Five Simple Rules

Hat tip to my brother for sending this my way:

Five Rules to Remember in Life

1. Money cannot buy happiness but its more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle. 2. Forgive your enemy but remember the bastard’s name. 3. Help someone when they are in trouble and they will remember you when they’re in trouble again. 4. Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them. 5. Alcohol does not solve any problems, but then again, neither does milk.

Why Declutter?

Because decluttering is fun! It also opens up new possibilities.

From Courtney Carver: http://www.bemorewithless.com/

I knew that decluttering was just the beginning of some great possibilities and that it would give me the momentum and inspiration to make other great life changes.

• Becoming clutter free made it easier to become debt free.
• Becoming debt free made it easier for me to quit my job.
• Quitting my job made it really easy for me to do work that I love.

If decluttering feels like an overwhelming chore, think about the hope and possibility that comes along with it. That will help to lighten the load, literally and figuratively.

Bad news. I’ve got a leak in my rear en

Bad news. I’ve got a leak in my rear end.

@pogoplug once again enables attaching a drive locally in Windows. I see a great potential in pairing this with @crashplan.

How to fix our country, in one day or less

Step One: Calculate the amount of taxes we will collect next year at current GDP and tax rate

Step Two: Retain in the federal budget only the departments and spending which are necessary

Step Three: increase taxes and cut spending until Step One and Step Two balance for 2012

That’s all. Stop pretending we have ten years to get these two items down to a $1 Trillion deficit. We need a balanced budget, next year, or we might as well be Italy, or Greece, or Spain, or France… It’s already too late for them, will we learn?

How debt creates a bubble

Helga is the proprietor of a bar. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Helga keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans).

Word gets around about Helga’s "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Helga’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in town.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Helga gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages.

Consequently, Helga’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Helga’s borrowing limit.

He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!!!

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS.

These "securities" then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.

Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as "AA" "Secured Bonds" really are debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb!!!, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Helga’s bar. He so informs Helga. Helga then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts.

Since Helga cannot fulfil her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Helga’s 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Helga’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions
and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds.

Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers. Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.

The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Helga’s bar.

What Occupy Wall Street is trying to accomplish

Occupy Wall Street is not getting its message across. They’re seen as leftists, or ant-capitalists, just homeless/jobless with nothing better to do. The truth is, OWS, started with, and is advancing an important message:

Wall Street isn’t winning – it’s cheating (as in, breaking the law) and is using our Congress for its illicit gain.

We have banks, investment firms, and Congress in bed together, collectively ripping us off, stealing our taxes, and running our country into the ground. We need to break the tie between Washington and Wall Street, un-elect our corrupt congress, and prosecute the fraud in the financial sector.

But we can’t do any of this while the current ruling class is in place – Congress won’t reform the laws, and the Executive branch won’t prosecute. The vast majority of Americans don’t understand that we – “the 99%” – continue to be victimized by the NY-DC oligarchy. That’s the message of OWS. Get enough people aware, and we’ll either vote for change, or we’ll spark a revolution. Either of those is better than being swindled into debt slavery.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025

How does Wall Street continue to get away with it? They own the media, too. And they can use their own “Cheat Codes” to describe in pleasant terms how they can continue to rape America:

FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve…

CREDIT AMNESTY. …Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system — and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government’s credit rating. Banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for people who’ve been foreclosed upon, because it’s their own fault… …Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they’ve scored bailouts. When was the last time the government stepped in to bail you out? When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street. But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout — and got it.

UNGRADUATED TAXES… …As for the banks, as companies, we’ve all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 – this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation — paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate. When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit’s revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won’t pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM’s losses. Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world’s biggest tax breaks.

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. …Virtually all 2.3 million of those in prison in America come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0. The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million — just over half of the damage. Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.

These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.

Why Travel?

Because when you leave behind the familiar, you can’t help but be changed by the foreign.

Because comfort zones become constricting zones over time.

Because the world was meant to be experienced, not imagined.

Because you’ll meet people who are different than you. (Are we all the same? Not really, but that’s OK.)

Because it will frustrate and annoy you at times, and you’ll be better because of it.

Because you are afraid, and it’s always good to make peace with your fears.

Where to?

That’s up to you—it’s a big world out there. The choice of destinations is far less important than the choice to depart.

When you return you’ll look back on your journey and think, Did that really happen? Was I really in the land of _____?

And then you’ll go through reentry and reverse culture shock, and then you’ll face a choice. Option 1: to reminisce, to think about those days when you were brave, and that time when dreaming was something you did wide awake.

Option 2: to take another look at the map, and start planning the next adventure.

Which will it be?

Thanks to Chris Guillebeau, that unconventional guy who never ceases to inspire: http://chrisguillebeau.com/3×5/why-travel?awt_l=FQRDh&awt_m=J1Ca.AYbWsnt7W

Obama doesn’t want you to have a job

To be perfectly clear: the Executive branch has located 300,000 illegal aliens, currently working in our country. (Or worse, collecting welfare in our country!) Rather than deport them, they will allow them to stay in America, because they’re “not violent.”

That 300,000 number is the current equivalent of THREE MONTHS of job creation in America.

I wonder for whom those 300,000 illegal immigrants will cast their illegal votes in the next election.

—

The Obama administration said Thursday it will allow many illegal immigrants facing deportation the chance to stay in the U.S. and apply for a work permit, while it focuses on removing those who pose a danger to public safety.

Officials announced plans to review 300,000 pending immigration cases and halt the deportations of people deemed to be a “low priority” — those who have lived in the U.S. for years without committing serious crimes.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7703000.html#ixzz1VV6WTZrS

Future Generations – A Bunch of Jerks Who DESERVE to Pay Down the Debt

What’s Wrong with Making Future Generations Pay for our Debt?
Unless they get so angry at us that they send terminators from the future to kill us.

Wow, that whole debt-ceiling debate was scary. For a while there, it looked like a few radical extremists were going to keep the country from going further into debt. And then where would we be? Without all the free stuff we like, because some people are stuck on the primitive notion that a budget should balance? I think you can say without hyperbole that people who think like that are literally terrorists, except a million times worse.

What makes people think the government should spend less money than it brings in? Probably racism. Also, a lust for violence. Because there is no logical reason for the government to spend less. None.

I do know one reason people keep bringing up as to why we should spend less: Because otherwise we leave the debt for future generations. But no one ever explains why that’s a problem.

Let’s look at this logically. There are three groups who could possibly pay our debt: People of the present, people of the past, and people of the future. Basically, the extremists are arguing that people of the present should pay for the debt, but that’s obviously insane. For one thing, the national debt is currently over 14 trillion dollars, and we don’t have that kind of money. If we were to even think of paying it down, we’d have to cut spending, when right now we need to be spending even more. That first trillion of stimulus money didn’t turn the economy around, so we clearly need to spend another trillion. And probably another trillion after that. Because that will create jobs by… well, I’m not sure how jobs are created. Ask Paul Krugman; he’ll explain it to you.

Anyway, the point is that it’s quite apparent that people of the present — us — just can’t pay down the debt. So let’s move on.

The other possibility is to have people of the past pay it down, but we can’t make them do it without a time machine. And even if we had a time machine and could go back and steal all their gold, that’s the exact sort of thing that would get you kicked in the face by Jean-Claude Van Damme. So let’s just give up on that idea.

That leaves only one possible group to pay down the debt: People of the future. We can leave the debt for them to pay without the use of time machines and without angering any time cops, so it’s perfect. The only objection I ever hear to it is that we should feel bad for leaving all this debt to our children and our children’s children. This is also stupid reasoning. Why, you ask?

Because future generations are a bunch of jerks.

Come on; we all know what future generations are like. They’re going to look back at us and say, “Oh, look at those people from 2011 with their backwards morals and primitive scientific knowledge! What a bunch of cavemen!” Yeah, that’s right; they’re going to make fun of us. And while they’re making fun of us, they’ll be playing around with their laser guns and jet packs and robot maids — all of which they’ll completely take for granted. Future generations are a bunch of arrogant, over-privileged punks! I hate them. And I don’t see any reason to feel bad for leaving such awful people tons of debt. Maybe that will wipe those smug smiles off their genetically altered faces.

So there’s really no downside to leaving debt to those horrible jerks in the future. None.

…Unless they get so angry at us that they send terminators from the future to kill us. That’s definitely a possibility, but if they try that, we can easily fight back. For instance, we could bury a bunch of time capsules that are not to be opened for fifty years. Then when future generations open them — BOOM!

Yes, some might label this “terrorism,” but the true terrorism is the notion that we should be paying this debt now, and we’re not going to stand for it. We need to send the message to future generations that he who controls the present controls the future, and that means we can easily hurt them — much more easily than they can get to us. And if those arrogant scumbags think that we’re going to pay for that debt here in the present, well, we have a few violent messages for them. They should just be happy that debt is the only thing we’re leaving for them, because it could be a lot worse.

So, to any future generations reading this in the internet archives on your holographic screens — or perhaps downloading it directly to your brains — I have this to tell you: It would be nothing for us to destroy everything you hold dear. Why, we can just nuke this whole world now, and that’s the end of you. And you can’t stop us. So that’s why you’re going to pay all of our debt and like it.

Or you can just leave the debt to your children as well. I don’t see any problem with that. Frankly, I think we should all just keep passing it on until society collapses under it and the apes takeover. Then they can pay down the debt. Big hairy jerks.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-making-future-generations-pay-for-our-debt/?singlepage=true