Bailing Building and Loan

Now CitiCorp or, CitiGroup, or whatever it’s called, gets a massive bailout in the blink of an eye. Why them and not the auto industry? As I’ve said, I think GM, Ford and Chrysler had decades of warning, but at least they manufacture something. All this money being borrowed by the feds that will eventually have to be paid back with higher taxes, and yet the credit market is still frozen.

Why, after all of this, is the whole concept of the global economy not being questioned more? Sure doesn’t seem to have been a very good idea, after all. I just watched a segment on The News Hour about the situation in England, and since September it seems to be suffering more of a short, sharp shock than what we have in America.

I hate software

I’ve been working on a couple of items about last weekend in New York that will have numerous images. But the browse feature for the upload function within WordPress when using Firefox stopped working. It worked in IE 7, but then I ran into a different problem with that. So I went back to Firefox, determined to figure out what happened. Eventually, I remembered that I’d taken an update to Abode Flash recently and, sure enough, when I disabled it as a Firefox add-on, the browse button re-appeared.

Ya know, I’m really, really tired of this sort of [insert anagram of the word “this” here]. Why the [insert word that rhymes with luck here] should Flash interfere with this function within an editor? It’s [word that rhymes with clap] like this that makes me say I’m glad I figured out what the [rhymes with bell] was wrong, but it’s late and I give up for now so I can go to bed and go the dentist in the morning. Eventually I’ll get to publish what I’ve been trying to get to for the past three days, but haven’t been able to due to illness and technical inanity/insanity.

Ah. Here we go. Wish I’d found this an hour ago. Big problem, and in the release version of Flash 10, too.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/177127

DON’T USE FLASH 10 WITH FIREFOX! Did I mention I’m really tired of this sort of stuff?

P.S. I downdated to Flash 9 and browsing to upload media files is working again.

Let GM Suffer

OK, I know I said GM should be allowed to fail, but that was my immediate reflexive reaction. They should be allowed to suffer, the executives and the unions alike, but something will have to be done.

I abhor the idea that a corporation is “too big to be allowed to fail,” because it means companies are motivated to grow by any and all means — past the point of economies of scale and into inefficient bureaucracy — as sort of an insurance policy. But seeing 100,000 jobs disappear overnight, rather than maybe 25-30,000 as would be needed for a reorganization, is unacceptable.

I like an idea I heard on NPR while I was sick in bed. Let Exxon-Mobil loan the auto makers the $25 billion. Why should it be the taxpayers floating Detroit? Washington should strong-arm the oil companies. Get tough and threaten to put the CEO’s in front of a Senate panel, under oath. Start asking about price gouging, and don’t let the dramatic drop in gas and heating oil prices soften the questions about windfall profits. Why not?

And if the loan ends up coming from Washington, there better be a lot of strings attached, take it or leave it. No compromise on new mileage standards, for example.

Sibley on Mickey’s Birthday

This morning on the BBC World Service I heard (while writhing in agony from my ailment) our blogging friend Brian Sibley talking about Mickey Mouse’s 80th birthday. There’s audio of Brian talking about Mickey, that’s a bit different from what I heard this morning, at this link. And over at this link, Brian has an essay about the significance of the mouse, all these years later.