More rants of a dead man

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Web 4.0 is already passe.

A few weeks ago I was in traffic court to see about playing that little game of reduce-the-fine.

The judge was very up front and clear about how the game worked. He explained that there was another employee of the government who would call your name, ask you to walk outside with her, offer you a deal, and it would most likely be in your best interest to take the deal.

Then he said, this is not a money making scheme.

I somehow managed to restrain myself. This guy was obviously a wise and intelligent guy, he made no story or issue about what was going to go on in his courtroom. We were all playing this game, and this is how it goes.

But then he flat out lied to everybody by saying this was not a money making scheme.

There is a $85 surcharge that new york state tacks on to nearly every ticket and summons it passes out.  Does the state feel the need to extra-punish us? Or does it just want more money.

I am reminded of a time a few years ago when I was getting off the exit of a highway and there was a checkpoint. You know, where the cops look at the inspection and registration of every car looking for expiration problems.

He took one look at my car and pulled me over.

He pointed out the my registration had expired. Interesting, I thought I very distinctly remember going to the dmv website and renewing my registration and paying. But I looked at the sticker in the window and sure enough it had expired.

So I got a ticket.

It seems to me this is a money making scheme. If the nice police man really wanted to help, he might have said “Your registration has expired, is everything okay?” And we could have discussed the situation, and I would have thanked him for pointing out the problem to me.

In fact what had happened, was I used a state government website to renew my registration. The state government either failed to mail me the new registration sticker or the federal government’s postal system failed to deliver it to my house. Either way, I did everything right, the government’s system failed, and for this, I get fined $60.

Of course you can say it’s my car it’s my responsibility to make sure everything is in  order, and I agree it is. I will take responsibility (the issue of being forced to register my car is another matter entirely) for my actions. But did they have to fine me or could they just have pointed out to me the problem so I could take care of it.

No, this is not a moneymaking scheme.

If anybody’s looking for reasons why the revolution has failed, here’s a good example.

There are arguments that the democrats tax and spend and that the republicans want smaller government and give tax brakes to the rich making them richer.

Half the population says taxing and spending is bad, and the republicans are lying. The government is bigger and they pissed quite a bit of money away on the war. Wars. Sorry.

So while Obama is going to spend lots and lots of money we don’t have, lately, the republicans have been spending plenty too, and while war is good for business, it’s bad for inter-country relations, so better we spend the money on businesses and infrastructure where we actually gain something than crazy wars that kill people get everybody pissed at us, and yield us no long term benefit.

So while the war money was spent on some US businesses, a lot of it went to resources that were just
pissed away like ammunition and Humvees and armor that got wrecked and helicopters that don’t fly anymore.
At least when you build a road, it’s there for 20-30 years.

So whether you agree with tax and spend or not, all the government really is, is another player in the economy.
They happen to be a really really big player, but so is wall street.

Wall street gets its money from the same place and people the government gets it taxes from, and one way or another they spend it.
Arguably, the wall street money ends up in relatively few hands, at least the government money ends up
spread out to a lot of people.

It’s really all the same thing, I don’t see why everybody gets so upset taking sides.

It’s almost darwin’s 200th birthday, and reading articles about his fame made me realize something.

In the previously mentioned book Ishmael, it’s pretty obvious that man is not the culmination of evolution. It’s the point at which evolution created a being that is self aware can make computers and read bogs.

At some point, the humans will kill themselves off and nature can go back to evolving the way it did before we showed up.

So if you think about it, there’s a long highway on which time goes by and things evolve, and we, the humans, are a pitstop. We mess things up, we kill other species and don’t evolve naturally (“Society killed darwin.”)

So after we’re done with our lunch at the pitstop, the humans will go away, and the trip on the highway will continue again leading to something even greater than ourselves.

For the next generation of intelligent beings will be able to look back and see that we were here and took ourselves out of the gene pool.

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.