If they need to be told:

Just a few weeks ago, the Federal Reserve Bank released new guidelines for mortgage lenders, instructing them not to make loans to borrowers who would not be able to pay them back.

Then I sure as hell want something for bailing their asses out after a bad night at the casino. I already bought my house (July 2004, yeah great timing, right about at the peak of home values) and have gleefully watched as the home values have dropped just as fast as I have paid down my mortgage balance.

What do I want you ask? I want to know that this will be a hell of a lot less likely to ever occur again, and I don't want to bail out anyone who is holding more than one property. You gambled on getting rich or wanted to live the high life with a second home? No problem, just don't ask me to save your bacon. You need to take your lumps. Bailing out naive first time home buyers is about all I can stomach, and even that is only really to prevent the whole economy from completely nose-diving.

"Trust us, we know the business and the 'free' market works great, we don't need to regulate it. That would be sacrilege. Oops. Can you help us out, just this one time."

I'm not so sure I favor any measure to ease the pain. I know that sounds like the kind of thing only someone who is not feeling too much pain could say. Guilty as charged (for now).

But really, the sacrifices that lay ahead as we try to get energy independent and clean things up are not going to come cheap. They are going to involve replacing entire power generation and fuel delivery systems. Any kind of effort that involves borrowing money to allow us just one more meal at the petrotit sounds like a bad idea. The sooner we accept that business as usual is just digging a deeper hole and delaying the inevitable, the better. The money is better spent on the transition off petroleum, than on one more comforting suckle.

I'm not by nature a doomsdayer or conspiracy theory buff, but current trends (and they do seem like trends vs fads, given the magnitude of dollars involved) kind of make things look a bit bleak. It would be one thing if an asteroid came around the sun and blind-sided us, but this is of our own doing.

It really seems to me like so many smart people have been so busy crafting things to make MAD cash, blithely ignoring common sense or moral values.

I'm really too lazy to be a revolutionary, most Americans are. But it seems like having so much wealth be generated out of proportion to the value of the work behind it, or without actually doing anything of value at all can't go on forever. I guess the revolution (evolution) comes when we go down to Walmart and the doors are closed, they just can't make it work anymore. So much for us being a progressive and resourceful nation, we just wait until our chance to make a change for the better is gone and come what may...

That oil sounds like future quarters of record profits when oil gets even more scarce, it's not like our demand for oil is going to end in 5 or 10 years. And it doesn't seem like any "demand destruction" that occurs will be long-lived to me. There will be demand for that oil. Plus technology might even improve a bit more in the future to enhance the % they recover (maybe even more cheaply?) when the price of oil goes even higher than it is now.

So with record profits now, why the panic? Must be getting a real sweetheart deal on those leases? Low royalties maybe? It doesn't seem like we should be in any hurry to give it away - until they pump it belongs to you and me, right?

The idea about rewarding someone who SOLVES the battery problem is not stupid because it comes from McCain. It is stupid becasue it is stupid.

You don't walk up the guy that is standing there holding the golden goose, and then hand him $300 million. He ALREADY has a sure thing, if he can't bring it to market, there are plenty of people who will buy his idea for a tidy sum.

The other comments about executives and their biases to short term thinking have all kind of hinted that there is an intrinsic problem with the way execs are motivated. So a change to their compensation plans is required, right? Right now they are probably making decisions that take into acount the value of their stock (they would be stupid not to), which they can sell. If you want to make their time horizon go a little further, how about giving them a new class of stock that they can't sell, ever. They just get the dividends. Maybe the stock even expires after 20 years so they aren't a long-term burden on the company.

Speaking of long-term burdens on companies...

Has anybody seen %'s for how many companies actually can and do honor their commitments long term? It is so surprising to me that companies and employees don't push from both sides for removing health care from employers' responsibility completely. I just don't understand why companies aren't all over trying to unload a cost that is so far out of their control and NOT part of their business. Similarly for employer sponsored pension plans, switch 'em all to 401ks (with mandatory options beyond company stock). Then when your company goes belly up (Enron) at least you had a fighting chance to preserve some of your retirement.