don’t panic

I recently read an article on CNN that talked about how entire careers of people in the sub-prime lending market have practically disappeared. It would seem that thousands of people are loosing jobs that were previously earning them six figure incomes…

Hmmm… While I can feel for those individuals (in the lending market) who are struggling to stay afloat and just make a mortgage payment, some part of me really wants to give them all a big fat raspberry and say, “you earned it baby.”

The sub-prime market is generally thought to be the cause of the current fiscal disaster we call our economy (as well as complete overspending by our current administration [cough]warfund[cough], but that’s another story). So why is it such a news story that those getting fat incomes off that market are now in trouble? They damn well should be! Welcome to the hell that the rest of us have been living in. The actions of many lenders bordered on criminal, let alone unethical. Just because you can legally do something doesn’t mean that you should, and they pushed it to the limit. Now that heads are rolling we’re supposed to feel sorry for these people?!?

I don’t think so.

It seems that Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was finally brought up short today. And it’s about time. This administration has been using the guise of “national security” and “the safety of the American people” to justify unwarranted wire-tapping for WAY too long. Nobody wants terrorists bombing another building, but allowing this to go on without a single public justification for it’s use is INSANE. I have yet to see even one example of how government wiretapping has made me safer. I’ve seen no articles showing how terrorists were thwarted because the CIA was able to intercept their plans as they spoke over international calls from another country. There has been NOTHING.

I’m sure that the Bush administration would say that the “successes” have been made “classified” to protect those involved (something Valerie Plame would find laughable). How convenient. It just seems like something this important (and obviously controversial) would be handled with the upmost care and patience, not discussed behind closed doors in a secret meeting. If the American people could at least see some of the results of giving up their privacy, it might make it a little easier to swallow.

It has become standard White House policy to simply throw a blanket patriotic concept over an issue to get what they want without having to explain or justify it. They’re position is:

“Exposing the private sector to continued litigation for assisting in efforts to defend the country understandably makes the private sector much more reluctant to cooperate. Without their cooperation, our efforts to protect the country cannot succeed.”

You bet it makes them reluctant to cooperate! They don’t want to get their butts sued for doing something they know is wrong!

Republican Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico said:

“They [Democrats] know, they know the risks they are taking on behalf of the American people and they don’t care … and that’s what bothers me most.”

Actually, Heather, the Democrats don’t know, that’s the problem. The White House refuses to discuss how the wiretapping works or what they are using it for, specifically. It’s not like these are national secrets. It’s pretty obvious that calls from outside the U.S. are monitored, and any serious terrorist is almost certainly not going to use those means of communication to contact cells within the country. There are a dozen other ways that a terrorist could stay in contact with an outside source that would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to track. They are far more savvy now than they were on September 11.

We take risks every single day. I risk my very life every time I drive on a SoCal freeway. But to call blocking something that hasn’t even been justifiably shown to prevent terrorism as risking the lives of the American people, is cheap and stupid. Sorry, but I value my freedom more than that. Just look to the UK if you want an example of how restrained government is when it comes to protecting the privacy of it’s citizens. The idea that I can relax and trust the current administration to do the right thing with it’s power is absurd. Again and again they have shown us that they will lie, cheat and deceive in order to protect nothing but their own jobs. Public be damned. We’re fighting a war because the American people were told that there was “indisputable proof” that Saddam was not only linked with terrorists but was preparing weapons of mass destruction himself. Even this week we are learning that no such link ever existed. Ever. So either our current administration is completely incompetent (resulting in the deaths of thousands more American lives than were ever lost on September 11), or they are purposely and knowingly screwing over the citizens of the United States for their own ends.

Sorry, but taking Bush’s advise on almost anything seems to me to be a far greater risk to my life and well being than moving more slowly in allowing the CIA to violate my privacy any time they want.

After a few weeks of using my phone, I have pretty much stretched it’s capabilities to their max. My final opinion – close, but no cigar.

As I stated before, there are some basic features that either aren’t there or could be better with only a little more work. The first thing I found out was that the LG 9900 enV is a BREW phone. This is good and bad. It’s good because the third party programs for it will come from certified companies and will probably be better than most. It’s bad because those third party companies are certainly not going to give anything away for free. In other words, there’s no free stuff. At all. Anywhere. And the stuff that is out there isn’t a buy-once kind of thing, it’s always a subscription. Sorry, but that completely sucks. I hate subscriptions. I want to pay for my phone or my software, or whatever -ONCE-, and not have to pay for it again and again and AGAIN until the day I die. Especially when it’s just some tiny little function like a better clock or an email client that should have come with the phone to begin with.

Speaking of clocks, I mentioned last time how disappointed I was in the general clock display of the phone, primarily from the outside. Well, after more playing around, I am sad to say that the 25 year-old Casio watch hanging in my bathroom has FAR more functionality than my brand spankin’ new high-tech phone. Things like a stopwatch or a countdown timer probably aren’t big selling points, but my last phone did both functions and I used them frequently. What’s up with that??! This kind of functionality is already built into the hard-code of the phone, so it mainly boils down to laziness on the part of the software manufacturer. The term, “value added” just really escapes the cell phone market. Phones could be SO much more useful if they would just take a tiny bit more time. So what if most people wouldn’t use such and such feature. Like what percentage of cell phone owners use the “Tip Calculator”? Frankly, who cares! It’s there (and has been in the last four phones I have owned – go figure) and I COULD use it. It’s the idea that I have tools at my disposal. Here are a few more handy ideas to incorporate:

You’re cell phone as a flashlight – You forgot to leave your porch light on and you’re fumbling with your keys in the dark. How many of us have flipped open our phones and used their dim illumination to help us find the keyhole? This could be better. How about being able to assign a “quickdial” key to a function that just displays a bright-white screen to help us see, or even turns on the “flash” that many camera phones have now.

Better function keys – My enV has a special button that takes you to a “shortcut” menu which allows you to directly jump to… one of the items on the main menu… I can even reassign these shortcuts to… anything listed in a predefined list from the main menu. What is the point? If I could access ANY tool on the phone, it would actually be useful. As is, it’s just a way to revert to a numbered list of functions for those people from another world who grew up memorizing number command sequences.

Organize preferences into something resembling an intelligent and intuitive order. HINT: There should NOT be a selection in my “SETTINGS & TOOLS” menu called, “Phone Settings”. They are ALL phone settings! And how is this different than “Call Settings”, which mysteriously contains the selection, “PC Connections”. Then there’s the option for Power On/Off under “Sounds Settings” (shouldn’t that be singular? – whatever).

Phone as a sensor – Ok, so this is pure gadget lust, but my current phone is hardware capable AS IT IS RIGHT NOW, of knowing where it is in the world, the time, if daylight is present, and if there are sounds around it. It would be simplicity itself to include a thermometer (it may even have one) to collect internal (and more importantly) external temperature readings. Since it’s bluetooth capable, it could know when it’s near a paired object such as my laptop. AND YET – with the possible exception of the GPS system (which Verizon again wants you to pay extra for), none of these sensors is utilized in any other functional way.

The phone as an alarm system – Throw in a simple motion detector (like the one found in my MacBook) and instantly your phone could be an alarm system while you’re away at a hotel. You could even use the microphone and make an alarm that goes off when it hears noise, or an alarm that activates when light reaches a certain level.

The phone as a pedometer – The same motion sensor above could be used to turn your phone (which is usually stored on the hip anyway) into a pedometer to help you with your exercise regiment.

The phone as an ebook reader – If it can play music, it could display text files stored on a memory card.

The phone as a radio – I’m not sure why no one has bothered to do this yet, but why not make a phone capable of receiving AM/FM radio signals? We listen to music, why not NPR? Of course, Verizon would want to stream it to you digitally for data and airtime charges…

I have become pretty disillusioned with our whole political system in the last year, and the situation with the democratic primary elections isn’t helping.

The situation was that everybody wanted their state to be first (or at least among the first) in the election process so that they could claim to have more political clout – The thought being that the presidential candidate would be chosen early and the later states votes would be mostly pointless. But, since everyone wanted to go first, they all kept moving their election dates forward until the Democratic National Committee finally stepped in and said “enough” and rightfully put a limit on things and said that any state that holds their primary before February 5 would have their delegates stripped.

To make a long story short, Florida and Michigan decided to call the DNC’s bluff and went ahead and did an early election anyway… only it turned out not to be a bluff. It also turned out that the candidate won’t be chosen by the early states after all since things are so close, but rather the final few. So NOW, Florida and Michigan are screaming for a do-over, siting how millions of votes are going to be overlooked because of the DNC’s decision to remove their delegates. Coming from Florida specifically, it seems a little hypocritical, but that’s another post.

What no one seems to be addressing here is the fact that this was not some random act of God that caused these two states to lose out. Their governments CHOSE to try and buck the system. They knew what they were doing and they decided to say “screw-you” to the rules anyway. Now that they could make a difference, they want “in” again and are crying like babies that they can’t have their way. Of course they don’t even want to have to pay for it all – do-over elections being expensive things that don’t look good if you are trying to get re-elected. And the DNC certainly isn’t going to pony-up for it.

So it’s looking more and more like Florida is going to once again screw things up for the country and make our election system a joke to the rest of the world. Thanks a lot… whiners. Here’s an idea – Have the people who made the decision to move the election ahead of February 5 pay for it. Yeah, like that will happen. A politician actually taking responsibility for their actions… not a chance.