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Yeah – one of those posts. But I’m not talking about the latest blockbuster, and I’m not even talking about anything even remotely “Matrix-Like” (though it does make the list)

I’m talking about the movies us techie-types hate to admit that we loved.  And these are my favorites – feel free to comment with your own if I missed anything glaringly obvious.  (No – not Dune)

Here they are:

Honorable Mention: Short Circuit – campy but lovable. Good movie for the kids.

10. Weird Science – John Hughes at the height of his mediocrity.

9. The Net – Love me some Sandra Bullock, but who believes that hackers are going to take over the world with Macs? (or that Ms. Bullock is going to be the one to stop them?)

8. Independence Day – See “The Net”: Jeff Goldbloom isn’t believable as a hacker/nerd/geek in the first place. Hacking an alien species with a Macbook is beyond bad.

7. Hackers – Angelina Jolie before she really was anyone, and yes, we get to see her websites. Plot-line was fun, dialog was horrible, tech was sadly misrepresented – the scary part though is I’ve known people like Cereal Killer….

6. Tron – So nerdy even the nerds won’t own it. Stay tuned – rumors of a Tron2 running around, I saw a pirated preview on youtube. (Link – Here)

5. Real Genius – Val Kilmer plays a slightly left-of-center genius. Great laughs, good teen/college movie.

4. Stargate – ok, not so much a nerd/geek show but the scientist saves the day every time. (and gets the cute slave-chick in the process)

3. The Matrix (Any one of them) – There is something to be said for the ‘willful suspension of disbelief’ – I thoroughly enjoyed the movies and one day want to learn kung-fu by ramming a needle into the back of my head.

3. Blade Runner – Can’t hate anything with Harrison Ford in it, but it took a lot of hemming and hawing over whether this went above or below The Matrix. It is a serious marvel. Just got it on Blu-Ray and it’s SPECTACULAR.

2. Wargames – My inspiration. That and when I was growing up I was about as nerdy as Matthew Broderick…well…..is. (And he still managed to get Sarah Jessica Parker)

1. Star-Trek – Didn’t think I’d forget this did you? Most of the movies were great, once you got past the ones that sucked (Voyage Home, anyone?). The movies are here as an afterthought because they were pure marketing. An attempt to capitalize on the popularity instead of furthering the idea. The series rocked though, and I will always have a warm-spot in my heart for Gene Roddenberry.

How cool is this? That’s the downstream equivalent of 20 T1′s.

Someone asked me on twitter why I batted around numbers like $100 billion when it comes to what the direct cost to the taxpayers is if we *DON’T* bail out the auto industry.

Well the number is a guess, based on figures I’ve heard batted around on NPR, CNN, and a number of other news sites.

But here is what it’s based on:

PBIC – This is the Pension Benefit Insurance Corporation.  This is a federal agency, much like the FDIC and SIPC that guarantees pension payments should a company with a pension plan go bankrupt.  This is a direct taxpayer cost.  If the “Big-3″ automakers go bankrupt, we will pay any and all costs associated with them bankrupting off the debt owed to their current and former workers.

Lost Revenue – Obviously, if the companies go bankrupt and lay off a significant portion of their employees, the local, state and federal governments will lose substantially when it comes to lost tax revenue.  This is money that MUST be made up from somewhere.  Enter the rest of us.

Unemployment Benefits – Obviously we’ll be paying long-term unemployment to most of the people displaced.

————–

Now – take that number, whatever it is, and multiply it by every business that is downstream of the big-three.  You see, our automobile “manufacturers” are actually automobile “assemblers”.  More than 70% of the material used is built and purchased from hundreds of smaller companies.  From companies that supply the “bin parts” (screws, washers, nuts, etc) to companies that supply the electronics, interior, engine components, etc.

A large number of these will go bankrupt as well, some will survive.  This will unfortunately have a DEVASTATING effect on the “southern auto makers” (which loosely translates to the foreign car companies that chose to move their assembly to American soil)

If this happens the fall-out will be even more disasterous.  Because they will most likely pull their manufacturing back home, to Japan, China, Korea, etc.  That will result in an even higher trade defecit, because as you all know, with the big-3 out of the picture, we’ll all be buying foreign cars.

Now maybe $15 billion dollars doesn’t seem like such a problem.

I have a rant – if you don’t want to hear it, fee free to move on.

Ok – in this economic climate, it has to be said.

To those companies who continue to outsource tech-labor to third-world countries without even a good record on basic human rights, let alone strict laws and oversight on the treatment of Americans’ financial and personal data…

STOP IT!

You are both directly and indirectly contributing to and furthering the recession. I’d even dare-say you’re an active participant and maybe even a root cause in it.

Listen – It may sound protectionist of me, but I do believe that in situations where our economy is in the toilet, it’s ok to be so. We can’t continue to bolster other economies when ours desperately needs the help.

My former employer – let’s call her “Kelly Robinson” for a while outsourced a sizable portion of her business to Canada. Besides the obvious dollars that were leaving the country, never to return, there is another downside to this – Her business dealt with lending, so as a result we were also exporting names/social-security-numbers/financial information to a country that may or may not have the strictest controls in place to care for that information.

We’re doing the same thing in India. Do you realize how much financial information we send out of the country every day? Half the time I call Dell Financial Services I end up in an overseas call-center, being forced to recite my social-security-number to someone who isn’t even subject to US laws regarding information security and identity theft.

Those are our jobs. 15 years ago I got my start in technology through a support center for a major online service. This is where technology people, in large part, get their start. By exporting the entry-level jobs overseas, we are exporting the entry-point for most of our workers to enter the field.

I’m all for having a “world economy” but until we have a single governing body that actually has the authority to stomp on idiots, it can’t safely be done.

The best you can do as a consumer is to refuse to deal with the foreign call-centers, and to complain loudly when you get them.

So…Watching modern media these days has led me to conclude one thing.

Man we’re getting dumber and dumber as time goes on.

With shows like Survivor, Real Housewives of and whatever other tripe is popular on TV these days, I can only conclude that modern media of this country is playing to the lowest common denominator.

Except for Spongebob Squarepants.

Yes, Spongebob is actually one of the more intelligent shows on TV these days. Even though on the surface it’s one of the more shining examples of stupidity out there, when you dig deeper you find interesting layers of intellect buried beneat (way beneath) the surface.

The even scarier part is that some of the best tidbits of intellect come from Patrick…

Quotes like:

(after spongebob draws a jellyfish with a “magic pencil”)

“It’s two dimentional and your perspective leaves a lot to be desired.”

and:

“The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma.”

Even spongebob gets into it with lines like:

“He was just a two-dimentional creature trying to fit into our three-dimentional aquatic world.”

I still say that nothing is nearly on the scale of the likes of “Bugs Bunny” and the other Warner Brothers wonders of my day and age.

But it’s not bad in the grand scheme of things.

Survivor’s guilt is the guilt felt by someone who, usually through no fault of their own, survives an accident that takes the lives of others.

I feel that way about this economy and job market.

On January 5th, Monday, I report to my new assignment, a one-year engagement in Washington DC.

In the next week or so it’s going to be announed that 2,000 or so people are going to be laid off of the company I was consulting for.

This is not my fault.  There is nothing I could have done about it.  I’m tremendously lucky to be “alive”

I still feel guilty  But I’m also angry.

Nothing sucks more than getting a pink-slip right before Christmas.  Especially from a company that continues to outsource a large number of support jobs to some god-forsaken hell-hole in India where they can’t even be bothered to learn the bloody language.  (This is not a racist comment, I say the same thing when I travel to Mississippi and Alabama, where they also haven’t really learned the language)

Just a short rant for today.  Got to get to sleep tonight.

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Heard on the news that we’re in a recession.  No fucking shit.  Nice of the economists to finally break down and tell us something that anyone who’se been shopping has known for a year now.

What a lot of people don’t know is the root cause: Here’s how recessions happen:

An external stimulus causes people to become afraid and withhold spending.

Lately a large and recurring cause of this fear as been…..

Drum roll please…..

Elections.

Now before everyone gets in my face screaming that “Our guy won! – that can’t be the true this time” let me clarify something:

It has nothing to do with who wins, loses, ties, or self-distructs on National TV. (my apologies to John Edwards)

It has everything to do with fear because elections themselves have everything to do with fear.  There has not been a political campaign in decades that didn’t involve fear.  Fear is how you win/lose elections.  You win if you convince 51% of the country to fear the other guy more than you, while the other guy convinces 49% of the country to be afraid of you.

In the end, 100% of the country is afraid.  And fear causes recessions.

In 2001 I wrote an article called “Anatomy of a Recession” pointing out that the 2001 downturn was caused by Bush/Cheney scaring all of the trailer trash into thinking that a recession was coming.  How did they do this?  They went out and told them this was going to happen.  And the weak minded sods believed it.

Same thing is happening now.  Only we have the added weight of the Mortgage mess.  (Caused, thank you very much, by deregulation in the mortgage industry)

So people are afraid.  They’ve been told many times on national TV that no matter who wins life is going to get difficult.  The republicans are panicking because they believe that their taxes are going to be higher, the democrats are panicking for whatever it is democrats panic about…

So what happens is maybe we’ll wait on the new purchase.  Maybe we won’t buy the new car but instead make this one last a few more years.  Appliances, etc.  We hold back fearing the layoffs that might come.

Here’s a news flash for the mental midgets.  Holding back causes the layoffs.  IT’S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.  If you held off on a major purchase this year out of fear.  You contributed to the resulting layoff.

Hell I contributed to it myself.  When the lease came up on my Chrysler I extended it instead of turning in the car.

What I am sick of hearing is this:

“We don’t know what causes recessions.”

We do know what causes recessions.  We have but to look in the mirror.

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