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.

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

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.

Is it not Bush’s fault the economy sucks, or does Obama not have experience to lead? Pick one.

Bush apologists are a strange breed. They are so quick to defend their President as if they were blind, overpermissive parents of high school troublemakers. “Are you calling my son a liar? Not MY George! He doesn’t DO things like that. Why are you teachers always picking on my son?”

It’s been a long time since the buck has stopped anywhere.

I’ve heard a whole lot of talk lately from people trying to take the blame off of Bush for Iraq and for our country’s current financial state and putting it on the legislators or business or the Muslims or the liberals or  the consumers ourselves or anybody BUT the president, saying that he’s not responsible, its not his job to regulate what goes on in this country, that he’s just the figurehead. To be the “leader of the free world” you don’t really have to do any actual leading, you just have to be a pretty face and a nice sound bite and let the whole rest of the government take the blame for what goes wrong. (Unless something goes right, which you get the credit for. That’s one of the nice things about being a god, oops I mean president.)

If Bush is just a figurehead then wouldn’t it stand to reason that it doesn’t matter how much experience you have? So that would get Obama off the hook with that inexperience argument. The only person who actually has the experience to be president are the former presidents.

My butt could be the President of the United States as long as it got some sweet photo ops on aircraft carriers,made some endearing comments to give to the media, and did everything its handlers told it to do. Actually it might be even more qualified than the current candidates, since it has a whole lot of experience in sitting around doing nothing and spewing hot air.

“They should just use other forms of transporation then”

We need some moderation in things, and gas prices are going up and we must adjust, but just using public transportation  or buying a hybrid is not a reality for a whole lot of people without access to it or several tens of thousands of dollars burning a hole in their pocket.

They’re not finding other forms of transportation because in a whole lot of places outside the elitist urban archipelago there just aren’t any other forms of transportation. And the fact of the matter is you have to go to work or you don’t eat.

Say you live in a suburban enclave 6 miles from the business area in your town. Or out in the country 20 miles from civilization. Or you have a great job that just happens to be a 45 minute drive from where you live but it beats unemployment or working at the Family Dollar, and moving would cost more money up front than just budgeting for rise in gas prices. Or you live in Arlington, Texas - one of the few major metropolitan areas with no public transportation, which the voting public has opposed since the 1960s because they’re afraid it might attract more poor people.

They may change the WAY they drive but they’re not going to change the method of getting there because in the last few decades and more, we’ve moved outside of the high population cities and self-sufficient farms hardly exist in this country anymore. We’ve got suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and that equals to commuters. Family no longer lives on the same block. We go to college and don’t return to our hometowns, or we find employment elsewhere. This is not bad, it’s good. But it does change the way we have to transport ourselves.

“I can’t live without my car” is not the lament of the lazy obese person who drives two blocks to the grocery store, it’s a reality for a lot of working people. Alternative forms of transportation are trendy now and fun to talk about but either don’t exist in the here and now or aren’t economically viable for most people. I drove a 1992 Ford Explorer at 13mpg because I had to, not because I wanted to. I did not have a vehicle and no one else was willing to let me pay them $200 a month until the $1200 he was asking was paid off, and let me drive the car at the same time. Until Priuses start falling from the sky like manna, using better-mileage cars is not going to happen, not even with tax credits.

So what’s the answer? I’ve kept my gas spending pretty level in the quick time that it has gone up. I work from my house sometimes because I do have that luxury. I call my mother more often and visit her less. Trips to Grandma’s are carefully planned in advance. When I do take the 45 mile drive to my office I leave before rush hour starts and go home either before it starts or stay three hours late until it’s over. Knowing the prices aren’t going to go down any time soon, it might be good for some of us to plan and start saving money for a more efficient vehicle, even if we can’t buy one now we might be able to put enough money away to buy one in two or three years.

My husband is a waiter and he has noticed that he’s bringing home significantly less money day after day and wonders why. But it’s pretty consistent with the rise in gas prices. People (including us) are not choosing to eat out in restaurants so much, and when they do, they probably won’t be as generous with the tips. It does have a lot of effects, and if they continue to rise, we’ll just have to compensate in other ways.