Lovely weather we’re having for the golf.
Debtors’ prison
It’s a concept from the old times. If you can’t afford your bills you are thrown in prison until they can be paid by hard labor. You essentially are made work off your debt to people/society in this way. This is a system that works in the past as people didn’t have the ability to get out of their depth in debt. As soon as you reached the edge you were thrown into prison, never to return.
The problem with such a system is that is is too draconian. You don’t allow a person to get out of debt by their own means – they are plunged into a working role that only pays minimum wage from which they are unlikely to emerge from.
The problem is the declaration of bankruptcy. You create a business that does not do well and you end up in more debt than you could ever service. A declaration of bankruptcy allows you to completely evade this obligation without much in the form of penalties. Granted you are not allowed to have a company for a period of time, but that’s the sum total of the penalty once you file a chapter 11.
Consider a mandatory prison sentence for anyone who has a debt after the final judgement on a chapter 11. I would feel that if they could convince a jury that they were capable of paying off this form of debt they should be permitted to do so – however I would not permit a lawyer into the system. They should be able to convince us on their own that they can pay the bills. Give them a period of time to be producing a reasonable return – based on the loss to the other parties.
Creditors should be allowed to clim their debts as is reasonable (as decided by a judge (maybe not the judge in the original case). But the long and short of it is that people who were owed money will not be left at odds once the business is restarted. I have personally seen murderous intent towards new companies prinipally due to the fact that the original creator is still involved and he didn’t suffer any loss due to an adverse judgement against him.
Ahrrr (pirates)
Today be talk like a pirate day. Arrrrr!
Finally got XGL working properly
It started off not displaying on the screen correctly – it turns out that I had 16 bit visuals enabled. Changing to a default depth of 24 made that go away. It is really pretty. Prettier than vista. All I need to do is not waste time on it.
Oh yeah, cheating at gambling may be legal
Yes, legal, but when did that ever stop the folks running the casino from suddenly finding you missing, and that you turn up later with the crap beaten out of you. Let’s be perfectly honest about this… legal is one thing, not getting caught is the real trick.
Honestly, even with deregulation, I don’t think that the use of electric or electronic mechanisms to directly alter the probability of winning at a bet is illegal.
Indirectly, I don’t know.
credit for gambling thoughts
Well, it’s all about the legislation. There has been renewed interest in the legislation considering banning the use of credit cards to pay for gambling debts. Personally, I think that bannig it is incorrect. It should instead be treated as another form of a cash advance. I am reminded of an accountant friend of mine (yes, they do exist) who told me that it’s illegal to use one credit card to pay off another (without an agreement). Basically it’s all about credit, cash and debt.
Using cash for a bill means you owe nothing after the transaction.
Using credit for a bill means you owe something after the transaction.
Using credit to pay for a pure credit transaction is just plain cheating (and the banks and law says so most of the time, and in most places).
Using credit to pay for gambling debts is nothing more than an extension of the previous point. You should not be using credit to pay for what should be a cash transaction only; because the last thing you want to have is people owing money to ‘easy’ firms when they should really be owing money to ‘hard’ firms.
Sarcastic statement? somewhat. I’m a bit of a pragmatist on things like this. The only problem is that I don’t believe you should be cheating by laying off a debt for a month when you should be paying money for it.
New power brick
Next business day does mean next business day.
Dead power brick on the laptop
The power brick on the laptop died. I have about 4 hours of juice left. It’s the weekend, and support is closed. Thank crap for the warranty and NBD support. Grrrrr.
Finally got the pictures uploaded for the wedding
It was a bit of a trial. The images were too big, I didn’t have a correct php configuration. An update to the gallery was borked, so I was missing some fields. All fun, really.
Some of my pictures from Dermot and Lindsay’s wedding are now viewable.
Oh My Aching Livers (Dermot & Lindsay’s Wedding)
It was Dermot and Lindsay’s wedding over the weekend. It was a great event, and I’ll get to uploading my pictures as soon as is practical. They’re a bit larger than usual and ADSL really puts the capital A in Asymmetric. 100mb upload to come soon, and tomorrow I’m helping someone clean out their house.