Standard Mischief

tgirsch, of the blog Lean Left, sometimes posts over at pro-RKBA blog Say Uncle. He sometimes post what has been dubbed “a flaming bag of poo”, meaning a deliberately inflammatory post dumped on everyone on Friday like a paper bag of crap, lit and left on your doorstep.

It’s a cute name, but not very fair because he doesn’t just ring the doorbell and run, he sticks around and defend his points in comments. I really appreciate the different perspective, and it’s not like I’ve got to go out and find a left leaning blog that allows something other that Reasoned Discourse^TM [1] to get a well-rounded insight on the issues of the day.

In his latest effort, I think I might have caused him a last minute cognitive shutdown to avoid a warp core breach.

I’ll rephrase the question here, because hey, it’s my blog:

Given that you have a government that is “of, by, and for the people”, and given that this government’s revenues from royalties of publicly held mineral rights exceed the government’s expenses, what do you do with the extra cash that is as far as possible from socialism?

It’s not a hypothetical question, shocking as it seems from living in the greatest country on the planet which happens to have had a crushing deficit and multiple future unfunded obligations arguably for my entire life. The real life democratically elected republic is called the state of Alaska. Their answer to what to do with excess revenue is called the Alaska Permanent Fund.

tgirsch seemed to have a tough time wrapping his head around the concept, at one point asking me where his check was from the royalties on minerals extracted from United States property. Did I really have to point him back to those multiple future unfunded obligations like Social Security and Medicaid and our deficit?

So my question to you is this, what else would you do with the excess funds? Please try to keep your suggestions as far away as possible from unevenly spreading the wealth around, pretending that such a lopsided approach would be good for everyone.

Ideas considered and rejected so far:

• Used the extra cash to line the pockets of the politicians.

This seems to be permissible in the various dictatorships dressed in democracy clothing that we’ve supported around the world in the past (because they were not communism), but this is hardly suitable here at home.

• Cut the taxes on the corporations extracting the minerals to reduce revenue.

A little Corporate Welfare, eh? No, the tax rates ought to be set to return the largest amount of revenue possible while balancing the need for a responsible, effective and clean use of the people’s resources. Factors in the world oil market may need to be weighed in, and the fees may need to be adjusted from time to time. The oil does not belong to Exxon, and they ought not get their hands on it for free.

[note: I may add a few more examples below this line, but let me publish this now.]

Oh, and apologies to Say Uncle for the “probing” I did with his comment moderation thingy the other day.

[1] Reasoned Discourse^TM

I was trying to understand why the stock market went nuts with a rally yesterday. The talking heads weren’t saying anything new, it seems they report on the market movement and then make up a reason why. That’s not very helpful.

From what I can tell, the only thing that changed from Friday was that the Federal Government decided to guarantee bank to bank and bank to business loans. That was enough for a rally.  It seems the credit freeze exists because no one trusts anyone else enough to loan them money.

Remember Bear Sterns? They went from “we’re well capitalized” to bankrupt in three days. That means they were lying about their balance sheet and lying about how much they were leveraging. Who’s in jail today over the fraud that occurred?

So instead of forcing these artificial entities, (that exist solely because of permission from the government in the form of a business license), to not lie, to stop hiding their bad loans off their balance sheets so the free market can decide who is a good credit risk an who they should not loan to, they’ll just bail anyone out (well, anyone who’s not a natural person), when they go belly-up with money from our grandkids.

Let’s just keep hoping that the rest of the world keeps buying our paper.

At my new job, I was asked to meet with our VP. He’s the guy that runs the show at my place of employment, but he does what management he does by acting like a cheerleader. I really didn’t think he had a technical background because when I was asked to do some bare-bones IT work for him he asked me some basic questions about Microsoft XP that I was easily able to answer (and I haven’t used XP since five years ago at $BigFacelessCorp).

I’m always a bit nervous about talking to him though, because he’s very hard to read, he’s from a completely different culture. It turns out however, that he was blown away by my analysis of the log files from $SeekretDevice, and he asked me to explain exactly what I was doing. I explained that, having been given a herculean task of reading through endless log files, I had just whipped up some simple one-liners that increased my productivity twenty-fold. (You can do that at a start-up. If you need to do something, you just do it, documenting the procedure later for possible reuse. That’s why working for a start-up is made of awesome, that, and free sodas and snacks) He wants more detail, so I show him my code. He wants a step-by-step explanation, so I start in saying, “Well, do you know what grep does?”.

It’s then that I’m informed that he built the first prototype of $SeekretDevice in his basement before the founding of the company.

Yea, I was totally set up for that one.

Who won the debate?

I’d probably call it a near draw, with a slight advantage to Biden, assuming we saw a debate that was on a level playing field.

Since it was anything but a fair debate, with the media setting the tone in advance by using the Michael Moore school of creative editing to make Palin look like a moron, and with a totally unbiased moderator (that incidentally doesn’t have a book about one of the candidates set for release in the near future) , I’d have to say that Palin won on points. There wasn’t a knockout though.

I noticed, unless it happened during the 10 minutes or so I was out of earshot, that our totally unbiased moderator failed to ask any questions on border control, immigration or “gun control”

Also, I’m looking for, and will actively link to, obvious GOP supporting blogs that say Biden won, or clear Obama supporting blogs that favor Palin. So far I haven’t found any.

Are members of The House of Representatives still going to try to sell us that line about a looming fiscal crisis which needs strong action immediately, after they get back from their holiday break for Rosh Hashanah?