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I hope we continue to fight for what’s right.

Fair Park, 2008

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” —Mark Twain

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” —Abraham Lincoln

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.” Unknown

Well, it was approved today. I’m very disappointed. Obama reneged on his previous stance against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I’m pretty sure McCain voted for it as well. At least Clinton held her ground. Some of Obama’s supporters created a website petition to try and change his views on it. Why do we keep losing our liberties? FISA will allow any American who has international ties to be spied on surreptitiously and “legally” by our government. I hate this current administration. The legislative branch is taking it up the ass and being such a bitch for the executive branch. And in the end, we the people suffer. I hope the EFF and the ACLU are successful in taking this to court. Let’s hope the judicial branch isn’t as lame as the other two. Who’s gonna stand up for our rights? Neither Obama nor McCain? Geez.

I’ve had the opportunity to listen to the latest (when I started this entry) podcast of “This American Life” which explains from head to toe how the mortgage crisis started and who/what was behind it. I’ll try to summarize:

At the very head of problem is the growing pool of global money. Say like the Chinese federal bank who has over a trillion USD. People/entities with lots of assets. These assets amount to around 70 trillion USD. Well more than the total budget of all the world’s goverments. These investors want to have safe investment venues in which to grow their pool of money. Typically they’d such things as treasury bonds, municipal bonds. Well, in the early 2000’s when Alan Greenspan was still head of the U.S. Fed, he sent out a clear message to those investors by hold the federal funds rate steady at around 1%. That in turn guaranteed that the treasury bonds, etc wouldn’t yield much of a return for a long while. Which made them turn to wall street to find other instruments to invest in. So those gurus in the stock market decided to sell them home mortgage loans. Since people around that time were paying at least 5% on those 30 year loans, they made perfect sense to bundle those and sell them as investments. At this point, all was good and nice. No problems. The loans they sold were from approved and verified people with good credit, steady jobs.

(This is where I stopped writing. Now one month later, I’m finally going to finish it. It’s going to be rough. I don’t feel like putting much polish on it at this point.)

Well this global pool is huge, much larger than what the market could bundle together and sell to them. So in a nutshell, they needed more mortgage loans. And they got it any way they could. Wall Street told the companies that were selling mortgages they wanted more and those people told those lower down they wanted more, and finally to the mortgage companies who had to find ways to get more people loans and get them larger loans. So they started relaxing their standards, their background checks, down to the point of NINA loans. No Income No Asset. You don’t have to disclose income or assets on your loan application. Completely absurd eh?Well of course you can foresee future problems here. People getting in way over their heads. The blame here lies on both the borrower and the lender, all the way back up to those who sold the mortgage backed securities in Wall Street.

Feel free to comment. I don’t pretend to know everything about it. But I think I have the jist of it down.

I was booking an LTL (less than truckload for the uninitiated) shipment today at work, and there at the bottom of the form was an optional charge for carbon offsetting by Terrapass for $1.25. I ticked of the checkbox. I dunno how much this will help, but I guess since we had some margin on shipping, we could try and do some good.

I’m still skeptical about cap and trade.  One study reported by NPR show that companys will probably end up doing what’s best for them and not for the environment.

I wrote this post  on one of the car forums I subscribe to:

Over here in the states, we focus on how much distance we can cover per unit of gasoline (e.g. miles/gallon). The way the U.S. government actually calculates it (say for the CAFE regulations) and the way Europe and other countries do it is by unit of gasoline consumed per unit of distance (e.g. gallons/mile). It’s very interesting to realize the understand the difference of lower and higher gas mileage when you see it this format.

(to calculate gallons/mile, just take the inverse, or 1 divided by your mpg)

For example, let’s take a 5mpg, 10mpg, 20mpg, 30mpg, and 40mpg car:

5mpg car = 0.2gallons/mile

10mpg car = 0.1gallons/mile

20mpg car = .05gallons/mile

30mpg car = 0.033gallons/mile

40mpg car = .025gallons/mile

You can see that it’s actually a larger gain in efficiency to get cars with lower mpg (<20) off the road than it is to go from a 20mpg to 40mpg car. Basically, you’ll save more money at the pump by getting rid of your 15mpg truck and going to a four cylinder SUV that can get 25mpg versus getting rid of your 20mpg minivan and going to a 30mpg sedan. And it really doesn’t save you much by going from a 30mpg car to a 45mpg hybrid. I thought this was very interesting when I heard it on NPR the other day.

Here’s an spreadsheet graph I made to illustrate it better:

Edit:

In conclusion, I think if you can double your EPA mileage, than that’s great. But most people can’t. And probably won’t on a daily basis. By increasing your mileage by 50%, you’re only going to save 25% on your gas costs. If that’s significant for you, than that’s great. But how many people can and will even put forth the effort to do that? I think in conclusion, hypermiling a car that already gets 25mpg or above is not as good as it’s said to be.

Seems a lot faster. I like the much improved memory management. Now having 50 tabs open doesn’t hog up 1/2 a gig of memory. I tuned the smooth scroll off for the tabs. Can’t stand it.

In the about:config, double click toolkit.scrollbox.smoothScroll and restart.

Am I the only one who isn’t enthralled by the new iPhone? Hardware-wise, there’s only two new features — GPS and 3G. And as a T-Mobile subscriber with limited or unvailable 3G support, I don’t find that exciting at all. Of course, I’m not the target AT&T user. And to be honest, I haven’t been that dissappointed with the EDGE data speeds. GPS would’ve been a very nice feature had the iPhone 1.3 firmware release not included cell-tower triangulation. The GPS doesn’t bring much more to the table. Just a bit more accuracy, but I’m already satisfied with the current results. I’m just not buying the hype over this new hardware. It’s not actually thinner or lighter. The processor hasn’t changed. Screen hasn’t changed. Basically all the old hardware is still in the “new” iPhone.To me this phone is like the PS2 Slim.  It’s brought out only to attract new buyers and I think it’ll do very well as such. But to those who already own an iPhone, there’s really not much sense in buying the new one. Is having somewhat faster download speed and slightly longer battery life worth another $200-$300? Not to me. Firmware 2.0 is far more exciting, not because of it’s intrinsic features, but because of the new App Store and the possibilities that natively run 3rd party software are going to bring. Let’s hope Apple gives the developers a long but firm leash to release innovative and also robust new applications.