they’re calling it a bridge loan

Tell you what. Give the auto industry the $15 billion dollars they’re asking for and then a 7 year timetable to pay it back with interest, let’s use the store credit card rate of something like 21.9% APR. (Hey, you wanna play, you gotta pay and big corporations should be equally credit-burdened as the rest of us if they’re going to play like that.)

At the end of seven years, each taxpayer will receive his or her share of the $15 billion plus the interest in a lump sum payment.

And let’s go literal with the bridge loan – if they default, CEOs and upper management will be thrown off a bridge.

If not, we’re never gonna see that money again.

Here’s what I think about the auto industry bailout idea.

No, a thousand times no, they should not be bailed out. It’s not anything to do with that “wah wah the economy makes it so no one is buying cars …” lame FAIL of an excuse. Toyota is solvent. Volkswagen is solvent. Hyundai is solvent. Even in spite of protectionist policies that shielded the Big Three for so many years, the bad management, top-heavy business structure, entitlement mentality and infinite greed combined with an inferior product is still causing them to have liquidity problems. Fuck em. They should file bankruptcy and their workers can go work at the Hyundai or Toyota plants in the South. And Chrysler isn’t even publicly traded, so super extra FU to them, if we can’t even own shares in the company why in the holy hell should we give them our money.

It is not the responsibility of the workers to subsidize the continued failure of bad business practices by the robber barons of the ruling class.

But what about all the jobs that will be lost?

Jobs are already being lost, bailout or no.

And they’ll have to take that up with the people who mismanaged the company in the first place.

The first thing people need to realize working in this type of economic system is that you are not entitled to anything. Nobody is entitled to a job. Nobody is entitled to a certain standard of living. And if the people that you put your faith and trust in to give that job and standard of living to you fail, you will have to go down with them unless you can innovate and make something else happen, be it getting another job or going into business for yourself.

I consider anyone receiving a salary from any company bailed out by the government as a welfare recipient.

It is going to take a lot of tragedy, a lot of suffering, a lot of real poverty, for people to realize that free market capitalism isn’t as free as you’d think it is.

In tragedy there is opportunity. Maybe this is the change we need.

Perspective from a technophile

Here’s something I wrote on another message board, from a girl who said she was the last of a dying breed because she didn’t have a cell phone, didn’t play video games, wasn’t all into this new handheld technology stuff, and kind of had a rather negative opinion of advance in general and said that a whole lot of people depended too much on their technology and said it gave them validation. I’m all for people living how they want to live, but had to share my perspective.

Technology itself doesn’t give me validation, but improving myself and my situation does. And in this day and age, I use technology to do that.

I got a call on my mobile when my husband slipped and fell at work, when my sister needed $200 fast, and when the baby was sick and my husband needed to know what to do. I willingly pay for my mobile phone because it is so necessary in situations like that, especially working an hour from my home.

Technology deployed the airbags in both cars when the little old man ran the red light and I plowed into him at 35 mph, resulting in a zero-injury collision.

Super Mario Brothers actually improved my handwriting. My motor skills were not the best as a kid and after one nasty hot sticky Houston summer of playing Super Mario Brothers, my hand-eye coordination had improved to where I could write more legibly.

I push myself in my job to stay on top of the new technologies and remain competitive in my field, because nobody wants a web developer who stopped upgrading their skillset in 1996. Yeah, I find myself resisting a lot of the new ways … we’re kind of conditioned to stick to the comfortable … but I have to work to break out of the “well that’s not the way we USED to do it” box and just accept it and move on .. only later do I realize the utility of the change.

Sure, technology also brought us Grand Theft Auto and the nuclear bomb, but in general, progress has been for the better, not for the worse

This website is a hell of a timesuck though, lol …

Sure, we CAN live without video games or iPods, without cell phones, without carseats and airbags, without microwaves and air conditioning, but given the means and the choice, I choose the advances. Sometimes they’re misguided (LOL @ HD-DVD) but in the general scheme of things, they’re more positive than negative.

This is what I’m really looking forward to in the end though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

John McCain = Maverick

Where I come from, “Maverick” is synonymous with “loses in the playoffs”

So he can be a Maverick all he wants.

I’ll even buy him a jersey.

why it’s not any sand in my vagina if john mccain actually convinces the majority of the electoral college to vote for him

I already put on my Facebook political status as Selfish so if you disagree with me, kindly go to Fox or MSNBC, whichever floats your boat and don’t piss on yourself about my insignificant blog. No comments on this one. Just telling you what I think, not trying to attract the hordes.

So here’s why it’s really not that big a deal to me, even as much as I will vote for Obama and tell off anyone who supports McPain, if they actually do eek through and win (be it through vote tampering, disenfranchisement, bribes or whatever means they tend to use nowadays, or if the majority really is just that stupid.)

We’ve been through this. We’re used to the idiocy, warmongering, and cater to the rich bullshit coming from the Bush administration, and even though McCain tries to deny it, he’s just going to be more of the same. And as I’m doing alright now, it’s not going to change a whole lot for me then.  So I’ll just continue to do more of the same. Shake my head and titter in derision at the stupidities the same shit different day administration squeezes out its sphincter and hope for improvement sometime in the future when thinking people become the majority in this country.

It won’t send me running off to another country all worried about the end of the world.

It will just make me put my nose in the air a little higher, knowing that I actually am, in fact, completely superior as a human being to at least fifty percent of the voting population of the United States (if it was a legit count). I’ll just shake my head in condescension like I always do at the fact that the silly backward people tend to have the most political clout in this country, and I’ll continue to make fun of them on the Internet.  But sorry guys – I’m not going anywhere. I’ll keep living here, working here, socking away my easily-earned American dollars to go spend them after my  working years are over someplace else, halfway because it would be cheaper, and half on GP.

Sorry folks, I’m going to stick around, and be more annoying than ever.

Now what’s going to be really funny is if Obama wins, watching all these stupid rednecks freak out like OMFG SOCIALIST ANTICHRIST BLACK MUSLEEEMMMMMM!!!!! with their panties in a wad trying to find some country, any country, to go escape to that the USA hasn’t already alienated.

of fears and threats

One of the most disturbing thing I’ve heard from the wrong Right lately is that if Obama becomes president, we should prepare ourself for more terrorist attacks on American soil. They sound so secure of it.

Logically, people are victim of terrorist attacks because the attacker is unhappy with something the target is doing and so they react irrationally – be it following the wrong religion, displacing their people, cultural imperialism, what have you.

So electing a president who would (at least compared to his opponent) leave that part of the world where most of the terroristic acts are occuring well enough alone, you’d think it would reduce the incidence.

Unless….there were a faction of people who would be unhappy that Obama won the presidency with the capability to react irrationally.

I am convinced that the people so certain that there will be terrorist attacks on American soil if Obama wins the presidency might not be so wrong … they are probably only giving us threats of their own future intent.

I really wouldn’t put it past some of the McCain supporters, so riled up with hatred and convinced by the VP candidate that Obama isn’t one of us, that he “doesn’t see America the way you and I do” to take matters into their own hands, see him and his supporters as a threat, and go about trying to eliminate us.

It’s definitely possible. I heard some stupid whitehat college student in a Youtube video say he thinks Obama is a one-man terrorist cell. Would it be too far a reach then to think that eliminating him would be a victory on the War on Terror? This is the kind of dangerous rhetoric the McCain campaign is insinuating, and not doing anything to stop their followers.

There is nothing more dangerous than a stupid, angry mob who believes their actions are righteous. And the McCainists seem to fit that description perfectly.

So yes, I am worried about instances of terrorism if Obama wins … but they will come from our own people.

Still, I’m willing to run that risk.

If you vote for McCain, you’re not paying attention

Or you’re one of those one-track-mind  automatons who only care that he’s against abortion, everything else be damned.

Where in the holy hell did all this talk about regulation come from? McCain wants “tougher rules on Wall Street” to protect your retirement? LOL OUT LOUD. Up until this moment, when voting Americans became a little bit concerned that their retirement accounts are tanking, your lovely Senator McCain – who had a personal hand in such tankings by gleefully supporting Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the rest of the massive deregulation that effectively removed many of the safeguards to prevent another Great Depression – goes all pro-reg on us.

McCain already has admitted that he’s no expert and doesn’t understand the economy. So he goes to his BFF Foreclosure Phil for his economic advice.   The same who on top of orchestrating the catastrophic deregulation acts that opened the door for everything from Enron to the mortgage crisis to the AIG disasters,  recently accused Americans who are noticing their retirement funds are dwindling and their consumer prices are rising of being nothing but  a nation of whiners with a mental recession.  So what if he’s gone from the campaign? McCain hasn’t changed his economic platform. And even if he did at the eleventh hour, would you trust it? Don’t buy the lip service – Gramm’s disappearance was for cosmetic purposes only.

And then McCain, who supported the bail out of Bear Stearns saying it “probably was necessary because of the ripple effect it might have had on other institutions,” went around earlier this week saying the government should let AIG fail to teach it a lesson?  If Bear Stearns was too big to fail, AIG is somehow … not?  Not that I’m for corporate welfare in the least and it’s got to end somewhere but I understand that when it’s complicated and has such a stake in the world markets, shades of gray exist. They created this mess and now they have to clean it up. Now McCain wants to get all tough on sprawling multinationals that he let get to that point in the first place and throw the world into a long, hard, global recession for some lofty ideal? Now he does? Now he espouses populist economics and touts the merits of corporate responsibility? Where were you for the last 20 years, Johnny Boy?

Is this for real? Do these people really exist in the world? I believe the need for satire and political parody has been rendered null and void. Who needs parody when real life is like this?

When will you all realize that deregulation is not equal to smaller government or “freedom” – it is a necessary safeguarding against greedy grabby corrupt people and corporations who create alliances and monopolies and extra layers of unnecessary insurances and fees to make a quick buck and then when their stupid unchecked laissez-faire ideas fall apart like they always do, it’s us that suffer.

Let me reiterate one more time – the retirements of our grandparents are NOT going to be our retirements. They had pensions, social security, and individual accounts. Today, company pensions are disappearing and social security will be all used up. So our individual efforts to save for our retirement is all we have left. If we allow these senile old white men to continue these idiotic policies of deregulation that make them and their cronies and their wives extremely wealthy at our expense, we won’t even have the individual accounts anymore. Think about it.

Vote your future.

Lehman, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Oh My!

Makes me wonder if I’m fortunate I didn’t start my 401k already or not.

And yet, less of something is still something, and I’ve got nothing. Investing options in this economy are daunting. But necessary. My goal right now is to pay these hospital bills and then in January start throwing a little something into a conservative investment account.

been awhile, hasn’t it?

I’m going to update this blog more regularly so that I can get all my wrong opinions out of my head instead of letting them get me frustrated.

I have work to do now, but here are the short versions:

Rich old white men labeling Obama “elitist” makes me LOL a little.

The people who put legal problems on CERN because they’re scared that the LHC will create mini black holes and swallow the earth have been reading too much exitmundi.nl. Fire that thing up!

Sarah Palin might be “hittable” but that’s no reason to vote for McCain/Palin ticket.

More later.

on faith

I really want to believe like I did when I was a teenager. A lot more things made a lot more sense back then. I did the right thing for the pleasure of doing it. And knowing it was agreeable to someone other than myself.

But I don’t want that to mean that I have to be like them or them or have to concern myself with stuff on this website.

My husband is the perfect example of non-fanatical faith. All those examples above don’t concern him. They’re not what he believes in. His belief is a reflection of the God he trusts in to have gotten him this far. And it helps him to do good things that help people and he never judges, just uses what he’s learned for positive reasons.

I really do want to be more like him and less like me. My heart wants to, my head says not yet.