House of the rising Moonglum

Greenwald at Salon points out how the bailout follows the normal way things are done in the US government these days. You do not make rash decisions in moments of panic and fear. You take a breath and look at the problem and figure out a solution. I hope this failed vote is the moment of breath and that congress is able to come up with a couple good plans, and hash out the best possible solution. $700 billion on something everyone has to hold their noses for is no good. We are a better country than that.

One really positive outcome of this is that both sides of congress voted for and against the bill. That shows that we have something to work with, and we should be able to come up with an actually good bill, not just one that people hold their nose and vote for.

Just this one. If you already had $630 billion to throw around, why did you need our $700 billion. And if your $630 didn’t do the trick, why did you think $700 would? Just asking.

Looks like the bailout bill is failing. And yes the stocks are tanking, but isn’t it interesting that one bailout already happened? Citigroup buying Wacovia was all private. No taxpayer money needed. The value of Wacovia was low enough that Citi felt it was worthwhile to take on that debt. That they could make some money off of it. The real problem is that the confidence isn’t there for other companies to do the same. We need more transparency to know what skeletons are hiding in these banks closets so that people will be confident again to invest in them.

One telling quote on the bailout though: “With this strong and decisive legislation, we will help restart the flow of credit so American families can meet their daily needs and American businesses can make purchases, ship goods and meet their payrolls,” Bush said.

Really?! Well that right there is what the real problem is. People use credit to meet their daily needs. Credit to ship goods to sell is one thing, you have value to get return on. Credit to cover living expenses? You will never get out of that hole. And that I suppose is how we got into this mess in the first place. Home equity for a nice big TV and car and don’t worry about how you are going to pay for it. For the past two years I have had a home loan, and every time I get a home equity letter in the mail, I get so mad.

The worst offense of this government in my opinion, has been the installation of a lack of sense of cost in the population of this country. There is no need for sacrifice any more. Remeber 9/11? Go and buy. Spend to prop up the economy. Our many years war in Iraq? No sacrifice at home, that’s only for the troops and their families. Keep driving, keep buying. 12:1 liquidity ratios for securities firms? Forget it. How about 36:1 instead. It looks like that payment is coming due. Ugh. So mad. And now there are no good solutions. I’m just glad that Congress wasn’t cowed into forcing this deal through without some real time for analysis first.

I am completely amazed. It took the US government dozens of attempts before we got to this stage. On the fourth attempt, SpaceX, a private corporation, made it to orbit. And they did it at a fraction of the cost of other companies. Yes, even including the failures. (Well, not including the payloads, but really, why do you put a payload on a new rocket?) The best thing about it is that the entire first stage is reusable. This means that they will have rapid turn around and the more launches they do the cheaper it gets. Now if only we weren’t about to enter a massive depression and have the US government go insolvent. We could cut ALL OF NASA and it would be less than 3% of this bailout. Oh well.

Good job SpaceX, sorry about the timing.

Good for google. I went to two weddings this summer that requested that the gifts be donations to No On 8 initiatives, so I have sent my money in. But it is nice to see some big names jump into the ring. I wonder if this will lead to the Baptist Convention boycotting google?

Hey Pickens, I know your plan is cool and all, but if you are going to saturate the entire country with ads after the debate telling people to go to your website, you might want to set aside some cash to actually get a couple more load balancing databases.

I guess I’ll check it out tomorrow.

Have you ever seen David Letterman like this? Wow, he is pissed at being dissed by McCain. The saddest part is that he clearly loves the guy. Watch to the end, when they cut to the interview. (from Chicagoist)

A local blogger reposted a “what I would do with the AIG bailout cash” plan. I have seen this going around the internet. It gets people very excited. It is a perpetual motion machine. It explains everything that is wrong with this country. Nobody cares about large numbers. A billion for this a billion for that, who cares? It also fail common sense. The federal budget is in the trillions. If we spend trillions each year, and we pay taxes to cover those trillions, billions divided up evenly is going to be much less than the average tax paid by the average American. You can’t get something for nothing, though I sometimes think that this is the kind of accounting that Wall Street uses. The math, for your edification:

85,000,000,000 /
200,000,000 =
850/2 = $425 per person.


Three zeros makes a big difference. That is just about what the bush tax rebate (that he’ll need back to pay for this bailout thankyouverymuch) cost. Trillions is a lot, but our collective taxes pay for all of that. You can’t get something for nothing, and there aren’t so many people paying millions of dollars in taxes that the average goes up so high. The US GDP per capita was $46,000, and the average tax base was around 25%, so $11,500 per person is about what we pay. You can’t give people back more than that, because they didn’t take more than that to begin with.

Of course you can take much more than that if you are just going to give it to a couple companies. Going the other direction that gives you an income of about $2.3 trillion, with deficit and other taxes making up the rest of the spending that we do. So that $700 billion bail out? Maybe not such a good idea. Almost a third of our entire income. Which I believe is what they were saying was too much for a family to spend on mortgage, much less the US government which is already more than maxed out.

Well this is the most depressing thing I have read all week. I’ve always known that Fox News pushes the edge when it comes to fact checking on its reportage. But apparently the damage it does is longer term that the immediate current events. A recent study shows that we are more likely to believe lies that back our ideology. That is not particularly surprising or new, however it also shows that once we are shown that those lies are false, we are unlikely to stop believing them. This is so depressing. Just lie enough and you will win your election. How much of the country thinks that Obama is a muslim now[1]? Ugh. I can even watch it operate in my own head. I hope that I am able to sift though it though and discard incorrect beliefs one I identify them though. Maybe that is harder than I thought though.

[1] – Apparently 12% and interestingly it is evenly divided between democrats and republicans. Not only that but 37% of the people who think he is muslim are planning on voting for him.

When all else fails, Bush reverts to his old standby, the politics of fear. I mean why shouldn’t he? It has worked so well for the past 8 years. “If you don’t give me $700 billion, the terrorists will have already won.” I really do wonder if there isn’t some secret plan to make the super rich so rich that they and a select few necessary others will be able to build an impenetrable compound where they will be able to survive the coming oil apocalypse. It would explain so much.

An excellent look at why this is the politics of fear:

“Either the disaster is going to come, wether or not we do anything, or it’s just a power grab and they are just taking the money, looting banks and giving it to their friends.” I don’t know who this guy is, but he is awe inspiring.

The UK press has an interesting look at the US financial meltdown. I really do wonder if we actually can afford to bail out these banks. I can only imagine what the repercussions would be, but it seems like if we really do want a free market, we should let those banks fail. That would hurt the stock market, and many people use the stock market for retirement savings, but I think the long term advantages would be large. If companies continue to think that they will be bailed out every time they buy bad mortgages this cycle will just continue. Isn’t this exactly the same thing that happened in the 80s with the S&L bailout? I mean not learning from the from the distant past (e.g. the Philippine insurrection informing our invasion of Iraq) is one thing, but not learning from the mistakes WE MADE OURSELVES?!?! That is just criminal, and we should have to suffer the consequences, but spend what little cash we have left on bailing out what are clearly failed institutions. And which will keep failing. I simply don’t see how providing the fund for failed or going to fail companies is going to stop companies from failing. We already wasted a trillion dollars on an unnecessary war, do we need to waste another trillion on failed enterprises?

The director of the CIA recently made remarks about the intelligence behind discovering the Syrian nuclear reactor. Yes, the one that the Israelis blew up. I love the mention of that “it was destroyed.” Make me think: “That’s a nice nuclear reactor you got there. Shame if something might happen to it.” In any case, this speech is interesting because it outlines the difference between good intelligence and bad intelligence. Too bad we didn’t have some of that excellent discernment 8 years ago. (To his credit, the director notes that as well.)

The news report said it was the worst 24 hours ever in terms of amount of rain on the ground. It was also pretty consistent from one day to the next. And in two days almost made it one of the rainiest Septembers ever. However, my wife and I were driving around, and saw the madness, but it didn’t effect us directly, so my thinking was that the deep tunnel project worked. In fact we even went to a party the next day. Not so for the entire county. Albany Park in Chicago was completely flooded. We managed to bypass it by sheer luck. Des Plaines was also hit hard. Makes the lakes we drove through in Lincolnwood seem downright tame by comparison. All of a sudden I am feeling that the money spent on that new ejector pump was well spent. Still given that this is a once in a 150 years rainstorm, the city did pretty well for itself. Gotta say that deep tunnel project paid itself off last weekend. All the flooding seemed to be constrained to areas near natural waterways.

At least I know why we couldn’t get on at Pratt. I wish I’d known that there was so much trouble in Albany Park. That isn’t too far away and I could have helped make sandbags or something. At least it is dry this week. Give the sewers time to empty.

What I want to know is why the town couldn’t simply pay TDS to build and maintain the local interconnect, but maintain ownership. In this way TDS still gets that last mile business, but the town can force the ability to interconnect and choose through that last mile. Obviously TDSneeds to protect its investment through lawsuits, but if the town paid for that investment instead, that seems like a much easier way at administering choice. Ever since AT&T won the right to keep competitors off their last mile network I have really come around to thinking that data access really is a utility style service. Run a fiber to every house and lease it out to service providers: cable, phone and internet. No need for trucks to come to your house, and certainly no need for new wires to be run. I wonder if it would be possible for single blocks to build out as a co-op? Ultra high bandwidth loop through the alley with an interconnect at the corner that any service provider can access? This is similar to how a condo works, only no more infighting for pole space and service access.

I’m not wasting time, I’m just practicing science. Wired’s article is interesting in that it points out some neat facts about what science is and isn’t. In particular, it brings up the problem I have a lot with biblical literalists. It isn’t about knowing the rules that govern the world, it is about the process of finding out those rules. It is about evolving and refining an idea to more closely match observations in the world, and throwing away ideas when they are shown to be incorrect. It isn’t about rote memorization of facts, much though your fifth grade teacher may have told you that.

Oh yeah, and T-2 days until the end of the world. For those who are actually concerned, the chances that the trinity test back in WWII would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world were much higher. Nothing like that chain reaction had ever happened before on earth, whereas here much higher energy astronomical particles blast through the earth all the time. The only difference is that those happen in places where the scientists aren’t looking.

Cool, it looks like Fermilab managed to measure the characteristics of another Omega baryon. I used to work for a group that was trying to study isospin variants via combining accelerators rather than simply building larger ones. It was a clever idea and would have saved a fair amount of money to get similar science done, but this was the era of the super conducting super collider, so it was not to be. That was after all, the only high energy study on the horizon. And it never even got finished. Long story short, it warms my heart to see someone still working on extending the known set of isospin variants.

Also, I just recently discovered that they managed to fill out the rest of the elements in the current shell of the periodic table! I had no idea that anyone was working on that or that they had discovered so many more elements. I learned that from the excellent videos provided by the University of Nottingham.

Be forewarned, any story titled Poopsplosion can’t end pretty.

So, the drains downstairs weren’t draining properly. With the big rainstorms coming up we figured we’d better get the plumber in. Turns out we were right. In fact the ejector pump (not not the sump pump, sigh, stupid builders) was broken. Not only that but the backup pump (apparently the technical term for this is, and I am not making this up, the “Ace in the Hole”) wasn’t running either. Somehow (and no I am not pointing fingers) a piece of black fabric got into the sewage pit and wrapped itself around the turbine of the ejector pump.

Well, nothing was working so the plumbers took it all apart and were testing the different mechanisms to see where the damage and what was salvageable. The main ejector pump was shot (crap $500) but the ace in the hole just had the line blocked by the fabric that was stopping the main pump. They of course couldn’t have known this and when testing to see if the ace in the hole was humming (this means it may be salvageable) plugged it in and banged it on the side. Well, since they removed the other pump (and with it said blockage) the ace in the hole started working. Remember that this is a pump that needs to clear out two decks worth of rainstorm. Lets just say the plumber looking down the wrong end of the poop cannon was having a worse day than I was.

He was drenched head to toe. Those clothes will be burned when he gets home. Fortunately his dad (at least I think that’s the head guy) was quick with the plug and stopped it as fast as possible (keeping the rest of the basement pretty clean). The bulk of the poopcano hit the poor underling. Humorously apparently the same thing happened in reverse 20 years ago. That’s a long time for revenge pops.

I don’t know whether to be honored or not that I got to witness a once in 20 years plumbing event.