All done trick or treating

Well, we're finished trick or treating and I'm exhausted. Thing 2, my two year old was practically asleep in her mouse costume before we got home. I'm pretty wiped out too, but Thing 1, my 5-year-old is BOUNCING off the walls. too much sugar. But I guess that's what is supposed to happen right? Anyway, I have sorted (read stolen the good ones) her candy, and she is brushing her teeth. Now for some javascript and then some sleep.

Halloween costume

It's Halloween today and I am going as somebody who SHAVES. New thing for me...

My point exactly

http://mobile.chicagotribune.com/news.jsp?key=183951&rc=op This is a nice little piece on how Obama is not a socialist. I think I would like this guy.

Song bag

I found this old backpack full of song lyrics in my basement. Some of these songs were something like 20 years old. Must be 200 songs in there. After reading them, I was surprised at how many I could remember. I was also surprised at how uncrappy they were. There was at least *one* good thing about all of them. Maybe I'll record a few, just for fun.

On another note - you can hear my band The Foibles here until I decide to change everything..

And here's the sunset

Wow, what a bookend to this morning's sunrise.

Why all this nonsense?

I'm tweeting, I'm blogging all over the place, I'm on facebook. I guess I'm just trying to assemble content. Like now I'm on the train, why not continue to communicate? I've decided that people who try to be mysterious are usually very boring.

Query to get earnings

Stupid software. Here’s a nice query to get earnings by year by customer. The billing history table is historysummary.

SELECT customers.customername, SUM(historysummary.total), year(historysummary.invoicedate) from customers INNER JOIN historysummary ON historysummary.customer = customers.customer GROUP BY customers.customername, year(historysummary.invoicedate) ORDER BY year(historysummary.invoicedate), customers.customername

New beginning

This is what I saw from the el platform this morning. I was late for work and grumpy and bleary-eyed from too little sleep.

I hope my camera phone caught it. I'll have to look at it later. Sometimes, it seems that as hard as we try, we'll never do anything as cool as a sunrise.

From the PHONE

Just seeing if I can do this from my phone... Late in my kitchen - who needs twitter? Open the floodgates!

Broke people get dumber. Dumb people ruin nations.

I'm broke, like everyone else I know. All my money goes to mortgage, food, education, health insurance, transportation to my job, Gas bills, Electric bills. I don't have cable, and I drive a 10 year old car.

People get all fired up about wealth redistribution. You know what wealth redistribution looks like? When it's done right, it looks like Social Security; elderly and sick people getting what they need to live. When it's done wrong it looks like AIG spending margin and fee money on $500k executive retreats. Taking their profit (which came from investors like us) and using it to pad their lifestyles.

Don't give me any crap about hard work. I just read this:

Although sociological research on the subject wealth is relatively new, economists have long been studying wealth. Economic research has shown that family wealth has grown considerably over the past several decades as housing and stock markets have soared (Wolff 2002). Wealth inequality has also increased substantially over the same time period. Inequality in wealth far surpasses inequality in income. The top 1% of U.S. families control over 38% of the country’s wealth, and the top 5% own almost 60% of all wealth. One of the potential consequences of this rising inequality is that families with wealth will use it to create more opportunities for themselves and, particularly, for their offspring.

from this site: http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/3/9/0/p... It's a good paper. I know that we don't read 20-page papers any more, but it's a good read.

My point is, we have been living in essentially the most free market of all economies since the eighties. Bill Clinton, though a democrat, still geared the nation's finances toward the free market. As a result, the rich are REALLY rich and the middle class are poor, and the poor are broke.

Broke people get dumber as a whole. Dumb people ruin nations. You cannot save America by creating an environment which allows the super-rich to sustain itself and actively exclude anyone else. You can save America by funneling it's resources back to the people where they belong.