It’s getting too late to jump ship

This is a must read.

According to that article, China owns 95% (other places I’ve read 97%, but who’s counting?) of rare earth metals and has bought up another 11% in the last year, probably in Africa.

Rare metals: cell phones, flat screen tv’s, computers, the Chevy Volt.

Ah, the Chevy Volt, with the $10,000 battery. Check that out and prove me wrong.

Soon it will be too late to jump the sinking ship of state.

And Obama wined and dined this dictator like he’s an ally. Oh wait – I guess he is now that we’ve tossed Britain and Israel off the boat.  But they should really consider themselves lucky to be off the USS Sinking America.

Google to become the HAL 9000 of our future

from The Telegraph

Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook.

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.

This is a scary forecast, isn’t it? He’s right, too. We don’t understand the ramifications of what happens when we “put it all out there” for the entire world to see. And our kids especially don’t understand it. They will face an entire lifetime with this kind of lack of privacy, for the rest of us, it’s all still pretty new to our lives.

In an interview Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.

The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives.

Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.

HAL 9000 from 2001 - A Space Odyssey

“We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

It sounds like we are looking forward to a future of not one HAL 9000 but a gazillion HALs – all named Google and all inhabiting one giant monolith (pardon the sorta pun, there.) I think I’ve had an epiphany right here and right now! The mystery of the monolith in Kubrick’s movie, and Arthur C. Clarke’s fabulous book, has suddenly made itself known to me. This goes light years beyond cloud computing.

I don’t know that I’m not just a bit bothered that I will have a computer program reminding me that I need to pick up bread and bagels. And I have to disagree with Mr. Schmidt: I DO want google to answer my questions when I have them and I don’t want to be told what I need to do next or more importantly, what I need to PURCHASE next.

Things have become so different since I was in school. We actually used pencils and paper and later on, typewriters. We actually had to look up stuff in — my God — books – some of those were the Encyclopedia Britannica – and take notes. We had to write facts down more than once, which is how we learned those facts.

Now kids have facts at their finger tips and have no need to remember anything, which is what learning is. And it sounds like Google is going to make it easier yet for future generations to remain uneducated.

And one last thing that really disturbs me: I’m finding myself discovering more and more information from the British press than I’m reading from the so-called free press in the U.S.

A wonderous thing – the internet

I learn so much and learn I’m so much out of touch, too.

Tonight I learned about the 99ers. Never heard of this bunch of people before tonight but they seem to be the current pet cause of Fat H-ED Schultz:

He’s so loved by these guys that they declared: Ed there is no other way to say it except: You are the bomb and you totally ROCK. Yeah, what a stink bomb he is, indeed.

(There is so much in his rant that I’d like to take up but I’ll save that for another blog.)

But not to be outdone, ABCNews is hosting a peace rally for them in Chicago on August 6th.

These folks do have one thing in common with the TEA partiers: They hate Pelosi and Reid. This means they have some redeeming qualities. And they have an election day countdown clock on their really ugly website. You mean to tell me that there’s not one unemployed web designer in this bunch?

What they want is an extension of unemployment because none of them can seem to find a job. They are blaming employers for hiring younger people. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) is blaming the Republicans for saying these 99ers are lazy and just don’t want to work.

I read some of the comments left on the page by the unemployed. Here’s a sampling:

I do not understand what is going on. They say in Texas, we have up to 93 weeks. I have not received any benefits since the end of march 2010. I started my original claim in February 09. That is not 93 weeks. In addition, back in march I had 1500 still left on the current claim, until TWC decided to say I was not eligible. Had to go through the appeal process finally after 2.5 months the appeal came back in my favor. I checked my account online and the website indicated that I had exhausted all my benefits. I have been using my credit card, thinking that I knew I was going to get the benefits when my appeal came back.

Brilliant. Use a credit card to live on because you’re thinking you knew you were going  to win an appeal and then charge like you’re dying tomorrow before you check your account. It’s no wonder you’re unemployed, you jackass.

What happened to the days where you could walk into any company and be hired, with minimal schooling and no experience. Currently, I have achieved the knowledge and have plenty of experience in the work force and still the road is gone for my continued future. Why don’t we start with a stimulus package to each American that puts a large amount into our pockets so that we may invest, hire, create our businesses and keep our homes. One lump sum to each American gives us the chance to start fresh and pursue of the American way. If we each had a turn to sing one song, make one video, we would be paid handsomely for our effort. But instead we are fighting for reasons beyond comprehension. Money makes the world mad. How would the world re-act if money was obsolete or if we were given a stimulus package of $100,000 per American? Oh wait, what the world is a much happier place! Were better off dead!…

Another very brilliant thinker. What kind of job is she talking about that requires minimal education and no experience? Wal-Mart greeter? Dining room swabby at Taco Bell? But oh! If she just had a chance to sing one song or make one video it would guarantee this person a handsome paycheck just for the effort? I do have to agree with her on one thing: We’d all be better off if the government had just stimulated us with all that money. I mean, if I have to see my unborn grandchildren buried in debt, I’d like to do it myself. I might be able to hide away some of that money for them.

Yes, money does make the world mad. Lack of money makes the world madder and brings out a lot of incoherent knuckleheads with computers. Interesting how these folks who are losing their homes and who just want to sing one song, can afford the internet, isn’t it?

But here I stumbled on a glimmer of common sense – I never said she was smart, though:

Congressman Harry Reid # 202-224-3542
Nancy Pelosi # 202-225-0100
Let’s Ask them What a Vacation Is?
Let’s tell them there going to have a Long Vacation come the Elections in November!

New taxes to bail-out print journalism

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 84% oppose a three percent (3%) tax on monthly cell phone bills to help newspapers and traditional journalism.

Similarly, 76% oppose a proposed five percent tax on the purchase of consumer electronic items such as computers, iPads and Kindles to help support newspapers and traditional journalism. Seventy-four percent (74%) oppose the proposal to tax web sites like the Drudge Report to help the newspapers they draw their headlines from.

Although I lament this because newspapers have been a big part of my adult life, how many 20-somethings do you know who read a newspaper on a regular basis? I don’t know if there are any statistics about this but I’d venture to say that the percentage is in the single digits.

According to a new study from Experian Simmons, 87 percent [of] Americans have at least one mobile device, and it’s not just young people. Though adults under 50 are most likely to have a mobile phone, at 93 percent, 78 percent of adults over 60 also own a mobile. Part of the reason for this high adoption rate is the phones’ increasing versatility. Seventy percent of users now take pictures with their mobiles, while 31 percent access the internet…

Most of them, and us, get our news online or on television. They aren’t reading newspapers and fewer of  us are reading news magazines.  Many of us have Kindle, Ipad and Iphones with internet access and almost all of us have access to home computers. That’s where the news is being disseminated.

So this is why the new idea being floated by our government to force a 3% tax on our cell phone bills to save print journalism is going to sink. Not only is it going to sink, it’s the stupidest idea yet. Do my kids want to pay this? Do they want to bail-out newspapers with taxes on their cell phones? My kids have ink in their blood (my daughter does still read the newspaper, after she’s done the crossword puzzle) but I’m quite sure that they will not want to pay an extra 5% tax on the next purchase of some electronic device to bail out the NY Times – a newspaper they don’t read – or any other newspaper, for that matter.

Has the NY Times, print journalism et al, became the next “too big to fail” segment of our private sector? If the age has outpaced print journalism, so be it. We did, after all, leave the horse and buggy behind for cars and those manufacturers had to diversify or fail. Print journalism will have to do the same. Why should people who have no vested interest in it, be responsible to save it?

But be not mistaken. This is not a bail-out as much as it is another attack on the free market. If the truth be really told, nationalizing car companies, banks and possibly, oil companies in the near future, were not bail-outs, either. All of this is nothing more than the dismantling of the American free-market system by the communists who are now in charge.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” That means that everything the government has given (in bail-outs) can also be taken back. Those industries that have accepted the bail-outs and government take-overs, are at the mercy of the powerful who can pull the money rug out from under them if they decide that keeping a “too big to fail” industry going is not in their best interests.

Newspapers beware.