Saturday, May 04, 2013
Permission
This "permission structure" business illuminates the centrist Democrats approach to revoking the New Deal. Bi-partisan commissions, historic presidencies, hostage-taking, tribalism are all tools for obtaining permission to violate core values that poll really, really well.
Friday, May 03, 2013
The Reviews Are In!
Who amongst us does not want to buy a "wonderful first novel" which "has the feel of an instant classic?"
Jobs
+165K, unemployment at 7.5%. This will be hailed as good news, but it isn't really. Not bad news, but not good enough news.
Thursday, May 02, 2013
Thursday Crass Commercialism
Who amongst us doesn't need more external drive storage?
Best way to support this site is to click on the amazon links (direct links in posts like this one, or the bottom right ad) and buy crap you were going to buy anyway. It's their money, then, not yours. The commissions are decent.
Best way to support this site is to click on the amazon links (direct links in posts like this one, or the bottom right ad) and buy crap you were going to buy anyway. It's their money, then, not yours. The commissions are decent.
Kids Today
For people under 18, basically any behavior that didn't involve actual harm to others should be treated as a behavioral problem, not a criminal issue, and certainly not an adult criminal issue. Maybe burglarly should get you a short trip to juvey.
To completely mess up your life at 16, you should have to do something which is actually pretty bad.
To completely mess up your life at 16, you should have to do something which is actually pretty bad.
Capacity
One thing about highways/transit is that people conceptually overestimate highway capacity, let alone actual usage in rural areas.. A highway lane operating at perfect capacity can maybe do 1800 cars per hour. Fewer than capacity is fewer, too many cars means congestion and therefore much less capacity, and obviously things like on/off ramps and accidents slow things down quite a bit, especially on older more poorly designed highways (they have gotten better at this). So if a transit line is hosting 26,000 riders per day, that's roughly equivalent to a highly used highway lane.
My urban hellhole has two heavy rail subway lines. The north-south one, especially, is definitely underutilized, but even it gets 135,000 daily weekday riders.
My urban hellhole has two heavy rail subway lines. The north-south one, especially, is definitely underutilized, but even it gets 135,000 daily weekday riders.
Paternalism
It all just boils down to "I must know what my teenage girl is doing." Which I get, and if you have a healthy open relationship with your teenage daughter (good luck!), good for you. But uncle or daddy might also be raping her, or planning to beat the shit out of her for daring to make Jesus cry. Or quite possibly she's just shy and scared for no good reason and you're wonderful parents who would happily help her. Establishing an age limit of 15 in a world where almost no 15-year-olds have real IDs and increasingly 17-year-olds don't either, puts up a huge access barrier to everybody. Fighting for a higher limit is worse.
Infrastructure
Little Tommy's oft repeated, remarkably stupid, view that technology and globalization changes everything also gets the public policy completely wrong. If we're entering a world of job-shifting entrepreneurship, with high-risk/high-reward opportunities for the talented and diligent,* then we need a government that provides a foundation for that world. That means not just a really solid set of social insurance programs independent of people's jobs, like health care and pensions, but also a stronger basic infrastructure.
Pull optical fiber to every post office and set up public wireless. Give everyone a bank account at the Fed. Restore access to inexpensive higher education. Stop the copyright and patent madness. The best public policy in Tommy's world would eliminate the parasitic monopolists choking off innovation and opportunity.
*Tommy and his ilk leave out the most important factor of all: luck.
Pull optical fiber to every post office and set up public wireless. Give everyone a bank account at the Fed. Restore access to inexpensive higher education. Stop the copyright and patent madness. The best public policy in Tommy's world would eliminate the parasitic monopolists choking off innovation and opportunity.
*Tommy and his ilk leave out the most important factor of all: luck.
The Good Old Days
So much more fun.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, chemistry sets entered the atomic age. Gilbert offered an “Atomic Energy Lab” that came with “radioactive ores” and a Geiger counter. A Porter Chemcraft kit had uranium samples and a spinthariscope, a device for viewing radioactive decay. (The humor site Cracked.com last year named toys like this in a list of “The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys.”)
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Afternoon Thread
I liked this post, especially because I wrote it in about 5 minutes. I suppose if you have to explain the joke it isn't funny, but I was mocking BoBo Brooks's column about how he is the best pundit ever.
Stupid Plan B Rule
Basically anything having to do with teenage girls and sex freaks people out. Whether or not 13-year-old girls should be having sex, plenty of them are. If the drug is safe then it's safe.
...also, too.
...also, too.
What Could Go Wrong
I'm not a parent, but I do know that young children only have a vague understanding of the potential consequences of their actions. Teenagers only have a vague understanding of the potential consequences of their actions. So, you know, don't give them guns.
A Kentucky toddler was accidentally shot dead by her own brother as he played with a gun he'd been given as a gift, police said.
Caroline Starks, 2, was killed after her 5-year-old sibling fired the .22-caliber rifle at their Burkesville home at 1 p.m. Tuesday.
Looting And Pillaging
Clueless and/or malevolent rich people are going to destroy everything nice in this country.
Resistance
NYT: Banks Resist Strict Control of Foreign Bets
Am I the only one who thinks the Times should explain just how banks go about "resisting" laws? I'd like to know, next time I'm in a TSA line.
Am I the only one who thinks the Times should explain just how banks go about "resisting" laws? I'd like to know, next time I'm in a TSA line.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Blue Or Orange?
The terse writer aims at getting to the heart of the matter, to drive the point home. The verbose writer is just enamored with her own voice, each additional word a tribute to her own ego and not an aid to communication.
Fonts matter, too, of course, as do colors. Some writers ornament their words with orange, an obvious sign of intellectual stagnation. Cooler colors, such as baby blue, or powder blue, or even light blue, communicate the kind of seriousness that a serious writer needs to convey.
A writer at the peak of his powers will limit himself to 140 characters, with perhaps one associated link. Invective is important, as is frequent if calculated use of profanity. An occasional appearance of cats is the true signal of genius, as are pictures of grilled crustaceans.
The road traveled by the powder blue, cat-obsessed, crustacean crunching, one-liner generating author is the path that all others must follow. The ridiculousness of everyone else is apparent, their lack of humility on display.
Fonts matter, too, of course, as do colors. Some writers ornament their words with orange, an obvious sign of intellectual stagnation. Cooler colors, such as baby blue, or powder blue, or even light blue, communicate the kind of seriousness that a serious writer needs to convey.
A writer at the peak of his powers will limit himself to 140 characters, with perhaps one associated link. Invective is important, as is frequent if calculated use of profanity. An occasional appearance of cats is the true signal of genius, as are pictures of grilled crustaceans.
The road traveled by the powder blue, cat-obsessed, crustacean crunching, one-liner generating author is the path that all others must follow. The ridiculousness of everyone else is apparent, their lack of humility on display.
Not Sure How Much It Really Matters
Or, even, if it's a new thing, but, yes, the elected Republicans are not servants of their base they are the base.
The Republican congressional delegation -- particularly the members of the House -- are completely creatures of the base. They are former state legislators and state senators who got elected to those offices espousing ideas that likely were further out there than the ones they're spouting now. In large part, they were raised within the base's political structures, both inside and outside of government. They are the product of a closed information society, with its own history and its own science and its own truth. To borrow a line from Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, the Republican members of the House are the fking base, motherfker. They're not asking for permission to do the right thing, and they're certainly not waiting for this president to provide it. They're not posing. They are not doing what they're told. They're doing what they believe.
Gay People Are Everywhere!!!
Yes if you've ever been in a gym locker room where people change clothes, get naked, and shower in public or semi-public facilities you've already given a gay person an opportunity to check out your junk, whether they're interested in doing that or not.
The Otter Menace
Many people on the internets seem to think otters are cute and cuddly creatures.
My exposure to otters was to... giant otters. Those things are freaking scary.
My exposure to otters was to... giant otters. Those things are freaking scary.
Obedience and Control
Some people just do horrible things, but there's a strain of parental psychology such that (some) parents require extreme obedience from their children. It's weird.
Almost Verbatim Governor Corbett
Don't you understand that my state is filled with unemployed methheads?
Do Not Point And Laugh
People who express bigoted things must be respected!!!
Broussard didn't just say Jesus doesn't like gayness or that being gay was a sin, he said a gay person couldn't be a Christian. All kinds of sinners welcome, well almost all...
Broussard didn't just say Jesus doesn't like gayness or that being gay was a sin, he said a gay person couldn't be a Christian. All kinds of sinners welcome, well almost all...
Who Matters
Whom they care about:
The White House would not respond to a request for comment. Bill Burton, a former deputy White House press secretary for Obama, did not respond directly to Democrats’ concerns about the president’s move on entitlements.
”There is no doubt that Karl Rove and his allies will spend millions of dollars lying about what the President’s budget means in terms of the economic health of our country,” Burton, now a strategist for the Democratic public affairs firm Global Strategy Group, wrote in an email. “What we don’t know is just how much Democratic donors are going to stand up to those lies.”
Monday, April 29, 2013
Fancy Me
I actually went to El Celler de Can Roca, though years ago when it was a bit less well known and quite a bit less expensive.
Mussels, 5 different ways.
Mussels, 5 different ways.
Journamalism
I admit I find this to be deeply weird. Why the need for cut rate advertising to help them? You have the whole newspaper to do it for them.
Priorities
Our local weird curmudgeon has his annual diatribe against sidewalk seating out today.
He isn't totally wrong in that some restaurants do take more than they should away from pedestrians, but I'd prefer erring on the side of more outdoor seating rather than less. And it just isn't that important.
He isn't totally wrong in that some restaurants do take more than they should away from pedestrians, but I'd prefer erring on the side of more outdoor seating rather than less. And it just isn't that important.
I Have No Idea
Ed asks what can we do to improve Obamacare? I have no idea. Republicans aren't going to vote to improve it. HHS can do what it can to make the system as good as possible, especially for the states on the national exchange. Otherwise...?
It's another reason why a public option was key. Yes, of course, for liberals like me this was "stealth" single payer. Make a decent public option and eventually the rest of the system would whither away. But it was also important to make sure the administration had the power to make Obamacare good.
It's another reason why a public option was key. Yes, of course, for liberals like me this was "stealth" single payer. Make a decent public option and eventually the rest of the system would whither away. But it was also important to make sure the administration had the power to make Obamacare good.
Reporters Drive
And I get why they do, but it does mean that coverage of transportation issues is a wee bit skewed to the perspective of drivers, even in the ultimate urban hellhole, New York City.
It'll All Be Obamacare
The problem with the optimist's take on the implementation of Obamacare is that it leaves out the fact that our health insurance system sucks and at some point it will all be seen as Obamacare. Even if the legislation does genuinely improve the system overall, it'll still be a horrible system. A horrible system known as Obamacare.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Austerity Forever
Sadly there's no hope for anything other than austerity. There are simple solutions to the problems in the economy and the people who rule us are uninterested in embracing them. So people suffer.
Elite fail.
Elite fail.
Time For Lunch?
It seems states are aggressively recruiting applicants for food stamps. Seems putting money in the local economies is a win/win.
XV
David Waldman's (@KagroX) weekly #gunFail compilation.
This week, instead of my count, his summary:
This week, instead of my count, his summary:
This week's compilation includes: three police-involved accidents, two of which occurred during gun training classes; three "home invasion shootings"( i.e., when one Patriot elects to share a Liberty Projectile with a neighbor, via a Freedom Wall, Window, Floor or Ceiling); five accidents while cleaning loaded guns; three hunting accidents; one concealed carry ninja who shot himself taking his gun out of his pocket, and one who was shot by a child reaching into his pocket. And speaking of the kids, there were nine victims of GunFAIL this week, aged 10 months, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11 and 14. You may have noticed that that's not nine ages. It was a particularly rough week for the 10-year-olds, of which we lost two, and saw one wounded.
Stories of particular note this week include that of the second Carolinian to leave a gun behind in a New York hotel this month; a tee-ball rage shooting; the opening of turkey hunting season (resulting in the shooting of two turkey hunters and an undetermined number of turkeys), and; a potential Idiot Hall of Fame entry involving the Florida man (of course) who tried to convert his BB gun to .40-caliber using nothing but household tape and American Exceptionalism. Why have a firing chamber? Why have a barrel? Let's cut out the middle man! Sure, it sounds stupid and you'll end up wounding yourself, but let's face it, put a suit on that guy and let his stupid idea cost jobs instead of bandages, and he'd be in line for a fat bonus.
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