I noticed Black Thunder wrote a post about the economic crisis, and decided to add my two cents (along with the fifty-six hundred dollars).

It’s not blaming the mountain lion for what the caveman did to adhere to the analogy. This financial crisis and subsequent bailout bill is another incident to prove that Americans don’t have any sort of memory over four years politically, and the ones that do won’t tell you everything you should know.

There are a lot of things that led to the subprime housing collapse. There’s the Federal Reserve, inflation, NAFTA, all setting the stage for the financial bubble our dollar has become to collapse. However, from what I’ve read, the worst offender by far is the Community Reinvestment Act. After some slight reading , you’ll notice that things look immediately harmless, right? Afterall, the words “subprime loans” don’t appear anywhere.

Well, you know the American government and legal system. It’s capitalism, there’s nothing that won’t make you money left in the United States. John McCain thought so with the Keating 5 scandal, and Obama seems to agree when he sued Citibank for not lending under charges of racism . He was able to pull this off under the principles of the Community Reinvestment Act, written by Carter (D), and revised later by Clinton (Also D). Basically, under these provisions, banks were legally forced into becoming predatory lenders for people who were willing to abuse it.

Don’t plan on making this long, just reading this all and wondering why Americans get their news from television at all, everything you could possibly need to know is on government info websites with absolutely no bias.

This economic situation is definitely scary, however. The way people are approaching it, it’s like they’re stabbing a bed of spikes to kill it. Each time they stab, the spikes impale their arm. You have global investors pulling stock out of American markets, neglecting to realize that while China may be the manufacturing capital of the world, the United States is the stock capital. Pull money out of a market that’s nearly globalized due to NAFTA and strangely positive trade relationships with China isn’t just going to bankrupt America, the entire market will suffer from the current bear market. Panic overweighs logic in thie situation, though.

Time to bite fingernails.

It was a normal day like any other. I’d “fixed” a few user’s machine, effectively wiping the past 2 weeks of work on their Design projects, and I was feeling rather satisfied with myself. Along comes this rather self important grad student, complaining that its laptop won’t connect to the wifi. Now, it?s not my job to care, much less help the guy, but he seems so self important and busy, I think I’ll help him. “Well, this isn’t really my job, but I can try” I say, as I proceed to the command prompt. “Is that necessary?” he foolishly asks. “Of course it is! Do you want to do this yourself or do you want me to help?” “Oh yes, yes, please, go ahead, I didn’t mean anything by it. As usual, its having second thoughts already. At the command prompt, I do my usual routine of making room on its hard drive for my special script to run, the one that fills all open space with goat porn, if you can imagine such a thing. The first step to running this script is to run the good old deltree command. It gives you a lot more space than disk clean up would and gives you virtually no restrictions on space. “Only a couple more minutes.” I tell the user reassuringly. After I get the script setup and running, I close the lid, hand it back to user, along with a bogus story about how he’s going to have to let it sit over night while it installs and configure the drivers at the bit level, and send him on his merry way. Users. What nimrods, always coming back.

I don’t really know why I got an Xbox 360. The only next-gen game I was looking forward to at the time was Metal Gear Solid 4. As far as my friend was concerned though, getting a 360 so we could play Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 online was imperative. Unfortunately, my days of first person shooters ended with a particularly pathetic, greasy and unhygenic summer, but I suffered the headache of Live and played anyway. One day, as he does often, he picked up a 360 game on a whim for being on sale. The game was F.E.A.R. I have no idea what the abbreviation stands for, but he pointed out to me because it’s supposedly a horror game and I do enjoy anything “horror”(typically the worse, the better). He’s playing it, and telling me how creepy it is. There are elongated shadows, children occasionally appearing on screen, giggles and bodies exploding into ash.
(more…)