Had two good assignments today, one a violin shop owner and the second a Nobel Laureate in economics at my alma mater. I've never been one for economics -- a gander at my bank account will back that up -- but this guy, Joe Stiglitz, a Gary native and now a professor at Columbia, put a whole bunch of things in perspective. For example:

-- Our leader Shrub took a 2 percent budget surplus and turned it into a 5 percent deficit in three years.
-- We can piss and moan all we want about outsourcing, but we've been putting the screw to other countries far longer -- unintentionally, sure, but screws are screws. See, according to Stiglitz, the United States pays about 25,000 cotton farmers between $3 billion and $4 billion in subsidies each year for them to produce buttloads of the stuff. When output goes up, demand goes down, naturally, so what happens to the 10 million cotton farmers in Africa and all over the world whose only crop is cotton? They get fucked. But the kick in the ass? When someone went to complain to our trade representative about the inequity, his answer was, "Let them do something else." You know, because it's easy to just pick up and do that when you live in SAND. Idiot.
-- Competition has become global, and there's no monopoly on knowledge or skills, y'all. The best one can do is keep learning and making it better for yourself.

Don't know about you, but I'm still kinda pissed about the cotton subsidies. Once again, I'm in the wrong business.