I sure hope people are paying their taxes.

Because otherwise the trough would be half-empty.

I sure hope IBM paid all their taxes and didn't play with any tax optimization schemes...

Oh yeah, he also emptied the White House of the taxpayer-provided decorations when he left including some stuff that was hanging around there for quite a few decades time. And IIRC, the window curtains. Just sayin'

Quand c'est foutu, c'est foutu!

And then....

"Some would say Clinton got his second term and budget surplus because of the dot-com boom, so maybe he should be Bubba Dot-Com. It has been almost 20 years since Clinton was first inaugurated, and Clinton said it was hard to believe it has been that long."

Yeah. Here's something that was written in January 2001. It still applies to January 2013. It's hard to believe it has been that long.

Clinton's legacy, January 2001

White House insiders have said for years that Bill Clinton has been desperately seeking a legacy for his administration – other than having been impeached and having disgraced himself and his office. At long last, he has at least two of them.

Clinton’s second legacy will be soaring prices for oil and electricity. All during his presidency, he and his underlings conducted what amounted to a jihad against energy producers, along with owners of other natural resources. A soft economy in Asia mitigated some of the inevitable price increases, but reality finally came to bite Clinton and company this year with a vengeance. It will be up to Bush to follow more sound policies, although the same groups that supported Clinton’s anti-energy policies will hog the media spotlight if the new president follows economically-sound policies....

No such luck with Dubya of course, but let's stay on track....

The Fall of the Dot Coms

Dependence upon the Keynesian paradigm keeps Business Week and its allies from understanding the nature of the current business slump. The current high-tech morass is not due to any lack of aggregate demand or quirks in the tax code. Instead, we are seeing once again the classic business cycle as first outlined by Ludwig von Mises in 1912 and again by Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard in later works. This seeming cluster of entrepreneurial errors has come about because Greenspan and the Fed shoved billions of dollars of new money into the economy, triggering malinvestments that now must be liquidated. Any scheme – monetary or fiscal – by the government to reverse this current trend will only make matters worse.

However, as Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek would have noted, the pattern of new investment did not fit the pattern of consumer spending. While the advertisements for some of these new startups made a big splash during the Super Bowl last January, they didn’t translate into consumer demand for their products and services. By the late summer and early fall, many of the once-hot Internet stocks had plunged to near-penny stock levels. The Austrian Business Cycle theory, ignored by academe and the political classes, had once again proven true.

Self-serving politicians and their self-serving retconning

Woah, let's just immediately hit the buffers here. Ex-President Clinton should slink back to where he came from. While arguably fighting rearguard actions against retarded conservatives out for blood, he gave us Clipper Chip Proposals and an endless stream of Big Brother Productions, laying the groundwork for the 21st century perversions of Bush/Obama, he bombed Yougoslavia for no good reason, wrecked Iraq for no good reason, gave us no progress in the Middle East, exploded with philandering extravaganzas onto TV, revved the "dot com" bubble (the latter by ordering up some easy money from the serial mumble Greenspan so as to look good politically) and I don't know what else.

Ok, back to basics. What do I hear?

"If you are interested in particle physics, earlier this year, finally at the CERN superconducting supercollider – which I tried to build in Texas, by the way and you may remember your former senior Senator, Lloyd Bentsen, who became my first Treasury Secretary, came to me and said we were trying to make a budget deal back in 1993. And he said, 'We can't get the votes unless we give up the supercollider.'"

Ok, here's the actual story...

From "The Decline and Fall of the SSC" by John G. Cramer -- Alternate View Column AV-84

"It is common wisdom in Washington, D.C., that it is dangerous for a large project to span more than one Administration. Bush was defeated by Clinton in 1992, and the SSC project came to violate this rule and suffer the consequences. In 1993 the incoming Clinton Administration made a budget-tightening decision to stretch out the SSC project, moving its date of completion from 1999 to 2003, increasing the overall cost of the project while reducing its yearly cost. The SSC cost rose to over $10 billion, a 16% cost increase. The budget-conscious freshman Congressmen swept in with with Clinton in November of 1992 felt no responsibility for the decisions of their predecessors, and the SSC project became a tempting target of opportunity. Clinton's new Science Advisor John Gibbons did not give active support to the SSC project, as had his predecessor, Alan Bromley, and Clinton's new Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, now famous for her million dollar travel excursions, proclaimed during her confirmation hearings that she was "not passionate" about the SSC. In September, 1993 when her passions were finally aroused, she took the counter-productive steps of re-shuffling major SSC contractors and increasing the already bloated oversight team to 140 bureaucrats in the Dallas DOE Office. Before the two critical votes in June and October, neither Clinton nor Gore was willing to make personal appeals to House Members on behalf of the SSC, as Bush had in 1992. The final blow to the SSC came late in 1993 when the DOE's Baseline Validation Report was released. The validation group surveyed the sorry history of SSC cost escalations and concluded that extreme conservatism was needed. Their report advocated much larger safety and contingency margins and moved the completion date back to 2004, increasing the project cost to $11.5 billion or another 15% increase. With this, rank-and-file members of Congress had had enough. They were fed up with the ever-rising SSC price tag, the evidence of poor management and DOE indecisiveness, and the heavy-handed attempts by Congressional Leadership to save the project. On October 27, 1993, by a vote of 283 to 143 the House rejected the Conference Committee report that would have continued SSC funding. The project was officially dead."

"McAfee said he was scrupulous about paying his taxes"

I think this tax thing is fast becoming the new-age "are you or have you ever been a communist" thing, and maybe an "is your pedigree provably aryan" thing.

"list of shame"

What kind of shame is that, then?

The same one invented by Good Honorable Citizens and People In Power And Need Of Money on which ..err.. "money lenders" were once put?

Well...

All the nostalgia and reminescing is appropriate, but I have to say I find it even better to have robots checking out the outer reaches of the solar system or planetary surfaces while engineers safely ensconced in white-collar bunkers check their weak transmissions for newsworthy data.

Of course, there are not nearly enough robots. And they are all energy and delta-V starved. And there should be at least a few doing 0.01c to the Oort. Up with the robot program! Bring on the nuclear propulsion. The universe demands it!

Or one can let depression set in while reading Ballard... "The Dead Astronaut":

"Cape Kennedy has gone now, its gantries rising from the deserted dunes. Sand has come in across the Banana River, filling the creeks and turning the old space complex into a wilderness of swamps and broken concrete. In the summer, hunters build their blinds in the wrecked staff cars; but by early November, when Judith and I arrived, the entire area was abandoned. Beyond Cocoa Beach, where I stopped the car, the ruined motels were half hidden in the saw grass. The launching towers rose into the evening air like the rusting ciphers of some forgotten algebra of the sky...

Already, too, the relic hunters were at Cape Kennedy, scouring the burning saw grass for instrument panels and flying suits and – most valuable of all – the mummified corpses of the dead astronauts.

These blackened fragments of collarbone and shin, kneecap and rib, were the unique relics of the space age, as treasured as the saintly bones of medieval shrines. After the first fatal accidents in space, public outcry demanded that these orbiting biers be brought down to earth. Unfortunately, when a returning moon rocket crashed into the Kalahari Desert, aboriginal tribesmen broke into the vehicle. Believing the crew to be dead gods, they cut off the eight hands and vanished into the bush. It had taken two years to track them down.

From then on, the capsides were left in orbit to burn out on re-entry. Whatever remains survived the crash landings in the satellite graveyard were scavenged by the relic hunters of Cape Kennedy. This band of nomads had lived for years in the wrecked cars and motels, stealing their icons under the feet of the wardens who patrolled the concrete decks. In early October, when a former NASA colleague told me that Robert Hamilton's satellite was becoming unstable, I drove down to Tampa and began to inquire about the purchase price of Robert's mortal remains. Five thousand dollars was a small price to pay for laying his ghost to rest in Judith's mind."

Schrödinger's Cat is now DOWN

"by imparting spin – the angular momentum possessed by an electron – to a storage medium"

I'm not sure that what really occurs is all that well expressed with this sentence.

"The miscreants accused the ruling royal family of interfering in the affairs of neighbouring countries, such as Syria and Bahrain."

Because photos of tanks being driven around and weapon crates being dropped off are just not enough, these are "accusations" made by miscreants.

Whereas hyped hearsay about the Iranian nuke program are "grave accusations" made by "reliable anonymous sources".

Snowcrashing!

As as you brain doesn't explode when you look at the sticker's white noise, I can live with this.