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
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
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.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
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:
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Another Explanation for the Wall Street Crisis
Wow! Is this ever good. As you watch it, keep in mind it was filmed in 2007!
Friday, October 17, 2008
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)
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
Monday, October 6, 2008
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!
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!
Sunday, October 5, 2008
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.
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.
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