Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Worries
You know? There's lots of stuff to worry about. Poison peanut butter, $2 trillion dollar tax payouts, record unemployment and job losses, companies folding by the bundles, and CEOs making millions for leading their companies into the ground.
And you know what else? There's lots of stuff that doesn't even need more than a footnote in the news. Things like 28 year-old college kids smoking grass, atheletes making $27 million a year who take steroids, movie actors commiting suicide and singers beating up their girlfriends.
Which of the two paragraphs above do you think more people know about?
Labels: crime, government
Space - the Final Frontier
I've just read that Indian plans on spending 100 billion rupees ($2 billion) in an effort to launch a man-carrying space capsule. That now makes two countries - China and India - who are reinventing the wheel. A two or three man space capsule isn't expanding the frontiers of space, it's only exploring the same place people went over 40 years ago.
Space exploration can't be a national process. It's too expensive and space is too big. Why spend billions redoing something that's already been done. That's kind of like Turkey sending a ship west across the Atlantic to see if there's land someplace out there.
How about getting together and making an international plan for manned space exploration. Three countries have already independently proven you can orbit a can with two or three folks sitting inside. Move on. What we need is a cheap and reuseable launch vehicle to launch either personnel or cargo into orbit and beyond.
Labels: government, tech
Priorities?
After lunch today I was listening to the hourly national news blurbs. The headlines were Obama in Denver to sign $782 billion bill, hauling away bodies from last week's plane crash, the plunging stock market, jobs and oil prices, and then Alex Rodriquiz and his steroids. Does some guy sticking a needle in his butt, really rank with the other problems going on today? Why should we care? He's being paid to entertain crowds of people, so who cares what he does to entertain them? As if the rest of professional sports is squeeky clean.
Why We're Broke
Why are we spending $780 billion to try to save USof A companies? The below is an article I just read. This company has gone bankrupt three times since 2005!! Yet, the CEO says, nothing will change and we'll do business as usual. What the hell?? If you've gone bankrupt three times in four years, you're obviously doing something wrong - even a business cretin like myself can see that. Change something, you moron.
CHICAGO (Reuters) The Chapter 11 filing marks the third plunge into bankruptcy for the company [Trump Entertainment], which was created out of a restructuring in 2005. It also underscores the struggles facing the casino business as recession squeezes casino gambling.
"This filing will result in no immediate change in our daily operations, and we expect to make no changes regarding our operating structure or philosophy," Trump Chief Executive Mark Juliano said in a statement.
Labels: government, scams
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Same Old - Same Old
Didn't take long, did it? President Obama - in just a couple short weeks - has started stepping into the Washington D.C. morass of cheating, corruption, and influence peddling. His cabinet is supposed to be composed of some of the top minds and people in the country. It seems like a large percentage of them are already shown to be cheats. Really; "Oops, my bad, I didn't know I was supposed to pay that $125,000 in taxes. I'm not a working class slob."
The IRS was after me when I didn't file a state tax form for which I didn't owe any money on. At the time, military income was exempt from state tax, so I didn't file the state tax form. I was a kid and figured if I didn't owe anything, why should I file? I had to track down five years worth of paperwork to make the tax folks happy. So how does someone miss paying $125,000 they owe until they are vetted for a cabinet seat?
And where are these trillions of dollars coming from? We just had a president who built the largest deficit in history and almost (we're not done yet) bankrupted the country. Now our new president's plan is to go even deeper in dept. So now, because some invester and home-buyer and widescreen TV buyer overspent themselves I'll have to pay their debts?
Those trillions in bailout bucks have to be coming from someplace -- and my taxes are it.
So how about instead of throwing more money at businesses who business model is broke, just let them fail and let the businesses who are actually successful reap the benefits of doing a good job? It's going to hurt, but so, eventually, is throwing trillions into the crapper.
Labels: crime, government
