One of my favorite quotes i've run across lately comes from The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security: It is often easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart.

Not doing something dumb... That's something I know a lot about. For example, my digital piano. Well. A picture's worth a thousand words right? So, We'll just start right off with this:

Here you can see the result of doing something dumb. Note To Self: Never spray any thing from an aerosol can into any electronic device blindly. See, it all started with the E key sticking. It ended with Tri-Flow being sprayed in between the keys, resulting in the D, Eb, E and F keys not functioning. Oops. I would have been much better off not doing nothing.

And then there's politics. As with any election, the candidates are talking about what they want to change. Well duh. Nobody should be surprised at that. I would strongly challenge people not to get caught up by change, but rather to realize that change for the sake of change is not a good idea. Now one of the best eye-opening articles I've read lately is this from the new york times, The Vanishing Republican Voter. The statistics on health care costs are probably the scariest. The fact that over the past 8 years businesses are paying employees substantially more, it's just all eaten up by benefits - particularly health care costs - just, well, sucks. Of course, the average person doesn't know this because the companies are sucking up the costs. So to the average person, their pay is stagnant. However, the overall economy has been doing well, if we could just "fix" healthcare, the average person would start to see the benefits again.

Now, all that was written before this past week. Obviously the mortgage industry has screwed all of us too. Now, a good question is, what is the government's role in "fixing" problems in the market? Clearly the financial world is complicated in that the Fed is so tightly integrated into it, as are other quasi-government organizations, that it blurs the line between government-controlled and free-market, I think you need a Ph.D. in... heck, I dunno what, I was going to say economics, but this is way bigger than that. Frankly, I've tried to research and understand everything that's going on, read news articles, etc. but for me to really 'get it', it would be a full time job I think. The one thing we should learn from this is how decisions made long ago take many years before you can see the negative effects. So when people say that the prosperity in the economy during the Clinton era was more a result of what Reagan did, they're probably right. Not to discredit Clinton, economically I think he did a wonderful job too... but he should be credited for the generally good times we had in the Bush era, if you don't take into account y2k, the 9/11 attacks and accounting scandals, etc. Of course, I do sorta remember Clinton talking about reforming health care... that obviously never happened. But, I have my thoughts on that and that's not for this journal entry. It's long enough as it is.