Doom and gloom

The talk of the last several weeks has of course, been the debt crisis - the US's all grown way out of proportion liabilities. The latest has been the S&P downgrade- well deserved in my opinion  - the credit rating agencies may not have a whole lot of credibility given their role in the subprime crisis - but its never too late to start building some rep. And much was made of the 2 trillion miscalculation - which sounds gigantic (it is gigantic) - except its only 10% of the total (20 trillion was miscalculated as 22 triliion). And if you ask me - that could very well be treated as a margin of error.

But the saddest thing in the last few weeks is not the apparent ending of good times on Wall Street (I doubt they're ended, honestly) - its the end of the space shuttle program. No, it doesn't make quite as good news as watching traders panicking on the floor, and we've all become far too used to seeing shuttles taking off for it to have any excitement at all - but it feels a little like the end of a dream. And there's no knowing if we'll ever get it back.

The International Space Station is going to be dropped into the sea in a few years, and putting a man on the moon- something that was achieved with computers that could be built on the back of a cellphone now - looks like an ever receding pipe dream. How was it that so much more was achieved with so much less, so many years ago? The same way the Egyptians built the pyramids maybe? 

In any case, it was the end of the Columbia space shuttle, that truly marked the decline for me - the markets will after all, rise again another day.