Reduce spending? No, silly, this is government!

What will be the largest sector of growth for 2009? Government spending, perchance? Could be. It seems New York faces a budget deficit. Rather than doing what private industry must do, they increase their spending (albeit by a mere 1.1%) and finance the machine with tax increases. (What did we expect?)

Once the government takes active roles in, say, people's health--they are then obliged to dictate what will and will not be deemed healthy. Coercion from above.

The idea is to discourage consumption of high-caloric beverages — health officials estimate a 5 percent drop — and to raise $404 million in fiscal year 2009-2010 toward the state's multibillion dollar budget gap. Paterson said the proposal would raise $539 million in 2010-2011.

Where do I opt out? (Colorado, I hope.)

Tangled webs woven

I don't quite know what to think of this. But the connections made between various groups and nations is interestingly spooky.

Terror in Mumbai, MI6, CIA, RAW, U.S. Navy SEALs, Abdullah Azzam. Interesting.

Time for a little humility?

I found this to be quite the interesting article, regarding Chinese banks and their stake of the U.S. debt. When taking an Asian history class at ASU, we read one of this author's books regarding Japan (Looking at the Sun). Fallows seems to know what he's talking about. I imagine Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, also knows what he's talking about.

Shop rights bites Bratz

Wow, an epic case regarding shop rights. We students were warned about this issue way back in ASU's College of Design. A toy designer at Mattel apparently created the concept for the successful Bratz dolls line while still working for Mattel. Apparently that violated a contract of some sort. By the article at Bloomberg, I couldn't gather whether this was from use of on-the-job time or a moonlighting project banned by non-compete agreements. I wouldn't be surprised if Carter Bryant (the Bratz designer) pitched the Bratz concept to executives while at Mattel--only to be shot down. Bad call, eh?

The success of the Bratz line really chewed into Mattel's Barbie profits, so we can clearly see why Mattel was upset. But I wonder what everyone has learned from all this. The stodgy stance by Mattel with their Barbie line is clearly lacking in appeal to this younger generation--an appeal that the Bratz line met directly and quickly. The bottom line is that Mattel never managed to compete with this new appeal. What will they do now? Are the Bratz to be shelved? Will we see some of their features migrate to the Barbie dolls--a sort of pathetic compromize between winner (Bratz) and loser (Barbie)? Sure, Mattel won the lawsuit, but that's a mere battle in the war. If they choose to fail by ignoring the success of the Bratz line, someone else will create a knock-off Bratz line and Mattel will find themselves in the same position, once again. What's to hinder Carter Bryant from using exactly that strategy? Fine, don't use the Bratz name or any names of the dolls, but this market has already been established, and could soon experience a vacuum, depending on what Mattel chooses to do now.

It will be interesting to see how Mattel handles this. Yes, I'm a bit jaded. As I see all the time, the world is not necessarily one in which the large eat the small, but in which the fast eat the slow. Why is corporate America bent on failing at every opportunity? They are not attacked by the super-large, but by the super-agile. And hence, I eat my lunch.

The best government money can buy

I've often wondered why, exactly, I'm not represented by my representatives. Not only do these makers of laws not actually write the laws they pass, they often don't even read them. Apparently, they don't need to read them. They are mere pawns of those who pay well to get laws passed in their favor--writing the bills is just icing on the cake. It's symbiotic, so I'm not sure we'll see this system go away any time soon.

This linking up of the new blood with the old system is covered by this CNN article and called "education". Gotta love that. If calling something what it is will make waves, call it something as near the opposite as you can get.

You want representation? Show me the money.

Careful what you say...

In early October, I made an off-hand comment to a friend that the Dow Jones Industrial Average might fall into the 6,000 range (about half its value at the time). Well, it's looking like I'm no longer very far from that number. Nice.

I have difficulty in finding optimism for the situation, too. What's going right? The treasury is clearly out of control, as are our central banks. What might have been a recession will almost certainly now be a depression--with global consequences. How will the U.S. fare? I don't know. What do we manufacture and export anymore? We import almost everything (something with which I'm quite closely familiar, since over90% of my designs are manufactured in China). Lots of currency flowing outward, lots being printed from inside. This may result in momentary deflation, but I can't shake the idea that "printing" one third of our GDP in a couple of months can only lead to staggering inflation in the near future.

The bottom line is that we no longer have a standard of value for our currency. It's based on--what?--faith? Not a very robust means of determining value these days. Gold stocks sell for less than $800, whereas real, physical gold can hardly be obtained at whatever price you like (the old $20 U.S. gold pieces are selling at over $1,000 each).

Might be time to get to know some Amish folks...

4.3 TRILLION of something--guess what?

That's a big number, eh? This is the number of dollars recently doled out by our most benevolent mother, as reported at CNBC. How is mother paying for this? Well, I don't think she is, but she is able to "print" dollars at will, so who cares, right? I do. Ultimately, anyone holding or earning money is paying for this.

My big question is how am I being represented in all this? (Isn't it about time we had another big tea party?) Wouldn't it be odd if the folks responsible for making laws actually followed some of them? Maybe start with the constitution, and throw away anything in conflict with that document as a start.

Oh, well, who is John Galt? As Dennis said in Monty Python's Holy Grail, "You don't vote for king". No, Dennis, you don't. You also don't vote for the secretary of treasury or anyone running a central bank.