thaBadDawg’s Musings

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man
in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your
government.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the
milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised
when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you
have down sized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an ordinary cow and
produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded
trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give
excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they
also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don’t know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don’t milk them because you cannot touch any creature’s private parts Then
you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the
hospital.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can’t figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the
best looking cow.

CALIFORNIAN
You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the other doesn’t.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich, transgender, non-milk-producing cow. You change your
business to beef. PETA pickets your farm. Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your
driveway. Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help “working cows”.
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm “for the
children”.
Schwarzenegger signs a law giving your farm to Mexico.
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you
groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times’ analysis shows your business failure is Bush’s fault.

Congress is waging war on supply side economics in an effort to assert their supreme authority as arbiter of the little people. They are hunting down the “big fat cat” CEOs and trying to chop business down to where they think it should be. And this is where the beginning of the end comes from. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are aiming to destroy what they consider to be the inequalities of free market capitalism. The problem is, that in the process they are destroying the vast majority of their constituents.

Congress is about to get a lesson in the trickle down theory in a bad way. Congress attacked the gas hog vehicles and forced energy efficient cars down Detroit’s throat. The result of CAFE standards? Automobile manufacturing costs increased and sales dropped. Ford, Chrysler and GM lost significant investments in their lines and ended up having to lay of significant portions of their workforce.

The Clinton White House jumped into the act of sabotaging the economy by directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start accepting more sub-prime loans to increase home ownership. Both entities were given additional credits for helping to push through more low income home ownership. There’s a reason a person has a low credit score, and that reason tends to be that a person doesn’t pay their bills as agreed. But the government wanted to expand home ownership and you now have the driving force of our current recession. Trillions upon trillions of dollars are tied up in houses that people haven’t be able to pay on and their value decreases constantly because they aren’t able to maintain them.

At the same time this puts a huge crimp in the plans of expansion and development. Contractors, sub contractors and general labor gets hit hard because there is no money to support the costs associated with growth. So instead of maintaining a reasonable growth trend, the government kicked everything into high gear, the market grew way faster than there was demand and now we are sitting where we are.

The other funny thing that congress is doing is they are trying to shame corporations into not having private jets. This is an amazing two faced standard because the government has a fleet of jets that would rival some airlines. But there’s a more insidious that that is going to happen with this. Corporations will stop buying private jets, they’ll ground their fleets and they’ll try to sell off all the jets they do have. Let’s take a look at all the pieces that go into this puzzle:

The jet has to be made. One corporate jet take roughly 100 days to build, and it is a task so complex that it takes hundreds of people to do it. Then once the jet is built the interior has to be finished, all the electronics installed, and final assembly done, another process requiring a lot of people and another 100 days. Then the jet is delivered, and then a whole new set of people become involved, including maintenance staff to take care of the jet, pilots and FBOs (think of them as airport terminals for private jets.) Every year the jet has to be completely torn down, inspected and rebuilt, a job typically done by the manufacturer, for which they have an entirely different staff employed. Tens of thousands of people rely on private jets for their source of income, and congress is having a grand ol’ time attacking the users of private jets.

What is eventually going to happen is that, because of government, all of the so called extras that people enjoy will actually result in a deepening of the recession into a full scale depression. A supply side economy can fix itself. Everything balances out. A Keynesian economy on the other hand stuggles and limps along until it is forced out of that scheme back into a supply side system. And you need no more proof of this than looking back at the Great Depression. They tried to use Keynesian theories to dig out of the depression, and it wasn’t until we entered WWII and had to build up an army and the associated gear that goes with it that we were able to shed the weight of the depression. Supply side economics works, monkeying with the system breaks it and gives us what we have today.

It’s funny how things change of the space of two years. (Well… almost two years) For example, me dreaming big in a Facebook post:

I have a goal. I want to personally earn $1,000,000 by the end of 2009. So in the spirit of public declaration I’ve decided to post both my concepts of how to accomplish said goal and what I want to do with that scratch when I get it.

Consider for a minute the insanity of that statement. I was making $50k a year from a programming/media job, I was doing a couple of side gigs with personal projects and home theater installations and I had the insanity to believe that it was possible for me to sell enough home theaters and do enough programming over the space of 2 years that I could bring in $1M in the space of 30 months. We actually weren’t off to a bad start because Acero (our home theater operation) had sold a couple of major systems ($100k+ each) and we had a couple large deals in the works, including doing 20 units out in Roosevelt and 100+ units in Cedar City. At one point I figured out that Acero’s profit on all of those would be close to $200k. While that wasn’t all (or even mostly) end up in my pocket, the fact that we had that all lined up was making me feel pretty confident. What would happen if we expanded our reach?

It turns out, that like most dreams, the goals weren’t well thought out because it didn’t take into account a huge problem looming from the sub-prime mortgage failures. We had no contigency plan and when our easy way to get rolling fell apart, so did our motivation to push things further along. Was it dumb to have that dream? No. I still think it could be done… even in this market. The problem is finding the motivation myself, the time to make it happen and the additional man power to make the machine work. The same thing goes for all of my other ideas, like the ez tracker and the custom web sites and everything else I can actually do. It’s all a function of time and energy. Time seems to be on short supply lately because of work. I love APX, but it’s sucking every available minute away from me right now. And I’ve learned more in the past 4 months worth of programming some of these APX sites than I have in my previous 8 years of programming. (PS… I always used to say that I hate Microsoft, but I’m coming to the conclusion, largely because of .Net  in general and Linq in particular, that they really know what I’m looking for.)

But speaking of goals… I wanna drop 65 pounds in the next 12 months. It’s a relatively easy goal in that I know everything that needs to be done. It’s just that I can’t seem to get my fat ass up off the couch and into the gym. Or I can’t seem to avoid that 4000+ calorie intake days. Sounds easy enough until you actually have to sit down and plan out when to work out. A failure to plan is a plan to fail. And it seems lately that I have LOTS of plans to fail.

And the sad thing is that I should be able to accomplish all of these goals. None of them, by themselves, are so hard that they can’t be done. It’s going from dream mode to action mode. Realistic goals are nothing but dreams if there isn’t any action put into place.

Obama has gone on record quite a few times saying that the stimulus package he wants passed is neccesary for preventing a complete meltdown into what the Great Depression was… or worse. But instead of trying to spend our way out of the mess (which is infinitely more irresponsible than the Wall Street types that his administration continually verbally beats down) why not diagnosis the sickness and treat it instead of trying to attack the symptoms. Any good doctor will tell you that treating the symptoms does nothing to attack the disease.

If Obama is truly the post-partisan answer to Washington that he claims to be why isn’t he out front and center trying to diagnose the disease instead of demanding that everybody pay attention to the symptoms? I suspect it’s because he really isn’t the post-partisan he led everybody to believe he was, but I could be wrong.

After taking a year plus hiatus from the world of blogging I’ve decided to get back into it. I’m working on setting up a small network of blogs to do some SEO experimenting with. This blog will be solo, but I plan on doing a web development blog with some friends, a purely political blog with some other friends and then maybe a sports blog with some of those friends from the other two.

And here’s the best part… I’ve got it setup that my posts from the other three blogs end up here as well. Now how’s that for awesomeness? Yes, I am a nerd and proud of it.