Well I can dream, can’t I.
Periodic downturns happen in every market, but this cycle is notable for a “credit crunch”. You can point the finger at number of firms and individuals:
- “Creative accounting” by Fannie, Freddie, and a number of Wall Street firms
- The failure of these quasi government agencies to only buy conforming loans as set out in their charter.
- A number of firms that repackaged loans for resale with the intent to conceal risk.
- People who flat-out lied on their “Option ARM” loan application forms.
- Government regulators, congress critters and other maggots that looked the other way while the bubble was inflating, instead of enforcing regulations that are already on the books.
In the unlikely event that the people and lending institutes who committed crimes that contributed to the the current mess actually get any fines, I’d like to suggest the following:
Force them to pay the fines by putting 20% down, and having them pay off the remainder on a 30-year fixed rate amortization schedule. Require the CEO or individual themselves to personally sign the payment check within a thirty day window of when the payment is due (with the sincere hope that they will remember their lessons for the next time a bubble starts inflating).
Instead, I’m confident that the taxpayers’ own unborn grandkids will pay the check, Congress will respond by making fraud even more illegal-er, and today’s lessons will be forgotten with the next market upswing.
Inspired by countertop’s modest proposal.
I write a post, accidentally publish it and then yank it back before anyone notices. Then I schedule it for this morning and it never posts. wtf?
Why not tag your name someplace where everyone can urinate on it?
I don’t really talk much about my personal life in my blog, but I’m happy to report that my new “consulting” gig has at least a part of my duties and responsibilities occurring right at the command line. That self-directed Linux total-immersion course I undertook a few years ago has begun to pay off. A few observations:
- n00buntu makes you lazy, (in a bad way), with it’s fancy-pants GUI. I’m working partly in embedded systems. While looking at log files on these thingys, you don’t really have many options. You don’t have less, you don’t have more, and you certainly don’t have nano (a small, much more intuitive editor than the classic choices). I’ve ssh into my remote server for my websites and nano had always been available in the past to do the odd editing job. Locally, it’s always been nano or something like kedit, you know, something that does not require you to RTFM before you can figure out how to call up the help menu that would hopefully allow you to figure out how to exit the program. Anyway, for embedded systems when cat or head or tail -f isn’t enough, I’m getting reacquainted with vi.
- The breath of the Unices continues to amaze me. I got a rep I did not deserve by looking at a script that had my vastly more experienced mentor stumped for several days and seeing the problem immediately (sort before uniq, or sort -u). After that, he sent me off to debug his busted perl scripts. Not much success yet.
- If I ever had the idea that I could be a successful and lazy (in a good way) sysadmin without knowing perl, well that’s pretty much dispelled now. The basics of perl are fairly easy to learn when you put your mind to it.
Dry Ice.
When I was driving across country, I remember seeing dry ice for sale at say a Wal-Mart in the middle of Nowhere, Montana. I figured that if you drove 60 miles to stock up on food, it would be worth it to buy a chunk of dry ice to make sure your ice cream stayed frozen until you got back.
A few years after that, I started seeing it for sale around here. I mean, it’s always been available, but you’ve always had to go to some special store somewhere out of the way, with odd hours and pay twice as much.
Anyway, it was surreal to be in the midst of a crowd of people, carts all overflowing with perishable goodies in advance of a big storm, and I was the only one buying dry ice. What is the logic behind stocking up the fridge in anticipation of a big storm that might limit your mobility and cut your utilities for a few days?
In any event, I had the “12 items or less” checkout lane virtually to myself.
Three slabs of dry ice were wrapped in newspaper, placed in a soft sided lunch size cooler, which was placed in another larger cooler and padded all around with foam and towels. This worked very well, as I’d estimate from the initial 17 pound purchase shrunk less than a pound per day.
Instructions on the bag directed me to not put the dry ice directly in a working fridge. I put the cooler in the garage, figuring any liberated carbon dioxide would sink to the lowest level, and if needed I could always open the garage door to refresh the oxygen. I never needed to, but it’s something to think about if you store the stuff in an airtight area also used as living space
