Hedging? or Rigging the Market?

Last week’s episode of This American Life was a super-interesting deep dive into some of the players that caused the financial meltdown.  They started with the premise that the oft-repeated phrase “no one saw this coming” was unacceptable.  Wall Street is supposedly filled with these financial wiz kids, and can we really believe that no one saw the risk?  No one is responsible for the creation of so many worthless assets?

Because the podcast is an hour long, and WAY to dry for most normal humans, I’ll try to sum up some key findings here.

Continue reading Hedging? or Rigging the Market?

Weekends are Nice

Weekends are just fantastic.

This weekend, we enjoyed a friday night game night with our friends, the Brauns.  It has been TOO long since we hung out!  The best part of the night was when little Elizabeth came running into my arms and playing on my lap for a few minutes.  Granted, her motivation was to avoid having to go to bed, but still – it was a FIRST!  She is finally warming up to her Uncle Brows.

Saturday was going to be an intense yard day, but it wasn’t to be.  I got up early to attend a baptism, and when Audrey went to go pull the mower out, she saw the TruGreen people pulling away – no mowing for 48 hours!  At least our weeds will die now, and we’ll hopefully have something to mow!

We decided we could still trim the bushes, but when I got my trimmer out I quickly found that all of the batteries were dead.  As dead as dead could be.  I guess winter likes to drain batteries?  Who knew?

So we went to Plan C: clean off the back porch.  We had about 10 pots of various dead vegetation on our back porch that needed to be removed and destroyed.  When we were all done, we were left with a single potted tree.  Kinda sad, but kinda good.

I returned to the inside world where I got laundry and dishes done while Audrey washed her car and soaked up some of the great spring sunshine.  What a beautiful, allergy-filled day it was!

That evening we enjoyed Sherlock Holmes together.  I thought it was a really good movie.  Well played!

Sunday, I barely made it to my 6:30am meeting.  A2 had to re-wake me up at 6 after I had disabled my alarm at 5:30 and fallen back to sleep.  I trudged to church and put in my obligatory 8 hours.

When I finally got home, A2 suggested that we watch Star Wars Episode 3 (the only one she had never seen…) so we did!  It was a miracle that she suggested it.  The only greater miracle would be if she ever asked to watch The Princess Bride.  Somehow I avoided falling asleep during the movie.

We took a nice walk after the movie and enjoyed some of the activity in the neighborhood.  These are some of the few weeks where people here in Texas enjoy being outdoors, unless you’re an allergy sufferer in which case you still have to wait for the fall to truly enjoy nice temperatures.

Nice weather outside always turns my thoughts back to our boring back yard.  On our walk, we talked about what we wanted in our back yard.  We verbally designed a 20 or 30 thousand dollar back yard, and then came back to reality to know that we just needed to do something simple that we could enjoy a few times per year.

Does anyone have any landscape design skillz?  We need help translating our vision to paper!

Back to work today…

Party of No

I like a good political rally.  As an independent moderate, I enjoy listening to both sides and coming to my own conclusions on where the truth is in all the politics.  I’ve been known to make solid, impassioned arguments solely for the opportunity to hear myself talk sometimes, even.  Rhetoric can be good, clean fun.

This is how the Tea Party movement began in this country; a group of people got together as way to protest what they felt like was wasteful government spending on bail outs and special deals.  Fun.  Some people even dressed up in little colonial costumes and read from scrolls.  Nice.

Continue reading Party of No

A Proposal

I’d like to propose a change in our country’s social security system.

The way I see it, generationally speaking, families are having fewer and fewer children with each passing generation. My grandparents had 11 kids. My parents had 5. I will be lucky if I even get a mickey mouse handful*

At the same time, we’re not sure we are going to have enough money and labor in our system to pay for the children of the baby boomers who are now entering our social security and medicare systems.

My solution is the following:

Put the married, under 35 year olds all on Social Security. Pay them a decent living wage just to stay at home and make babies, raising a large next generation. Make all the 62 year olds through the totally decrepit go back to work.

This way, we young people have all the liberty, time, and resources to reproduce that we need, and we get some economic value out of all those old farts milking the system for all it’s worth.

Whaddya think, Ethel?

* for the record, mickey mouse has 3 fingers and a thumb.

Say No to Socialism

I found this on Facebook, and can’t find a source to attribute it to.  Still, it’s is good.

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power utility regulated by the US Department of Energy (DOE).  I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.  After that, I turned on the TV to one of the federal communications commission (FCC) regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) .  I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation (DOT), possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and of a quantity regulated and certified by the State Bureau of Weights and Measures, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve.  On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service (USPS) and drop the kids off at the public school .

After work I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet, which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.