Help! Bailout! Or Not. . .

To help the struggling stock market President Bush proposed a 700 billion dollar bailout plan. The government would inject lots of money into the market, buy the sub-prime loans that aren't really worth anything at the moment (but could be worth more in 20 or 30 years), and basically try to make sure the market didn't crash. It didn't work. The House of Representatives voted it out. Actually it was the House Republicans who didn't vote for the bailout. Bush, McCain, both party leaders in the house, and Obama were all supporting the bill, but all of the house is up for re-election in five weeks and the bailout is very controversial. If a house member seeking re-election or trying to move to the senate voted for the bill, their opponents would definitely use it against them in the election.

I'm not sure how I felt about the bailout. If the bailout happened the stock market would be a little more stable at least in the short term and there wouldn't be a sudden loss of jobs, loans, and stuff like that, but the bailout would be payed for in taxpayer money so taxes could go way up. However, the bailout was necessary because there is a lot of artificial value in the market right now and if the government bought the worthless mortgages that are giving the companies so much trouble, the government would be continuing to pay for things that weren't really worth all that much and the artificial value crisis would go on.
If there was no bailout, the stock market would crash (like it just did), people will loose jobs because companies don't have as much money so the cut back, it will be harder to get loans of any type, and all sorts of other things. But taxpayers wouldn't have to pay to rescue all the rich CEOs on Wall Street and once the market rebounded (it probably will eventually, sometime in the future) there would be no more artificial value of sub-prime mortgages.

I really didn't know what to think about the bailout. On one hand, I didn't like it because it seemed like it would give money to some already rich guys and make normal people pay for it. However, if there was no bailout there would be the job losses and stuff like that. It would be good to get rid of the artificial value in the market but getting rid of value, artificial or not, would mean that the market would go down. It seems like a very hard choice to make and I don't envy the politicians at all.

The house is meeting again on Thursday to talk about this again. People for the bailout will try and convince the other people to vote for it when they do a second vote. People against the bailout will try and convince their counter parts to join them. I'm sure all of them will have hard choice to make and there will be a lot of yelling and barbed speeches. I, however, am very glad I am not a member of congress. Hopefully I will get better at deciding about these hard issues by the time I can vote but for now, I have no idea what the best path would be.

A Debate over A Debate

The first official debate between the presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain was scheduled for this Friday (9/26/08). However John McCain announced that he wanted to suspend his campaign and go to Washington to work on the economic crisis, and he called for Obama to do the same. Obama however, said that he would show up at the debate site regardless and if McCain didn't show up he'd have a town hall meeting or do something by himself depending on what the moderators for the debate wanted. So he tossed the ball back onto McCain's side of the court and now people are waiting to see what McCain will say.

Today I also read an article in the Star Tribune about what high school debaters think of the presidential debates (at least these particular high school debaters).

"Our presidential debates are media events that are forums at best, with the candidates primarily seeking a sound bite that will play out on the news the next few days," said Chris McDonald, whose Eagan High debate program is a perennial state tournament powerhouse.

It does seem like the candidates say the same thing over and over again when you listen to them making speeches and talking to reporters. But then again, don't people ask them the same questions over and over again? So they couldn't really give different answers. But I do think that they have some set word for word answers that they give out in response to the questions.

High School debates differ from the presidential debates in having only one topic for the entire year. Well you could say that the question, "Who is the best person to be president of the United States?" is also one topic but it covers a wide range of subjects. For the 2008-2009 school year, the topic is alternative and/or renewable energy. Wayzate High coach Gail Sarff thinks that the kids know more about this particular subject than any of the candidates because they research the issue, argue one side of it in the first round of debates, then argue the other side during the second round.

I think having high school debate teams is a good idea. While it seems strange at first to have groups of people come together and argue with each other, I think it makes people more aware of both sides of any issue and more aware of issues in general. That being said, I'm not sure I would want to be on one. I'm not very happy arguing and I have trouble seeing how I would argue for a position I didn't hold myself. It seems strange to try and promote say off shore drilling if you didn't agree with it yourself.
That's where I think it would be really strange to be a lawyer and try to argue for your client even if you didn't really agree with them. Hopefully most lawyers try to get clients that they actually agree with. . .

Android Phones Take Over the World!

Image from: http://www.mobileburn.com/imagepop.jsp?Id=5360&file=media/t-mobile/g1/thumb_g1_white_open2.jpg

Well not really, but today was the first unveiling of the T-Mobile G1, an android smart phone created by Google, T-Mobile, and HTC. The exciting thing about this phone is that the software used to run it will be open source so anybody who knows how to will be able to make application

s for the phone and share them, a lot like Mozilla Firefox the web-browser. But why they called it an 'android' phone I don't know. It always puts me in the mind of Starwars whenever I hear it.

I watched the unveiling press conference online. It was really strange!!! There were these four guys talking to a room full of reporters. They were in a really weird room, the walls were like fake stone or something with purple lights. There were also a couple screens for showing demo movies. It looked like the Batcave! Very strange. . . 

The guys were a bit strange too. I'm not exactly sure who they were, well there was one guy who was a representative of HTC, one from T-Mobile, one guy from Europe, and one guy I thought was from Google, but I don't know names or anything. None of them were very good speakers. Well, they all did much better than I could've but you'd think that if these people spoke about their products for a living, they could do better. They weren't very engaging and they said a lot of weird stuff that was either strange stuff that I had no idea what it was supposed to be, or really weak attempts at jokes.

They also did a couple really dorky photo shoots. First they showed a really, really short teaser thing about the phone, then they all got up and said, "anybody who wants to take photos please come forward". Then the guys stood in a semi circle holding the phone and all the reporters took pictures of them. Then they did a longer video with more details about the phone and another video with different people talking about how great it was to have open source software. Then the co-founders of Google came up and stood around, and looked uncomfortable, and made strange jokes, and said how the phone was so fun to play with, then they had another photo shoot and left. I think they were even worse at public speaking than the other guys. Well maybe I'm being a little harsh on these people, the only people I've watched speaking in public recently are the presidential candidates and I suppose they have to be really good at it.

The phone itself seems pretty cool. It has a touch screen like the iphone and the menu and display look a lot like the iphone but it also has a full slid out keyboard. It has e-mail, web browsing, google maps, amazon music, and all that sort of stuff. Not anything that we've never seen before but it seems to work ok.

I think that it's exciting that the phone is open source and anybody can make up applications for it. Firefox is set up that way and I really like it. However, for the phone I have the feeling you might need to pay for some of the add ons. Who knows, it'd be nice if some of them were free but also if they are charged, the developer might get something for their work. 

As I only turn on my cell phone once a week, my calls are seldom longer than three minutes, and I can't text a sentence in less then five minutes, I don't think that getting an android phone would be very helpful to me. Well possibly the internet access part would be useful but not the phone part and since it's a phone, well, that seems sort of strange.

Image from: http://www.mobileburn.com/imagepop.jsp?Id=5360&file=media/t-mobile/g1/thumb_g1_black_closed.jpg

A good way to get squished disguised as a game

So, I've been reading a lot about football recently in the newspaper. The NFL season started a couple weeks ago and all that stuff so football is one of the biggest sports going on at the moment. I got somewhat interested in football like a year or two ago and I admit to reading the articles about games and players in the sports section. But I'm still continually perplexed by football and football players. First of all, why is it called football? I mean, the players carry the ball with their hands. I looked that up online and found some answer about American football evolving from rugby football and rugby evolving from soccer (I'm an American so it's soccer not football) but it was still pretty confusing and I didn't get a clear answer. 

Personally, I don't think I would ever want to play football. There seems to be a high chance of being injured, squashed or killed. However it does seem that some people really like playing it and do so for hours on end and for a profession. But then again, I fence and I suppose you could find something similar in voluntarily getting out a sword and letting someone try to stab you while trying to do the same to them, and voluntarily getting on a field and presenting yourself as a target to lots of 300 pound guys whose job it is to squash you. 

Surprisingly enough, I actually like both the Minnesota Vikings and the Gophers (college team). The Vikings I don't know why I like them, probably because they worked hard and came close to the playoffs last season but didn't quite make it. I like the Gophers 'cause I feel sorry for them 'cause they had a horrible season last year. They're doing much better this year though with an undefeated 3-0 record. Of course I don't think it'll stay that way but considering they were 1-11 last year, it's a big improvement. In the NFL I also like the Green Bay Packers. I think it's cool that the majority of their stocks are owned by fans and not just one or two super rich people. I'm also rooting for their new quarterback Aaron Rodgers because he was put in such a hard position, following Brett Favre. 

Football. A game where the object of the offense is to move a ball down the field and score. And the object of the defense is to promptly squash the guy holding the ball. Though the first recorded mentions of modern football were during the mid 19th century I can easily imagine cavemen playing a similar game during their days.

Um, just a slight malfunction

Picture from: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/18/large-hadron-collider.html

The huge atom smasher in Switzerland was turned off Wednesday due to an electrical problem. The malfunction affected a cooling system for the high-powered magnets that steer the beams of shooting protons. A CERN spokesperson said that because it is a very complex piece of equipment it wasn't uncommon for a stoppage to occur. 

It was also mentioned in the article that the atom smasher took 20 years to build. Wow. I knew before that it took a long time but I was thinking like 10 years or something like that. 20 years is a looooooooong time. 

Well I hope they get it up and running again soon. 

Hurricane Ike

Hurricane Ike is the 9th named storm of the 2008 season. It made landfall in the US on September 13th at 2:10am CDT in Galveston, Texas. At the time it was a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 110 miles per hour. However it was much, much larger than an average hurricane. A bigger storm makes a bigger storm surge and because the water around Texas and Louisiana is shallow, that area is more susceptible to storm surges than other areas. 

The death toll for the storm wasn't very high but thousands and thousands of people were displaced and whole areas were completely destroyed. Hurricane force winds from Ike got as far inland as Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. More than 2 million people are without electricity in those regions. Chicago also had a record rain fall of more than 7 inches in 24 hours and the city experienced flooding in some areas.

It's always sort of strange that every time a hurricane or storm hits the US coast a big deal is made out of it but whenever a storm hits one of the island nations like Cuba or the Bahamas, it's only mentioned briefly. I suppose it's because those are different countries but it's still sort of strange. For example Haiti has been hit hard by four hurricanes in a row Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike, but nobody is really talking much about it. The Haitian city of Gonaives was devastated by Hannah and 495 bodies were recovered by September 5th. Officials expect that number to grow because they still can't really get into the city. Ike further damaged the city causing flooding so severe that the prime minister said they might have to rebuild the city elsewhere. 

While I like rain and storms, hurricanes are a bit too destructive. According to some speculations, because of global warming raising the temperatures of the oceans, hurricanes will be getting stronger. That's a scary thought.  

Cuauhtemoc Blanco

Blanco retires from the Mexican international team after playing for seven minutes in the world cup qualifying game against Canada. (I'm trying to find the score online but half the sites I look at say Mexico won 3-0 and the other half say they only won 2-1. It's very confusing but at least the part that they won is clear) He is not quitting soccer entirely though. The 35 year old will continue to play in the U.S for the Chicago Fire for a few more years. Blanco has been hailed as one of Mexico's greatest soccer players and has scored 34 goals since is 1995 debut against Uruguay. Ever since we started watching major league soccer, he has also been one of my dad's favorite players for some reason.

Blanco was born on January 17, 1973, in the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City. He made his Primera Division (Mexico's 1st division) debut in 1992 at the age of 19 playing for the club America. He was a member of the Mexican team that won the Confederations Cup in 1999 and was the leading goal scorer in that tournament with 6 goals. He was also part of two world cup teams, France in '98 and Korea-Japan in '02. On April 2nd, 2007, Blanco signed to the Chicago Fire and started his Major League soccer career in the U.S. 

Speaking of the US international team. They just played a qualifying match against Trinidad and Tobago and won 3-0. I was pretty surprised. We're talking about the men's team here by the way. The US women's team has been pretty good for a while now but I don't really think of the men's team as being very good. However, they seem very motivated to give a good showing of themselves so it might get interesting next world cup. I don't think they're as good as say, Brazil, Argentina or Italy but I don't think they're horrible either. It'll be exciting to see what they can do.