Financial Crisis

The sky seems to be falling... except that Chicken Little isn't actually trying to warn anyone, he's telling everyone that everything is okay and hoping that enough banks will somehow scrape up enough cash to prevent total economic collapse.

I don't think the Dutch Boy has enough fingers to plug all the holes in the dike. Bear collapses, and JP holds them up. Student loans bought up by the president. Fannie and Freddie go down, and the Fed promises to hold them up. How many loans can the government buy? Is Lehman next? Who's going to hold up the holders? These entities are collapsing dominoes, transferring debt between one another like so much kinetic energy, and at the end of the line we have the boogeyman no one wants to acknowledge, the asteroid plummeting down from the heavens: the unknown amount of over-leveraged credit card debts. Who's going to pay when the credit card banks need all their money back? How "leveraged" are they?

Is all this government backing just staving off a needed recession, and possibly delaying a recovery? Shouldn't bad banks just be allowed to fail, in true capitalistic fashion?

NO NEW DS??

WTF. I love my Wii and all, but I don't need new accessories yet... I need a more iPhone-like DS!

The Wii is an inherently social gaming device, played in a living room with a bunch of people running around a big TV swinging their controllers around. It's made for party games and co-op activities and other fun group social things (by the by, I'm really waiting for the first truly cooperative wiimote experience - why isn't there a "Top Chef" game where one player has to prepare a bunch of sous-chef things, and another artfully combines stuff into plated meals? I'm glad they at least demoed their cooperative music thing at E3)

The DS on the other hand is the ultimate solo gaming platform. One (usually) plays with it in bursts, and its highly mobile nature satisfies gamers anywhere, anytime. Sure, there are WiFi games, but I don't think they're as popular and you never know what your connection will be like when you're moving around.

Oddly enough, since moving to NYC, my social paradigm has shifted to "outdoor" activities more than "indoor" ones (people don't typically hang out at each other's residences, it seems). This makes my Wii much less satisfying than my DS (though I still play solo games on the Wii, they're just not as fun as the group ones).

Maybe Nintendo pulled their new DS because it wasn't as innovative as the iPhone currently is. I can't see them making an equivalent device though... maybe something with an accelerometer and a larger touchscreen - but two touchscreens? Would it make sense for a DS to have GPS? Accelerometer is a total no-brainer for the new generation of DS. What about abandoning the legacy cartridges? Does that make sense for a new DS model? Would that gain some space in the device and free up some resources?