Julian--
Those are good AV choices. Symantec is bloated, often corrupts after a
little use, and can be a pain to uninstall requiring a tedious cascade or
registry key and file deletions to uninstall manually and it's zap
tool--even longer than Windows One Care does.
All the OEMs sell space on their desktop for many apps and work deals for
what Walter Mossberg calls "crap ware"--it's just part of the advertising
culture. I'm not sure if they are "bribes" so much as they are business as
usual with desktop real estate. Whatever they are, with respect to Dell and
Vista, Goolge paid a bigger bribe than MSFT to MSFT's chagrin to get space
on Dell's desktop.
http://www.caseytech.com/?s=how+to+remove+software+
By the way, what name do you give to the phenomenon where Accountant and OEM
VP for Microsoft Scott Di Valerio forces the 300+ OEM Named Partners (Dell
Bucked them) into not shipping a Vista DVD with the expensive purchase of
hardware called a computer with a markup as high as 1100% for the hardware
and for the preinstalled Vista MSFT sells to be loaded onto the box. MSFT
has caught enough flack at hosing their millions of end users out of Win RE
in Vista to feel enough guilt to include it in Vista SP1 that has been
downloaded by thousands this week. Service Packs are notorious in Windows
OS's for having near zip functionality improvements--as in SP2--but this is
a rare exception.
LOL--you'd have a helluva time with the Wall Street Journal and the New York
Times because some of the richest people on the planet called Hedge Fund
Managers get "breaks" after paying "bribes" to Senators and Congressmen and
Congresswomen in the US and the people that clean the bathrooms in their
offices pay more taxes than the hedge fund managers under the bribery system
codified into law in the United States.
As in:
Congress Weighs End to Private Equity Tax Break
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/b...3553d96c998c33&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
CH
When Rove says he's quitting to be with his family, that's English for he's
"quitting because Abramoff has been singing to the FBI for a year and his
ass is about to get indicted."
PAUL KRUGMAN: It’s All About Them
Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your
father’s political campaign.
Last week, at one of Mitt Romney’s “Ask Mitt” forums, a woman in the
audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the
military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.
The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but
near the end he let his real feelings slip. “It’s remarkable how we can show
our support for our nation,” he said, “and one of the ways my sons are
showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they
think I’d be a great president.”
Wow. The important point isn’t the fact that Mr. Romney’s sons aren’t in
uniform — although it is striking just how few of those who claim to believe
that we’re engaged in a struggle for our very existence think that they
themselves should be called on to make any sacrifices. The point is,
instead, that Mr. Romney apparently considers helping him get elected an act
of service comparable to putting your life on the line in Iraq.
Yet the week’s prize for most self-centered remark by a serious presidential
contender goes not to Mr. Romney, but to his principal rival for the G.O.P.
nomination.
Rudy Giuliani has lately been getting some long-overdue criticism for his
missteps both before and after 9/11. For example, The Village Voice reports
that he insisted that the city’s emergency command center — which included a
personal suite with its own elevator that he visited “often, even on
weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the
relationship surfaced” — be within walking distance of City Hall. This led
to the disastrous decision to locate the center in the World Trade Center,
an obvious potential terrorist target.
At the same time, Mr. Giuliani is being attacked for his failure to take
adequate precautions to protect those who worked on the cleanup at ground
zero from the hazards at the site. Many workers have since been sickened by
the dust and toxic materials.
For a politician whose entire campaign is based on the myth of his
leadership that fateful day — as The Onion put it, Mr. Giuliani is running
for “president of 9/11” — anything that challenges his personal legend is a
big problem. So here’s what Mr. Giuliani said last week in response: “I was
at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. ... I was
exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m
one of them.”
Real ground zero workers, who were digging through the toxic rubble while
Mr. Giuliani held photo ops, were understandably outraged. So the next day
Mr. Giuliani tried to recover, claiming that “what I was trying to say
yesterday is that I empathize with them because I feel like I have that same
risk.” But thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can all watch Mr. Giuliani’s
actual demeanor as he delivered the original remarks. Empathy had nothing to
do with it.
What’s striking about these unintentional moments of self-revelation is how
much Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani sound like the current occupant of the
White House.
It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s pain.
His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes off-the-cuff,
unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San Antonio when visiting
the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the severely wounded: “As you
can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in
combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch.”
What’s now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P.
presidential nominee are cut from the same cloth.
This probably isn’t a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the
Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of
getting nominated.
To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly
smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of
being stupid. To appeal to the G.O.P. base, however, you have to say very
stupid things, like Mr. Romney’s declaration that we should “double
Guantánamo,” or Mr. Giuliani’s dismissal of the idea that raising taxes is
sometimes necessary to pay for things like repairing bridges as a
“Democratic, liberal assumption.”
So the G.O.P. field is dominated by smart men willing to play dumb to
further their personal ambitions. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn
that these men are monstrously self-centered.
All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly
fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect
another?
posted by See You On The Other Side at 7:49 PM 0 comments
Thursday, August 09, 2007
PAUL KRUGMAN: Very Scary Things
In September 1998, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, a giant
hedge fund, led to a meltdown in the financial markets similar, in some
ways, to what’s happening now. During the crisis in ’98, I attended a
closed-door briefing given by a senior Federal Reserve official, who laid
out the grim state of the markets. “What can we do about it?” asked one
participant. “Pray,” replied the Fed official.
Our prayers were answered. The Fed coordinated a rescue for L.T.C.M., while
Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary at the time, and Alan Greenspan, who
was the Fed chairman, assured investors that everything would be all right.
And the panic subsided.
Yesterday, President Bush, showing off his M.B.A. vocabulary, similarly
tried to reassure the markets. But Mr. Bush is, let’s say, a bit lacking in
credibility. On the other hand, it’s not clear that anyone could do the
trick: right now we’re suffering from a serious shortage of saviors. And
that’s too bad, because we might need one.
What’s been happening in financial markets over the past few days is
something that truly scares monetary economists: liquidity has dried up.
That is, markets in stuff that is normally traded all the time — in
particular, financial instruments backed by home mortgages — have shut down
because there are no buyers.
This could turn out to be nothing more than a brief scare. At worst,
however, it could cause a chain reaction of debt defaults.
The origins of the current crunch lie in the financial follies of the last
few years, which in retrospect were as irrational as the dot-com mania. The
housing bubble was only part of it; across the board, people began acting as
if risk had disappeared.
Everyone knows now about the explosion in subprime loans, which allowed
people without the usual financial qualifications to buy houses, and the
eagerness with which investors bought securities backed by these loans. But
investors also snapped up high-yield corporate debt, a k a junk bonds,
driving the spread between junk bond yields and U.S. Treasuries down to
record lows.
Then reality hit — not all at once, but in a series of blows. First, the
housing bubble popped. Then subprime melted down. Then there was a surge in
investor nervousness about junk bonds: two months ago the yield on corporate
bonds rated B was only 2.45 percent higher than that on government bonds;
now the spread is well over 4 percent.
Investors were rattled recently when the subprime meltdown caused the
collapse of two hedge funds operated by Bear Stearns, the investment bank.
Since then, markets have been manic-depressive, with triple-digit gains or
losses in the Dow Jones industrial average — the rule rather than the
exception for the past two weeks.
But yesterday’s announcement by BNP Paribas, a large French bank, that it
was suspending the operations of three of its own funds was, if anything,
the most ominous news yet. The suspension was necessary, the bank said,
because of “the complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market
segments” — that is, there are no buyers.
When liquidity dries up, as I said, it can produce a chain reaction of
defaults. Financial institution A can’t sell its mortgage-backed securities,
so it can’t raise enough cash to make the payment it owes to institution B,
which then doesn’t have the cash to pay institution C — and those who do
have cash sit on it, because they don’t trust anyone else to repay a loan,
which makes things even worse.
And here’s the truly scary thing about liquidity crises: it’s very hard for
policy makers to do anything about them.
The Fed normally responds to economic problems by cutting interest rates —
and as of yesterday morning the futures markets put the probability of a
rate cut by the Fed before the end of next month at almost 100 percent. It
can also lend money to banks that are short of cash: yesterday the European
Central Bank, the Fed’s trans-Atlantic counterpart, lent banks $130 billion,
saying that it would provide unlimited cash if necessary, and the Fed pumped
in $24 billion.
But when liquidity dries up, the normal tools of policy lose much of their
effectiveness. Reducing the cost of money doesn’t do much for borrowers if
nobody is willing to make loans. Ensuring that banks have plenty of cash
doesn’t do much if the cash stays in the banks’ vaults.
There are other, more exotic things the Fed and, more important, the
executive branch of the U.S. government could do to contain the crisis if
the standard policies don’t work. But for a variety of reasons, not least
the current administration’s record of incompetence, we’d really rather not
go there.
Let’s hope, then, that this crisis blows over as quickly as that of 1998.
But I wouldn’t count on it.
