Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Househusband: Day Three

Househusband went on strike today. OK, not completely on strike, but I didn't accomplish what I wanted to today. I must have fallen asleep reading or something, because I have about three hours I can't account for. I need a hobby or something.

Anyway, the web is still quiet; even other bloggers are noticing a fall-off in traffic and comments. Probably has something to do with a third of the country being in the deep-freeze. But I did find some things of interest.

I love the guys that do Yahoo's Tech Ticker. Yesterday, they had a piece on the bank bailout, with special attention paid to Citi, who just put up a $10 billion loss. Stop the charade, indeed. As much as I hate to see private industry nationalized, I find having profits privatized and losses socialized even more disturbing. If Citi is so poorly run that it needs 10's of billions in taxpayer dollars to survive, then shareholders and bondholders should be wiped out. End discussion. In Citi's (and other national bank's) defense, they have stopped sending home equity loan offers to our apartment....

Retails sales in December were worse than expected and pushed retail negative for the year for the first time in a quarter century. Duh. This is, of course a "disaster" because retail sales "plummeted" 0.1%. Welcome to reality.

Under-18 girls are being arrested for child pornography for taking naked pictures of themselves with their cellphones and sending them to their boyfriends. Child porn is illegal on the theory that the person taking the pictures is exploiting the child and the child cannot truly consent as they are not of age. So in this case, we have 15-year-old girls being charged with exploiting themselves by taking nude pictures of themselves, and not consenting to themselves to have the pictures taken by themselves. For this, they will be dogged for life with felony child porn charges. And to repeat what I said a few days ago: what exactly did these "children" do wrong? Please support your answer with the appropriate moral framework that does not include any reference to deities.

And Warner Music Group again demonstrates that they are run by mental defectives. Which is more: $.01 times 1,000,000 views or $.10 times zero views? If you pick the former, you have a higher IQ than the entire executive suite at WMG.

Cool video:



Love JoCo.

2 comments:

Michelle said...

I suspect I may have been one of those bloggers you mentioned moaning about a lack of traffic, so here I am, reading, noticing and giving feedback, cos it's nice to get :)

I've read that story about the girls before, and I'm afraid I can't give you any possible justification for blaming the kids that way, it's just insane.I mean it's a complicated issue, whether it's wrong for girls that young to be sending nude pictures of themselves and whether it spells the ruin of society etc etc etc.. (for the record my personal belief is no), but that's not the point. Even if you personally think those girls are being exploited by their boyfriends and/or a society which sexualizes girls too young, or that they're nasty sluts, have no self esteem, are ignored by their daddies.. who the hell thinks that prosecuting them is a good idea! It's just insane, whatever way you look at it. Grrr.. Jan

Ric said...

And thanks for stopping by. :-)

Things just seemed really quiet the last week or so. My traffic is way down, other blogs I regularly visit are posting a lot less or not at all. Like everyone is just holding their breath. Getting past next Tuesday will certainly help here in the US. Maybe.