Icicles at Sunset – Winter in Minnesota
Originally uploaded by DaffodilBlue
It has been my good fortune to visit my wife’s lovely family here in Minnesota for some 31 years – often around Thanksgiving. We’re here in Northfield, MN this year. Carleton College and St Olaf College are both here with pretty and historic campuses. Northfield is also home to the world headquarters of Malt-O-Meal and I am informed this is a great Minnesota retirement area.
OK, so I’m lost in a blogOspheric mania but not posting enough here at Joe Duck.
The new project is with my gadget expert pal John and it’s called Technology Report. We’ll report extensively from CES Las Vegas this year and I’ll have liveblogging from the Convergence08 and Mashup Camp conferenced in Mountain View in a few days.
I’ve imported lots of my technology posts from here so I hope this does not mess up any search issues because I certainly don’t want to delete indexed blog posts from here.
And thither into an infinite ocean
Originally uploaded by Zeb Andrews
Thanks to Zeb Andrews for posting this superb shot of the Peter Iredale, a shipwreck off of the Oregon Coast that has been buried in the sand for 102 years.
Peter Iredale owned his namesake 2000 ton iron framed sailing vessel, part of a shipping fleet based in Liverpool, England.
The ship sailed from Mexico, in September of 1906 headed for Portland, Oregon. Aboard was 1,000 tons of ballast and a crew of 27,which is reported to include two stowaways.
In late October the Captain, named H. Lawrence, noted the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse.
As the ship entered the mouth of the Columbia River it became grounded at Clatsop Spit, and after that the ship was driven ashore.
Nobody was injured but efforts to recover the ship failed as it sunk into the sands off the Oregon shore.
In a final toast to the Peter Iredale, the captain said
“May God bless you, and may your bones bleach in the sands.”
Sacre Coeur, Paris
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
Sacre Coeur is on of Paris’ many splendid Catholic Cathedrals, though this one is much newer than most of the other European landmark Cathedrals like Notre Dame, Chartres, and Winchester Cathedral.
Sacre Coeur sits atop the hill called Montmartre from where you gaze down upon the debauchery of Pigalle, the notorious red light district of Paris which includes the famous nightclub “Le Moulin Rouge”. The metro stop for Sacre Coeur is probably Paris’ most famous, called “Metropolitain” which was the gateway to inspiration for many of the world’s most famous artists such as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Degas who lived – often poorly – in the Montmartre region.
Sequoia’s Advice to startups has been the subject of speculation for the past few days, but now VentureBeat has posted the actual slide show from a recent major meeting where startups were told to prepare for some seriously bad economic stuff and a recession that could last for many, many years.
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I was particularly glad to see the slide noting that people have been using home equity as a “piggy bank”.
My current take on the huge Government actions trying resurrect the prosperity economy is subject to change faster than you can say “The Dow’s Down 500”. However I would like to hear more talk about how the economy got too big for it’s britches and most of us, and certainly the country as a whole, have been living pretty large for no good reason, fueling both economic growth and personal living off of home equity that …. ain’t … here …. no …. more. We’ll need to work harder and get less for awhile, and perhaps forever as the rest of the world catches up to our levels of prosperity. Welcome to the new global economy.
Another factor I’m confident about is that the banks are going to act very opportunistically with the new sources of funding, though I’m not sure what form this will take. Assume, for example, that you run a totally solvent bank and have managed risk appropriately. Yet you know the feds are about to absorb disproportionate risks in order to get the macro economic juices flowing. Your best play is to lay low for awhile, waiting for potential free money, lower risks, and most importantly saving up the benefits of your solvency so you can scoop up smaller banks and deals as they become available. Although I assume there are some safeguards in place I think one of the Fed’s miscalculations right now is that the big bank players *want to play* when in fact the best of them *want to hang out and make a killing* as the insolvencies rip through the system and are removed at taxpayer expense. This behavior by solvent banks *also* increases uncertainties because nobody currently knows who is good to go and who will be dead later in the month. I *absolutely* agree with those calling for a massive increase in financial transparency throughout the banking sector – e.g. requiring banks to place much more itemized information about assets and liabilities online for all to see. This should be a condition of *doing business with the Federal Government*, which means every bank would be required to do it. The initial effect would probably be a massive shift in resources toward the healthier banks but this is where the Government, again with total transparency, could balance things out to avoid potential catastrophic failures.
Sequoia is among the most prestigious and success of the Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms, and today they warned their portfolio of companies that trouble is coming.
Although the “bad days are a comin'” news was close to obvious for most of us I think this announcement will get the attention Valley in a more dramatic way. Before the meltdown a large majority of startups failed anyway. Now we are facing the worst economic conditions in decades, so … look out.
The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN
Originally uploaded by Image Editor
When activated, it is hoped that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson — often dubbed the God Particle — the observation of which could confirm the predictions and ‘missing links’ in the Standard Model of physics, and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why the remaining force, gravitation, is so weak compared to the other three forces.
Credit: CERN
[Reciprocal link back The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN]
Washington does not understand why taxpayers are so angry about the bailout. Some pundits are calling this ignorance, but I think to the extent *anybody* can predict things taxpayers know pretty much what is going on here, and realize there is major hardship ahead whether or not the bailout moves forward as proposed, as a modified bailout, or does not happen at all. Some of this is already reflected in the stagnant broader markets we’ve seen for the past few years, and some reflected today in the Dow’s drop of about 700 at the close. But this is not a meltdown, suggesting to me that the rumors of total market meltdowns have been at least somewhat exaggerated.
Paul Samuelson noted today in an excellent article that we are basically seeing the bankruptcy of modern economics:
Our leaders are making up their responses from day to day because old ideas of how the economy works have failed them. These ideas were not necessarily wrong, but they’re grievously inadequate at the moment
The American experiment was spawned in large part as a revolution against military-inspired spending taxation from Britain. Few today realize that the taxation levels of the 1770’s were so tiny by today’s standards that they would not raise a modern eyebrow, let alone spawn any kind of spending revolution.
Over the past 230 years times have changed and we now expect Government to tax us at what the founders would have seen as enormous and totally unacceptable rates, and spend *even more* than they take in, leading to a deficit so large it is in my view of greater economic concern – far greater – than the current recession (which will be getting a lot worse, bailout or not).
What would restore most taxpayer’s confidence? Massive Government spending *cuts*, not massive Government spending as proposed in the bailout.
For most of the modern era Washington’s response to problems has been massive debt spending, pushing problems forward to future generations who’ll have to pay down our debt. The Bailout was a similar response unless you accept the optimistic notion that all of that 700 billion will come back after the toxic assets were sold off by the Government. Most likely based on my take some but not all will come back.
Over at President Picker blog I also gave my take on the amazing decision from John McCain to suspend his campaign, pull out of the Friday Presidential Debate, and head to Washington to work on the fiscal crisis which is looming very large.
On balance I think this is probably a sincere move by McCain, though it would seem to me that if he *really* wanted a fully non-partisan approach he should have negotiated this surprise action with Obama. I think I’m cynical enough to think the McCain campaign saw this as an opportunity to dodge some bullets while at the same time doing the right thing in working on the fiscal crisis – a problem either Obama or McCain will immediately inherit as they rise to power in January 2009.
Now, Obama is left looking like a follower if he simply accepts this huge change to the campaign plans or looks disinterested in the crisis if he refuses. This is a strategically untenable position which is why Obama, in my view, needs to counter-propose something along similar lines and McCain needs to accept. This balances the political advantages and brings us back to solving the second greatest economic challenge in US history.
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Joe Duck 