For everything from family to computers…
Jun Kang, a friend from the Austin years, has always had such an artistic side to him.
Here’s his latest project that he shared with me. 😀 It’s very enticing though it may not seem to have any major message. And that’s Jun’s voice interviewing Bobby. It definitely was a good break from all this financial turmoil and such…
Bobby HD from Jesse Armstrong on Vimeo
First, it took only two people to re-write my thoughts, ie. Joanna and Daniel. You guys do shed lots of light. Really. For me anyway.
So after much turmoil, I am re-thinking and re-hashing things here. I do realize that it will affect the much smaller mom-and-pop size small businesses, just as much as the larger corporations. I still couldn’t care less about the effect on the stock market though. But since we all have become such a global economy, I can only cave in and say this… “pump up the volume”. Not the music, but the volume of money into the economy.
But I still say that many of the things have to change, as many of the economists have said so themselves. First, purely investment banks like Goldman Sachs need to live up to higher standards. Second, if you are bailed out with the government money, we own you. Not so literally but in the sense that these companies will have to shape up and eventually pay it back.
While I still wanna agree with Ron Paul, I say we do so at different levels…. that the government pump in the money to those banks that make daily operations happen, so that small businesses could pay their employees, and so on. But in the end, I just want a financial revolution. I am sick and tired of pumping hot air into commodities when they don’t have that much value to begin with! Especially with crude oil prices! Fix that. Cap it. Whatever it takes to stabilize that.
While Daniel made good point with large bonuses to attract great management, it should come at some kind of conditions. Like if you let your company fail, you don’t deserve any [bonuses]. Am I bit naive about that? Yeah, you betcha. But that’s how the rest 90+% of us w/o some kind of financial degrees think. WaMu ex-CEO should really return that $18 million that he earned in 3 weeks ’cause he didn’t do jack.
In short, there better be a restructuring and monitoring within the financial companies. And lots of it. It was only a few years ago that Enron created a different type of disaster. If this happens again next time, I say return to the bartering system and to heck with it all.
EDIT: Joanna pointed me to a NY Times article that explains better the implications of the severity of the financial situation and why the bailout is needed (as much as we hate the idea).
Well, when you thought that things couldn’t possibly get worse, it did!
Last week, things got so bad for WaMu that government interjected and took things over… and then was sold to Morgan Chase! Yikes. And today, we learn that same fate was applied to another bank that I had thought was doing so well, Wachovia! They got sold to Citi Bank. Still, WaMu’s CEO, only after 3 weeks of working, got away with $18 million in payout! What the fudge?!
Not only that, we are bailing out three of our largest auto makers with $25 billion loan. Most (rich) people still want the government to bail out the troubled financial corps (for me, corpse) with $700 billion! What are you freakin’ insane?!
Sure not bailing them out will hurt. But things will have to get worse before they get better! This was all brought to us by our own stupid greed. We have to face the facts. If the government is the parent, and the financial corps are the kids, it’s time to stop bailing them out. Let them learn. Otherwise, things will never improve in the long run.
With Fannie Mae and Freddie doing so badly that the government stepped in to bail them out, and now with the $85 billion bailout loan to AIG and so many others, I am honestly just ticked. Off. All this means is that we, as tax payers, will have to pay for the troubled economy.
How did we get to this state? Greedy investors and companies. That’s the American way and dream, right?! And if people want less and less interjections and such from the government, what the heck are we doing allowing the government to take its claws deeper into the businesses?!
So what if Fannie Mae and Freddie’s going down will cause a turmoil?! Things will HAVE to get worse before they get better! It’s like a teenager that spent too much of his/her money and you practice the “tough love” portion to help the teen learn the valuable lesson. Yet if Bush administration wants to bail the entire economy out, no one will really learn anything.
I for one am sick and freaking tired of using my own money to help others. Let me be clear. I am sick and tired of helping other rich people from losing their money! I would rather want the money to go to help insure the poor families and such. Does this make me a Democrat?! Then so be it! But I still don’t like a lot of Democratic perspective on things, let alone the fact that I don’t like nor do I endorse Senator Obama (and don’t you DARE to accuse me of racism ’cause I’m not).
I just wanna end it with this saying that I didn’t think I’d use myself… “Bah, humbug!”
As most of you know by now, we fared well. I had to finish to some work from home and by 8 pm Thursday night, we were ready to evacuate as we were in the mandatory evacuation zone. 😮 So we headed west to Pastor Shawn’s place not realizing that there were already some evacuees already!
At least it was a good time to meet Pastor Luke and his family, as well as Shelly, who is new to our church. We avoided driving in the daytime because of heat and too much traffic on the road. Surely enough, by the time we left in the evening, traffic was almost at normal speeds.
Staying at Pastor Shawn’s is always a joy as there’s no stress. However, power went out on Friday late afternoon and humidity began to settle in. 🙁 So it was a great excuse to cook up all the Korean BBQ stuff in his freezer!! 😀 Whoot! Then came the Ike later that night. It was rather loud as expected… lots of gusts of wind and cracking sounds… but you know me, I slept like a baby.
On Saturday morning, it was evident that this storm was rather a powerful one. We had anticipated that knowing that this hurricane’s diameter was about 300 to 400 miles wide! However, upon visual inspection, it was even more so. Trees had fallen everywhere and fell everywhere. Power went out in 90+% of the Houston area. And surge had caused most of coastal areas to be flooded. We drove to Mike’s place in order to drop off Pastor Shawn’s freezer goods and noticed that damage was even bigger than we had thought. Here’s our ride in video…
Once the humidity was killing us, we decided to head over to John & Joanne’s place for shelter as they had power as well. We had originally planned to evacuate to Chung & Celeste’s home but they also had lost power. John & Joanne are another very hospitable family. Later on, Pastor Shawn’s family, Luke’s family, and Shelly came over for dinner and hung out. With TV, we had learned that the Houston downtown had suffered quite a bit of casualty as well and that due to more rains that followed, Houston was in flash flood warning!
So Sunday’s service was canceled due to flash flooding. Then Min & Daniel’s family came over for lunch. I had left our answering machine on so that we could find out easily & quickly if we had power or not. Well, power at our place had gone out Friday but came back on Sunday!
So after buying some more food and such from Komart (gotta give it to the Koreans for being open!), we headed home. Traffic and roads were fine. But at least 80% or more of the traffic lights were out due to power and/or damage.
Then I had found out that my work was closed for Monday. Anna’s school was canceled through Wednesday. Eventually, my work place closed for the entire week, and so was Soojin’s school, and Anna’s school! So we are having our unexpected week-long break. We had checked out Target the other day and still milk and dairy, as well as fresh produce were pretty much out. Gas was still in a bit of tight squeeze but we hope the conditions will fare better.
But in overall, we are thankful that all of our friends and family in Christ are well. We wanted to take this time to thank Pastor Shawn’s family and John’s family for always leaving us an open and welcome doors, and for everyone else for checking up on how we are doing.
None of our properties or cars were damaged but if you had, be sure to head over to FEMA website to register for possible reimbursements and repair costs. Be safe everyone!
What the fudge?! Two of the biggest mortgage financing firms are on the brink of disappearance, so much that the government is taking them over, and their CEOs still get to leave with millions of dollars?! I know our country is based on capitalism, but come on!! It’s bad enough that we as tax payers will be paying for the salvage of these two financial nightmares, but letting the CEO’s go with millions?!!
I say enough is enough! Let them all rot! 😡 Government needs to freeze those CEOs’ fat pockets when it’s their fault as well!! What happened to good ol’ fashioned “go down with the ship” mentality?! It’s gone, I tell ya. I hope the two CEOs have miserable lives! Erg…
I wake up this morning and get two e-mails from PayPal. They are receipts that get sent automatically upon paying someone. www.chinesetravler.com I don’t recognize the site and checked it out. The whole site is in Chinese!! 😡 My account got hacked obviously so I logged in to change password and such and then file a claim for unauthorized payments.
Later on, the website personnel called me to confirm if this was my own doing or not. Of course, I told him it wasn’t. I also filed for them to look into this case. While it’s not much, $52.50 total, it’s the CONCEPT that they could’ve taken a whole lot more!
Lessons learned:
I hope this doesn’t happen again.