Replace Congress

The more I learn about Congress, the more I appreciate the joke about con being the opposite of pro so what's the opposite of progress? Apparently our elected officials think that obfuscation is better than honesty. The practice of earmarks (more affectionatly called pork) is just one of many practices that must be excised from the current practices of congress. Our government is supposed to exist for the common good (read the preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America) of the people of the United States. Pork puts individual interests above the common good and exploits the present at the expense of the future. Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson recently wrote: "We face a choice between a society where people accept modest sacrifices for a common good or a more contentious society where groups selfishly protect their own benefits." Congress has definitely fallen into the latter category protecting their own self interests at the expense of the nation as a whole.

Combine the self serving attitude that members of congress seem to have adopted with the "need" to get re-elected and you have a formula for disaster. Basically Congress is for sale and the biggest contributor takes all. I propose that we skip terms limits and go straight to single terms. Then there wouldn't be any need to accept donations in exchange for preferential treatment. It would also help eliminate the current culture of pork. In fact, I propose we start this movement with a complete and total re-election of all of congress barring any incumbents from running. To keep the rotating schedule we have right now, some members would be newly elected for 2 years, some for 4 years, and some for 6 years.

Given that the above will never happen (what member of congress is going to vote himself out of a cushy job?), what is the next best alternative? I'm not sure but clearly there has to be a better way. Maybe the media should take back its role as exposer of the sort of self serving behavior that exists now and move away from the drama (Have you seen the front page of the Daily Herald's coverage of the Olympics? We now have drama awards by the paper? What next? Survivor as an Olympic sport? Puhleeze!) it tends towards. Maybe we should make deception in congress a punishable act? That way when some congressmen puts an earmark for some park in his own district into a transportation funding bill (what exactly does a park have to do with transportation funding?) we can throw that congressmen and all those that voted for it in jail! Yeah!

More on the elected morons later...

Addendum to financial disaster

As an additional bleak thought, the current national savings rate in the US is now officially negative. That means on average, people spent more money last year than they earned. This hasn't happened since the great depresssion. Combine that the fact that for many Americans, their biggest investment is in their house, means little in the way of liquid assets. Why does this portend a financial disaster. My prediction is that as baby boomers start to retire in mass, they are going to destroy the housing market. If many (most?) of them need to sell their homes to fund the lifestyle they are accustomed to, what is that going to do to housing prices? Combine this potential significant drop in housing prices and the probably upcoming Social Security debacle, and we have the potential of having a country filled with the ederly living in poverty.

Pending financial disaster

I feel sorry for the post baby boomer generation. Our government is setting up to saddle them with expenses they'll have a difficult time paying. What I'm referring to are Social Security and Medicare. I've already resigned myself to the likelihood I'll only receive back a fraction of the money I paid into those systems. Why? Because they are essentially bankrupt. Instead of saving our money for us, the government has used the revenue from those taxes to pay for other programs. This works as long as employment is growing faster than the number of people drawing on those programs. As the baby boomers retire, that isn't going to be the case. The number of retired people will increase substantially while the number of active employees contributing to the system decreases.

What does this mean for the post baby boomers? Likely large increases in taxes and decreases in government services. As well they will need to make some very difficult decisions on tax and benefit issues that will significantly affect the financial status of their parents. What does it mean for the baby boomers? Well if you're like most, you'll have counted on Social Security for a substantial portion of your retirement and you're likely to find those benefits cut some. If you're like me and have aggresively saved over the years for retirement, you'll probably find you don't get anything from Social Security, or will be taxed such an amount in retirement that it will have little positive effect on your financial situation.

Is it too late to change this? Depends upon who you believe. Are we headed in the right direction? As Bill Cosby says in his Noah skit: Riiight.

Stop electing morons

Do we have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find elected officials? Apparently our elected officials are too stupid to read the legislation they vote on. Last summer Congress (if con is the opposite of pro, what's the opposite of progress?) passed into law a bill erroneously titled "Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005". This bill weakens the protections offered by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and makes it easier for a company to send unsolicited junk faxes. Prior to this piece of festering dog doo legislation it was illegal to send an unsolicited fax to someone unless there was an established business relationship. This act basically makes it easier to claim such a relationship existed. And although it nows requires a removal number, my guess is that will be as effective as the similar requirement in the Can Spam act that congress also passed making it easier for spammers to spam you.

Unsolicited faxes essentially represent theft. They shift the burden of advertising costs from the advertiser to the recipient. How so? Instead of paying to have advertisements printed and mailed to you house for 25-45 cents per person, they can send you a fax for 3 cents and you pay for the ink/toner and paper.

So if anyone can figure out how S.714 (the number for the bill) prevents more spam, please let me know.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Is it a practice in Congress to take voice votes on bills they know aren't going to be liked by consumers? This bill apparently passed by voice vote so there is no way to know whether your friendly elected moron voted for it or not.

Broadcast DTV and the upcoming turn-off of analog broadcasts

I'm somewhat amused at the state of affairs in consumer electronics related to the upcoming shutdown of analog broadcast TV. The FCC has decided that we should all get the benefits of digital television and so has ordered the shutdown of analog television broadcasts. Actually they want to get rid of analog broadcast television because digitial television offers much more and is far more bandwidth efficient. In fact the broadcasters will get a benefit out of this as well as broadcast digital television requires far less power and televisions spend a large amount of money on electricity.

So why am I amused? Well the original date for the complete switch to digital television (DTV) was the end of 2006, but that has already been pushed out for a number of reasons. This is funny in of itself in that the decision to move to digital broadcasting was made nearly a decade ago. Is this going to be another one of those transitions like adopting the metric system? My cut at it is that it is caused be several factors, although I think the primary blame falls squarely on the consumer electronics companies.

For most people in the United States, watching a DTV signal is going to require the purchase of some equipment. At a minimum a DTV receiver is necessary as the hundreds of millions of existing analog television sets aren't going to be able to receive a digital signal. These receivers are often called set top boxes as they'll be somewhat like a cable box or satellite box. But try to buy one of these devices right now. My family tried to buy me one for Christmas and the one store that thought they knew something sold them an antenna! Yeah for consumer electronics sales people. They are so clueless about this technology and what's needed that it would laughable if it wasn't so sad. Add to this that there are not many set top boxes available and only a few consumer electronics stores in the area carry them, how is the average consumer ever going to get this sorted out? Oh, and to further complicate things, I suspect most consumers who bought an HDTV think they are reawdy for all this. Well it ain't so. The majority of HDTV sets people are buying are HDTV ready. All this means is that if they are given an already received HDTV signal, they can display it. So without a set top box, they won't see broadcast channels when the analog signals are shut off. This has all the earmarks of being another "metric adoption" fiasco.

Trials and tribulations of building a homebrew PVR

Some years ago I put together a PC that was specifically going to be used as a home theater PC. This was probably a little ahead of its time, but nonetheless wanted to give it a try. I made the disasterous mistake of purchasing an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder TV tuner card. This card seemed to have everything I wanted. It included a TV tuner, at the time a reasonably high performance video card, and TV output. All seemed seemed well until I tried to use the ATI provided drivers and TV applications. What a joke. The system would lock up regularly, the applications only worked some of the time, and I later learned the drivers for this card are as buggy as the other ATI drivers. Even their Catalyst series of drivers appears to be full of problems.

So after struggling with this machine not making much of a PVR, I decided to try a linux based solution thinking that might be a better approach than using Windoze. There are some great packages out there for linux based PVRs including MythTV and Freevo. They provide many of the capabilities of TiVo, yet require no monthly fee and the ability to add many other features such as News, Weather, SNES emulation, web browsing, easy sharing of recorded programs, etc. But again I'm stuck with this dog of a TV tuner card. Apparently ATI won't share enough information about the Radeon All-in-Wonder card to allow good linux drivers to be written for it. So maybe this card is headed for the parts bin.

Frustrated but still plugging away...

Beat him when he's down

Or take advantage of the disadvantaged...

Why does it strike me that the Lottery, paycheck Loans, and the like are simply more ways to keep poor or uneducated people poor? Take paycheck loans for example. Presumably the only reason someone would consider such a loan is if they were in rather desparate need. Yet the loan rates are usary at best. For example, a quick Google search yields MyCashNow who's banner claims "Quick and Affordable Payday Loans" and "Helping People Live Their Lives". Yet when you check their rates, they charge $18.62 per $100 financed for a 7-14 day loan. That works out to an APR (annual percentage rate) of almost 450%!!! And others have even higher rates. How is it legal to charge someone 450% interest?

And if the Lottery isn't a poor tax, I don't know what is. The expected payout of the lottery is 3-5 times worse than the expected payout at a casino. Casinos are regulated by law to payout a certain amount. For example, in many casinos the slot machines are required to payout around 90% on their slot machines. This means that over a long period of time, you'll win roughly 90 cents for every dollar played, i.e., you WILL lose money but only 10 cents on the dollar. The lotteries on the other hand generally only payout 40-60 cents on the dollar (In Search of a Fair Bet in the Lottery). This makes the average lottery about the worst bet someone can make.

Actually maybe all of this is part of the gotta have it now mentality that seems to be sweeping the country (world?)...

Spammers rot in ...

I love it. I make a couple of initial posts and then not come back for quite a while. When I do come back, the only comment is by some moron spamming my blog for a mortgage! Get a life moron. What idiot is going to trust a spammer for a mortgage? Guess I need to turn on word verification.

Hope you won't cancel, or other come ons

I recently "signed up" for a credit monitoring service. The reason I placed signed up in quotation marks was that I had no intention of utilizing this service. I simply wanted my credit score. I suspect many others do the same thing. So after "signing up", I'm supposed to get a postal mail containing some code I need to get access to my credit file and credit score. 4-5 weeks later and no mail, I contact this credit "service" CreditExpert. They e-mail the necessary information, only after having already charged my credit card for the next months service. They "offer" to extend my account for another 30 days. These sleezeballs count on you signing up for the service and then not cancelling. My guess is that most "1 month free" offers count on you not cancelling a worthless service.

After all is said and done, I finally got my credit report and credit score. Since CreditExpert wouldn't credit me for the 1 month of service I didn't receive, I called my credit card company who promptly removed the charge. I've subsequently cancelled my CreditExpert account and suggest others not bother with their "service".

While I'm on the subject of credit reports and credit scores, I find it more than humorous that I have only a fair credit score. Apparently paying a couple of bills past their due date damages your credit score. I could understand this if the situation were that I was unable to pay the bills. But in my case, either myself or my spouse didn't keep on top of the bills so paid some late. For the privilege of paying the bill and the usury interest and fines for paying late, I get a "fair" credit score. Does the credit score consider that I could have paid off the balance 1000 times over? No. So not only does the creditor get some ridiculous late fee and interest rate, the idiotic credit reporting agencies ding my credit score. The lesson to all of this? Be poor and pay your bills on time. You'll get a great credit score.

And who says morons don't run the world?

First but not last

Well since this is going to be the first of my random rants, I thought I'd start out gently.

Why is it when you call Cingular with a question and your bill is due or past due, they treat you like a criminal? In fact, why do most companies treat you that way? Never being one to be particularly inclined to watch my bills like a hawk, I'm periodically behind in one or more bills. Although I may have successfully paid the bills to a certain vendor for the last 10-20 years, I'm treated like a deadbeat and someone that is going to make off with their valuable services.

I'll add other companies to my list of least favorite customer service, but to begin with I'd like to name:

Cingular
Wells Fargo Home Mortgage
Sears

as receiving dishonorable mention for treating a past due bill like a mortal sin. Phooey on you!