Greg In The Desert

I remember being in Junior High and High School reading about the 1918 Flu epidemic and The Great Depression. In the future, such events wouldn’t happen again.

Here we are in the future. A possible great epidemic is upon us. We are experiencing the largest recession since the Great Depression. General Motors is closing down Pontiac. The United States has a black president. There are still no flying cars.

We are in interesting times. Hang on and enjoy the ride.

The current recession is like nothing ever experienced since The Great Depression. The semi-conductor industry is getting hit hard and I’m concerned that I could loose my job. It was the beginning of January that my employer said they will not need to cut jobs. At the end of January Intel announced plant closures and layoffs.

I can only speculate but I think these closures were going to happen at some point. They are just occurring earlier than were originally planned. Intel had already been slimming down for the last several years. The 1000 lay offs in the manufacturing sites were a surprise and maybe they were expecting those position to be eliminated though attrition. The site I work at is reducing 100 to 200 people.

A little over two years ago Intel cut jobs here in Rio Rancho when they merged factories and elimated the 200mm factory. This happened when the economy was booming. Then, I was very unprepared to loose my job. I had significant debt, little savings and no plan in the event that I lost my job. That was a very stressful time because the whole process lasted 6 months and I didn’t know if I would have a job or not. In the end, it turned out to be a whole lot of drama for nothing as I was never at risk for losing my job.

That whole ordeal taught me a lesson and I decided that I never wanted to be in that position again. Since then I have cut all my debt except for my mortgage and have started saving and building an emergency fund (I still have a much more to save before I make it to a years salary).

The economy seems to be getting worse. I fear Intel will have no choice but to cut more jobs to remain profitable as semiconductors sales drop. I could still get redeployed, the fancy term Intel uses for “we eliminated your job but if you can find another job in the company go for it. There aren’t any.” What happens If I do get laid off? Business Week says Albuquerque is one of the best cities to ride out the recession. I’m not sure I believe that and have started to plan for long term unemployment, a year or more.

Besides my savings I won’t be immediately without money. Not only do I have accumulated vacation and absent time that I can cash in, it’s very likely I will received at least three months of severance pay, maybe more due to my long service with the company. After the severance pay runs out I could draw on unemployment for a while. I have company stock and although it’s lost significant value in the last few months the stock sale could produce enough money to live off of for several months. Finally I could pull money from my 401K if I absolutely needed cash.

I will need to cut costs where I can. A few of the major expenses I can think of:

• Good bye satellite tv. Ironic since I will have plenty of time to watch it. I may replace it with a much cheaper Netflix plan, if I find I have time to watch movies. I still have my Apple TV and uh… bittorrent.
• I might eliminate the data plan from my iPhone. If I find I am at home most of the time I don’t see why I would need it much. I won’t eliminate my internet service. I already have a fairly inexpensive plan and using the internet will be needed for job searching.
• Since I won’t be at work, I will stop going out for breakfast and lunch. I will need to monitor my food budget much more closely. Now I buy whatever I want without much regard for costs. Maybe I will become one of those extreme coupon clippers.
• My 1997 Ford Ranger is paid for and in good conidion. I recently reduced the insurance on it. Assuming I’m unemployed for more than a few months, I would plan to ride my bike around town to reduce the chance that my truck would have problems. If I did have problems with my truck I am more than capable of making repairs myself. I could pay for repairs with a credit card and make the minimum payments if I had to have someone else fix it.
• I’m not sure there’s much room for reducing energy costs. I already have the thermostat aggressively controlled by the home automation computer and I don’t use that much energy by myself.
• Today if I want something, I put it on my credit card and buy it. If I want to travel somewhere I go. I do carefully budget these expenses so that they are paid for at the end of the month. It is pretty easy to do when I have steady income. If I get laid off and a new iPhone comes out, it’s going to take quite a bit of will power to not buy it.

If I am unemployed, I am not going to sit around and feel sorry for myself. In fact it’s an opportunity to get some things done that I haven’t had time to do.

• I have bunch of junk that I need to sell and or donate that I haven’t been able to sort out.
• I have a number of projects around the house I can work on that cost little or no money. I also can scour Craigslist for materials.
• I have my iPhone and Mac OS programming to practice.
• I will be blogging a lot more.

I think there will be some jobs out there, they just wont pay nearly as much as what I make now. If I have to I will work for minimum wage at the local pizza place. I could survive off that little money and still make the house payment. Who knows, I might actually enjoy it.

Unlike the last time I went through lay offs, I am not stressed about loosing my job this time. Sure it won’t be easy and it helps that I don’t have a family to care for. I will have to make some lifestyle changes. I have a plan and I am prepared for what ever comes along.

• The Washington Monthly – The compromise plan announced last night includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years. With that in mind, Steven Waldman argues, persuasively, that when the vast majority of congressional Republicans oppose the package, they'll be voting against the biggest tax cut "in history."
• Intel PR Tries To Shore Up WiMax’s Sagging Image – Ahead of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona… – Intel this week went into damage control mode, telling any reporter who'd listen that WiMax struggles in the United States aren't a big deal — and that globally, the technology will reach 800 million people by 2010.
• Twin Tip Nation Ski Shop – Rio Rancho based ski shop and online retailer.
• REI sees income dive, will trim 61 jobs – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Outdoor retailer Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) saw its net income for 2008 dip 65 percent, prompting the cooperative to eliminate 61 full-time jobs, primarily at its Kent, Wa.-headquarters and its distribution center in Sumner, Wa.
• The National Economy Versus Your Personal Economy – Mitchell says that the current recession is a “generation-changing moment”. Events like The Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 — and the current economic crisis — fundamentally change the way people act and behave. He cited his own father, who was a teenager during The Great Depression. “For him, high-risk investment was a passbook account,” Mitchell joked. Because he had seen the bank failures of the 1930s, he was leery of even a basic savings account.
• Focus on the Family spent big on Prop 8 – Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family gave $727,250 in cash and services to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, according to records released by the California secretary of state, including a $100,000 check in late October, just days before the evangelical media empire announced it planned to lay off nearly 20 percent of its employees.

  While there has been public scrutiny of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its attempts to influence the campaign to reverse a California Supreme Court ruling allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, Focus on the Family and related donors pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into the ProtectMarriage.com campaign, records show.

• 2 big satellites collide 500 miles over Siberia – Two big communications satellites collided in the first-ever crash of two intact spacecraft in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds and posing a slight risk to the international space station.
  NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday.
  "We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
  NASA believes any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course. There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.
  The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said.
• Mother Of The Year :: SonnyRadio.com :: Feel Better About Being Alive! – In a zoo in California, a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of
  triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the
  pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size,
  they died shortly after birth.

  The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started
  to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The
  veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a
  depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate
  another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.

• Icicles of Brick – The reason for it to have such a strange look is because it was used later by Russian army to test the influence of Russian alternative to napalm inside of the brick houses. Due to very high temperature of napalm the bricks started melting just like ice melts in the spring forming the icicles, but those icicles are of red brick.
• Comcast asking the FBI to solve its porn interruption | www.azstarnet.com ® – Comcast is turning to the FBI to help determine how pornography interrupted its feed of the Super Bowl earlier this month.
  “We have shared all of our information on this situation with the FBI and will continue to provide our full cooperation to them throughout their investigation,” spokeswoman Kelle Maslyn said in a statement e-mailed to the Arizona Daily Star.
  Thousands of Comcast’s Tucson-area customers who were watching the company’s standard definition feed during the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl on Feb. 1 were subjected to a 30-second clip from a pay-per-view porn channel.
• Kevin Kelly — The Technium – The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It's well know the strictest of them don't use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.
• ABQNews: Death penalty repeal passes House – The House of Representatives voted today to abolish New Mexico's death penalty and replace it with a sentence of life in prison without parole.

  The legislation, HB285, passed on a vote of 40-28, and headed to the Senate.
  Twice before, in 2005 and 2007, the House approved a death penalty repeal only to have it fail in the Senate.
  This year, repeal supporters are banking on a different outcome because there are new members in that chamber.
  "If everyone who told us they would vote with us stays, we will pass the Senate," predicted Viki Elkey, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty.
  A final hurdle would be Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson, who has been a supporter of capital punishment in the past.

• Rumormonger: Intel’s Secret Geekfest to Kill the iPhone – A wireless exec from Disney was at the recent invite-only "brain drain," according to a tipster who was at the meeting on Intel's campus in Santa Clara, Calif. As was John Faith, the head of MySpace Mobile. Alan Kay, a famous computer scientist attended, along with a host of other graybeards. So what did Intel show all the geeks it gathered?

  Executives shared secret plans to build a new mobile device based on Intel technology that the chipmaker hopes to have on the market this year. The inspiration: the runaway success of Apple's iPhone. And the fear: that this will be a rerun of Intel's past failed attempts, like the dead-on arrival "ultramobile portable computer" concepts it showed off last year.

• ‘Buy American’ rule proposed for Obama stimulus plan – New Mexico Business Weekly:
  The U.S. Chamber said foreign companies employ 5 million workers in the U.S. and the business group worries about such trade restrictions mirroring what happened in the 1930s, when the U.S. hiked tariffs during the Great Depression and global trade dipped by 50 percent.
• The Official Site of Rio Rancho, NM – Building Details
  Hewlett-Packard’s new facility in the Rio Rancho City Center is a 218,000-square-foot, three-story office building which will house the company’s New Mexico operations. HP will initially employee 1,350 with the ability to expand within the building. The design of the facility incorporates many attractive features and amenities for employees, and will be an integral part of City Center.
• Why CableCard isn't on the Mac | Playlist | Macworld
  There are the copy-protection issues around CableCard, mandated by content owners who are terrified of piracy. There's Apple’s lack of interest (at least, so far) in creating a CableCard-ready Mac. There are access issues with the new DisplayPort connection.
• Denver's red light cameras: no data, just lots of tickets – Ars Technica
  The only thing better than setting up red light cameras and watching the cash flow in is doing so without collecting the required data to prove that the cameras are useful and accurate. Right? Okay, maybe not so much. This is, however, the situation unfolding in Denver, Colorado, where a local newspaper's detective work has revealed that the contractor hired by the city to manage the cameras has failed to submit contractually-required documentation. What's more, the city wasn't even asking for it.
• Nortel Finally Bails On WiMax (NT)
  Telecom gear maker Nortel (NT), which filed for bankruptcy protection two weeks ago, is finally putting an end to one of its big wireless bets. Toronto-based Nortel (NT) is killing off its mobile WiMax business, ending a joint venture with Israel's Alvarion.

  WiMax, a super-fast mobile Internet technology, hasn't taken off the way some of its backers had hoped, as many telcos — like AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), and T-Mobile (DT) in the U.S. — opt for a competing technology called LTE.