What explains the Obama phenomenon?

The polls still show Obama with a significant lead over McCain.

That, despite his long and close associations with Rezkos, Wrights, and Ayres. That, despite the flip flops on NAFTA, public financing, Iraq and surveillance. That despite his comments on guns and faith.

Come to think of it, Obama has no resume other than a speech he made in 2002 (he never voted according to his convictions on Iraq war). And he really has nothing to offer other than hope.

What hope?

That he will get jobs back to the US. That he will improve the schools and the hospitals and infrastructure. That the US will usher into a green energy revolution.

And how will he do that?

Here's where you hear the deafening silence. There are no plans. Just hopes. Of course there's this plan to tax the oil companies because of their record profits. And to tax the wealthy.

While I truly believe that just like you can't drill your way out of the energy crisis, you can't tax your way out of this economic crisis, I will focus on the other important question - what makes Obama so appealing to the voters?

Firstly, people are very outward-looking. They get easily swayed by looks and appearance. Obama is a fairly decent looking guy. He dresses well. And yeah, he speaks well (you could contrast him with Hillary who used to stretch her sentences like "And we will go all the wayyyyyyyy", and McCain who, my friends, speaks like a sad man).

Secondly Obama knows that blaming the current administration always works because people are generally fed up or just bored with the current administration. It just helps more when you have an economic, housing and energy crisis at hand. And if you blame them long enough, people actually start believing that.

Thirdly, Obama knows that if you promise people the good life (with great schools, hospitals and infrastructure, and jobs and high tech jobs in green energy, and cheap energy etc) they will like you without questioning. (They don't trust the Nigerian emails where they are promised a share of millions of dollars if they could claim the money in a Nigerian bank, but they will gladly trust a politician without question).

It just helps that Obama is 46 and McCain is turning 72. The ageism is on his side.

Obama has very carefully cultivated a rock-star image, playing basketball and pool for photo ops and playing rock music in his meetings. He knows that the American youth can be easily impressed with these symbols of Americana, and since the young tend to earn less, the promise of taxing "them" just impresses them more.

He speaks nice to each community. He talks about going easy and diplomatic with Iran, yet talks about protecting Jerusalem to Jews. He talks about nuclear energy to everyone but no Yucca Mountain in Nevadans.

Overall, Obama comes across as a very shrewd politician who plays his cards extremely well. Whatever might be Obama's negatives, you can't deny that he is one of the most clever and calculative politicians of recent times.

And at least that is a good thing.

The collapse of Indymac Bank : Bad Omen?

Today evening the FDIC took over the beleaguered Los Angeles, California based Indymac Bank.
The rumors had been circulating for over 6 months - it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the final straw came when Chuck Schumer, D-NY went public with his comments on the bank's liquidity crisis and its ability to survive the housing crisis. Over $1.3b was withdrawn from the bank in the last few days. Indymac tried to offset this by increasing its interest rate on deposits to 4.55%, but apparently it just wasn't enough.

Schumer should be answerable for his irresponsible act of taking his comments public.

FDIC says over this weekend, people can use ATM to withdraw their money but can't use telephone banking or online banking. Ridiculous!! It is discriminatory against people not local to Los Angeles area (or where ever Indymac bank branches don't exist).

As I write this, the indymacbank.com website is down.

Most of the customers with deposits in the bank are safe because it is FDIC insured for deposits up to $100,000. Overall, 96% of the deposits in the bank are FDIC insured. The bigger problem is going to be more of the impact on the psyche this event is going to happen.

What does it mean for the overall economy? Monday would be another bloodbath in the stock market. Secondly, the world's faith in the US economy will take a beating, and as the world's investors move to withdraw their investments in the US dollar, the value of the US Dollar would fall. This in turn will increase the price of oil. Gas will become more expensive, and inflation will increase. Overall, it will hurt the American people.

Let us now keep the crystal ball away and keep our fingers crossed. Lights, camera, action ...

A small (and free) hosting solution !!

Recently I heard in a forum about how some people want to be able to have their own small private website without paying for it.

OK, my take on this is - don't do it. Its generally not worth it.

1. Firstly, hosting is ultra cheap now. I have a domain (www.stockeconomics.com) and it costs me ~$9/yr. The hosting used to cost me like $4 a month (when I was hosting it - I am too lazy to do anything, so not hosting now). Overall cost was like $4.75/month. Ultra cheap by all standards. Now I am not advertising for the provider I used so I'd not take names.
   
2. Secondly, and the bigger problem is security. If you have your home PC running your website, I would never be sure if you've secured it enough that no one can break into your system and steal your information. In running an HTTP or a FTP server on your PC, you're inviting anyone on the internet to be able to connect to your PC (albeit on port 80 or 21 respectively), but depending on your application and security it provides, someone will some day manage to break in.
3. Most service providers' terms of service specifically disallows you from doing this. They will ask you to buy static IPs or business class service from them. They monitor port 80 or 8080 for activity. If you're running only a few MBs a day, you'd probably get away with it without noticing, but if you become greedy, they will notice and shut you down. Of course you can find ways around that too - run your HTTP service on a different port, or tunnel it through a VPN. I will discuss the second part sometime later.
   

Enough said.

If you really want to go ahead and do it, you can try what I did as a proof of concept.

1. I registered with dyndns.org. I created (say) abcd.dyndns.org.
2. I went to my router's configuration page. My router is Netgear MR814v2, and I have a link for Dynamic DNS configuration. If you have a different router, see if you have Dynamic DNS confguration. I provided DynDNS user name and password (from #1) in my router's configuration, and specified the port (say) 1234 to be used.
3. Set up Port Forwarding on my router for port 1234 for the computer (say) 192.168.0.7 in my network that will host my HTTP application(s).
4. I ran the Apache HTTP Server on my computer (192.168.0.7), on port 1234.
5. Opened the Windows firewall for Apache application.
6. Went to my browser and typed in http://abcd.dyndns.org:1234/. It works !!

The good thing is that you're running your HTTP traffic over port 1234 instead of 80. So no one will notice it immediately, though someone can simply run a port scan on abcd.dyndns.org to see that you have port 1234 open.

Do share your experiences if you try this.

Why Democrats don't understand, and Republicans don't listen?

America is a nation divided. Vertically. Into Republicans and Democrats. Republicans call "them" "left-wing, liberal nut-jobs", and Democrats call "them" "right-wing conservative nut-jobs". Both are right. Both are wrong.

How can I tell? Because I am neither Republican nor a Democrat. Heck, I am not even an American, so there are a thing or two I know about the world that most Americans don't. Ah and yeah, having lived in the US for 5-odd years, there is a thing or two that I know about Americans that most non-Americans don't.

Republicans are still living in the past

Republicans still think that the US is the most powerful country in the world and war is a solution to all foreign policy issues.

No more. Firstly, the strength of a country is not in its military alone, but also in its economic strength. US is militarily strong, but it is not economically as powerful as it once was. If you remember, USSR was as powerful as the US once, but it was brought down to its knees because it stumbled economically. It did not lose its military might till the very end - it had a big fleet of high technology fighter airplanes on the ground - but no money to fuel them.

Secondly, the wars that are fought now are not the conventional wars - they're more like Gurilla or terrorist wars where pure military might is of little, if any, significance. Come to think of it - US could not win in Vietnam and Somalia, and lately the victories in Iraq and Afghanistan can be summed up with this quote "Once you hear of the details of victory, its hard to distinguish it from a defeat - Jean-Paul Sartre".

Finally, even a small nation state, like N Korea or Iran can now stand up to the US on the might of their nuclear weapons. Conventional warfare just does not cut it. There's Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) of course, but a small crazy nation state like N Korea does not care because it really does not have anything to lose, while US has everything to lose.

Republicans still think that Global warming is a sham propagated by the likes of Al Gore

Maybe it is propagated by Al Gore. Maybe it was done to gain power and control. But moving beyond the political aspects of it, are the physical aspects of it untenable? It is obvious that if you burn carbon-based fuels, you release CO2 in the atmosphere, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so it traps more heat from the sun than O2 and N2 would. This is Physics 101. If you don't believe CO2 is given off by fossil fuels burning, or CO2 is a greenhouse gas, you're bordering on insanity. If you believe the earth is heating because of the natural heating cycles of the earth, why push it even more so that it goes over the top? Some Republicans that I talk to tell me that the earth is actually cooling, and 2007 was the coolest year in last 15 years or so. Balderdash. The 8 hottest years on record have all occurred in the years since 1998.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recenttc.html

What is wrong with the Democrats?

Democrats still believe in robbing Peter to pay Paul

Democrats still believe in higher taxes, especially the higher income people to spend on the "unfortunate". This is so stupid because

1. This reduces incentive to work. If one is "earning" without working, he'd rather not work and "earn" a little less, than work and earn a little more (and see a big chunk of earning taxed away).
2. The "unfortunate" (or anyone for that matter) does not appreciate something that is not hard earned.
3. Higher taxes are bad for the economy - they drive away the industry. Why would someone set up a true multinational in the US if the US is going to take 40% of their profit away, if setting up the same company in another country can reduce the tax liability by 90%. A case in the point, Schlumberger, the oil drilling company is moving to Dubai.
4. If the industry moves away, there goes your employment, and there goes your taxes. Is that too hard to understand?
   
5. What part of never kill the goose that lays the golden egg you don't understand?
6. This country was founded on the notion of "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". It is pursuit of happiness, not provision of happiness.
   
7. This is Capitalism, not Socialism. US is prosperous because of enormous wealth creation by Capitalism. Socialism didn't work in USSR, it didn't work in North Korea, it didn't work in East Germany, it didn't work in China (till it shunned its Socialist/Marxist policies in favor of Capitalism).
   

Democrats still believe that they can tax companies to keep jobs in the US

This is an erroneous view of the world. Companies shift jobs overseas to cut costs and stay competitive (and of course make profit - but then isn't profit the motive in any enterprise? Is this charity?). You tax them to keep jobs in the US, and they lose their competitive edge. Believe it or not, but at this time, there's nothing in this world that cannot be made outside the US. The world is a competitive place. You tax your companies, the companies would simply close shop and move.

Democrats still believe that war is not the right thing, and they can use diplomacy instead

Maybe, but its not a given. Some people just hate the US. It has no rhyme or reason. If Iran wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, its not because of a reason, Palestinians or otherwise. Its just what it is. The world is not a rosy, quiet, friendly place. Just like Republicans are war mongers, Democrats are diplomacy mongers. US does indulge in a lot of diplomacy, but a lot of it is covert than overt. Of course it also indulges in a lot of overt, rather than covert operations. Diplomacy is not a panacea for all ills, and it ticks the Republicans off that Democrats don't get this.


There are stark differences between Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, instead of talking and resolving these differences, they resort to shouting each other down. This is a nation divided, and it does not bode well for the country.