As stated earlier I had issues with Live's changes to the Spaces part of their service.  I cooled down a bit, listed out my issues and outlined them on Spaces's Live Blog, the Space Craft.  A vast majority of the comments were negative and outlining my same concerns.  One major difference.  Many many people were very nasty and mean spirited in their critisim of the Live team.  While upset at the changes myself, I do work in the IT industry and I know how changes are inititated, driven, and implemented.  Microsoft has a corporate culture of rolling out items before they are completely finished, hense service packs and constant bug fixes being issued.  I tried to respond to my dislikes in a way I would want to receive them from a client of my company.  In less then 48 hours I was replied to personally and while it was not communicated if my issues would be resolved, it was made clear my constructive critisim was appriated and my concerns would be addressed but they did not know if they could revert to the older Spaces features I was requesting, Photo and Friends sections in paticular.

 

My point being is this.  If you have a concern or a critisim you need to be respectful and outline your comments and suggestions like a sane person.  Always follow the golden rule folks, do unto others as you would want done unto you.  While I requested I not receive a canned response that dismissed my concerns, I actually received a private message from a manager, I did receive a message that just placated me irritation with corporate views on customers.  My concerns were merley acknowledged and they will "look into your issues but have no specific plan to revert to previouse features at thsi time." which is like a canned response but at least it was by a person and not a bot.  If more people took this approach instead of calling the people who worked months and months on the code idiots, jerks, and ### ##### the replies would be taken more seriously and more weight would be given to those of us who are upset and unsatisfied. 

 

If you have an issue with the changes, please go to Live's SpaceCraft blog, you can get to it from your Spaces overview page, and log them the way you would want some one to offer feedback to your work.  This is getting close to the Christmas season, a time of year near and dear to Americans and Western Europeans and many more alike.  Before you blow your top, remember Santa is watching and making a list, checking it twice, and if you use fowl language for feedback or try to demean others because you are upset, you just may get a lump of coal or a switch in your stocking instead of an orange, candy cane, or something really nice.  Let's use the good tide and cheer of the season to look past our personal and national problems we are facing and look towards the hope and possibility of the human existance and everything we can do to make the best with what we have and make others the same. 

As Windows Live continues to change things around and "improve" our user experiences I wanted to take advantage of a new feature, that is actually an older feature just one taking over from one they are kicking to the curb.  The Live team is taking over the MSN Groups with Live Groups.  For those interested in Photography I am trying to start a Live Group centered around photography.  It is called the World View Photographs Group.  If you are interested in joining to help share your knowledge, learn something new, and share photographs of our world with those from other parts I hope you can join and participate.  This group will not be dedicated to hard to learn advanced topics but aimed at those using cell phones to DSLR cameras.  I am not wanting to replicate sites that evaluate cameras, lenses, and software but help out people figure out framing, exposure, using alternative software packages, and sharing some of thier images from around the glove.  For those shutter bugs out there who like taking and sharing pictures of our world, I hope to see you there.

At the end of this week the wife and I will have a special reunion.  Our daughter is moving back home for Christmas and perminately!  She will soon be two, God time flies, and that means she will be old enough for some day care facilities here in Shanghai.  Over the past 20 months we have missed a lot of our daughter's firsts.  Over this time we have visited as much as we could afford, financially and time wise, and we have been amazed and listening to her activities on nightly phone calls to Coco's parent's home.  Living in a different culture and world then I grew up in has taken some getting used to, but this will mark a very special event and time in all three of our lives.

 

We have spent the last 6 weeks piecing together her room and it has been ready for about a week now.  I know the adjustsments for all 3 of us will be great.  My daughter will have to continue learning her native Chinese while now being exposed to my foreign English, my Chinese is still pretty bad and I don't want her picking up my bad Chinese habbits.  Her routine will be totally upset, new school, playmates, city with sights, sounds, and smells all unfamiliar.  She will now be with her parents and not with her grandparents, who have done a wonderful job, and will have a new role and routine to get into.  It is much colder in Shanghai then Guangzhou, and she will have to spend all of her day at day care and with a nanny for a few hours in the afternoon until we can come home.  Reality is we can't afford to have only 1 of us work as Shanghai housing and day care is very expensive, but family shuld be together and now we can spend evenings and weekends together.  On a good sign, she has said she looks forward to moving here with us and that her grandparents should stay in Guangzhou, well, speaking is a not quite right, but that is what it was translated as meaning.  Just a few days left now.  Now I can really say it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

This is part 2 of the series and will discuss the cost of increased spending, focused on wage to service imbalances in our economy as well as the consequences of living unbalanced existences.

 

Since the presidential primaries the idea of terms of wealth and taxes were being buzzed around in the press like mosquitoes around our ears.  Campaign promises of 'Robin Hood' style taxation and corporate punishment for success were lauded as noble and honorable and even patriotic (Joe Bidden is a blessing to us political pundits).  Now our economy has stumbled and fallen flat on its face, thanks to the housing market falling like pants on a running man who enviably trips, the real problem is brought into clear and blinding light.

 

Our problems boil down to one simple, pure, intrinsic yet all encompassing word, greed.  From Wall Street to Fannie May and Freddie Mac, from Exxon to Congress, from main street to state capitals, our society is awash in the foul stench of greed and excess.  No I did not get up on the wrong side of the bed or in a foul mood, I am instead bluntly pointing out that the 300 pound gorilla in the corner is there and ensuring those in earshot of me know this too.  While the focus was placed on credit, or lack of obtaining it, the real problem is why it seems we all need access to so much of it?

 

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was unable to make ends meet on his measly little $177,412/year salary so he wanted to double his salary and get his poor wife a like paying position to better his family’s financial security.  The average wage of a governor is $124,398 by the way so he is better off then most; California, New Jersey, and Tennessee governor's currently refuse their salaries.  UAW concessions help to shave down GM’s and Ford’s production overhead, but at levels of $78/hour per worker of overhead compared to Toyota’s $43/hour per worker the concessions will not be enough to keep the company solvent, GM’s Chinese factories are so profitable they are the only thing keeping the company afloat, until the Chinese economy began to shrink this coming year.  So what does all this talk about pay have to do with anything?  Simple fiscal sense.  We have to live in our means.

 

Real Americans, most of us, work for a wage for a year, not a salary.  Wages are based off of a 2000/hour per year estimation (we have 6 federal holidays per year and expected to take 4 sick days per year which equates to the true 2080 hours or work time per year).  Hourly wage earners have only 2 options to increase their pay, raises are few and usually small percentages in good times and frozen in bad times.  These options are; overtime or get another job.  Minimum wage was just increased to $6.55/hr this past June, when I was working it was half that at $3.15/hr.  Has the cost of living doubled in these 20 years?  For most of us its all about the time and hours spent working, our pay is dictated by our per hour rates.  If you make $20/hr your annual gross income is $40,000/yr.  If you make $50/hr your annual gross income is $100,000/year.  

 

Salaried employees, managers, executives, board members, contracted employees, all get a set rate.  They get paid if they are at work or if they are home sick.  They get paid the same if they work 9am to 5pm or 7am to 11pm.  Their vacation and time off rules are much different and they usually get different compensation packages if fired, due to the intimate knowledge of the company they worked for, as a way to keep them from going to the competition out of spite.  Their responsibility is much greater and expectations much higher so they are paid accordingly.  Most people considered ‘rich’ work for salaries, including government officials.  Remember, the worker pyramid applies here, fewer people work salary at the top then the majority of workers at the bottom who make hourly wages.

 

Paydays are the happiest days of the week, well when we all got checks on Fridays (if you remember this ancient ritual and the subsequent getting it cashed at the bank or grocery store then your second high-school reunion us due if not just past or even third).  In our daily lives we have commodities and services we have to pay for.  Food, transportation, dry cleaning, entertainment, clothing, etc. its all part of daily life in a consumer driven economy.  All of these items employ people like us who are paid wages we support by our purchases.  Business has to pay rent, insurance, utilities, and the like to offer these goods and services and are expecting to make a profit at the same time (remember the main purpose of all businesses is to make money).  If we only support low priced items, we only support low wage paying businesses.  Service, commodity, and goods businesses, as well as their supporting businesses, all are in the hourly wage category.  So are the manufactured goods, like cares, appliances, and machinery producers.  Low prices on any of these items means low paid employees.

 

Our social problems of the current 10 year period are focused on; education, health care, and governmental agencies (military, political, and agencies like Social Security, DMV, Child Services, Police, etc.)  Many of these positions are salaried, fewer hourly then in the private sector.  So what is the point of all this and how does it relate to the main point of increased spending, wage imbalance, and unbalanced fiscal social norms?  Its half the problem.  Let’s take a quick look at the top 3 items on my first list.

 

Education is a huge problem in the United States.  From public primary school quality to the accessibility of colleges we all know there are massive problems in our school systems.  Primary and high schools report high drop out rates, low college entrance exam scores, low college admissions, and massive teacher quality issues all in the news.  Teachers are not paid well, their unions protect the inept and bankrupt their districts constantly (property tax increases), and school facilities are deemed lacking by most people’s standards.  College tuitions are outstripping family incomes at 5 to 1 over the last decade.  The latest reports stated that by the end of our first decade in this centaury college tuition for 1 child will cost 30-40 percent of a family income for the 4 years it takes to graduate.  Politicians pose solutions of offering more aid and scholarships to close the gap.  Closing the gap does not fix the problem, the problem IS the gap.  Top NCAA football coaches at public universities make 7.5 times the pay of the governor.  Some of this comes from alumni, the lion’s share comes from tax payer who fund federal grants, loans, scholarships, etc.  The problems is the cost of the employees and the facilities of the universities, their overhead costs.  Primary schools funding is too little because it is governed by elected school boards, university funding is too much because of boards of trustees and political appointees who glad-hand and favor collect their way up the food chain, most of these people are salaried.

 

Health care in the United States is still world leading in quality, access to this health care is the problem.  Growing up my grandparents had private health insurance, known as Blue Cross and Blue Shield.  It was known as the Cadillac of healthcare at that time.  They paid premiums each month and saw the doctors they wanted.  Now we have HMO’s, employer based health plans, co-oped managed health services and the such.  Why?  Healthcare costs skyrocketed in the 1980’s because malpractice insurance premiums, lawsuits, and managed healthcare systems being hired to make hospitals profitable.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s there were a rash of hospital closures, many of them run by churches or trust funds, and their overhead costs became too much to sustain.  The result were business approach health industries and self sustaining organized groups who offered lower premiums if you agreed to stay in their circle.  Doctors had to pay to participate, in addition to their high insurance premiums, and the decisions of medical procedures were plugged into business models and profit based matrixes for decisions.  Most of the people in these industries are salaried.

 

Government agencies are the lest efficient workplaces on the planet.  Tax payer funded and bureaucratically run their efficiency rating is through the floor.  They get more holidays then private business, their have hiring practices that hamper hiring qualified individuals and favor quotas.  Their retention rate is near 100%, due to inability to fire lazy or incompetent staff.  Their hours are less then regular business and their breaks and non-work times are excessive to get efficient work completed.  Anyone who has ever went to any government agency to get anything done will attest to this, from the DMV, county clerk, circuit court, SSI, tax bureau, etc. its always dreaded because of the inability to handle the work quickly and efficiently (add in bad attitudes and manners for good measure just to keep the customers away as long as possible).  College professors, college staff, political staffers and aids, public works organizations, and even the military are all included in this group, all salaried and only the military has any efficiency, from my years in there this is not as high as it should have been because of the civilian components running the support agencies.  There are reasons people love to get government contracts, ask Lockheed, Boeing, and McDonald Douglas.

 

The common thread here is that the price for production of all goods and services is higher then the cost increases passed onto the people who purchase and use them.  Increasing pay of employees will always increase the pay of the product produced, its part of the value of the items equation.  It does not matter if it is an iPod or a high school biology class, the cost of the service is mostly made up by the labor used to produce it and the overhead of the facility it is produced in.  Our expectations of pay and ratio of pay per item is all out of whack.  Add to this the expectations of employees to increase their buying power without advancing in their fields, raises over advancements, and you end up where we are.  Public school teachers being paid less then a Ford auto factory worker who is paid the same as a US Congress member but they are both paid less then a public university professor who is paid less then a public university football coach is only paid less then top executive at a financial institution.

 

For most workers their pay is fair and not too inflated, the problems are the vicious cycles our society has placed on some areas over others all in the name of competition.  Backsliding is the effect of digression from a previously held spot.  When taxes increase and the cost of living goes up but our pay remains the same we backslide in our finances.  We have less to use and have to pay more for what we need and want.  Increasing minimum wage, while good, creates inflation in the service sector, the business area that relays heavily on this labor market.  Increasing student aid to pay high tuition creates inflation in taxes to fund the aid and even causes tuition to inflate because the money is now there.  Paying top executives, or football coaches, 7.5 times the salaries of the top elected official in a state causes inflation in that business rippling down to the consumer dependent on that good or service.  Capitalism has run amuck and created a dragon like problem with no knights or kings around willing to slay it.  As these salaries increase the money has to come from somewhere.  Government taxes to pay its workers, Business raises prices to pay its workers.  We all work, but we all consume too.  If you consume more then you work you are backsliding.

 

How can we change it?  You won’t like the answer, seriously you will not like it one bit.  The problem, on the surface, is the exorbitant pay, but in reality the problem is all our expectations.  We sent a loud and clear message to Wal-Mart and others in the 1990’s when we refused to buy their “Made in the USA” campaign goods over the cheaper foreign made ones.  At the time people blamed the foreign workers for working for mere pennies on the dollars of wages, its not their faults as they are only trying to climb up out of third world poverty.  When we stopped buying our own produced goods in favor of less expensive items made domestically we put thousands of factories and their workers onto the unemployment lines, what was the year could you buy an American made TV and who made it?  No, we can blame the Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sacks CEO’s but in reality when we kept buying their products and services we were telling the companies we were fine with their CEO wage structure and how they ran their business and totally approved.  The only way to change this is to change our own views on wealth, value, and ratio of work to services obtained.  Ever since TV flooded homes with distorted perspective TV shows like; Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and the eventual reality TV fixation spawning such things shows like Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, the Bachelor and Bachelorette series, and others showing extravagant settings and people doing whatever possible to “win” access to it.  For 20 years Hollywood bombarded houses with prime time shows flaunting wealth, excess, and rich lifestyles eventually distorting our values on what comfort and success really were.

 

The real truth is many of us live really boring lives devoid of the rich excitement and intrigue we see on TV and in movies.  Our distractions are influenced by ad agencies who entice us to consume their client’s products because rich and successful people do, so therefore if we do we are more like them.  Kids grow up seeing this on MTV, in teen magazines, on WCW wresting and the such, even in their video games the theme of obtaining luxury items and wealth is the measure of success.  We all want to escape the drab and dull existence of our 9-5 worlds and we all wonder, “why can’t I have a hot tub like the character in this or that TV show”.  Instead of doing what people did 40 years ago to entertain themselves we invite industries into our home to distract us from our world and fill us with ideas and suggestions that are not in our best interests.  Don't get me wrong, 40 years ago parents would lavish a fancy item on the family every now or then, but they would scrimp and save before doing so, and the whole family was told time and time again how much it cost and was worth.  We don’t participate in our society now day like we did before cable TV, DVD and TiVo, iPods and cell phones, PC’s and internet messaging.  We connect to our friends through Face Book and My Space and not Tuesday night dinners, weekend BBQ’s, or Wednesday night Bible study.  We have become addicted to instant gratification and materialistic ideals that place success as surrounding ourselves with luxury and objects instead of accomplishments and connections with family, friends, and community.  We have to re-align our outlook and viewpoints first to resolve this problem.  Then we need to demand those who accept gross pay for their jobs take reductions to more realistic levels.  

 

Only when those on the top tiers cut their costs and re-align their pay to match reality and not TV fantasy land can we expect to see education and health care return to affordability.  Congress and Politicians pay is, in my opinion, not too far off as they are responsible for a great deal and must work long hard hours.  We need to live in our means, stop accepting other’s views of success and value, and be more realistic in our approach to live, success, and contentment.  Most Americans earn honest wages for honest work, but the few who don’t, who make excess should not be our ideals or goals in measuring success.  Why is it the CEO of any company would make exponential times the wage of the leader of our country?  Does this CEO have more responsibility, more time needed to run the enterprise, more at stake if he fails?  Does a political lobbyist need to make exponential times the wage of the person to whom he is soliciting for support on this or that legislation?  Will the quality of the leaders of these or any other position suffer if they stop paying such insane amounts?  If a NCAA university offered a head coach $150,000/year would they really get an inferior candidate as apposed to the national average of $900,000/year when now most coaches last less then 5 years in their current employ?  The problems are all pay related.  Hourly wage earners support salaried employees and their industries through the price of their goods and services.  If the cost of this out steps that of wage earners they all will backslide to the point of the economy collapsing as it prices itself out of the market.  Basic services like health and education have to remain affordable, only the best should get pay raises and insensitive to reward them and encourage them to work harder, not because its an annual occurrence or the union put it into their contract.  The real solution is in our outlook of the world and our measurement of success.  If we insist on materialism and object collection as success then we all have to become CEO’s, but then who makes, distributes, and sells the objects?  We all can't be rich.  Being rich is a reward for sacrificing your life for your career.  Most rich people will tell you how hard, long, and scary the trip was and none of them will tell you they spent their way into being rich, they scrimped, saved, and starved their way in.  Even the sports stars and music industry wonder kids all made huge sacrifices to get where they got.  We can't spend our way out of debt, and you can't spend your way into sucess or becoming rich.

 

On the verge of spending trillions of dollars on recovering our economy, which is gripped with a credit access crisis, what is it we are actually doing here.  The problems with our economy and our nation is essentially too much debt. F rom the federal government to Wall Street investment firms to large capital and small capital business to individuals we are all straddled with too much debt.  Our government has a plan, sped our way out of debt.

 

How do you spend you way out of dept? Normal people can not do that.  If we have personal debt, student loans, credit cards, department store cards, car loans, home mortgage, small business loan, etc. you can not spend you way out of debt.  This was made painfully clear this year by the collapse of the housing market.  People were trying to spend their way out of debt by burrowing against the equity of their homes, when the market crashed their access to funds dried up and all the debt they held was not due.  Now people have to get out of debt the only way you realistically can, cut spending to less then income to a point you can apply more resources to debt until it is gone, then, once done, you have the free capital to spend again, until this time you will only incur more debt if you continue to spend.

 

Businesses seldom spend their ways out of debt.  This is because many companies are small and unable to access large pools of capital for long terms.  Companies have to be efficient enough to have positive cash flow, negative cash flow is never sustainable if occurring for extended periods of time.  Most businesses today gave up on their liquid cash assets of 50 years ago.  They spend money to expand, renovate, research and develop, or produce new revenue generating products, however they have to ensure they can cover their current and new debts the actions incur with the new products, if not they are doomed to failure, it is just a matter of time.

 

Government is unique in that it takes the approach of only spending to try to get out from under debt.  Realistically government needs to take the excess revenues over its costs each cycle to apply to debts to eventually reduce them, however governments are unique in that they can print money on demand but it must be remembered this does not pay down the debt, just delays it.  In our current case the governments of the world are attempting to spend their ways out of the credit excess debt crisis by flooding their economies with money.  The long term effects will cause increased spending, in theory and therefore cause markets to welcome more risk to grow revenues again.  Still government can not pay down its debts unless its tax revenues increase to exceed the operational costs to a level they can be applied to the national debt (monies owed to banks, countries, organizations the government utilized for keeping currencies at ideal values or to fund desired activities).  The problems is when governments print more money, money is valued against other currencies and the GDP of each country now days, the value will go down or you invite inflation to grow as more money will increase prices and cause values of all items to increase.

 

So how does spending the way out of debt work?  During the Great Depression President Roosevelt introduced the New Deal.  Governmental programs that put people to work through public works projects, provided safety nets for people out of work, Social Security, and the creation of governmental oversight programs to protect citizens form unforeseen financial events, the creation of the FDIC.  Freed up our currency by dissolving the gold standard, and introducing regulation over public utilities and higher taxes on wealthy individuals.  The measures all had short term success but failed to bring the country out of its depressed economic condition, it was the build up of heavy industry and war materials for WWII that eventually pulled the country out of the hard times, not governmental spending.

 

In 1974, yes I can remember the period but only barely, we were facing a looming economic set of problems similar to what we are seeing today.  President Ford was highly unpopular for pardoning Nixon, the fall of Saigon drawing the end to the Vietnam conflict, and mediocre yet temporary inflation controls.  This lead to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 with the condition of the US economy into a state of stagnation and minimal recovery he pledged to clean up government and control spending but ran a deficit during his entire administration, created more government by creating new agencies, and was hamstrung by a Democrat majority congress over his battles on decreasing ‘pork barrel’ spending projects.  During this time the national debt skyrocketed, unemployment rose, and inflation was only held in check by high interest rates making loans more costly to those seeking growth in the business sector.  Business growth and development was stagnant during this period, keeping the economy stuck and unable to expand.

 

This time around trying to spend our way out of an economic problem like Roosevelt or Carter did will result in about the same responses based on the following.  Government will not be radically empowered or grown as it was previously.  The policies created or drafted in those times are still around today, so they can only be expanded, cost more money, and the results will not be as dramatic as they were then, and finally people today are much less willing to listen and sacrifice then they were back then.  The real problems are not different this time around, but the solution being used is in its third attempt and success will be limited due to the lack of effect it can have this time around. We need more wealth generation to pay off our debts across the boards, not more debts to pay off tomorrow.

 

Sure, public works will create tens of thousands of new jobs for infrastructure upgrades, and they are needed, but they are short lived gains and those workers will not be better off once the projects are completed, 3 to 5 years time.  “Reinvesting” in education or access to it will yield little as tuitions, quality, and conditions of the current state of our system will only expand, not improve, under new funding only measures.  Not instituting a longer range objective or shaping the industrial sector of our nation into sustainable future industries our competitors can not clone or copy in short order will do little to ease the underlying problem of our national state of crisis. The problems are too deep and pervasive to be solved by merely flooding them with cash.

 

The reality of the situation is two fold, banks and people have lost money and they will not spend easily now as they feel compelled to recover their recent losses.  As described earlier business will need to become more efficient to regain a position of credit worthiness to access credit when banks feel ready to issue it again.  Banks have taken massive write downs on holding and seen losses in stock holding to the point they have little capital to back up their own operating costs, much less to extend credit to others.  They will want to build up more cash reserves before lending again, and then their policies will be more strict and fiscally sound.  Only when they loosen their grip on their reserves and allow business to access it, therefore business will grow and create more jobs, will people begin to stop hording their cash.  Because credit is tight and business is gearing down, people are laid off, scared of losing jobs, etc. and seeing nearly 30-50 percent of their retirement savings invested in the markets evaporate these people will not want to spend anything but rather try to recover as much of the lost retirement savings as they can, many of which are retirement age now.  Only when this fear and comfort is restored will they begin to spend, creating more demand and starting the cycle of spending that grows business and generates more jobs and wealth.

 

When governments print more money, for whatever reason, they invite a very unwelcome guest to the table, inflation.  Currencies are based off of GDP and relations to other currencies.  Our only saving grace currently is that everyone else’s currencies are as bad if not worse off then our own, therefore decreasing the effects of inflation. The issue is though when we print more money to give to people who are not spending it the prices of goods will increase in value in anticipation for the potential cash infused into the system.  Inflation is inevitable when we print money for no other reason then to spend our way out of debt.  It didn’t work well for Germany in the 1930’s and it won’t work well for us either.  Next is our national debt.  It is already into the trillions, thanks to the last 2 wars, and the interest on this debt is growing each second of each day.  The average piece of the national debt held by each American has risen so much they had to get new signs with more zeros on them to calculate it.  Finally the proposed spending is on unsustainable programs that are mere bandaids to the real underlying issues of our economic crisis.  Cash infusion is not going to do much good when the fundamental economics of our country are broken, ancient, antiquated, and invested in the industries of yesteryear, and successfully copied and resold to us cheaper by foreign emerging markets who have wholesale human capital at fractions of the price.  Federal programs are not sustainable indefinitely. We need to look forward and entice business to change to more future technology and economy systems that innovate and build off of what we are currently doing, surpassing our current industrial climate into one that is not in direct competition with resources we can not compete with.

 

In conclusion to part 1, the massive spending, bail-outs, and creation of larger government programs and initiatives will not get us out of the current problem in my opinion.  The reason we are in this mess is more to do with our current point of view to fiscal responsibility and reality then to a lack of cash.  Spending out way out of dept by flushing cash into the system will not work.  When we have banks scared to loan, who in turn refuse to lend, and baby boomers near retirement who have lost up to half their life savings more worried at hording any cash they can get to make up lost savings, well flushing cash will mean it will get absorbed and stuck until the climate warms to allow enough confidence to foster more liberal spending and loaning again.  Flushing cash into the system is risky and flirting with inflation that could begin to overvalue all sectors of our economy causing more rounds of problems.  If the government really wanted to do something to help, they would capitalize on the disaster as an agent of change to steer the country away from past industrial models and into more sustainable future industries.  To do this they need to implement part 2 of this discussion, the changing of our pricing and valuing structure.

Ok, I have to continue the previous blog's gripe about Live Space's update, this time regarding the photo gallery.  Previously the policy was, you can upload up to 350 pictures per month, at 1024x768 resolution.  Now you can upload 25Gb of photos.  While this is a huge amount of space I can burn through that in 6 months.  I was curious if this new limit applied to my currently posted pictures... it did not! Yea.  Then I noticed the album page had toatlly changed.  The albums thumbnails looked like poo, very grainy and pixelated.  I clicked on my latest album and it had a nice little message to update my album to get better looking thumbnails.  I did and they increased in size and resolution, they looked really nice.  It was only applied to that album, so I did the next and then the next and then I noticed it.  My space meter showed that i had used 500Mb of space after "improving" the thumbnail quality of just 3 albums (although one does have around 300 pictures in it).  So, if you update your photos you use up your new quota and there is nowhere on the page that tell you this.  I have around 110 albums which means over 1,000 pictures so if I update them so they look nice in the new Photo page I will have no new space for adding new albums.  I fear they will get rid of all the albums not updated over the course of the month, the time I discovered they were updates all of MSN's services, hotmail, messenger, live, etc. 

 

To my friends who post a lot of pictures, be aware of this "new" space requirement and how it applies to "updating" your existing albums just to make the thumbnails look better.  On a second note, the new Album gallery looks and functions like CRAP!  It is no longer attached to the blog, meaning the theme is different, the page the albums are on is differnt, longer load times, navigation is differnt, and it completely takes you away from the blog.  Selecting albums is a little easier but, navigation in the album is not easier and being on a different site it detracts from the work all of us have done to make our blogs more complete and personal, now it is just a link to a page like Flicker, Kodack, or any other web based picture site.  I have seen many many many negative comments on the Live Team's blog and will be adding my own after I take a few days to cool down and to discover what else is all jacked up here.  THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD!

At last something has drawn my attention away from politics and sports.  MSN, in their infinate wisdom, has changed Spaces yet again.  Not only did they do so in the middle of the week, not over a weekend, or on the 1st, 15th, or 30/31st for the month, but in the middle of the week the first week of December.  Now I have preached that the only constant in the universe is change and this year that theme was dusted off and rode all the way to White House, but it would be nice if it was better advertised on, like say, MSN's home page, Spaces page where most of us Spaces users go to check on activity and comments, etc.?  Is that too much to ask?  Its like going to the mail box to see the actual mail box was changed.  With that out of the system...

 

The new Spaces "overview" page is a million times worse.  The older page was much better and more informative.  From one location I could see number of hits, recent comments, friends updates, friend requests (which was not working for the past 3+weeks, hense my inability to accept friend requests from 5 additional people), and any messages that were sent.  Now it is all hosed up with a view that gives very little information.  The old page also had the nice feature of letting you add content from new blogs, pictures, files (which I have never used), lists, and site options all from one easy toolbar, now its gone and all I can see is addding a blog and a few links to go here or there making navigation a 2 to 4 click process instead of the old 1 click process.  Now I know Microsoft is sore over Vista but must this translate into the rest of their product line, like MSN?  First impression, this new interface and overview sucks.

 

Now I know I preach against knee-jerk reactions and I try to stay out of it as much as possible but this change is something unexpected, uncommunicated it was coming, and not user friendly or intuitive.  I can say that because my college degree is in Information Science and 1/3 of the program is on HCI, human computer interaction.  We did semesters of usability theory, testing, and evaluation of hardware, software, database interfaces, and information reports.  If you have to think about it, it is not designed properly.  If you can't find the logic or instinctfully get where you are going with minimum effort then the design approach and logic is flawed.  IT companies always tinker and try to improve products to make them current and "fresh" but hey, if it is working and working well stop trying to improve it.  If you must change it, please tell us users first and let us see what will be changhing and, preferably, request our input and suggestions prior to just changhing it willy nilly.

 

There, its off my chest.  MSN does not care and won't reverse its changes because I am a little miffed or sore.  I know this, but I also would like them to know things like this should be better handled in the future.  Since opening my blog here some years ago Spaces has changed about 5 times, 4 of those for the better.  It would be better if they would consult the actual users and communicate things better or let us choose the new and old formats, like Hotmail did, for a little while to get more used to it before the switch was made.  Thats it, for now, I'm done on this topic, I swear...