Both New Gingrich and Paul Krugman are against this ridiculous bailout. That should be enough to demonstrate that it is a bad idea, but I still think it’s going to pass. The congressional leadership of both parties are too deeply entwined with the financial industry to prevent it. The only amusing part of this crisis is reading the naive commentary from the left who apparently believe that the Democrats are less involved than the Republicans in this corruption. At this point, the differences between the Republicans and Democrats are as irrelevant to the main issues of the day as the differences between the Aristocrats and the Populares were during the late years of the Roman Republic. And we all know how that story ended.

UPDATE: Obama saying he may keep Paulson on, has apparently woken up at least one of his supporters to the kind of change he is offering. see here.

See Twitter has a new look.

Check out Jeff Jarvis’s post Google: Monopoly or Marketplace where Jeff claims that Google is not a monopoly, while describing it in a way that clearly indicates it is. The collapse of Yahoo has left Google in total control of the search advertising market. If you run a commercial website of any kind, you have to get up every morning and worry about what Google is doing to you, and you have no recourse. Google raises rates on adwords: you have no recourse. Google cuts your share of revenue on text ads on your site: you have no recourse. You have no recourse, because Google has no viable competitors. No viable competitors means they have a monopoly. And, no amount of dancing around the issues by bloggers like Jeff Jarvis will change that fact.

As I have previously written on this blog, I am a big fan of the burritos from Como Esta in Palo Alto. I usually get their super burrito, but they also make a mini burrito which has no sour cream or guacamole. I bought one the other day for a family member. Here’s a picture:

As usual, the burrito was great.

The other day I was in need of some quick food, so I grabbed a $1 frozen, carnitas chimichanga at the drugstore, and microwaved it when I got home. Here’s a picture:

I added the salsa myself, obviously. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the chimichanga. Although not outstanding, it was a hell of a lot better than the frozen burritos I ate all through college.

I’m not a fan of John Derbyshire, but his column entitled The Election From Hell pretty much sums up how I feel.

According to the ego killing feedburner badge, writing about stuff other than burritos is steadily driving down my readership. I’ve dropped from 12 readers to 7. So, I’m giving up on cars and I’m going back to burritos.

UPDATE: Just promising to write about burritos has brought back two readers.

One of the big advantages to living in the city/valley, and working at SOMA is that you get to mingle with all the other people who are working on new web stuff, or are writing about it. Almost every night there’s a different party or event. On Thursday, I attended two: an AOL launch of their new fantasy football site, and the monthly Mashable event. Here’s my name tag from the Mashable party:

The Mashable party was far better attended, and it even had better bouncers.

So, bored with the usual crash tests, some safety engineers decided to see what happens if you take a car with a 5 star safety rating, capable of protecting it’s occupants from a 40 mph head-on crash, and ram it into a wall at 50 mph. The predictable answer is that what is merely an unpleasant experience at 40 mph becomes deadly at 50 mph. I say predictable, because (as we all know from High School physics) force increases as the square of the velocity.  A picture is worth a thousand formulas, so here’s the video:

The newest fake car acessory idiocy is apparently fake brake calipers. Check out this photo:

Now, you too can ruin your brakes by gluing fake Brembo calipers to them. See the details at JDM Insider.