Mammon category archive

Heaven forbid that the town of Wildwood, which owns and maintains its beach, should host events and raise money for the town on its own damn beach.

Full Disclosure:

Back in my Philly days, I vacationed at Wildwood several times. Nobody does tacky like Wildwook.

In my local rag, education professor Claire Berube argues that, as long as politicians continue to flail at public schools with standardized tests, education will continue to deteriorate. Here’s a bit; read the rest.

Under intense pressure from voters, politicians with no educational experience sought the easiest and cheapest solution to prove accountability: Multiple-choice tests. The high-stakes bubble-test assessments soon became a monster

The beneficiaries of the testing flailure are the outfits selling the tests and no one else.

Via Job’s Anger.

I used to visit Granite Run Mall from time to time. It was a bit out of our normal stamping grounds, but it was not a bad mall, though it seems to be quite out of fashion these days.

The best way to turn around the struggling mall, according to its owners, is to demolish it.

What was once a classic suburban mall will be reborn as something more classically urban.

Outdoor courtyards will replace the traditional mall structure as it becomes a town center with retail stores, restaurants, and luxury apartments.

There is no town for it to be a center of. There is just an intersection in the suburbs.

We have one of those faux “town centers” created at an intersection right here in Virginia Beach. It is sterile wasteland of cookie-cutter chain restaurants, over-priced ersatz boutiques, and sky-high-costing condos and apartments with all the gritty urban flavor of, well, a suburban shopping mall.

To have a “downtown,” you must first have a town that knows how to get down.

“Town Centers” are “developed.” Downtowns are.

Afterthought:

You can bet that the developers will make out okay. They’ll be long gone when the vacuous emptiness of their effort becomes apparent.

Via Raw Story.

What mistermix said.

(Oliver) Twisted history repeats itself.

. . . or the Man behind the Medicine Show:

A daytime talk show guest has agreed to pay $9 million to customers he duped on The Dr. Oz Show and The View.

The Federal Trade Commission accused Lindsey Duncan of selling phony weight-loss aids, including green coffee bean extract, that he claimed could cause consumers to lose 17 pounds and 16 percent of their body fat in 12 weeks – without diet or exercise.

Duncan told Dr. Oz Show viewers that his claims were backed by a clinical study, but the company that sponsored the study settled FTC charges in September that found it to be severely flawed.

Via Jobs Anger.

Steven M.

I haven’t paid much attention to the “free community college” proposal because I knew it was a non-starter out of the box, though it might be a laudable goal.

Frankly, a more laudable goal would be ending the student loan scam and the charter school/testing scams.

Reducing the amount of money that real universities waste on big-time sports might also be a good idea.

Via Job’s Anger.

Kavips explains how the privatization scam works.

. . . and you still seriously expect that, one day, you will be able to retire?

In case you wondered why law firms are buying those annoying ads asking whether you’ve taking this drug or used that mesh . . . .

. . . big pile of money burns.