16 October 2001
Today I want to discuss three topics: RAM Prices, Making Peace, and the Kansas City Royals.
I can remember hoping that hard drives would fall to a dollar a megabyte. Now they're something like $0.0025/MB, and RAM is going for $0.20/MB. Windows is a pig for RAM, and having lots of it helps anyone using Windows get some real advances.
For Win95, you need 64MB minimum. For Win98/ME, go up to 128MB minimum. For Win2000, go for everything your motherboard can hold.
Speaking of motherboards, not everyone can add the RAM that they're selling today. I don't think it's a good idea to buy a new computer because you want to add some RAM, but you might find that you have to have a new motherboard to hold more. And that motherboard might or might not have the right number and type of slots for your expansion cards. Think ahead, and help yourself.
I woke up the other day realizing that we can't have peace unless our moderate Arab friends take a stand for us. They should tell their people that we are nice guys. If they don't do this, we'll find that the people over there are making up monster stories about us, and no balanced message will get out.
Then I started to think about foreign aid. How we give lots of money to the people who say we're so bad. I looked up the amounts of foreign humanitarian and military aid that we give. Of course, there's a lot of that, but then I started to wonder if we don't allow a trade imbalance - it's kind of the same thing as sending aid. Wow. The US trade imbalance was over $400 billion last year. Wow. The Apollo program cost $25 billion. That used to be the cost of oil we imported every year.
When we finish winning this war we better get our trade in balance or we'll ship out everything we own and won't have anything left for our kids to waste. It wouldn't bother me if we'd start working on alternative fuels so we could kick that addiction to Middle Eastern Oil that we're feeding.
Of course, the Royals are already a joke for pretending that Tony Muser is a major league manager. Guys, there are only 30 openings in the world for this job, why are you sticking with a guy who is clearly number 2,000? At least three announcers and one lawyer have already done better.
Jamie Quirk was bench coach for the Royals, and had the temerity to openly discuss how stupid Muser is during the games. Jamie is also a longtime close friend of Hall of Famer George Brett, who is a front office executive with the Royals. Muser went to his boss, GM Allen Baird, and probably whined about how hard it was to keep the thing going with Jamie telling the truth about him.
While Brett was out of town on 9 October, Baird fired Quirk, who had been in that position for 8 years, because according to Baird, the team needed "an adjustment" at bench coach. The team needs an adjustment all right, but this soap opera is ... well, for entertainment it's better than anything else in baseball that doesn't have Steinbrenner in it. Baird meets with Muser for the weekend, then fires Brett's pal and keeps the rest of the coaches.
Muser makes the worst decisions in the game of anybody I can think of. I'm not surprised that he blames his bench coach for his lack of a clue, but I'm astounded that an organization with the class of the 80's Royals can fall this far. Allen Baird, if you want to make the team better, why don't you fire your non-coach and then resign for the classless way you work. I think that removing two negatives would be a positive.