on line in less than 10 years. Nuclear energy is no longer rocket science and shouldn't be treated as such.
Open up Yucca Mountain as a storage facility for nuclear waste, regardless of Harry Reid and Nevada's whining. Sorry, greens...
Work with the nation's electricity producers to upgrade our grid. If we could get more strategically placed nuclear facilities, the grid would become less important, since each region should have enough energy except in dire emergency, but we still need a modern way of transporting energy around the nation (except to those area that don't want to participate.)

Look at how much money Apple has made on the iPhone/iPad/iPod products. Imagine how much money a company could make if they develop the next big thing in energy. Somebody is going to do it if the money is there to be made. Oil companies have way too much power. Move them from the driver's seat to the passenger seat. Stop letting them call the shots.

Want to beat China? Figure out how to do it, get them to build it and then we will sell it around the world. Ask yourself, who makes more money? Apple or Foxconn? China will never get past us by building our products if we don't let them steal the technology from us. But, why beat China? Doesn't a rising tide raise all boats? As we say in the intelligence community, Trust but Verify.

There is so much politics in the energy world. We will need a strong leader and a willing Congress to move forward towards our own best interests. If we look inward, we achieve control of our own destiny. We will not be directly influencing or controlling other nations, so they shouldn't have a reason to complain, should they? (Funny how people accuse us of 'stealing' their natural resources, but NO ONE complains when they cash the check, do they? Only ones that really complain are the ones that don't get a slice of the cash...)

[Cue a loud crashing sound]

Whoa, I just woke up. Deep sleep. Must have been dreaming... Let's see what Drudgereport is saying. Hmmm. Gaddafi Flees Tripoli. Wonder what that will do to the price of oil?

Good Luck, Egypt (you are going to need it)

2011-02-11T18:40:00.002-05:00

For Egyptians, 11/2/11 will hold a special place in their hearts, for on this day they threw off the shackles of an oppressive regime. A regime, that in its beginnings probably had the best of intentions for the Egyptian people, but after 30 years, it was time for Mubarak and his people to go. It is pretty apparent that Mubarak treated Egypt like an embezzler treats an American Express Black card. I don't even want to venture down the path of discussing the merits of Mubarak's power and longevity.

The point of this post is that the easy part has been done. Now the real work begins.

Today I tweeted this: Random thought: If you are the opposition and you can't get a majority in a vote, what better way to win than to just take over? #Jan25

Nature abhors a vacuum and politics abhors one even more. Mubarak realized this and though he held on to power for a number of reasons, one must have been that he knew that if he just hopped a plane for Riyadh, the leadership void would be rapidly filled by the closest thing to an organization available and it sure wasn't going to be the peaceful students.

We in the US need look no further than Washington DC for an example of this phenomenon. After the Tea Party catapulted the Republicans to victory in the House last November, it was all sweetness and light. Mainstream Republicans were congratulatory and thankful for the Tea Partiers for giving them a huge majority, but before the ink was dry on the headlines, the power shifting began and it was 'step aside' time for the Tea Party. "Thanks for the ride, fellas, now sit over there while we show you how it is done" seemed to be the attitude of the new leadership.

In Cairo, as genuine freedom-seeking people (likely the majority) teamed up with leftists and the Muslim Brotherhood to topple Mubarak, I fully expect that the Islamic fundamentalist will waste little time consolidating power and control.

Egyptians seem to be a very well educated people and very savvy in the ways of the West as well as very much situationally aware. If they have been watching the world even a little over the past 20-30 years, they know what ugliness can arise from hitching their star to the Brothers. The Army also is going to be there to (hopefully) broker free and fair elections. It is in the Army's best interest to stay on the good side of the US and the West, and that cannot be done under an Islamic theocracy running on Sharia law.

It was joyous to watch the celebration in Tahrir Square tonight but my mind kept drifting to the thought of how fleeting this freedom might be. It is my fervent wish that the citizens of Egypt stay strong and look at the past history of the people and organizations vying for power and not to fall prey to the sweet words of these nascent politicians. Otherwise it will be out of the frying pan, into the fire for most of the people, especially the women.

Guns, Legislation and the Games They Play

2011-01-13T08:48:00.003-05:00

I was reading E.J. Dionne Jr's latest piece in the Washington Post called Violent talk blocks sane gun laws. He even coins (or popularizes) a new term, militarized rhetoric, which is always followed by the words "from the right". I will not debate the one-sidedness of that statement.

He mentions that we cannot have a sane debate about reducing the number of rounds you can legally carry in a gun clip (or more correctly, a magazine.) It is reported that Jared Loughner had a Glock-19 9mm handgun with a high-capacity 33 round magazine. Supposedly it jammed which is how bystanders were able to subdue the gunman and keep him from emptying the gun on more people. Let's be honest, even if magazines of more than 5 rounds were made retroactivelly illegal, the millions in circulation would always exist.

What came to mind when I was thinking about this subject was that Congress doesn't know how to pass a clean bill. The first thing out of the mouth of the Democrat minority in the House, concerning the bill to repeal Obama Care was, "the majority has shut down debate, we have no way to amend the bill." It was a simple one or two page bill! What's to amend? Repeal the original bill, yes or no. Next question?

There have been many attempts over the years to legally reduce the number of rounds in a magazine, but these efforts have always been imbedded in a much larger piece of legislation. Later, when a tragedy like this comes up, Congressman X will say that Congressman Y voted against reducing the size of pistol magazines, when really Y voted against a 250 page omnibus spending bill that had a line in it reducing the size of magazines. Y may have wanted to vote for the magazine section, but hated the rest of the bill so he voted no. This type of rhetoric is why none of us can believe a single word out of any politician's mouth and why I named my blog The-Asterisk.

I am not a parlimentarian, so I don't know if it is practical for Congress to pass a large number of small, single issue bills, but if these guys in DC want to get things accomplished, they need to figure out a way to fast-track small items and pass them in an up or down manner. Perhaps, they could have a weekly 'package' bill that includes tens to hundreds of smaller bills. There would be no debate and each item must be specific and single purpose. Each representative would vote yes or no on every item and on the next Tuesday, all of the items that passed would be sent in a package to the other house for approval. When the President receives the package, he would have line-item veto privileges and the ones that passed the House and the Senate, only to be vetoed by the President could go back for an override vote.

Would this work? I don't see why not. We all know that there will always be politicking in politics, but at some point, the adults need to run the show and let the 'drama students' play in the corner.

So, if after a tragedy like Tucson where a once-per-decade massacre that can be attributed to 33 round clips occurs, politicians band together to make high-capacity magazines illegal, let them. If it can pass both houses and the President, then so be it. It won't take away the magazines and it won't fix the problem, but at least they will have done something.

Arizona Shooting

2011-01-12T01:35:00.002-05:00

I have tweeted, read and listened to the echo chamber since word came out early Saturday of the tragedy in Tucson. It was no time before Paul Krugman hit the keys, blaming right wingers and Tea Party members for the vitriol and toxic atmosphere. Paul, stick to economics. At least there is no right or wrong with economics, just guesses and opinions, plus... no one cares what you think about economics.

What I want to see is how much money it costs to prosecute the shooter and how long it will take to make the case against him. The feds have already appointed a lawyer, Judy Clarke (she is a spitting image of Paul McCartney) who has defended the Unabomber, Zacharias Moussaoui (the 20th 9/11 hijacker), serial bomber Eric Rudolph, Susan Smith (the 'mom' who drowned her kids by driving her car into a lake), Saddam Hussein and Benito Mussolini. Well, I made the last two up, but it could have happened if they had been in the US...

In about 12 seconds this nutbag detoured our national discourse, killed at least 6 people and wounded many more. He stopped shooting when his pistol jammed. I assume that he would have offed himself in the end like most of these heroic cowards tend to do. It is unfortunate that he did not have the opportunity.

Now we must endure months, leading into years of introspection, debate and testimony about why he did it. DOES ANYONE REALLY FRIGGIN' CARE WHY HE DID IT? He did it. Period. End of story. Large number of witnesses, physical evidence and all of that. A trial should just be a formality. Why does this piece of human debris even get a hearing? He shot these people in cold blood and that is it. Even the wingnut sheriff of Pima County got something right when he said that this guy was deranged for doing it. I guess he is making Loughner guilty until proven innocent.

Wanting to know why he did it really is the sickest kind of voyeurism there is. The journalists and the mental health professionals and the lawyers and the rest of the media will play with him the way a cat plays with a mouse before it gets tired and finally kills it.

Due process is due process, but give the scumbag a speedy trial, and if a jury of his peers (now THAT is in insult to peers) decides on the death penalty, then get 'er done and over with. It will save all of us taxpayers a huge sum of money as a by-product.

Verizon iPhone Peek-a-Boo

2011-01-12T00:55:00.002-05:00

I just had to make a quick comment about the strange kabuki dance that has gone on between Apple, Verizon and the press/rumorsphere. It has been common knowledge for several months that Verizon would be carrying the Apple iPhone on its CDMA network, especially in light of the fact that they are currently carrying the iPad.

It is kinda cute in a way, isn't it? Keeping a secret like that. I had a Verizon rep tell me on Monday that the rumors were false. Really!

Like the small town couple who got engaged, bought a ring at a local jewelry store, visited the town hall for their marriage license, rented the church and arranged for all of the flowers and food, but tried to keep it 'hush-hush' and then got a little angry when they found out that everyone already knew when they announced it.

Sheesh...

Please, Touch my Junk

2011-01-06T22:56:00.005-05:00

I watched Steve Ballmer's keynote address at CES last night via live stream. I say keynote, but it was more like a tag-team infomercial, but whatever... that is what CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) is really all about.

Back in the day, CES was where TVs, audio equipment, radar detectors, electronic toys, video games and such were shown in January after Comdex (the Computer Dealers Exposition) had taken place in November. Both were humongous shows, both were held in Las Vegas and both attracted upwards of 200,000 attendees. I regularly attended Comdex from 1984 until its demise in 2004. Now, CES has become the premier stage for new product introductions.

Back to the subject at hand...

Those that have read my blogs or may have tripped over some of my 'guest' posts on other's blogs know that I am passionate about the fusion of new technology with our pedestrian computer needs. I have long advocated for interfacing touch screen technology with portable handheld units and then joining them with computers or display units to increase the usability. The iPad was an exciting product and from what I have heard this week, 2011 promises to be a watershed year for my sort of equipment.

But, as I was thinking about the demonstration last night, and how the AvatarKinect showed realistic real-time animation, how the Kinect interface allowed gestures and voice to control a multimedia experience and how the Surface table is now a 4 inch thick wall-hangable multi-touch computer screen, I really started imagining how all of these technologies could help the aforementioned pedestrian computer experience. Surprisingly, the answer I came with was not much.

When you are sitting down in front of your keyboard to do work or anything except games, I just cannot imagine doing anything beyond using a mouse. In fact, if one could just grab a mouse and do everything from that one interface device, I think the majority of humans would be quite content. Even reaching for the keyboard throws me off my stride if I am busy navigating the web. It would be much easier if we could do everything with the mouse.

I think about my use of the iPad or the iPhone. I barely tolerate using the 'keyboard' on these devices. Sure, if I am on an airplane and I want to type something on the iPad, I will do it, but you won't catch me typing my first novel on an iPad keyboard unless it is my only option. So, if that is the case, why would I want to flail about with my arms and use my voice to control a computer that is optimally controlled by a hand, a wrist and two fingers.

Could this be because in the beginning, the only Human Interface Device (HID) beyond the keyboard was the mouse? Maybe it is my upbringing and what I am used to. (Consider this: If it wasn't already universal, who would ever think of controlling a modern car with their feet, even though it seems perfectly natural to all of us?)

I would never desire to reach up to my monitor and use gestures and pinches to control the display. Maybe there is a use for a Kinect-style interface to make presentations, but that is a very narrow use case.

What I do think would be awesome and not hard to learn to use is really to find a way to enhance and extend mouse movements. If they could make either a touch surface or a touch sensor about the size of a mousepad that could accept finger movements (much like the trackpad on a laptop) and filter out any palm touches, that could be an awesome user interface. They pretty much have the single touch interface worked out on laptops. Add in multi-touch and also the ability to use a pen or a finger cap to get better granularity and I think you would have a revolutionary interface.

Oops... I just reached over to my touch surface to move my pointer and it wasn't there. Wow, mind over matter. While writing this blog, I had already convinced myself that it would work. I can't wait to try one as soon as it is invented.

Why we all can't just get along?

2010-12-19T22:46:00.006-05:00

Something has been bothering me for the past several weeks as the lame duck session of Congress played out. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I was watching some of the Sunday morning interview shows. As the pundits were punditing about gridlock and conflict, the guests from the left blamed the right for blocking everything with threats of filibusters and the guests from the right accused the left of ramming legislation through the process without any input or consideration of their point of view.

You know what? They were all correct! But why? And why now? That's what had been bugging me, then the answer hit me like a two ton heavy thing. It is the stakes... they are too high.

Most of what Congress has been/is still fighting about during the 111th is very substantial and will have a big impact on the future. Plus, the number of dollars in play is mind boggling and there is little hope of abatement in the near term.

On Meet The Press was Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ. This is a man who certainly has his plate full, especially since he was re-elected earlier this year for another 4 year term. I follow him on Twitter. He is a very proactive manager of his city and he seems to really listen to his constituents. I understand that he is a Democrat, but that fact does not ooze out of his pores with everything he says and does.

Also on Meet The Press was Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Congressman. He is a conservative, but often has his bona fides called into question by the more strident of conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others. There was also Mark McKinnon rounding out the 'right' side of the balance sheet (as it were) on MTP. Mark, a former Bush and McCain campaign leader, has started a non-partisan organization called NoLabels. The same strident conservatives have made light of this new organization and the tweet-stream earlier this week, after the official launch of NoLabels, was a bit brutal on.

So... when the right is in power the left blocks legislation, ambassadorial appointments, hearings on judicial appointments (judges and US Attorneys) and trade agreements just for starters. When the left is in power, similar things happen from the right, but the left, with the help of a more sympathetic press, screams obstructionism and it becomes an issue that really bothers the 'nattering class'. To quote Rodney King, "Why can't we all just get along?"

Why can't cooler heads prevail, such as the three men previously mentioned above?

I think that the amount of power vested in the federal government and in our elected officials in Washington, DC has reached a tipping point. The first wave of repercussions from this fact was borne out in the November elections. The Democrats were slaughtered. They lost state houses, governorships, city and county majorities, the House of Representatives (by over 60 seats) and nearly lost the US Senate as well. The next wave could slaughter Republicans as handily as the Democrats were routed.

Something else that helped me recognize the problem was the Omnibus Spending Bill that was defeated this past week. It was a last-ditch effort by the waning Democrat majority to push through a single appropriations bill that was infused with pork and earmarks totalling billions of dollars. What struck me about this bill the most was what the pork and earmarks were being spent on. Many of the most egregious expenditures have become legendary. Spending MY money on this stuff just is NOT what the federal government is supposed to be doing. The Edgar Allen Poe Cottage Visitors Center? Huh? His freaking cottage??? Maple Syrup research in Vermont? (What else can be said about maple syrup?) If this crap is so damned important, let the states and/or the constituents that stand to gain from it pay for it.

Last time I checked, the Constitution of the United States (there goes that pesky document getting in the way again) leaves everything to the states that is not enumerated as a federal responsibility. NOTHING except a Vermont state law would restrict Vermont from studying maple syrup to its heart's content (and spending its citizen's money in the process.)

I have always been a huge fan of NASA. As a kid, I had a model of the Saturn V rocket with the Apollo spacecraft hung from the ceiling of my bedroom with 'invisible' line. Was the race to the moon a federal responsibility? A case can be made that there is a national security component to space, even stretching it a bit further to justify landing on the moon, but what about probes to Pluto? Satisfying scientific curiosity about space really is NOT something you can substantiate by a careful reading of the Constitution's enumerated federal powers. As I have previously written, if it is important enough that it should be in the Constitution, then let's amend it to say so.

The mantra of the nascent Tea Party movement is not so much to elect conservative politicians, but to 'conserve' the intent of the founding principles of our government. This necessarily begs for a smaller federal government. A smaller federal government with scaled-back power will cause fewer and fewer polarizing debates in Congress because there won't be nearly as much to fight about and holding that reduced power will not be quite as attractive as attaining a seat in Congress is now.

Another aspect of putting power back at the state and local level would be to de-homogenize this nation. Sure, we need standards and I am not trying to be absurd. But think about it, the railroads came up with time zones, not the feds. Licensing for medical doctors was a peer-group thing before the government got involved. Highways, national defense, postal service, weights and measurement standards, financial regulation, etc. make sense and fall reasonably under the Commerce Clause, but gay marriage? Liberal welfare benefits? Free health insurance? Fairness in hiring? Minimum wage? Retirement benefits? These should all be state functions.

Let there be competition amongst the states for citizens. If you want to live a liberal, bohemian lifestyle, surrounding yourself with other like-minded people and you don't mind paying a lot of your own money to support it, move to the Free State of California. Want a conservative, law and order life and don't mind living near a dude with 3 wives? Move to the Free State of Utah. Don't like the '3 wife' thing but still want the security and order? Move to the Republic of Texas. Want gay marriage and no big box retailers clogging up the countryside? Check out the People's Republic of Vermont. Birds of a feather will definitely flock together. They always do.

I am serious. We have blended our vast and diverse nation into a pablum-like state. We have brought ourselves to the point where virtually no one is really happy. So, how to become happy? Pursue it! But not by removing money from some to giving it to others, regardless of the nobility of the cause. If the cause is noble enough, sell the idea to a state, municipality or individual that will pay for it. Then, pick up and move there so you can enjoy the fruits of your effort and leave the rest of us alone.

Trickle Down Works (if it is not spent on food and shelter)

2010-12-12T20:55:00.001-05:00

The-Asterisk note: This was a draft posting that got lost somehow when BlogSpot got hung up, so if I get a chance I will come back and expound on why Trickle Down economics works if it is not all spent on food and shelter.

The Pursuit of... An Upgrade?

2010-11-25T09:05:00.003-05:00

My Thanksgiving thoughts (with apologies to Tom Peters.)

Buy One, Get One Free. Frequent Flyer Miles. College education. New job. Trade in a four year old car. Lottery tickets. Different job. Movie and sports package rather than Basic cable. First Class instead of Coach. Whatever it is, we humans are always looking for an upgrade. What does this have to do with Thanksgiving?

As a native born, plain-vanilla American, I was born in the right place at the right time. At least that is my opinion and I am sticking with it. As anyone that reads this blog can attest, I might seem a bit cranky at times, but it is because I am always seeking... looking for... pursuing... something, but what? Perfection? Nirvana? Excellence? WOW? While I was pondering this salient point this morning, it occurred to me that most of us are pursuing an upgrade.

Aren't we all just looking for something better? When a university trained engineer from Iraq, or a medical doctor from Mali, or a school teacher from Bangladesh leaves it all behind to come to the US and take a job as a taxi driver or as a room cleaner in a hotel, what is the motivation? Are they getting an upgrade, or are they gaining the ability to pursue an upgrade?

We Americans (and I assume Australians and Canadians have similar feelings) are lucky to be where we are. You can't do much better. For that I am exceedingly thankful. As much as we collectively complain about our politics, the direction the country is heading, our health care, food prices, gas prices, EPA regulations, taxes, etc., would any of us volunteer to leave it all behind and move to North Korea???? Chad? Nepal? Pakistan? Afghanistan? Anything-istan? Syria? Portugal? Russia? Anywhere in Africa? What about China? I mean, pick up and move there and try for a better life because you know that you can do better than where you are now. That's right, be honest. Would you do it?

Even Alec Baldwin did not move to France like he promised after George Bush beat Al Gore. Why not? I think we all know the answer.

This is what is lost on most of us. We have it pretty damned good here in the US of A. Even the least of us could do a LOT worse somewhere else. Except for the mandatory 6 to 8 week vacation periods, early retirement age and free, government provided health care of some 'progressive' countries (and we see where that is taking their economy, i.e. Greece, Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, etc.) our citizens who choose to work are doing quite well.

In our country, "below the poverty line" includes cell phones, TVs, enough food to remain 100 pounds overweight, enough money left over to buy drugs or booze, plus access to free housing, free health care and subsidized higher education. What a country!

So why are we so discontented?

I think it is the human condition to always seek better. If contentment were the norm, we would still be living in caves, looking for fire. When do you have enough? Enough is never enough. Our President, Barack Obama, recently talked about that while giving a speech about financial reform and the Wall Street fat cats. That is such a hypocritical question to be asked by someone who went from State Senator, to US Senator, to President in just five years. Not just to pick on our Prez, but that is a hypocritical question to ask by just about anyone besides a cloistered nun or a Buddhist monk.

We all want more. We all want better. We all want to have more money, better food, better hair, better teeth, thinner waistline, nicer clothes, cooler car and on and on we go.

Not happy with your religion? Go grab a new one, or have none at all. Try that in 2/3 of the rest of the world. You will be lucky just to stay out of prison, or leave with your head still attached to your shoulders.

So what am I thankful for this Thanksgiving 2010? I am just thankful that I have the currently unlimited ability to pursue these upgrades and to keep most of what I gain to do with what I choose. I am also thankful that I live in a country that allows me to fight politically to keep this rare ability.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Bristol "The Pistol" Palin and DWTS

2010-11-22T13:13:00.005-05:00

Wow, the spewing forth that is going on in the blogosphere and in the media about Bristol Palin ~~winning~~ not getting the boot on Dancing With The Stars last Tuesday night is actually quite amazing. If we could all show this much concern about the North Koreans building a new nuclear material enrichment facility, we might have a better situation right now. (Ooops, sorry, The Situation got booted a few weeks ago.)

Anyway, my point for this abbreviated version of The-Asterisk is that many of the left wing "spewers" have mentioned that Sarah Palin is a know-nothing, obnoxious, attention-grabbing, right wing nutbag that wants to be President of these United States. So? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton thought they had a shot at it. So did Dennis Kusinich, Pat Robertson and Al Gore.

And speaking of glow-in-the-dark intelligence driving great job performance, how is Barack Obama doing on the foreign policy stage lately? Yeah, lighting up the G20, eh?

Sometimes I think that having a huge naturally occurring case of common sense ability in a candidate would trump all of the book-larnin' that liberals like to say that conservatives never have. Is Sarah Palin the one with the common sense that can run our nation properly? Who knows, and with the nation divided quite evenly and vehemently right down the middle, no matter who wins, exactly half of the US population will automatically think that the winner sucks.

Think about this: if people place such little credit towards one who has the common sense of the 'little people' then why do feel good movies like Dave strike such a chord with the folks? Because we don't think it is possible to get someone with common sense in the White House?

(The-Asterisk observation: The oxymoronic truth is that if someone had any common sense, they wouldn't be seeking the job anyway...)

The "Numbing Down" of America

2010-11-21T07:28:00.003-05:00

As I sit in the terminal at JFK Airport in New York awaiting the final flight of my trip from Los Angeles' LAX, airport security is at the top of my mind. To the best of my knowledge, today poses no bigger threat to national security than yesterday did. Yet as I proceeded on a shuttle bus from the off-site car rental facility to the Delta terminal, traffic was piled up near the big, white L A X letters announcing the entrance to the airport. As we crept to the turn-in, there were several tent-like structures composing a security checkpoint with uniformed police somehow choosing which vehicles would pass and which would be stopped for inspection.

We were waved through Checkpoint Charlie. As the bus pulled up in front of the terminal, there were several TSA personnel milling about outside. I went in and retrieved my boarding pass from the convenient self-service kiosk. Proceeding on, there were only three people ahead of me in the security line. As the initial TSA person tried using a faulty UV flashlight to look at my drivers license (does anyone have a clue what they are looking for with this device?), he got a working light, scribbled something on my boarding pass and cheerfully asked me to proceed to screening.

I picked the shortest of the two lines, dutifully removed my shoes, pulled my laptop from my bag and placed all metal objects in a pocket of my messenger bag and put them all in bins on the conveyor belt to be scanned. As I proceeded to pass thru the metal detector archway, the next TSA asked me to remove my belt. I never remove my belt or wallet because these do not set off the equipment. At this point, I knew what was next...

"Please stand between those two walls, place your feet in the squares and hold your arms over your head for a moment."

"This is the X-Ray machine isn't it?" I asked.

"What have you heard about it?" he replied.

I paused, thinking of an answer that would not put the rest of my trip in jeopardy.

"Probably nothing good, I suppose" was his response to my silence, to which I replied, "Yep"

After they took my picture, I stood there in the Retract-A-Band cordoned area for a few moments waiting for the all clear signal, he asked if I had a wallet. Yes I did. He had me remove it and then said that he would have to pass his hand over my buttock to check for something. He patted my ass with the back of his blue plastic-gloved hand and then allowed me pick up my bags, my shoes, my belt and my dignity from the conveyor rollers.

I stood there, re-dressing, mumbling various epithets under my breath in an imperceptible volume. I gathered my stuff and headed to my gate. As we were milling about, jockeying for position to get on the plane as early as possible so that we would have a fighting chance of being able to shove our carry-on bag into an available overhead bin, the PA announced that TSA would be doing random inspections and to have our ID out and ready.

Finally, Group 4 was called and as we shuffled past the boarding pass scanner, I was asked by a large TSA woman if I would mind opening my bag for her to look into it. Did I mind? Did I have a choice? I received approval to proceed and as I was dragging my suitcase down the Jetway ramp, it occurred to me that we am in the middle of a massive campaign to "numb down" America. Not "dumb down", but "numb down".

Think about it. The more we see Catholic nuns being frisked by screeners, or returning troops from Afghanistan being swabbed and pulled for secondary screening because of traces of gunpowder residue on their backpacks (duhhhhhh!), the more likely we will just collectively shrug and shuffle off to whatever we were doing before we were hassled by The Man.

(The-Asterisk observation: I cannot wait for the moment that the now-government-loving left finally gets fed up with this encroachment on personal liberty and starts pushing back. It will certainly be an "All Of Me" moment. I await the convulsions with eager anticipation.)

Will all of the traveling public continue to waste untold thousands of man-hours every day, being protected against some nefarious, unstated, top secret threat? Is there actually a threat, or are we all on the receiving end of a huge, conspiratorial con job?

I am beginning to think the latter... but if there is a real and credible threat, let us all in on it. Aren't hundreds of thousands of eyes on the problem better than relying solely on cops and TSA? After all, who found and stopped the Underwear Bomber? The Shoe Bomber? Has any domestic threat since 9/11 been thwarted solely by screening at airports by TSA? (No, I am not counting finger nail clippers, pen knives removed from 85 year old WWII vets, or knitting needles from Granny's yarn bag as credible threats.)

Let's use some common sense, people!

Now... why can't I feel my fingers, my toes or my brain?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Terrorists Have Won

2010-11-15T18:16:00.004-05:00

Every time I pass through an American airport, I think to myself "The terrorists have won." This has been my opinion for the past eight years or so. I don't think these prehistoric goons with a modern education ever imagined that they would or could collapse not one but BOTH of the World Trade Center towers. Given the heinous-ness of that action, there is NO WAY that they could have predicted how easily the US Government, both Republican and Democrat, would allow them to irreversibly change the way every traveller is affected every day.

But once they saw how easily we were manipulated, I DO think that they took thier most hapless stooges, sent them off on a 'mission' to blow up a plane, knowing that they would get caught, but realizing that with each of their Keystone Kops mis-adventures, they were throwing yet another bag of sand in the gears of commerce.

And THAT is really their goal. To scare us back to the Stone Age. Not bomb us back to the Stone Age (yeah, that works in third world countries where bombing them back to the Stone Age is not that far of a journey) but scare us in the same way that lawyers have sucked the life out of the step ladder industry.

Here is today's DrudgeReport home page picture:

A Catholic nun is being patted down by a dutiful TSA agent. At first glance, it appears that the TSA 'patter' is wearing a head scarf. But, it couldn't be... that would be just too rich. I did hear on the radio that CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) has asked for a special exception for Islamic women who find being touched by strangers in that 'special way' as offensive.

People, YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP. Seriously. We get harassed by crazy Muslims ostensibly in the name of their religion, our shields go to full repel mode, and they have the huevos to ask for an exception when in reality, they are the only ones that should be xrayed and cavity searched in the first place??? WTF?

I really think that sane Americans are about to reach a tipping point. We proved that we are near it with the election results from earlier this month. Now we realize this xray thing is absurd, but real. I will be traveling on Thursday. We shall see how exciting it gets in LAX on the return flight. If more people travelled on a regular basis, the pushback would have already happened. Hats off to the pilots and flight attendant unions for resisting further erosion of our rights. Fighting back against this sort of thing will certainly send innocent people to jail. I hope I am not one of them...

Veterans Day from the perspective of a vet

2010-11-11T08:56:00.003-05:00

I will keep this concise.

I am a 30 year veteran of the US Navy and Naval Reserve. I joined when I was 17 in order to get an education and get going in life. Well, I certainly accomplished that goal! During my 11 years of active duty I lived in two foreign countries for over 5 years and had several stateside duty stations in addition to about two years of electronics and specialized training. While I was building my business (started it with another Navy vet) I spent 20 years in the reserves.

During this time I met a HUGE number of people in the military, some of whom are lifelong friends, a few I never want to see again, plus a lot of people that I enjoyed growing up and working around. The military gave me an opportunity to mix and mingle with a spectrum of people both in and out of the service that I would probably never have had otherwise. I found out about how people actually live in other countries (as opposed to dropping in for a one day visit on a tour bus.)

What really sticks with me is that we in the military just do our jobs. Whether you are a fighter pilot, skipper of an aircraft carrier or of a PT boat, if you fix electronic gear that you can never talk about (me) or you are patrolling some village in the armpit of the world, you just do your job. You never expect that anything extraordinary will happen until it does, and then you just do your job.

I look back at all of the people that I knew in the Navy and a lot of them were 'crazy' and had a lot of 'issues', but as an organization, we got it done. Despite all of the bitching and moaning and complaining, we got it done.

A mentor of mine (Navy, of course... now deceased) used to say "Some people are born great while others have greatness thrust upon them". This is really how it goes in the military. No one really wants to be a hero. They just do their job. But when the moment comes and they step up to the plate and do what needs to be done AND they get it done... THAT is what I reflect on and remember on Veterans Day. Not everyone became a 'hero', but as a team, we did what we were asked and WE GOT IT DONE.

Some vets have lived through hell before their 19th birthday and some (like yours truly) retired after 30 years without the proverbial scratch. My hat goes off to ALL of the veterans who volunteered, did what needed to be done and did their job for the USA so that the rest of us can be free to do ours!

Celebrating Veterans Day 2010

Reflections on the 2010 Election

2010-11-03T08:46:00.007-04:00

As I have stated elsewhere, with the Republican victories yesterday we got the CHANGE, now we move into the HOPE phase. Hope that the Class of 2010 can put the cart back on the road, regardless of which ditch it is in and who put it there. Charles Krauthammer made a poignant observation last night on Fox News. He said that the Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006 and the Obama election of 2008 were anomalies on the political landscape. That they were upheavals based on huge external forces on the body politic... the Iraq War in 2006 and the Grand Depression of 2008 and that now, 2010 brings us back in line close to the status quo in the US... older people voting, youngsters and the poor staying home.

Staying home and not voting is fine with me. Those that scream "Vote or Die" are nuts. The last thing I want is an enfranchised Zombie voting for whomever is on the blue slip they are handed as they trudge into the polling place. If you cannot press, click or punch for whomever or whatever without a crib sheet, then I don't want you voting... on either side. I also don't want voting to be so easy that everyone can do it without any effort.

This election is a repudiation of sorts of the old argument that there is too much money in politics. Well, maybe there is, but it is obvious that spending $160 Million cannot buy you a governorship of a large western state. Neither can it buy you a seat in the Senate. Usually the people arguing that there is too much money in politics are the ones that don't have enough of it. I would have liked to see Meg and Carly win in CA, but their loss proves that you cannot compel a voter to vote your way just because you pummel them with a relentless onslaught of ads. Unlimited money in politics just ups the ante. It does NOT guarantee results.

I used to be for full disclosure of the source of money in campaigns, but with the way that left wing groups mine the lists for prominent donors and then find something obscure in the candidate's (or the candidate's cause) and pin this on the donor has tainted the whole 'transparency' effort. Remember: NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED.

The Republicans are in a great spot right now. They control the House, therefore they control the purse strings. They don't control the Senate, so no one can accuse them of boxing in the President like they did in 1994. Sure, the Left and MSNBC will do it anyway, but we will all see through their charade. There are enough Republicans in the Senate to assure that nothing crazy will be rammed through and as much as the Democrats whine about the Republicans abusing the filibuster rule requiring a 60-40 majority for any legislation, the Dems were the ones who perfected the cudgel after they lost power in the 1980's. (I guess that is like the US saying that no one else should have nuclear weapons?)

Like the dog that finally caught the car he was chasing... what are the Republicans going to do with the majority in the House now that they have it? Will they handle it responsibly, or will they start sliding back into the swamp of earmarks, pork and back-slapping?

Hopefully the much-maligned Tea Party members will remember from whence they came and, in the words of gadfly, serial Virginia gubernatorial candidate in the 70's, Henry Howell, they will "Keep the Big Boys Honest."

I love the Internet and I love Google

2010-10-13T08:04:00.003-04:00

First let me clarify. I own a technology company that provides IT support services to a lot of small and medium sized businesses. As you well know, supporting anything that has to do with computers is a huge undertaking and what you need to know to make it through one day is completely different than what you needed to know the day before.

Several months back, we took on the support of a decent-sized company. Their data center was, shall we say, a mess. Well, I looked at their existing servers and decided that we could re-use two of them. They were built from Intel parts, with a 2U rack mount case, 4 active removable drive bays and an Intel S5000VSA motherboard. This motherboard supports RAID but the existing RAID drives were degraded (NICE!!!)

We finally got the opportunity to pull one of the servers out for refurbishment. I brought it back to the shop and ran Sysinternal's DISK2VHD on the server. Next, I removed the old drives, well... removed the old drive and set it aside as a fall-back (we wanted to save the old Exchange server in case someone found they were missing data three months from now.) I installed four new 1TB drives in the four carriers and booted up the server. The BIOS did not offer me any option to go into the RAID controller. Odd. Went into the BIOS and found out that the RAID controller was OFF! The previous tech had used Windows Server 2003 software RAID and had set the drives as dynamic. I enabled the onboard RAID controller and rebooted. Now I had the RAID controller option.

(Full disclosure: I should have realized that it was a software RAID, because viewing drives in Windows' Drive Management plugin, a real RAID drive would have been presented as a single drive, not two drives in a degraded state. My bad. )

So, now I am attempting to set these four drives up in a RAID5 configuration, but the RAID5 option was greyed out leaving only RAID 0, 1 or 10. WTF? I hit Google and found that Intel decided to make an extra 80-something dollars by requiring a little AXXRAKSW5 plug to be inserted on the motherboard to allow RAID 5. Priceless...

I capitulate and set the server up in a RAID 10. Two TB of storage should be enough for a while, right? I prepare the RAID VD and then I successfully installed Server 2008R2 and applied all patches. Everything looks good. I installed 16GB RAM and the server seems quite fast with its RAID 10 drives and dual quad core processors.

I added the Hyper-V role to the server and commenced to creating the first VM on the host. I decided to copy the 96Gb VHD that was created using DISK2VHD. I ran through the Create New VM wizard, pointed to the VHD, clicked Finish and BAM! Up on the screen pops an error: 'A virtual disk support provider for the specified file was not found.' (7864368). (Virtual machine ID E6579719-992D-43AB-80F7-79D8290987683). Nice... now what? A support provider? What is this? Welfare? Someone not making child support payments???

I hit Google again. I was referred to a KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2013544. This KB applies to having a tape drive installed and some other issues. The original server had Backup Exec running, so what the heck? I made the registry change and rebooted. No joy. Same thing.

Fine. I had had issues with DISK2VHD images in the past. Must be something horked with the VHD. Let's create my data server VM which is needed as part of the process. I fire up the Create New VM wizard, get all the way through to identifying a new VHD and BAM!!! There it is again. That support provider thing. I try several other tricks, but no luck. Cannot get past that error.

This time I decide to check the event logs. I find Events 14140, 12140, and 12620 every time I attempt to attach a VHD to a VM. I Googled these three numbers. Now I start seeing references to RAID controllers and specifically Intel S5000 series motherboards. Hmmmmm. I finally landed on a thread on Microsoft's Technet. In it is this:

The solution with some fiddling is as follows
regedit
navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E97D-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\Properties

export it

Rightclick Properties, permissions, click through to
change permissions you cannot see, click advanced, owner tab and take ownership,
ok back to properties, and then click to add a permission, and all will come
back.

Ok Click out and back to properties,
export it again to
another file
in that folder find "Security"

Delete the value

reboot server, re-attach any disks, and hey presto it works.

So, I try it. I open REGEDIT, find the value and cannot export the registry file. Nope... it doesn't exist. That's right. Doesn't exist. Fine. I will take ownership. Seems Administrator is already owner, but it won't let me take it anyway. Well, let me just try to delete the Security value. Nope. Can't see it. It isn't there. Hmmmmm. Catch 22?

Well, let me make a Recovery Point in case I screw everything up. Guess what? In its basic form, Windows Server 2008R2 doesn't have the option! Sweet...

No guts, no glory, so I try to start regedit as an administrator (which I already am.) I am sure there are other ways, but I ended up opening a command window as administrator (thanks UAC!) typed regedit and hit enter. I found the Value, took ownership (yes it let me do it this time), deleted the Security key and rebooted.

Mirabile dictu. I was able to attach my VHDs to my VMs. I was able to boot the 2003 server image from DISK2VHD and successfully add the Integration Services. I was also able to install my data server successfully.

Is there any way that I would have been able to figure this out on my own? Who would I have asked? Would I have had to pay $295 for an incident with Microsoft to get to an answer? How long would it have taken? Microsoft techies are GREAT and it is the best $295 you could ever spend for tech support, but you have to be able to stay on the phone with them for HOURS until they come to a conclusion. Was this problem Intel's fault? (it also affected non-Intel RAID controllers.) Should Intel at least be responsible for letting us know of an issue between a currently supported motherboard and the latest and greatest Microsoft server operating system?

Bottom line: there is TOO much to know to do my job properly without the support of the Internet technical community. I absolutely LOVE the way that technical people in the IT industry share and share and share. Searching and researching on the Internet is the only way that I can do my job properly. Seriously.

If only every other industry were this open (car manufacturers, are you listening???), the world would be a much better place and so much less time would be squandered.

Health Insurance is like the Soda Pop industry?

2010-09-22T09:18:00.002-04:00

All this talk about price increases with your current health insurance and how much it will cost to pay for Obamacare got me to thinking... Health insurance is a lot like the Soda Pop industry, isn't it?

Take a walk through the refreshment aisle of your local supermarket and just look around. You will see Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke, Diet Cherry Coke, Coke in 8 oz. glass bottles, 16 oz. and 24 oz. plastic bottles, 12 oz cans in 12 packs and 24 packs, one liter bottles and two liter bottles. And lets not forget those awkward 8 oz. cans. Have you ever noticed how the smaller the container, the more expensive the product seems to be? And I haven't even talked about Pepsi, Mountain Dew (regular, diet and EXTREME), RC and Diet Rite, plus the ubiquitous 3 liter barrel of house brand soda for 89 cents per bottle.

Next, check out 7-Eleven. There you will find an endcap display of Coke products for $1.89 per 2 liter bottle right next to a Pepsi display for 99 cents per bottle. Turn around and look in the refrigerator case. There is a 20 oz. bottle of Pepsi for $1.59 and a 1 liter bottle for $1.69. (For those of you who are metrically challenged, 1 liter is a little more than 33 oz.) Of course, you can get a 44 oz. Super Big Gulp for around $1.39 (refills are 99 cents each.)

Now, how much do you think it costs to make these drinks? I would bet that it costs more for the packaging than it does for the water, fizz, caramel coloring, natural (and unnatural) flavoring and high fructose corn syrup (or aspartame for the diet variety.) Any way you slice it, it costs mere pennies to make this stuff and people part with a lot more money than it costs every single day and they do so quite cheerfully.

What does this have to do with health insurance? Look at the variety of types of health insurance available. My company just went through a torturous process of picking insurance and if you have not been involved in something like that, believe me when I tell you there is a mind-numbing array of choices within carriers and between carriers. What's the end result? That's right: you get health care. What's the big difference between all of those plans? Cost. Pure and simple. It is the difference between what YOU pay for out of pocket and what SOMEONE ELSE pays for out of their pocket.

I read a piece today on the web about the price of health insurance going up to cover items mandated as of September 23, 2010. Some of the comments after the article were similar to this: "You people can't stand to see a few dollars of your monthly pay go out to help children with pre-existing conditions get health care, can you?"

Well, isn't that precious? Throw out the "C" word and make everyone feel guilty. Except, now, your 25 year old daughter living at home, maybe with a child or two of her own, may have to be covered on your insurance. Who pays for that? And who wants to think that any person with pre-existing conditions shouldn't be able to have their maladies remedied? How are the greedy insurance companies going to be able pay for all of this newly mandated coverage without raising premiums?

(Funny how many of the same people that want businesses to make no profit and 'give back' to the community, somehow want their retirement fund to be invested in these very same companies and to make double digit returns each year. Sorry, Charlie, it doesn't work that way.)

For another aspect, let's look at value for a moment. Take colas. Sure, there is a difference in taste. Coke tastes different from Pepsi. Pepsi and Diet Pepsi have nothing in common, taste-wise, just like Coke and Diet Coke. I drink Diet Pepsi, but honestly, I prefer the taste of that 25 cents per can Sam's Diet Cola you get at Wal-Mart. Seriously. My point is that neither Pepsi nor Coke tastes five times better than Sam's Cola, yet we pay five times as much every day and these guys spend a pant-load of money on adverts and promotions to keep us coming back for more and guess what? It works!

When you go to the baseball game, or the concert at the big venue, you are going to pay over $4.00 for a watered down, ice-laden cup of name-brand soda. You may cringe, but you pay the money (don't get me started on their $11 beers.) Is it any better tasting? Are you any thirstier? What makes you spend the money and more important, why aren't you saving that money to pay for your health care? After all, isn't your health the most important thing to you and your children?

Health care costs are rising every year. Most doctors are making less money. Don't get me wrong. They still make decent money, but less of it than in years past. Come to think of it, the docs that do elective procedures... you know, the kind that insurance does not pay for, seem to be doing the best, AND the price for their procedures are generally trending downward.

Show me ANY person in business, from the guy that mows yards in his neighborhood to the president of Exxon Mobil, who doesn't strive for greater profitability and higher income, and I will show you a businessperson that will soon be looking for another career. Insurance company executives are no different.

"Wrap it up, OK?"

OK. Here's the moral of the story as I see it. When a consumer is presented with an array of choices, he or she will make a buying decision based upon how much they want the product and how much they are willing to spend. If it costs them next to nothing, they will likely choose the most expensive one, but not necessarily the best one. If Pepsi was free, who wouldn't stock up on it? Like sodas, there are good values and bad values in health insurance, but there are enough buyers to make all of the choices viable and you won't see a Coke executive or an Blue Cross executive worrying about where his next meal is coming from.

When it comes to health care, every consumer should have some skin in the game and NONE of it should be free to anyone. FREE HAS NO VALUE. We can do better.

Campaign Disclosure Laws - Good or Evil?

2010-09-13T10:37:00.003-04:00

I have always been a proponent of transparency in government. I even crafted an elaborate scheme about 10 years where each political ad would have a 6 digit tag line for radio and TV or a code at the bottom of each printed piece. You could then go to www.fec.gov/open, type in that number and find out who or what paid for the ad. If there were other entities involved, you could drill down until you found the true source. I sent this suggestion to all of my federal, state and local representatives. I got NO response from any of them.

So what changed my mind about disclosure?

Militant liberals, that's what. In case after case, left wing loons (I love calling them the same thing that they call us) in California have used the state's FOIA law to find out who is contributing to political races. A prominent businessperson could donate $5,000 to a candidate for Attorney General because he agrees with the candidate's stance on business and regulation. An abortion rights fringe group could find out (through disclosure) that Mr. Big gave $5,000 to the candidate who, by the way, happens to be against repealing the ban on public funding for abortions. Suddenly there is a ad campaign underway lambasting Mr. Big as being against women's rights and suggesting that people boycott his department stores. Sound familiar? Is that fair play?

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

So, as E. J. Dionne so eloquently and passionately discusses in his piece in the Washington Post today, by opposing the bill to 'fix' campaign finance reform after the Supreme Court gutted it in the Citizens United case earlier this year, Republicans again look to become the bad guys.

Dems want to squash the flow of political money, but money is like the Mississippi River... you can kinda, sorta direct the flow, but you cannot stop it. Also, remember YOU CANNOT HAVE GIVERS WITHOUT TAKERS, and I doubt that Congresspersons could ever stop taking money.

So, just like every argument worth discussing in Washington, DC, things are not as they initially appear. Just remember that when you see a politician's lips moving.

What our best and brightest are doing to protect society

2010-09-02T08:53:00.002-04:00

I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday describing how lawyers "concerned about consumer protection" are scouring the shelves and racks of retailers looking for expired patent numbers printed or embossed into products. If the attorneys find an expired patent number, they are filing suit against these companies in the name of the federal government for violating a law that until recently was seen as about as serious as jaywalking.

A recent ruling, however, stated that they could sue for a $500 fine for each violation and each violation could be interpreted as every box, package or item with the bad number. Additionally, the interesting part is that the lawyers split the spoils with the government, so there is no impetus for the feds to pull back on this extortion.

Is this all that these scumbags have to do? Read the article and see the self-aggrandizement dripping from these attorney's statements.

To me this law breaking is about as serious as a company having the wrong ZIP code or area code on their product information.

This is a perfect example of corporate blood-sucking and should be abolished and the affected corporations should be able to sue these law firms for harassment. Plus, the lawyers should be so embarrassed at their triviality that they quit their profession in abject shame.

Don't blame the pushers, blame the crackheads???

2010-08-26T22:39:00.004-04:00

I am having a debate with a new found friend on Twitter @REcrab. We met through @tom_peters, who really knows how to spark debate.

Earlier today I tweeted: "If the Gov't investigates BP 2 the Nth degree 'to make sure it doesn't happen again', when can we do the same to Congress abt fin. meltdown?" Tyler tweets back "Congress caused the meltdown?Thought we did not like regs. You got what you get with no regs. " and off to the races we went.

My contention is that Congress' intention to create 'affordable' housing for all Americans basically unlocked the bank vaults and left the doors unattended. Everyone wants to prosecute the bankers and brokers but the politicians and policy makers get away scott free and NO ONE in Washington loses their job.

Let me make myself very clear! I have virtually NO respect for bankers. Absolutely NO respect for credit card companies and the same goes for brokers and mortgage sharks. These guys are responsible for the bastardization of the system, but look at it this way: if you leave bags of money on the curb by the street, don't exclusively blame the people that come along and walked off with the money. The doofus who left the money out there carries 51% of the blame IMHO.

One lesson that I have learned after 30 years in business is that banks DO NOT lend money to people that don't have any money. That rule is carved in stone. They will lend OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY if they have it to lend and if the other people will guarantee to hold the bank harmless.

Sure, there are always going to be swindlers when there is a butt-load of money sloshing around. You can regulate as much as you want, but when you are being told to lend money to people that are NOT creditworthy, bad things are going to happen. Most people are 'not creditworthy' for a reason. They are either too poor or too irresponsible. Nothing wrong with being poor. Irresponsible is tough to fix, though and luck has nothing to do with anything.

Bottom line? For the evil financiers: Hang 'em high, but be sure to leave room on the yardarm for the politicians.

Settle the score on November 2.

Senate wants to lend $30 Billion (US) to Small Businesses

2010-07-23T23:20:00.003-04:00

From Bloomberg Businessweek Senate Clears Way for $30 Billion Small Business Fund

So let me get this straight. Let's say I have a small business, I am in dire straights, cashflow-wise, and I need money. My credit cards are maxed, uncashed paychecks sit in my safe and my three employees leave early on payday to make sure their check gets in the bank that day.

I am going to go down to my local hometown bank, sit down in front of the friendly loan officer and say "Hi. I would like to borrow $100,000 dollars from that cool $30,000,000,000 fund that the government has set up for small businesses that need funding." How is that conversation going to go?

I have a house that is still 20 years from being paid off and it has a second mortgage based on its inflated valuation in 2007, so I have -$45,000 in equity. I am the guy that needs the money. Anybody out there think I am going to get it? Especially if I am a healthy white male? (No, not a white whale... a white male.)

Memo to entrepreneurs: BANKS DON'T LEND MONEY TO PEOPLE THAT DON'T HAVE ANY. Maybe if you are in an aggrieved group you might get a little walking around money, but serious cash? Uh-uh. McFly!!! Who are you kidding?

The best bet is not to get in the position of needing fresh money just to survive. The sad fact is that if you are there, it is probably too late. The sadder fact is that I have been there and have been able to claw my way back from the precipice. It was a long, long journey and I got some help along the way but it WAS NOT from a bank. Banks have no sense of humor and very little compassion.

Yes, some businesses need cash to fund proper investments, but right now, most savvy businesspersons are sitting by and waiting to see how desperate 2011 will be (especially if the 2010 election leaves things status quo.) Hiring is not fun and firing is even less fun, so most businesses are doing with what they have.

I don't know about your business, but my business is "Stimulus-free since January 2009"

My thoughts on Flipboard

2010-07-23T07:35:00.004-04:00

First it was Robert Scoble late last week announcing an earth shattering product that will change the way social media and the internet were viewed (but he was under NDA so he couldn't elucidate). Then the tweets started rolling around 8pm on Tuesday about this new thing called Flipboard. I googled flipboard and found numerous references to a prop for skatr boyz and a link or two about the real company, flipboard.com. Here is the first video that most of us saw on the product:

The problem was, it would not be released until midnight California time. I am on the east coast and I wasn't about to wait until 3am to download a cool program, so off to bed I went.

By 7am the next morning, the internets were all a-twitter (yes, pun was severely intended.) I found a few posts about @flipboard so I clicked on over and followed them. I was #105. Cool. I then went to iTunes and loaded the app on my iPad. Cooler. Then I tried to set up my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Not so cool. Seems that Flipboard had been "Scobled". This is a phenomenon where the aforementioned Robert Scoble hypes (the word hype being used in a good way) a product and then when it is released, it explodes.

This Scolbe phenomenon most recently occurred with a product called Soluto which got severely hammered after Robert mentioned it and it took about a week for them to recover. I even sent the guys at Soluto a tweet and they replied:

By the end of the day they had over 6,000 followers (remember, it only runs on an iPad, not the iPhone or iPod Touch.)

So last night, I finally got my Twitter and Facebook accounts hooked up with Flipboard and it really is revolutionary. It expands links in your Twitter and Facebook feeds, presenting them in a magazine format so that you don't have to click through on everything that you want to read a little more about. Normally I end up just not clicking because I don't want a million open windows. Flipbook willl show you 3 or 4 on a page with the first few paragraphs, then it is quick to open the full linked page if you touch the article. Simply touch "close" and you are back to your flippage.

This is not intended to be a review since I have only played with it for an hour or so, but I have a few initial observations.

In its current form, it will not supplant Tweetdeck or other aggregators. If Tweetdeck is the crawl at the bottom of FoxNews or CNN, then Flipbook is the NatGeo channel. Will Flipbook try to pull you back with a new feature called FlipFeed? Probably, but my experience is that nothing ever does everything right. (And you can quote me on that.)

Another thing is that it is slow to update right now and I did not see a refresh button.

Last thing: lists. Supposedly it has a way to use Twitter lists. I have not tried this, but all of my lists are in Tweetdeck, so they need to be able to pull these in as well.

All in all, it looks like a GREAT product. I just can't wait until they start peppering the pages with contextual ads and start selling off the intel they derive by crawling everyone's Twitter and Facebook feeds. And there is your asterisk...

VDI, Windows and what will Microsoft do?

2010-07-14T23:50:00.004-04:00

VDI, for those of you who don't know, is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Generally speaking, VDI is the technology where you set up multiple virtual PCs on a host computer. What you end up with is a server running VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, or some other hypervisor with a number of PC images running on top of the hypervisor. Each image is then controlled by a client device, be it a thin client, re-purposed PC running special software, or some other equipment. Contrast this with Terminal Services (now called Remote Desktop Services) which is where a server multitasks and allows multiple users to share the same server simultaneously.

VDI hosts multiple instances (Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Linux, Windows 98) running at the same time whereas RDS allows Windows Server 2008R2 to be run by 20-30 or more users at the same time.

Now that we have all of that established, there are a bunch of cool technologies out, or coming out that support VDI in a variety of ways. Today I saw a demonstration of Zenith Infotech's new SmartStyle product. Very nice and, I believe, well designed. There is also Kaviza, Stratus, NComputing and many others. They all provide (in varying degrees) the total infrastructure, grid, fabric and management features to allow virtual PCs to operate.

What is missing? Windows is what is missing. Like buying a bunch of parts and assembling your own PC, a virtual PC isn't going to do you any good without an operating system. Of course, you could install some form of Linux, like Ubuntu which is free, but realistically, Windows is what most business users need. (Don't even think about putting Mac software on one.)

How do you purchase Microsoft Windows to install on a VPC? I don't want to bore you with the few acceptable ways, but suffice it to say that the Regent of Redmond doesn't seem to really embrace VDI at this point. They recently came out with a VDA product (described here) that costs $100/VPC/year. Really? Who wants to put $500 toward Windows over a 5 year period?

When you buy a new PC you get OEM software. This software is licensed for new equipment only and the license expires when the computer is retired. The license for Windows 7 Professional costs around $130 (and I am sure, significantly less for the likes of Dell, HP and other large OEMs.)

What would be wrong with licensing a version of Windows (say, Windows 7 Professional) for an organization to be used virtually and it would be a perpetual license until the O/S is retired? Or you could purchase Software Assurance with the license to keep it up to date if you are so inclined. Let's get real.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer gave the cloud a huge bear hug in his opening remarks at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010 on Monday. If Microsoft is going to embrace the cloud, then let users put their software into the cloud without getting soaked.

Until MS comes up with practical and realistic VDI licensing for their desktop operating systems (one of their three cash cows along with Office and Server O/S), the small print will read *not serious about the cloud.

Who Inherits One's Digtritus?

2010-07-09T09:37:00.006-04:00

Just saw a tweet from Michael Arrington and it made me think. When you or I or someone we care about dies, where does our digital legacy go? This Arrington article speaks mainly about a new company, 1000Memories that provides a place for people to memorialize someone that will remain in place 'forever'. That is a great idea... a common gathering place for memories and recollections. A sort of "Tombstonebook" where The Wall has no participation from the subject. (Now that I think about it, I wonder what Facebook's policy is on the death of a FB participant?)

What his article really made me think about though, is the other stuff that comprises one's digital life. Word documents, spreadsheets, online email accounts, Outlook pst file, digital photos, digital movies, accounts and passwords, virtual money in Second Life or FarmVille.

Think about it. Most of this stuff is now virtual. I mean, it is not tangible, but is it any less valuable?

When my grandmother died 20-some years ago I somehow ended up with a tattered paper bag full of a few photos and a bunch of old negatives. These were old Brownie and 620 black and white negatives, scratched up and piled together. Back when I used to do darkroom work, I made some contact sheets to see what was on these negatives. It was mainly blurry pictures of old friends and family. I never did a full catalog, but I still have the bag.

When my wife's father died several years ago, we ended up with some of his 35mm slides, some negatives and some 16mm home movies. We even ended up with an old Silvertone wire recorder and a collection of old recordings.

Here's the deal. I am the only person in the world that has access to and possession of these memories. If I do nothing with them, they really don't exist, do they?

Now think about today. We photograph and record EVERYTHING. Sure, some of it gets posted to YouTube but that is only a sliver of a fraction of what gets recorded. What about all of the gazillions of snapshot pictures that people take with a variety of cameras, phones, Flip cameras, etc.? They collect on computers, external hard drives, iPads, iPhones, SD cards, old CF cards, even Iomega ZIP drives (remember those???) We used to be frugal about pictures (I doubt that I have more than 20-30 photographs in existance that I took when I was a teen.) Now, since digital film is so cheap, we snap away.

Beyond photographs, movies and audio, what about our Evernote files, our Pulse Smartpen recordings, our NEAT scans, our MobileMe, our Dropbox, our JungleDisk and on and on? Do we know where it all is? Does anyone have our passwords to get to it? Does anyone even care?

I call this our digital detritus or digtritus (Pronunciation: \dij-trī-təs\). It is everywhere. It has become our footprint in the sands of time. Will that footprint be blown away in the next sandstorm or washed away with the next crashing wave? Or will it become solidified like a fossilized footprint in Pompeii, remaining forever for all to see? If you want it to live on, who will be responsible for deciding what is to be seen and not seen? Will it become public or remain private? Who actually gets to be the one to gain access in order to do the dividing?

Is there anyone out there that doesn't have something that is so private that they don't want anyone they know to see it? Conversely, would you want everything that you have squirrelled away in your digital world... all of your digtritus... to disappear upon your demise?

I do not know the answer to these questions, but I think that we need to discuss this with our attorney or our family members so it can be addressed in our Last Will and Testament before we pass on. It will be one less thing for families to argue and fight over after the death of a 'loved one' and may actually be a legacy to be proud of.

Independence Day thoughts on Immigration

2010-07-03T23:51:00.004-04:00

It seems that our President has brought immigration back into the national conversation by proposing "comprehensive immigration reform". What does comprehensive mean? All inclusive? Omnibus? Actually it is code for amnesty along with a bunch of other stuff thrown in to get votes which will never get enforced (except for the amnesty part.)

As a lifelong right-wing, but independent, thinker, I have an opinion on what would work to cure our immigration ills. (If you are a regular reader of The-Asterisk, you will already know that I have an opinion on just about any subject. If you want to know more, leave a comment at the end of this entry.)

My solution is fairly comprehensive, so let me give it a go.

The-Asterisk's Totally Awesome Comprehensive Immigration Reform Plan

1. Nationally sponsored identification card. Privacy nuts... get over it. The cat is out of the privacy bag. The barn door has been left open. It is water under the bridge. Enough metaphors? We are all identified seven ways from Sunday in this nation. If you want to buy cigarettes or alcohol or cash a check or use a credit card or get a bank account or vote (except in Atlanta), you need an ID. In Virginia we just got these sexy, new driver's licenses that have a clear oval window with the image embedded in the plastic. There is embossed lettering on it as well. 1D and 2D bar code on the back. Pretty tough to counterfeit.

Let the federal government specify minimum standards for these cards for all states. Within 5 years EVERYONE must have one. Everyone must carry one. If you are asked to show one and you cannot do it (or you don't have a valid Passport/Visa), or it is bogus, off you go until it is sorted out. Period. Again, get over it. Red and yellow, black and white, doesn't matter what color you are, guilty until proven innocent.

If you can remember your ID card number and the authority that requests your card can pull up that number, you should be OK if you match the picture and description.

Nothing in the Constitution give you the right to anonymity. In fact, you are required to be enumerated (counted and identified) every 10 years. This is nothing new.

2. Issue a temporary (cough) amnesty (cough) for one year for illegal alien and employer alike. There. I said it. Let's get real. We are not shipping 12 or 16 or 20 million people back to Mexico, England, Pakistan, Nicaragua or wherever the heck they came from. It ain't gonna happen. It isn't practical and it isn't possible and it would certainly push everyone back into the shadows if we tried (which we have proven that we will not do.)

During this one year period, anyone that is undocumented in this country (including expired visas, expired passports and border sneaks can come forward and get issued a new-style ID card if they provide their name, address, phone number and employer name. They also must declare their next of kin living in the US, their country of origin, ID number from country of origin and their address back home.

This ID card would also contain a FICA account number (SSN) for which employers must immediately begin collecting appropriate taxes and payroll deductions.

These people would henceforth be known as documented guest workers (DGWs).

After one year, anyone caught without an ID card and found to be undocumented will be flown home, courtesy of the US government. They will be biometrically identified before being sent back and if they reappear and get caught, they will be jailed for one year in Arizona under Sheriff Joe Arpaio's supervision before being sent back home again. For employers, after one year of grace, ALL employers will be spot checked and ID cards will be compared with employment records. Violators will be fined severely.

DOCUMENTATION DOES NOT EQUAL CITIZENSHIP.

3. Require all employers to observe relevant state and federal labor laws, including minimum wage. These now documented guest workers would be exempted from federal unemployment taxes (states could opt-in if they wish). If a guest worker loses his/her job, they will NOT be eligible for federal unemployment benefits. If they cannot find a replacement job within 6 months, they must leave the country. Employers must inform their state employment office if a DGW is released from work via an on-line mechanism which scans their ID card for verification. This info is immediately forwarded to the US Department of Labor.

Since DGWs and native-born Americans are now competing for jobs on a level playing field, if an able-bodied American refuses to take an available job within a specified radius that is then taken by a DGW, the American will lose his/her unemployment and other welfare benefits. State or contracted employment agencies will attempt to line up citizens for suitable jobs. If these jobs offers are refused by citizens after X number of offers, the citizen would lose their benefits

(The-Asterisk note: there is a dirty little secret that all 'dumb' welfare people are keenly aware of and that is, in MANY cases it makes more financial sense to stay unemployed than to take a low paying job. We must do something about this. Tax credits, sliding scale assistance and variable benefits shift the "living wage" responsibility away from employers, to tax payers. I do not like this, but at this point, we will need to suck it up just to get the bigger issues taken care of. Make it economically worth more for someone to get a job than to stay on the dole.)

4. Fix the interpretation of the 14th Amendment or amend the Constitution to state that non-citizens cannot give birth to a child which then become a United States citizen by virtue of being born within US borders. There should be NO anchor babies. Sorry. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution in order to ensure that slaves and their children would be ex post facto citizens of the US.

5. Citizenship. Yes, this one is the biggie. Being a DGW gives one absolutely no rights toward becoming a citizen. I don't care how long you have been in this country, working does not equal citizenship. Too bad. Actually, how many guest workers really want to become citizens? Has anyone asked? I am sure they would take it if offered and if they could retain citizenship from their native country. I am not an expert in what it takes to become a citizen, but I know that it is not that simple. I would let DGWs queue up for this privilege like everyone else and their date of eligibility would start when they got their ID card.

If I was totally in charge, I would add some requirements to becoming a citizen, like being required to be at least conversational in English. There is no reason that a modern day immigrant cannot learn to speak the language. If they cannot/will not, then sorry. Step aside. Next please!

Oh, and no multilingual ballots anymore. I mean, come on. If you cannot pick out a candidate from a list, select him/her and submit the ballot because you cannot speak English, then how much can you seriously understand about whom you are voting for?

6. Employment/benefits. This one won't sit well with my brethren on the right, but here goes. If a DGW has a job, he/she can stay. If they pay into FICA for the minimum number of months, they will be able to take some sort of benefit when they become eligible. I would change the benefits for some of the 'social' aspects of Social Security such as disability benefits going to their children. Here is the problem. We allow these individuals to come to our country to work as long as they are gainfully employed. While here, they are engaging with our economy, buying food, fuel, shelter, clothing, etc. This is good for the US. If they retire here, then they, by definition, are not employed. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, so if they retire or go on disability and no longer work, then the rest of us are paying for their non-work until they leave or die. I would, however, advocate for paying back over time what they put into the system with some interest, even if they are living back home. It is only fair.

7. Borders. Shut them down with extreme prejudice except at approved crossing areas. Put up a decent fence, leaving spaces open for animal migration. Station guards along the border and make it known that if you sneak across, you WILL be shot. It is that simple. I hate to say it, but after a few get shot and get sent back home, wounded, after trying to cross over, a lot fewer will try.

8. Reform the State Department. One reason that so many people enter this country illegally is that there are jobs available for them at a better wage than they can get at home, but they can ill afford to wait 10 or more years to get here legally. Fix the guest worker program. Don't let people in just so they can hang out in front of the Home Depot waiting for day labor, but if there is an employer that will certify that the applicant has a job waiting for him/her upon arrival and that the job will last at least six months, then that person should be able to take the job.

Remember, the job is being offered at the same rates for citizens and the only reason that an employer would go to the trouble to hire someone from outside of the country is that the local people either will not take the job, or they are useless at the job. Either way, this should effect the benefit eligibility for the citizen as well as clear the way for a DGW to take the job.

9. Logistics. This is about how it all works once a DGW is here and working. We usually assume that someone coming to this country to work is uneducated, Mexican and will do menial tasks. While that is certainly true in some cases, it is not for all. Even those that do construction work can make some serious money. There are also a lot of people that come here from all over the world to work who are skilled and highly educated. If they stay here long, they may want to bring their family over, or create a family here. This cannot be stopped.

If a DGW lives here, makes a certain amount of money and pays their taxes, they should be treated accordingly. I know that the argument can be made that the social safety net that has been constructed for the least among us is for our citizens, but lets be honest. Who is more of a burden on our society, someone that will not or cannot work, or someone that is doing a needed job (or jobs), pays taxes and needs some help? Our society is bettered by the fact that there are people that are willing to do jobs that "Americans are unwilling to do." This has value.

If an individual works and sends almost all of their money home and does not have money to pay for basic services, then that should be their problem. Base their benefits on W-2, not ability to pay at that moment.

10. Reform the H1B and other programs for highly educated immigrants. Having foreign students attend our universities and colleges is obviously good for the higher education industry. If they go home and take this learned skill back with them, it is usually a good thing (unless they are a privileged Muslim terrorist who hates America.) However, sometimes, the best and the brightest from outside the US can clog the programs at our best schools, disallowing citizens the opportunity to get a slot. If, after graduation, they all then go home or to other industrialized countries, then our nation loses because we will be spending our intellectual capital educating those that will not benefit us at all.

If there are jobs available in the US that can be rightfully filled by US university trained immigrants, then these people should be able to stay on in the US subject to the rules of the DGW program.

An argument could be made that a newly graduated architectural student from Bangalore would be much more willing to take a lower starting salary than a citizen would and this might be true, but if that person were to go back to India and work for a firm that does outsourcing work for the same firm that might have hired him, where does this put the citizen graduate? He/she doesn't even have a shot at the job. Every time that a protectionist measure is put into place, it usually causes a worse problem where you least expect it. The law of unintended consequences is not one to be taken lightly.

Conclusion. This is as comprehensive as I can get for now. I have hit what I think are the major points. I know that there will be little issues that could trip up the whole package, but we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If Congress tries to fix every problem before it happens and protect every special case with a carve-out, then we may as well just leave things as they are and shut up.

The final takeaway: We need guest workers. Let them in if we truly do not have citizens that will/can do the work. If they run out of work, they go home. Citizenship is a completely separate issue and should never be construed to have linkage. Voting should be protected to allow the privilege to only registered citizens and the new ID card would go a long way to making this possible. DGWs are contributing members of our society and should be treated as such, but remember, they are basically hired contractors. We should know it and they should know it as well.

Enough!

2010-06-27T21:54:00.004-04:00

I am currently reading the book "Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life" by John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund family. It is a very good book and comes highly recommended by Tom Peters, but lest you think this blog post is about the book, it is not...

It is a quick blurb about how much stuff is enough.

Last week, I had a small water line that feeds my refrigerator ice maker burst at my cabin. I was not there when it happened and it was about 4 days before it was discovered. Wow, does water ever seek its own level! First, it got on the wood floor, then under the wood floor, then under the tar paper over the subfloor and then when that was full, it just cascaded down walls and ducts into the basement where it repeated the scenario until it finally found a way to get outside.

Once it was discovered, we got the ServiceMaster people out there with blowers and dehumidifiers, and generally got most of the obvious water cleared out in about a day. But... the water between the tar paper and the subfloor was still there, and not visible. Thinking that it is going to dry by itself, is like thinking a sponge will dry inside of a ZipLock bag sitting in the hot sun. It just isn't going to happen. So, now we need to pull up the whole wood floor, including kitchen cabinets and the kitchen island which was built upon the floor.

OK. Premise is set. I am coming to the theme of this post: When it was time to move all of the stuff out of the cabinets so that we could proceed, I was struck by how much stuff had accumulated. Keep in mind, this is a cabin, not our main home. We had jars and bags and take-out food containers and things I hadn't seen in 10 years that was under stuff I hadn't seen in 5. I hate to throw out a perfectly good container. After all, it says it is Reusable. What good is reusable if you throw it away? And those jars, and grocery bags with handles, and gift bags and on and on. It all just gets pushed into cabinets, onto shelves and into closets.

I know that most of us have this situation. No matter how hard I try, it seems that I am always bringing something home that I just had to have and that I cannot even find a place to store it once I get it there.

I kind of feel bad about it, like it is a waste of money and in many ways it is a waste of money. But, by the same token, buying take-out, picking up a new widget from Target or ordering one more electronic gadget is my contribution to a robust American and global economy.

I am not advocating spending every dollar you make on random stuff in order to help the economy, but if you are fortunate enough to have worked long enough to achieve a comfortable financial existence, it makes little sense to save it all and live like Ebenezer Scrooge. Our local, state, national and global economy is intricately entwined. As we have seen over the past two years, when one section of the economy hiccups, another section feels it. Or when another section sneezes, we all get Swine Flu!

Everyone in the economy suffers in their own unique way when people or businesses or governments modify their spending habits. And like rush hour traffic, things in the economy usually run at 60 mph or they come to a complete stop. It is hard to achieve and maintain a happy medium. So, when things get tough, it would smooth out the peaks and valleys if everyone would moderate their spending and lending, and not just stop their activities altogether.

As for my stuff, I am trying to de-clutter and stop collecting as much, but it is going to require a life-changing experience on my part to get past this one. And as for Mr. Bogle's documented excesses, I still have a long, long way to go before I have to say Enough!

Blinded by "Settled" Science

2010-06-10T08:04:00.004-04:00

Headline in today's local paper "BP's rosy spill plan vs. the grim reality" reflects a feeling that I have had for a number of years. It talks about how BP said they could suck up most of the 20 million barrels of oil, but the oil is now covering over 3,300 square miles. About how the blowout would have "no adverse impact" on marine animals, but it obviously has. And about how the blowout site was too far offshore to necessitate shore cleanup concerns, but the reality is that the currents are spreading the oil to the shores to the north and east as well as potentially to the eastern coast of the US.

Please note that this is not a BP bashing post. There is enough of that from other bloggers and from the White House. This is a post about 'settled science'.

Don't get me wrong. I love science. I am constantly amazed at the new products and services we get every day because of advances in science. But the untold secret is the fact that for every advance, there are huge numbers of failures. When you get right down to it, science is the art of persistent, targeted guessing. Did I just say what I just said? Science is an art? Of course it is. Math is more of a science than science is itself.

So when scientists say with certainty that we are having global climate change because of human-caused reasons, I have doubts. When anyone predicts anything, I have severe doubts. Heck, we can barely explain why things that have already happened have occurred. And if politicians and activists want us to commit enormous sums of money and time toward a prediction based upon 'settled science' when related professionals cannot even reliably predict ocean currents in the Gulf over a six week period, I am skeptical. Very skeptical.

Bring up CNBC or Fox Business Channel and watch the programs where four pundits sit around and talk about stocks and investments. They will be no consensus by more than two people on any point raised. Listen to the talking heads about the results of this election or that. What caused the result and what does that portend for the next election? Theories abound, but no one really knows.

Sure, a blind squirrel will occasionally find a nut. And when a pundit or politician or scientist gets something right, they are hailed as a genius and the 'go-to guy' on that subject, but does that person ever repeat their prognostificatorial prowress? Not usually. There are people on political talk shows that, as consultants, have one win and ten losses under their belt and they are still dragged on-screen for their opinion as if it really matters. What really matters is quantity, not quantity.

Bottom line: science is experimentation and experimentation is educated guessing. When we rely on science to fix something that has never occurred (an oil well blowout at an ocean depth of one mile) we are going to get experiments which means that we will get more failures than successes. BUT... next time it happens, we will be ready.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

2010-06-01T21:23:00.000-04:00

With apologies to Joni Mitchell. I am sure that someone else has used this metaphor before, but I haven't seen it, so I am going to claim it as original thought...

While cruising at 38,000 feet on my way to the Kaseya Connect User Conference in Las Vegas, I am looking out at beautiful, fluffy clouds. I don't know if they are Cumulus, Nimbus, Cirrus or a combination thereof. They just look pretty and innocent. From the ground however, it could be a whole different story. It might be a thunderstorm dumping unneeded rain on saturated ground causing flooding and destruction, or it could be the same storm dumping millions of gallons of water onto parched crops, saving thousands of people from thirst and starvation.

The clouds could also be an annoying drizzle on a family picnic, or they could be providing blessed shade from a blistering sun.

My point is that as we move into cloud computing, every business and every IT service provider will see the same thing in myriad ways; some good, some bad, some game changing, and some merely an annoyance.

Torturing the metaphor just a bit more, as our 737 makes the transition from clear air into the clouds, there can be some turbulence. But an experienced pilot can navigate the aircraft in a way that can minimize discomfort and can sometimes miss the chop all together.

I want to be that pilot for my clients. As the path to their destination forces them to move into the cloud, we will be there to help them to get in, get through and get past it without there being any rain on their parade.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Our future is partly to mostly cloudy

2010-05-31T00:35:00.001-04:00

From 35,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico.

Finally in the air after a weather delay in New Orleans, I am reflecting on the past three days of the 3rd quasi-annual SMB Migration IT Pro Conference. In addition to great food, great people and great times, I think we all were able to pick up new ideas about trials, tribulations and trends in the IT support business.

We IT Professionals are in the midst of a transformation from the MSP era to a new era. Many would call this new era the "cloud" era, but I think it is more than that. I might call it the "cloud-driven" era, but even that name doesn't fully describe what is beginning to happen. The cloud is really a catalyst, forcing us to take a new look at how we deliver (and bill for) services. A recurring theme of discussion, both on-stage and in the hallways, was how would the cloud change our businesses. While this is an important question from an existential point of view, my biggest point of ponderment (my new word) is how will the cloud affect my client's businesses?

Our clients, and people in general, are arriving at a stage of "IT Self-Actualization". Just like the point in other technological evolutions where individuals go from relying on others, to starting to make their own informed decisions about complex technology, the cloud makes it so easy to decide to start using XYZ service by going to www.xyz.com and signing up for a $300 per month solution that will do everything they need to manage their business. No expensive servers, no expensive SQL, no big bills from the IT guy to set it all up, right? Unfortunately (for the business owner) a sanity check is not included with that $300 monthly payment.

The questions should be obvious... What if the Internet is down at the office, will we still be able to work? How do I get my data pulled in from my existing, on-premise system? How do I get my data back should I choose to bail out? Can I have copies of my data periodically sent to me? What if XYZ.com goes belly up one weekend? What if their data center computers gets seized by the Feds and impounded? Do I need to go on?

Who is going to be able to provide them the needed sanity check? Me? Will they call me before they sign up (like they didn't do when they bought BlackBerrys for their entire sales department?) And if they do call before signing, how do I price my advisory service?

If they are already a Managed Services client, and they eliminate a server or two in the process, do we adjust our monthly fees to reflect that? If we do so, then we need to know if our cost of providing the kind of service they expect from us will actually decrease (and if it doesn't, then why should we reduce our monthly rate?)

Don't be fooled. This technology evolution is metastasizing. For example, I used my new iPad for the whole conference. I never used my notebook computer. I used the iPad for note taking, processing email, looking up references on the web, checking in for my return flight, etc. It is small, light and easy to carry around with great battery life. Couple this convenience with ubiquitous internet connectivity providing access to a killer app in the cloud, and who in their right mind wouldn't adopt it? And... it will be happening sooner rather than later.

Enough about MSPs. What about the IT support firm that is not even a managed services provider? Do they skip right over the MSP phase and transition directly to a cloud-centric model? That is a decision that I am glad I will not have to make...

So yes, we learned things from experienced peers that we didn't know and found out new ways to approach situations and issues that plague us all, PLUS we made new contacts and friends which should help us going forward. My biggest take-away is the required mental challenge to process all of this information.

For me, I feel like a conference is really successful if I come away with more questions than answers.

Mission accomplished.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Amend it, don't bend it

2010-05-25T02:08:00.000-04:00

This past week I received a 'fat envelope' in the mail. It was from the Cato Institute. I'm sure I am on their list because of my world-renowned blogging and tweeting abilities. So I ripped open the envelope expecting some talking points or such, but out fell a little pocket-sized copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

I have read both documents in the past, since they are both very short, just like my attention span (this little pocket edition with both documents is only 1/8" thick... compare that with the Obamacare bill which was over 4 reams of standard-sized paper.) I started thumbing through the booklet and I focused my attention on the amendments. Of course, the most famous amendments are the first ten, commonly referred to as the Bill of Rights but there have only been 17 more since the original ten.

I was really surprised by my realization that there have been very few amendments of substance. Most of the changes to the Constitution have been procedural. Let me explain.

First, a housekeeping item. I am NOT a Constitutional scholar, nor do I play one on TV. Our current president is a Constitutional Law Professor according to his statements and his C. V., but I never sat through one of his lectures, so I cannot vouch for him. Perhaps if I had sat through 20 years of his lectures (like he sat through Rev. Wright's sermons), I probably would be considered an expert, but I digress.

I can read, however, and most of the Constitution makes sense, even though it was mostly written almost 225 years ago.

Please note that when I say procedural, I mean that it changes the rules of the game, but doesn't fundamentally change the game, itself. This is important to my argument.

Allow me to run through Amendments 11-27 (you will like #27...) (By the way, the amendments are referred to by a Roman numeral, but I will use standard numbers for ease of reading.

11. The Eleventh Amendment is an odd one. It is procedural, in that it disallows the federal courts from hearing lawsuits brought against a state by another state, foreign country or by an individual. There are four broad exceptions carved out by the courts, but this one gets a P.

12. The Twelfth Amendment describes in excruciating detail how to vote for, and count votes for, President and Vice-President. Procedural.

13. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude. Passed in December after the end of the Civil War, it is definitely Substantial.

14. The Fourteenth Amendment is a rambling piece with five sections. It is Procedural in that its purpose was to ensure that freed slaves would be represented in Washington and that anyone born here would be a citizen. This would disallow freed slaves from being considered state-less, since they and their offspring were not previously considered citizens. The first Section is the most controversial and it does have the section that currently allows citizenship to be automatically bestowed upon "anchor babies" of parents who are NOT citizens. The original intent of that section seems clear to me. The-Asterisk score? .9 P and .1 S.

15. The Fifteenth Amendment ensured the rights of all people to vote regardless of race, color or prior condition of servitude. After abolishing slavery, it was implied that former slaves would have the right to vote, so this Amendment codified it. I give this one a P since it just clears up the intent of the Thirteenth.

16. The Sixteenth Amendment touches every one of us every day. It is the Amendment that allowed income taxes to be collected. Previously the federal government gained revenue from tariffs, surcharges and taxes on goods. With this new tax, they took just 1% from the most affluent Americans. Less than 100 years later, look how far we have progressed. Perhaps that is why they say the tax code is progressive. This Amendment is absolutely Substantial.

17. The Seventeenth Amendment directed that Senators are to be elected by popular vote, and also directs how vacancies will be filled. Prior to 1913 when this amendment was passed, Senators were appointed by the State legislators. With this amendment, the state governments (remember that the United States was originally a federal coalition of nation-states) lost all representation in Washington DC. I give this Amendment a P since it really is a matter of changing the rules without substantially changing the game (unless you are a state...)

18. This one is a two-fer. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1919 and was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty First Amendment. As most know, this amendment abolished the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors along with the importation and exportation thereof. So, we couldn't make it, sell it, transport it, nor could we buy it from or sell it to other nations. These two amendment are very Substantial.

19. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. Actually, it said that rights to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Substantial.

20. The Twentieth Amendment has six sections. Basically, it moves the end of the Presidential term to noon on January 20 following the election. It also stipulates when Congress assembles and addresses various issues on succession and qualifying a President and Vice-President. We almost road-tested this one in 2000 with Bush v. Gore. Procedural.

21. See 18.

22. The Twenty Second Amendment limits a President to two terms in office. Procedural.

23. The Twenty Third Amendment gave the voters that live in the District of Columbia a voice in the Presidential election by apportioning electors to them. Procedural

24. The Twenty Fourth Amendment forbade denial of the right to vote because a voter could not or would not pay any Poll Tax. Procedural.

25. The Twenty Fifth Amendment further clarifies the terms of succession of the President by the Vice-President because of death or incapacitation. Procedural.

26. The Twenty Sixth Amendment gives the right to vote to citizens 18 years old and older. Substantial.

27. The Twenty Seventh Amendment should have been the Eleventh Amendment, but it was never ratified. So, in 1992, this amendment which states that no law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of Representatives shall have intervened. Procedural.

So... what is The-Asterisk's score for the 17 constitutional amendments since the Bill of Rights were ratified? 4.1 Substantial, 10.9 Procedural and 2 were a wash. AND, of the 4.1 that were Substantial, 2.1 had to do with allowing more citizens to vote.

Bottom line: after 221 years of existence, there has been only three significant, substantial changes to the basic law of the United States; the end of slavery, the introduction of the income tax and the prohibition of liquor (and this one was repealed.)

I think this fact proves that as a whole, our nation is pretty happy with the Constitution as written, but even further, proves that significant change (no matter how fair-minded the change) is hard to adopt. We can all point to silly laws and absurd bending of the Commerce Clause to show how ridiculous our legislators can be to get around the spirit and the letter of the pesky Constitution. So, why can't we just stick to the Constitution as intended, or change it if it is really needed? Theoretically, we can.

Theoretical is messy, however. Just ask Dr. Rand Paul, GOP candidate for Senate in KY. He had to pick the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the example to make his point about federal intervention into private business, didn't he? He states that the part where the law forces a totally private business to allow any person to interact with it is wrong. He is either crazy or crazy like a fox. The left brands him a racist and the right steps back a few paces, but his message spreads like a virus across the fruited plain. (Note: Dr. Paul will learn quickly to answer questions with non-answers and to obfuscate those answers he must give. His candor was great while it lasted.)

That law makes my point... judges (and nice people in general) want to do what is 'right' in spite of the letter of the law. They make this ruling and that ruling, bending and twisting the words just a little bit each time "because it is the right thing to do."

But then one day you look at 'settled law' and instead of it being like a big, fully formed tree, you have a bonsai... twisted, shaped, contorted and clipped. Imminently pruned and roots restricted to a tiny container, this is the best way to control the scope and direction of its growth.

Lawyers (and most legislators are lawyers) have funny ways of looking at situations. On one hand, a lawyer will say that current law is insufficient or that his case was never imagined when the law was written, so the law needs 'interpretation'. On the other hand, they will defend axe murderers, child rapists and terrorists because these people deserve their day in court "as it is written", regardless of the effect on the greater society. So what, if Osama Bin Laden gets acquitted... that's the law, right?

I bet you are all thinking... "OK. Nice history lesson and commentary, but get to the point" So, here is my point:

In almost 225 years there has been only two fundamental changes to the game (the Constitution); abolition of slavery and allowing the income tax. That's it. Every other move away from the rather obvious intents of our Founding Fathers has been through unchallenged laws or through Supreme Court and Federal Court rulings or interpretations. The left always says that the Constitution is a living, breathing document, and it is. It is just that the framers baked in a way to modify the Constitution and it is called the Amendment process. As we have seen, rarely does a substantive amendment take place. Why not? I believe it is that Americans largely subscribe to a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.

And obviously, it ain't broke.

So, if we feel that we have outgrown aspects of the Constitution or that the Constitution does not address certain things, then FIX IT THE RIGHT WAY. If a majority of Senators and Representatives believe that it is the Federal Government's role to create an education framework and to fund pre-school, primary, secondary and college-level education, then FIX IT THE RIGHT WAY. If a majority feel that the Federal Government should provide health care to all citizens and illegal aliens, then FIX IT THE RIGHT WAY.

The framers set the bar pretty high for a Constitutional Amendment (two-thirds of both Houses or conventions in two-thirds of states to propose, and three-fourths of either to ratify), but in over 200 years, only four substantial proposals have been ratified into the Constitution and I think I know why. Not enough people want the majority of the laws we currently have on the books and the politicians are afraid of the result they would get if they did the right thing and asked to change the Constitution. Like the saying goes, it is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

My mantra for our Constitution:

Amend it, don't bend it.

Looking for a job?

2010-05-22T09:33:00.003-04:00

I saw a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the 2010 graduates. Today, the Letters to the Editor had several lamentations about this perennial subject and it got me thinking...

Back when we were rolling out of the caves and becoming the Homo Sapiens that we are today, each and every person had to be an independent player. Sure, there was the tribe, but if you wandered far out of camp you were on your own.

Even as recently as 100 years ago, society was a thin neglegee compared to the oppressive woolen Snuggee it is today. Without rapid communications and transportation, unless you were smack in the middle of a town or city, you had to take care of yourself. There was no one to call to come and bail you out of your situation. Was it tough? You bet. Would I want to live back then? Not so much.

Then we got comfortable after World War II. Plenty of jobs, GI Bill, education galore, big companies, big pensions, big unions, credit cards, cell phones, safety net, Medicare, Social Security, SWAT teams, government help everywhere.

Then we had the recession of 2008. Companies shedded jobs that will NEVER return. Things have changed. People are having to make their own way, more and more. Micro-businesses are springing up like desert flowers after a spring rain. Technology is allowing this to happen in an unprecedented manner and those that are willing to seize the moment are finding a new way.

But, what to do with the uninspired... the ones either not willing to find a new way, or the ones not able to find a new way? To me, that is the big question of the second decade of the new millinneum. In prior times, you could just live on the farm and eeke out an existance, or hunt and live the life of a hermit, but in today's times with our huge societies and neighborhoods and lack of tribes, what do you do?

I don't diegn to say that I have the answer, but I can already see what is NOT the answer. The boundary of permanent unemployment benefits beyond 99 weeks is already being tested. Are these 10 Million citizens the new Welfare Queens of the 10's? Where will it end?

It is easy for me to say "Cut off benefits." But I have a job and I employ 6 others. On the other hand, running that business and innovating to keep that business relevant takes most of my energy. Is it fair for me and other workers to subsidize those that are unwilling to adapt to the new situation and who adopt a permanent woe-is-me stance?

We scoff at the angst in Greece and the flames in Bangkok, but like a heroin addict going through withdrawl symptoms, when the US does what we all know it has to do... well, this nation ain't seen nothin' yet.

I got my 3G iPad, now what's next?

2010-04-30T22:17:00.004-04:00

While I am getting used to using my new 3G iPad, I am thinking ahead to what might be next... actually, what I want to be next.

I was struck by three events that happened this week. HP purchased Palm for a cool $1.2 Billion, Microsoft dropped its Courier (two screen foldable) tablet project and HP has also dropped its plans for a slate device based on Windows 7. Things are definitely happening in the mobile computing space, and happening quickly.

As I have tweeted and talked about before and Dave Sobel has actually demonstrated, the iPad can be used as a kind of portable thin client. I don't yet know how well it works, but any kind of application like this is a good thing for business computing.

We keep hearing over and over about cloud this and cloud that. We also hear about how Apple is the devil incarnate to application developers who are stymied by Apple's restrictions on what can be developed for the iPad and iPhone. And do not forget Steve Jobs' obsession with keeping Flash out of his world, which renders a whole slew of websites unviewable on the iPlatform. Are we all being forced to march lockstep to Apple's drumbeat like the grey, proleteriat workers in the prescient 1984 Mac commercial while we wait, wistfully, for Android to break Cupertino's steely grip?

What's a mother to do?

Improvise!

Here's what I am thinking. Microsoft needs to develop, or mature, the ability for its Windows 7 and its Remote Desktop Services (nee Terminal Services) to be a host to Very Thin Clients (yes, I am officially coining that phrase, the VTC.) The VTC refers to the actual thickness of the thin client, not the size of the operating system, although the O/S will need to be thin as well.

I have read recently about Microsoft's work with client-centric and host-centric RDS experiences, along with other advanced controls. You can read more about these efforts here on the RDS TechNet blog. To explain this in layman's terms, some remote access connections put a computational burden on the host (the Windows 7 PC or the Terminal Server*) and some put it on the client (the PC running RDP, the thin client or the web browser.) One burdens the host, while one gives the client a workout. What is the biggest problem with most portable computing products? Battery life and heat. Too little of the former and too much of the latter. Putting the load back on the host can take the strain off of the client and use less bandwidth.

Microsoft's first goal as a publicly traded company is to make lots of money and the way they do it best is through their cash cows. Specifically, Microsoft Office, the Windows PC operating systems and Windows Server operating systems. So, by identifying that which Microsoft is most interested in sustaining is where I think I stand the best chance of getting them to create what I desire. I want to be on the first "I invented Windows 8" commercial, so here is what I propose:

As stated earlier, Microsoft should work diligently to make a Windows 8 PC with the built-in ability to act as a host-centric RDS server. They could do the same with Terminal Services* on their latest server platform. They could even offer a selection that would tweak the RDS role to stipulate either host-centric or client-centric hosting, based on which RDS client would be accessing it. On the client side, Microsoft would create a version of Windows Phone 7 Series (oh, how I hate that name) that had a very tightly written RDP client built in, on a platform that looks hauntingly like an iPad. It would need multitouch, intelligent gesturing and, of course, the ubiquitous 'squeeze' zoom feature. In fact, they already have most of the UI in development.

If Microsoft would work with some of the thousands of companies that they have acquired over the past decade, along with video and processor chip manufacturers, it is not a stretch to imagine a VTC with a robust RDP client, custom designed to work with the silicon in the VTC to provide a nearly there remote experience.

What does Microsoft gain? First, they gain street cred because they instantly provide a lightweight, portable platform while shifting the heavy lifting to the host. It validates the Windows 7/2008R2 (or the next generation) codebase as a viable option for VTC computing. It also helps save Microsoft's cash cows by allowing users to access them as needed without lugging around a bulky notebook. It fits in well with their VDI strategy (Strategy? Nevermind. Subject for another post.) It could even usher in a new type of service where users can park a synthetic PC up in the cloud, or rent one as needed, while their profile is kept somewhere else secure, then merge it with the SynPC to create an instant-on virtual Windows 7 app... all on a VTC platform.

Oh, and DO NOT FORGET ABOUT REMOTEAPP. This is probably the most overlooked part of the RDS feature set. "There's an app for that" would instantly gain access to 10's of thousands of Windows apps. Instead of running a stripped down version of your favorite desktop application natively on the VTC or having no access to your custom designed Line of Business application, just make a RemoteApp out of it and put the icon on your VTC. Now, you just tap your Shipping and Receiving icon and you are connected back to the home office without even opening a new desktop. Nice...

Most of this capability (except for the RDP software and the chipsets) is already out there, available, in the Microsoft universe. Who knows, their skunkworks probably has some of the special sauce in prototype as we speak.

For the record, I am NOT a Microsoft fanboy. I am just an IT professional who realizes that Windows is in the DNA of almost every business in the US and in most of the rest of the world as well. We are not all just going to throw it all out, embrace web-based applications built on Linux and then run them all on Apples, Ubuntu and Android. Maybe it won't be Microsoft who figures it out. In fact, it would surprise me for Microsoft to actually bring to market something like this within the next several years. They just don't move fast enough. The game will be decided in two years... Are they in?

While this post focuses on Microsoft fueling the development of the VTC, it really doesn't have to be their product. If they could swallow their pride and work with VTC devs (HTC, HP, WePad, Nokia, Motorola, etc.) to integrate the chipset and allow the app to be acquired inexpensively (somewhere between FREE and $9.99) on whatever platform a customer chooses, they couldn't lose. They would retain the corporate space, project presence into the mobile space and show a vitality that they are sorely lacking.

Playing around with an iPad is cool, but if you could have all of the features of an iPad or Android PLUS an option to remotely access your PC, Terminal Server or SynPC as if it is running on the VTC... I would call that a game changer.

* I still want to call the Terminal Server a Terminal Server. RD Server just doesn't roll off of the tongue. Sorry.

Introducing the new AFL Commissioner

2010-04-25T11:23:00.002-04:00

The way I am wired can be a bit annoying at times. I am always trying to figure out solutions to any problem that I see. I just can't help it. Some things are easy, like fixing potholes: JUST DO IT!!! Or fixing really bad roads: Sue the contractors for the repair... like having a ten year warranty on their work. Or getting stuck in a line at McDonald's behind someone that is ordering for 10 people back at the office: Adopt a single line like Burger King.

So, while watching the Sunday news shows today my affliction kicked in again when the subject of financial regulation inevitably came up. I have wasted more than a few brain cells on this issue over many years, but nothing like the past 20 months. I have blogged in the past about who I think was the real culprit in initializing our most recent crisis, as well as how the law of unintended consequences is the only law in Washington that will work as promised.

And then it hit me. We need a gaming commissioner. Seriously.

It has been my opinion for a very long time that the majority of Wall Street deals is nothing more than legal (or sanctioned) gambling. Very little of what happens in finance goes beyond educated guessing and most of the rarefied activity that REALLY gets us in trouble is nothing more than gaming the numbers.

I was in Las Vegas a few months ago for a conference. As I walked through the various casinos, I was amazed at the number of different games available. Back 25 years ago when I first started going out there on a regular basis (seems that almost all computer-related industries have held their conferences in Vegas) there were the traditional one-armed bandits with between one and five payout lines. Card games consisted of a few variations of poker, blackjack and baccarat. Now there are hundreds of 'slot' machines playing multi-lines, crazy characters instead of fruit, themes based on Elvis, Baywatch and Happy Days, and all kinds of electronic card games. Oddly, none of them require you to put real coins in a slot anymore. The card tables have a plethora of variations including Pai Gow Poker, Caribbean Stud, Texas Hold 'em, Seven Card Stud, Omaha HORSE and the list goes on. Like in the stock market, variety breeds unfamiliarity and unfamiliarity makes it easy to make stupid decisions which usually leads to loss.

In any casino, when you walk in the door you know one thing... IT IS GAMBLING AND YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE SOME OR ALL OF YOUR MONEY. Anybody that goes into a casino, gambles, loses their money and then comes out and complains about it is a fool. You know going in what the odds are. To keep the casino operators honest (honest? is that the right word?) each state has a gaming commission that sets up limits and boundaries within which casinos must operate. The casinos in turn engage in very sophisticated processes including surveillance, background checks, audits, psychology and muscle to keep players and employees from cheating. How is that for an oxymoron? Cheating at gambling. Kind of funny if you think about it. That's like accusing someone of cheating in a knife fight, but I digress.

If you step back and take an objective look at what is loosely defined as Wall Street finance (buying and selling stocks, bonds, options, derivatives, futures, investment banking, IPO funding, etc.) you will realize that very little of the day-to-day activity is based on the necessary and essential process of buying and selling equities and agreeing upon prices for future purchases of commodities. It is not the object of this post to go into all of the ways that these relatively simple transactions have been gamed and new products and services layered on top of the foundational functions of the Stock Exchange.

My proposal would be as follows: Segregate the foundational processes and transactions of the Stock Exchanges, Boards of Trade, and investment banks away from the gaming functions such as puts, calls, options, leverage, derivatives, etc. Any layperson could identify which belongs in which column. Keep the regulation of the former under the auspices of the SEC which has done such a good job so far, and put the regulation of the latter under a newly formed Commission of the American Financial League (AFL). This quasi-government body would be modeled after the various sports leagues as well as the gaming commissions of the various states because it is a sport and it is gambling.

The primary, immediate benefit of this segregation is that everyone would immediately know when they are walking into a 'casino'. If one has the stomach for the gambling, go for it. If an investment company (casino) fails because of poor bets (options) then so be it. They would just be losing the money that is sloshing around on top of the foundational money of the base market. In other words, the players would just be hurting themselves and the basic investor would be insulated.

Of course, regulation would have to stipulate what the maximum percentage of a retirement fund could be invested (gambled) in this new market, and how would gains be taxed (and losses be carried forward.) No plan to reform or remake the incredibly large national and global financial system would be easy or could be completely thought out by a guy like me, so I am not even going to try. I am not naive enough to think that this would ever even happen as I suggest, but I am serious in my assertion that we need to at least stipulate up front that a large proportion of our financial system in the US and the world is nothing more than gambling. If we can start with that principle as a guideline, then the rest of the negotiations will be a lot easier, since we would not have to treat some of these crazy schemes as legitimate financial instruments.

Once the financial instruments (games) are established, the Commission would issue rules by which all firms (casinos) would have to agree. Then, like posting nutritional information in fast food restaurants, each instrument would have a disclaimer section written in plain English which would define the rules and list the potential risks and rewards. Then the investor (player) would at least know what they were getting into. Caveat Emptor.

C'mon people, let's call a spade a spade and get on with meaningful reform.

You need a strong constitution

2010-04-08T10:24:00.002-04:00

I just saw this video posted on Breitbart. It has a man at a town hall meeting with Congressman LoBiondo (R-NJ) asking the Congressman various 'trick' questions about the Constitution of the United States. At first, you may feel a little sorry for the Rep, since no one wants to be put on the spot or have to memorize law books, but this one is different.

The way I see it, fortunes can be won or lost on whether a particular law has the word "and" or the word "or" in a certain position and lawyers will beat a semantic phrase to death to get their point across. Also, political fortunes can we won or lost based on what the meaning of "is" is.

So, it is with that backdrop that I think that it is infinitely more important that all of our representatives, who swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, should know what they are upholding and defending.

The basic Constitution is really not that long or that difficult to read. Some of the phraseology is a little stilted some 230 years after it was written, but there is plenty of background on the meaning (see the Federalist Papers) and precedent on how it has been interpreted. Every citizen should have to read it once per year and every lawmaker should have a copy glued to their wall.

When I was in the Navy, we had the UCMJ posted all over the place; every workplace is supposed to have the State and Federal employment rules posted in a prominent place and Congress wants to have nutrition information displayed on menus. Why? So that we are constantly reminded of these things.

Is there a copy of the Constitution posted on the wall in every Congressman and Senator's office? I doubt it. If it was, perhaps we wouldn't be in the state that we are now.

So, IMHO, those were valid questions and crappy answers in that video.

What is medical insurance, anyway? (The price of FREE)

2010-04-02T09:12:00.003-04:00

I was at the dentist yesterday, sitting in the waiting room, when this lady comes in and goes to the reception window. She explains how she tried to call but must have been calling the wrong number. So she had to come in to reschedule an appointment for her significant other.

After the receptionist rescheduled the appointment, she asked "Do you want to go ahead and schedule your cleaning and checkup?"

The lady replied, "I am not a patient here and besides, I don't have dental insurance."

With that said, she left.

I sat there for a moment taking that statement in. Was she saying that since she doesn't have insurance she wouldn't do anything for her dental health unless she had an emergency? Or was she saying that since she would have to pay for it, she didn't consider a cleaning and checkup to be a worthwhile thing to do?

Conventional wisdom in the US now is that everyone considers health care to be a basic human right. Well, what good is health care if you are not clothed, fed and sheltered? Do these three items trump health care as a basic human 'need'? (I will not go off on that line of reasoning right now.)

Is it in the best interest of the insurance companies to pay for health maintenance or wellness programs rather than to just pay for emergencies once they have occurred, many of which were caused by negligence on the part of the patient? There are no other traditional insurance plans (home, auto, life, etc.) that pay someone to take preventative measures, although all of them offer some sort of incentive in the form of discounts if you take certain precautions (don't smoke, be a good driver, get a burglar/smoke alarm, etc.)

The question is, are Americans (and people in general) more motivated by significant discounts or FREE?

I think that most are motivated by FREE because FREE is immediate and discounts accumulate over the long haul and are passive, not active benefits.

If all health care is FREE, will people take advantage of it because they really need it or because it is FREE? And the corollary, what if they don't need the care even if it is FREE?

What do you think?

Health Care Reform - If I was King

2010-03-21T23:26:00.002-04:00

Part of the package that passed tonight was desperately needed modification of how health insurance companies operate. As a small business owner, I absolutely HATE the news that comes each August as my annual renewal notice for my company's medical insurance premium arrives. Has it EVER gone down year over year? Nope. I usually hear my insurance agent say "Well, they wanted to increase it by 25%, but I got it down to an 18% increase." A Pyrrhic victory at best. I have been screwed, glued and tattooed by insurance companies over the years and they have lied on several occasions. I have also seen how "groups" are the biggest way that these companies really penalize small employers by creating artificial entities which are rated in a vacuum. With these statements, I hope I have established my bona fides that I am not a shill for the insurance companies.

So, what would I do if I was the king? On the insurance front I would make a few fundamental changes. First, I would remove the ability of each state to set separate requirements and rules for insurance underwriting. Of course, this would all be un-constitutional in the United States (oh, that's right... so is the new Health Care Reform bill that just passed a few minutes ago. Ooops. Sorry.) I would allow individuals to purchase insurance from any company that offers a legitimate policy from any of the several states.

I would also mandate that individuals would purchase their own insurance policies and that employers would be removed as the purchaser of most of the health insurance in this country, making health insurance like home, auto, life, disability, supplemental, flood, umbrella and any other insurance that an individual wants and purchases.

I would retain the ability of an employer to pay, with pre-tax funds, a certain amount of money toward an employee's health insurance premiums.

I would level the playing field for pre-existing conditions by issuing the following rule: If an individual has a current health policy, either from parents, organizations or by one's own money, any insurance company has to accept them if they want to move over and choose one of their plans. If an individual chooses NOT to have a health insurance policy for whatever reason and they contract a condition that would preclude them from getting insurance, or from having that condition covered, TOUGH. They should have thought about that while they were pocketing the $200/mo when they were young and healthy. If an individual decides later in life to purchase insurance and he or she does not have a pre-existing condition, their costs for the rest of their life would be a certain percentage higher than those that have always had insurance (and this percentage would increase the later one waited to get on-board.)

As much as it pains me to do it, I would have a plan to subsidize health insurance premiums for those who are not working or choose to not work, so that no one who truly wants health care insurance cannot get it.

I would require individuals to have to pay some percentage of the premium if the government is footing the bill. It CANNOT be free because most people just do not appreciate nor take care of something that is given to them for nothing. I would also require individuals to have to pay a co-pay for the same reason.

I would have a minimum coverage floor set for the cheapest plans, which would cover comprehensive needs above $2000 and catastrophic needs before the cap. I do not believe that health insurance should be mixed up with health maintenance. Just like you don't place a claim with your homeowner's policy to paint your home, or to fix a broken window, because you know that you have a substantial deductible and that your rates will likely go up, you shouldn't expect to have your health insurance pay for every little sniffle and sneeze during cold and flu season. There are those who say that if you do this, that it would put a chilling effect on the ability for people to get care that they really need. Well, I think that if you wear out your shoes and you need shoes, you will find a way to get shoes. If you are hungry, you will find a way to feed yourself. If you are truly sick, you will find the money or the way to pay to get well.

Because the last paragraph would make me seem like a cold-hearted SOB, I would also ensure that there are very affordable places to go for primary care besides an emergency room. These urgent care facilities are already in place in much of our country and they can provide basic medical needs like front-line diagnosis, X-Ray, prescriptions, physicals, lab work, etc. There is absolutely no reason that your local Wal-Mart or other store couldn't provide this service.

Medical fees should be available from doctors, hospitals or other health care providers. Just like you know how much gasoline costs before you pull in to the station, so should you know what your medical care will cost. Because I am just a regular king, not a King Solomon, I cannot yet figure out how to pay the providers once the insurance starts paying for it. I guess they will just have to continue to negotiate with insurance companies and perhaps accept less payment than they want from insurance and bill patients the difference. If the patients do not want to pay more than their covered amount, they can go down the street and find someone who will do the work for scale. Doctors need to be paid fairly to compensate them for the rigorous training they go through, but if they want the $4 Million mansion, fancy cars, yachts, etc. they are going to have to make if from their patients because they are just damn good and the people are willing to pay (see cosmetic surgeons if you have doubts that this system could work.)

Also, since I am not a King Solomon king, I haven't wrestled the what-constitutes-the-end-of-life monster to the ground yet. Important element, but not make or break.

(Note: I keep hearing these anecdotal arguments about people that had terrible cancer, or heart attacks that died because they didn't have health care insurance (in other words, they couldn't pay for the care they needed). How does that square with the fact that no hospital can refuse care to people who need it? When gangs shoot each other, who picks up the tab for the ride in the ambulance and the care at the trauma center? Do the Crips and the Bloods have a Major Medical plan? I don't think so, but these scumbags get patched up, often with heroic efforts by the medical staff, and put back out on the street. So why can't someone's mom get care? You tell me.)

So, in a nutshell, here is my King Asterisk health care plan:

The kingdom decrees a baseline coverage for an acceptable minimum health care policy. The premiums are based on your age and where you live (there are already plenty of regional multipliers available and acceptable for pay and benefits because, lets face it, it costs more for things in New York City than it does in Grinder's Switch, Arkansas.) Each individual would be responsible for the first $2,000 of payments per year and then the insurance would kick in and pay for 100%. The caregivers would NOT know if the individual had met or exceeded their 'deductible' amount, nor could they ask, so that they would assume that the patient was paying and would have to act in a prudent manner and not waste money on things just because insurance was going to pay for it.

Employers would know what the matrix for health coverage looks like for their area because everyone's fees come from the same schedule. Employers could pay a percent of this amount (even exceeding 100%) pre-tax for health insurance, but they could not pay more than what someone pays out for premiums (to avoid profiteering by the employee.) Insurance companies would be allowed to tack on riders for individuals that engage in risky behaviour, including smoking, excessive alcohol or drug consumption, dangerous sports, carrying excessive body weight, etc. The cost for these riders would also be known and standardized for the minimum, kingdom-controlled policies. Employers would NOT be allowed to pay for these riders.

Employers would have to include the amount that is paid to employees for health insurance as a line item on their compensation report, even though it is not taxed. This would be similar to how the military pays non-taxable allowances to service members for housing and food. This would ensure that each employee would know what their true salary is. This would also make it much easier for employees to compare wages and benefits between potential employers.

Supplemental insurance policies could exist to pay for the gap before the Major Medical plan kicks in. If an individual is destitute and cannot pay for the first $2000, then charities, family and as a last resort, state and local government could assist. The point is to make it such that everyone has some skin in the game. This might make people take better care of themselves, but at a minimum, it would cost them out of pocket to use the health care system for trivial items.

I wouldn't force anyone to purchase insurance, but I would make it very attractive for them to do so. If they chose not to have a policy, then when they need care, they must suffer the consequence of their own bad decision.

Insurance companies could not reject anyone coming from an existing approved insurance policy for reasons of a pre-existing condition. There would not be lifetime caps allowed, but once an individual reached a threshold of, say, $2 Million, a mandatory review would be required to determine where the money has gone and if more should be spent. The denial of coverage could be issued only if there is evidence of fraud or malpractice. If it is the latter, malpractice insurance payments would be in order.

I would attempt to bend the cost curve of medicine down by providing standardized payments for procedures and any amount in excess of the baseline could be charged by the provider if the patient is willing to pay. If not willing to pay, the provider must accept the standard payment, or the patient can go elsewhere. Providers must have a schedule of costs readily available for patients. Can you think of ANYTHING that you buy that you don't know how much it costs before you sign up? Let the free market rule.

Experimental drugs could be paid for by insurance companies, charities or individuals, but would not be paid for by the basic policy. Sorry. (If you had gotten sick two years ago, the experimental drug probably would not have even been an option. Wait a few years and it will probably be on the formulary. Is this rationing? I don't think so, but you have to draw the line somewhere.)

Approved medical expenses could be tax deductible which would encourage people to get the care that they need.

There you have it. My not-all-inclusive idea on how to reform our health care system. Is it perfect? No. Can it be gamed? Of course it can, but anyone caught cheating or gaming the system should be dealt with harshly and with prejudice, including jail time. Once people found that the penalties for cheating were severe, most would not do it. Take those 16,000 new IRS agents approved in the new HCR bill and make them Medical Coverage Auditors. Cut them loose and let them check out claims of bad conduct by patients and providers alike.

The Democrat Congress and the President claim that this monstrosity of a bill will bring down costs, squeeze out fraud and waste, extend Medicare 10 years and make your breath smell minty fresh. If you can point at any government program that has come in under budget, then I may consider listening to your argument. Ergo, my skepticism.

PLUS, show me a government program that does not grow and metastasize over time to exceed what even the most optimistic supporter could have imagined. That adds dramatically to costs.

They all told us how great this bill will be and how little it will cost us. Who do we complain to in 2016 when we find out it was all a total fabrication?

As we step into a new era in government control

2010-03-21T22:29:00.002-04:00

I sit here watching the House of Representatives voting on the Health Care Reform bill. Unless something unexpected happens, this Senate bill (and its companion House bill) will become the law of the land. So many Democrat Congresspersons have sold out for promises and innuendo.

Now, the final vote is in: 219-Yea, 212-Nay and they are cheering.

The-Asterisk observation: The ‘big’ insurance companies were made the Bogey men and the Dems took up an "us against them" stance. What the applause-givers don’t talk about is the fact that so much of what is wrong with our health ‘system’ now is government imposed rules, regulation and restrictions. Business fulfilling a need is like water in a swollen river, you cannot stop it and when it reaches an obstacle, it either goes over it or around it. That is why our health system is such a labyrinth of insane nonsense. And the Pelosi-Reid-Obama triumvirate think that this 2500 page tome is going to fix it? Are they freaking insane?????

Like the housing/finance collapse which was caused by incessant government meddling, this is the beginning of a HUGE new set of unintended consequences, the scope of which we can barely fathom.

It is truly historic and my sadness over this decision is epic.

Reply to my Senator

2010-03-10T23:01:00.003-05:00

Senator Mark Warner sent out the following email to me today:

A sobering experience

There has been a lot of talk recently about the apparent gulf that exists between what we're talking about here in Washington and the economic uncertainty that too many Americans are experiencing in their daily lives.

An event I hosted in the Fredericksburg area earlier this week illustrated this economic anxiety in a powerful way.

My office sponsored a federal job fair at the Stafford County campus of Mary Washington University, and more than three-dozen federal agencies were represented -- from the Transportation Security Administration, to the Peace Corps, to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

The response was overwhelming -- literally overwhelming.

As many as 7,000 jobseekers showed-up to speak with these federal agency recruiters, and the unexpected response resulted in long lines and significant traffic congestion. In fact, our event reached capacity before lunchtime -- so members of our staff started collecting resumes and contact information from people who could not stay.

As I visited and chatted with many of these jobseekers, I heard stories from the long-term unemployed and the under-employed -- all of them obviously willing to stand in line -- not because they wanted some kind of hand-out, but because they simply wanted an opportunity to improve their situation and help their families in this tough economy.

After returning to Capitol Hill, I spoke to my colleagues on the Senate floor about the experience. I told my colleagues that the individuals waiting in those lines did not understand or care about filibusters or the other procedural tactics that too often dominate the discussions here in Washington. It is crucially important that we put partisanship aside and get serious about a bipartisan effort to create more, and better, jobs.

My office will host additional job fairs in the coming weeks, because the need obviously is there.

But I look forward to the day, hopefully soon, when we no longer are overwhelmed by the large crowds of jobseekers like we saw earlier this week.

Thanks,
Mark Warner

To which I replied:

Sen Warner,

I just got your email about the jobfair in Fredricksburg and it is truly unfortunate that so many people are un- or under-employed.

If we are truly honest with ourselves, we know that the possiblility of full employment with good, high paying jobs for all Americans is a pipe dream. With efficiencies of manufacturing reducing worker count and the fact that high enough labor rates to count as 'good, high paying jobs' will just force manufacturers offshore means that our traditional ideas of employment are rather quickly morphing into something that we don't know how to deal with.

Is it the job of the federal government (or any government for that matter?) to 'create jobs'? I guess that the government can create jobs and pay for them with revenue from taxes but then the tax revenue needed to sustain this process causes a chilling effect in the private sector.

As a former entrepreneur and employer yourself, how much of your time and treasure was spent figuring out ways to minimize your payments to state and federal coffers? Be honest. NO COMPANY wants to pay taxes and NO BUSINESS OWNER (especially S Corp. owners) want to see their company make big profits, because they know that at the end of the day, much of what they take home will only be confiscated from them in the form of taxes on the business.

Hiring an employee is a big deal, especially when you consider how much it costs to fully fund one person. There are a LOT of deductions out of paychecks and many are paid for by the employer. Health care is huge and gets bigger each year. Some state mandates push up the costs even higher than other states. The threatened government takeover of our health system will ABSOLUTELY cause the costs (either directly or indirectly) to go up. [Please name me ONE, just ONE, federal program that has come in consistently under budget. To expect that health care costs will come down with the Senate or House Bill is a fantasy and it insults my intelligence that Democrats are swearing that it will save us money.]

So, if government hires workers that cannot be fired and likely will never see their job go away and this translates into even more pressure to raise taxes to pay for these permanent employees, what part of that will encourage business owners to start hiring workers?

I also want to comment on something else. As a business owner for almost 30 years, I have NEVER gotten an easy loan for ANYTHING, especially a business loan. Banks want two pounds of flesh for every pound that I borrow, plus personal guarantees, assets greater than the loan amount and leins attached to anything they can attach to, and to top it all off, I must have a life insurance policy with the bank as the beneficiary in case of my premature demise. And guess what? Several loans were guaranteed by the federal government. The banks had NO exposure, yet I was put through the wringer to get the loans.

What I want to know is WHO ARE THE LOSERS WHO GOT 'LIAR LOANS' AND OTHER EASY MONEY THAT JUST ABOUT BANKRUPTED THIS NATION? How did that happen? Why wasn't I ever offered one of these loans? Why are people struggling just to qualify for very low end homes that needs LOTS of work? They have jobs, but how can they ever hope to get ahead? We are not talking about illegals working as gardeners and domestics buying $500K homes on a signature, either. Did any of the fraudsters spend one minute in jail? I have heard of victimless crimes, but this recent debacle created 'crimeless victims'. We are all victims, but no one is going to jail.

I know that laws are virtually never repealed, but there are so so many rules and regulations that effect everything we do, that it makes many not want to do anything. We are the freest country in the world and we can start a business at the drop of a hat, but to cross the line to become a really successful business and hire people is very daunting and frightening.

BOTTOM LINE (and I know with absolute certainty that this will NEVER happen)... get the government out of the way of entrepreneurs and let us revitalize this economy. Most of the jobs that were lost are gone forever. They are not coming back. Large companies were just waiting for the opportunity to prune while the spotlight was shifted elsewhere. The only way we are going to dig out of this hole is to unleash American ingenuity. You want to teach new skills to people? Teach them to run a business. Teach them about money. They will figure out the rest. And I have to say this at the risk of sounding callous: eternal unemployment insurance is not the answer. Some people will NEVER find a job as long as someone is willing to pay them not to work.

Caution: if you teach people about money and business, you will lose your docile constituency. They will start to recognize the fraud and deceit and hypocrasy of our laws and start to fight back and get rid of the dead wood in the Senate and the House. It would be an unhappy time in DC, but it might be just what the Doctor ordered to get us all back in shape.

And we can't stop it either...

2010-03-01T00:23:00.001-05:00

Al Gore will never change his mantra on this subject, but I must refute his thesis. Climate Change? Yes, of course. Man-made? Probably not. Can we do ANYTHING about it? No.

As this winter that we still have not escaped in the Northern Hemisphere proves, the climate does change. Funny how every person's reference point for the "good ol' days" is how things were when he or his parents were young. Al is a smart man but he does not exhibit his intelligence by holding onto this theory of man-made climate change.

The believers will say "Oh, we have to do SOMETHING before it is too late." The problem is, if they do do something and it doesn't change things, then they will say that the non-believers wouldn't let them do enough, or we waited until it was too late. If they do something and the seas do not rise, then they will say that what they did worked and the non-believers were idiots.

This is the same modification scenario where Global Cooling became Global Warming which then became Global Climate Change, all within a 40 year period which is a flyspeck of a nano-particle on the continuum of the almost 4 billion years that we believe this earth has been in existence.

How arrogant for us to think that we have the power to change the fundamental operation of this planet on which we live. Unfortunately, the non-believers are lumped into the same group as the land-rapers of the past. I resent this community organization. I fully want an energy independent United States. I would like to see the use of coal as an energy source reduced. Right now, the most feasible, massive energy source is nuclear. It will be a long time before true alternates can supply the world's voracious appetite for electricity and motive energy. The developing countries (as well as ourselves) cannot get enough energy already, so we are going to stop 80% of our electrical generating capacity to stop Climate Change??????????

Mr. Gore should turn his attention away from such a controversial 'scientific argument' and focus toward something more helpful, like pushing nuclear, natural gas drilling and other 'clean' energy sources past the enviro-wackos and the NIMBY alarmists.

Except for the ELF-style protestors who want nothing less than the total destruction of any capitalist society, the believers and the non-believers seem to ultimately have the same goal: clean, cheap, responsible energy that can power us all to a better, more sustainable tomorrow.

So, can't we all just get along?

in reference to: Op-Ed Contributor - We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Keith Olbermann's Lament

2010-02-25T01:14:00.002-05:00

At the end of his MSNBC show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" Keith made a 10 minute closing monologue about his father who is hospitalized with a panoply of ailments. You need to take the time to watch the video to fully grasp the meaning of my comments.

I truly feel sorry for the Olbermanns. It is a horrible situation to be in, especially if it lingers. A family member of mine just died tonight after a quick but tortuous bout with lung cancer, and after getting hit with dementia. These sorts of thing occur all too often and are an unfortunate part of life.

However, this does not justify Keith to use his grief to bend the meaning of death panels to his own description nor does it justify the way he damns to Hell people who have a different opinion. Without researching exact comments by specific individuals who coined the phrase "Death Panels", my take on the term (as an astute observer of current events) is the suggestion that a body of administrative bureaucrats (not doctors actively involved in treatment) would make arbitrary decisions about go/no-go on any further treatment. In Keith's situation, if his father was on Obamacare and at month 3 (instead of month 6) he had a bad spell, the 'Life Panel' could decide to let his life be decided by fate, and not by the best medicine possible. If his hospital bill was at, say, $250,000 and that was all the manual would allow for a 75+ year old in his condition, well, then pull the wires and let it be.

THAT is a Death Panel. Call it what you wish, Keith. I seriously doubt that heroic efforts would be regularly approved by state-controlled insurance administrators for an average Joe. Perhaps if his family was able to pay more, or if someone was political or a celeb or famous it would be, but what about the rest of us just trying to get well?

IMHO, I think that King Solomon would draw a blank when confronted with our current situation vis-a-vis health insurance. There is NO good answer. Reform is needed desperately with insurance, but if there was a $1000 per pill 'cure' available, who wouldn't want their loved one to get a month's worth of them for free? Who's going to pay for it? When insurance rates go up 20% per year, would paying the insurance company execs $1 per year cause the cost of insurance to flat-line? I doubt it. When GE charges $2 Million for a Nuclear Scanner, who is going to complain if it helps your wife get better? Why shouldn't Jeffrey Immelt donate these machines for the good of mankind? Why shouldn't food be free for that matter? Or water? Or housing? Or clothing? Aren't they all essential for health and life? Why not a cell phone so that you can call in case of an emergency? Why not a free GPS in case you get lost? Free helmet and knee pads for bicycle riders? Free air conditioners for elderly people? Free handguns for vulnerable citizens in inner cities?

Am I being silly? At some point everyone reading that list will say "Well, that's ridiculous." But who gets to decide where that point is? Obama? Pelosi? Reed? Tea Party members? Supreme Court? Keith Olbermann? HHS Administrators? You?

I HATE conundrums! They make my head hurt. Can I get a free aspirin?

Does money buy elections, or politicians?

2010-02-03T04:46:00.003-05:00

The recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down a portion of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform law which was passed in 2002 was assailed by Pres. Barack Obama in his first State of the Union speech when he said "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections." Let us ignore the comment about a "century of law" as the court overturned seven years of law, although it may seem as if it has been a century since it was passed. And also the part about foreign corporations who have a right to have their US subsidiary interests represented. What I would like to focus on is what role does money really play in elections?

Obviously, this post could fill volumes, but really the question is quite simple... What are politicians afraid of? They always claim that money will buy elections, but look at it this way. What good is buying an election if the politician is not also bought? If Hendrick Motorsports took reigning 2006-2009 NASCAR Champion Jimmie Johnson's #48 car and gave it to me to drive, do you think they would get back the money they spent on the car? Of course, not. They need a great driver to drive a great car in order to win.

Every politician connotes that other politicians can be swayed by contributors but they, themselves cannot. If this is not true, then why do the majority of sacrosanct politicians always try to take the money out of politics? Does money give their opponent an advantage? Candidate Obama pledged that he would abide by the financing limitations set forth in "settled law" but when he found that he was raking in cash from "the people" to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, he decided that hearing "the people's" voice was more important than following a campaign pledge. A pledge that his less fortunate opponents were bound to follow. Not because they believed in the law (though McCain co-wrote it), but because THEY NEEDED THE MATCHING FUNDS.

The-Asterisk alert: perhaps the reality is that the presidential campaign is really the only competitive race in the federal election system and the effect of money on the presidential race was not the target of the McCain-Feingold law. Most incumbents are not concerned with losing their seat to a weak challenger. They are concerned about losing their seat to a strong challenger. What better way to nullify challengers than to mute their voice, especially in the critical 60 days before an election? Presidential campaigns are out of body experience and I believe the control over presidential campaigns by the FEC is an there for cover only. The real battle is in the House and Senate.

In modern politics how do we define voice? Money, of course. In the current best seller "Game Change" the authors talk extensively about how the politicians rank and rate themselves based upon how much money is coming into the coffers, week by week, month by month. The more traction Obama's speechifying got him, the more money came pouring in to his campaign, and the less money came to Hillary's campaign because in party politics, money is usually a zero-sum game. Obama's income went through the roof only after he began attracting independents and crossovers who showed their love how??? Contributions of MONEY.

In Obama's case, he would tell you that money was an affirmation of his message, though in his SOTU speech the other night, the implied that money was a corruption of other's deeds. Can a politician really have it both ways? They always spin it that way, but you know that money can only corrupt a corruptible politician. Another point in "Game Change" is how much time pols spend schlepping for money and how much they hate it. As soon as one campaign is won, the hands go out, collecting money for the next one. Ad infinitum.

Back in the day, politics was totally a party game, with candidates being selected in "smoke filled rooms" by party power-brokers and then the chosen candidates duked it out in the general election, mano-a-mano. Actually "we the people" were lucky if there was any "duking it out" since many elections were decided by political machines, keeping incumbents in power until they died and then replacing them with another compliant politician.

Then, along came radio and TV. Suddenly, populism started to push the power-brokers out as the deciders. Except for one thing... advertising was not free! You needed money to buy media advertising and those TV spots were VERY expensive. Now the candidates needed more money than ever to mount a credible campaign. Incumbents were already spending an inordinate amount of time involved in fund raising and now they needed to raise MORE money to fend off challengers? I can hear them now, "Hrrmph. I am a United States Senator up here doing the people's work and this guy is on the radio spouting lies about me. I am working hard every day, but his only job is to run against me and my enemies are funding him to do so. I need to stop him (or at least keep him quiet.) Let's make it difficult for him to raise money except in tiny amounts from large numbers of people. We, on the Hill, have the bully pulpit, franked mail and other powers of incumbency. We should be able to handle this threat."

Laws have been passed to keep money out of politics for decades, but like water, you cannot stop money when it wants to flow. Many rich challengers have spent fortunes in self-funded campaigns only to lose the election. I admit it... I HATE political ads. They are all BS. (I don't know how those poor souls in Iowa can stand it.) Day after day you hear ads. In the general election, especially on radio, it is a constant barrage of ads. You actually look forward to hearing an ad about hemorrhoids or car dealers! But what is the alternative? Are you actually swayed by ads? Everyone says NO, but the evidence suggest the opposite. Ads work, especially for the majority of people who are not wrapped up in politics, whose only real exposure to politics is what they hear in the media.

The alternative is leaving the message up to the incumbent and the media. Even in our wired world, radio and TV advertising are still huge and ads permeate the online experience as well. Do we want to allow our opinion to be shaped merely by what we read in the paper, browse online at CNN or Washington Post, or by what we see on CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC and even FoxNews? Or would we rather hear what the candidates want to say and more important, what others have to say about them? Should we stop "the others" from speaking 60 days before a general election? This is the golden time when most voters start really listening and that is when the law wanted to shut the "other" voices down.

Presidential campaigns get the big attention, but as we are now seeing, the legislative branch of government is as important as the executive and this is where the law was intended to do its damage. The straw man argument is against foreign governments and BIG corporations, but it actually squelched the speech of many organizations like Green Peace, PITA, NRA, NARAL and many, many more that have something to say for their members. All of these organization represent people, even the corporations.

Listen to what the politicians are actually saying about money. Read between the lines. Follow the money. Ask yourself how can a public servant get rich on $200,000 per year when they maintain at least two residences? But they do get rich, don't they? The powerful ones all retire with money... much more than they had when they came to Washington. So, who's corrupt??? Who is trying to keep their jobs?

Don't be swayed by rhetoric. Let every one's voice be heard!

New Media... a matter of participation?

2010-01-30T18:04:00.007-05:00

This week was the week that Apple finally released their iPad, the long awaited and breathlessly anticipated tablet computer. At the 'unveiling', Steve Jobs announced that the iPad (a name scorned by many, but one I think fits well within Apple's iNomenclature) would be based on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform and that all 140,000 applications previously developed for the platform would work on it as well. I think this was a wise decision, giving the iPad immediate access to a plethora of working applications, instead of having to dumb-down Macintosh applications, or worse yet, have to develop a whole new ecosystem around the iPad.

Something that was actually shown twice at the announcement (once when Steve sat down and demonstrated the functionality of the iPad and then again when several new iPad-focused applications were showcased) was the New York Times app. I think this is very revealing because for this device to be more than a novelty, it needs the ubiquitous 'killer app'. I see newspapers and magazines (and other printed media) to be the killer app for the iPad.

What will this killer app ultimately look like? No one knows. The person to blow the doors off of the printed media reader genre is probably still overclocking gamer PCs in his bedroom, or she is still designing user interfaces for ATM machines. Practically all of the great, game-changing innovations have come out of nowhere. So, for now, we are going to have to be content with using the iPad as an analog to the traditional 'turning of the page' that we are used to with books, papers and magazines.

But... this isn't so bad. Really. While there are those who are happy sitting at their computer, scrolling up and down as they read stories or articles... I don't like it. And I am NOT alone. I like to read where I like to read. Whether it is at the breakfast table, sitting in a comfortable chair, lying in bed or (yes, here it comes) sitting in the 'library' taking care of business, I don't want to have to drag a computer around to do so.

Laptops tend to get hot, are not easy to hold, have a short battery life and must be read in landscape mode. What if I am stuck in line at the DMV or sitting in my doctor's office waiting room. I don't want to have to read an 8 month old copy of People Magazine, or squint at my iPhone. I want my own content. Of course, I could carry my Kindle but I DON'T HAVE A KINDLE. Nor do I want one. I think it is too small and I like color. Sorry.

Here at The-Asterisk ranch, we subscribe to the local daily newspaper and the Wall Street Journal. Most mornings the papers are out on the front porch waiting to be brought inside. I tend to read the WSJ and my wife tends to pore over the local zeitung. She likes to do the Jumble puzzle every day. I like to do the Crossword Puzzle in the Friday Journal. C'est la vie! Wouldn't it be nice if we could read and participate in the media of our choice on our new iPad or on our new Whatever Tablet?

Follow me through this scenario:

It is a blustery, cold and rainy day. The alarm clock ungently jolts you into consciousness. You swivel out of bed, ambling towards the bathroom. On the wall, hanging like a small picture in its charging cradle, the iPad is lit up. It was set to awaken at the same time as you. It displays your To Do's for the day and it also shows a few top stories from all of the media that you subscribe to, in the order you have chosen. You grab it from its perch and carry it with you as you wipe the sleep from your eyes.

Whether you freshen up and do some exercises, sit and meditate, or eat breakfast after your shower, you have your news and your day in front of you. You look at your schedule and get a clear idea of what you need to do today, then you tap one of the headlines that interests you. Your local paper slides to the forefront and presents the article for you to read. There are a few ads sprinkled around the periphery of the page. You read the piece and tap the picture on the page. It jumps forward and plays a video of a local official describing why something was not his office's fault. You didn't mind it because the length of the video was clearly stated in the caption and you have the 20 seconds to watch it. Along the side you see an advertisement for the local grocery store. They have fresh cherries for $3.99/lb. That is a good price, so you make a gesture over the picture of the fruit and it adds the item to your grocery list already in progress.

You close that article and choose the next one which is from the Wall Street Journal. It is a quick read, but you like to peruse the Commentary section, so you tap the tab and there are the headlines, first paragraphs, and highlights of each column. The one that you read was written by someone that you do not recognize, so you tap his by-line and a bio pops up complete with a picture and a video of him on Charlie Rose last week.

You only have a few minutes before you need to leave, so you close the WSJ and tap the New York Times article. You subscribe to the Times, but you don't have the paid subscription like you do with the WSJ, so when you pull up the article, you see the ads and can read most of the article, but the in-depth portion is not presented to you. You can still make use of the interactive ads and if you really want to finish an article, you can elect to purchase it for 25 cents.

What is really interesting, is that while you are enjoying the stories, the publishers are getting feedback about which articles are being read, how far you are getting into the article and which ads you click through. They are providing you with content, and even if you are not a paid subscriber, you provide them with revenue through ads and statistics. It is like a Neilsen box on steroids.

Beyond that, if you are curious about a word or phrase that is used in the article, you can press on the word and a definition or reference can pop up to help you understand it better. Also, another gesture on the article allows you to share your interest in the article with any number of friends or groups who are linked into your social sphere. Finally, when you are done with each article, it is conveniently listed as 'read' on your timeline so you can keep up and not revisit it unless you want to.

As you move through your day and you have time, you can catch up on more reading. On the commuter train, you start working on that crossword puzzle, using the interactive mode which lets you fill in the squares and even check your answers. On your way home, you stop by the market. You pull up your grocery list app and along with the milk, tomatoes and orange juice, you remember to pick up two pounds of cherries at $3.99/lb using the interactive coupon in the paper.

Notice that I didn't even talk about any other aspect of having a tablet beyond how the 'new' media will interface with your daily routine. The rest of the story could fill volumes. I admit that I used a little poetic license in the story with the apps, but if they do not already exist, it would take someone probably a month or two to throw them together.

The nay-sayers are certainly out there vis-a-vis the iPad and let it be known that I am NO Apple fanboy. No-sir-eee. I haven't been a fan of Apple since the Apple II days when Steve had a lot more hair and fatter jeans. Steve Jobs and I are the same age and my take on the situation is viewed through the prism of many years of wandering in the 'wilderness', writing letters, emails, blog postings, blog comments and such; begging the powers that be to take the existing pieces of technology in the tablet and touch world and assemble them in a cohesive manner. I have watched the absolute abdication of the tablet throne by Microsoft who has had a presence in tablets and touch for close to 10 years and has many, many innovative ideas sitting on the proverbial shelf in a closet somewhere in Redmond.

Then along comes Apple a little over two years since redefining the mobile phone business. It has now, I believe, redefined the tablet and mobile business. Because they have defined and provided clarity to the segment, does it mean that they own it? No, but they will remain the trend setter. Just like Nirvana defined Grunge, The Beatles defined 60's pop music, and Michael Jackson ruled the pop world of the 80's and 90's. These groups are the personification of their genre. And then there is Elvis. All Rock 'n Roll of his generation is compared to Elvis. This is where Apple is today. They are the sine qua non. Now we know where the bar has been set. Apple has defined the absolute minimum that the market will accept in a tablet and I think it is a great place to start.

I can hardly wait to get my hands on an iPad and start participating in the new media.

You might be getting old if...

2010-01-03T20:51:00.003-05:00

I woke up at 4:30 this morning with my head totally congested to the point that I couldn't breathe. I stumbled into the bathroom in the dark, careful not to step on one of our two Golden Retrievers and found the decongestant that I had just purchased the day before after having to show my Drivers License and sign a declaration along with my home address that I wasn't going to abuse Pseudoephedrine HCl. (That is a subject for a whole 'nuther blog entry.)

As I laid in bed waiting for the drugs to kick in and not being able to sleep, my mind started wandering. I started thinking of all of the things that we have now that were unheard of 50-some years ago when I was a child. I started thinking "You might be getting old if you remember when..." Here is a rather stunning partial list, starting with the first item that got the thought going:

Nose drops really were drops in the nose. You had to tilt your head back and your mom would drip two drops down each nostril and it was like a precursor to waterboarding. Oh, it was horrible with that yucky taste going down the back of your throat. Ewwww.
Paregoric was used. We had a little brown glass bottle in the medicine cabinet. I don't really remember much of why we used it (maybe ear aches?) but I just found out it is camphorated tincture of powdered opium. Hmmmm. I kinda miss it.
Q-Tips had wooden sticks.
You heated your house from a oil burner in the floor that had to be lit by hand and had a 'register' grate over top of the big rectangular hole in the floor. Wow it hurt when you fell on that thing. My mother used to hang wet clothes on one of those wooden expandable clothes rack over top of the register in the winter so they could dry inside.
There was NO clothes dryer except for a clothes line or the above wooden rack.
Washing machines did not have a spin cycle. You had to feed the wet laundry through two wooden or hard rubber wringers which would squeeze the water out and leave the clothes in a hard, flat pile. (Don't get your fingers caught in the wringer!)
The dog stayed outside, never came in and chased cars (and kids) down the street.
You rode your bicycle anywhere and everywhere, and did not wear one of those goofy looking helmets.
Skateboards were made out of a board and a skate. Seriously. With nails to hold the skate to the board!
Skates were two piece metal contraptions that clamped onto your shoe between the heel and toe and were tightened with a key. (Okay, so that's where the term skate key came from.)
Trash was put out by the street in brown paper grocery bags inside of metal cans with dented metal lids. The trash man would walk down the street, throw the can up onto a shallow flatbed dump truck where another man would pack the bags like bricks in the bed of the truck and throw the can back down where it was 'caught' and slammed to the ground.
Recycling meant saving newspapers for the Cub Scouts.
Cars didn't have air conditioning, radios, seat belts, automatic locks, electric windows (except for a Packard), or backup lights. Even turn signals were optional.
Every September, the auto manufacturers would come out with a brand new model, barely resembling last year's model.
Cars came with a 90 day, 3,000 mile warranty.
UPS and FedEx were random letters of the alphabet
Fax was what Sgt. Joe Friday was looking for on Dragnet. If you wanted to get paperwork to someone the next day, too bad.
Xeroxing and photocopying were exceedingly rare and expensive. There were actually copiers in stores where you could make a copy for a quarter (back when sodas were a dime.)
Every year or so you would remove the tubes from your TV set, and take them down to the drug store to test them in the tube tester. No, not the big CRT, but the small vacuum tubes that were the precursor to transistors. Don't forget to let them cool before you pull them out!
Speaking of TVs, there was probably just one in the house and you had to actually get up to change the channel and adjust the volume. Not to worry, though. There were only three or four channels to choose from.
The weatherman on TV drew on an actual map with a big, black marker.
When you turned your TV off, the screen dissolved into a little white dot that slowly faded away as the tubes cooled down.
There were morning and evening newspapers. We also had Grit which was delivered weekly.
Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post came weekly.
People actually bought things like Kirby and Electrolux vacuum cleaners, Avon cosmetics, Fuller Brushes, World Book Encyclopedias, magazines, freezers full of meat, pots and pans, life insurance (Mutual of Omaha), brooms from the Lions Club and other stuff from door to door salesmen.
Air conditioning in a home consisted of a window fan blowing out at night and the windows dropped down to create a sort-of breeze. It is a special kind of misery trying to sleep on a hot summer night with 98% humidity and no wind.
No one wanted hardwood floors. Carpet was the new thing and it was measured and sold by the square yard, not the square foot.
Shag carpet was really neat.
The only way you kept up with music was listening to the radio. When FM came on, the sound was fantastic and everyone wanted to get a Stereo Hi-Fi for the home.
Records would break if you dropped them.
You had to replace the needles on record players or it would really mess up a record.
Christmas trees had lights that if one blew, all the rest went out, too.
Metal tinsel was put on Christmas trees.
Popcorn was threaded and also used to decorate the trees.
Boys actually wanted train sets for Christmas.
Santa sat in a little hut at the shopping center, not in the middle of a huge castle in a shopping mall.
Malls didn't exist and shopping centers were drawing crowds from downtown to the suburbs.
Kids walked to school or took the bus. No one drove (or was driven). Have an activity after school? Walk home if you couldn't get a ride.
No one called their mom to let her know where they were. As long as you got home in time for dinner, everything was alright.
Homework was a few pages of work, not hours of drugery (I still never did mine...)
Book reports were handwritten or typed on a typewriter (if you could find one)
Girls took typing class, boys took shop.
Gas was pumped for you while the windshield was cleaned and the oil checked. No, really. And the price was 32.9 cents per gallon, AND you got Green Stamps, AND you got a map if you needed one.
7-11 had sliding glass doors that stayed open at the front of the store and the soda bottles were in one of those cooler cases that had the sliding top that you had to lean over to get into.
You bought a sandwich at 7-11, you had to pop it in a toaster oven and it took about 3 or 4 minutes to warm up.
Motor oil came in cans that had to be opened with a can opener, or one of those push-on opener/spout devices. Believe it or not, it was easier to put oil in your car from a can than from the plastic bottles we now use.
Beer cans and then soda cans had to be opened with a can opener. Pop-Tops, when they came out, pulled all the way off of the can with a little ring and a tab. People would drop them back into the can and then occasionally swallow or get choked on them. (Darwin rules!)
All soda bottles were 3 cents deposit (in VA) and the big quart bottles (High-Rock came in these) were 5 cents. There were NO plastic bottles, NO throw away bottles, NO cans (except for beer.) Many a kid made a decent amount of pocket change picking up bottles by the side of the road and cashing them in.
Grocery stores had carts at the front of the store to drop your bottles in when you came in to shop. It was the honor system when you checked out and told the cashier that you brought in bottles. I had to sort them out when I worked in a grocery store and it was not a fun thing to do.
Cashiers actually had to punch in prices for each item on the cash register and I (as a worker) had to price everything with a pricing stamper. Remember that sound? ker-chnk, ker-chnk, ker-chnk. A really good stocker could price a case with 12 cans in about 3 seconds. And we had a cool holster that held the stamper on our belt.
Kids went to public school with the girls wearing dresses and the boys wearing white shirts and often ties.
Schoolboys got graded on whether they wore a belt and carried a handkerchief.
With rare exception, white kids and black kids went to different schools.
Growing up, you really didn't know the difference between a Jew and a Christian, except that the Jewish kids got more holidays off than we did. Muslims were something you learned about when you studied the world's religions along with Budhists and Hindu.
Barefooting was standard operating procedure from May to October except when going to church or school. Tetanus shots were to be expected at some point each year.
The summers were really, really hot. I mean really hot.
There were no Interstate highways, very few freeways and no bypasses around small towns on the highway. Even divided highways were rare.
You boarded an airplane by walking across the tarmac to a flight of steps attached to the back of a truck. Your airplane ticket had that red carbon paper built in.
You actually got fed a meal on a flight.
Credit cards were called "charge plates" and were issued by the store or a local bank.
Layaway was how you bought things you couldn't quite afford.
Friends and family could walk out to the gate at the airport to wave goodbye.
Public restrooms required a dime to open up the stall.
Calling long distance was a BIG DEAL and was usually reserved for Christmas Day or special birthdays
Birthday parties for kids didn't look like Christmas
Drive-in movie theaters were everywhere and some even showed X Rated movies outdoors.
Schools gave kids vaccines on a sugar cube.
Parents wanted their kids to get vaccinated because they knew what polio, smallpox, measles, flu and other diseases could do to children.
U.S. Savings Bonds could be bought by purchasing a 25 cent stamp each week and when you filled up the card you redeemed it for a bond.
Mercury from a broken thermometer was something a boy played with, not something to involve a HazMat team.
Your parents purchased health insurance at the beginning of the school year for incidents since most people did not have insurance of their own.
Braces weren't cool
When you wore out the knees of your dungarees, your mom ironed on a patch and sent you back out to play.
Rainy days were B O R I N G. All you could do was read or play a game with your brother or sister (and that usually turned into a fight.)
Your mom would spend hours ironing clothes.
If you wanted to know something, you had to ask your parents, or go to the library and look it up.
Comic books were 12 cents each.
Bullies were the rule, not the exception on playgrounds.
Self-esteem was not something anyone worried about.
You could actually learn something in school without using a computer. Books, paper, pencil, straight edge, compass (that pointy thing with the short pencil used to draw circles), chalk, blackboard and the occasional movie or filmstrip was all it took to get a decent education. (I never did use that french curve thing that we all had to buy.)
If you failed a grade, you got to repeat it again.

Wow, I could go on and on but I must stop.

I am a little over 50 years old and looking back, it is stunning how much things have changed. If you look back just 100 years, man had just started to fly in airplanes, horses ruled for transportation and telegraph was just about the only way to have rapid communications. 100 years! 100 years before that, Thomas Jefferson was president and 100 years before that the settlers and Indians were still 'working things out' while little wooden ships brough more people over from Europe and Africa.

What gives me pause is thinking about how much more change we are in for in the next 50 years. If our government and narrow-minded individuals and groups can get out of the way, and crazy, wacked out Islamists would quit blowing themselves (and everyone else around them) up, we could easily, in 50 years, be energy self-sufficient and bring the rest of the world out of poverty. The downside is that if everyone is out of poverty and health care is universal, there are going to be a LOT more humans around on this planet.

Two things mitigate this frightening fact. Healthy, well-off people don't have a lot of children and technology/knowledge allow a lot more people to be sustained for the same amount of effort.

So, there you go. Now... how old do YOU feel?

Whirled Peas or a Really Cool Tablet?

2009-12-24T15:50:00.003-05:00

Warner Crocker just posted his annual wishlist at GottaBeMobile.com.

I am an inveterate wisher, so I made a comment to his post that I liked so much, I decided to just post it here too. Click the link above and see if anyone else added to the discussion.

Here it is:

Warner,

Best wishes with your wishes. My grandfather used to say "Wish in one hand and %$#^ in the other and see which gets filled the quickest."

For all of the absolutely horrible, unwanted products released into the wild, why can’t one company just give us what we have all been wishing for for over a decade? I read a statistic that 99% of all products released in Japan in a given year fail. What are these designers thinking? Do they test anything with real people? Do they read blogs? Do they even read their own support forums after they release a turkey?

I think not…

My perfect tablet would be big enough to simulate a piece of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper, maybe fold in the middle for carrying and protection and be pretty thin. It would need to have WiFi, IR and Bluetooth and have a traditional USB available for kbd, mouse, printer or whatever. It would absolutely require the ability to plug in a USB kbd to be truly universally usable.

It would have multitouch and be more like an iPhone, not an iMac. We need multitasking, but not a Mac tablet IMHO. Reaching all the way into full-bore computerdom would probably kill it. Let it run apps and be a killer web browser. The web will be our computer in a few years anyway. Embrace the love.

Oh, and it would charge off of the ~~Bluetooth~~ USB connector, Duh!

And… not be wrapped in skin-slicing blister packaging :-)

OK. Done. Easy, huh?

Randy