Special Interest Group on CRAP

I have to vote in an election coming up. This one is somehow more interesting than a lot of local elections, because it’s a california state senate seat. In case you don’t know, the California state legislature is fundamentally broken in the same way that the federal legislature is broken – they refuse to compromise. [...]

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Like many small investors, I have recently started thinking of the stock market as nothing more than a Ponzi scheme in which companies and financial services companies conspire to print lottery tickets. Many of us have mostly sat on the sidelines while the DOW went from 7,000 to 11,000, while financial services companies who received [...]

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Every year when I fill out my taxes, I am amazed at how screwed up our taxation system is. If you are an average wage earner, perhaps with a mortgage, then you end up with a really simple procedure for filing your taxes. If you have a business (sole proprietorship, partnership, etc) or if you [...]

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It’s odd that Facebook was blocking post of a link to this. For the humor impaired, this should be recognized as satire.

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I find myself fascinated by the California budget process. Much of the stuff I have read about blame for the crisis makes no sense at all to me, and has made me even more cynical about the state legislature. The shortfall in revenue this year amounts to about 10% of revenue. That doesn’t seem so [...]

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Thanks to Spafford for linking to this. I used to think of Ronald Reagan as a horrible president, but then along came George W. McCain. I particularly like the part about whether the US is more respected than it was four years ago.

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When I was a young man, my country was engaged in a supremely misguided war in southeast Asia. Once again, my country is engaged in a supremely misguided war. While it can be said that every election is important, few elections are as important to the future of a country as this one in the [...]

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As I look around at what is happening in the world today, I keep seeing evidence that it all comes down to trust. As someone who spent a great deal of time working on information security, the subject of trust is one that I tried to design for, but I always regarded trust as a [...]

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President Palin. I think I’m going to puke.

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In January I made a bet with a friend of mine that any Republican candidate for president will beat any Democrat, provided he gave me 2 to 1 odds. Since then, everyone has been assuming that the democrats would win because Bush looks so weak, but all along I have been thinking about what I [...]

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