Chase Bank Website Down Again

Back in 2007 Chase's website went down. Looks like it's happening again, and it seems to be a more serious outage this time. Look at all the nasty comments over here!

It's been about 24 hours since the outage began, and people are worried about not being able to pay their bills on time. Some are also worried that the bank is the recipient of a malicious hack job. Whatever it is, hopefully they'll get it sorted out soon.

Social Security: Massive Ponzi Scheme

That Social Security is a decades-old, massive ponzi scheme that is reaching its foregone conclusion sounds pretty right to me. To quote a very interesting article on Bloomberg,

[Overwhelming debt] is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.

The article delineates the reality that our government is totally bankrupt, but that thanks to politically expedient obfuscatory financial labeling, government debts are bearing down on us under the radar.

The article concludes,

Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: “Something that can’t go on, will stop.” True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.

And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.

Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it’s the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.

Hold on tight, this is gonna get rough.

New Tron Legacy Trailer

10 degrees of cool.

The Grades Your Grades Could Be Like

Unless you've been disconnected from the Internet for the past few months, you've seen the universally praised Old Spice commercials, which have taken on a life of their own and launched actor/former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa into superstardom.

There's a parody of those spots making the rounds this morning--promoting none other than the Harold B. Lee Library, on the campus of my alma mater, Brigham Young University. The execution and delivery are nowhere near the impeccable Old Spice productions, but it's not too shabby. Check it out.

Poetry in Translation

A few years ago I stumbled across a technique to turn mundane text into wacky poetry – using the amazing Google Translate tool.

Here's a sentence from a news story from this morning.

In its first ruling on the rights of employees who send messages on the job, the Supreme Court rejected a broad right of privacy for workers Thursday and said supervisors may read through an employee's text messages if they suspect work rules are being violated.

And here's the glorious poem that results. (The line breaks are my own addition.)

In the first Human Rights Award

them the right way,

the Supreme Court rejected the rights and privacy

of its kind to work

last Thursday, he said,

can read text messages to officers, staff,

we suspect violations of the trade rules.

The technique? Simply translate some text into another language using the Google Translator. Then take the result and translate that text into a third language, and so on. Finally, translate it back to English. If you've done enough translations into enough languages, you should end up with something fairly presentable.

My example above translated from English to Afrikaans to Arabic to Belarusian to Catalan to Traditional Chinese to Czech to Irish and then back to English. Voila!

Human Flight to Mars - 20 years behind schedule

I stumbled across this 1969 news article stating that President Nixon wanted achieve a manned Mars landing as early as the 1980s.

Of course, back they all believed that in 2010 we'd have flying cars and unlimited energy. I guess dreams just became too expensive. They probably got sucked up by government social programs.

What's a crisis? Just about everything, apparently

How do you define the word "crisis"?

To read the news, that word covers just about everything. Here's a short, top-line summary of news topics from the last 24 hours featuring the word, "crisis."

financial crisis

debt crisis

Catholic abuse crisis

Madagascar crisis

oil spill crisis

energy crisis

Korean military crisis

Boy Scout abuse crisis

Asian financial crisis

Stephen Baldwin's cash crisis

Niger food crisis

Thailand's political crisis

MGM's financial crisis

school budget crisis

mortgage crisis

California budget crisis

Iraq election crisis

health care crisis

Iceland volcanic crisis

Canadian political crisis

student debt crisis

Toyota sudden acceleration crisis

Vermont dairy crisis

food crisis

Florida avocado crisis

Latino youth crisis

illegal immigration crisis

global warming crisis

Indian radiation crisis

obesity crisis

Now I'm sure that Stephen Baldwin considers his cash flow a serious issue. Even a crisis. But for me, it doesn't even come close to that definition.

How about something bigger? The Iceland volcano crisis. It shut down European air travel for days and cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. A true crisis? I'm sure it was to the stranded passengers, or to any airline employee who lost a job as a result. To me? No, not really.

Surely the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico counts as a crisis. That will cost billions in cleanup and damage wildlife, tourism and fishing/shrimping in the Gulf states. It will probably even increase the cost to fill up my tank. Yes, paying that extra $0.20/gallon will suck. But to me--it's not a crisis.

The economy? Okay, I'll go with that one. The effect of the mortgage meltdown and recession have without a doubt affected my economic well-being, and I surely would be living a much more comfortable life if certain economic opportunities hadn't evaporated. So yes, by that sort of estimation, the state of the economy is a crisis.

My point? "Crisis" is entirely subjective. It's a cheap word used to push news stories. If it's a crisis, it must be important. Sure, it's important. But usually only important to someone else.

The biggest crisis in my life right now is a loved one undergoing surgery and treatment for cancer. This crisis eclipses every other issue that concerns me or even holds my interest.

When a news story tells me something is a crisis, it's telling me what should be important to me. It may be preaching something that I happen to agree with, or that I am truly concerned about. But please: Stop cheapening the word, "crisis."

I'll decide on my own if it's important to me.