Tirade against Federal Budget and Bank Bail-outs

I'm so tired of hearing all this pointless drivel about the economy and the banks and new Stimulus bill. The basic fact that never seems to get stated is this:
The banks lost our money.

So what do we do about it? So far it looks like the only politically expedient solution is to 'print' more money, devaluing our remaining money in the process. But there are other solutions and there's also more back-story to how we got here.

The really important issue that's being ignored is the so-called -- and NON EXISTENT -- Social Security Trust Fund. For decades now the government has been using the excess income from social security withholding to paper-over our deficit spending. Now that money is going to come due and IT'S GONE. Printing more money could 'fix' this problem, too, but only if we stop cost of living adjustments (COLA) and thereby screw all the people who are expecting SS to support them.

Frankly, part of me isn't sympathetic. I mean, all the baby boomers who are about to get screwed by SS are the same people who've been benefiting from artificially low government deficits -- yes, LOW, because otherwise the deficit would have swelled long ago, and taxes would have had to have been raised. So why should I now have to pay all those 'back taxes' ?

Back to the first issue re banks, why isn't anyone talking about a 'windfall profits' tax on real-estate speculators? These are the people who sold houses at the top of the housing bubble (in 2005/06) but did not turn around and reinvest those funds in another house. This is where all "the bank's" money went! It should be easy enough to find these people based on their tax returns. I don't mean to be punitive, in fact, I congratulate them on their financial acumen (and luck). But isn't this the very definition of "windfall profits", i.e., profit at the unreasonable expense of others?

Since the FDIC is totally gonna run out of money I say we recover some of that lost money and directly funnel it back to the original 'owners' via FDIC bailouts of personal savings.
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Why Renting Beats Buying A House

Did I write this while I was asleep? It sounds exactly like something I would say :-)
http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/5-reasons-renting-still-beats-buying.html

Basic premise: Home prices never change!
When accounted for inflation and expenses the (financial) value of owning a home is a wash. So treating it like an investment is foolish. For hundreds of years home prices have been a constant-function of the cost of owning them, no more, no less. And the housing bubble of the past 8 years was totally predictable, and has yet to finish deflating.

The author also makes note of this Atlantic article which envisions less future-need for home ownership,
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography
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Circuit City Liquidated at Full Price, amazing!

My hat goes off to the company that liquidated the old Circuit City stores. I've been dropping by every couple of weeks, waiting to find a deal on any of several pieces of equipment. And when I heard that this was the last week I thought My Time had finally come. I'd even prepared for this by signing-up for a new VISA card, one that included extended warranty coverage -- i.e., I could get an extended warranty regardless of where I bought something.

But I just went by my local Circuit City and almost everything is already gone! And the few remaining pieces are still full price?! By "full" I mean typical street price, not the fictitious "suggested retail" price. And half the remaining stuff is demo units, too. Who's buying this stuff? Must be P.T. Barnum's friends....
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More fuel for anti-Mortgage Deduction fire

Apparently I'm not the only person who's still worked-up about this. Yesterday's NY Times had an essay calling for the gradual elimination of the mortgage deduction,
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/killing-or-maiming-a-sacred-cow-home-mortgage-deductions/
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The Mortgage Interest Deduction has to go!

I have been waiting for years, literally, to buy a house. My wife and I even made offers on a couple of houses back in 2003 (we were outbid, no surprise) before deciding "this market is a bubble" and waiting it out. Now, we're house hunting again and I've been consumed with the idea that prices got oh so high in part because of the home-mortgage interest deduction. In general, I think the deduction has been 'priced-in' to the cost of houses so it doesn't really save anyone money. But when I tried searching for the history of the deduction I found that the issue was much more complicated than just that.

A great source of information is this 2006 NY Times article,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305deduction.1.html?pagewanted=print

Basically, there has been an allowed deduction for 'interest' since the beginning of time (or, at least, the introduction of the American income tax). Until 1986 you could even deduct your credit card interest. Surprisingly, the mortgage deduction is only used by 1/3rd of homeowners? The presumption is that most people don't itemize their deductions, hence they can't claim their interest payments.

Much as I disagreed with him on most issues, I gave kudos to GW Bush for pushing 'tax simplification'. The panel he empaneled even proposed doing-away with the deduction but GW refused to support it, knowing what a political hot-potato it was.

In 2005 there was a widely discussed Slate.com editorial supporting the idea,
http://www.slate.com/id/2130017/
Clearly, there's already been a lot of discussion about the why's so I'll just let those links speak for themselves.

The one thing I wanted to add to the discussion was this suggestion:
Gradually phase-out the deduction at a rate linked to inflation.

In other words, existing homeowners would continue to receive the same deduction they originally expected (and no doubt factored into their purchasing decision). But the deduction would go away as the time-cost of their money also reduced their mortgage cost. So these existing homeowners wouldn't 'get ahead' like they'd expected. The whole point of this (beside 'tax simplification') is that new buyers like myself would get better prices on houses.
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Finally, a dual-cpu HD video player

The new DivX v7 is the first video player (that I know of) to support dual-core CPUs. This is a major development as all previous software was unable to coordinate both halves of a now-typical dual-core. So you had to have a really fast CPU to play high-definition videos especially if they were encoded in the new h.264 format. Now, with DivX 7 you can manage it with a much slower dual-core, i.e., with older machines.

Unfortunately, this is only available on Windows (not Linux).

I've done some quick testing and so far the program lives-up to it's claims! I was able to play a 1080p h.264 clip on a dual-core AMD Turion 1.7 GHz, which is about a 3 year-old model. With all previous programs this processor could only play it at half-speed. Now, it can just barely play it at full-speed, and only if the video is full-screen (not windowed) and without anything else displayed on screen such as the mouse pointer.

One problem, however, is that it does not appear to include any deinterlacing. So even though it's fast enough to play 1080i AVCHD clips they look terrible because of the interlacing artifacts.
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Further info on playing AVCHD

I've had a chance to test this on several computers now and can make the following clarifications and improvements to the suggested procedure.

NOTES

• You need at least a ~2.4 GHz processor. It doesn't playback correctly on my 1.9 GHz whereas it plays-back with spare cpu cycles on my 2.7 GHz AMD X2, as well as on a 2.7 GHz Intel Core2.
• The existing 0.9.4 version (in the standard repository) plays AVCHD just as good as the newer "1.0~git" nightly. So there's no need to go through uninstalling, adding the 'nightly' repository etc. But you may still need to reset the configuration files.
• The UI on the 1.0 version has a lot of bugs, so it's preferable to use 0.9.4 in that regard.
  

TWEAKS
There are 3 changes you should make in the configuration:

1. in Tools > Preferences, under Instances, enable "Allow only one instance".
2. Click on Show Settings:All (radio button in bottom-left). Under Input/Codecs > Other > FFmpeg,
   set "Skip loop filter for h.264" = ALL
3. under Video > Filters, on the right-side screen, scroll down the page to the second listing (for Video Output Filter Modules) and enable "Deinterlacing video filter"

That last change re deinterlacing will cause VLC to default to "Discard" mode which uses the least CPU. If you have CPU cycles to spare, of course, you could then go down into the Filters > Deinterlace settings and select a better mode.
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