April 2009 Archives

So Obama took the podium today to talk about the Chrysler bankruptcy announcement. CNN writes:

The president also blasted a group of investment funds and hedge funds for holding out for an "unjustified taxpayer bailout."

Several financial institutions, led by J.P. Morgan, agreed to reduce Chrysler's loan repayment obligations by as much as two-thirds, Obama said.

But "a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout" Obama said. "They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices and they would have to make none."

Heyyyy, welcome to the real world, buddy! Why should they take the risk if you've made it quite clear you're willing to have everyone else (e.g., the taxpayers) assume the risk. This is exactly what fiscally conservative folks were predicting would happen. Once you make it clear that the government's going to step in and bail people out, there's no reason for private investors to bail themselves out. They'll just wait for Uncle Sam's tit to be presented and suck it dry.

If Obama and his predecessor weren't both so completely ridiculously stupid when it comes to economic realities (and the human/social realities that go with that), then this could all be avoided. Instead, they both set a precedent of "you don't have to actually TRY to succeed, we'll bail you out with taxpayer funds if it gets too bad", and now you and I, the taxpayers, foot the bill.

Obama was recently quoted, in a CNN story, as saying:

"That's why I've said we've got to have health reform this year -- to drive down costs and make health care affordable for American families, businesses and for our government," said Obama.

If your goal is to "lower the costs for families, businesses and government", en toto, then you are destined for failure.

Let's say it costs $500 for an operation, and 1,000,000 people a year get it. That's $500,000,000 a year in costs for that operation. Let's assume for round numbers that the population of the US is 10,000,000 (this is not right, but we'll use it as an example).

Now, in a pure-capitalist society, those 1,000,000 people all pay $500. The rest of the country pays nothing.

In a pure-socialist society, those 1,000,000 patients all pay nothing. The government pays $500,000,000 to the medical providers, and charges everyone in the country taxes totalling $50 per person. Actually more than that, probably about $100 per person, because the government infrastructure for billing, processing, collecting, and then paying out to programs all has to be accounted for.

But at the end of the day, the "total cost to the American people" hasn't changed. In fact, it's only gone up (from $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 because of government overhead).

So if you want MORE expensive healthcare for the country, ... yeah, you should definitely sign up for Obama's plan....

A recent Huffington Post article had the headline:

Nearly 3 In 10 Say Fox News Too Tough On Obama

This just in:

Over 70% Say Fox News NOT Being Too Tough On Obama

I'm not a Fox News fan by any stretch, but with numbers like that, HuffPost shouldn't have tried to spin it at all. They should've just shut their mouths and let the numbers slide, rather than making more readily available the statistics that a vast-majority of people think Fox News is A-OK when it comes to its Obama coverage.

Yes, that's right, kids, if "how to type meaningless crap in under 140 characters" is something you're having trouble figuring out, O'Reilly is running a Twitter Boot Camp. For the low-low price of $399, you too can be "trained" on things that are essentially covered in the help pages of what has to be the simplest and yet most inane product ever devised on the web (and let's be honest, that's saying a LOT).

What's more, there's the option of UPGRADING to the boot camp plus a "talk twitter dinner" with Tim O'Reilly, for $1500. Now, meaning no disrespect to Tim, because he's a fine human being and he keeps robo-signing my quarterly royalty checks, but .... SERIOUSLY!?! $1100 extra to "talk about Twitter" with Tim over dinner? For fucks sake, that dinner better be cooked personally by Mario Batali at that price, and include full-GFE with someone cute, because that's just insane.

You can go to the O'Reilly Open Source conference (or, frankly, almost any conference O'Reilly runs) and sit down at the same table as Tim at lunch and eat a meal with him, and I'm sure he'd happily discuss Twitter, or Perl, or web 2.0, or whatever other topic you brought up, because that's the kind of guy he is. He loves to chat about tech issues. There's nobody so hard up to talk to Tim that they need to pay $1100 to do it, when Tim does it for free all the time. :-)

It truly is a world gone mad, I tell you.....

Sometimes, I need pain to remind myself of what I already know. So, as previously mentioned, 0U PDUs suck. From all vendors, in all cabinets, in all power configurations, they all suck.