2011 archive
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Making homes more affordable while reducing wasteful spending on unnecessary frills such as schools, police forces, and fire departments:
(snip)
Bunn said what Norfolk experienced with its home values is not unlike its neighbors. Virginia Beach’s real estate tax assessments will drop by about 3 percent, Chesapeake by 3.3 percent and Suffolk from 5 to 7 percent, she said. She did not get an answer from Portsmouth leaders about their assessments, she said. Other South Hampton Roads cities are expected to release details soon about their 2010 assessments.
War on CyberHype 0
The BBC reports some sensible comments. No doubt they will be lost in the rush to sell scary books and make scary headlines (emphasis added):
Bruce Schneier claims that emotive rhetoric around the term does not match the reality.
He warned that using sensational phrases such as “cyber armageddon” only inflames the situation.
Mr Schneier, who is chief security officer for BT, is due to address the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week
Speaking ahead of the event, he told BBC News that there was a power struggle going on, involving a “battle of metaphors”.
(snip)
His point of view was backed by Howard Schmidt, cyber security co-ordinator for the White House.
“We really need to define this word because words do matter,” said Mr Schmidt.
“Cyber war is a turbo metaphor that does not address the issues we are looking at like cyber espionage, cyber crime, identity theft, credit card fraud.“
The portion I put in bold illustrates part of the reason for the success of the “cyberwar” hype.
Unscrupulous persons do lots of different nasty things.
Nasty things done with computers have in common one thing: they are done on (gasp!) computers.
Many persons, even those adept at using individual computer applications, such as a web browser or an office suite, have no idea how a computer or a network does what it does. Therefore the hypesters can fool persons into thinking that the many nasty things are actually one nasty thing–“cyyyyyyyyyyybeeeeerwaaaaar”–because they are done on (gasp!) computers.
They can therefore write white papers, sell scary books, get interview gigs on telly vision, and, perhaps most significantly, get lucrative consultancy gigs writing more white papers, promoting more scary books, and appearing in more interviews on the telly vision.
I’m not saying there is no reason to worry. Both individual computer users and system admins should practice safe HEX.
But there’s no reason to predict cybergeddon.
Elephants Have Big Earmarks
0
Jamie discusses the drive to buy a second engine from a secondary manufacturer for the F-35 (note that the plane already has a first engine from the primary manufacturer). Here’s a bit:
He winds up by hoping that the Teabaggers hold to principle rather than to party.
There’s irony in there somewhere . . . .
Virginia Beach Democratic Committee Third Thursday Dinner 0
- What: Virginia Beach Democratic Committee Third Thursday Dinner
- When: February 17th, 6:00 PM
- Where: Kelly’s Hilltop Tavern, 1936 Laskin Road, Virginia Beach, VA 23454 (map), in the nonsmoking section.
Show up, order off the menu (separate checks), socialize, and talk politics–or whatever else interests you.
I have attended several of these. They tend to be smaller gatherings, highly informal, and a lot of fun. Don’t know whether I’ll make it this week, though–a cold seems to have caught me.
For more information, email VaBeachBoy@aol.com
Causation 0
Writing at Bloomberg, Michael Short analyzes the causes of the late and future panic depression recession.
The reasoning is dense and requires careful reading, but it’s worth a gander, maybe even a goose. A nugget:
The CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, has often called our attention to the outrageous amount of banker bashing by Americans outside the financial sector, who seek to blame their troubles on others.
Wall Street leaders now understand that they made a mistake, one born of their innocent and trusting nature. They trusted ordinary Americans to behave more responsibly than they themselves ever would, and these ordinary Americans betrayed their trust.
Amazingly, these ordinary Americans don’t even appear to feel guilty for their actions. Like wild animals that have lost their fear of humans, they continue to wander down from the hills to rummage through our garbage cans for sustenance.
Big Bad John 0
Bad at this job, and, in true Republican fashion, just making stuff up.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The particulars of the indictment start at approximately the 4:30 mark.
Fifteen second commercial at the beginning.
Via Steve Benen, who has commentary if you aren’t in the mood for video.
QOTD 0
John Barrymore,from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks.
Turnabout 0
One can only hope . . . .
When Wells Fargo still didn’t respond, Rodgers got a $1,000 default judgment against it for failing to answer his formal questions, as required by a federal law called the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act.
And when the mortgage company didn’t pay – does something sound familiar? – Rodgers turned to Philadelphia’s sheriff.
The result: At least for the moment, the contents of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, 1341 N. Delaware Ave., are scheduled for sheriff’s sale on March 4 to satisfy the judgment and pay about $200 for court and sheriff’s costs.
It’s not a foreclosure issue and the homeowner has enough resources to take on the bank.
The bank has been trying to force him to buy a much more expensive homeowner’s policy than the one he had before, a “replacement-value” policy rather than the standard market-value policy.
The purpose of the insurance requirement in a mortgage is to hold the bank harmless in case the house burns down. The bank has no reason to force the homeowner to buy more, unless they are also in the insur–but I speculate, just like a bankster, with no idea of what’s actually going on, just like a bankster. I’m just not too big to fail.
Read the full story at the link.
Battery Misdemeanor 0
This was under a cover behind the engine against the firewall. I had to pry the cover loose with a screwdriver.
My friend’s battery would not have gotten like this if Toyota did not like to hide components from view, like some kind of mechanic’s Rubik’s cube. (I had a friend who told me of having to remove the battery from a Toyota so he could replace a headlamp. I’ve heard even worse about changing spark plugs.)
If she could have seen the battery, she would have kept it clean.
Yesterday, I cleaned it up and jumped the car, but the battery is over five years old and didn’t hold a charge through the night, so I trotted out to get a new one this morning. At the store, the clerk dragged out the battery and started to ring it up, along with something else.
“What’s that?” asked I.
“That’s your replacement kit.” (What means this “replacement kit”? The battery is the replacement.)
“What’s in it?”
Turned out that it was two flat rubber washers to fit on the terminals between the leads and the battery case and a packet of brake grease for coating the terminals against corrosion.
Now Vaseline works as well as brake grease and is a damned sight cheaper and the two rubber washers–well, given that the terminals are slightly flared at the base, the leads won’t touch the battery case in any event.
She was trying to sell me about a two bit’s worth of useless stuff, over-priced to 18 bits, as if it were a goes-without-saying necessity.
And I bet they get away with it more often than not.
I waved her off. “I don’t need that.”
Finding the Missing Link 0
The beckless search for truth:
Via TPM.
Spitball’s Old News 0
The only thing new about this is the confession:
Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.
I remember reading that he got the name “Curveball” because intelligence types thought that was what he was throwing.
Bushies believed him because they wanted war more than they wanted truth.
Jeopardy 0
I’m rooting for Watson.
Watson, by the way, runs Linux.
Watson is made up of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. Davidian sontinued, “This is enclosed in ten racks including the servers, networking, shared disk system, and cluster controllers. These ninety POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, each with eight cores. IBM Watson has a total of 2880 POWER7 cores.”
Domestic Economy 0
Or, How To Bargain about Anything.
Spill Here, Spill Now, Pay Later, and Later, and Later, and Later . . . 0
“Wake up, America, you are being lied to. The beaches are not clean; they are not safe . . . .”
The Nation has more. An excerpt (emphasis added):
Perhaps not coincidentally, the most outspoken scientists doing this research come from Florida and Georgia, coastal states that have so far managed to avoid offshore drilling. Their universities are far less beholden to Big Oil than, say, Louisiana State University, which has received tens of millions from the oil giants. Again and again these scientists have used their independence to correct the official record about how much oil is actually out there, and what it is doing under the waves.
Video via Steven D.
Even a Blind Pig Finds an Acorn Once in a While 0
The Teabaggers get one right correct.
Facebook Frolics 0
Pillows of the community:
In tutus, gorilla suits and pajamas, they came by car, bike and train, some with pillows strapped to their backs. They lined up on opposing sidewalks, then with the blow of a whistle, charged one another. They met in the middle in a fluffy frenzy.
“A panda just hit me!” one pillow-wielding man called out as the crowd of revelers, hemmed in by park benches, smacked each other from behind, above and beside.