Bailout Bullshit

I've been reading all the articles on the current and future financial market bailout plans, and I really wish someone would realize that feeding money into these cesspool companies is not going to save America's economy. Corrupt companies will remain corrupt companies unless you remove the corruption from them, and some companies may be too far gone to save.

Personally, I really wish someone would adopt a plan to start investing in American manufacturing. Especially the space program. The best thing we could do would be to plow these huge sums of cash into American companies who MAKE things. Shifting money from pile A to pile B is not making anything. It's not growing anything.

If we took these billions of dollars and used them to make the greatest space program in the world once again, we could be employing all the people who BUILD things again, and as a bonus put engineering back on the map as an American speciality.

We would have to change some plans at NASA, especially the one that limits the manufacturing run for the new launch vehicles, and make sure we build a space program that plans to serious launch missions as often as needed to get real things done in space. Russia has never planned for the obsolescence of the Soyuz system. They've been basically using the same launch capsule and platform for 30 years. It's fantastically stable, and they pay $20 million per launch. We spend over a billion on each shuttle launch. That's just dumb.

VMWARE Action

We've started moving various servers to a VMWARE solution at work over the last month or so, using an EMC server as the backing store. I have to say this technology is really impressive. I did some testing on Progress dumps and loads of our primary databases in comparison to our old system with attached RAID 10 partitions, and I saw NO loss of performance, even with only a minor increase in CPU speed between the two servers.

This is good stuff kids. It's going to be interesting to see how everything performs as we move more systems onto this server.

Stress

You know Murphy has you marked for death when you have two server failures in a row, then a database threatens you with a false corruption error message that eats 4 hours of your Saturday.

Murphy can just leave me the hell alone now.

Schumer: Don't blame me for IndyMac failure - CNN.com

Schumer: Don't blame me for IndyMac failure - CNN.com. Okay -- you're one of the big shots on the banking committee. So, I think you get to take some blame too asshole.

What irritates me about the current Dems vs. Republicans is the deep seated need to point the finger of blame at the "Bush administration" for everything that's going wrong.

I may be a democrat, but I am NOT going to blame the banking crisis on the Republicans. I'm sorry, they weren't the only ones on the switch for the last 15 years. I believe a Clinton was "running the show" when this whole free-wheeling mortgage market took off. No-one was bothered by it then. When everyone saw the writing on the wall, NO ONE did anything. And that includes the Democrats who control Congress right now.

Shut your stupid mouth Schumer. You're not helping anything.

Saw WALL-E

We took the boys to see WALL-E today. We all agreed that it was a good movie. I think the most challenging type of movie to make is one where the action has to speak for itself, and this one does a pretty good job of it.

One warning: if you have problems with the green movement; if being made to recycle makes you angry. If pointed statements about rampant consumerism and the destruction of nature bother you, I'd say you need to stay away. You won't like it.

FDA urged to ban 8 food dyes-Why?

FDA urged to ban 8 food dyes - CNN.com (from CNN). I can understand if some major issue with food safety is involved. Hell, the FDA has not always had the American public's best interests at heart.

My issue is with this "Center for Science in the Public Interest" that is arguing the issue. They're claiming, and I quote:

"The purpose of these chemicals is often to mask the absence of real food, to increase the appeal of a low-nutrition product to children, or both... Who can tell the parents of kids with behavioral problems that this is truly worth the risk?"

CSPI Executive Director Michael F. Jacobson

Okay, so we're arguing that because artificial dyes mask absence of real food, we should ban these dyes. Time to whip out the cluebat: NO, THAT'S NOT A REASON. It's YOUR JOB, as a GODDAMN PARENT, TO TAKE CARE OF THE WELLBEING OF YOUR CHILDREN. Quit trying to offload the issue on the FDA, or the government, or anyone else. If an artifical dye causes problems for your children, STOP FEEDING THEM CRAP!!! How hard is it? Cook 2 squares a day for them, and pack healthy lunches. Oh, that's right, you don't have TIME for that anymore. Tough shit. If you're a parent, your children should come FIRST, LAST, AND ALWAYS. Make time.

And While I'm Bitching about Politics

Since I'm on a roll about politics, I want to point out a couple things that people seem to keep forgetting about the presidency:

1. The President is not getting ANYTHING except wars done by himself. And this last Iraq one was pretty much signed off on by everyone. Shame on everybody. Quit acting like any of the current candidates are going to be getting us out of Iraq or anyplace else. You want to drive around in cars? You love your ginormous SUV? We're stuck there until we wean ourselves from foreign oil. Good luck on that.


2. NONE of the current presidential candidates is "looking out for average Americans" -- they want the top dog job. They're going to say and do whatever it takes to get it. As Tom Clancy has pointed out more than once: they would drive a car over their own children for that job. Don't look to politicians to look out for us anymore. It's not their job. Their job is to get elected, then to STAY elected. Bureaucracies are built to maintain themselves and little else.


3. If you're going to choose a candidate, your going to have to look over the offerings, and pick the one that's going to SCREW YOU LESS. I'm not sure ANY of these candidates are going to cause me less pain in the next 4 years.

Questions about Lewinsky shadow Chelsea

Okay, even if you're a die-hard Hillary hater (and I'm nearly in that camp, mind you), CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Questions about Lewinsky shadow Chelsea « - Blogs from CNN.com has some FASCINATING commentary from "average Americans" on the bottom.

I hate to shock you slew of assholes, but Monica Lewinsky is not "Chelsea's private life", and it's not her place to talk about it. She didn't screw Monica, her Dad did. What would she really know about it? Why would it have any impact on her Mom's presidency, if she gets elected (oh God please no)? Do you all think Hillary is gonna invite her back and get busy in the Oval Office? Good God people.

Why does Bill banging Monica have anything to do with Hillary's morals? Does everyone think this is Bill getting 4 more years? If Hillary wins, I doubt Bill is gonna have much more than his own opinion on what Hillary would do.

And finally, quit lumping Chelsea into her parent's moral fiber and calling her a liar and a cheat and a womanizer etc etc etc. She's their DAUGHTER. She's her OWN person. Treat her as such.

What a pack of imbeciles this country has turned into. A good porton of the crew commenting on that blog entry are obviously unable to do any independent thinking.

New Windows

We just finished having our new low-E windows installed in the house today. While this was a fantastically expensive project, the payback this summer should more than make up for it.

We went with WindowWorld's window system, and their installers were quick and professional. The massive bay window looks awesome. I would link their website, but honestly it's hardly worth visiting. Find the local franchise and work with them. Ours was excellent.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: The Business of Walking Away

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: The Business of Walking Away discusses the current mortgage crisis and what's going to happen as individual families, and the banks involved, start walking away from the properties that cannot sell.

It's scary what happens when megacorps walk into bad investments with their eyes open, and consumers follow along.

Some Vista Advice

We've been working with Vista at work since mid-summer, since Dell really hates selling XP to businesses now. I have a couple of tips for those who are going to be trapped into an upgrade to Vista and Office 2007:

• Don't order the PC with anything less than 2GB of RAM. If they insist, refuse the upgrade and stay on whatever POS machine you're on now. Vista at less than 2GB is slower than anything I've ever seen. Grass growing is lightning quick in comparison.


• Make sure you turn OFF encryption between Outlook 2007 and the server. It's ungodly slow if you're on an office network. If you're on the road, I might reconsider this suggestion. I went from about 2 minutes to about 20 seconds for Outlook to start with this one change.


• We found a network setting to turn off dynamic speed negotiations with the network. Changing this setting helped the speed of network copies, and fixed some issues with TAPI drivers on Vista. To change the setting, right Click Command Prompt --> Choose Run As Administrator and then type the following:
  

  netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

I'll chime in wtih more as we find it.