Socializing @MIA

... or at least trying. This is a weird and difficult crowd. So it sounded like a cool idea. A networking event for yuppies at the Miami Science Museum. Live music, food, drinks, beautiful people, whatever. So after one or two rum and colas, I sit down in a bench to watch one of the bands. I take out my cell phone (hey... I have to keep my ADD busy) and some. Suddenly I see a hand grab my cell phone. I look around and see a guy holding my cell phone and smiling.
"Fuck you!" he says and smiles again.
He eventually gives it back, but then takes out his own cell phone and starts hitting my cellphone with his. And no, I don't even want to begin trying to understand why. By that time I was just staring.
"Hey man, you're really drunk." But he just keeps hitting my cellphone. Luckily his own ADD made him turn around and start bugging the sitting to his side. The conversation was around the lines of what ass was "kosher" or not. By this time a lady had taken to my other side. She begins to make some small talk complaining how she missed most of the music, since she was working on the event, blah blah blah. I get up and head to bar for another drink.

When I come back I see my two aquantences (for lack of a better word) engaged in a very involved conversation.
"He slapped me! Someone call the security guard!"
"Fuck you! I don't care, arrest me, arrest me!"
Then I realized that I missed the most interesting bit of the evening, and it was time to go home. I think she wasn't kosher.

Same shit, different day

So we have a new president. Congratulations to Obama, and to all of those voted for him. And even to whose who didn't vote for him. Truth is the fact that he was was elected rings of change. And change it's good. But the fact that he was sworn into office changes little. So it's the same shit, just a different day. The economy is still going down the toilet. The war in Iraq is going on. Guantanamo is still open for business. I wish the man good luck, seriously. But a single man sometimes can't do too much on it's own. There's congress, there's lobbyists, the NIMBY people, the conservatives, the ACLU, the KKK and other self proclaimed Christian organizations, conspiracy theorists, and the cultists hiding in caves waiting to be picked up by a flying saucer. It's a shitty state of affairs. So we can all sit around and wait for our stimulus checks to go out and buy crap we don't need to try to fill our own personal emptiness. Or we can each do something. Me, I'm going to go grab another beer from the fridge. 'night everyone!

Crash and burn...

Tough days for Wall Street. Several banks have crashed and burned to the ground. But just like the tides, just like the seas that increase and fall again, the calm will return to Wall Street. This isn't the Great Depression, and it wont be. But now what? Out in the great emptiness, life goes on as usual. Or as close as usual as things get nowadays. There's three main things that I see.

First: The banks will keep lending, no matter what. They have to. They might require more down payment, or higher interest. But higher interest will have more people saving, balancing interest rates in the long run.
Second: The biggest problems are not the banks, the biggest problem were the investment funds that bought the bad mortgages as investment instruments. This created an incentive for banks to give out bad loans, since they were not taking risks. And those are the people that should face the consequences of this mess, since they lost the money of a lot of peoples' pension funds and life savings.
Third and final: And now the government is trying to save some of the banks. And while some people say that's the only way to go, I'm not really that sure. The problem happened because of a market distortion. And now the government is trying to fix the problem by dumping money into the market, creating another distortion. Two wrongs don't always make a right. The market should be fixed by itself. There's investment funds set up waiting to invest in assets when they can get a bargain. Those funds, appropriately named vulture funds, should be the ones trying to bring the market to its feet. The government intervention will cost us dearly, in taxes and inflation. However, I think it's safe to say that the bailout might make the markets bounce faster than it could on itself. But only time will tell, and most times, it's not even the money, but the mental effect of such a possibility on the investors.

I don't claim to have all of the answers. I probably don't even know most the questions, but this is my humble opinion

Hey Palin... whose God are you talking about?

...certainly not my God. No, my God would never task a country to invade another country on the whim of its leader. The war on Irak is not a "task that is from God." And lying to people to justify the error of the decade, won't change things. If the Replubicans should still hope to win, they need to keep her quiet and looking pretty in a corner. After all that's all she is, the poster lady (or poster hockey mom) of the Republican stereotype. She likes guns, hunting, is pro-life, has and a church-goer. I must admit, it was a strike of genius from the Republican strategists to put her next to McCain. But she's clueless. She's got zero foreign policy experience (living outside of the contiguous states doesn't count, sorry) and seems to be completely out of touch with the current situation. It was a big push for Hillary's voters, who might feel disenfranchided with Obama, it might have helped, but in the end it might even be counterproductive. Hillary wasn't perfect, but she had clue. And the people that voted for Hillary wanted her as president, not some Republican hockey mom out of the boonies.

We don't know what the energy question is, but bio fuels are not the answer.

With gas prices at around $4 per gallon of gas in the USA, there's one reality that most people here in the US won't like to admit.  The US likes the price of gas to be high.  But you might ask, "isn't the high price of gas hurting the US economy?" Yes it is, but not as much as it's hurting China and India, the two biggest threats to the US world hegemony.  It's pretty simple, while consumers in the US pay market price at the gas pump, gas in China and India is heavily subsidized by the government.  And as those governments try to keep prices down while international prices soar, they begin to hurt. And that hurts their development.  And that's worse than a fat lady not being able to fuel her Hummer (that she bought with $0 down) to be able to go to Walmart.   I read a very interested article in The Motley Fool, where they said that fossil fuels are never going to run out.  They're just going to get more and more expensive to extract until they are no longer economically feasible.  

But what about the revolution of biofuels? Can't I grow petroleum in my back yard? Well, I don't have a back yard ... nor a car for that matter, but let's get back to the point.  All (ok, almost all)  alternative fuel sources are solar energy sources.  Hydro, wind, photo voltaic, solar thermal, photochemical, thermochemical, and yes ... even biofuels, the panacea of alternative fuel sources, is nothing but solar energy using a different storage medium.  All those energy sources or reserves are nothing but solar power.  And the Earth receives a limited amount of solar energy in any given time period.  Transforming, storing, and trasporting is normally very inefficient.  It took millions of years to create the fossil fuel deposits that we are using.  Can we store, transform, and transport enough solar energy to replace our fossil fuel reserves? I don't think so.  And I'm pretty sure that many of those that say we can, actually know that we don't.  Many alternative projects are economically feasible only because of government subsides.  But the idea of biofuels gives a lot a people a fuzzy feeling inside.  But if you ask me the real energy alternative is that long forbidden word: nuclear  

Big deal...

Yeah... it's a big deal... so Russia invaded Georgia.  I was really worried that the Russians would come south into Florida, but at least our president stood up to them... Oh yeah, the USA has a lot of moral authority to tell another power not to invade a country without a valid cause.  We've never done that. Never. Ever. I swear.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I was in favor of invading Afghanistan after 9/11.  Also I was in favor of invading Iraq, given the information the government "had" at the time regarding weapons of mass destruction.  Of which he found none.  You don't see a lot of news about WMD lately, do you?  And now the plan is to leave Iraq in 2011.  That's a full decade after we invaded Afghanistan, and eight years of unjustified occupation in Irak, for those that don't want to do the math.  But then enough on Iraq, that's so last week.

Putin might be aggressive, uncompromising and somewhat ultra nationalist.  But he isn't stupid.  He knows how far he can go. He knows neither the USA nor NATO will stop him.  Yet I'm sure he knows he can't completely conquer Georgia.  The Georgians know very well that they can't stand against Russia in conventional warfare, so they have been clear that they will resort to guerrilla war if the need arises.  Russia can't win a war like that. They couldn't win in Afghanistan, and  they won't win now.  Yet Putin has already achieved his real objective, place Russia once again on the map saying, "we're still a military power, and we're willing to use that power".  The USA is pushing for a missile screen, stepping on the old soviet sphere of influence.  While that system might (according to some optimists) indeed help US security, it's stepping the bear's toes, trying to push forward on what used to be the soviet sphere of influence.  And that's the big deal.  It's not about Georgia, they're just cannon fodder in a new cold war... and is the USA going to bail out Georgia out of this mess? No chance at all, really... 

Quien dijo miedo?

So it's been a bit more than a month since I moved to Miami.  But I'm still quite new, I don't even know what to buy at the supermarket! Originally I wanted to move to New York.  And I wanted to live for a while without a car.  But I ended up in Miami.  And with no car.  Why did I choose to live without a car in one of the most pedestrian and bike unfriendly cities in the U.S.? I'm still not sure.  Bike trails that lead to nowhere, leaving you in the middle of a five a corner intersection.  Drivers that barely know how to drive.  A public transportation system that covers about 10% the city. And the huge urban sprawl.  At least it's flat.  And it's been fun.  But I still ask myself sometimes... what the hell am I doing here? 

And so I welcome myself to a new city.  This is not by any means the end of the journey, but while I lay my head to rest, it's what I will call home.  And this is the story ...