Talking heads and media pundits are all talking about how we are nearing a bottom or “leveling off” of the current recession. Personally, I don’t think we’ve found the bottom yet. I think once we find the bottom, the world is going to stay there for a long time. The “turn around” everyone talks about will simply get us back to the condition we were in several weeks prior to the bottom, then we will stay there a long time.

I’m not basing this line of thought on doctored up accounting data or other reports seer sizzled up by the same accounting firms who participated in the stock market and mortgage fraud cases we’ve been hearing about. I’m basing this on current trends and human nature. I think it will be at least a 30% contraction and it will last for 3-8 years.

Prior to our finding out just how void of ethics the mortgage/housing industry was (we always knew about the Realtors), the credit card companies were held out as the bowels of the Antichrist. They would issue credit cards to people’s dogs if an application had been filled out. (That’s not an exaggeration, I know someone that actually got a credit card for their dog.) Credit card companies had a seemingly endless list of tricks to jack up interest rates or charge excessive fees. Consumers got used to being rectally violated by these practices and started playing the “ 0% Interest Balance Transfer” game as a way of getting even. Of course, that game would only yield victory to those who stopped using their credit card for anything until the entire balance was paid off. You see, you had to pay the 0% balance off before any payments were applied to your new charges.

Eight years ago, it was nothing to run into someone with five credit cards in their wallet. Nearly everyone of these cards would have some kind of balance that was older than one month. There was a large group of people who thought it was OK to buy $140 pair of sun glasses, then make minimum monthly payments to their credit cards. Of course, the credit card companies encouraged this behavior. They even paid Congress to change the bankruptcy laws without lowering the maximum allowable interest rate. Retailers flocked to accept credit cards and also encouraged consumers to pay it off over time. If it wasn’t for consumers living well beyond their means, CEOs couldn’t possibly get those multi-million dollar bonuses.

Today, we see that the White House is about to spank the major credit card companies like they’ve never been spanked before. When they left the meeting in Washington almost none stopped to talk with reporters. They knew it was coming. There has been a mad rush to jack up interest rates on every card out there. Granted, a lot of that money grubbing is because the credit card issuers had a lot of exposure to the mortgage crisis. They think if they squeeze unemployed people who are behind on their mortgages harder from the credit card side, those people will suddenly pay things off. Make no mistake, it is usually “mortgages” for these people. They bought a house, went hog wild with the Martha Stewart decorating thing, ended up with massive balances on their credit cards, took out a home equity loan to pay off the credit cards, then ran balances up again. Now they are upside down on a mortgage and have just had their credit card limit slashed below their outstanding balance to generate more fees for the issuer.

Being a consultant, I try to never carry balances on my cards. I also try to never finance a car. I’ve seen too many consultants rack up large debt while on a long term contract only to have that contract suddenly end due to some funding/policy issue at the client site. Those are the consultants you find slithering into those absolute shit contracts offered up by EDS or the worse ones offered up by Verizon through the illegal alien vendor management system. The billing rate doesn’t even begin to touch a living wage, but it generates cash flow to keep gas in the tank and food on the table. It won’t begin to pay off a single debt. Those consultants will spend each day on the phone continuing to look for a new contract which actually pays a living wage. It doesn’t take long before they are fired, not because they couldn’t do the work, but because they put forth the level of effort such a wage deserved.

Enough consumers have either now been thrust into this undesirable situation or know people in such a situation, that credit card practices are going to change. The credit card companies have already started one massive push to bleed people while they can. I just got rid of my Bank of America card because they sent a letter stating the new interest rate minimum would be 8.65%+ the highest prime rate published in the Wall Street Journal for the prior two weeks. Talk about assholes! Since I don’t carry a balance, I called to cancel the card. My final bill arrived today. I also ordered them to remove me from their contact list. Most people forget that step. They have to actually remove you if you request it at the time of card cancellation. This stops all of those annoying “We Want You Back” letters.

I don’t think I’m alone in my actions. While I don’t consider myself the cream of the crop for credit card companies, (and since I locked down all of my credit to avoid identity theft, they can’t tell what I am), I can’t imagine people who don’t have a balance on a card getting a letter like the one I received and not cancelling the card. There was a time I was one of those people with five credit cards in my wallet (though I usually didn’t carry a balance on any), now I’m a person with exactly one credit card. From what I hear a lot of people are getting down to one or fewer credit cards. Now that most banks pass out debit cards for free and you can even use them to buy on-line through any vendor that accepts the credit cards of the same label, I don’t see a lot of overspending happening in the future.

How does this equate to a 30% or better global economy reduction? Many economies relied on Americans living well beyond their means. Some countries had even banked their entire economic and infrastructure growth on being able to sell as much as they wanted to American consumers. China is feeling our downturn even more than we are feeling it. The world economy isn’t ready to face American consumers having fewer than two credit cards in their wallet and never carrying a balance, but that day is quickly approaching. Once we hit bottom, that’s as high as we are going for a long time. It took over 50 years after the Great Depression hit before Americans started to live beyond their means in any serious way. It’ll take twice that long now. This time we don’t have to carry cash and checks.

Over the past few weeks we have been hearing stories about how every government in the Union is trying to increase revenue since the corrupt bastards that run the banking system were deregulated during the Clinton administration and allowed to continue running unchecked through the Bush administration flattened the economy. Since all of the elected criminals…errr…I mean officials view themselves as holier than thou (at least trying to portray such an image until we find out about cigar use in the oral office), the first thing they reach for is a new “sin” tax. Here in IL, that tax increase, plus mild price hikes by the manufacturer nearly doubled the cost of tobacco products a couple of weeks ago.

You know, this holier than thou sh*t has really gotta stop. They have already fraudulently lowered the blood alcohol level so far that you cannot walk through a room and smell an open can of beer with any hope of passing. Before they did that they taxed alcohol nearly out of existence, then they wondered why all of their tax revenue vanish. Gee, Einstein, what do you think happened?

Here in IL, and pretty much every other state that I have been to, the police departments have been horribly corrupted by both the legislature and the people who run them. Now; every raise, bonus, promotion, equipment upgrade, set of brakes for the squad car you’re driving, etc. all hinges on how many DUIs you issue. Law enforcement officers aren’t allowed to be law enforcement officers anymore. The system has forced them into becoming revenue generation machines simply to draw a paycheck.

Recently there was a big round up of police officers in Harvey IL on corruption charges of renting out their badges to provide security for drug dealers. The TV news had all kinds of officials putting their face in front of the camera saying how shocked they were that law enforcement officers would so quickly rent out their badge and the public trust. Yeah right! You manufactured them! You, the same person they are interviewing and a member of that same holier-than-thou cult which give us Al Capone, Murder Incorporated, and the first Heroin pipeline into America. You couldn’t remove all sin and form your religious Utopia with Prohibition, so now you are trying to get all sins taxed out of existence. I mean why wouldn’t you? Just look at the rousing success you had with Prohibition! That raid in Harvey was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your current round of success. In less than two years people will look back on the historic reports about corruption in the New Orleans police departments as the Norman Rockwell era.

I have finally figured out how to put this highly detrimental movement in check and help balance the budgets. The Holier Than Thou Tax. A $3 tax on every bible printed or imported into the United States. Doesn’t matter if they give them away, if it is created, it is taxed at the time of creation. Tax must be paid prior to the units leaving the printer. Same tax on every Tanakh and Quran and any other bible type book I’ve forgotten about. A $10 meeting tax will be levied for every service or other religious event occuring in a place of worship with the tax to be paid within 7 days of the event or service. Furthermore, the tax exempt status of all religious groups will be null and void, they will pay the same tax all other businesses pay.

Taxation has been favoring a religious agenda for far too long. It is time to enforce the separation of church and state by implementing the Holier Than Thou Tax. Uncle Sam will start looking forward to Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. They might even find the funds to help the Post Office stay open 7 days per week to keep the stream of revenue coming in.

It was a rather odd turn of events when Oracle jumped to purchase SUN. While they have been looking to have their own OpenSource Linux distro, most thought they were simply going to crush RedHat and take that distro over. Nobody really though them stupid enough to attempt going toe-to-toe with both IBM and what’s left of Microsoft while still trying to crush RedHat. Guess we all should have been warned about thinking.

This may very well be Oracle’s swan song. Yes, SUN is the originator of Java and Java is quite the rage. Yes, SUN is the originator of the codebase which hath become OpenOffice. Yes, Oracle got themselves an OpenSource Unix distro…well free anyway…that comes with an installed base, but to those of us who’ve been around a while, it sounds like the Quaker Oats buys Snapple deal all over again. Paid too much for a product that’s only going down.

Yes, most corporations are now standardizing on the Open Document Format. Decades of excessive fees and proprietary restrictions from Microsoft have finally taken their toll. MS Word is no longer the corporate document standard. There are, however, quite a few word processors implementing the Open Document Specification. IBM recently released the best implementation out there as far as completeness, Lotus Symphony. It has some missing features and some bugs, but hands down is without equal as far as implementing the complete specification goes. OpenOffice has way more in the way of recognition, features, and plug-ins, but it has some severe gaps when it comes to the implementation of the specification. Will OpenOffice ever manage to implement the complete specification? I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t look like they are heading in that direction right now.

OpenOffice has another severe flaw, it was written by Java developers not software developers and data architects. If you’ve been in the software industry for any length of time, you can spot applications with this fault just like you can spot applications that were written by Visual Basic programmers instead of software developers and data architects.

The easiest way to spot this problem is to create a large document with many screen shots, open the document in OpenOffice, then in a terminal window use the “free” command to check free memory. Kill off OpenOffice and open the same document in Lotus Symphony and try the “free” command again. I got forced into this little experiment when I was trying to port “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer” from a WordPerfect format to OpenDocument. At the time my machine hand only 2 Gig of RAM and I needed to keep both a 900+ page converter generated file open along with the new file I was pasting into. I started crashing badly when I got to around 300-350 pages in the destination document. That’s when I noticed that I was out of RAM and using swap.

Boosting RAM didn’t help. Started having the same crashing problem when I got to 400 pages. That’s when I pulled down Lotus Symphony and tried the experiment above. Symphony functioned well within the 2Gig limitation even with both documents open. Why? Symphony was written by software developers and data architects who happened to use Java rather than Java developers. They knew that throughout history we have had to restrict word processor type applications to only loading a few pages at a time. Java developers don’t understand such things. They want everything loaded live in the VM and that is how they design applications. Memory issues are someone else’s problem.

It is true that IBM has a large investment in Java, but it is also true Oracle won’t get away with trying to force commercial licenses down the throats of those currently using the language. No, it seems Oracle has stripped to the waist and decided it’s time for Microsoft to die.

Isn’t that an eye catcher? It is far more accurate than the pee-pee-ka-ka being spouted by “industry analysts”, big 4 consulting companies and MBAs everywhere. What these supposedly knowledgeable people are spouting follows:

“ We have to get off of VMS because HP is dropping support for the VAX.”

It’s very difficult to determine if this statement comes from genuine cerebral damage or outright intent to commit criminal fraud. In the case of the “industry analysts” and the big 4 consulting companies it is hard to believe the statement comes from anything other than an intent to commit criminal fraud and drum up some off-shore porting contracts. In the case of MBAs, they really do tend to have been dropped on the head repeatedly as children.

Part of the problem might be that VMS is VMS is VMS. The VAX to Alpha port of VMS was so clean that a lot of end users and managers had no idea their VAX was now an Alpha. Granted, the Itanium hasn’t lived up to any of its advertisements, but it is the current architecture VMS runs on.

Yes, HP is dropping support for the VAX architecture. They are no longer going to compile, patch, update, etc. VMS for that architecture. They also haven’t manufactured one of those CPUs in well over a decade, so…either the companies still running on a physical VAX have stockpiled a lot of old spare parts, or they have went the emulator route rather than migrate to an Alpha…or migrated to a different OS on the Alpha platform AND chose to run a VAX emulator in some kind of virtual environment. It doesn’t really matter. Odds are they haven’t been applying OS and layered product updates for a while. When was the last time anyone reading this actually got software on a 2400′ magnetic tape or a TK-50 from HP?

The Alpha is going to be supported until some time in/around 2016 and the Itanium (known as the Itanic by many) will be supported until some time in 2025. So, you have a very long time to make a decision. For those who can rip out the MACRO code in their home grown applications, they can mostly recompile on the Itanium and start running on an architecture with a lower support cost. Those of you unfortunate enough to have written production software with MACRO (assembler) have a much tougher row to hoe than most others. R0 ain’t what it used to be when you get over there. Higher level languages will be happy happy joy joy.

Microsoft hasn’t shipped an operating system or application which will run on the 8086 in years. This same group of “industry analysts” and big 4 consulting companies should be telling everyone to abandon Microsoft.

It was an inevitable outcome for a failed policy. The criminal fraud which has occurred with wanton abandonment over off-shoring had to end with Bernie Madoff style arrests and thousands of companies quickly trying to tidy up their books before the feds come in for a closer look. The beginnings of the legal brew-ha-ha began today with the auctioning of a piece of Satyam.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/India-outsourcing-firm-buys-apf-14909847.html

The criminal cases are going to drag on for years and involve many companies. Given the news and the closeness of growth reported by most other offshoring companies, Satyam wasn’t the only offshore company going for a Pulitzer with their financials.

Now, it appears, that the Fed has offered up something of a get-out-of-jail-free card to companies who were willingly participating in the offshoring scam which ran rampant through the business community. All you have to do is jump onto the backshoring bandwagon with both feet like this company did.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090406/ap_on_bi_ge/sallie_mae_jobs

It’s really quite amazing that you could be a company engaging in a practice which brought about world wide recession and have the Fed offer up a get-out-of-jail-free card. At least they are going to force one of the leading culprits into bankruptcy now. GM and EDS were at the root of the offshoring debacle, and they both need to be forced into bankruptcy with upper mucky-mucks servering lengthy prison sentences. Yes, HP owns EDS now, but they should have thought about the prison time before offering to buy a company which was going to be held accountable for its role in the global economic resession.

What to look for?

Over the course of the next 6 months, you will see large companies who couldn’t talk enough about their offshoring suddenly start talking about how many jobs they are bringing back to the U.S. They will also go deathly silent about their offshore divisions. Most of the offshore divisions will be spun off into “ partnership” type companies so the parent company doesn’t have to admit they have an offshoring business. The companies who don’t do this simply won’t be in business right now. Mom, dad, and Aunt Carol simply aren’t going to buy stock in your company. The “green” and “social conscience” funds seem to already be migrating to companies that have publicly sworn they will abandon offshoring before the end of the year. In less than 18 months, if you are a company that still has offshored some portion of your IT jobs, you simply won’t be able to give your stock away. Your competitors, on the other hand, will enjoy a rising stock price along with available credit.

Second thing to look for:

A re-writing of the charters for many “green” and “social conscience” funds. Oh, they will still be sticking to their values. They simply will want the investors of those funds to let them issue loans directly to companies which meet the fund’s investment criteria. The green wave is taking off and will run for at least 5 more years (longer if all governments officially admit we’ve passed the tipping point for crude oil). You can only help a company become green so much by purchasing its stock. The SEC will only let the company sell a limited number of shares. So, the next big thumb screw will come from the funds themselves issuing loans with a magnitude of strings and inspections to the companies they are trying to force to be green.

I’m a bit more interested in how people choose the books they buy, now that I’ve put out a novel. I’m also a bit more sensitive to the term “ Bestseller”. You really should be too.

Remember, back when we were kids and FM radio was just catching on? Remember how all of the DJs talked about “the charts”? We all thought that those were accurately compiled from actual sales numbers and call in requests. It wasn’t until some years later that most of us learned only a few major record store locations were counted and that all of the major labels had identified those locations. If they wanted to boost a record/album’s standing they would simply arrange a free giveaway of a couple hundred copies at one or more of the locations. When the next set of numbers came out the artist was skyrocketing up “ the charts” and they were a “top 10 artist”.

I haven’t yet figured out if the New York Times Bestseller List has a similar sampling flaw being exploited or if there really is some form of overall ethics in the listing. I do know that the secondary uses have nothing to do with ethics at all.

You have to understand the “wow factor” to understand what is honking me off. I see it in all of the writing and book business magazines. You read it in press releases for books and even in IT magazines when they talk about books. They usually couch it to avoid direct criminal prosecution, but some don’t even bother with that these days.

A bestseller from xyz publishing!

In part, I have to be pissed with the NY Times. All of us, from Junior High forward have heard about the NY Times best seller list. This list was supposed to convey accuracy and integrity. Even if you didn’t listen to your English Lit teacher telling you about it, you heard about it on TV talk shows. In the American Psychology, bestseller became synonymous with NY Times Bestseller. The NY Times worked to achieve this, then didn’t defend it, now, we get raped by it.

Some years ago, I became aware of the blatant abuse when reading some trash put out by PMA, now called IBPA or something like that. Basically a lapdog organization herding sheep to the slaughter at Amazon. There was an article talking about a member publisher’s “new bestseller”. When you dug deep enough to find the actual numbers you found out the book had “almost sold out its initial print run of 5000 copies”. To say that I had cognitive dissonance when discovering that would be an understatement.

I have even encountered the same thing with my own books. When “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer” came out, some write-ups referred to it as a bestselling application development book for the OpenVMS platform. Well, it certainly never made the NY Times list, but, the only book in print in that category so….technically they are correct…I just wish the NY Times had defended its turf somehow. When most of us here “bestseller” we think there was some process which went into measuring that title against all others. Sadly, that is almost never the case.

With all of the criminal investigation efforts being focused on Bernie Madoff and other financial fraud mongers, most of corporate America seems to think it has a “get out of jail free” card with respect to its own criminal activity. What has been building for several years is now out there in full force. I don’t know if Gartner and/or Accenture are actually advising clients engage in this criminal activity or if it can simply be explained away as “only clients gullible enough to accept 4 color marketing literature those two were paid to pass out as ‘Independent Industry Analysis’ are gullible enough to think they can avoid going to prison while committing this crime.”

We have seen contracts posted for billing rates well below 1/3 of the actual going market rate for some time now. Usually the companies had a system in place which would allow pimps to present candidates at actual market rates, then have the manager manually reject them as being “too high”. While this was unethical, it was legal. The newest venture into time and cost savings is to install a system which physically will not let a pimp submit a candidate which is outside of your chosen rate range. The pimps have to sign an agreement saying they will abide by this application restriction. At this point, multiple crimes have been committed. If you live in Illinois you are used to hearing these two crimes talked about a lot…Price Fixing and Racketeering. I think we hold the international patent on both. We certainly have enough high profile trials putting people in prison for both.

There is a MAJOR difference between manually saying you won’t pay a price after a candidate has been entered into the system and having the system block all said candidates from entry. Anyone care to take a guess at one more place where that difference comes into play?

Once management decided they wanted to illegally use H1-B labor when there were hundreds, if not thousands of qualified U.S. Citizens around, they basically said they wanted to commit this other crime. Trouble is, if any evidence exists that qualified candidates actually existed and had applied, you can’t hire that $10/day person. What do you do Aurthur Andersen? Why shred the documents, of course! In this case, you deliberately block the documentation from being created. Now you can fill out that form for an H1-B and show them no qualified candidates existed for the position.

The additional crime is perjury. It happens on virtually every application justifying an H1-B visa and is a crime more widespread than the mortgage fraud. Thankfully, the only thing federal investigators need to do to make arrests is to find out which companies had a vendor management system which allowed for the blocking of higher priced submissions.

Today was one of those days where I learned something I’ve always known. Everybody knows putting things off increases the cost of doing them later…with the possible exception of purchasing a new TV, yet even that will significantly burn you. Because so many people experience similar things, I added a category to my blog called “Thankyou Sir May I Have Another”. It seems appropriate for these types of tales.

Almost all of us have old programs or data somewhere we’ve been saving in case we ever wanted to use them again or have something to show the grandchildren. I probably have more of that than most given the fact I did significant work on multiple platforms and I’m by nature a pack rat. My office looks like the inside of one of those houses you see on the news where they find two old men dead inside with just tunnels to crawl through the trash heap which was their collected treasures. I’ve gotten a lot better, but this still isn’t the kind of place I would show anyone. One thing which really helped was the opening of an electronics recycling drop off center in Kankakee. I now try to make a trip there every couple of months to drop off all those treasures I was always going to “try putting on eBay before tossing out”. Given what I see for shipping charges and eBay auction fees, I’m never listing anything there again. Other than some memory which came with “free shipping” on the back of a camel which had to swim both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans before getting here, I haven’t even stooped to buying on eBay much lately. If I’m looking for new stuff I can always get a better deal with an on-line search than I ever find on eBay. Now the only time I visit eBay is when I’m looking for used junk…like my “new” Sony Mavica.

You might have guessed that I’m getting things ready for a trip to the electronics recycling drop off. It’s not too far from where I get my hair cut and it is getting close to that time again. In building the pile I came across those two 5 ¼ floppy drives I’ve been saving. Yes, I have some things on 5 ¼ floppy that “I’ve been meaning to copy off to disk one day.” I thought I would try making today the day when I “ got to it”. Believe it or not, I even had the “edge connector” floppy cable to go with them in a box on a shelf…Odd since I threw two massive boxes of old cables including edge connectors out a few years ago.

I was a good little geek. I dutifully did an orderly shut down on my machine. I opened the cabinet and even cleaned all of the dust bunnies out. (Leave a machine run 24×7 with 3 fans in it and you will be amazed at how much gets inside. Add in the occasional office kitty or visiting office dog and…well…you get the picture.) The motherboard port for the floppy cable just happened to be on the bottom edge in the most inconvenient place possible. I guess a lot of people don’t use floppy drives anymore. I know I keep my LS-120 installed, but mostly copy things off to USB these days.

Something in the back of my mind told me this wasn’t going to work. Perhaps it was the fact I had saved two 5 ¼ drives and didn’t mark either as 360 or 1.2? Perhaps it was simply that I had saved these two, but not my dual floppy drive which I always treasured…I did look on eBay to find some fool thinking they were going to get over $200 for one of those…think again.

When I booted the machine I left the case open and hit the DEL key to get into the BIOS. My gut told me this was going to be a bad day…it wasn’t wrong. There is Legacy Floppy support in this BIOS. It will operate either a 720 or a 1.44. If a 5 ¼ drive isn’t Legacy…how can a 3 ½ be? Just how much room could it actually have taken in the BIOS to leave the 5 ¼ code in? Obviously there is room because you have released many BIOS updates for this motherboard since I bought it. Who’s bright idea was it to nuke this?

I like my disappointment in small doses. I put off making today the day I “got to it.” There is still an old machine that used to belong to my parents gathering dust on a shelf. It was the first machine they ever owned which had XP on it. I’m sure it still supports a 5 ¼ floppy drive. Maybe before my next trip to the recycling center I’ll “get to it” then.