Visual Impressions

One of my unique traits (or special abilities) is that I am really good with faces. I mean...I am really good. That guy, I haven't seen in 6 years , yea I recognize his face...immediately. The thing is that it does not extend only to real people. People on TV trigger the near spidey like feeling that I get when I absolutely know I recognize a face, but cannot place them.

For example, Cassidy Freeman who is now on Smallville. I was watching Smallville and realized that I recognized the face. I thought that I seen her before, but could not figure out from where. I thought that it was from Smallville because I had seen her on the show before, but I would have had the near spidey like feeling last time I saw the show if i recognized her face. So I must have seen her on something else, between the last time I watched Smallville and tonight. After some googling and reading around. She was on "Cold Case" True Calling (2008).

While I was on a roll, the guy who plays Jimmy Olsen, look familiar as well. Well it turns out that i have never seen Aaron Ashmore, but he has a freaking twin brother Shawn Ashmore, who was in the X-Men movies.

Check and mate.

New real life friends

Well I went to shoot at my favorite range the other day, but some guys from Texas came and screwed up the range so bad, no one could shoot on it. While they were in town, i was able to meet a few of them. I met "The Girl", "Catfish", "SgtDave", and "JR". They are as fun in person as they are on the web, which is more than i can say for myself.

Goverment run service

Recently (years in web terms), Kos made this comment on his blog.

"How could a government-run service be any worse than these unaccountable, unethical, disgusting creeps?"

He was talking about the health care\health insurance. This comment was after a fairly lengthly post complaining about some insurance troubles he was having. My only comment would be to ask, what makes him think that a service run by unaccountable, unethical, and disgusting government creeps, with the weight of the law behind them would be any better.

Sarah Palin reminds me of...

Just thought I would mention how Sarah Palin reminds me of Annie Camden, the mom from 7th Heaven.

Bailout or optout

I just wanted to drop some thoughts to the web concerning the “bailout”. First I would like to point you to a few posts by some very smart bloggers that are for the idea of the bailout. For example, Daniel Drezner is for the bailout. The Skeptical Optimist is also for the bailout. They state so here in these two posts.

I don't know if the bailout is a good idea or not. The way it was proposed and brought up in its initial form were absolutely horrible. The constant reminders that we have to do it now, only made the situation feel more and more like I was wearing wool underwear and running 6 miles. I just want to expand on the central idea of the bailout that bothers me and provide some basic information if you are having hard time keeping up.

One of the key issues that got us into this mess in the first place, was too much liquidity. The low interest rates of the mid 2000's help set us up for this calamity, in the first place. Easy money, help lead to bad loans, which led to bad investments, etc. So telling me that the government needs to buy investments, that no one else will buy, to make sure that the money keeps flowing, just does not set well. The only problem, is that there is an actual problem that needs to be solved concerning liquidity.

The LIBOR rate is climbing higher and higher. The LIBOR rate is the interest that a bank would charge another bank when the former bank makes a loan to the latter bank. The entire idea that banks would loan money to each other was a brand new idea, to me. It makes sense. If you are full on cash and you cannot find enough customers to loan to, why not loan it out to other banks instead of keeping it yourself. It also makes for an extremely efficient way of moving money around in an economy.

The problem is when banks don't trust each other and they start wanting to keep money for their selves. If LIBOR gets high enough it causes a liquidity crisis. It could lead to certain banks being unable to lend out money or at a worse case bank runs by the general populace.

I personally think that it would take awhile (time scale of weeks) for the liquidity crisis to affect the accounts of an everyday person. No data or anything to back that assertion up, just some basic understanding of process flow and human systems. It sometimes takes time for effects to work their way downstream. I believe that we have more time than we are being told to fix the problem, of course that is just speculation.

To summarize, liquidity helped get us into this mess, now no liquidity is the problem. I just don't know if more liquidity is the answer. I just hope for a solution that fixes the problem long term, not postpones it until after the election. I doubt i get what i want for Christmas.