Thud the First: Do you fly places due to a business requirement? If so, I feel sorry for you. The rest of us consider flying optional, and with the twin reasons of TSA Security Theater and lack of pilot qualifications to actually FLY the aircraft, vice operating the flight control computers, I don't fly much anymore. "Thud", indeed. I hadn't realized that almost 1,000 people had lost their lives in the past 11 years due to six cases of aircraft computers shutting off, and their pilots being unable to continue controlled flight without them, but the expert in this vid lists the crashes. Scary.
Thud the Second: "Solyndra". This looked to be a "gotcha" on the Won, but the whole FUBAR was the predictable result of a Government give-away program that GW started, the "green bank". The problem with Government largess is that even after Congress authorizes the money to give away, there is no guarantee it will be done properly (think Fannie, Freddie and Sallie). In the case of this "green bank" that gave Solyndra the money in the first place (before the loan was politically tampered with, that WAS Obama's fault), the Feds running the program were just not up on the cutting-edge industries they were funding. If they had been, they would have seen that China had geared up to hugely over-produce solar-panels, and that the bottom would drop out of pricing of the panels because of oversupply. A REAL bank would have had the market assessed BEFORE making the loans, and would have assessed the prospective borrowers' business plans to see if those plans were capable of dealing with a depressed price point in their product line. So, it turns out that the Solyndra example is not only Chicago Politics gone mad, the whole idea behind a "green bank" was crazy to start with. "Green" must be evaluated for capitalization under the same rules as conventional industries, and this sad story tells us why.
Thud the Third: A crisis of failed expectations is the only thing that will sell the hugely-ballyhooed Amazon "Kindle Fire". You are getting less than half an Apple here, and although it's less than half the price of an I-Pad, the rule is, in technology, you either keep up with ALL the available advancements, or you wait for the next offering. This dud's going to make a loud "thud" when it fails. I have an early smartphone, the Samsung SCH-I760. It does everything the Kindle Fire will do and more. I keep it around as a PIM, and to play silly games on. I can even read on it (with good glasses). The ordinary Kindle is very good for what it does, and very basic, and has a basic price. The Fire does NOT make it as a tablet computer (no 3 or 4G connectivity), and you can get three Kindle Basics for it's price. THUD!
Thud the Fourth: The GOP Presidential race. The Thud is coming from Perry, who is a good 'ol boy, but lacks the sophistication to stay with either Romney INSIDE the political bull-ring, or Cain OUTSIDE of it. I like Cain, even though we tried hiring a Prexy based on his "outsideness" some 35 years ago, and the result was a disaster known as Jimmah.THUD! goes Perry (unless he stops tripping on his dick and suddenly finds a way to out-do both the weasely Romney AND the business-savvy Cain).
Thud the Fifth: My You Tube/Public Access TeeVee series. I had to rip up the script for the big opening segment, "What price Green"? Download Common Sense Gresham 3 See Thud the Second, above. I'm still writing the series, but now I will have to re-focus this segment as a purely economic one if I want to still do it, and I don't have the chops for that. Not an economist. Nope, got a "C" in that course in collitch.
Thud the Sixth: The Boston Red Sox. What else can be said. Seven and twenty in the last, most important month of the season? The only bright spot: Jacoby Ellsbury: give him a bonus, fire the rest of the team and build a new one around Ellsbury.
Solyndra is local. The money they spent just on the building was obscene, according to people who looked at it. No way will they re-coup any measurable portion of that. Total idiots, or they were planning on skimming from the infrastructure when they set up the company. When lots of money gets thrown around by a sugar daddy, greed usually breaks out. ( I think that's one of the unwritten rules for humans )
Posted by: Will | September 30, 2011 at 19:36