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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Quick tangent:
If these bailout's continue do you think we could get a reality TV show out of the negotiation meetings? I mean, I understand you couldn't possibly give the public a seat at the table when their tax dollars were being thrown around like it was a strip club, but at least we could get some entertainment value by having a camera there?
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Just one more. Put it on my tab.
What an extraordinary year. Oddly I saw the housing crash on the horizon as far back as 2004 or so when talking with friends but I never could have imagined where it would take us. And it seems the ride is not over yet. I guess the fat cats on the cover of Fortune just a few months ago crowing about Citi are perhaps more reserved today as I type this.
It is funny to me how we argue and debate about the words we use to define what is happening to us in these most amazing times. Recession. Depression. Tomato. Toomato. Let me throw one out there for folks to consider: a reckoning. It is as simple as that. It is our day of reckoning and are we responding appropriately? I will throw my guess out there: no.
Granted that I am more apt to throw out historical parallels in these wild times than perhaps most but I will offer to you what you no doubt may have guessed if you read this blog very much: our earth is telling us something in so many ways. We need to listen.
At the core of it to me our earth really is saying that we are too many and we are asking for too much. Slow down. Now, granted, I am not sure how I would put this information in my innagural address and package it for the American people and the world to truly understand but there are unmistakable signs out there that we keep trying to cover up for ourselves by using short, punchy words like 'recession'.
This is more than that of course. It has no absolute label and no one, including this writer, has any idea where it is going or how it going to end up but briefly we should explore how we got here:
Technology stocks bit the dust right around the turn of the millineum. 9/11 happened. We as a nation frankly should have had quite a downturn under any other circumstances simply because, well, the capitalist system is like that for one and two, much wealth and confidence had evaporated. But instead of visiting the shallow end of the pool on that one and taking our medicine we took actions to paper over this crisis. Literally. So much money and paper was pumped into the system from all sorts of streams that we made the dip as short and painless as possible.
But there is no free lunch and now we are paying for this extremely loose money policy. It is not just housing - that is where I had it wrong. That, oddly, is just a symptom.
Because again, now, we are seeing this same response: paper over our failures. Rescue another one. Give them cash or at least a guarentee or, hell, I don't know but THEY ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL.
Let us please break out of this and realize that for the good of our children and the good of our society and our country and our way of life: we need to take a long look in the mirror and get off the various addictions we have been holding so dear. The time is right.
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Tuesday, November 18, 2008
'And so now Jerry Yang is out of the company he co-founded, looking less like a visionary and more like another high tech entrepreneur, a la Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment a generation ago, who didn't realize that time had passed him by.'
Please let me never to know this fate. Please allow me to remain introspective and educated about where I can contribute and where I can't.
Unfortunately I see too much of this that is described in the article around these days, namely, zealousness. I have a coworker who is not unlike how Jerry is described in this article: will not use anything MSFT to the point of having Linux on his laptop. It would be funny if it were not so tragic: seeing dogmatic souls at work is ugly.
Let us all have open hearts and open minds and be willing to laugh at ourselves. We are a damn funny creature.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
'NEW YORK - President George W. Bush asserted Thursday that the global financial crisis is “not a failure of the free market” and urged world leaders to adopt modest financial reforms that stop short of the tighter regulations Europeans favor.'
Well now that you have taken that view and you have been wrong about, well, everything, I think you have just proved my point: extreme financial reforms and extreme free market reforms are needed. Thanks for the confirmation lame ducky.
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I watched this last night and I really respect this guy. He seems very smart, knows what he is talking about and is incredibly professional, but respectfully I would offer that gentlemen like him are missing the point. They of course have a reason to miss the point (their livelihood and $$) but the point to me is this: we need to get back to basics like perhaps the gold standard and a much more moderated type of capitalism. It is as ridiculous to me now as it was a week, a month, years ago that we try to apply the laws of supply and demand and the free market to, for instance, healthcare. We of course have done this in so many facets of our life and society and it is ridiculous and needs to be changed. We need some sort of infrastructure or system that still promotes innovation and the good old American drive, but we also need a system that recognizes when something becomes (or in the case of healthcare: always has been) a commodity.
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Olbermann on Prop 8. Perfect.
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Friday, November 07, 2008
Tears to Remember - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com
Tears to Remember - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com: "“Look what we did. Look what we did,” he said, puffy-faced, red-eyed, fighting back more tears on CNN. “He’s won. It’s over.”"
The happiness continues and spreads across the land.
The happiness continues and spreads across the land.
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Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Thank you BushCo. You united the country and moved us forward and you spent up all our ignorance and apathy. Kudos. You dug us quite a hole, but you gave us quite a gift too.
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Ah, you are coming into a better world. I am sitting here on this quiet night with your mom (and you) with my insides screaming:
YES. WE CAN.
I have had a particularly exciting, inspirational day. I took in an amazing speech today by Dr. Larry Brilliant. It was followed by a speech by Malcolm Gladwell - an amazing man with an amazing point about how we need to take meaningful action in our lives and make sure not to give up. 'It's remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely' he writes.
Which brings us to our new president: Barack Obama. You are coming into a new world and it was re-made today. This successful man has just stomped McCain to take the Whitehouse, but more importantly he has stomped out the politics of fear and, frankly, stomped out the politics taken from some of the worst moments in human history. A new age is being born just before you are about to. It is a great time for you to be coming into the world because even though, as Larry Brilliant spoke about, there is a lot to be saddened about in our world, there is even more to be optimistic about. I can't wait to tell you the story.
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