Free Republic

As a hardcore Cruz supporter, I still wish he was our nominee, but he's not. I have said for over a year that regardless of who the nominee is, the Republicans will win the election come November. Now I agree that anything can change over the long hot Summer, but for now it looks like Trump will not just win, but he will will probably win in a landslide we have not seen since Renaldo Maximus won in 1980 & 84. As usual, when a market economy candidate replaces a socialist Big Government commie in the White House, the economy...

The ride-sharing app company Uber last week raised $1.2 billion in venture capital on terms that valued the company at $17 billion. As Will Oremus at Slate.com observed, that's almost as much as Hertz and Avis combined. It's more plausible to see Uber's valuation not as an artifact of its genuine potential, but of growing inflation within the high-tech bubble. Consider this: the number placed Uber in a rarefied club that previously included Groupon (worth $16.6 billion on its first day of public trading in 2011) and WhatsApp (worth $19 billion, based on the price paid for it by Facebook)....

I spend a lot of time worrying about the next tech bubble. It's my job to worry, of course, and this year, worrying became a full-time occupation. Ever since Facebook's stock price rebounded this year to the level of its initial public offering, tech startups have seen an incredible run-up in valuations.

Goldman Arming Itself? :-> This is a riot (well, ok, I might be a week - or a month early on that): Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the...

As we have been reading the latest coverage on the AIG bailout from the SIGTARP report and the Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Congressional testimony, a nagging question remains unresolved: why did AIG get bailed out but the monoline bond insurers did not? . . . I hate to get sucked into the vampire squid line of thinking about Goldman, but the only explanation i can think of for why AIG got rescued and the monolines did not is because Goldman had significant exposure to AIG and did not have exposure to the monolines. When it became clear that AIG could face...

The role of fat cat climate profiteers' bundled contributions in so-called "climate legislation"We read in our morning paper that the Obama Administration promises that proposed carbon regulations will cost American families less than a dollar a day, and will reduce deaths from air pollution. The latter proposition is an outright fraud because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; our lungs always contain a far higher concentration than the air around any coal-fired power plant. Obama's dishonest efforts to equate carbon dioxide to genuine pollutants like sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, mercury, and so on shows just how eager he is to...

LOS ANGELES - Voters streamed to the polls Tuesday to make an unprecedented decision: whether to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis (news - web sites), whose popularity plunged after the downturn in the economy and burst of the high-tech bubble. Its just a small thing but being one in whose face the tech bubble burst (I took a beating) its interesting that said event is sited here as part of the cause for the plunge in Gray Davis's popularity. It seems this pivotal event is never mentioned as having anything whatsoever to do with the state of the economy under...

After researching the demise of tech bubble... I have come to the conclusion that we will not see any significant resurgance in the IT industry for at least another 2 years. Threw the late 90's, most companies obviously spent a signifacnt amount of money upgrading and implementing software and infrastructure. But that was then and this is now and it's new projects that drive most of our careers, and right now were worried about the installation and implementation of new equipment. The fact of the matter is, money is going to determine when a company is going to purchase new...