Since California Lawmakers have been unable to do their job and come up with a budget for the next fiscal year, Governor Schwarzenegger has decided that no budget means no money allocated for salaries. And no money allocated for salaries means the only rule that applies is federal minimum wage. Brutal, but makes sense.

On NPR the other night the host interviewed a spokesman from the Governor’s office as well as State Controller John Chiang. The Governor’s spokesman explained the legal precedent that justified this course of action. The Controller stated that he is in control of payroll, and would simply refuse to follow the Governor’s order.

It was surprising to hear how openly arbitrary and defiant the Controller’s position was, not citing any legal precedent (despite his quote in the LA Times accusing the Governor of faulty legal premises). He should be embarrassed.

It’s all rather symbolic anyway given that “If the governor is successful in cutting the employees’ income, they will receive their full back pay once a budget were signed.”

Anyway, it seems unlikely that Sarah Connor would have been nearly as frightened if she were being pursued by the Controller.

vs.

A week and a half ago at the Amazon Independent Online Seller Conference, during a Web Services presentation, someone asked if the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) was intended to compete with PayPal. The question’s intent was pretty clear: Does Amazon have something in the works to compete with PayPal? The Amazon execs gave a beautiful response that any politician would be proud of: no, none of these [web services systems up on the Powerpoint slide] are intended to compete with PayPal.

Then what do we find a week later? Amazon Payments.

Nice work, Amazon execs. Transparency and frankness, with just a hint of deception.

Nice to know that California’s governor supports the massive expansion of the state’s tax on stupidity.

Raise taxes? Cut spending? Why do that when we can try something even crazier and put more burden on future generations?

We never liked future generations anyway. What have they ever done for us?

Yes Cuil is brand new, so I guess I should cut it some slack, but relevancy is everything in search. Who cares how many pages you have indexed if you can’t pull up the most useful ones?

It’s like having warehouses full of file cabinets and having to dig through drawers to find the file you’re looking for.

Although TechCrunch points out, “Cuil does a good job of guessing what we’ll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries.”

Virgin Galactic Launches the White Knight 2

Virgin Galactic is Sir Richard Branson’s latest venture which should put the rich into outer space where they can no longer harm us, the poor.

I hope that happens some day: a stratified society where the rich live in space and rule over us.