assets.

it's funny to think about that when i walk to work i may have absolutely no cash in my wallet, but i'm carrying close to $500 in electronics.

weird.

speaking of assets of a different sort, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff has declared that security trumps privacy, and american citizens will be made safer if they give up ever more personal information to government databases.

"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"

it sounds to me like he's trying a carrot-and-stick approach there, except...i don't see any carrot.