Comments Posted By Foobarista
Displaying 51 To 60 Of 63 Comments
IDEOLOGY vs PRINCIPLES? SCHWARZENEGGER HIDES UNDER THE BUS
As a Californian - and one who isn't interested in leaving - Arnold was someone I hoped would do well, but who couldn't escape his Hollywood need to be "accepted".
The problem in California is the local Republican party is nonfunctional. Social conservative ballot measures sometimes win here, but so-con politicians are DOA. Winners need to be libertarian-minded economic conservatives, which is how Ahnult ran in his first election, and since he basically side-stepped the nomination process by running in the run-off, he managed to win.
Typically, the "RINO purge" at the nominating convention gets rid of non so-cons, who'll be lucky to win 40%.
The sad thing is there are lots of "leave me aloners" who are ripe for the right kind of socially don't-care, economically conservative politics that Arnold initially promised.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 23.02.2009 @ 22:13
THE STIMULUS SHOULD GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
At the end of the day, the biggest problem we're having is agency problems and "ownership abstraction". The more abstracted the ownership, the bigger the problem we're having.
Case in point: credit unions. They've done far better than banks in this crisis, even though they're portfolios are dominated by residential real estate and credit card loans. To this point, CUs haven't cost the taxpayer a dime. The difference: they generally keep and service their own loans, so they know their loans and their customers well.
Another problem is Wall Street ownership models. The private partnerships of the "old" Wall Street would never have done the really weird stuff the public Wall Street has done. One aside: Goldman Sachs was the last of the partnerships to have an IPO, and it is the entity that has done best of any of them. When they went public, the traders went from using partner money for their trade to using "public" stockholder money, and the partners cared much less about it and didn't watch them as closely as they once did.
At the biggest level, big corporations have become toys of their management teams, who have become quite divorced from any "owners".
What do all these have in common: fewer "layers of abstraction" between business "owners" and management for things that worked well, more layers for things that worked badly.
As a programmer who's been in the biz for 25 years, one of my pet peeves has been deep, expensive "abstraction pyramids" that tend to develop in big projects using "modern" programming methods. I've achieved amazing improvements in performance and quality in several projects by "flattening" these pyramids. This involves getting rid of intermediate abstractions and "magic code" that nobody understands.
My beef is our economy has developed the same sort of abstraction pyramids. Flattening them will be hard, but probably has to be done somehow.
This is an excellent analysis, thanks. We better pray that Geithner has it mostly right or we are going to be in a world of hurt.
ed.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 10.02.2009 @ 11:08
BLEAK CHOICES FACING GEITHNER IN TRYING TO SAVE THE BANKS
Here's an interesting take from a friend of mine. Basically, the problem isn't mortgages or deposits, but wierd "financial instruments" that are so complex that nobody knows what they're worth - if anything.
This is why the "let 'em all fail and start over" solution may be the only thing that has a hope of working.
Here's his post:
http://derivethis.blogspot.com/2009/02/whatcha-gonna-do-when-11-no-longer.html
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 8.02.2009 @ 16:52
SMALL GOVERNMENT, BIG GOVERNMENT, OR CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT?
For me, a few things:
1. I wish government wasn't run by bureaucrats. My biggest beef with government is its organization is basically late 19th century "Big Management" with deep hierarchies, lifer employees, and permanent departments. Unlike everything else in our world, these entities aren't punished for failure, and often are "rewarded" for it with budget increases.
2. Our government has grown to the point where it is increasingly undemocratic simply because much of it is too "far away" in terms of organizational distance from Congress and the people it's supposed to serve. Federalism may help, but many functions aren't geographic anymore and we'd be far worse off with a lot of them, particularly stuff like product regulation. An idea I toy with is something like citizen supervisory boards auditing the various bureaucracies - and shutting them down or forcing them to reorganize when they aren't working. To avoid insider dealing, this would be made up of randonly selected citizens, drafted in much the same way juries are drafted (and not "elected" from a bunch of pet bureaucrats as is often the case with outfits like "transit authorities", etc).
3. That said, I generally agree that in a hugely complex modern world, the libertarian dream of having everything be "caveat emptor" simply is unworkable.
4. Another notion is we may have reached the simple mathematical limits of electoral democracy. We need to come up with post-electoral ways to insure democratic legitimacy in a vast country. Wealth and celebrity are required to win elections nowadays, and the political parties are primarily electoral machines. I think we need a two-tier system, where elections are used to pick which members of the national elite will be in one part of the government, and a random draft of citizens would be used to counter the power of the elites in another part.
The wealth and extremes of ability/luck/whatever required to win national office pretty much guarantees that our national representatives are emphatically not "representative" of the population.
Anyway, enough of my junk. I'm normally a lurker here, but this series is one of the best things I've seen on blogs in a long time.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 8.02.2009 @ 04:16
What's being celebrated is the end of the shortening of days, and "rebirth" of the sun. This is why numerous cultures - including our own - have their New Year on or near the solstice.
Also, since harvest is done and there isn't much that one can do agriculture-wise at this time of year, why not have a massive party :)
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 21.12.2008 @ 15:16
TOP TEN THINGS THAT CREEP ME OUT ABOUT OBAMA
For me, the creepiest thing is how many of the bored billionaire types Obama has in his corner. These are people who are so rich, they no longer care about tax policy or whatever as much as being seen as nice, wonderful people.
I live near some ultra-affluent areas in Silicon Valley. When I drive through nine-digit areas (ie, most people in the neighborhood have 9 figure net worths) like Atherton or Los Altos Hills, nearly every house has an Obama lawn sign next to the gate entrance. These were the people in the crowd when Obama gave his "bitter" speech in San Francisco.
I'm as big a fan of capitalism as anyone else, but I'm always suspicious when _all_ the big money seems to want something that seems to be against it's more obvious interest. Maybe they know something we don't? Maybe lots of promises have been made? Or maybe they're rich dupes?
One lesson of the Valley from someone who's lived here his whole life: big money doesn't always add up to wisdom or political intelligence.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 27.07.2008 @ 15:33
FINALLY, THE MEDIA 'DISCOVERS' OBAMA-AYERS RELATIONSHIP
Where are the actual pro-Americans, if any, in Obama's social circle?
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 18.04.2008 @ 14:15
ELITISM AND THE ELITIST ELITES WHO THINK THEY'RE THE ELITE
Elitism and elites isn't such a problem; it's when the elite gets entrenched that things get ugly. This is why the dynastic trends in American politics are so disturbing; some very large percentage of Congress come from "political families".
As you point out, our Revolution wasn't so much a revolt against the idea of elites; those were the French and Communist revolutions. Ours was against nobility, which is the idea that elite status is inherited.
The question in democracy - as in all systems - is how to pick the ruling elite. It may well be that elections aren't always the best way, especially in a vast country where the only ways to get noticed are to have "name recognition", or to be a single-minded political careerist like Obama.
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 13.04.2008 @ 03:09
MY ADVICE: BUY A HORSE, INVEST IN BUGGY WHIP COMPANIES
The irony here is that much of the first wave of "scientifically inspired" Bigthink Disasters were around the collapse of cities due to excessive numbers of horses in the mid 19th century. Streetcars and then subways worked past these problems, followed by cars.
Ever since, we've had all manner of bigthink disaster forecasts, from big-thinkers of both the Left and Right. Maybe one day one of them will be right; after all, if you predict an earthquake every day, eventually it'll happen. But until then, I avoid peak-oilers, global-warmers, overpopulationists, "big germ" types, and other unpleasant folk of that sort. One often gets the impression that they want their pet disaster to happen so they'll be "right"...
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 11.03.2008 @ 02:46
MY TEN FAVORITE MYTHIC HEROES OF ALL TIME
A replica of El Cid's sword "La Tizona" has a place of honor in my living room. A old friend of mine gave it to me for Christmas many years ago...
Comment Posted By Foobarista On 31.10.2007 @ 03:34
