Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	4/10/2006

US dollar (and all fiat currencies) continue plunge

You're watching the charts at the right, right?

It was less than a month ago that it took only nine federal reserve notes with $1 printed on them to buy an ounce of silver.

You pour money down holes in Iraq and New Orleans long enough and eventually investors figure out the jig just may be up.

Plenty of fresh dollars to build a light rail line and new roads in the Heart of the Triad though. At $10/gallon for gas they might just get some riders on the train.

3:01:25 AM

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US soldier quote of the week from Iraq:

"There is more fraud waste and abuse over here than you would believe. It is incredible."

2:54:02 AM

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Guilford County Schools anonymous quote of the week:

(from a 1st year teacher who filled one of the slots making up the 40% of the Dudley staff who did not return at the beginning of this year)

"I just hope I can make it to the end of the year without becoming a crime statistic."

On rumor of an impending gang fight, over 20 police officers were counted in the high school on Friday.

2:50:09 AM

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Heart of Triad Charade: Nights 2-5

I'd heard about it, I've read about it, but thanks to the HOT organizers, I have now participated in my first week long charrette based on the Delphi Technique. The Delphi technique has it roots in Hegelian (some say Marxist or fascist) dialectics. It is the bane of most in-the-know freedom fighters.

However, on the suspicion that I was the only one sitting in the Girl Scout Learning Center of Colfax, North Carolina thinking that Marx and Hegel, and the totalitarians Karl Popper believed they inspired, are somehow tied up in the plans to bring a light rail line and sports stadium to our area, let's cut to something more familiar.

First Bottom line: Local taxpayers should be relieved to know that perhaps the biggest ticket item in this project, a light rail line, can be done through a combination of federal and state funding. Against a back drop of highly compenstated consultants packing up their only slightly modified boilerplate presentation material and heading home to Florida, that's the way co-chair of the HOT steering committee Robbie Perkins saw it at the end of the week on Friday as he shared his thoughts with a few stragglers at the front of the charrette room. (I'm not sure Mr. Perkins viewpoint was on the record but Allen Johnson was standing right there next to me so I will pretend that it was.)

Alternate bottom line: If you thought I was off base suggesting that dialectics and totalitarians are somehow part of HOT, what alternative explanation can we give to this closing presentation slide from David Taylor who headed up the HDR consulting team: "2+4 = 1"? That's the Orwellian equation Mr. Taylor suggested with unintended irony was the operating principle behind making HOT a reality: Two counties plus four cities working together to create "one special place."

In other words, residents in the area described as the size of Manhattan are going to be living in a corporately controlled paradise of unaccountable appointees skilled in the latest best practices for effective governance. Instead of being embarrassed by their elected representatives making fools of themselves every few weeks on on public access TV, the nominal future citizens of the HOT region will only have to suffer through a single ten minute power point presentation of glowing results given to a county board of commissioners once a year by a local DSS or PTAA type director. Regional problems, needing regional solutions can no longer be encumbered by our antiquated system of directly elected representative government.

The rest of the story...

(etymological clarification: If cigarette is a small cigar and dinette is kin to diner then it follows that our charrette is correctly considered a small charade.)

1:59:07 AM

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