link round-up

[cellio]

Maritan Headsets (from Joel on Software) is a long but worthwhile article on software standards -- both not having them early enough, and having them and trying to enforce them. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, like the paragraph containing this passage: "[...] but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it's raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purposes of hasLayout..."

Rescue me: a fed bailout crosses a line seems (to this non-expert) like a good analysis of what just happened to the market and the dollar. (Need a login ID? Try BugMeNot.) I am more scared, and more angry, about our government's economic policies than I've been in a while. As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

As long as I'm saying "too bad"... too bad, Michigan and Florida. Agreed.

On a lighter note: Garfield Minus Garfield is surreal. And since seeing it a week or so ago, I haven't been able to read Garfield "straight".

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'm all for personal responsibility as long as it applies to the industry as much as the individual consumer. On someone else's blog on the same topic, I idly wondered how much of the current "crisis" could have been avoided if there were a requirement that the institution that approves the mortgage has to continue to hold it (and bear the consequences of bad loans). My mortgage was sold twice during the first three months of its existence -- how can that promote responsible behavior on the part of the lending institutions? Unfortunately, any government bailout is going to primarily save the industry from the consequences of it's bad decisions and greed, rather than saving individual home-buyers from the consequences of their bad decisions and naive optimism.

Of course, I'm not in any of the current classic home-buying categories: neither an over-extender, nor an under-buyer, nor a wait-and-seer, nor an intended-to-flipper. So I can be annoyed at the possibility that other people might get rescued from the consequences of their own short-sightedness, but my own decisions would have been exactly the same even if I'd been omniscient.