| Monday
July 21, 2003
Begin with yesterday, and why
it was or may have been a Black Letter Day despite being the anniversary
of Apollo. We also had Puppy Pictures.
Subject:
The changing nature of work
I don't know if you have access to the Online Wall
Street Journal -- well worth the expense, in my opinion -- but if you do
this might be of interest to you.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,
SB105874846888793500,00.html?mod
=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus
===== Tiomoid M. of Angle JD MBA
Well I get the paper copy, and they make it a good bit of work to do
the on-line subscription; more than I care to go through. They don't need
to know that much about me.
I agree that the article is interesting, assuming that the one you
reference is the front page right hand column for this morning. Despite
all the protestations, the fact remains: we are losing our industrial base
and are becoming a nation of importers, with a deficit balance of trade.
And while the economists continue to tell us this is nothing to worry
about, history shows that somehow the "exceptions" and
"externalities" have always negated the theories. Free Trade has
been a great theoretical success, but it doesn't seem to have been such a
practical wonder for those who keep at it over the long term. Perhaps This
Time For Sure, though.
My concern is over the effect of making a large part of our citizenry
into redundant scrounges when they were formerly valued citizens believing
themselves to be part of the middle class. Now they know better; but they
still have the vote. And there is no lack of those who will organize
discontent, and find someone to blame for the problems of people who
believe in a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and who, through
absolutely no fault of their own, find themselves dependent when they were
once under the illusion that they were independent.
Very few in this country are more than a few paychecks from disaster.
No one OWNS anything lucrative now. It's not as if you could cut back and
run your candy store or dry good store or Mom and Pop grocery and eke out
an existence in hard times building good will with your neighbors and
doing a good bit of your business off the books. Those days are gone with
Walmart and the government's use of computers and various forms of
welfare. In California you can get, free, a wheelchair costing about
$38,500, but only if you are a pauper.
Now being a pauper is no fun, but pauperism with the right government
benefits is a lot more desirable than minimum wage. The result of that
kind of thinking, plus extending benefits to anyone who manages to get
into the State, may have something to do with California's $38 billion
deficit. I can recall when the US national budget was under $100 billion
and that $100 billion was considered a ceiling no President dared break.
Odd: you would have thought a Trillion would have been a barrier but by
then no one noticed.
A great deal of this generosity was affordable so long as we had a
solid base of manufacturing with blue collar workers paying a good part of
the taxes, and thus having an incentive to keep the taxes lower. Taxation
with representation can be onerous but there are some controls. But there
are no limits to the taxes one is willing to vote provided that someone
else will pay them: or more likely, that you can be convinced that someone
else will pay them. To make it better you can then "cut" taxes
for both those who pay them and those who do not, giving tax
"rebates" to those who don't pay taxes to begin with. This makes
for good politics, and becomes appealing to those who used to be middle
class, and who know it was not their fault that they were suddenly
dependent.
Of course all this requires a larger bureaucracy, some of which is used
to organize the voting base of the discontented.
The benefit, though, is cheaper imported goods, and the import firms
aren't paying the taxes required to support those whose jobs have been
exported.
Welcome to the joys of Free Trade. But perhaps we can make it up with
imperial conquests. If oil goes down to $19 / bbl we may get some
speculative booms again, a rising Dow, good times. I know arguments
against that, but cheap energy often does stimulate a boom -- but we don't
seem to be able to get Iraqi oil production up to pre-war levels.
But we keep trying, and perhaps this time for sure.
The next step is to hire soldiers to occupy Iraq and then to find ways
to levy tribute on someone to pay for it all. The money has to come from
somewhere, and we have good soldiers.
Gold will not get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get
you gold.
And see mail.
The Adelphia Story:
Apparently I am not the only one. Adelphia Cable Modem works splendidly
when it works, and it periodically == about once a day == just dies.
Adelphia tells me that when that happens I should reset the modem by
unplugging it for about a minute. That should work except when it doesn't
in which case try again in a few minutes.
Megapaths iDSL continues to work just fine, but the Hawking router has
problems making the failover because the Adelphia system is unpredictable
and will work for a few seconds, then die again. Some readers in other
parts of the city who are stuck with the execrable Adelphia service tell
me that this has been the way it works for the past year or so.
Of course the City Council for what seemed to it to be good reasons
gave Adelphia a monopoly in my area.
Story continues below
 Subject:
Fakeerr Worm - Destructive Payload
This worm looks like an Internet Explorer error
message from Microsoft. It is particularly dangerous: if you you click on
one of the buttons, it will start deleting vital system files. It doesn't
appear to be widespread, but it is getting some media attention.
Information about this virus is here: http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_100489.htm
, among other places.
Of course, if you never open up mail attachments
that are programs, and you keep your anti-virus up to date, you are safe.
Of course, if you never open up mail attachments
that are programs, and you keep your anti-virus up to date, you are safe.
Of course, if you never open up mail attachments
that are programs, and you keep your anti-virus up to date, you are safe.
...what I tell you three times is true.
Rick Hellewell digitalchoke@digitalchoke.com
Indeed.
From Rich Pournelle:
Now it is all starting to make sense. Kobe gets the
seven year itch early. Wife is home with the kid and decides to get
surgery in Colorado. Hears that he can find a young sure thing at a
particular hotel and figures he can get away with it if he's traveling.
I stand by my prediction that this thing will never
go to trial.
"A number of NBA players have said Bryant's
accuser, a college student and former high-school cheerleader, is well
known as a basketball groupie." http://www.msnbc.com/news/938249.asp
Have we yet heard her side of the story at all? And
see mail
Subject: The Praetorians
deliberate . . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A25376-2003Jul21.html
Roland Dobbins
I will leave comment on this as an exercise for the reader.
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