2011 archive
Dustbiters 0
I was busy last night, so I missed the banks that went missing.
Two more assemblages of responsible fiduciaries bit the dust.
We need to stop treating banksters as pillows of the community.
They are more like the bedbugs of the community.
We Need Single Payer 0
Not payola payers.
Bait Byte Car
0
The Nissan Leaf is tracking its drivers.
I doubt that Nissan is being evil.
Rather, it is being stupid. American companies do not have a monopoly on dumb.
The moral of the story is that doing stuff on the internet for no other reason than because you can may not be a good idea (this website excepted).
The latest news, cited at the link in the first paragraph, is that location data is no longer being published.
Via GNC.
Toll House Cooties 0
In Delaware, hitting ’em where they live:
Enviromental Whackos 0
Not who you think they are. Steve Chapman discusses this in the Chicago Tribune. A nugget:
During last year’s campaign, the National Journal reported, “Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect.” (The exception: Mark Kirk of Illinois.)
Conservatives fear liberals will use climate change to justify heavy-handed intrusive regulation and wasteful subsidies, and they are right to worry. But that’s no excuse for pretending global warming is a myth or refusing to do anything about it. It’s an argument for devising cost-effective, market-based remedies that minimize bureaucratic control.
If today’s Republican attitude had prevailed four decades ago, Americans would not have such vital measures as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Then, many people worried that environmentalism would strangle economic growth and personal freedom. But both have survived and even flourished.
Conservatives once understood that corporations are not entitled to foul the environment, any more than individuals have the right to dump garbage in the street.
I remember my first trip to Los Angeles, thirty years ago.
The sky was a glorious orange; from my hotel in Little Toyko, I could barely see Dodger Stadium about two miles away; breathing was an exercise in filtering hazardous waste from each breath. At the time I lived in northern Virginia, where we had regular pollution alerts and orange skies of our own.
It’s much better now, though from Burbank in the hills east of downtown L. A., you can sometimes see the orange cloud down in the valley.
Republicans clearly long for those good old days when you couldn’t breathe air in Pittsburgh or eat fish pulled from the Delaware River (well, actually, you probably still shouldn’t [pdf], but it’s better than it used to be).
Stray Question, First-Person Shooter Dept. 0
How many on-target drone strikes must a CIA agent direct before he levels up?
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
Republicans cooked up the “voter fraud” thing because they fear voters.
They fear voters because they know that their policies are inimical to the general well-being.
Cynthia Tucker explains:
(snip)
It’s no accident, then, that Republican governors and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are following the lead of Georgia — an early adapter of modern methods of voter suppression — by setting in place strict voting requirements that insist on a driver’s license (or some other state-sponsored form of photo identification). They want to make it inconvenient — preferably impossible — for some of those faithful Democratic voters to cast their ballots, giving the GOP an edge in close elections.
They’re going after young folk, too — especially college students. While Reagan-era college kids tended to be faithful Republicans, the current generation heavily favored Obama in 2008. That has led some Republicans to look skeptically at the 26th Amendment.
Endangered Species? 0
The Philadelphia Daily News offers a theory about politicians behaving badly.
It’s absurd, but so are they.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
All joking aside, this may be one good side effect of the bust. Every silver lining has a cloud and all that.
I’ve always had a gut feeling that “reverse mortgages” were more predatory than propitious.
(snip)
Reverse mortgages allow retirees to create a lifetime stream of income by tapping the equity in their homes. Lenders are repaid from the sale of the home when the borrower dies or moves. Bank of America Corp., the second-largest U.S. home lender, said in February it was retreating from the business because of “competing demands and priorities” at the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company.
Up a Tree (Updated) 0
Via Tri-Cities dot com.
Addendum, the Next Day:
The headline was cute, but wrong. The cat wasn’t feisty. The cat was frightened.
North Carolina Is Burning 0
The smell was really heavy yesterday and this morning:
This peat fire that started on May 5. It could burn for months.
Strange Barmates 0
Last Friday’s Fresh Air explored the history of Prohibition.
A confluence of twisted events led to the passage of the Volstead Act. A tidbit, from the transcript:
Mr. OKRENT: Well, going back as far as the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s and then the beer tax that was brought in during the Civil War to finance the Civil War, the federal government had been dependent upon the excise tax on alcohol to operate.
In some years, domestic revenue, as much as 50 percent of it came from excise taxes. So the Prohibitionists realized that they couldn’t get rid of liquor so long as the federal government was dependent upon liquor to get its revenue and to operate. So they supported the income tax movement, and in exchange, many of the populists who were behind the income tax movement supported Prohibition.
In 1913, the 16th Amendment is passed. The income tax comes in. The federal government has another means of supporting itself. And at that point, the Prohibitionists who had been operating state by state by state decided we can now have an amendment to the federal Constitution because the government is no longer dependent. There’s another source of revenue.
Also, the state of Maryland had an official state bootlegger.
Follow the link to listen to the show or read the transcript. It’s worth it.
We Need Single Payer 0
We are headed to a society with three classes: the insurance executive bonus babies, the insured, and the dying.
Even the low-income children who were not rejected had to wait an average of 42 days for appointments for urgent conditions such as diabetes, seizures, asthma, or a bone fracture – 22 days longer on average than children with private insurance.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Still over 400k:
Further declines in dismissals followed by gains in hiring would help sustain consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. While payrolls have been climbing, a jobless rate above 9 percent underscores the need for a pickup in employment that will spur an expansion entering its third year.
As Dick Destiny has repeatedly pointed out, as in this post, trying to prosper on consumption without creation is a fool’s game.
Road Hazards 0
Back in my younger days, I had a friend who hacked in Northern Virginia and D. C. for several years.
While he was hacking, he had only one accident. He was driving his personal car; a cab owned by a rival cab company (both companies were owned by the same person) ran a light and broadsided his car.
Driving a cab can be a pita, but he did not encounter anything like this:
She was unhappy that the driver did not permit food in his cab, so she divested herself of it.