President-Elect Obama

Even though I voted for him I remained a bit apprehensive about what direction he might take once he was elected. I am much less fearful now having observed his earliest moves and having concluded that he appears vastly smarter than most of the people who voted for him. That's a refreshing change already. :) Had he persuaded me of that earlier I may have even campaigned for him.

The economic crisis will cause him to be more cautious than he would have to be if times were booming, but I suppose that's true for everyone. I'm still fearful of how deep the downturn may be and how long it may last. My own income is holding up well considering the circumstance but the poorest people in the world now face starvation and the ramifications of that concern me.

A bleeding heart concern for the suffering itself is in order but I'm even more concerned about how it affects geopolitics. The last depression caused a lot of people to follow iron-fisted dictators and we certainly have eager candidates for that role today. With Russian warships approaching the Carribean the Bidenian "test" may be at hand. Russia has much less to lose than China as a provocateur and I have no doubt that al qaida and their friends would love to have a role on the world stage to greet our incoming president. OTOH I've been wrong about these kinds of things before.

We do live in interesting times.

Unread TOS dooms earth.

As I was reading the Google Checkout refund policy it occurred to me that it is unread or poorly understood credit agreements that have recently collapsed our economy and could eventually unravel our entire civilization because instability seems rampant.

I have always felt uneasy entering agreements that I have not fully understood and virtually all service agreements are too much for the average person to read or understand. The larger the company the more insidious this problem seems. I am very worried about our future.

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Moral Hazard and our Great Depression

During the 1997 Asian crisis no banks or companies were bailed out and the economic recession there cleared up in about two years.

That is a huge difference and the bailouts create what is known as a moral hazard. The people who actually caused the problem will not suffer and will have no reason to consider their bad acts a mistake.

There is profound corruption throughout the system in both political parties which is why none of the scoundrels are being punished or even singled out as culprits. In fact they are being rewarded with billions of dollars.

Those who caused the crisis are in the best position to profit from it. Only those who knew how bad the banks were in trouble had the nerve to short them (Goldman Sachs et al) and make billions more from the suffering of others.

So it's unlikely this will clear up in a mere two years as in Asia, the new US administration has many ties to the scandal and will thus not pursue the actual guilty parties but will try to blame others (guess who) and act the savior.

Blue skies Smiling at me, Nothing but blue skies Do I see... Irving Berlin 1927

Very angry about the sub-prime crisis.

Frankly I am very angry that no one is being held to account for the sub-prime crisis. It has destroyed more wealth than all the Al qaida attacks combined, even if you include the future earnings of those killed.

McCain could have won the Presidency if he had made good use of his famous anger and promised to get to the bottom of this and put the scoundrels in jail.

Unfortunately that won't happen because the perpetrators are lawmakers and their contributors. The criminality runs deep through both parties and everyone just throws up their hands and leaves solving the problem to those who created it.

I don't know if you caught the full moon rise tonight but it was stunning here in the mountain desert.

I made this page for me.

"I made this page for me. If you can use it, cool. It's free, no ads, no bs." I added this line to the very bottom of the start page after making some improvements. It is getting a lot better since I've begun using it very regularly.

A new methodology

I have been working on this directory for almost seven years now and I have been slowly improving my methods and collecting and writing software that helps me do this. But the other day I had an epiphany and figured out how to use my existing applications to double my efficiency. Now it is still a lot of work categorizing and editing all these listings but I am thrilled that the directory will be getting significantly better soon.

I think Barak Obama should be President. The downside is that his economic policies will make us all a lot poorer, especially those who are already poor. But we really must get on with this national redemption from our history as slave holders and racists even if it is painful economically.

Mass starvation in the less developed areas of the world is inevitable anyway and a world-wide depression will speed this along sadly. Better to be done with it before there are many more people born into poverty, exponential population growth is unsustainable. Malthus was right, just had the timing wrong not seeing technology's role in deferring the inevitable. I do my part, but the coming disaster is beyond anyone's capacity to avert. Pollution and global warming may make things even worse.

That's why I'll be voting for Barak on Tuesday. Well that and then I can share in the good feelings that will sweep around the world for a while.

Update update

So the fifty pages in forty categories from the Andistars site are now very neatly integrated into the Andilinks site. But most of these pages haven't been checked for bad links or updated with new links in months. So I will set a goal of getting these up-to-date in 30 days which is a little more than a category per day.

andistars.com is no more

Actually the domain and the website will continue on but will redirect to directory"k" on andilinks.com. I do worry that there was something there that caused the Google penalty and if the penalty returns I'll just give up. I can't live with the madness that is Google, I'll just quit.

I'm hoping that tonight during the debate Gov. Palin will have lots of information on the Democratic Party connections to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, it is really disgusting me how they are trying to pin this crisis on McCain.

The Great Bailout of 2008

I thought it would be democrats that would block the Paulson plan, I sure was wrong about that. I find it exciting that some discipline is being brought to bear but am concerned that the people actually responsible for packaging the toxic paper will not be the ones to feel the sting of the discipline.

Resources for Tall People

I am beginning a resource page for tall people, and starting by updating the tall size page. If this goes well I'll go with petite and plus size resources. I hope to have the new page online by Wednesday, possibly a pilot page by the end of the weekend.

The panic of '08

In Feb. 2005 Greenspan did speak out against the lack of regulation at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so he knew this corruption would eventually boil over. But if he dialed back the corruption there by raising interest rates he'd be remembered as the guy who kept poor people oppressed and not as the hero who averted the panic of '08. Nobody remembers the panic/recession that never happens.

Save your pennies, if the Paulson plan doesn't pass cash will be king. If it does pass throw your pennies away, inflation will make them worthless...

Fashion Blogs

I removed all the blogs that hadn't been updated in 45 days and I regret there were many of them. That section has been neglected because it doesn't get a lot of traffic which is a vicious circle. Ironically this section is a lot of fun to update and yields a lot of good links so I'll have to set a goal to keep it more up to date. As soon as I finish the tall-size updates. :)

Google penalty lifted

On June 22, 2008 the traffic to the site increased fivefold and I began updating the content. The updates were not completed until the end of August and I then began adding pages and making other improvements.

Decline, Google penalty

I regret to report that I have been unable to shake this latest Google penalty and prospects do not look good.

Lots of Progress

I should post more often with so much going on with the AndiFashion site. I added the dozen or so Fashion Week designers that weren't already listed.

The Shoe Section has doubled, I added about 250 new designers/brands and the whole section has doubled from three pages to six.

I have updated the Fashion Blog section and now for the next week or so I'll be reading these blogs and scouring them for the new and the hot... I've already found dozens of new retailers but these won't be integrated into the site for a week or so.

Fashion Week Designers

I have updated sixteen Andifashion categories since the last post and will now be adding any omitted fashion week designers who have web sites. It's not exactly a trip to New York but I will indulge myself with a complete viewing of the web site. Finding designer's web sites can sometimes be tedious because even though there may be lengthy runway videos the designer's link is not given. And designers, when they even have sites, seldom rank well in search engines even for their own names. Often the designer's site is a work of flash art with little or no actual text that a search engine can index.

On the bright side of this my work in finding their sites can be appreciated by others who are also looking.

Google 'Metaverse'

This would be exciting because...

...the speculation being that Google will use real-world data gathered from their existing enterprises to craft an alternate reality platform online.

People (me included) will check in just to see how their own data is showing up, seems like a winner to me.

On the AndiFashion front I've updated Formal Wear, Shoes, and Size (Petite, Tall, Plus, Maternity, Children's) and will be doing the general shopping pages next.

Slow menus...

I had the new menus on my home page for one day and the traffic was down 30%, I can only assume that a lot of people bailed before the menus loaded. I can't afford to take that kind of a hit on the rest of the pages so the menu idea was just a waste of a few days time. Live and learn. Fortunately I hadn't purchased the license for the menus yet, it was just a trial. The menus worked beautifully though.

So now I'll finish updating the cosmetics pages, Bath and Body is complete, I'm very pleased with how these turned out.

Beauty Products

The new menus are ready but only installed on the Andilinks Home Page so far, they need a little tweaking. I'm going to install them on the rest of the pages as I do updates.

As indicated in the headline I'm updating the Beauty Products section now. There is a new category, Body and Bath, which will take two pages and should be uploaded in a day or two.

Wedding Pages, new menus

A wedding section that goes beyond dresses and formal wear is a bigger task than I'm willing to take on at the moment so I'm just updating Checklists and Gift Registries for now.

I would begin this larger Wedding project right away but I've decided to provide new javascript menus for the apparel pages first. The new Wedding section will be up and running in part I hope before February first because the wedding planning season has already begun.