Cramming on the phone bill

The Wall St Journal has run two articles on cramming in the last week. Cramming is the practice of the phone company to pin charges from third parties (porn sites, get rich quick schemes, telemarketers, etc) onto phone bills. In many cases the harried home owner, trying to get the bills paid, just writes a check covering the phoney third party charges. The Journal mentioned several regulatory actions in the works to slow it down.
The phone company should NEVER bill customers for anything except phone service. Third parties who want to get paid should submit a bill, on their letter head, with an self addressed return envelope inclosed. The phone company should not assist anyone in getting money out of their customers.
We can do something about this. The New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission regulates our phone company and can tell them to stop cramming.

So what does it all mean?

Well, it has some minor , very minor cuts. It avoids a government shutdown. The cuts are not very big, nowhere near big enough to come anywhere close to balancing the US budget. And they are mostly fake cuts. And they don't come into effect until the "out years" (2021). Congress in 2021 isn't going to pay any attention to budget resolutions passed back in 2011. Just like today's Congress pays no attention to resolutions from 2001. Which is why discussing the US budget in terms of ten years is essentially deceptive. All and all I don't understand why the democrats are crying so loudly about the cuts. Cause there aren't any, really.
We don't do a tax hike. That's a goodness. Hiking taxes in the depths of Great Depression 2.0 is a bad idea.
We have made it clear to all the voters that the US is running on empty, money wise. That little fact has been concealed by the msm up to this time. Getting that truth out is worth a lot of hassle.
We have a lot of losers. Obama, Harry Reid, and the democrats look like losers. We don't have very many winners. John Boehner comes out looking pretty good, but that's about it.

It's a bug, not a feature

Black Box, my trusty Compaq desktop has been running slow for some time. I had been thinking it was the network until youngest son complained the Black Box was slower than his laptop. So I started out on the traditional virus hunt. Ran Task Manager and saw an unknown process called jqs.exe. Some Googling on the name revealed that jqs stands for Java Quick Start, and the jqs process was loading up during boot time, downloading a good deal of java run time code, and constantly querying something to stay up to date. Unless you run Java programs every day (few of us do) you don’t want jqs sucking up your memory or your run time.
You gotta be careful what you see in Google. One Google reference gave a lengthy removal hand patch involving the always perilous Regedit, and then a download button that tried to sell me something called Spyware-Doctor. I backed out of that sales pitch and found another reference that suggested the Java Quick Start could be disabled thru Adminstrative Services.
Procedure.
Start->Settings->Control Panel
Click on “Administrative Tools
Click on “Services” (gear wheel shaped icon)
Find “Java Quick Starter” in the list of services.
Just to check things out, right click on the jqs service and select “Stop” . After a pause it should report jqs is stopped. This merely stops jqs from running right now, it will restart next time, and I do this just to make sure that the gear wheels are meshed and working right.
Now right click on jqs and select “Properties”.
Select the “General” tab and then set the “startup type” to “manual” There are three start up types, Automatic, Manual and Disabled. Automatic means load at boot time, every time. Manual means only load when needed, and disabled means never load no matter what.
When you reboot, you should no longer see jqs in task manager. On Black Box the improvement in Web surfing speed is very noticeable.

Words of the Weasel P 20

Heard on Meet the Press this morning. "a balanced deficit reduction package" really means "a tax hike".
"Compromise" really means "vote my way".

The Republicans voted a debt hike thru

Now it's the democrats turn. Despite a lot of democratic whining, the House bill doesn't cut much, the cuts are fake cuts, and the balanced budget requirement is popular with all the voters. If the democratic Senate and the democratic president shut the government down, the bade vibes ought to accrue to the democrats.
Also amusing is seeing Barney Frank, the man who gave us Great Depression 2.0, arguing that a downgrade of US debt by the Wall St rating firms doesn't mean anything.

They vote their districts

Elected officials, US reps, State reps, Senators, selectmen, usually vote the way their district wants them too. These guys all want to get re-elected, and the way to do that is to vote the way their district wants.
On issues where the the district doesn't care, the rep can vote the way he likes, or trade his vote. On issues where the district cares, the rep has much less freedom. For instance, my district (Northern NH) doesn't care much about Gulf of Mexico oil drilling, immigration, or farm subsidies. This means our US rep, good old Charlie Bass, can, on these issues, trade his vote pretty much at will and we voters back in the district don't care much. On the other hand this district cares a lot about taxes, fuel prices, and jobs. On these issues Charlie has no discretion at all. Should he deviate from the district line, it will cost him in November and he knows it. We all have email and Cornerstone, the Tea Party and a bunch of others make sure we get the word about how Charlie voted on the stuff we care about.
Recently as the US economy has worsened and more voters find them selves out of work, the districts begin to care about a lot of things that they didn't use to give a hoot about. Which restricts the liberty of their reps to wheel and deal. Which makes it harder to get things like tonight's debt limit bill thru the Congress. Speaker Boehner is to be commended for lining up the votes to pass his debt limit hike bill this evening, it must have been hard.

Credit default swaps not saving Greek investors

The infamous credit default swap is not saving "investors" (aka speculators) in Greek debt. The Greeks are broke and will not be able to pay off their debts. Everyone knows this, and has known it for a long time. Desperate Greeks are offering 8,9,10 percent interest, which is a helova lot more then you get for investing in US treasuries. So a number of gullible Euro banks have been buying Greek debt and hedging the risk by purchasing "credit default swaps" (CDS) on the Greek debt. A "credit default swap" is like insurance, an equally gullible bank or insurance company offers a CDS which works like this. You pay me a hefty premium up front, and if the Greeks default, I'll pay you what the Greeks owe you.
With connivance of the EU central bank, the Greek debt holders are being coerced into "extending" the maturity of their Greek bonds and accepting less interest. In short, the Greeks don't pay, and they cut the interest rate. The lucky gullible investors find that the CDS won't pay off until the rating agencies (Standard & Poor and Moody) declares the Greeks in default. So far, the rating agencies are claiming the Greeks aren't defaulting, so the CDS's aren't paying off even as the investors are getting a haircut.
All is not bad. Investors should not be pouring valuable capital down the drain by investing in Greek debt, they ought to be investing in things that make money and provide jobs. Having the gullible investors who thought they could reap high interest risk free get skinned will wise up the rest of the bunch.