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Sunday,
January 11, 2009 Still at the beach house. I am definitely
going to get a swivelable monitor for use down here, but it will have to
wait until I have another best seller (or at least good seller). The
ViewSonic VA 1930 at 1440 x 900 is pretty nearly Good Enough for most of
what I do. For keeping this place up I need the horizontal aspect since a
lot of the work here is pasting mail and editing it, and I have to go to
Firefox or Internet Explorer fairly often; web sites really expect you to be
in landscape mode. But for writing stories and for that matter for reading
on screen, what I need is about ten to twelve words a line and as many lines
as I can get which means portrait mode. I can't leave my system set up here
when we leave, so it all has to pack away into a closet; that also limits
what I can use, and probably keeps me from having a 24" swivelable ViewSonic
as recommended by Joanne Dow in recent mail, but we'll see.
I am definitely going to set up two monitors, one vertical, on my main
communications system when I am back home; and I will look into whether a
MacBook Pro can support two monitors, one vertical. Anything that increased
productivity is worth considering as an investment, especially since the
Republicans seem to have worked hard at wiping out much of my savings, and
now the Democrats seem to be working harder to top their achievement.
=========
I have been reading Confessions of a SubPrime Lender, and I am horrified;
apparently it wouldn't have taken much brainpower to determine that when
Lehman Brothers brought Wall Street into the real estate business there was
great potential for disaster, and that the ratings companies were in a bind:
if they rated a package of junk at what it was worth they wouldn't get paid
to do ratings any longer. What Lehman and the others wanted was AAA ratings
for packages of mortgages so sliced up that it was impossible to determine
what the actual risks were or even the ratio of loan outstanding to the
value of the properties that were collateral for the loan; and when the AAA
ratings started to flow, everyone wanted in the act. Those who smelt a rat
were trapped: if you didn't get in on the deals, your return on investment
was low compared to those who did get in on it. And you didn't dare say much
about the insanity of it all lest you trigger the crash!
Apropos of that:
Atlas Shrugged...
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB123146363567166677.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
"'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52
Years"
Charles Brumbelow
Atlas Shrugged shows capitalists overwhelmed by government regulators who
don't understand how things work and eventually, which trying to assure fair
play, make it impossible for the market to work. The referenced article
above shows how we come closer and closer to that state every year.
Alas, a slave market shows where unregulated capitalism will go if left
to itself.
For two thousand years political philosophers have known that good
government consists of a mix, and that maximum freedom can only be obtained
through mechanisms to assure that freedom. "That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the
consent of the governed,"
Apparently no one remembers any of this. Miss Rand didn't; her
unregulated capitalists were still decent men and women, what a D&D master
would call "Lawful good" alignment, and apparently the only "chaotic evil"
people were bureaucrats and politicians, with government workers being at
best "neutral, neutral." In the real world there are some very
competent villains -- including, of course, politicians who have found it's
the easy way to power without having to produce anything. But that's another
story.
(And see next Monday's View)
==========
I would think that if you have set up a system to intercept
messages and tell people they can beg you to let them send you mail which
you may or may not deign to look at, you might, before sending out personal
messages about your recent graduation or such to a list of people, put those
people on a white list so that if they choose to congratulate you, they
won't get that infuriating message about how in order to avoid spam...
I suppose I am merely being curmudgeonly. I mean, some messages to a list of
people aren't intended to generate replies, but some, with personal details,
most certainly will. Ah well.
=============
About a decade ago, the Wall Street Journal has a story
about a man who had spent 3 years in jail in India, awaiting trial on a
charge of stealing from the government, to wit, riding a train without a
ticket. The maximum sentence he could have been given was under a year.
A year later the Journal ran an update: he was still in jail awaiting trial.
Comes now this:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24898119-29277,00.html
===============
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