More rants of a dead man

A long time ago I met a guy from IBM who explained to me that sun invented java because at the time hardware was getting cheaper and cheaper and faster and faster, and soon you’d be able to buy a dell for $200 that would run all the current day software rather well.

Java fixed that alright.

Today I heard about Websphere 6 introducing the concept of “Core Groups” and I realize that Websphere is IBM’s solution to the same problem.

I had this neat thought today.

Like everything else in the world, banks are expected to live forever. Because really, the earth is going to exist forever, and so are humans in general and if individual people die, well they can hand off their interest in assets and whatnot to the next generation, but the people will always be there.

The sun is never going to burn out, we’ll never overpopulate the planet, all these things will keep going on forever.

But banks are interesting. Banks create money.

I’ve never started a bank or any other business, but I expect it works something like this:

A group of people take out a loan or hit up some venture capitalists for money to open a retail outlet and hire some people and get carpeting, and have some extra cash left over to lend out as starting money.

People off the street open savings accounts where they get 1% on their deposits, and the bank lends out some number times the amount of deposits and charges 5-10% for use of their money.

Except of course they don’t have that money, the created it.

So as long as the bank does okay, and there’s no runs on the bank everything works fine. This has been going on for hundreds of years at thousands of banks.

But what if you wanted to close your bank. You can’t. In order to close your bank, you’d have to collect all the money you loaned out and give back all the money that was deposited.

Unless you have enough profit to cover giving back all the money in the savings accounts, or plan years ahead so that you stop giving out new loans and wait for them all to come due, you can’t close your doors.

You can, however fail. The FDIC makes it easy, just run your business badly, you go into bankruptcy and the FDIC bails out all your depositors and worries (or not) about the outstanding loans due.

Why is it that all the toothpaste makers  that I’ve seen always think they’re getting one over on us. I’ve noticed without fail (though I can’t say I’ve tried every toothpaste in my life) that when you first open the tube and squeeze, some toothpaste comes out, but behind it is a lot of air.

I can imagine some kind of excuse about leaving room for pressure equalization based on the packaging plant and your house being at different altitudes, but somehow I don’t think so.

I think they just want to give you less product in a bigger package.

They’re not fooling me. I know it’s a conspiracy.

I don’t know about other religions but being jewish really means you live somewhere on the line of ‘how jewish you are’.  The level of jewocity you are is linear up to a point.

If you are, or consider yourself jewish you appear on the line somewhere.
Anybody to the left of you on the line (less religious) is by your standards not really jewish and anybody to the right of you on the line is crazy.

Once you get into the ultra orthodox/hassidic arena, the line forks out into many lines where groups can be
differentiated by how they wear they hats.

All of them are crazy and they think that nobody else is really jewish except them.

Everybody’s got a view, why not me.

National health care won’t work. It won’t work simply because by definition it has to be worse than what we have now, and what we have now obviously isn’t working.

It’s a lot like the recent economic bubbles, we’re leveraging against our future with the current system and it’s like running so fast your legs can’t keep up with your body and you eventually fall over. At the current rate, the existing system will collapse soon enough. (universities seem to be having this problem as well)

The reason I say it has to be worse than the existing system, is because if the government were to take over the health care system, they’d have to play ball with the current health insurance infrastructure. They’d have to, simply because the health insurance companies aren’t going to just say “okay, it was fun, we’ll go out of business now, since you’ve got a handle on it.”

No, they’re going to fight to the death to maintain their existence. And what we’ll be left with is the government instituting a system of health care, that involves the extra wasted layer of infrastructure that the health insurance companies bring to the table. They’re not needed, since the government will be providing the services that they now currently perform (thus ‘nationalizing’ health care) but they will be there sucking up administrative costs all the same.

So what we’ll end up with is a system more expensive than what we have now and I think we all see that the system we have now is already too expensive.

I imagine what the health insurance companies want is for the government just to pay all the bills. Right. And it’s in who’s best interest not to pad all the bills? After all the government is paying.

We’d need to create a system where it is in everybody’s best interest to try and do things cheaper, and I hate to say it, but competition is probably the best option.

I had a novel idea about making the car companies profitable…
Get rid of the unions.
Just the overhead of the unions themselves…. if all the employees stopped paying union dues, the car
companies could lower their salaries by the same amount saving a ton of money, and nobody would see a pay cut.
How about that? ohhhhhh nooooooooooo… you can’t get rid of the UNIONS oh no… who would protect the
workers from the big bad company. Yeah, well, honda and toyota are doing just fine, so I daresay in this case, the unions are more of a problem than a help. When the pendulum swings the other way and big corporations start abusing employees again, then you can form another union, but in the slow times, it’s just a waste of moeny. And it’s helping to kill the car companies.

So when the big three go out of business, you can lay some of the blame on the unions.

You guys heard about the worm fossil looking thing they found on mars? They say it looks like a tortellini or some other italian noodle. At first I was skeptical, they just want something to
get excited about, but after some thought I realized they’re really off their knocker.
Life on this planet started out with plants. There were forests of green thousands if not millions of years before the first slug crawled the earth. Plants are far simpler forms of life.
So why they hell would anybody even suggest that there might be some animal-type life on mars when there’s no evidence there was ever plant life. Let alone a fossil near the surface.
Please.

In the future we will forget the details of what happened, but 6 months ago, the price of gas at the pump was over $4.00 and heating oil was over $5.00

It is now December 2008 and gas is $2.10 and heating oil around $2.90.

Oh and the markets are all tanking.

So if you ever thought for a moment that the price of oil isn’t set by a cartel of some kind, this should give you food for thought.

In the good old days of writing software we used to reorganize it, now we ‘refactor’ it.

I just heard that gas is $1.71 in Edison new jersey.
And it occurred to me that the gas price fixing is the tool the government uses to help or hinder the
economy.
When the housing bubble was ramping up, they wanted to slow down the economy so they raised the price
of gas, didn’t work so well, the bubble popped, and now we’re in the dumps. So to spur consumer spending,
they’re lowering the price of gas to help the economy out.
It’s not working either, but at least there’s cheap gas.
Not bad for a conspiracy, eh?