From a bankruptcy lawyer

Appears to me

The tea partiers are such dumbasses that they don't even see that they are getting set up.

Give this a try

Just a thought experiment

Stiffing the defense contractors gave me great satisfaction.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/federal-debt-limit-you-choose-who-gets-paid/?hpid=z2

And yes, I would default.  Yes, I realize that it would be pure hell.  Still, I am thinking that it is the way to go.  The easiest way to start living within our means is to stiff people so that they won't loan us any more money.  Kinda forces our hand

Job Creators

Really?

And folks are expected to buy this line of crap?

Folks, these are the same folks who disassembled out factories and shipped them to China.

Sometimes words fail me.

The means of production

Consider for a moment:

Mr. Daley acknowledged, however, that both sides are now at the brink. “We are now getting to a point where markets around the world will question whether the political system can come together and compromise for the good of the country.”

So now our political process is not longer a consideration of the needs and aspiration of a civil society, but rather, a set of marketing strategies to placate the wealthy and the greed of others

Deleveraging a Bar Tab

It is odd how people are freaking out because the world is "deleveraging".  When you listen to the press, this is a bad thing, soon to be the end of the world.

But in truth, all that deleveraging entails is getting out of debt.  Nothing more, nothing less.

I have been deleveraging now for the past three years.  My gross debt was a credit card run-up caused by keeping my medical insurance active while I was unemployed.  $800.00 a month for more than a year can cause quite a bit of leverage.  But the balance plows down at a steady -$350.00 a month and it will go away soon enough.

That is deleverage.  It is a virtuous thing.  It means that you have finally came to your senses and started living within your means.  Sometimes debt is necessary, but you pay it off.  What we did in the 'nineties and 'ought's was just plain foolish living beyond our means.  We got caught up in tulip-mania and now we have woken up and started paying the piper.

The "growth" that we got used to was nothing more noble than running up a bar tab.  I think that this analogy it the best one, and since I am the first one I have heard using it, I will take it as an original thought.   It doesn't mean that I was the first to use it, no it just means that I thought of it myself, or I am too senile to remember where I heard it in the first place.

Anyway, giving folks a bar tab is always a fools game.  The customer will always pimp you in the end.  What the banks did was play the fool and give a whole bunch of folks a whole bunch of money, which, fools that people be, they used foolishly.  Now the banks are freaking out because they are fully aware that they are in fact, the greater fool.  The government isn't going to act as their kneecappers for them, so they are trying to get the money out of the government itself.

No one knows how the whole thing will play out, but folks getting themselves out of debt and not taking on any more debt gives me some hope

Handmade cheap plastic crap

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.


I thought that this might be useful over time.  I played with it and did what I could.

But in the end, I just realized that the pieces that it made were just plastic crap.  Granted, it was plastic crap that I made.  But it was still plastic crap.

Plastic is odd stuff.  There are uses where it does turn out to be as good as other materials, but I don't think for a minute that it is "best" in the great majority of applications.    What plastic does do is allow mass market economics to work, and that is where the whole idea is beginning to fall apart.

Now these things are beginning to hit the marker at consumer prices.  They are also being touted as "wave of the future" and "gamechanger".  I'm afraid I can't see it.  The ability to make useful things out of thermoplastic material at these temperatures is limited to pretty useless, non-robust gee-gaws.

One of the things that I am trying is purging all the plastic I can out of my life.  Don't get me wrong, I will never be able to get rid of some of it.  The black dingus that I am beating on to make this screed come out isn't going to be made of wood anytime soon.  There are also things that won't break to soon, and I sure aren't going to throw stuff away while they are completely functional in order to replace them.

Maybe one or two of these things will be handy to have around a small city to make the little replacement things that folks will need to keep things operational.   They will probably be in the machine shops/repair facilities that will be popping up in the future to keep the current stock running.

But as a mass market thing, I really can't see these things living up to the hype that everyone seems to want to attach to them.

A Bad Smell

I am coming to the conclusion that there is a war getting ready to be kicked off soon.

Don't know who, I am thinking that around September/October feels about right.

I really, truly hope that my gut is wrong

Down to a Week

I splurged last night.  Actually went out and bought a few brews.  This has been verboten of late as I am hoarding my coin for a potential period of no checks at the VA.  It was still good to relax a bit and see some blue sky.

I am really getting fascinated by the dance in Washington.  Especially those poor saps in the Republican party.  The Republicans have created the most unwieldy coalition of folks you can imagine.  I think that the current Republican party actually is less organized and less coherent than the Democrats, and that my friends, is saying something..

You have the old money, suck off the rich people, white shoe crowd in a shotgun marriage with the tea-bagger, gun-nut, xenophobia crowd.  Wow.  It is like going to a Hamptons party and having the Clampetts from the Beverly Hillbillies on the guest list.

The Tea Baggers are folks that I could probably get along with if they would bother to display just a little adaptability.  Their central premise, to wit: Government is out of control, is self evident.  Getting control of it has to be high on everyone's list of things to do.

The white shoe crowd is probably appalled by this behavior.  They are the folks that have been making a far-too-healthy living sucking off the banks, military contracts, corporate loopholes, and other large scale government largesse.  To them, the idea of reducing the revenue stream provided by government is anathema.

Enter Obama and Geithner and their crowd.  Not only does Obama have the absolute temerity to be black (well, sort of), which in it's own sense drives most folks in the Republican party into gibbering shit-fits, but he is absolutely wedded to maintaining the status quo, even if it does bankrupt the country.  

So the Republican geniuses, being completely incapable of letting go of their little private greed and petty bigotries, have come up with the brilliant idea of handing Obama all the rope that he needs to hang himself.  Raise the debt limit 2.4 trillion in three tranches and give Obama the keys to the car in deciding whether to use them.

You see this will give the white shoes another run at sucking money out of the Guv'mint, it will allow the tea-baggers the opportunity to paint Obama as a spendthrift for the next election, and it will give Obama the money he needs to keep the party going until the election.

I really can't see anything changing just yet.  We are getting closer to the denouement, but we aren't quite there yet.  I think that we will manage to slip through the rest of 2011 and into 2012.  But the fat lady is just stage right my friends, she is starting to warm up.

Teeth

I am venting on a deeply held prejudice here.  Many of you will be offended, but I hope that you will just hear me out.

I really don't trust people with perfect teeth who smile too much.  They creep me out.  When I see such a person coming toward me, brimming with ersatz bonhomie and eager to get me to love their perfect selves, I really want to just paste them one in the kisser.

It is creepy, we have a society where perfect teeth seem to rise naturally to the top ranks.  Parents with access to the best care in orthodontia seem to raise the children fated for higher wage.

TV personalities seem to have more teeth than what nature endowed them at birth.  I think that there is an ugly black market somewhere where teeth are farmed in tofu-raised children for implant into aspiring anchorpersons.  It makes me slightly nauseous when I wander through the nurses lounge and I see the cast of "The View".  It looks as though a village in Central America has been looted for teeth.

What it really shows is the triumph of the image.  Where access to orthodontia and plastic surgery are a requirement for access to jobs with public sides.

Churchill need not apply

Dumb Asses

The Republican Party is a farce.  It is held hostage by a bunch of economically illiterate, photogenic morons who parrot the ravings of dead men (in this case, Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman).

This group of barely-washed savages has recently blinked in the current hissy-fit that populates the airwaves and the blogosphere.  Their absolutely asinine assertion that there can be no new taxes to balance the budget is now in question.

This is where this group of nincompoops really miss the boat.  The money has been spent.  We have to pay it back.  It will take generations to do so.  The rich folk, the middle class, and the poor will all have to tighten their belts and pony up to pay for past mistakes.

We have one of the lowest tax rates in the world.  Despite all the screaming by the morons in the intransigent right, this cannot be allowed to continue.  This is not the world of the founding fathers, this is a post-industrial society thrashing about after making a series of desperately wrong decisions.  If anyone thinks that we can right the ship without pain to all parts of the society, they are living in an ideological dream world.

Social security and transfer payments do need to be tamed.  But that taming must include all transfer payments.  Social security, Medicare, Medicaid are transfer payments.  House tax credits are a transfer payment, bank bailouts are a transfer payment, a capital gains tax rate which are lower than income tax rates are a transfer payment, farm subsidies are a transfer payment, oil depletion subsidies are a transfer payment, etc, etc, etc.

Out tax code is a shambles because we have a system that rewards graft and corruption at the electoral level.  The tax code is riddled with exemptions and kickbacks for those with sufficiently large political fiefdoms.  In truth, it is not a unified tax code as much as it is a monument to the purchase price of privilege.

The Difficulty with Mirrors

I am always amazed at what people see when they become introspective.  Since I am people, this post includes me as much as anyone.

I think that as a society and perhaps a species, we are finely tuned self-deception devices.  I can't think of anyone who doesn't feel that someone else should take the hardships required.  Few people want their taxes raised, it is always someone else who better serves the society by giving their money.

Our country is a potlatch economy.  Our leaders distribute goodies to those who keep them in power.  We pay take in approximately 2.1 trillion dollars.  We distribute 2.1 trillion dollars in transfer payments to just about everyone.  Then we go out and borrow money to do the stuff that government is supposed to do.  This year it is around 1.6 trillion.

We are stuck in a debt spiral.  We probably aren't going to get out.  The boomers are already starting to stick their straws in what remains of the social security trust fund and it is running at a deficit as well.  When they (we) start retiring in a big way, that thing is going to become a huge albatross around our collective necks.  It will steepen an already steep spiral of decline.

There are a lot of folks out there in the blogosphere who rant that the social security money is there, all we have to do is tax the rich folk (which is a fabulous idea, but not enough).  We also have to realize that there will have to changes.  The first thing that we have to realize is that we (not our government, we) have spent our retirement money.  The social security trust fund is filled to the brim with IOU's.  The cash we pay out is all the current revenue that the program takes in plus a bit out of the general fund.

So, here we are getting old and broke and now we are panicking.  Getting up to go to work every day is getting stale.  But the money we put away is gone, spent on stuff we really didn't need.  So what us boomers are hoping is that we can keep the charade going long enough for us to pull out what we think is our due and then shaft the folks behind us in the line.

My big trouble with this is that it just kicks the can down the road for my kids to deal with it.  They have enough on their plate.  So, the only thing that I can do is to give up on the idea of a retirement and keep working.   A lot of this is due to the reason that my retirement account is filled to the brim with stocks from failed companies.  Another is that the cash that I do have buys less every day.  Another is that retirement looks boring as hell.

There are going to be a lot of folks like me.  I am hoping that me laying down the nature of my self delusion will help them over the hump of their rationalizations.

Too much of nuthin'

I am hunkered down in the house this weekend and week.  In the parlance of denial, I am on "staycation", where my vacation days are spent at home.  We went on a hike yesterday and today, and I will be walking each day this week, and I will be spending my time off beginning the process of getting my cardiovascular system in some kind of condition.

The reason for the staycation is simply money.  I have a bad feeling about the debt ceiling talks and the aftershocks.  I think that I will probably be missing a paycheck or two in the near future.  If the government shuts down, the hospital still opens up every day, it just holds our checks for us until the checks are made good.

I am thinking back to the "Contract with America" and the last time that governmental farce moved like this.  I think that this will probably go the same way. 

We are moving through a farce which has been played out before.  This farce contains elements with known means and ends and known fixes.  When a Republic heads into these things, the results aren't usually that pretty.

So, government will "shut down" as political theatre.  A means of looting the future will be agreed upon and government will reopen.  The rich will spend a little bit longer getting richer and not paying taxes.  The poor will suffer.  Somebody will finally get the balls to start taxing the rich.  We will plod ahead slowly to a new balance.  This is all old theatre.

But at the end of the process, we will be a little bit closer to realizing that the economics of growth are no longer available, that the economics of homeostasis are our future.

We aren't there yet.