Greg In The Desert

• Under 35? Hurray for the meltdown! – MSN Money – If you're 35 or older, the financial crisis may seem to have no upside. Your retirement funds, home equity, job prospects and credit lines have withered so much that it's hard to focus on anything but what you've lost.
  If you're young, though, the biggest threat to your future financial security isn't the current crisis. Your greatest risk is that fear will cause you to miss some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
• Al Jazeera English – Europe – Italians hold anti-mafia protest – Tens of thousands of people have marched through the streets of Naples to commemorate the victims of mafia violence and demand an end to organised crime in southern Italy.

  Demonstrators, many clad in white, held banners and pictures of relatives killed by mafia gangs, as the names of some 900 mafia victims were read out through loudspeakers on Saturday.

• Tech Trader Daily – Barron’s Online : Dell: Dude, What Did You Do With Your Cell Phone? – Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros., asserts in a research note today that the company’s first attempt was basically rejected by the carriers as too, well, Dell-like.

  He asserts that Dell showed a prototype to the carriers, but that they weren’t all that impressed. “From our conversation with supply chain and industry sources, it appears that it ultimately came down to lack of carrier interest and small subsidies, making it difficult for Dell to make a profit,” he write. “In our view, the last thing Dell needs is to enter another money losing business as it seeks to preserve its operating margins of 5%-6%.” (Which he notes compares to Hewlett-Packard at around 11%, and Apple and IBM at 15%.)

• Part of Biosphere 2 to get boost from sun to run things – Biosphere 2, the giant terrarium in Oracle, plans to use the sun's energy to operate a portion of the facility.

  Solon Corp., a solar-panel manufacturer with a factory in Tucson, is donating more than $200,000 in solar panels to the research center.

• Report: BofA CEO wants to repay TARP money by 2010 – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Bank of America Chairman and CEO Ken Lewis said he’d like to repay the government’s $45 billion investment in his bank later this year or in early 2010.

  “In terms of paying it totally back then you’re probably talking about sometime late this year or sometime early next year when we see the economy improving,” Lewis told the Charlotte [N.C.] Observer this week.

• New Mexico Independent » New Mexico’s brave new world of film and TV — courtesy of you! – Gov. Richardson liked the idea of luring movies and TV to New Mexico so much that he expanded the incentives package — increasing what had been a 15 percent film production tax rebate to 25 percent. The Democratic governor also led the charge to relax state sales taxes on the industry, and he added a program to subsidize the training of New Mexico residents in so-called “advanced below-the-line” crew positions — a subsidy that amounts to a reimbursement of half of the trainees’ wages.
• Goodbye Google | stopdesign – Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
• PETA: Ingrid Newkirk’s Unique Will – a. That the “meat” of my body, or a portion thereof, be used for a human barbecue, to remind the world that the meat of a corpse is all flesh, regardless of whether it comes from a human being or another animal, and that flesh foods are not needed;
• Was Eliot Spitzer Taken Out Because He Was Going to Bust AIG? | PEEK | AlterNet – Today in Slate Eliot Spitzer has a short op-ed that speaks volumes about what is going on, and indirectly, if you follow the money, what happened to him. Plainly stated, Spitzer brings the AIG Ponzi Scheme one step closer to the revered establishment when he explains how the bailout money was funneled straight into the top players, with Goldman Sachs being the name that comes up again and again. These top players already got bailout money, and Goldman is looking at zero losses at this point, while regular Americans are being asked to make concessions or just plain losing everything. here are the biggest financial entities in the world, making billions on what appears to have been nothing but air traded back and forth, and having gutted the American people they are walking away with 100% return to their stockholders.
• Despair over financial policy – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com – To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

I certainly don’t want to turn Greg In The Desert into a political blog (I know there’s not enough of those). However my friend Steve usually has interesting things to say about current events and thought I would give him a chance to express his opinions here – Greg.

German and FRENCH (mon dieu!!!) banks have received US taxpayer money…. nice… No wonder our deadbeat ‘free market’, ’self-regulating’, ‘privatized profit – socialized risk’ banks won’t say where the funds went.

I think the ‘terrorists’ have succeeded in taking down more than a few buildings with box-cutters. Thanks to our incompetent response! Talk about taking the opportunity to get one’s agenda to sail through our society… fueled on fear and extravagant, expensive war theatrics (and precious blood)…. What’s the current threat level? Orange? Pink… yes, PINK is where we are told we are headed. We sure got our underwear all tied up in knots. And BinLaden is still free! But that is understandable… if you kill the bogey man, how ‘ya gonna scare the suckers? Worked for 7 years.

Meanwhile, all our retirement plans are pushed out another 5-10 years…(my optimistic assessment). I sure hope WallMart opens up a few more stores because we sure are going to need a lot of those ‘greeter’ positions for our ‘Golden Years’.

Excuse the rant, but I just looked at my retirement funds. Foolish me! On the bright side, I do not make over $250,000 so at least I can bask in the afterglow of my tax cuts of recent years instead of worrying about my taxes going up…. oh, wait, I did not make 250k in recent years either — so my tax cuts were not even noticeable, and I can’t remember which gas station took the proceeds of those economic stimulus checks….. I certainly do not notice them in the current balances in my retirement funds…. Gee… I never saw this coming! — as most of you know!

And now we are bailing out FRENCH and GERMAN ( and who knows what other foreign) banks with our children’s future taxes… WOW!!!! …. or more to the point, WTF!!!!!

Anyone else feeling outraged? Is anyone’s ‘conservative ideology’ getting shaken by our current reality? And why are all these ‘free-market capitalists’ going to the ’society’ (sure sounds like PINK socialism) to be bailed out? I do not want to hear anyone bitching when Wall Street has to submit to a crapload of regulations in the future. In order for vultures to thrive, we need a bunch of suckers. And we sure do not have a shortage there.

And now all we hear from the solution-deprived perpetrators/enablers of this mess is that the new administration wants to take us into a socialist society! Socialist like the fire department, the city and state police, the National Guard the city and state road department, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, air-traffic control, the Coast Guard, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the national highway system, the CIA, the NSA, the ATF, the school systems (K-University), the unemploymnet system (which too many of us may be relying on soon)…and if you combine ALL of these, they pale in comparison to what Wall Street (and foreign banks) are are getting from US taxpayers…. gee we sure are a bunch of PINKOS!!! Karl Marx must be smiling in his grave (and BinLaden from his cave) right about now! How did we get here? Who reigned while we blindly headed here? Just exactly WHAT got VETOED in the last 8 years (besides that one stem-cell research-containing bill).

And, by the way, Rush Limbaugh needs to go on a diet and should quit dressing like he is auditioning for the Sopranos because his mouth is obnoxious enough for our country. Also, after cheerleading us into this mess with his FAILED, EXTREMIST brand of ideology, he should temper his pie-hole and quit trying to lead the GOP into being the Goose-stepping Obstructionist Party…. which too often has placed party before country in recent years. We gave W 8 years, can we give Obama at least 4 before we try to sink him along with the country? We are headed down HARD… help or get out of the way, OK Rush?

Oh yeah… here is the article that set me off: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638394500958141.html