Monthly Archives: March 2008

Press 1 for Spanglish

Posted on by

I paid $3 to wash my truck in a $2.50 carwash over the weekend. That irritated me because I needed an extra few minutes to finish rinsing the thing and the Car Wash sign said “Add quarters for extra time.”

Of course, when I added the two extra quarters for extra time, it simply swallowed them and blinked at me.

Where are the illegal aliens when you need them? I would gladly pay $3 to some illegals to wash my truck. I went searching for some and got 3,170,000 hits in Google alone. Outraged Patriots leads that list.

Thirteen motel owners in Mesa, Arizona, were sentenced last week for catering to human smugglers and conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens. UPI reported that a US task force raided several Latino commercial establishments and arrested 49 people alleged to be illegal aliens who worked for a security company.

Huh. My great-x8-grandfather, Richard Barnard (ber-NARD), was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, and sailed for the New World about 1642. Richard accompanied William Penn to the fertile southeastern counties of Pennsylvania (1). I guess that means that to the Lenni Lenape, my great x 8 grandfather was an illegal alien. Good thing the Lenni Lenape had less Homeland Security than we have today. And that conquerors don’t have to learn the Algonquian language known as Lenape (now “Delaware”).

I can think of a few reasons we don’t want people coming here from other countries to do the work we apparently don’t want to do. After all, they might change the way we live, change the foods we eat, change the way we manufacture things, and teach our wimmens a thing or two about love.

I’m all for it. After all, I come from alien stock. Just ask my kids. So do you, and you, and you. That fresh blood is one part of what makes this country great. I say we should spend our security efforts filtering out the peeps who want to rob and rape and maim and kill us and then invite the others in for a good party.

As long as we quit telling them they don’t have to learn English.


Want more detail? I wrote the op-ed Norman – French – English – Italian – Dutch – American for the Burlington Free Press about a dozen years ago. You can read it here.

XM Merger With Sirius Approved

Posted on by

The Justice Department’s antitrust division said yesterday that the buyout of XM Satellite Radio by Sirius would not hurt competition or consumers.

OK, OK. I get it.

Of course creating a de facto monopoly in satellite services won’t hurt satellite services competitors. There are no satellite services competitors.

<sigh>

Turning Tricks

Posted on by

In real life, I am an engineer. I do own a business. I do write a weekly newspaper column and all the rest. And I do work as a photographer. But underneath it all, I am an engineer.

It is more than just education or training; it is a state of mind.

A friend–I’ll call him Ralph because that’s his name, or not–is heavily into astrophotography. He emailed that he had just found a digital camera to lust after for his night shots. It apparently has intervalography functionality, a bruckjurnometer, and I think, the much desired high hepjabossity index. He says it has to plug in to his computer to work but the images go straight to the hard drive.

He sometimes runs one of his existing digital cameras from the computer; another friend–I’ll call him Clyde because that’s his name, or not, too–also does that, so I asked Ralph if he doesn’t think he has enough tricks now to turn pro.

Clyde runs big, ghastly expensive CCDs, Ralph told me. Clyde is in essence a pro, especially since he discovered a supernova.

Ralph says he (Ralph) wants to stay a prosumer which he defines as “really good at being mediocre.”

Why, I wondered?

Seriously.

He has the level of expertise. He has the interest. He has probably made at least the same order of magnitude of investment. He’s data-driven, for heaven’s sake. It seems like the reasonable next step.

“Nah,” he said. The real pros take the photos you see on magazine covers, in National Geographic, and so on. They are very very good. And their gear is very very expensive.

Unfortunately, that could be my competition, too, the cover shooters. Fortunately, the entry bar is still low enough in daylight photography that a gifted amateur with decent equipment can sell pretty well. After all, Ansel Adams’ first camera was a Kodak Brownie box; he also tested the Polaroid and promoted its use to his associates.

Still, Ralph has “no wish to devote that much energy on something with so little potential for tangible reward.”

“I am an engineer,” he said, “not an artist.”

I am both.

The relatively low entry bar is also true in some other branches of the arts. Were I a painter with the same ability as I have in photography, I could sell paintings at a price that is reasonable. I can already sell landscape photographs at a price that is reasonable. I can sell words at a price that is, unfortunately, unreasonable, meaning about the same in actual dollars as it was 50 and even 100 years ago. But I can sell them.

At the end of the day, that’s my bottom line.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

Posted on by

The accent may be on the wrong syl LA ble.

A friend mentioned that he had heard that a very large bank was talking to the Fed about liquidity problems. He was nervous that we might be on the brink of something way uglier than most are thinking.

He had probably heard the first rumblings about the Bear Stearns calamity. JP Morgan Chase agreed Sunday night to acquire B-S but the problem in the financial markets is widespread and still growing. The Wall Street Journal has a short history of troubled investment bank sales here: snipurl.com/21y4f

We recovered from the junk-bond market debacles and from the savings and loan scandals and from the insider trading/arbitrage adversity. We will recover from this sub-prime mortgage mess, too. Nonetheless, I am not happy about owning banking stocks right now.

That said, I have two thoughts for my friend.

Really.

Just two.

(1) 99.94% of the ARM crisis has been caused by systemic fraud (as in felonious behavior) on the part of the mortgage sellers and particularly the banks that financed the mortgages, then resold them as “secure” investments to pension funds and the like. The only good news is the Saudis and the Chinese appear to hold at least some of the paper.

(2) There is no real real estate problem no matter what the news says. Lemme repeat that. There is no real real estate problem no matter what the ID10Ts in Congress say.

We own a house. The roof still keeps the rain off, the heat still keeps the cold out, and the rent-a-cat still curls up by the fire. It absolutely does not matter to me today if this house is worth a dollar, a million dollars, or something in between. As it happens, the house is worth more than when we bought it. Yay! It’s also worth less than it was a year ago. Boo! Oh, wait. I didn’t sell it a year ago and I don’t plan to sell it today so its value on the market is of absolutely no consequence to me.

OK, its value on the market is of absolutely no consequence to me except when I pay taxes on its value but that’s a whole nother story.

Now the bad news. In other words, here’s why my friend may be right.

Nobody believes me.

We are so driven by this Chicken Little squawking about the housing sky falling that we really really believe the end is nigh.

And so it will be.

For a while.

Wot to do, wot to do.

Buy.

Warren Buffet is a whole lot smarter about this stuff than I am. His advice is simple. When you find a good property at a bargain price, buy it. Unfortunately, nobody believes him right now, either.

It’s not just the economy. It’s the stupidity of the herd that drives the economy.

Do You Worry That Everyone Will Know?

Posted on by

Do you worry that everyone will know? That’s the message of the Detrol LA ads, that people might find out you have to … pee.

Horror of horrors.

For heaven’s sake, don’t we have enough real stuff to worry about? Like snot on our sleeves or how to pronounce “cocamidopropyl betaine” and “polyquaternium.”