No, it doesn’t.

Foreclosures are a natural way of the system healing itself. If you drink too much, a hangover is the body’s way of trying to return to normal.

The best thing for foreclosures is not to try to stop them, but to instead speed them up, and humanely help those being foreclosed upon into housing that better fits their needs, to prevent them from being homeless. That means taking the dummies who are in a McMansion and moving them into an apartment, not letting them stay in their McMansion for another three years.

What a ditz. Geithner was underwhelming, this guy doesn’t seem much better.

The NYTimes has a noxious statement from the recipient-in-chief at Chrysler, Robert Nardelli.

“Chrysler will be viable,” said the company’s chairman,Robert L. Nardelli. “An orderly restructuring outside of bankruptcy, together with the completion of our stand-alone viability plan and enhanced by a strategic alliance with Fiat, is the best option for Chrysler employees, our unions, dealers, suppliers, customers, and certainly the taxpayers.” The company is exploring a deal with Fiat to share products.

So he mentioned the employees, the unions, the dealers, the suppliers, all of whom have political clout.

What about the shareholders? Oh, right. Chrysler is a private company owned by some very rich guys on Wall Street. 

This brings to mind an old story:

“”Once in the dear dead days beyond recall, an out-of-town visitor was being shown the wonders of the New York financial district. When the party arrived at the Battery, one of his guides indicated some handsome ships riding at anchor. “Look, those are the bankers’ and brokers’ yachts. ‘Where are all the customers’ yachts?’ asked the naïve visitor.”

Katie Ittner, a hairstylist at Awilda Salon on Robertson Boulevard, said she had a client who called in tears because she could no longer afford to spend $95 to $250 to get her hair colored and had no idea how to do the job herself.

On a recent weekday at Gallery Michael, where the Picasso prints run from about $2,000 to $700,000, fine art consultant Robert Avellano said he opened at 10 a.m. and did not see a customer until 2 p.m.

The unexplored story here is who else has joined CSPI in suing Coke. Suing large companies like Coke is a lawyer’s dream come true. Coke has so many billions that even the most jaded lawyer starts to get excited.

If you read the article carefully you see that “The other law firms involved in the case are Reese Richman LLP and Whatley Drake & Kallas, LLC.”. These guys are professional litigators, and they are going to squeeze a few hundred million out of Coke. In exchange, Coke will get a “settlement” that prevents anyone else from suing them, and the consumers will get a fifty-cent coupon.

Coke wouldn’t care about CSPI suing them, but when these law firms join the game, then Coke starts to take the suit seriously.

Here is a great post from NY Observer on how to watch the 2009 Presidential Inauguration Online

But instead it has degenerated into trying to find pictures of giant bunnies on the big bad web.

It all started when I saw this photograph of a monster rabbit.

Huge rabbit

Some old guy in Germany had sent a bunch of ‘Giant Gray’ rabbits over to North Korea. The North Koreans apparently thought a rabbit breeding program would provide a cheap, abundant source of protein.
The North Koreans are desperate enough to try anything, I think. But my curiosity is what the greater Internet thought about this. So I turned up a myspace page about a giant rabbit, and a website that debunks hoaxes. I also found a really funny video of some roosters putting the smackdown on a pair of brawling bunnies.

I think a better solution for the North Koreans would be to try to grow lentils since they are high in protein. Rabbit meat has 21% protein by weight, while chana dal, a lentil whose Latin name is Cicer arietinum is high in protein, is 22% protein, higher than rabbit.

I am quite distressed by now, so I think the best solution for a protein and food starved nation is to throw itself at the mercies of the USDA. This US agency will be glad to provide tons upon tons of Government cheese, enough for the North Koreans to turn themselves obese, like their South Korean brothers.

Unable to write a decent piece of prose

This could be a huge story: an online software provider decides to buy 40,000 licenses. This is the kind of story that propels a small company towards an IPO.

Webguild.com, a website with 73,000 unique visitors per month, put up an article that dumps on Google, saying that GE picked a competitor’s product.

But there are several glaring problems with this story.

I tried Zoho’s project software and found it having several nitpicky problems. I don’t like their simplistic help interface. I don’t like the way they write their English, which is too wordy and obtuse. Their software also loads slowly.

This article says GE picked Zoho’s software but it leaves out several critical details. The first is, if I was GE, I would not let my information stay offsite on Zoho’s servers. I would ask for a dedicated server onsite in my data center. So, is this what happened? If so, is this a new offering for Zoho targeting to the Fortune 500?
It also does not point out the biggest difference between Google’s offering and Zoho’s offering: price. Google’s products are FREE while Zoho charges money.

Chinese electric car MilesEV Sedan

In previous posts I had written about how the electric car company Tesla’s choice to manufacture its own cars in San Jose, CA was a huge mistake. I had also written about how the decision by the City of San Jose to give Tesla all sorts of freebies was a dumb idea.

Today I see an article that should send Tesla’s backers scurrying for the hills, and should prompt the mayor of San Jose to pull the plug on the giveaway. The long-promised for Chinese electric car is here, it’s called Miles Electric Vehicles, and it looks pretty viable to me. For $35K (or $55K, not sure yet) you get a sedan that goes 120 miles for $3 worth of electricity. It’s called the Miles XS500 and you can read about it at forbes.com or at autobloggreen.com

Highland Dance Competition

On the left I have a screenshot about Highland dancing. I am not sure what it is, but even if you win at it, it doesn’t matter. Just like the electric car race. Even if Tesla ‘wins’, it will be immediately run over by the big guys.

Yesterday I blogged about how Tesla should not have been given 89 acres for free in San Jose, and how Tesla’s decision to build a factory in Silicon Valley is a bad idea.

Now there is some news that Chrysler is going to come out with Electric versions of their cars. This presents serious competition for Tesla.

I doubt Tesla is going to be a real company five years from now. They may produce a few cars, but I doubt they will survive more than two or three years.

Tesla should not even have bothered to setup an assembly plant. There are plenty of automobile manufacturers around the world that would have manufactured an excellent car. I am sure that any of the Korean car companies, that are hungry for business, would have gladly done a joint venture-and picked up a lot of the risk along the way. These Chinese would have been even more eager to strike a deal.

Tesla’s thinking just doesn’t make business sense.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…