This has been happening for years, so it may not be the result of our current economic downturn. Something else is probably going on and there are numerous possibilities. It might be my unpopular ideas, though how would most potential employers know? It might be because I have basically been unemployed for decades, for I have been running my own companies since 1983. It might be that I am unqualified for contemporary software engineering jobs. Though I like to think a degree from MIT with a perfect GPA should count for something, even if it was thirty years ago. It might even be that I am over qualified for most software positions, because I also have a Harvard MBA and most MBA’s aspire to manage. It might be few managers can envision themselves working with some smart aleck who bandies about terms like Harvard, MIT and perfect grades. Finally, it might be age discrimination, since I am 53 years old when almost all programmers are in their twenties or maybe thirties.

I have a feeling that age discrimination is at least a contributing factor, but not the way you might assume. My theory is that the law against age discrimination is the problem. Ironically, age discrimination may be the unintended consequence of laws against age discrimination.

In modern usage, liberal and conservative are opposites. Liberals are for change, conservatives are not. Liberals favor helping the less fortunate while conservatives work for their own self interest. Liberals are intelligent and open to new ideas, being a strong majority in universities and other intellectual circles. Conservative circles include the Ku Klux Klan and those who disbelieve the theory of evolution. Sounds like the liberals win, right?

Brace yourself, for I will argue that liberals can be hypocrites that reduce freedoms and harm others for their own gain. Of course they are mostly unconscious of this and mostly have the best of intentions. But changing the world usually has unintended consequences and the unintended consequence of liberalism can be slavery in some degree.

I disagree and am more than a little suspicious that government oversight was the cause and not the solution. That Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were a disaster waiting to happen has long been clear to many, including me and I am no financial wizard. But Congressman Barney Frank, currently much in the news with calls for increased federal oversight of business, had this to say in 2003, “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.” The administration asked Congress to reign in quasi-governmental mortgage lenders in 2005, but that died when Senate Democrats filibustered.

So it appears that current problems were foreseeable and at least partially government responsibility. Of course banks were stupid too. But the stupidity of bankers is very old news and the new ingredient that pushed things over the edge this time appears to be political greed rather than greedy business. You may have noticed that the shit really hit the Wall Street fan within days of the government takeover of collapsing Fannie and Freddie. They have always been government sponsored and were very probably the catalyst for the current crisis.

But if the press blames Reagan, at least in Bloom County, then guess what? I think we might plausibly blame on the press this time. “It’s All Murdoch’s Fault!”, would be the headline, preferably on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, it is not totally new, being “low carb” like the popular Atkins and South Beach diets. But my South NH Beach Diet has some important differences that I think make it superior, through potentially less popular. So this is yet another unpopular idea.

Conventional wisdom is that weight is ruled by energy balance. Calories consumed minus calories expended equals calories of fat gain. It is called conservation of energy, or sometimes the first law of thermodynamics. And it is beyond dispute that conservation of energy applies to all systems, including our bodies. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom about calories, while very popular, is very wrong. At least that is my unpopular idea.

Of course the question arises whether a blog offers any real permanence in the long term. It is a new literary form with evolving norms, but my guess is that many blogs will survive, possibly in third-party “way-back” style archives and probably because heirs may be reluctant to turn off and discard blogs when their authors die. I think it might become common for heirs to keep paying the small bills to keep the blog running as a memorial. And even if not, survivors might well copy at least some of the blog to other web sites.

So here is Lorraine Simonoff’s eulogy for posterity. Below that is another short eulogy I gave ten years ago for R. Leonard White, my wife’s father.

I’m not going to argue that killing animals for their fur should be moral. My daughter distinguishes killing for food from killing for more frivolous reasons and she has a point. My point, made at the table yesterday and the the assembled throngs of you reading this today, is that killing plants should be even less moral than killing animals for whatever reason. So maybe the real sin was that we had just murdered a wide assortment vegetables for our dinner.

I once made the mistake of proposing to our Rabbi that “Social Darwinism” might help explain Israel’s seemingly miraculous victories in the decades following World War II. After all, in addition to being very lucky, those that survived the Holocaust and made their way to Palestine were probably among the most persistent and enterprising of the Jews who lived in Europe before the war. It was a bad idea, or at least a highly unpopular one. I won’t try that one again here. But I will argue that a good form of Social Darwinism is alive and well in the guise of capitalism. Plus you’ll receive my even less popular critique of charity at no extra charge!