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

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

That NYT article was full of beans. Completely and utterly full of beans.

Bear Stearns screwed up. Big, bad, bold and brash and for a very long period of time. The managers and owners are getting their teeth kicked in for it. (They are paid annual bonuses for performance - they aren't getting any for 2008. They get paid in stock, which is worth nothing to them. They own nothing, now. There was no "moral hazard" here.)

In times of plenty, there is capacity to absorb the failure of a bank with as many customers as Bear Stearns. This is not one of those times. Not only would there be failure, and many thousands of customers punished (and who would lose their shirts), but if the Fed didn't act, there could be trouble.

There are LOTS of banks in similar pain to Bear Stearns. It was the worst of them all, but not by as much as one might hope.

Plus: that industry runs on confidence, investor confidence, which is in very short supply.

"Saving" Bear Stearns (and they saved it like that village that was burned in order to save it), is actually preserving all the other banks, and if they collapsed there goes your company, your pension, and maybe the bank that has yours savings. And perhaps even the dollar, and who knows how far it would go?

It was necessary, it was smart.