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I have been ranting and raving about the greed that collapsed the world economy, but that’s old news (sort of).  Everything in American society is just mired in greed.  Ryan Seacrest just signed a deal for $45 million to say about 200 words once a week on American Idol for the 4 months the show runs between seasons.  He seems like a nice guy, but where’s the talent in what he does?  Can’t just about anyone do that?

I recently tried to find a domain name for a new business venture dealing with schools.  Nearly every reasonably close name has been gobbled up, not by people that need them, but by greedy as?hol?s that simple hope someone else will be desperate enough to pay them for tying up tens of thousands of names that encompass anything to do with the words in the english language.  There is no value added here, just greed, greed, and more greed. How do these jerks sleep at night?  They should have the word scum-bag burned onto their foreheads so people could avoid them like the vermin they are.

Remember last summer when the price of oil shot up toward $200 a barrel. Did you assume there was an oil shortage? There was no shortage, every barrel of oil traded 27 times by greedy f#^@e^s helping to set the stage for a collapse of the world economy. You can expect to see more and more of this sort of thing as natural resources of every stripe start to grow scarce.  Some say this is just smart business, I say it is greed and damn near immoral.

CEOs and executives think they deserve tens of millions a year for what they do. Maybe the next time one of those people rushes their kid to the hospital for life saving medical attention, perhaps the doctor should demand a hundred million or he’ll let the kid die.  Fair is fair, right? Supply and demand, right.  The CEO has an immediate and urgent demand, the doctor is the only game at the right time and place, pay up of kiss your child goodbye.  Thankfully doctors don’t play by the same rules, but the time may come…

I used to be a pretty big fan of capitalism, but if what happened and is happening on Wall Street, if what happens in every store in America, if Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and Goldman-Sucks 2.72 billion in profits, and if the shoddy products of nearly every company from Microsoft to the automakers to toy manufactures and on is what capitalism is all about, perhaps we need to modify our form of what should be a pretty decent system.

Does this headline bother anyone else?  Forget about the fact that the taxpayers had to bail these guys out and then they were allowed to repay the bailout, essentially depriving the taxpayer of any profits from its investment; but consider where those $2.72 billion in profits came from.  Those $2 billion in profits are $2 billion in “investments” that didn’t make it to the investment itself.  I always had this naive idea that when one invested in stocks, you were investing in the company those stocks represented.  Apparently not since it appears much of each investment goes to the Goldman-Sach’s executives and brokers and the ponzi designers.  If Goldman gets to keep $2.72 billion for a single quarter’s “efforts”, it seems to me that something is terribly wrong.  If the reports are correct, Goldman will be handing out an average of over $600,000 for every one of its 28,000 employees at a time when their actions and the actions of the rest of Wall Street bankrupted millions of people and left tens of millions more unable to ever retire.

We can blame Goldman-Sucks for their greed, but we also need to blame the investing public just as much since it is they that are helping to rebuild the same illusory house of cards that created the whole mess in the first place.  It’s sort of like losing your paycheck to the guy playing 3 card monty on the street corner one week and returning the next even though you know you can’t ever win.

The taxpayer loaned money to Goldman and other as if they were preferred borrowers, yet they were the riskiest type of borrowers, ones that were clearly on the ropes.  Admittedly Goldman was the best of the sheer crap we called Wall Street, but that is faint praise indeed.  If you and I showed up to borrow money in the financial straights that these clowns were, we’d have to find a loan shark and pay rates upwards of 150% interest, compounded by the second and backed up by someone named Guido.  Goldman got to pay a few million in interest and now is back to handing out bonuses as if the crooks on the other end of the phone were actually doing something worthwhile.  Check out the article entitled “The Great American Bubble Machine” in the July issue of Rolling Stone, it points out how Goldman is screwing the world to make these billions.  Its worth reading.

When I read that Google will be introducing an open source operating system that may some day go toe to toe with Microsoft, I let out a sigh of relief.  Ever since the first Windows operating systems I was disappointed in the Microsoft offering (to say the least).  It was a piece of junk then, and although there is no comparison in terms of complexity, features, stability, and so much more; Windows Vista is still a piece of junk, just junky for a different set of reasons. It is still unstable, much of what it offers doesn’t work (my other PC is “not responding” at this very moment). It doesn’t work reliably, and that’s an understatement, and while the Mac OS is quite good and stable, there needs to be something that will run on PC hardware and give the world an alternative to the outrageously expensive and oppressive Windows dominance.

I am sure Microsoft will deny this vehemently, but I swear they made Vista so unstable and incompatible and all around unusable just so they could sell upgrades to Windows 7.  Wouldn’t it be nice if Google had their operating system ready today and it was everything we might need in an operating system.  Alas, Chrome OS will take years, perhaps decades to do all that some people need, yet hopefully Google will stick to it and eventually unseat Microsoft as the 900 pound gorilla.

We are developing an entirely new software system for schools and are just about ready for the first round of testing the software and at the same time are looking for suggestions for desirable features.  Shortly we will be asking for volunteers to help us test the system.

We aren’t prepared to announce all of the features we already have, but we have identified who our competition is and they include some solid players such as Moodle, Sakai, Blackboard, Edline, and others; so you might infer that we hope to be able to do much of what they do better and at less cost.  We recognize that Moodle, Sakai and others are free open source projects, yet there is a cost to them nonetheless.  Our system is intended to be easy to maintain, easy to use, and if we have succeeded will encourage faculty and students to wholeheartedly embrace the system.

We have several innovative features built into the system that we hope will encourage users to contribute and collaborate on course content, research projects, creative writing tasks, and news stories.  It will integrate the many aspects of school life including classes, schedules, homework, reading, books, sports, images, audio, video, testing, grading and more.  We plan to allow content to be loaded from our system to electronic devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the iPhone so users can read course work, grade essays, retrieve any of the thousands of free titles from project Guttenberg or download electronic books from Amazon or other e-retailers. The system will be web based and start from any web browser, yet will not use a web interface, instead being a desktop application for a more responsive look and feel as well as less tedious user interaction.  From a user standpoint, there is no setup, they simply locate the web site, click on a link, wait for the software to load and go.  Returning users avoid the initial delay since the software is already loaded on their system.  Should updates to the software be available, they are installed automatically.  Unlike many applications, the system will not corrupt a user’s computer by installing incompatible drivers, dlls, or libraries; operating autonomously from other applications.

The system is intended for middle school on up with our initial focus on middle and high schools, although there is nothing in the system to preclude colleges and universities from using it just as they might use Moodle and other systems.

Our pricing has not been set but we expect it to be minimal, and taken in context of a lower learning curve, less reliance on support staff, and less overall hassle, it is our belief that our offering will be attractive and compelling.

If you are interested in offering suggestions, becoming a tester, or just wish to check it out when we release the software during the summer of 2009, please let us know.  Also, we are considering releasing some of the unique features of the system as standalone offerings so schools that are already heavily committed to another system might be able to avail themselves of those features.

Reply to this post if you have an interest.

I left California for Nevada about 15 years ago because I felt that, despite a robust economy at the time, the State of California was doomed.  I felt that there were too few taxpayers paying for too many services and there was a swelling number of people paying little or no tax yet expecting the world.  Apparently I was right since that’s in large part the main problem in California.  

I read one article that ties the current economic mess in California to Proposition 13 that capped property taxes so people couldn’t be taxed out of their homes by ever escalating home values and along with them, ever escalating taxes.  I’ve always viewed property taxes as a form of confiscation since a person that is retired or unable to work will eventually be forced to sell their property as taxes take a larger and larger share of whatever income they do have.   California can’t increase property taxes because of Prop 13 and so many state and local governments look at a simple bump in the property tax rate as a quick fix to irresponsible fiscal policies that simply assumed there would never be an economic downturn.  The same article states that taxes in California are unfair, which is true, but so are nearly all taxes.  Taxing one person at 39% and another at 10% isn’t fair.  Taxing one person $12,000 a year for property tax and another nothing, yet their kids go to the same schools, share the same police and fire, drive on the same roads and use the same parks isn’t fair.  The only fair tax is a sales tax and perhaps California should scrap all other taxes and impose a single across the board sales tax on nearly everything except perhaps food staples, rent on low income housing, and medical care.  This would eliminate the Pop 13 restrictions on property tax by eliminating the property tax, existing sales taxes, excise taxes, income taxes, corporate taxes and any and all other taxes and replace them all with a single state wide tax that can be adjusted up and down as the state’s budget requires.

With an across the board sales tax such as this, every person would feel the pinch of expanded services and tax hikes.  Some claim such a tax would disproportionately affect the poor, yet the poor pay these taxes anyway by paying more for goods and services that have all the other taxes built into the price and into the many hidden taxes.  By making all taxes a single percentage at least we all get the benefit of full disclosure.  Our entire maze of complex taxes is designed to obfuscate just how much we really pay in taxes, and it is an enormous burden.  If I am in the upper income tax bracket and pay all my taxes, I can pay as much as 39% in federal income tax, 11% in California income tax, 5% in property tax, 7% in sales tax, 10% in excise taxes, 5% in fuel taxes, 10% in corpoate taxes built into products we buy, and on and on.  Most of the truly wealthy, the ones that are supposed to be paying 39% and 11% rarely do and if they do, they simply demand even more outrageous compensation to make up for the higher taxes which of course gets passed on to you and me, rich and poor alike.

Part of the current California economic crisis is the state’s inability to quickly raise more revenue.  With a state wide sales tax in lieu of all other taxes, raising revenue to balance the budget would be a no-brainer and it would also get everyone paying their fair share, illegal aliens, executives, service workers, and so forth.  The sales tax would apply to homes and yachts and restaurant meals and cars and skateboards and all but the basics, with the basics being excluded to spare the poor that spend a disproportionate amount of their income on just food, rent, and utilities.

I love California but will likely never return there because I grew tired of paying for everyone else.  I had friends that used to grouse about paying $600 in federal income tax and $500 in property tax and 6% sales tax, yet they felt that they weren’t getting enough in return; yet their kids went to good schools, used the nearby parks and worried little about crime.  They, like most taxpayers, were receiving many times more in services that they put into the system, expecting everyone else to pick up the slack and still thinking they were paying too much.  With a sales tax, if they wanted more services they’d see the cost every time they bought something.  If they wanted a tax cut, they could simply ask for cuts in state services.  This tax system will never happen because politicians are counting on the current shell game to hide just how much money they are lifting out of our wallets.  Americans, perhaps people everywhere, don’t pay much attention to things like taxes when times are good, and when times get tough like they are now, they expect government to come to the rescue and show them just what their taxes have been paying for.  Few realize that past taxes had been spent long before they were every paid by the taxpayer and our entire economy and government has been operating on a spend now pay later basis for the better part of a half century and we are seeing just how precarious the whole system is as we watch states like California slowly sink in the quicksand of debt they’d been ignoring for far too long.

Should California be unable to meet its obligations, perhaps declare bankruptcy, the entire world will feel the impact as the 10th largest economy in the world stumbles.  Millions more jobs would be lost in California and that would have a ripple effect causing even more job losses nation-wide and world-wide which would feed on the cycle.  The idea of a national sales tax has been bandied about for decades, yet each time some fool decides that instead of all other taxes, a sales tax should be added on top of all the other taxes.  That won;t do.  Like so many things with the current problems facing the states, the nation, and the world; any solution is going to require that everyone forget about their own self-interest and start doing what’s right for the greater good and in turn benefiting themselves.  We usually only see this in war-time, otherwise we all fight to get something for ourselves even if it harms society.  We can no longer afford to do this and unless California can fix their budgetary problems and soon, we all will suffer dearly.  With a sales tax as the only tax, the state can act quickly to set a rate and then adjust it until they are receiving just what is needed to bring revenues in line with expenditures.  Right now they are talking about cutting back on vital services including education, highways, energy projects, water and all sorts of things that will have dire consequences in as little as a decade.  It’s time everyone starts to pay into the system and for taxpayers to decide how much government they want.  When it was just the top few percent paying for everything, the majority were glad to ask for more and more since it cost them little or nothing, but if we all paid the same percentage on every purchase, we’d all have an interest in keeping government lean and manageable.  We should have a national sales tax as well, but that too will never happen just like we’ll probably never fix the energy problem or global warming since it will require that we all ask for and start doing what’s right for the country and the world and not necessarily what will enrich us over the next guy.

I am reading Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded.  It is an excellent book and addresses the essence of the problems the world faces, although I get this nagging feeling that it is like so many such books, overly optimistic about the possibilities for the future.  I suppose it has to be, since the alternatives are too depressing.

I just finished reading a section where he talks about how if the world helps to electrify the poorest parts of the world, they will be better prepared to take the few remaining jobs that remain in the industrialized world, essentially transferring their poverty from rural India or Africa to Alabama or Chicago or San Jose or London or Munich.  Of course that isn’t how he phrases it, instead he presents the sunny view that outsourcing workers in crowded Mumbai will be able to move to less crowded rural India where they will have lower pay yet a higher standard of living which makes them able to undercut American or European workers more effectively.  As I write this, U.S. unemployment rates are well in excess of 10% and continuing to rise at an alarming rate, many areas as high as 20%.  Unemployment rates in India and China are also rising which basically points out that the competition for jobs and the need for jobs has never been greater, but this isn’t about jobs, at least not entirely.

Not too long ago I didn’t see the free markets and capitalism as a zero sum game but as one where everyone could achieve a higher standard of living if they played smarter, invested well, and worked hard; but that was before I started to better understand just how serious the problems facing the world are.  I have known about and written about and acted upon issues such as global warming and pollution and a looming energy crisis for decades, but I’d always sort of convinced myself that my personal sense of alarm was an aberration and those making the big decisions must have better insight than I.  Now I am entirely convinced that the so called leaders have taken greed and self-interest to unimaginable new levels that actually and profoundly threaten the entire planet in nearly every way imaginable, threaten it so severely that global collapse of society as we know it seems inevitable.  I pray I am wrong, yet the handwriting is on the wall.

In Hot, Flat and Crowded Friedman indicates that the world is vastly overcrowded, that resources will be the source of conflict, that mankind is killing off millions of species of living things every year and as bio-diversity is crushed, eventually we will sew the seeds of our own destruction.  Of course, like any author, he’s making a point and presenting his argument, and a compelling one, yet I sense he is forced to try to present an optimistic spin at the tail end rather than conclude that mankind is both too arrogant and too stupid to recognize that there is only one solution to the problem – make fewer people and soon.  As I write this the swine flu pandemic is just starting to unfold.  Those of us that studied the 1918 Spanish Flu know what may happen.  It could be awful, but it very well may be nature’s way of relieving the overcrowding and insane resource depletion that will surely kill even far more people if it is allowed to run to its logical conclusion unimpeded by something like a pandemic or a horrific global war.

I wrote a book proposing a solution to the world’s energy problems that suggests a different model for funding the trillions needed to produce a 100% renewable energy infrastructure.  It is simple, logical, feasible, profitable, and 100% doable and requires almost nothing of government.  I won’t rehash the proposal here, you can read the book or visit the web site if you are interested; but what is important is the fact that such ideas require overwhelming popular support before our myopic leaders might even consider them since such ideas represent actual thinking and comprehension, two items that are in short supply when it comes to leadership anywhere in the world, perhaps especially here in the United States.  As an example, last weeks episode of 60 Minutes had the CEO of Duke Energy stating that he acknowledged that his company along with the other major energy producers in the United States and the world are knowingly destroying the planet with their massive coal fired power plants and he stated quite clearly that he believes the only solution is more coal fired power plants, but ones that use “carbon capture and sequestration” to bury the CO2 they emit, yet he also acknowledged that his company has not spent even one dollar toward that end.  The unspoken portion of his statement was that his company has no intention of spending a dime on “clean coal”, instead he expects the government (aka taxpayers) to pay for it.  He did state that before anything can be done, we will need decades of research, millions of miles of infrastructure similar to the current oil infrastructure to support the movement and containment of liquified CO2, and the cost will be in the trillions, far in excess of the cost of just buckling down and build an entire energy infrastructure based on renewable resources.  In other words, he’s going to use his and his industry’s considerable political clout to get the taxpayer to fund the wrong and most expensive solution so that he and his cronies can continue raking in enormous profits while imperiling the planet.  His most optimistic view is that we will see the first fruits of such a massive undertaking in 40 to 50 years, about 30 to 40 years after what nearly all experts agree is the tipping point beyond which global warming and energy resource depletion will become runaway trains.  His solution isn’t guaranteed to work, is entirely wrong headed and illogical, and will cost more than the solutions he and his cronies once said were too expensive – yet the sad truth is, if I were a betting man, the coal industry will win and we’ll all lose.

In his book, Mr. Friedman points out that globalization is accelerating the rates at which third world players are striving to lift their economies by plundering their natural resources.  These of course are short term decisions that will have long term implications.  There is no such thing as a free lunch, and while they see short term gains by leveling millions of square miles of timber in order to plant non-indigenous crops, they, like others before them, will find that a decade from now their resources will give out, drought and pestilence and whatever else will undermine their efforts and they will be left without their rain-forests and without their new economy.  Mr. Friedman paints globalization as both a problem and a blessing.  The problem is that it contributes to the eventual collapse of the world ecosystem, exacerbates global warming at an alarming rate, and increases competition for what turns out to be a finite and nearly fixed number of jobs which in turn might lead to worldwide conflict.  On the upside he sees globalization lifting millions out of poverty, yet he points out that in so doing we actually increase the demands on the planet even if some of that upward mobility leads to the use of greener forms of energy.

His optimism stems from the potential for green energy jobs to reinvigorating what is clearly a failing economy and economic system based on flawed logic at nearly every juncture.  Our entire economy and the economy of the entire world are based on fossil fuels and every week another major coal fired power plant goes on-line, yet many people such as Mr. Friedman are calling for more people to get connected to the grid or be given access to green technologies for electrification, but he fails to acknowledge that those that desperately need electricity that they never had before have no means of acquiring it and the demand for green technologies is so great that with even the most optimistic projections the world could absorb any and all manufacturing capacity for all such technologies for the next century yet are still at the stage of saying we need more research and it is too expensive.  Neither of these arguments is true, but the point here is that the world needs fewer people consuming electricity, not more.  Yes we definitely need fewer people consuming electricity generated by fossil fuels, but we also need fewer people using power from all sources.

I hope to be dead and gone before the worst of this mess hits, but within most people’s lifetimes, they will see the catastrophic predictions unfold in dramatic ways.  With mankind’s tendency to revert to war as a means to solve so many problems, we can expect to see one war after another pop up as countries scramble to secure dwindling resources.  We’ve already seen the US and other countries engage in massively expensive wars in the Middle East over oil, and they are about oil regardless of what the politicians tell us.  We will see wars over food and water, especially water.  Water flows from country to country and as rivers start to run dry, downstream countries will be left without adequate water supplies to feed their populations and there is little doubt that conflict will arise.

Mr. Friedman rightfully points out that what we need is a massive and intensive push to a green world with green energy and that the United States must lead the way and do so rapidly and without delay.  I agree, but the vested interests won’t allow it to happen and we are already close to the point where we won’t be able to raise the capital to even get started let alone complete the task.  The plan I spell out in my book would work, yet since it works against the status quo by distributing the profits to be made from future green energy to consumers, those that want it all for themselves will fight tooth and nail and they will win, they always have.  Our economy collapsed because of these people and we are rebuilding the same economy with the same people calling the same shots so how can we expect anything to be different.  The world economy collapsed because of greed and corruption and the greed and corruption are still there being perpetrated by the same people, so expecting a different result is just crazy.

Mr. Friedman states again and again and again that the government must do everything, pay for everyting, plan everything and be the source of our salvation.  I disagree and disagree wholely.  Government should lay the groundrules and little else.  He calls for various forms of taxpayer funding and incentives and penalties, yet with the plan I propose, all this is unnecessary.  With my plan every energy consumer can invest in renewable energy and own their own production by owning a piece of a wind farm or a solar park or ocean hydro facility and receive their energy directly from their investment.  The utility company is paid for backup power and for delivering our electrons and little else. This plan cuts out the government, cuts out the banker, cuts out the middle man and allows those of us willing to invest in our energy future to do so and to profit from it.  Mr. Friendman and I and anyone else that is willing to do the math realizes that over the course of the next 30 years the average electic consumer will pay upwards of $50,000 for electiricity, yet if you could invest as little as $5,000 today, you’d be able to avoid future payments to the utility for 30 years, so anyone with $5,000 to spend would be crazy not to invest today.  People with less to invest would simply be offsetting less of their electric bill, but my plan would allow every consumer to invest in their future should they so choose.  With Mr. Friendman’s plan and all the other plans I have read about, we’ll all pay not only the $50,000 in utility rates but we’ll pay at least that amount in taxes to cover the incentives and grants and waste and corruption and whatever goes into a government sponsored “solution”, and if you look at the past 35 years, that “solution” won’t happen for decades at best since it should already be in place and yet we have nothing, nothing to show for 35 years of advanced warning of what we have today.  The power companies are immense, powerful, flush with cash, and paying ludicrous salaries to those at the tops of their organizations and sadly, they will win this battle and we’ll all be far poorer in so many ways.  Mr. Friendman’s book has the best intentions but like so much of what happens in the world, it is calling for a more of the same sort of thing that got us into this mess.  Asking the government and the utilities to fix the problems they created is just crazy, they’ll simply find ways of funneling more money into their own pockets and if the consumer benefits, that’s just a fortunate byproduct, not the actual goal or intent.  We’ll pay even more as we always have since it will be the taxpayer that pays for nuclear storage of utility company waste, the taxpayer that pays for cleanup from the aftermath of coal mining, oil drilling, oil spills, gas leaks, air and water polution.  Sure the companies responsible make a token gesture toward cleaning up, but it is always the government and the taxpayer that takes the really big hit. 

A hundred, maybe two hundred years from now, Mr. Friedman’s vision of the energy grid will likely be reality, yet that’s after we’ve suffered through droughts, famine, political upheaval, economic collapse, wars and whatever because we took too long and cow-towed to the power companies and the politicians and the corporate giants and ignored the handwriting on the wall and did little to solve the pressing energy and enviornmental issues in time.  What we are watching happen is a runaway train and we’re now only able to stand a safe distance away and watch as it heads for a deep ravine where we’d talked about building a bridge for decades but didn’t actually build it.  The politicians are standing in front of the crowd of onlookers and continuing to talk about how great the bridge will be, how many lives it will save, how it will be modern and efficient and cost effective.  Our bridge will provide jobs and make huge profits for the companies that build it and the companies that make the steel and on and on, yet the train is already heading toward the bridge that isn’t even designed.  People are telling us that other trains are also on their way not far behind that first train, lots of trains and hundreds of journalists are talking about the trains and hundreds of others are writing about the possibilities for our bridge and a few are suggesting that we need to get started, but most are calling for more research and saving money and on and on and on.

Mr. Friedman paints a rosy picture of cooperating energy companies and consumers and technological advances and how we’ll all work from home and commute for special occasions and how we’ll allow the utility to control our energy usage to better manage the load.  This will likely happen, but it won’t happen in the near term and it won’t happen when our government is already increasting the national debt by trillions and trillions and very little of that money is going toward energy, it’s going to keep the crooks on Wall Street afloat.  With my plan, at least you and I get to decide if we want to invest in our futures and to profit from that investment instead of watching as someone else profits at our expense and on their timetable.

Actually the title to this article is a little misleading.  I still use Windows, just not intentionally.  You may already get the drift of this article.  I have been using Windows almost since the beginning.  It sucked then, it sucked when it became Windows 3.0, 3.1 … then Windows NT arrived and it looked like there was some hope for Windows after all.  The early versions of windows were horribly unreliable and with with NT it was still unreliable, just way, way, way better.  The along came Windows XP and it was pretty good too, still problems but the billions of PC users the world over learned to live with them.  Then along came Vista.  Vista doesn’t have bugs, it is a bug.  It’s like the queen in an ant colony whose sole purpose is to breed millions of new bugs in her own image.  I tried to be reasonable and see the good in Vista and came up empty.  Those Mac ads with Justin Long picking on Windows, they are 100% spot on, not at all an exaggeration, and for legal reasons even hold back.

So, that begs the question, is the Mac any better than a PC or is it just a different set of problems.  It is better, much better.  It is basically reliable, it is feature rich, and it performs circles around a PC.  In one recent PC commercial touting PCs and claiming that a Mac is too expensive (see my post on Are Macs more Expenseive than PCs) the actor states that a Mac can only have 2gb of ram where a PC can have much more.  Perhaps that’s true for some Macs, but the hidden subtext is that a PC needs vastly more memory to achieve similar performance to a Mac.  2GB is just fine for 99% of users on a Mac, its a starting point for a PC.

Transitioning to a Mac is sort of a culture change.  Macs do things differently, but not so differently that you can’t figure it out.  The maximize and minimize buttons are on the left not the right, stuff like that.  The keyboard is a little different, navigating around documents is a little different, but nothing you can’t adjust to.  In return you get a system that is stable, nowhere near as quirky, and comes with many features built in that on a PC are optional or perform so poorly you need to search for a solution and then pay for it.  A big example.  If you ever have a PC hard drive go belly up, recovering your PC even if you have ample backups is a long and tedious process.  With the Mac, their built in Time Machine application allows you to fix the hardware and then restore everything including the operating system in just a few steps, typically losing no more than 15 minutes of work.  You don’t even want to know what it takes to get a PC back up and running and I don’t even think I could give an accurate description.  As unreliable as Windows is, you’d think they’d at least have a 100% usable recovery mechanism built in, but no, and of the commercially ones available that I have tried, none worked exactly as advertised and were as chock full of bugs as Windows.

If you think I’m overstating my problems with Windows, here are but a few chronic problems I face on a daily basis.  I like my monitor to be set to the higest resolution.  If I leave a video application such as Media Center or MediaPlayer open, when the PC returns from sleep mode, it resets the resolution to 640 x 480 and I must reboot to get the higher res back.  Nice.  When I reboot, it often gets hung and can take as mush as an hour to reboot.  It is sloooow!  It hangs, it reboots without warning, it is forever installing updates, many of which actually make the system less stable or completely unable to boot. The anti-virus software, Norton or MacAfee, is forever scanning, sucking up already limited system resources, and I mean forever. If you make the mistake of allowing the Indexing subsystem to run, you can kiss your system goodbye for hours on end, it being nearly useless while the “automatic” indexing is going on. The helpful little wizard that likes to tell Microsoft about all the problems I am having and informs me that it is looking for a solution to my problem has never once found a solution to the multitude of problems in three years.  You must install anti-virus software on your PC and Windows came with a trial edition of McAfee,  It was so intrusive and so insistent that I not be allowed to do pretty much everything I was forced to uninstall it.  On a different PC, running XP, there are times when the PC starts accessing the disc so fast and furious I can’t do anything for up to an hour.  I tried shutting down everything one by one to find the culprit, and when everything is gone, it’s still going.  The same thing happens on Vista but I found it was Vista’s totally messed up indexing scheme that doesn’t work in the first place.  I shut that off since Microsoft’s insane theory was that I’d be willing to not use my PC for hours on end as it did the indexing in return for faster files searches perhaps once a month, and I swear, it never found a file I was looking for, not once.  The disc access on my other PC isn’t indexed, I never had the time to figure it out and simply walk away when it starts doing that.  Bottom line, I’m a Mac use now not because the Mac is so much better, which it is, but because the PC and Windows are so, so, so much worse.

I read about Windows 7 and Microsoft plans to charge between $100 and $400+ for an upgrade and all that I’ve heard about so far is that the system will boot faster and eliminated a few of the annoying prompts for permission, but most still remain.  Other than that, your $100 – $400 upgrade doesn’t offer much else. The press release doesn’t even claim to fix the tens of thousands of outstanding bugs. Nice. One often wonders if Microsoft didn’t intentionally screw up Vista so the hundreds of millions of users stuck with that dog won’t be forced to fork over hundreds of dollars on the off chance that some of the worst offenses may have been corrected my accident.

Many banks are scrambling to repay the money the government loaned then when it looked like the banks would collapse because of all the many misdeeds and poor decisions and stupid risks they had taken.  This may sound like a good thing, yet they are being allowed to buy back the warrants that basically gave the government the right to purchase stock at a given price for up to ten years into the future.  The banks are seeking (and will be allowed) to buy back the warrants at a substantial discount, essentially cheating the taxpayers out of billions and billions of dollars in potential profits for the risks we all took.  Banks have long charged higher interest rates for risky loans as justification for the risk, yet now they are asking for the taxpayer to ignore the fact that we took an incredible risk on some incredibly stupid and greedy people that played you bet the world economy and lost.  There’s something so fundimentally wrong with our financial and our political system that allows this sort of blatant fovoritism to screw the taxpayer over and over and over again and to do so by rubbing our noses in it every time it happens.  Sadly, we are powerless to do anything about it.  We’re told we get a vote, but when the choice is between two nearly identical political hacks each and every time, that’s not much of a choice.

Millions of hardworking people have had their lives upended as a direct and indirect result of the unimaginably greedy individuals on Wall Street, then the taxpayer is forced into bailing them out and basically took the brunt of the downside to their misdeeds while the guys directly responsible still receive immense bonuses, keep their jobs, take lavish vacations.  These guys have destroyed the retirements of millions, taken the homes of millions more, destroyed businesses large and small, and undermined the economy; now we’re foregoing even the remote possibility of even the slightest downside for these businesses and allowing the executives to protect their all too generous pay packages by getting out from the few very flimsy TARP rules governming executive compensation.  Next time you vote, be sure not to vote for anyone that is already in office no matter what they say!  It’s time for a clean slate.  Vote for people without any network, without any connections.  We’ve always considered the idea that the guy with experience is the best one for the job, but with experience comes ties to the crooks that will sell this country and the entire world down the tubes if they stand to make an extra nickle off the transaction. Replacing everyone in government, top to bottom will create upheaval for sure, but the economic collapse certainly qualifies as upheaval and that was created and orchestated by these geniuses with experience, and they knew they were doing it, or at least risking it.  The fact that we failed to address global warming and the energy crisis that will hit again with a vengance and we’ll all stand around and wonder how me missed something so obvious.  It’s time for truely new thinking and people that haven’t yet been corrupted.

President Obama campaigned on renewable energy as a core part of his plan and is reportedly using billions of his stimulus plan to fund renewable energy.  Of course, most of the stimulus plan is going to rebuild the exact same banking system using the exact same people as we had before, an amount between itself and the amount we’ve squandered on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have paid 100% for a 100% renewable energy infrastructure including new transmission lines and all the solar, wind, geothermal and hydro to avert global warming and an endless series of energy crises.  Most of the money marked for renewable energy won’t be spent right away, and what is spent is and will be spent on immediate projects like weatherization.  Unfortunately the Obama approach to renewable energy will be much like previous approaches using the same people to make the same mistakes as they had in the past using the same schemes to accomplish little at great expense.

Obama drank the cool-aid and believes that the only way to develop renewable energy is for the federal government to bribe people to do it with immense tax incentives that only favor those with enough taxes to offset, in other words, gifts to the fabulously wealthy to help them become more fabulously wealthy.  He and other like him refuse to even consider a plan where energy consumers can pay for 100% of the cost of renewable energy production and perhaps allow the government to fund the delivery infrastructure.  The system he won;t consider is one where you and I and businesses can invest in renewable energy production and in return for our investment we get our portion of the electricity produced delivered to our homes and businesses, with some of the production being given to the utility for operation, maintenance, backup power, and delivery.  Using such a system we all can invest and we can all benefit.  For each dollar of my investment I will a small amount of receive electricity credited to my account each month, the more I invest the less electricity I must buy from the utility.  

An investment of about $5,000 might wipe out most families entire electric bill for 20 to 30 years.  If your electric bill is currently $100/month, then it is $1,200 per year or $36,000 over 30 years or with inflation, possibly as much as $55,000.  The plan is described in the book Profitable Renewable Energy:It Can be Done.

Mr. Obama will spend a great deal of money over the coming months and years on “clean coal” technology which is not renewable, an oxymoron, and something that if it made any sense at all would be funded by the immensely profitable coal industry.  It doesn’t make any sense and the CEO of Duke Energy stated bluntly that his company (the third largest energy company in the US) has not and will not invest a dime on clean coal implementation, yet they are all favor of the taxpayers squandering billions.

The Obama plan will be based on production tax credits, direct grants, R&D credits, and some money on infrastructure and some actual production.  The sad truth is that we need trillions invested in renewable energy today since the problems are immense and immediate yet with the downturn in the economy, we are actually seeing turbine manufacturers laying off employees and projected being tabled if not canceled altogether.  The reason why the Obama plan won’t work if it isn’t radically changed is that industries such as solar manufacturers and wind turbine builders can’t count on current or future business because they can’t count on future administrations continuing tax benefits.  That’s why we don’t have a significant renewable industry in the US because of this and we won’t have one.  Using consumer funding the future prospects for these industries are predictable and bright.

I’m not a drug user but I am in favor of legalized pot, but only if it is taxed and taxed reasonably.  The reasonableness test is an added stipulation after reading about California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s proposal to tax pot at $50/ounce. 

Pot is about as easy to come by for kids as cigarettes, it’s the adults that have a tougher time getting it unless they get it from their kids.  Like so many of today’s laws, the laws cost a great deal of money and yield miserable results.  If we taxed pot at say $5 to $10/pack, it would be difficult for smugglers and illegal growers/sellers to undercut the market.  At $50, undercutting the government would be a no brainer since pot is basically a weed and grows pretty much anywhere.

When I was a kid the rumor was that pot was a gateway drug to harder drugs, and it was, but not because of the chemical properties of pot, it was because and still is due to the fact that to buy and use pot you are instantly transformed into a criminal and get to start dealing with real criminals.  The guys that deal pot are often times just kids themselves, yet they must deal with adults that truly are criminals and the higher up the drug food chain one goes, the more hardened and genuine the criminal.  These adults eventually convince their distribution network to start offering more drugs, not just pot and we get to watch as our innocent children are turned into hardened criminals and hard core pushers. It’s a natural progression.  Our current laws basically indoctrinate our children into a criminal mentality where the cops and parents and authority are truly the enemy and to be shut out and avoided at all costs.  Is that really what we want?

By legalizing pot states could save billions on enforcement and raise billions of dollars in taxes, billions that wouldn’t flow into the hands of some fairly powerful drug cartels that have become as well armed and influential as many fair sized nations.  If we allowed legitimate companies to grow, process and distribute pot, many of the illegal drug cartels might decide to turn legitimate and forego a portion of their business in order to concentrate and profit from legal pot sales.  Is it an ideal solution, no, but it is a solution.

I’m sure some of the thrill of drugs is the illegal nature of them, but most people probably enjoy the high and aren’t looking for a bigger and bigger fix or the fun of running from the cops and worrying about drug searches and the possibility of jail; they just like to mellow out after a hard day at school/work.  If this is true, then a legal joint vs an illegal one is probably a better fit anyway.   Yes, I know we don;t intend to allow kids to buy legal pot, but we all know they’ll get it just like they get all the cigarettes they want.

Governments being what they are, even if they did legalize pot, they’d probably put severe restrictions on THC content and leave drug traffickers an opening to provide a more potent product.  If legalizing pot can work to cut into trafficker’s profits and raise state revenues and decriminalize a hundred plus million Americans, we need to ensure that what is being sold is what the majority of consumers want.  

Pot smokers aren’t the big problem in America, it’s Meth heads and Coke addicts and the criminal element associated with all forms of drugs.  With legislation to legalize pot, we’d put tens of thousands of low level drug peddlers out of business and allow law enforcement to concentrate on the meth labs and cocaine smugglers.  Admittedly, law enforcement is only paying lip service to pot anyhow, but I would like to believe that the majority of people that smoke pot and would eventually move on to coke or meth or whatever might decide to avoid the criminal and addiction risks associated with those other drugs if they could be “cool” by doing just pot.  We all know there will always be some percentage of users of anything that will keep rachetting things up, but that isn’t to say all or even a majority of users would fall into this category.

We can’t win the war on drugs, we can’t win the war on terror, and we can’t enforce morality or goodness or honesty; so perhaps we need to fall back, regroup, concede some territory and concentrate on the more serious issues and rake in some revenue for the states at the same time.

I am sure there are opponents of legalizing pot that can point to a few people that are actually addicted to pot. It’s rare, but it happens just like people get addicted to religion, shopping, porn and even sports.  Anyone can become addicted given the right motivation and circumstances, but our government is going broke and wasting money on un-winnable battles, so continuing down that path after the better part of a century has proven it can;t be done is just a mistake.

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