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The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar
You Know You're a Real Geek When...
You catch one of the juniors in an email lie, and realize this is going to be a fun week of torture!
You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.
This Crapolla is sponsored by...
In This Issue...
Goose-stepping to the sound of a different drummer.
One day I pulled into the WTHAIS parking lot and was shocked. It was full! I wondered what this meant as most of the people stationed in headquarters had seemed to go on the "I'm working from home" strategy permanently - even though working from home is officially forbidden. What could scare these bozos into actually showing up? Turns out we got an early Xmas present. No, it wasn't free Diet Coke for everyone. Even Better! The board fired Mein Führer and hired Danny Ocean to replace him. Apparently, everyone wanted to make sure there was a butt in their chair when Danny toured the building.
At the earnings meeting, Mein Führer told the analysts that WTHAIS was a great company and had a great future, and so he was bailing out. He announced he was moving to another company just one swamp over. Translation: The board kicked his ass out and found him another job to get him to go quietly, and to have a "better story".
Hmmm, so what will this mean? Is Danny here to sell the company, or to try to make a profit? Either way, I don't see how this doesn't turn into a layoff at some point.
Oh Please, Mr. Paulson! Please, Please, Please!
"Hello, Mr. Henry M. Paulson, Jr.? Hi, yeah I just tanked my company. May I please have several billion dollars? If you don't give it to me, I'm going to layoff everyone, and ruin the economy."
I am sick and tired of these bail outs! Ever since the Reagan administration, we've been told that we have to deregulate everything and let the free markets take care of themselves. So now the free marketers who screwed the pooch are singing a new tune. Turns out they believe in the free market until they need money.
The public is continuously told if we don't bail out big business the economy will tank even more. But if these free market guys really believed in free markets, they would allow companies to die, shareholders would lose their money, people would lose jobs - and someone else would move in and take over the market. Isn't that the free market theory?
We live that everyday in The Valley. Companies do stupid stuff all the time, and die! No one bails us out. Remember dot bomb? No bail out. Did we ask for one? No. We knew we were playing with a loaded gun. Either we were going to make billions losing money on each transaction but making it up in volume, or we were going to shoot ourselves in the head. We knew that, and really weren't surprised when there was a loud BANG! Now some banks got caught trying to act like us, handing out money to people who should never have been given it, then someone came up with this idea of selling, and re-selling debt. Big companies bought trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars of debt which were loans they would never have written if they were making the loan decision. (I always wondered by my mortgage kept changing hands.) And because the gun went off, they want the rest of us to save them.
I don't know if anyone has put this together yet, but I've got a feeling this massive tanking started with Enron. Think about it. Unregulated capitalists cooked the books, gouged the consumer, and made piles of cash before flying their airplane into the mountain. Then they were shocked with we decided to put them on trial. How is AIG, or Bear Sterns any different? We let them do really dumb things when the government eased the regulations that had been put in place during the Great Depression, you know, the last time unregulated capitalists tanked the economy.
These are the same guys who scream every time the government tries to impose cleaner air, safety, and financial transparency. They say anything you do to regulate them will put them out of business. Remember the last time the minimum wage was up for a raise? Jeez, you'd think we were putting the gun to their heads.
Government regulation doesn't kill business. This death spiral they're in proves that they don't need government regulation to kill themselves. They just need to be left alone. Unregulated capitalism appears to have damned itself by showing us that given little or no regulation, the fat cats will foul their own nest. It appears regulation has steadied the markets for decades and kept business afloat by preventing just what happened.
There is truth to Mr. Paulson's story. If we do nothing, the economy will death-spiral. I consider myself to be a capitalist at heart. The government can't solve our problems for us. And left alone, we find new markets and invent products everyday. But since it appears we have some companies that are "too big to let die", and they want our money to keep from dieing, I think it's time to put back those depression era regs. It would appear they had some value.
If a company is going to have this much say over all of our futures, they can't be allowed to act like private property. It's just not rational to allow a small board of directors to have that much power over the largest economy in the world. In fact, it's supposed to be illegal for a company to be "too big to let die". The original anti-trust laws were used to break up private companies that had gotten too large, and had too much power over the economy. Now we seem to think if there's another player in the market, it's OK.
I'm not saying go Commie or anything, but since the role of government is to provide an environment for the greater good of the populous (have a look at the preamble of the Constitution), that having a small amount of regulation is good for everyone. It's good for a stable economy. It's good for shareholders. It's good for workers. And although it might be a pain in the ass for management, it's good for them too. Perhaps they won't be bellying up to as big a trough, but the smaller trough will still be full for over-priced executives to swill cash from.
This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.
Dick Cheney Refuses to Come Out of His Secret Bunker
Four More Weeks of Fear and Empty Promises
Heard in the halls of various software companies.
"Anyone who loses the company 20 billion dollars should be fired."
"Do you think Prince Charles will ever take the thrown? Why would he want to be Queen?"
"Just think, in a few short weeks you'll have a whole bunch of new people to hate in government."
"I stayed up to 3 AM with two teenage girls after seeing Twilight."
"You're their mother, right? For a minute there I was having a fantasy."
"I haven't seen any Australian news. I'm an American, and we don't care what happens in your country."
I'm taking the rest of the year off.
Fek'Lar
They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?
Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!
Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.
From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people in the Bush Administration.
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EOJ
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