The other half of "Artists Ship"

I hate responding to RFP's and do my best to avoid them altogether. I completely agree with the article below. Although he doesn't mention RFP's directly, the cost of various corporate policies are the same.

Paul Graham - Artists Ship

These checks have started popping up in security reviews as well. We recently had one prospect suggest that the owner of the company should not publish code that he wrote directly to the production servers out of fear he might introduce malicious code. Really?

U.S. Agrees to Citigroup Bailout

WASHINGTON – The federal government agreed Sunday to take unprecedented steps to stabilize Citigroup Inc. by moving to guarantee close to $300 billion in troubled assets weighing on the bank's books, according to people familiar with details of the plan.

The full article is here but you may need to subscribe.

WSJ - U.S. Agrees to Citigroup Bailout

At the end of 2006, Citigroup was the fourth-largest company in the S&P's 500 Index with a market value of $274 billion. This was near the height of the bubble. Not sure where I'm going with this but the government still has not done anything to help the ailing real estate market and we continue to pour insane amounts of money into financial institutions that knowingly undertook massive risks.

Every one of them should fail and the money should be injected into the consumer segment through extended unemployment benefits and mortgage relief.

Ouch ....

What is it about babies ...

You simply can't help but laugh with them ...

I hope they are all electric ...

The worldwide fleet of cars is estimated at 700 million today and is expected to be 3 billion by 2050 with China producing almost 1 billion of those by then.

I certainly hope they are all electric or that we have figured out the pollution thing by then.

Economist - The Art of the Possible - A special report on cars

Makers ...

Ideas like FabLab at MIT, eMachineShop, and the TechShop keep me optimistic that the tinkerers and makers out there will keep churning out really cool stuff.

Some enterprising people turn these ideas into great business concepts like Squid Labs

I remember reading an article a while back about a professor at MIT that took $10,000 worth of equipment into various economically depressed areas around the world and the children in those areas would create really interesting things. Some developed tools to make farming easier ...why were these tools never conceived by the brains at the corporations around the world?

I'll see if I can find that and post as well.

The Great Bailout

I heard on NPR that GM has over 7,000 dealers throughout the US and Toyota has 1,500.

So Toyota is able to take marketshare from GM with less than 25% of it's distribution channel?

The discussion also mentioned that the auto dealers association lobbied state lawmakers to make it virtually impossible to renegotiate the contracts once they were in place.

They UAW also has a Jobs Bank where more than 12,000 are paid to do nothing. Jobs bank programs -- 12,000 paid not to work

Should we hand an industry that simply does not understand how to compete more money to burn? Of course not ... let the market work its course. Those that can compete and whose theory of business is sound will survive, others should perish.

Significant Swings

I'm not entirely sure what all this means but whenever charts move like the ones included in this article are doing, it can't be good.

Two signs that something is seriously wrong

Denny Crane

Do I really need to say anything more?

Possibilities

Saw news about this a few times but I think this was the first with pics. These printers can now be found in TechShops around the country and will soon be available for almost anyone to purchase. This is cool stuff ...

10 Things 3D Printers can do now