View 539 October 6 - 12, 2008 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
The Treasury Secretary has spoken and Wall Street has sort of responded. We're not out of the woods, but perhaps confidence is creeping back? That is, it probably doesn't matter a lot what the Feds do so long as investors are convinced that we will DO Something; the problem is, now much more harm with the Something do? That's one reason I was more fond of the original four page proposal than of the 450 page monster, and for that matter of the 100 page proposal whose defeat triggered the first Black Monday.
I know, I know, it gave unprecedented power to the Sec Treasury without much in the way of oversight and review; but no man who ever lived would have been in a brighter spotlight for the rest of his life; and without immunity he would have been subjected to endless lawsuits and the rescue certainly would not have worked. It was supposed to be a rescue, not a series of tax cuts and bounties, nor the Trial Lawyer's Full Employment Act.
The 451 page proposal didn't work because it is hard to have confidence in something you do not understand. The Secretary today made it a bit clearer, and Wall Street sort of responded, but we are not out of the woods yet. Something more will be required, and there are plenty of Congressional Militia and Senatorial Reavers who will act to get a piece of it written in. So it goes. Like occasional piracy off the Horn of Africa is a cost of using the Suez Canal, appeasing the Congressional pirate forces is the cost of rescuing the financial system. To carry the analogy further, we also insist on punishing the captains of the ships that allowed themselves to get into trouble, and perhaps we are more concerned with punishing the guilty than with rescuing the ships in trouble.
===================
I confess I am more interested in Tran just at the moment.
==========
For the record: it took 9 seconds to connect ftp to my web home page; 9 seconds to connect to the mail page; and 9 seconds to connect to the view page (I have different scripts for each because even with the lag it's a lot quicker to disconnect and reconnect to the proper page than to do two sets of drilling up and down). The next time I tried to connect to each of those pages the connection was instantaneous. My web service providers tell me they have done nothing to change anything. I have done nothing to change settings. I'm glad it works but I don't comprehend what's happening. It appears to happen only with Vista, but I can't think why.
Note that throughput isn't affected and is very fast.
===================
I want to thank those who recently renewed by upgrading to Platinum. Now back to Tran.
=================
That meteor in Africa didn't do any damage, but it was a coup for spacewatch. See Mail.
=========
After digesting the Secretary's message, the Dow closed down, not up. I guess he wasn't forceful enough. Meanwhile the prospects of a Democratic Congress with a Democrat President may be sinking in. The only way Obama is going to do all the things he promised will be to extract money from someone. His "tax cuts" involve sending checks to the 40% of the taxpayers who don't pay any income taxes -- or, if not, someone needs to say that, openly and strongly. His health care system is going to be costly, and while he says that his plan will save money, most politicians say that.
I would be very pleased to have two political parties either of which we could trust to do what is best. We may be running an experiment to see if we have that.
I suspect the best we can get is divided government. We'd still have Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd chairing the relevant committees.
===================
Ftp report: after about an hour of not using ftp the first reconnection took 9 seconds; the next was instantaneous. And now I really am off to Tran.
=============
I am still dithering over what to do with the WD 500 GB Blue Scorpion laptop drive: I don't need it in the ThinkPad, and I do need it in the Mac Book Pro. Friends tell me that now that I'm back among the living, replacing the drive in a Mac Book Pro is more tedious than difficult, and you can always keep the original drive and reinstall it if you need Warranty service -- which, given the useful life of laptops, isn't likely anyway. Macs are well made. So one alternative is to use the really explicit on-line instructions (there are several) and think of this as doing yet another silly thing so you won't have to. I'll get a column out of it for sure. I'd still rather pay an Apple genius to do this, but I learned yesterday ( see above) that Apple doesn't do third party installations.
Since Apple is apparently bringing out a Mac Book Pro with user replaceable hard drive, I would strongly advise waiting for that before buying a Mac Book Pro. I intend this Mac to run both Vista and Mac OS-X, and to become my main laptop, so it's going to need a big drive, particularly if it's going to be the only machine I take on trips.