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Recently, Bloomberg News carried an article detailing American’s loss of confidence with Our president. They have lost faith in his handling of the economy, the Gulf oil spill, the healthcare woes, etc. What is striking in all these cases is the timing. The president hasn’t been in office a full year yet, and already fickle constituents who hailed him as a agent of change have lost patience, ready to drop support for him and his political party and fill political vacancies with supposedly conservative pundits railing against Obama’s policies and choices.

Hardly a year into office, hardly time to advance a political agenda, hardly time to settle in and address the political emergencies and nightmares that are handed off from presidential office holder to office holder. Why hardly a year? My own opinion is that American’s have gotten used to immediate gratification, and forgotten how to make hard sacrifices for future gains.

Many people also seem to have lost touch witness reality with respect to how hard it can be to be the major political leader of a huge organization. While it is claimed that they don’t directly blame Obama for the problems which started under Bush, they seem to think that these problems can be fixed with the snap of one’s fingers. Why does nobody acknowledge understanding that the problems inherited by one president from another cannot be solved by edict the moment one steps into office? These immediate issues have to take priority over the advancement of one’s agenda, and they cannot simply be wished away by the wave of one’s hands.

What’s happened to patience in America? I would argue that America’s become a nation of citizens who expect an Internet presidency: instant answers to all problems; instant gratification for all issues; instant connection to all issues; instant resolution. Economy in a pickle? Oil leak in the Gulf? Google the answer and implement immediately. No time for sacrifice, no time for fact gathering, no time for analysis. Simply Google for the answer, implement and done.

Internet complacency, lack of critical thinking, unrealistic expectations, and instant gratification have converged to make American’s less tolerant of things that, in the past, people would’ve understood can’t be solved in weeks or months.

But, that’s just my opinion.

I’ve succumbed and bought the latest gadget. As it stands, I really can’t understand what everyone’s complaints about its shortcomings are. My expectations are no more than this, a large form factor iPod, making it easier to see, easier to use, and more convenient overall. It currently meets my needs and expectations, keepings the news available so that I can read it offline. The big test will be when I finally get an appropriate case to carry it and use it out in the big world. The flash problem does not bother me much…yet. This ist a case of only time will tell. Perhaps Apple will address this with with an update or the market will migrate to new technology which will function with Apple’s IOSx. I’ll keep updating as I test and try. Right now my favorite game is Bombardier, a space based missile attack game where you adjust velocity and angle of attack to account for gravity wells produced by planetary bodies and try to destroy the enemy base.

Cheers…

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0. The update was simple and straight-forward. Please let me know if anyone spots any issues or problems.

This is an interesting little article asking why Obama isn’t more lively in reactions to the environmental atrocities being committed in the gulf. Just follow the link.

One rebuttal I have as to why the president is taking a more measured response is that, if you are trying to make the person who did wrong fix their problems, you need to work from the standpoint of negotiation not persecution. If that party feels that you are punishing as they are working, they can choose not to do the work since, from their standpoint, they’ll get punished either way. I’d argue that he’s trying to set up a partnership to fix the problem and AFTERWARDS will attend to why it happened and will work towards addressing the wrongs after the issue has been fixed, particularly something of this sensitivity and magnitude.

Probably more comments on this later.

Let’s see – economic depression caused by unbridled greed on Wall Street – ecologic disaster caused by unbridled greed for oil – what have we learned from it? Not a damn thing!

Wall Street gave us years of roller-coaster stock returns, devastating home-prices devaluation, 401K funds turned insolvent, obscene pay and bonuses for those who gambled away fortunes of other people’s hard-earned money (but that’s still open for debate as to if it really was hard earned or just more ill-gotten gains), and an unbridled lust and greed to have more money than God.

BP gave us an unprecedented ecological disaster that continues to spread through the Gulf of Mexico, unstoppable, uncontainable, and promising to made worse by the fact that hurricane season will start in two days. As described in a recent news article, “think Katrina with oil’, a push into an area of diminishing returns where the desire for oil costs more, returns less (even though they claim that these are the largest fields of oil ever discovered), and an unbridled lust and greed to have more money that God.

In both cases we are hindered by ineffectual government bodies that failed to do their duty and regulate the industries as they should have. The agencies in charge of Wall Street turned a blind eye so they could download and watch porn all day long. Not to mention the fact that a Republican lead government spear-headed the dismantlement of the Glass-Stegall act because it “hindered” the market and kept financial firms from “getting their game on.” On the other hand, the agencies in charge of regulating the oil companies were actually producing the porn that the other were probably watching and receiving kick-backs, bribes, and other “goodies” to let the oil companies have their way.

Unfortunately the chickens came home to roost under Obama’s watch and he is unjustly shouldering the burden of blame for it all and having to cope with the cleanup and increasingly bad publicity which is only instilling more distrust in an agency that is supposed to look after the well being if it citizens.

What have we learned? Hire more people with scruples and ethics. Provide more oversight of the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting us from this sort of stupidity and risk. Greed is bad, as is Ayn Randian free-market economics. If a company is too big to fail, it’s a dinosaur and needs to fail.