Conan O’Brien was here at Google last week.  In his opening remarks, he said,

You call yourself ’Googlers’? Is that it? Let’s address that.  We can do better than ‘Googler’.  Ok.  We need something cooler.  Especially for the guys when they walk into a bar.  ‘I’m-a-I’m-a Gooooglgllgleeer’ [you have to Conan’s voice]

Conan is right.  “Googler” is a goofy nickname.

Microsoft does it too.  Inside of Microsoft, they call each other “Microsofties”, or sometimes just “softies”.

What is it with tech companies needing diminutive, feminine, metro-sexual identities?  Is it part of being in some sort of cult?  I guess every successful group has to identify themselves somehow.

Conan did offer some suggestions (you can hear them in the video).  They weren’t very good either.

Anyway, from this point forward, I’m not a Googler anymore.  I still work at Google, but “Googler” is gone from my vocabulary.  Thanks Conan!

As the IMF prepares to hand $150B to Greece, you’ve got to wonder what they are thinking.  Greece has demonstrated that it is a financial mess.  When you lend someone money, you’ve got to see a path where they can pay you back, right?

First there is the issue of spending.  Greece has been spending crazy amounts of money for decades.  While the IMF hopes to require spending cuts, what confidence can any investor have that Greece will implement them?  Sadly, the Greeks have been caught lying about their finances in the past.  How do you lend money to a country where the leaders are fraudulent?

Second, there is the issue of revenue.  The IMF wants Greece to raise taxes on its people.  That seems like a good idea, except that Greece has had policies of not enforcing their own tax code for years.  Why would any investor believe that Greece will suddenly change, and that its people will finally start paying their bills?

So for you would be lenders out there, Greece has huge risk both in terms of cutting its spending and also in terms of increasing its revenues.  In my view, lending money with any expectation of payback is simply wishful thinking.  It’s not going to happen.

Finally, who are the lenders then?  Well, as usual, it all comes back to the United States.  While the US isn’t getting the full  $150B for this one, the US contribution as being part of the IMF will be a staggering $39B.  That’s right, while the Greeks are selfishly protesting tax increases in the streets and not even paying their own taxes, America is going to take another $39B loan to help them out.  Nice.  For the record, that means every working American gets a bill for ~$278.

You can guess what I think:  let them fail.

I’ve not updated theme or features of belshe.com in quite a while, but this week we have a couple of nice improvements.

New Server
belshe.com first moved  it’s servers to ServerBeach in July 2006.  I’ve always been delighted with their service, particularly when I found in December 2007 that the site had run, without a hiccup or even a reboot, for 470 days.

Of course, in the 4 years that we’ve been hosted there, computers have changed a bit.  The 1GB Athlon 220 was getting a bit old, despite flawless service, so we’ve upgraded now to a new 2GB Core 2 Quad Q9400!  Hopefully you’ll be able to read all of my rants with amazing speed now.

New Software
I’ve also finally updated this blog with a few modernizations.  The most notable of which is the commenting system, which no longer has my ridiculous cheapo-capcha.  Instead you can login with your Facebook, Google, Windows Live, Twitter or AOL account.

I’ve also added better support for Google Buzz and Facebook Like button support.  If you use those services, be sure to click those buttons!

And finally, I’ve hooked up my facebook, buzz, and blog together so that my posts should show up on those services too.  It will look like I’m back on facebook.  Even though, I’m not…  (Err- well – I haven’t tested it yet until I post this message.  Cross your fingers!)

Jobs puts forth some pretty good arguments here for why the iPhone and iPad don’t support Adobe’s Flash.  From the driver’s seat (iPhone is at the top-of-the mobile device heap), you can see why Apple doesn’t want Flash holding it back.

The problem with the Obama administration rewards failure and punishes success.

• When the financial industry failed:
  Obama was there to bail them out.
• When GM failed:
  Obama was there to bail them out.
• When homeowners over-extended and failed to pay mortgages: Obama was there to bail them out.
• When Americans failed to find jobs:
  Obama bailed them out with extended unemployment.

But what happens to the Americans that managed to succeed and make money rather than lose it?  Obama chastises this group as the greedy, evil rich people.  And to punish these people for being successful, Obama increases their medicare taxes, increases their income taxes, increases their capital gains taxes, limits their itemized deductions, and even hopes to implement a windfall tax if you’re just too damn successful.   That’s 3.8% + 3-4% + 5% + reductions in itemized deductions.  So in addition to the over 50% that you already pay in taxes, Obama wants to take another 12.8%!

And don’t forget – the state of California plans to increase taxes too…

Let’s put incentives in for being a benefit to the system rather than benefits for being a drain on the system.

When browser upgrades arrive, they usually contain good improvements in terms of speed, security, reliability, and features.  For website developers, new browsers usually offer better capabilities for building websites.  Unfortunately, there is a lag-time between when browsers are released with new features and when users upgrade sufficiently that developers can use them.

Upgrades are also important from a security perspective.  When users run older browsers they are exposed to security risks which have been previously discovered and potentially fixed.  In the case of Internet Explorer, this problem got so bad, that various governments, and even Microsoft advised against users’ continued use of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

So how long does it take users to shift to a new browser?

The data from StatsCounter shows this very clearly.  Chrome upgraded virtually all of its users from version 4.0 within a month, starting in Feb 2010.  Firefox also upgraded version 3.6 at about that time.  The upgrade is progressing quickly, and now, 3 months later, approximately two-thirds of Firefox users have upgraded.   Internet Explorer 8, by contrast, was released over a year ago, and so far less than half of IE users have upgraded.

It’s April 15th.

Jerry Brown, the former California Governor and current California Governor hopeful, was on site at Google yesterday.  I attended the 1 hour talk where Eric Schmidt played a soft Charlie Rose.

At the end, I asked a softball question myself.  And I got a politician’s answer.

I asked, “California taxes – are they too high, too low, or about right?”  Brown initially pointed out that during his administration as Governor of California, there were no new taxes (1975-1982).  Then he went on to talk for quite a while, and basically said he didn’t think we should raise taxes, but he didn’t think that state financed programs should pay the price of the $11T of wealth lost due to the Wall Street debacle.  (He implied that the state’s budget problems are related to that, which is at least partially true)

Sadly, Gov Brown wasn’t completely truthful with me.  A quick search through Google reveals an article dated Sept 18, 1981 which proves that Brown did at least increase one tax.  I don’t really mind so much that he had a tax increase in 1981.  But he was quite emphatic in his reply to my question that he had never raised taxes as Governor.  Ok – he embellished.

So, to summarize his politician’s answer:   he doesn’t want to raise taxes, and he doesn’t want to cut programs.  He didn’t actually answer my question, and in his reply he didn’t stick to just the truth.  It wasn’t a horrible lie, and could even be chalked up to a minor mistake.  But isn’t this what we expect from politicians these days?  Nobody really expects him to just be straightforward anymore.

As for me, I liked Brown’s overall talk.  I won’t vote for him, though.  We need serious change in California, and the existing bureaucrats have proven they can’t do it.  I don’t know if CEOs and business people can do it (obviously actors can’t do it), but Brown loses the vote because he’s been a career politician too long.  Is that age discrimination on my part?  Ha!  Call the EEOC!

Obama likes to say that new spending should be “deficit neutral”.  That sounds like a great idea!  After all, nobody wants to be financially irresponsible, right? The idea that we account for new spending is a good one, and it is better than not accounting for new spending.  But, it’s yet another politician’s con job.

Let’s use a simpler example.  Let’s say you have a monthly income of $1,000.  And let’s say you’re carrying a debt of $100,000 for your mortgage, for which you pay $537 per month.  You also tend to spend about $500 on your other living expenses, so all in all you’re losing money each month.  Since a tax-hike is like a giving the government a raise, let’s say that one day, you get a raise of $200 per month.  You could decide to save that money.  Or, you could decide to go buy a car (healthcare) for $20,000 and a $200 per month payment.  All-in-all, you convince yourself, you are “deficit neutral”.

Here is how it looks:

As you can see, although we decided buy a car, we are still “deficit neutral”.   Our income has gone up, but our incremental losses each month have not.

But what happens 5 years down the line?

After time passes, we now see that “deficit neutral” does not mean we didn’t create a more dire financial picture.  Sure, we are now the proud owners of a 5 year old car.  But to do so, we’ve amassed 17% more debt, and have nothing in the bank.  Ironically, of the 3 financial outcomes, you can easily argue that we would be better off to never even get the raise than to buy the car.  Can you imagine saying to your boss, “Please don’t give me a raise – it will send me into more debt!”?

Finally, how often do you get a large raise?  Can the government give itself a raise any time it wants to?  The answer is – not very often.  Sure, the government can give itself a raise by way of more taxes, each time we do so, we decrease economic growth.  As such, the government needs to choose very wisely when it does tax and for what purpose.  By having increased our taxes to pay for healthcare, Obama will need to raise even more taxes to pay off our debt.

So now the question is – what is Obama’s plan to get to financial responsibility?  He seems to think “deficit neutral” is responsible.  But, as you can see, that’s not the whole picture.   I know this is obvious to most readers of this blog – sorry for being pedantic.

** The numbers above are all based on values I picked for interest, periods, etc.  I chose reasonable numbers – 5% interest, a little more for the car, only 10% for credit card debt, etc.  This was just the first set of numbers I used.  Regardless of the numbers you use, realistic-ish scenarios yield similar results.