Synchronized Presidential Debating

I found the first presidential debate pretty interesting. If nothing else, you got to hear each candidates policies side by side. I missed the second debate, but I didn't find the third debate as interesting. Follow the link below to find out why.

Synchronized Presidential Debating

Wassup? - 8 Years Later

Remember the clever Budwiser "Wassup?" campaign? The original actors reprise their roles to make a pretty compelling statement about how much things have changed - and how much NEW change is needed. Make sure you watch it to the end.

Me Again - Have You Made Up Your Mind Yet?

I know most people who read this probably have similar views to mine. And believe me, I DON'T like standing on a soapbox about politics! But I ran across this today, and just had to share it:

PLEASE!

Tell everyone you know to get out and vote on November 4th. Tell them to think carefully about where we were 8 years ago (can you say "budget surplus?") and where we are now (can you say "second great depression?"). Ask them if they really believe John McCain can bring the change we need. If they think he can, ask even if that is true, do they really believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president of the United States. (Remind them she thinks the VP is "in charge" of the Senate.)

If that STILL isn't enough, have them watch the above video. Have them vote responsibly because Opie, Andy, and the Fonz want them to.

Another Explanation for the Wall Street Crisis

Wow! Is this ever good. As you watch it, keep in mind it was filmed in 2007!

Mysteries of the Economy Revealed

Yes, that's right. In this tiny blog space I am going to unveil all the mysteries of the economy. Ok - not really, but I am going to point you to some real cool videos that are non-biased and will totally open your eyes as to the real nature of the problem facing the U.S. economy.

Before we can understand how the economy got this way, we need to understand the very nature of money. Money, of course, is a symbol - a placeholder for value, if you will. The pieces of paper and metal you trade for goods are no different than the Wampum used by the 13 original colonies because the Europeans did not want their money devalued by the "risky" venture taking place across the Atlantic.

Whether we are talking about Wampum, Dollars, Loonies, or Rubles, they are all placeholders representing wealth, while the real value stays locked away safely somewhere else.

Or does it?

My good friend Ford (the person, not the car company) sent me some links to some fantastic videos on YouTube that explain - in very easy to understand terms - the very nature of money and how governments (not just the US) are literally "conjuring" money from debt - which goes a long way to explain the current economic crisis. The video is almost 50 minutes long and is broken into 5 parts on YouTube. Here are the links:

WHere Does Money Come From? (Money as Debt)

• Part One


• Part Two


• Part Three


• Part Four


• Part Five

OK, so let's see if we can turn this into an elevator story: The way our system is set up, governments (including ours) have created a monetary system where borrowing money "conjures" up more money out of nothing. When money becomes "tight" (in demand), more money is "conjured" by raising the debt to real money ratio until the system eventually implodes on itself. So, by putting over 1 TRILLION additional dollars in play (the $700 Billion bail out, plus the additional $330 billion Emperor Bush poured into the global economy), banks get more money so they can make more loans to create more debt so more money can be "conjured," thus, in all likelihood, creating an even bigger problem for the next president.

Still don't get it? This should make it easier to understand:



No, really. Watch that again. Not only is it entertaining, but it is one of the least painful ways for us to even start to fathom the world of hurt we are all in.

So whose fault is this?

It is really easy for Democrats to blame Republicans, Republicans to blame Democrats, and for Independents to blame both. In truth, there are a lot of different people to blame — on both sides of the aisle and in between, Not the least of which are the American people themselves. After all, it is one thing to make credit so easy to obtain, but no one forced us to take advantage of it, did they?

There is a great article on FactCheck.org called Who Caused the Economic Crisis? You can read the entire article yourself (and you should) but it does quote The Economist magazine, who reported the problem is one of "layered responsibility," and provided the following partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

• The Federal Reserve


• Home Buyers (More or less, us)


• Congress


• Real estate agents


• The Clinton Administration


• Mortgage Brokers


• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan


• Wall Street firms


• The Bush Administration


• An obscure accounting rule


• Collective delusion (Us again, with all of the above)

I can't promise that Barack Obama will at least put in motion the changes we need to make sure this can never happen again. Heck, I was actually disappointed when he said he would vote for the plan and encouraged others to do so. But he cannot be entirely blamed for that. If you were him, would you want to inherit the state of the economy had the bailout not passed?

What I do know is that McCain is not the answer. I know that the Clinton administration - for all its faults - handed Bush a surplus, and he squandered it on warmongering to fill the pockets of his cronies. I fear that McCain will just be more of the same.

All the bailout does is buy the next administration time to come up with a better plan, and whatever that plan will be, it will not be an overnight fix. If you lay part of the blame at the Clinton Administration and Greenspan, then it is fair to say it took us at least a decade to get the economy in the state it is in today. Let's hope it does not take us another decade to turn it around.

How To Opt Out of Credit Card Pre-screening Offers

Are you getting tired of all those "pre-screened" credit card offers? Here's how to opt out of all of them at one time.

Go to OptOutPrescreen.com and fill out the form.

That's all there is to it!

I signed up about three months ago. With the current credit crunch, it's hard to tell if it worked, or if companies are just scaling back their offers. But I can tell you that I haven't received a credit card offer in the mail for at least 6 weeks!

Bill Gates Ain't So Bad (But Windows Still Is…)

I was reading an article in Newsweek that reminded me Bill Gates "left" Microsoft earlier this year. Of course, he isn't really leaving - and much too big a deal has been made about his "departure." He will still remain Chairman of the Board and when he is in town he will reportedly spend one day a week in the office.

But he will be scaling back his involvement with the company to focus more on his philanthropic efforts, which you can't tell by his prominence in Microsoft's new ad campaign. Which leads me to the topic of this post, Bill Gates Ain't So Bad (But Windows Still Is…)

Of course, it is easy to play the nice guy when you have more money than just about anybody else on the planet (depending on whose statistics you check) - and I don't want to take anything away from that. But Bill Gates has been portrayed at times as some kind of money-grubbing ogre who shipped shoddy products, but through marketing chutzpah was able to capture a monopolistic critical mass of the world's computer users.

Here's the thing: like Apple, Microsoft became very big, very fast. Just like an ocean liner, the captain might steer the ship, but he is not totally responsible for running it. In fact, over the years Bill Gates has shown he not only cares a great deal about the products his company ships, but also many of the frustrations of Windows users everywhere.

There is a gem of an email that was made public during the US Government's antitrust case against Microsoft. You can read the entire email thread here (PDF, 5 pages). The juicy part starts on page 3 in an email where Bill Gates describes in blow-by-blow detail his frustration in attempting to purchase and install MovieMaker from the company's own web site. In the original email he details not just his frustration with finding and buying MovieMaker, but with the process he had to endure with Windows just to get to where he thought it might be installing.

In the email thread, one of Microsoft's employees immediately starts to minimize the issue by saying "Bill's situation is worse then [sic] my personal experience…," and another says "nor am I yet sure the best way to handle the complex mess of coordinating between product teams,…" and then it goes on with each of the stakeholders in the issue restating how complex the issue is, but no one stepping up to take ownership.

I think this is a pretty good glimpse of how Windows got where it is today. You have a lot of competent, talented people writing code and building processes in their own teams, but no one has thought about the "connective tissue" that is needed to make the entire system work together. Try as he might, Bill Gates (or his successor, Steve Balmer) can only steer the ship so much. When you are dead in the water, steering won't do any good.

Apple went down this path too, before Steve Jobs returned to the helm. But it was not Steve Jobs who got Apple back on course - it was Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO before Steve Jobs took over for his current stint. I was working for Apple at the time and I remember sitting in an employee meeting where he discussed how he was consolidating Apple's hardware and software engineering efforts. Instead of 4 different logic boards, there would be 2: one for desktops and one for laptops. Instead of going to 3 different places in the system to address networking issues, there would be one, etc.

In a way, Gil Amelio was as much the father of the iMac as anyone. The first "Bondi Blue" iMac had a logic board that was practically interchangeable with the company's laptop computer. While the iMac definitely owes its success to Jonathan Ives and his design team at Apple that gave the it a distinctive look, and to Steve Jobs' uncanny ability to market directly to people's sensibilities, it was Amelio that set the ball in motion. Who knows what might have happened had he not taken that one step to reduce costs by making their manufacturing processes more efficient.

Even Bill Gates recognizes Steve Jobs' genius, btw. In another email from the antitrust trial, gates said "Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things." In that one email, Bill Gates encapsulated most of what is wrong at Microsoft: the lack of ability to focus in on a few things that count. Unfortunately, that is what many companies lack - even some of the smaller ones with whom I have been associated. Many people call it "the vision thing."

So Apple makes well-designed stuff. We all know that. So why is Windows still so bad? Why are people dropping Vista to go back to XP? Because the parts do not work well together. It is as simple as that. Just like the email thread I referenced above illustrates, the various pieces of Microsoft are not designed to fit together. They are encouraged to run as efficient, autonomous units instead of become part of a colony - and this organizational philosophy becomes obvious in the way the different products the company offers - and even the different pieces of its flagship Windows operating system - are put together.

So I congratulate Bill Gates on the massive fortune he has gained, and for his willingness to make the world a better place with a large portion of that wealth. But, for the simple reasons I have reported here, I still don't do Windows.

Pigs with Lipstick

You know from the title what this post is about, don't you? That's right - politics.

I normally try to stay away from Religion and Politics when blogging for the same reason you do at cocktail parties. But this time its different. Too much has gone wrong. There is too much at stake to get the election wrong. So I am just going to come right out and say it: it is absolutely imperative you urge everyone you know to vote in the upcoming presidential election, and to not throw our future away by voting for McCain. We absolutely must overcome the Republicans who would vote for this person and his policies.

And here is why I believe this...

I Am Not A Democrat

First, lest any of my gentle (Republican) readers might think I am the enemy. I am not. I voted for Reagan, Reagan, Perot, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry in the last 6 presidential elections. I vote for who I think is going to be the best leader. Which really brings me to the point of this post.

While it seems I lean Democratic based on the past few elections, it would be fairer to say I lean anti-Bush. I actually was leaning towards Bob Dole, but Dole made (in my opinion) a fatal mistake during his campaign - which is the same mistake McCain is making today.

Dole's fatal mistake was that he became a different person during the campaign. Before the campaign, he was jovial and self-depricating. His humor was genuine and endearing. During the campaign, however, someone - I don't know if it was the Republican Party itself or his so called professional handlers - convinced him that in order to win the election, he had to appear "presidential." The problem was, to them, presidential meant "serious" and "down to business." You certainly couldn't make fun of yourself - someone might not no you were kidding and think you were stupid or something.

And now McCain has done it too. During the last election I commented that I thought I would rather have McCain as president over John Kerry. I don't know - maybe it was the way Kerry carried himself - or the fact that he, too, had been told to "act presidential." Whatever it was, John McCain seemed to be the "democrat" of the Republican party, with opinions and attitudes that were far closer to the center than they were the right.

Now, however, it is like the Republican Party made it clear to McCain that the only way they would back his candidacy is if he "towed the party line" including the Bush Doctrine. Without a "pinky-swear" promise to continue the policies of the failed Bush presidency, he would have had no chance to be the Republican candidate.

No Third Term of Failure

Let's take as non-biased look at George W. Bush (OK, as non-biased as possible). Don't worry, I'm going to tie all this together in a little bit.

In an unscientific survey of historians, 81% said the George Bush presidency was an overall failure. If you consider George's Resume, it rapidly becomes clear how inept the Democrats were in putting up a candidate in the past two elections. For instance:

• He ran for Congress and lost.


• Bought an oil company, but (strangely) could not find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt.


• Bought the Texas Rangers and quickly made management decisions that made them one of the worst teams in baseball (while he owned it).


• While Governor of Texas (which he could not have won without his father's help), he changed pollution laws that resulted in Texas becoming the most polluted state in the nation, with Houston replacing LA as the most smog-ridden city.


• Set a record for most executions by any governor in US history. (Which is a good thing, I suppose, if you are pro-death penalty.)


• As president, he spent all the surplus gained during the Clinton years and has single-handedly allowed the US economy to get in the worst shape it has ever been since the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent depression.


• There were more foreclosures in a 12 month period than ever before in US history during his presidency.

And the list goes on and on. You can see more (a lot more) here.

Not to sound too much like a politician, but let me be clear on this: I don't think John McCain is a bad person. His daughter was on Larry King a while back and he asked her if she thought both her father and Obama were practicing dirty politics. She said "I think politics, by its very nature, is dirty."

Even Barack Obanma, who promised to run a high standards campaign, has stooped to negative campaigning - but not to the degree or level of dishonesty that McCain has. It has really turned into a "I'll say anything or do anything to get elected." And that is really sad.

No, John McCain has changed his politics in order to become president. That's a bad thing, folks - and whether you are pro-Obama or not, it should be enough to sway you to anti-McCain. Now there will be those who say "wait a minute, Obama has changed his positions on things, too."

True enough. But from what I can tell, Obama - at least for the most part - changed his stance on things based on new information, or even correction of misinformation he was previously given. In studying this person's policies, I really can't find anything substantive where he has completely reversed course on some issue simply in an effort to get elected.

In closing, I'd like to reiterate something. I don't like politics. I don't like the rhetoric and the 20 phone calls a day we get telling us why we should vote one way or another for some candidate. (There's something the next president can do - make politicians and charitable organizations honor the "Do Not Call" registry). I won't allow signs for any candidate, party, or politician on my lawn, in my window, or on my car. But there is just no way I can believe we aren't in for a whole lot more hurtin' if John McCain is elected president. I also am not voting for Obama solely because I am anti-McCain. I truly believe he is the best option to implement the changes we need to turn this country around - for our place in world opinion, the economy, health care, and a host of other reasons.