I could have sworn that I had already commented on this but it appears that I haven’t.

First, the California Proposition that tried to ban gay marriages (the infamous Proposition 8) has been found unconstitutional.¹

Then the Pro8 folks tried to overturn that ruling based on the fact that the Judge was openly gay.

Finally, the US District Court refuses to overturn that ruling.

In other news, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is declared unconstitutional in Federal Court.

The ruling Monday was also signed by 19 other judges on the 24-member court in an unusually emphatic display of consensus, he said.

That is an outstanding show of support for a judicial ruling.

In all of this I still haven’t gotten a clear answer. The key argument for Prop 8 is that it directly damages the bonds of heterosexual marriage. My question is: How does homosexual or any other form of consensual marriage damage heterosexual marriage?

Please, answer exactly and in simple secular terms, leaving your mythical gods at the door. It is a very simple question and I have yet to get even a complex answer. It is a question that the antagonists should have raised during the votation but the bible-thumpers shouted them down (how is that free speech, BTW).

As for the rest: Keep your gods out of my politics!

I apologize for not having saved the actual link for this one [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Does your laptop have rights?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. — Amendment four of the US Constitution

Note carefully that the only clause is one that includes probable cause and due process. This is followed closely by the fifth Amendment

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. – Amendment five of the US Constitution.

There is no need to pass new legislation to enable these rights. They are already the supreme law of the land.

Present law permits border and customs agents to conduct electronic fishing expeditions. – referenced LA Times article

Actually, it does not.

The reason airport searches are exempt from the 4th Amendment’s protection against illegal searches is that baggage might conceal contraband or dangerous materials. – referenced LA Times article

That is actually a very weak argument but one that both the DEA and TSA use extensively. That it is used and often upheld does not make it correct.

Extending that exception to allow federal agents to rifle through the content of electronic devices is unjustifiable. Unfortunately, two federal appeals courts, in cases involving child pornography, have upheld the Department of Homeland Security’s policy of allowing searches of electronic devices at the border. – referenced LA Times article

This is where I can agree but it needs no special legislation as it is already specifically written into the US Constitution, a Constitution that all Federal Employees are sworn to uphold and defend. What it needs is action by the ACLU or voting citizens to tell the government to stop violating our rights. What it really needs is the DHS to and particularly the TSA to be disbanded as rogue agencies of a rogue government.

How many of those confiscated laptops resulted in fair compensation to their owners as required under the fifth Amendment?

All it would take is for one (1) Congress-Critter to bring suit with the Supreme Court. It is certain that at $25M plus, a regular citizen can’t do it anymore, which is itself in violation of the principals behind the US Constitution.

Amerika, the fearful. Home of cowards and the land of the slaves.

(I am tempted to tell you that you deserve what you have but my daughter still lives there.)

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Alejandro Lazo, of the Los Angeles Times, reports that fewer homeowners are underwater on mortgages. The first quarter of this year saw a miniscule drop in the number of upside-down mortgages from 11.1 million to 10.9 million. That’s a measly 0.2 million or only 200,000¹ .

The decline in the number of borrowers owing more on their mortgages than those properties are worth occurred despite falling home prices, which plunge borrowers underwater.

Yes, that is because of acceleration in the rate of foreclosure sales, which take such troubled assets off the market.

Home equity loans also are contributing to the negative-equity problem, CoreLogic said. Thirty-eight percent of borrowers with second mortgages were underwater, compared with 18% of borrowers without home equity loans.

Remember that Jobless Recovery? That is when many of those second mortgages were sold. It was a way for many people to fund their unemployment after the Telco-Dotcom Crash, of 2001-2002, cost over 12.5 million jobs, most of which were not recovered during the Jobless Recovery, of 2003-2006. In fact, that 38%, or 4.2 million, looks suspiciously like those are the same folks that had no job to refinance with, in 2007, before the Great Financial Meltdown, of 2007-2008, and the jobs market puckered up tighter than a duck’s hind end.

While the US economy has been slowly healing since then, it is yet another Jobless Recovery. In fact, it hasn’t really been a recovery, although Wall Street is looking well. It is more like the economy being in Intensive Care since 2009, that’s three years folks and yes it is that sick; sicker even. The elephant in the room are the toxic assets that are still on the books and these upside-down mortgages are exactly what they are talking about.

Of course, I also knew others that bought a Ferrari with the equity but, chances are that those aren’t the ones in trouble, due to them having been eliminated from the system years ago. Stupidity generally goes broke early unless they have vastly more money than sense. These are folks that have been working hard to stretch their assets while desperately hoping for things to improve. Those that were anywhere near 50, in 2001, have probably been under-employed, at best, this entire time. Basically an unfunded but forced retirement. Some have started their own business, funded from their home equity, and others have been scraping by anyway that they could. Most have advanced degrees and are over-qualified for most jobs that they can apply for². Now, due to Banker greed, their home’s value has dropped through the floor, removing yet another survival tool.

The sad bit is that nothing is being done for them. They are barely on the RADAR. Most of them have no retirement savings. After ten years of this sort of hardship; who has a retirement plan? All that they have is an ad hoc survival plan; scrimping by. That’s over 4.5 million households in this position. Think about that when the next dis-compassionate Tea Partier starts kicking the next homeless and disabled engineer that can’t find work because the company insurance refuses to cover him.

Note that, these are National numbers. [↩]
These are the same folks that Junior Bush offered $5K to so that they could educate themselves in a proper [sic] vocation. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

If congressional negotiators fail to resolve their impasse over the federal debt ceiling, we may recall this moment in history as one of the nation’s worst since the morning Custer awoke thinking it might be amusing to go and annoy Sitting Bull.

It came from an article in in the LA Times by Tim Rutten, “They drank the tea.”

The highlighting statement is;

Boehner said that "allowing America to default would be irresponsible" but that failure to "reform the budget process" would be worse.

Which wasn’t good enough for the Tea Partiers

The Rev. William Temple, chairman of the tea party’s Founding Fathers, who appeared — as apparently is his custom — in a tri-cornered hat and full Colonial-era regalia, sneered at Boehner as "a wimpy RINO," (Republican In Name Only) and derided him as "our tearful House speaker." Temple said the tea party would give lawmakers "something to really cry about in 2012" by turning the debt ceiling vote into a litmus test: "If you vote to raise the debt ceiling, you get a ’0′ for the year from the tea party. If you don’t vote to raise the debt ceiling, you get a ’100′ and you’re a hero."

Number one, as a lifelong Republican, I am getting seriously tired of that RINO label. The Tea Party started off with decent agendas but have since been high-jacked by the Palinistas. They are now further right than John Birch and their core contains the radical Religious Right. They somehow do not know the difference between political conservative, religious conservative, and social conservative¹ . But then, what can you expect from a bunch who supports a bitch² that is too ignorant to know her American history and admit it when she is proven wrong.

However, all the grandstanding aside, if the US defaults then the credit rating is reduced and interest rates go up by a factor of 5, at the least. I disagree with Boehner; defaulting would be much worse and more immediate than failing to reform the budgetary process in the next two weeks. We can take a few months to do that, more carefully, without the risk of defaulting on US Gov debt, by raising the debt ceiling NOW!

I remember when Newt tried this during the Clinton administration and his political career is only just now recovering. If the Tea Party ignoramuses manage to push Boehner into the same play, then Boehner’s career might follow the same path. I would be very surprised if this were to happen and US Congress, in the hands of the Tea Party, fail to raise the debt ceiling. The Tea Party will directly face the consequences for such ignorant stupidity (I hope).

Quick clue, they are NOT the same and may even contradict each other [↩]
A pit-bull with lipstick is, in any parlance, still an Ignorant Bitch! [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Against the Swiss Franc, the US Dollar is now down to 83.4 centimes and dropping fast. This follows closely on news of the double-dip in the housing market and it is a not an inconsequential corollary.

The reason that it is called Real Estate is because land is the only real value. Given a sufficient a amount, you don’t need anything else because you can live on it. It is the ultimate commodity. Yes, it is subject to market prices but the market has been trading at well over the real value of the property (many multiples of the real value) for decades.

In the US West, the raw land shouldn’t be much more than $2K-$10K per acre. The houses that are put on it can ALL be built for less than $100K. Remember that these are all stick-built houses and they are not very durable. In fact, most have trouble lasting even 50 years and some become unlivable within the first 25 years. Yes, I realize that the reason for that type of construction is earthquakes but let’s face it folks, it is only a temporary construct. It adds nothing to the value of the land and I don’t care how big it is. It might as well be a double-wide trailer and arguably, a double-wide might last longer. At least, it is easily replaceable.

Most folks in the US West live in housing tracts. These are developments where a cheap stick-built house is planted on a patch of land, called a lot, that is barely larger than the house. You can’t drill for water, you can’t mine it, it’s too small for a grove of trees, and in many communities you aren’t even allowed to plant a vegetable garden or raise animals. That house is good for one thing and one thing only; to sleep in. You can’t even do that for more than 25-50 years without major renovations and repairs. These repairs will often vastly exceed the original construction costs.

The result is that most houses in the US West, on their own, are barely worth their construction cost plus the price of the lot that they occupy. A very sticky point that; the lot price. Lots are typically 8,000 square feet, much less than an acre. It’s not much good for anything except to plant a building on. The only mitigating factor is it’s location and since the land isn’t sizable enough to earn its keep and the recent tight job market works against home-workers, the lot needs to be close to available jobs. If there are few to no jobs within, roughly, an hour’s distance than the lot becomes essentially, worthless. This is essentially the problem of the folks in North Las Vegas, for example. They are stuck in the trap of sunk cost and no more jobs.

The real problem is that these folks should never have paid as high a price for those houses in the first place nor should the banks have funded those high prices. They were all caught in the massive house price inflation of the past 50 years, the most recent of which was led by bank and realtor speculations that was enabled by a too readily available money supply (NINJA¹ loans and the like) that let anyone bid up the prices of housing, to unreasonable values, with little to no repercussions.

However, there is a safety valve built into the system and it works much faster than the foreclosure process. It was originally put into place hundreds of years ago under fears that the banks would put the entire country into improvident debt. At the same time, debtor’s prisons were outlawed. You are not obligated to pay an impossible to repay debt, which is probably a debt that shouldn’t have been incurred in the first place. This safety valve is called bankruptcy.

Unlike almost anywhere else in the world, Americans can simply walk away from improvident debt with few, if any, repercussions. If an American commits to a $100,000 house for the improvident price of $500,000 and that house falls back to $100,000 then they can simply declare bankruptcy and walk away, leaving the bank to hold the unsellable over-valued property. It puts the onus on the bank to make sure that the price paid for the house is not out of reason because the bank is out the larger part of the losses if the deal fails. The bank is supposed to be smart enough to know better. The bank is supposed to be on the buyer’s side in these things and that is by design.

The bankruptcy process allows you to keep the tools of your trade, 401K, your job, your car, and enough cash for you and your family to live on. If your property is Homesteaded, then you may even be allowed to keep living there for a token rent payment² At the end of that process, you won’t be rich but you will certainly be debt-free (except for child-support and certain tax debts). The important thing is that you will be rid of that upside down white elephant and can now rent a place for a lot less money. You will also be free to move to an area with more or better jobs, or better business opportunities.

If you are older, like I am, there are complications to hitting the big financial reset switch that is US Bankruptcy law. For one thing, I have less than 10 years of working life before I hit 65, mandatory retirement age. The trick there is to become self-employed in some manner. If you have a business, it’s incorporated (Delaware and Nevada preferred) , and you’ve managed to keep from co-mingling funds then you might be able to separate the business from your personal bankruptcy (IANAL so really go and see a lawyer on this one).

Too many folks get conned into continuing to pay on improvident debts. This is only to the benefit of banks which have already been indemnified against those losses by the TARP. Essentially, your actions let them collect double from your mortgage; once from the TARP and again from you. They should already have written down your mortgage to current market conditions. That they haven’t is only because they think that you are fool enough to pay them a second time (after their TARP bailout).

As an aside, the main reason that CDOs and CDSs should have never been rated above B is the presence of US Bankruptcy law.

No Income, No Job or Assets [↩]
Although I have been through this process twice, I am not a lawyer (IANAL) and you should REALLY have an attorney that is competent in the bankruptcy laws in your state. This will typically cost you approximately $2,500-$4,000 in up front cash. There are lots of them out there. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

The good news, for me, is that I was correct and yet another prediction has come to pass.

The US Dollar is now worth only 84.7 centimes or 0.847 Swiss Francs.

Contrary to what this sounds like, it isn’t good news for the US economy. In fact, it is a leading indicator for Gonzalo Lira’s Hyperinflation scenario and this happened about 4 months sooner than I thought it would.

Now for the bad news;

An index of home prices in the nation’s largest American cities plumbed new depths in March, pushing past a low set during the worst of the Great Recession.

The reasons for this is

The housing market appeared to be headed toward recovery last year, but those gains were largely driven by a popular credit for buyers. Sales and prices have been weak since then.

The problem is that while a lot of those sellers had stopped the losses for those buyers, they have now signed up, in full, for all the losses going forward.

"This month’s report is marked by the confirmation of a double-dip in home prices across much of the nation," said David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P index committee, said. "Home prices continue on their downward spiral with no relief in sight."

In other words, the bubble is still deflating. Some of them are facing losses as high as 60% from their original purchase price. Any foreseeable appreciation is too far down the tracks for a reasonable recovery.

Some economists would agree, predicting that a full recovery in parts of the West’s "foreclosure belt" — California, Nevada and Arizona — won’t occur until at least 2030.

In fact, that’s an optimistic view. There will not be any recovery until the current bottom is found and it is nowhere in sight nor is it expected to be seen soon. In this case, it could be well into the last half of this century. What these unfortunates need to do is file bankruptcy while they still can, get a complete discharge of their debts, and start over. After all, that’s why the TARP was paid to the banks, to indemnify them against those sorts of losses.

Of course, the banks should really be writing those mortgages down to reality and taking the losses that they were already paid to take by the TARP. However, it doesn’t look like that’s happening. Maybe, we should have just let those banks fail.

The only ones that are doing well are my friends like DessertRat, whose house is paid off with no liens. I am sure that he is enjoying the reduced property taxes. Winking smile He may be taking a paper loss but it isn’t a real loss until he tries to sell it.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

A few days ago I wrote about the LG Optimus 7 and the Windows Mobile 7 experience. Basically, it wasn’t. Rather, it was a bad trip. It is every bit the customer lock-in experience that the Apple iPhone is and the Cloud Computing experience is all about parting you from your money through monthly tariffs and data charges. It is no wonder that the phone companies are so ready to subsidize these things for you. As for price, I got this for 89.00CHF ( $75.47 at 84.8 centimes to the dollar, with a new 2 year Swisscom contract).

LG Optimus 2x aka, LG Optimus Speed aka, LG G 2x

They’ve been talking and hyping Cellphone-PDA Convergence and it is finally possible. My standard scenario for skepticism about this convergence is the following Use Case;

You are on a conference call and need to lookup a Contact and send it to the others.

On a normal cell-phone, this cannot happen without dropping the call, even with a hands-free headset. However, with an independent PDA (Palm TX, iPaq, etc.) one can simply take out the device, look up the contact and verbally distribute it to the others, without interrupting the call. This is why I still use a PDA, in addition to my Cellphone. Also, as SG likes to point out, if you have a dead bat in your cellphone your PDA is probably still okay, that’s where the information is, and a landline can usually be borrowed in an emergency.

Until Android, this was never possible in the same device. This is because all the handheld operating systems were single-tasking. This is true for Palm OS, Windows Mobile (aka WinCE), Symbian, and Apple IOS. Android, being a derivative of Linux, is inherently multi-tasking. In fact, it is the first and only true multi-tasking operating system for a handheld device. It is the only OS where you can have a multitude of applications running at the same time and they will run until you tell them to stop, regardless of whatever else you are doing, even while making a call. I just had the weather application update, via WiFi, while SG called in to talk to me. Try that on your iPhone, it will fail.

That’s Android; now about this phone. The 2x designator means that it’s a dual-core processor. Currently it’s the only one on the market. A dual core processor makes no sense without a multi-tasking OS and therefore you will never see such a beast running Windows Mobile 7 or any of the other handheld operating systems out there. In addition, the others are also on lower speed CPUs. Android can run there too but, a dual core CPU really lets it fly.

For details on the features you can read this or that. What none of the reviews cover is that this phone is one of the few that still syncs with the standard PIM (MS Outlook) on the desktop. It doesn’t require MS Exchange like WM7 nor does it require an external Cloud like Windows Live, Apple, or Google. Although, the default is to use the Google Cloud. The LG PC Suite IV package does the job nicely but it doesn’t use Active Sync. However, M$ doesn’t use it anymore either so that’s a small loss. My point here is that you save a quantum shedload of monthly data charges by syncing with your desktop directly if you can and is one of my main criteria for a convergent device.

The other happy note is that many of the applications I use on my iPaq are also available on Android. These are specialty applications like SPB Mobile Shell and I just found out that my favorite alarm program, SPB Time, is also available, as well as my secure wallet, Splash ID. Many of those used to be home on WM6.5 (My iPaq PDA) and couldn’t launch on WM7 (MS exclusivity is almost as bad as Apple these days. Both companies seem to have forgotten who won the PC warz and why. MS was open development and market while Apple was closed and exclusive; MS won¹ ).

Anyway, the Cellphone/PDA Convergence foundation has finally been laid and now it’s time for the applications developers to catch up and quit thinking in terms of exclusive single-tasking. What’s there now is decent but it is bound to get a whole lot better.

One quick word about battery life; don’t count on it lasting much more than a day. Especially if you do a lot of calling and internet/data access. Mugen has both 1700 mAh and 4500 mAh batteries for it. the normal battery is a 1500 mAh pack. I am considering the 1700 mAh pack, for $49. However I’ll see after a month, how long the bats live. I have mine tethered a lot due to frequent syncing and every time it syncs, it’s also getting charged.

Specifications

Also known as LG P990 Star, LG P990 Optimus Speed

General
2G Network
GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900

3G Network
HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100

HSDPA 900 / 1700 / 2100

Announced
2010, December

Status
Available. Released 2011, February

Size
Dimensions
123.9 x 63.2 x 10.9 mm

Weight
139 g

Display
Type
IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors

Size
480 x 800 pixels, 4.0 inches

- Gorilla Glass display
- Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Gyro sensor
- Touch-sensitive controls
- Multi-touch input method

Sound
Alert types
Vibration, MP3 ringtones

Loudspeaker
Yes

3.5mm jack
Yes, check quality

Memory
Phonebook
Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall

Call records
Practically unlimited

Internal
8 GB storage, 512 MB RAM

Card slot
microSD, up to 32GB, buy memory

Data
GPRS
Yes

EDGE
Yes

3G
HSDPA, 10.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps

WLAN
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot

Bluetooth
Yes, v2.1 with A2DP

Infrared port
No

USB
Yes, microUSB v2.0

Camera
Primary
8 MP, 3264×2448 pixels, autofocus, LED flash, check quality

Features
Geo-tagging, face and smile detection, touch focus, image stabilization

Video
Yes, 1080p@24fps, 720p@30fps, check quality

Secondary
Yes, 1.3 MP

Features
OS
Android OS, v2.2 (Froyo), upgradable to v2.3

CPU
Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 proccessor, ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 chipset

Messaging
SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM

Browser
HTML

Radio
Stereo FM radio with RDS

Games
Yes + downloadable

Colors
Black

GPS
Yes, with A-GPS support

Java
Yes, via Java MIDP emulator

- Social networking integration
- HDMI port
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail
- Digital compass
- YouTube, Google Talk
- DivX/Xvid/MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player
- MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ player
- Document editor
- Organizer
- Adobe Flash 10.1 support
- Voice memo/dial/commands
- Predictive text input

Battery
Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh

Stand-by
Up to 400 h

Talk time
Up to 7 h 50 min

Misc

I don’t care who was better; who has all the market share now? Open standards will always beat closed shop. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

To be honest, the only say that they could cause cancer, maybe. Yeah right, getting old causes cancer too.

Last year, results of a large study found no clear link between cellphones and cancer.
But some advocacy groups contend the study raised serious concerns because it showed a hint of a possible link between very heavy phone use and a rare but often deadly form of brain tumor. However, the numbers in that subgroup weren’t sufficient to make the case.

This is just like the argument that active power transmission lines in Chicago causes a drop-off in dairy milk production in Wisconsin.

The statement was issued in Lyon, France, Tuesday by the International Agency for Research on Cancer – the cancer agency of the World Health Organization.

Yes, the WHO causes advanced cretinism in it’s members.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Last Friday, amidst other things (which I will discuss in another post), I had to go down to the SwissCom shop to deal with my Piece-of-Shit HTC s740. What I walked away with is this:

It is an LG E900, aka the LG Optimus 7. As far as the hardware goes it is pretty cool. Good looks, excellent performance, and good accessories. I was even happy with the wired headset.

However, the hardware doesn’t deserve it’s software. Windows Mobile 7 is a pile of stinking pre-composted manure. Since I have a 14 day trial, it’s going back in the morning. Windows Mobile 6.5, what I have in my IPAQ, is loads better than Mobile 7.

My main reason for getting a Windows OS for the phone is sync. I have had major problems with sync I the past and without sync, the damned thing might as well be a brick, for all the good it does otherwise. There are three things that I need sync’d;

Contacts: My address book is huge, with over 800 entries. These are definitely more numbers than I am willing to try and remember. Loosing them would also be a major catastrophe. Right now, Outlook, on my laptop, syncs with Plaxo. This is an online service that I have learned to trust. The master copy is in Outlook. This is a part of Office Premium 2007. As a writer, it is my main tool these days.
Calendar and appointments: See above.
Notes

Note the conspicuous absence of email in that list.

In any case, I fully expected the damned thing to use Active Sync with no problems. It doesn’t. It uses an app called Zune. One problem, Zune does not sync with Outlook or any other Office 2007 application. You have to have a Windows Live account to make that happen, along with an available MS Exchange server. I do not use Exchange. I use hMailserver. Guess what? I’m hosed Sad smile

I had to upload my Contact list with Windows Live manually and it still will not sync it. I have to do the sync manually. That’s a show-stopper all by itself, right there.

Okay, I think, can I buy an app from Handango? No, Handango doesn’t sell Mobile 7 apps. I have to go to the Microsoft Marketplace. Okay, I think, I’ll just look there. Listen for the screeching halt terminated by the sound of crunching metal here folks: I am an American ex-pat in Switzerland and I was forced to tell my phone that (it goes with the Swisscom SIM card). Consequently, it only allows me to speak German or French. Well, at least they deal with French. My problem is that I don’t do French worth a damn and while my German is scads better, it still isn’t up to legal contracts and I prefer US English. Will it deal in the language that I want? The answer is not a resounding ‘no’ but a blastingly loud ‘HELL NO!’

So no, MS Marketplace will only sell me stuff if I want to switch to German or French. Argh! This is yet another showstopper. The putzes that do Internationalization for American software firms have their collective heads up their asses! They are doing it wrong! This is another post topic for the future.

I will swap this pile of excrement for an Android in the morning. LG is a good company and the hardware is beyond reproach but the OS on this thing sucks.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

One of the biggest mass violations of the US Constitution is not being set right but it is moving in that direction.

Charles Fahy, an appointee of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, deliberately hid from the court a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence that concluded the Japanese Americans on the West Coast did not pose a military threat.

US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which authorized forced removal of Japanese Americans from "military areas" in 1942. The government and the military agreed the roundup of Japanese Americans was required as a matter of "military necessity." Roosevelt issued the order on Feb. 19, 1942, about two months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged the U.S. into World War II.

Katyal said he decided it was important to publicly acknowledge the mistakes made in the solicitor general’s office. Hiding the truth from the justices, he said, "harmed the court, and it harmed 120,000 Japanese Americans. It harmed our reputation as lawyers and as human beings, and it harmed our commitment to those words on the court’s building: Equal Justice Under Law."

Over 120,000 Americans¹ of Japanese decent were incarcerated in one of 10 prison camps in the country. California had two, Tule Lake and Manzanar. This was via Executive Order. There was no due process and most of those people lost everything they had when they were wrongfully incarcerated. Most of them were barely allowed the clothes on their backs and all of them lost whatever land that they owned with no remuneration or any sort of fair compensation.

Scholars and judges have denounced the World War II rulings as among the worst in the court’s history, but neither the high court nor the Justice Department had formally admitted they were mistaken — until now.

It is now 69 years down the timeline and only now is this crap coming to light.

He then looked into the history of the World War II internment cases, including documents revealed in the 1980s. Peter Irons, a professor at UC San Diego, had found reports in old government files that showed the U.S. military did not see Japanese Americans as a threat in 1942. His research led to federal court hearings that set aside the convictions of Korematsu and Hirabayashi. Congress later voted to have the nation apologize and pay reparations to those who were wrongly held.

The reparations were still not just or fair for what is, in essence, wrongful imprisonment and unlawful incarceration. compared to current practice for those crimes, the Congressional Reparations were a pittance, verging on an insult. It mainly rubbed salt in the wounds that the US Feral government had already flayed open.

Are you still proud to be an American? The US needs to stop doing wrongs! Those Guantanamo prisoners need to be tried in civil courts or released immediately. If there is no evidence then they should never have been incarcerated. The Illegal search and seizure practiced by the TSA on every airline flight needs to be stopped immediately. The US Feral Government needs to start living by its own Supreme Law of the Land, the US Constitution! If it does not then it should be dissolved!

These were US citizens, natural-born, and some were even third generation Americans. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

I often check on news at home and this LA Times article struck me as hilarious. It is the story of a project at Orange County International Airport, known by its modern name of John Wayne Airport¹ . The project is a classic example of how not to run a project. What was supposed to be a 3-4 year 11 million dollar project has now morphed into a 10 year 30 million dollar behemoth. This is without taint of corruption or scandal of any sort.

For one, the original cost estimate was simply the price of the equipment, without consideration of installing it. Then there is the issue of where to put it. Power plants are not small or trivial. No one on the original planning board considered that they would have to create a dedicated building for it (a 5 million dollar: Duh!) or have to upgrade to the most recent air quality standards (Oopsie!).

But by the time contractors started up the engines in late 2010, the county had to spend more than $1 million to refurbish the generators, which needed lubrication and had to be modified to meet new air-quality standards.

The whole thing is a classic example of how not to plan and that infrastructure costs can be many times more than the simple cost of equipment.

Having grown up in Orange County and knowing the local nuances and culture, I laughed at this story. The sad part is that at no time did the Board of Supervisors have the option of simply cancelling the project. It was both too large and cleaning up the resultant mess would be more costly than going forward; a classic example of what people mean when they reference “Mister Toad’s Wild Ride”.

– for your amusement Winking smile

Yes, not so modern. It shows my age, I guess. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

This guy actually traced the roots of the loan fraud CDOs back to early 1990’s, at least. The GW Bush administration was warned about this by the FBI fraud division. Bush’s Attorney General, in 2008, refused to prosecute.

We are doing everything possible to make the next crisis come more quickly and make it kick us in the teeth far harder – William Black.

William Black on the Mortgage Crisis/Fraud.

Fraud is no reason to regulate – Alan Greenspan

Eh?

The real engine of destruction was Liar’s Loans. – William Black

A few bullets;

Glass-Stiegel was intended to prevent fraud (During Clinton Administration and encouraged by Greenspan).

Liar’s Loans¹ begin in 1990-91, in California

Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (Targeting Derivatives market fraud) was quashed by Greenspan

FBI Fraud Division warned, in Sept 2004, that there was an epidemic of Mortgage Fraud and predicted that it could lead to a financial crisis. (Open “testifoney”² , US Congress, House of Representatives)³

MARI, in 2006, reports on Alt-A loans; incidence of fraud in Alt-A loans (Liar’s Loans) is 90%

Bush’s Attorney General, in 2008, actively quashed investigations into Mortgage Fraud.

10 trillion dollar loss of wealth in US alone and cost almost 20 million full-time jobs losses.

Role of fraud in this latest crisis was far greater than that of the S&L Crisis⁴ of the late 80’s-early 90’s.

Recipe of Control Fraud for a lending CEO:

Grow like crazy
Make really bad loans but at a premium yield
Have extreme leverage
Have no to minimal loss reserves against the default losses

The whole point is that the CEO, for a short time, makes the company look outstanding while garnering huge incentive bonuses. When the organization goes bust, as it must eventually, they walk away from the wreckage with millions (20-50 million dollars) . This is before Securitization (CDOs and CDSs, aka Toxic Assets). Securitization lets this scheme continue and spreads the losses around. That same CEO now can make up to 150 million dollars.

I got the original embed from Gonzalo Lira’s blog.

A term already used for Alt-A loans by industry insiders. [↩]
Direct quote from William Black, I assume that he means it as a derogative that presupposes that all testimony is foney. [↩]
There were no actions taken by Congress or any regulatory body to follow up on the FBI report. [↩]
S&L Crisis lost 150 billion dollars. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

For more than a month now, I have been predicting a USD:CFH fall to 85 centimes. This is both a prediction and a dread. This morning the USD dropped below 86 centimes for the first time, ever! I only have to spend 85.9 centimes to buy a USD. That’s 0.859 CHF :1.00 USD. When I arrived here¹ it was the reverse ($0.85:1.0 CHF). This is a direct result of Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing, a backdoor way of devaluating the dollar.

On the other hand, I really don’t see that he has another choice. The alternative is far worse.

2Jul2003 [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Apparently, I can no longer edit existing posts due to a number of interacting issues. Worse, I can’t fix it on this server. I am in the process of building a new Web Application Server (WAS) and will fix it during the move to the new machine. My problem currently is that we are on Holiday and away from Nyon and the VPN is not quite good enough to let me do some things remotely.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

The unlawful detainment of known and obvious innocents is one of the first major proofs of a tyranny and the US is guilty as charged, again, and again! Amerika is NOT the land of the free! freedom at the convenience of the government is NOT freedom. It is not just the fact that Guantanamo exists, it is the fact that it can exist without major protest by the American sheeple. Amerika has forgotten the base meaning of freedom!

Again and again I point out that the Federal Government of the United States of America is a Rogue Government¹ .

Since that scumbag (Abraham Lincoln) was handed War Powers during the US Civil War, no POTUS² has ever relinquished a War Power willingly. Indeed, I suspect that to be the fundamental reason that Lincoln was assassinated. He was about to relinquish the tyrannical powers granted him for the Civil War. In truth, he should never have had them! Note that the United States has been under continuous War Emergency since the US Civil War.

This parallels the sad history of the Romans, who started as a Republic run by a Triumvirate. They had an exemption for what they called a Tyrant³ . I make careful and obvious note that the US Constitution has no provision for a tyrant. This is by careful design and is not an oversight. However, this and other non-trivial matters⁴ are simply ignored by the current US Federal Government. The US federal Government has long ago stopped being a government of the people and is now a tyranny of the Demo-Republican parties, The Tyrannical Republic of Amerika which is no better than The People’s Republic of North Korea. Both are fascist tyrannies, as was the old Roman Empire.

George Walker Bush (Junior Bush) is and was the most disgusting and evil President in US history⁵ . He has done more than anyone to undermine American freedoms and the US Constitution. Now, three years after we elected Obama, Barack Obama has proven that he is not one bit better than the Evil Bush. Obama has unilaterally extended the the Patriot Acts to long after the US Congress rescinded them. This is simply because he does not want to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, the single largest Police State tool that has ever existed. The fact that he does not want to dismantle it makes him no better than the Evil Bush that built it in the first place.

Update: Ignoring the US Constitution.

A rogue government is a government that does not follow its own rules. For the US, those rules are enshrined in the US Constitution. [↩]
President of the United States [↩]
This is where the word originally came from and simply means Supreme Commander, during times of war. Unfortunately, as Rome grew, they were always at war and their tyrants found it increasingly easier to decline to relinquish their tyranny until one finally declared himself Emperor. The parallel to the US Federal government is obvious. [↩]
Like the protections of the writ of habeas corpus and the protections against improper and unlawful search and seizure [↩]
I’m a Republican and I still hate him! [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Again and again I point out that the Federal Government of the United States of America is a Rogue Government¹ .

A rogue government is a government that does not follow its own rules. For the US, those rules are enshrined in the US Constitution. [↩]
President of the United States [↩]
This is where the word originally came from and simply means Supreme Commander, during times of war. Unfortunately, as Rome grew, they were always at war and their tyrants found it increasingly easier to decline to relinquish their tyranny until one finally declared himself Emperor. The parallel to the US Federal government is obvious. [↩]
Like the protections of the writ of habeas corpus and the protections against improper and unlawful search and seizure [↩]
I’m a Republican and I still hate him! [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Also from GL’s blog comments:

Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House.
One is from Chicago, another is from Tennessee, and the third is from Minnesota.
All three go with a White House official to examine the fence. The Minnesota contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil.
"Well," he says, "I figure the job will run about $900 — $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me."
The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, "I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me."
The Chicago contractor doesn’t measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, "$2,700."
The official, incredulous, says, "You didn’t even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?"
The Chicago contractor whispers back, "$1,000 for me, $1,000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence."
"Done!" replies the government official.
And that, my friends, is how the new stimulus plan will work.

Enjoy

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Found in the comments section of Gonzalo Lira’s blog:

It is a slow day in the small Colorado town of Pumphandle and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.
A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night.
As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op.
The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.
The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.
The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything.
At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves.
No one produced anything.
No one earned anything…
However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future
with a lot more optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a "stimulus package" works.

Thank you

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

0.899CHF=1US buck

It’s a milestone folks!

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

The US Dollar dropped below 0.92 CHF (Swiss Franks), yesterday. It is still there this morning at 0.918 CHF. In a way, that’s a hidden inflation. A McDonalds burger costs over 8CHF here, that’s over $8 for a burger that costs under $2 in the States, even at California prices!

On other fronts:

My Electric Vehicle study got bogged down in research. Many electric vehicles were announced this past quarter and from all the major manufacturers. Many of the releases were game-changing. No, not for the better but they do change the matrix; for the worse.

The recent quake in Japan is causing a re-evaluation of Nuclear Power plans. This isn’t good either. Two huge political issues are coming to a head Global Warming and Energy Production. Fundamentally, Green Peace and others want us all to reduce our CO2 production¹ but they also want to eliminate Nuclear Power as an option. The unannounced elephant in the room is global food production, which needs energy and land² . That is yet another thing changing the matrix. The thing is if; we cannot generate CO2, we cannot build nuke plants, and renewables aren’t there either then; How the Fuck will we generate the power to grow and process the 70% more food that we will need by 2050?³

The Greens smugly sit back and smile when asked this question, leading one to think that they confidently expect the rest of us to off ourselves in the interests of the common good.

The world is not headed to a nice place and it’s our own stupid fault.

Not that it’ll make a fart-in-a-hurricane’s worth of difference. [↩]
As an example; if you grow a hectare of crops, the most profitable is corn, mainly for ethanol production. This raises the prices of food. Castro was correct, bio-fuel is stupid and it is one of the Renewable Energy resources that Green Peace likes to rant on about. [↩]
Based on recent UN studies on Global food production requirements. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.

Profile

slamlander

June 2012

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Sienna for Nouveau Oleanders by branchandroot
Resources: OpenClipart

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 20th, 2025 04:32 pm

Slamland 2

Recent Entries

Late but good news anyway ;)

Amerika, the beautiful?

Does your laptop have rights?

Amerika, the fearful. Home of cowards and the land of the slaves.

This is better but still not good

One of the best lines I have read in a long while …

The freefalling buck, where will it land?

First the good news

Convergence: More than just a word, finally!

LG Optimus 2x aka, LG Optimus Speed aka, LG G 2x

Specifications

Cellphones cause cancer?

New Shiny? I think not.

Remember Manzanar?

The best laid plans …

This is an eye-opener: The creation of Toxic Assets (CDOs and CDS’s)

The falling buck

Technical difficulties

Remember Manzanar!

Remember Manzanar!

How a stimulus package works in the real world

How a stimulus package works

Saint Patty’s day

Oh wow, that isn’t real good.

Profile

June 2012

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags