Ric & Debbie's Place

Grab Bag Post

2012-02-15T10:04:00.007-05:00

I'm not sure what we've been doing, but we always seem to be busy. We did find time to spend the day wandering around Disney World last Thursday after I had a day to recover from jury duty. Normally we pick a park and spend the day there, but the last couple of trips we decided we need to figure out how to use the various Disney transportation methods to park hop. Our last time out we rode the boat from Hollywood Studios to Epcot; this time we ditched the car at Epcot and rode the monorail to Magic Kingdom. The standard line about Epcot is that it is what the future was supposed to look like in 1970, and nowhere does that future look shabbier than on the monorail. Someone needs to tell Disney that a jerky train that tops out at 40mph wouldn't have impressed any railroader from the 1890's when trains routinely hit 100mph while running smooth enough for passengers to have drinks on their table, and did so without breaking down several times a day. Having a recorded voice trying to convince me that I'm riding in the future of transportation while being knocked around in my seat looking at the train car's chipped and dented interior and the stained carpet smelling slightly of piss was just sad. I guess riding the trains in Italy has wrecked the glory of Disney's monorail for me.

But otherwise, it was the perfect Disney day with temps in the high 60's to low 70's and sunny with a slight breeze. We hit our usual favorites and tried out a couple things we hadn't done before, but mostly we just wandered, watched people and eavesdropped on their conversations. We had lunch next to one of my nieces as she was at about age eight. She said something (in that oh-so-serious way that only eight-year-old girls can do) when she was ordering her lunch that had me laughing so hard behind my napkin, I almost had to leave the table. That in itself was worth the drive down Death Highway.

So I was reading one of my regular web pages this morning and someone mentions that Whitney Houston was dead. Wait. When... What? So I head to The Store of All Human Knowledge (you probably know it as Wikipedia) and sure 'nuf: Whitney Houston was found dead Saturday at age 48. I was never that into her music and I'm not sure that I could name one song she sang, although I would probably recognize the ones from that one movie she did with that one guy. I do recall that she had an awesome voice and was one of the last of the truly talented before Auto-Tune destroyed what was left of the music industry.

And you kids get off my lawn!!!

Years ago, I remember reading an article by a biologist about Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that has a weird life cycle that involves living in rats for most of its life, but reproducing in cats. So the parasite essentially tweaks the brains of rats so instead of being terrified by the smell of cat urine (a rat's primary predator) they are attracted to it, thus increasing the chances of a cat eating the infected rat and allowing Toxo to complete its life cycle. It was known then that Toxo infected a significant part of the human population, but was assumed to be harmless other than causing problems in pregnant women.

Well, maybe not:

The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

And:

Webster is more circumspect, if not downright troubled. “I don’t want to cause any panic,” she tells me. “In the vast majority of people, there will be no ill effects, and those who are affected will mostly demonstrate subtle shifts of behavior. But in a small number of cases, [Toxo infection] may be linked to schizophrenia and other disturbances associated with altered dopamine levels—for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and mood disorders. The rat may live two or three years, while humans can be infected for many decades, which is why we may be seeing these severe side effects in people. We should be cautious of dismissing such a prevalent parasite.”
...Just as worrisome, says Torrey, the parasite may also increase the risk of suicide. In a 2011 study of 20 European countries, the national suicide rate among women increased in direct proportion to the prevalence of the latent Toxo infection in each nation’s female population.

Now before anyone launches a world-wide cat eradication there is one important point the article makes:

Indoor cats pose no threat, he says, because they don’t carry the parasite. As for outdoor cats, they shed the parasite for only three weeks of their life, typically when they’re young and have just begun hunting. During that brief period, Flegr simply recommends taking care to keep kitchen counters and tables wiped clean. (He practices what he preaches: he and his wife have two school-age children, and two outdoor cats that have free roam of their home.) Much more important for preventing exposure, he says, is to scrub vegetables thoroughly and avoid drinking water that has not been properly purified, especially in the developing world, where infection rates can reach 95 percent in some places. Also, he advises eating meat on the well-done side—or, if that’s not to your taste, freezing it before cooking, to kill the cysts.

For years, Scott Adams has operated under the assumption that humans are just meat puppets under the control of brain chemistry and free will is just a lie we tell ourselves. Now it turns out our puppet masters are parasites running their own personal agenda instead of our own brains.

[Aside: How long before some lawyer uses "the parasite in my brain made me do it" as their client's defense?]

And I'll leave you with yet-another time lapse video. What can I say? I'm a sucker for these.

Aurora

2012-02-11T03:25:00.000-05:00

Nothing to add other than make it full screen and crank up the volume.

Crazy Lady Lawyer

2012-02-08T15:29:00.001-05:00

I'm starting to believe there is something in the water here in central Florida. I've spent the last two days deeply involved in the Seminole County justice system as a member of a jury. The case was simple; a misdemeanor incident to another, larger case. The court had only scheduled the courtroom for Tuesday (Monday is used to select all the juries for the entire week, which saves a great deal of time over the traditional way of doing jury duty.) The expectation was that we would be out early afternoon at the latest. Well....

Everything started off efficiently enough with the judge telling us how real courtrooms work as opposed to how they work on TV. We made it through opening statements from the lawyers and the prosecution's entire list of witnesses by 10:30AM. Sweet. Then the defense took over and everything went off the rails. The first problem that became immediately apparent was that there really was no defense. The police car video, which we would come to loath with a white-hot passion, pretty much told the story. Secondly, every defense witness was either a provable liar, contradicting what was clearly visible on the video, or completely supported the prosecution's case. But the biggest problem was the defense attorney: she was probably one of the most unpleasant human beings I've ever met, and seemingly had no concern other than wasting our time while collecting her taxpayer-funded fee. By the end, it seemed obvious to me that she would stoop to any level to force a mistrial.

She wanted to show the police car video, the only physical evidence, over and over; forward, backward, pause, play, skip back and play the same few seconds again and again. Which all would be bad enough, but she didn't know how to use her laptop or the video software she was using. The prosecution team bailed out her sorry ass a number of times, including loaning her their laptop, then finally feigned ignorance out of self-defense. She constantly violated the basic rules of court behavior, requiring the jury to be tossed out of the courtroom every few minutes while the judge gave her a verbal spanking. She needed to use the restroom more than any human on the planet. She claimed she couldn't hear anything. Her bad knees wouldn't allow her to stand to object, so the judge was constantly having to stop the proceedings to ask if she was objecting to something or if she was just mumbling to herself. (I found her mumbling especially odd given her constant interruptions because she couldn't hear what other people were saying.)

In other words, she wasted so much time that we were still waiting for closing arguments at 9:00PM. But even then, we weren't done. Her closing argument turned into a screaming diatribe that degenerated into the point-blank claim that if we found her client guilty we were a bunch of racist, homophobic neo-Nazis with smelly armpits. I couldn't even watch her because I was afraid I would burst out laughing. The prosecution team and the judge were too stunned to even try to stop her. Then she just ended mid-sentence and wrapped up with a sarcastic comment that we were going to do whatever we wanted no matter what she said. Um, exactly? Opening and closing arguments are not evidence and only serve to inform then remind the jury of what evidence was given. But at least she had finally shut up and we headed back to deliberations.

As the only person who had been on a jury before and the token male of the group, I ended up as the jury foreman. I took a quick poll and we had a unanimous decision without discussion, but I got everyone talking anyway. After ten minutes, it was pretty clear no one had the slightest doubt about their initial vote, so one last poll and we told the court officer we had a verdict. Unfortunately, Ms. Defense Attorney from Hell wasn't done with us. She had left the building. So we sat around another fifteen minutes venting about this idiot woman. Finally we were back in the courtroom and the verdict was read. Florida actually does the sentencing for misdemeanors right then and there, so we had to sit through that. We finally began working our way out of the building at 10:05PM.

Holy. Crap.

As a taxpayer who funded this public "defender", I want a refund.

Refocusing

2012-02-05T10:43:00.002-05:00

I seem to be in a constant state of refocusing what I spend my time doing. I think about the kinds of sites that used to occupy the right side of this screen and what is now there and it is quite jarring. The latest changes are the demise of my Facebook and Flickr accounts over the last week. I've not logged into our Flickr account once in 2012, and Facebook just seems to be cluttered up with less signal and more noise from "friends" I've not laid eyes on in 30 years or more, and with whom I have less in common than the illegal immigrants living upstairs. Every attempt to inject some sort of relevance was unsuccessful and when you add in the constant Big-Brother-Is-Watching creepiness that seems coded into all things Facebookian, and the new interface that seems to insure that if anyone posts something truly important, Facebook will make every effort to hide it in favor of someone's bowel movement narrative, and, well, I'm done.

Flickr was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but instead became and endless time suck that really added nothing to my life. Growing up in the 1970's, one of the most dreaded things in existence was the Vacation Slide Show where a host would force his (invariably it was a male who performed this particular torture) guests to sit in a dark room while he projected blurry, badly composed shots of the family's latest "Ha ha we went someplace awesome while you mortals were stuck here working" brag-cation. As perverse and anti-social as that was, Flickr takes it to a whole new level of pathology by inducing me to inflict the torture on myself through its creepy "someone commented on your photo so the polite thing to is to make them your "friend" and go look at their photos and make comments and you really really REALLY want to do the polite thing" passive-aggressive meme. No thanks.

We spent yesterday (our only day off together in the month of February thanks to stupid library people) visiting with my parents in their snowbird nest over on the other side of Florida. When we first got there, it looked like the weather was going to make it a dreary visit, but the sky cleared, the temp ran up to around 80 degrees, and we ended up getting in a couple bike rides, some music, dinner, Dairy Queen and a movie/how-do-we-work-this-DVD-thing teachable moment. (And people wonder why I don't set my parents up on the internet....)

Well, almost time to leave for another exciting day of shelving books and dealing with stupid people.

"Fire in the Spacecraft!"

2012-01-28T18:23:00.000-05:00

I missed this yesterday while messing about with other things. January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 cabin in a fire that started during a plugs-out test. The cause of the fire was never conclusively identified, but was likely caused by a number of construction and design flaws combined with flawed operating procedures. I don't remember the fire, most likely because I was only two years old at the time and would have been shielded from something so horrifying by my parents even if I had been older. I of course have vivid memories of Challenger and Columbia and can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing at the time. But I know Apollo 1 from second hand accounts, books, old news footage, and of course the audio recording. I'm sure copies of that can be easily found on the internet. Personally, I have no desire to listen while three men first struggle for their lives, then asphyxiate, all while on fire. Your tastes may vary....

Kitchen Goddess

2012-01-27T17:34:00.002-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time lately in the kitchen. I made a couple stabs at making bread. The first attempt was an Amish white bread recipe I found at allrecipes.com. It was actually edible, much to my surprise. I'd forgotten how dense most homemade bread is; anything we didn't each could have been used as a door stop. In the closeup, you can see I need to work on my mixing and kneading technique.

The scorch marks on the top were due to me trying to bake them in the toaster oven. The bread got too tall and touched the top heating element. Guess I have to use the big oven for bread. We've also been messing around with a pizza dough recipe as well. No photos of that, but it is quick and easy, and reminds me a lot of the pizza dough from one of my college jobs.

Today it was sourdough bread (I cheated and just grabbed a box mix at Walmart) and no-bake cookies from my mom's recipe. The cookies are for a care package that will get sent to Debbie's niece, who is away for her freshman year in college. The cookies turned out good, although they taste different than I remember, but I haven't had my mom's no-bakes in a long time. Maybe the pallet forgets? My bread mixing and kneading were a bit better this time around, but you could still use the stuff as a boat anchor.

But yea; I'm now a Kitchen Goddess. (Can you tell I've had three days off in a row?)

We went out exploring some a couple weeks ago. There is a park very close to us that featured a couple of the tallest trees in Florida. They weren't as impressive as they once were; both were sheared off by a hurricane in the 1920's. Then about a week after we were there, the tallest one named The Senator, caught fire and burned down to a five-foot stump. The forestry people still haven't determined the cause, but are fairly certain it was not arson. Anyway, here is what they looked like:

The Senator

Liberty

There seem to be dozens of little state parks around here, hidden behind strip malls and hemmed in by subdivisions. They can be tough to find sometimes. This one seems to be used mostly as a place for people to dump their vehicle and take off on bikes down the local bike path that goes through the middle of the park. I understand there used to be a gift shop and all the usual tourist-trap stuff before The Mouse sucked all the tourists away from Seminole County. No way a couple trees and a small zoo could compete with Wally World.

I'm still more or less in a holding pattern waiting to hear from the IRS. I ordered up my software and some other materials, but The Tax Geek is still not full blown reality, although I've been trying to keep the blog alive. I moved the blog from GoDaddy to Blogger; GoDaddy was just too primitive and quirky. Maybe it's just that I'm used to Blogger, but I kept running into roadblocks on GoDaddy and finally decided that I'd rather have a tool I can use instead of one that I constantly fight with. Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn't give refunds, so it was a rather costly experiment.

In the meantime, I'm still plugging away at the library. I can already see that this won't last long. I expected the normal sort of bureaucratic idiocy that defines any government operation, but Seminole County has bred some very special idiots indeed. Good thing I can just wander off into the stacks and be forgotten for hours at a time. I do know one thing; if you want to find waste and fraud in government, start with county government. As a percentage of their budget, I'm certain there is more to find at the local level than the federal or even the state, which are under constant scrutiny.

Debbie is in the middle of her busy season. She is never sure from one day to the next when she will be getting out of work. I've been riding both ways to and from the library when I get out at 5pm even though it's still a bit more dusk than I'd like by the time I get home. Now that we're past the winter solstice, I have a bit more light every day, it gives me a chance to have dinner at least mostly ready when Debbie makes it home, and Debbie doesn't have to worry about me being stuck at the library if she has to stay late. At least the payoff for all the crazy is some big checks. Woohoo!

If you have an account at Fidelity and you wonder what all those fees you pay go to, here is the answer:

A bit of background: this was a 401K left over from some previous job. So much of the money had been lost that the balance fell below what was allowed to be left in the account. Somehow in the process of closing the 401K, a penny was left in the account, which Fidelity spent accounting and auditing time, check stock, and postage to send to us. They didn't catch their mistake until after the first of the year, which makes me wonder if they will actually be dumb enough to send another 1099-R for a penny. They have already sent two statements, first showing the $.01 balance in the account, then showing the $.01 being disbursed from the account. In addition to sending us the $.01 check. Holy. Crap.

Flickr and Facebook are still on trial. Oddly, Flickr, which I've had much longer and have been a much more frequent user of, is currently in a more precarious position. I haven't logged onto Flickr in several months and I can't think for the life of me why I would. I'm not uploading new photos, I've stopped following any of my contacts, and I've canceled out of all the groups I was in. The only thing left to do is just close the dang account and be done with it already. Meanwhile, I've been on Facebook a number of times in the last week, keeping up with a tragedy involving some old friends up in northern Michigan, making FB far more valuable to us at the present moment. [Aside: This is one of those times when being a long way away really sucks.] No decisions yet on either, but I'll likely pull the plug on one of them before the end of the month.

That's probably enough for now. I have some work to do on the IRS site and I should make a post over at The Tax Geek. Later.

Blast from the Sun

2012-01-26T09:40:00.000-05:00

Our Sun throws itself a little hissy fit:

and we get to see things like this:

Awesome.

Entomophagy

2012-01-23T22:26:00.000-05:00

One problem with bicycle commuting is that we have these little teeny tiny bugs that fly in little swarms in random places. They're too small to see until I ride through the swarm with my mouth open and get a bit of protein along the way. I've gotten sort of used to that as it happens once or twice each way. Today on the way home I got a little bigger meal. I didn't see what it was, but my first thought was, "God, I hope that wasn't a fly fresh off some dog's steaming pile."

Yea, that's pretty much all I got.

Beautiful Day Off

2012-01-20T08:11:00.002-05:00

This is our last day off together this month --- and we are heading to Disney World!

With the schedules and Ric being sick around the holidays, we did not make it to DW during the Christmas season to take pictures. :-( This year -- no matter what -- we are going after the decorations are up and checking out each park and some of the hotels.

Cool this morning -- but suppose to warm up to the upper 70's -- great day for trekking around at Disney World.

Medical Misadventures

2012-01-19T12:17:00.000-05:00

I went to the local ghetto clinic a couple weeks ago for two reasons: one, I had picked up some sort of nasty sinus/upper respiratory infection that I just couldn't shake, and two, my ghetto "doctor" isn't capable of doing simple math and had screwed up one of my prescriptions. This is nothing new, of course. The ghetto clinic has a history with us of screwing up prescriptions, ignoring the main reason for a visit in favor of focusing on trivialities, losing things, and just generally being incompetent.

But my latest visit really takes the cake. It may be my last visit if I can find an actual doctor somewhere in the area that is taking new, uninsured patients. I expect that to be an impossible quest, but that is a whole 'nother post.

The ghetto clinic has been in the process of a major, multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded, remodel since we moved here. The remodel is now complete. It is a disaster. The lobby is completely nonfunctional, not to mention a HIPAA nightmare. My visit starts at 8:45am (appointment time is 9:00am) standing in a queue to sign in. There is no place for the queue that doesn't block the entrance, the door to the ghetto pharmacy, the hallway back to the waiting area or all of the above when everyone without a previous appointment bum-rushes the front counter when the ghetto clinic first opens. Arguments over who's next are common and it is impossible to have the HIPAA-mandated privacy when speaking with the person at the front counter.

Once I had run that little gauntlet (it is now 9:15am), I was told to have a seat in one of the dozen chairs in the lobby, which are already filled up and in any case would mean putting my face at ass-level with the mob at the front counter. So I stand leaning against the wall where I have an unobstructed view of the computer monitors displaying other patients' medical and financial information, and listening in on the conversations regarding patients' medical history and finances. Whoever designed the space needs to be beaten to death with a copy of the HIPAA law. I watch as several employees walk away from their computer terminals without locking them or blanking the screen. It's also obvious that there are massive computer system problems with a lone IT guy running around putting out fires.

At 9:40am, a woman who must have formerly been employed in a fish market screams out my name indicating it's now my turn to have my medical history and financial information on display for the benefit of everyone in the lobby. The only person unable to see the computer screen is me. I sit down then wait for a full five minutes of typing and mouse clicking before the person acknowledges that I exist. The "conversation" goes something like this:

Medical Person: Are you Richard Frost?
Me: Yes.
(Several minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Is Debbie still your emergency contact?
Me: Yes.
(Several more minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Is [redacted] still your main phone number?
Me: Yes.
(Several more minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Is [redacted] still your secondary phone number?
Me: Yes
(Several more minutes of typing and mousing.)
Medical Person: Today's visit will cost you $20.

I hand over my credit card, she swipes it and hands it back followed by several MORE minutes of typing and mousing. Finally she hands me my receipt and points me to the waiting room. She manages to complete the entire 20-minute process without once making eye contact.

It is now 10:00am; it has taken me an hour and a quarter just to get to the waiting room. Fortunately, my butt didn't even hit the chair before another female ex-fish merchant screams out my name. While she takes my vitals, I get a running commentary about how slow reception is due to the new computer system not working and how the medical staff are all standing around waiting for patients to trickle back. As she leaves the exam room, she practically collides with the "doctor" coming in, making for a novel experience: no secondary wait while sitting in the exam room. The "doctor" takes a quick listen to my lungs and prescribes antibiotics then asks what else I need. I tell him I need my prescriptions fixed because he obviously failed math in college. He responds by pulling up my old lab results and regaling me with how perfect everything is except my blood sugar.

Um, duh? We've already had this discussion. How about rewriting my prescriptions correctly? He goes on about how I need to "take control" of my diabetes. I tell him I would love to except his ghetto pharmacy is withholding my insulin forcing me to ration what little I can get out of them. I then get a lecture about how I have it all wrong and what nice people work in the ghetto pharmacy. He must be thinking of a different ghetto pharmacy than the one in the ghetto clinic, but I just inform him that we will agree to disagree on that point and can he please just correct the prescriptions he screwed up?

Finally, I escape. Sort of. At least that whole thing was the shortest part of my adventure so far at a mere ten minutes. He sent off the corrected scripts for my regular meds to Walgreen's, but I had to get my antibiotic at the ghetto pharmacy to get the Poor Person Price. So I go into the pharmacy to stand in line to turn in my prescription. Why my prescription can be sent electronically to Walgreens ten miles away, but I have to queue to turn in a paper script to the ghetto pharmacy in the same building is not explained. Must be a feature of the new computer system. Anyway. The ghetto pharmacy is another space with no place to queue, so it ends up being a mob blocking the door into the pharmacy. I turn in my script, then sit to wait with my face in the asses of people waiting to turn in their scripts. An hour later (it's now 11:15am), I get called up to the counter to pay $10 for an empty bag with instructions to have a seat because the pharmacist needs to speak to me. Holy frackin' crap. So back to the face-ass position for another 45 minutes. After enduring a five-minute explanation of how a Z-Pack works, I finally make the dash to my car. It is 12:05pm.

But the fun isn't over yet. I go to Walgreens to pick up my other prescriptions only to find out that my asshat "doctor" has yet-again screwed up the same prescription. I ask the pharmacist if she can please call over the ghetto clinic and fix it. She says she'll take care of it. A couple days later, I get an e-mail saying my prescription is in, but the count is still wrong. I head over to Walgreens to see what in bloody hell is up now. The answer: My ghetto "doctor" is holding my prescription hostage because he wants me to come in and do my labs. My labs aren't due until May. But what the hell; it only costs me $15 (the rest being billed to the taxpayers) and it's not like I have anything better to do than spend hours and hours standing in line at the ghetto clinic. I'm just another one of those poors after all.

And the elites wonder why poor people routinely go nuts on "service providers".

Duh!

2012-01-13T20:30:00.001-05:00

Friday the 13th is on a Friday this month!

SEE Part III Complete

2012-01-13T14:18:00.000-05:00

I completed the third and final section of the SEE. Even as I type this, my application to practice before the IRS is winging its way to the Department of Treasury. With that out of the way, I can finally focus on something other than test prep.

Old Age

2012-01-08T08:09:00.000-05:00

I forgot to clear out the Past Reading list at the beginning of the year. Senior Moments (tm) can really sneak up on you. Anyway, we read 129 books in 2011. That was on the low side probably because of the whole tax thing taking time away from my reading. Debbie kept up her end of things, but I've been seriously slacking. But my last test is Friday, so I will be doing some major catch-up with the to-be-read pile.

More Crazy People

2012-01-06T12:23:00.000-05:00

Isle of Man TT: motorcycles at 200+ mph:

I love that there are both crazy people and video cameras in our world.

Don't ya?!

2012-01-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

I hate when it is my day off and I can't sleep in! It would have been nice today since it is still cold down here in Florida (39 degrees now) to keep snuggled up in a nice warm bed. But no! I woke up around 730a and just couldn't fall back to sleep. After tossing/turning and punching the pillow; I decided to give up and just get up.

Work has been busy since the day after Christmas. With the new rules about no working off the clock and only up to 1hr OT per day, it is kinda hard for me to get caught up. I can only do so much in a day and I am lucky to have several repeat clients and referrals of those clients. I still have some emails from after New Years to research and respond to. Hopefully they all understand this is now busy season and be patient for me.

Ric is still sick --- sinus infection and coughing (hacking up his lung) since Christmas. He finally has a Dr's appt tomorrow am -- we will see what the "ghetto clinic" has to say and give him to help. I know he has not been sleeping good for awhile. Most nights he is sleeping upright on the reclining loveseat --- or, at least dozing on and off between coughing fits.

Well---time to find something for breakfast and decide what I want to do today at home. Maybe start making some birthday/anniversary cards or go shopping to spend my Christmas money or clean the bathroom (probably not this one!) or book our flights home to Michigan for the Wiklanski family reunion. (Yep, we are coming to Michigan twice in 2012 -- Vargason and Wiklanski family reunion times)

Happy New Year!!

2012-01-01T16:32:00.001-05:00

It's 2012 and I'm actually sitting in the exact same spot as last year. It feels kind of good to be able to say that. As expected when you don't relocate to another part of the country, it doesn't seem like we really did all that much over the last year other than work and keep our heads down. The year didn't totally suck like the last couple; staying in one place has at least allowed us to catch our breath financially. We know we don't want to make this place permanent, but it will serve its purpose in spite of the drug dealers, human traffickers, incompetent office people, and whichever of our neighbors has really noisy sex every night with their bedroom window open.

The 2011 tax season for me ended up going pretty much as one would expect working in a ghetto tax office. I won't be back even if they call, and I seriously doubt they will. I had planned on becoming an Enrolled Agent and opening my own office when lightening struck and I ended up with a paying job at the library where I've been volunteering. I love the pretty colors Plans make when they explode on contact with Reality. I'm still working on the Enrolled Agent thing with my final test scheduled for Friday the 13th (yes, I enjoy tempting fate), but for now, renting office space is off the table. While part time, at least the library job is predictable and as permanent as any job can be considered these days; something I haven't had in over five years.

Debbie is still working at the same job, for now at least. The owners' actions over the last year smell like desperation to me; the business model is a pure race to the bottom similar to what happened with car dealerships a decade or so ago. The internet removes middle men by reducing what they can add to the price of whatever they are selling to zero. The days when you can simply wet your beak without adding perceivable value are long gone. I just hope these guys figure that out, for their sake and for ours.

I've stopped following news and markets (highly recommended, by the way), so I don't have any deep insights into the world. In general terms, the US stock market ended 2011 almost exactly where it ended 2010. I'm sure people made money, especially the brokers who get a cut of every transaction regardless, but retail investors made nothing, just like anyone with money in the bank. The places where one can earn the requisite 8% yield that will allow us all to retire at 55 into a life of golf and 4pm dining grow fewer by the day. The rest of the economy still seems stuck at slow idle with no movement in real unemployment, housing, retail. Early reports are that Christmas shopping was up over 4%, but that seems to be the case every year. I'm not convinced that any increase, assuming it isn't a complete fabrication, isn't being more than offset by decreases at other times of the year, just like increases in online shopping are coming at the expense of physical stores. And if that figure isn't adjusted for inflation, Christmas sales were either flat or down 2% or so (depending which inflation figures you believe).

The real story of 2011, which will continue into 2012, is the slow-motion train wreck formerly known as the European Union. If nothing else, we'll get to see how long the politicians there and here in the United States can keep the plates spinning before it all comes crashing down. While hardly the Mayan Apocalypse, it will prove interesting from a number of perspectives, not least of which is the complete evaporation of whatever confidence is left in governments. I seem to recall the US getting sucked into some sort of kerfuffle in Europe the last time the people there lost faith in their leaders.

2011 will also be noted for what didn't happen: no one is yet in prison for the massive fraud engineered at the nation's too-big-to-fail banks and investment houses. Matt Taibbi is about the only person to keep hammering home that, contrary to what our president insists, much of the grift that lead up to the financial crisis was not legal. Certainly, many of the dirty deals that put multi-million dollar bonuses into the pockets of Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, et al were legal (the primary reason no one in the middle class should be in the stock market), but many were old-school pump-and-dump scams that have been illegal for decades. Maybe someone should check in on the Obama Justice Department and make sure they haven't committed mass suicide and gone off to live with the Space Brothers.

2011 also saw the last launch of Americans from American soil. Like the loss of the Saturn V, the capability will never be recovered. In the meantime, we hitch rides from our former sworn enemies to a destination that serves no real purpose. On the upside, Cassini is still returning drop-dead gorgeous images from the Saturn system, Opportunity is still chugging away doing science, and an all-new probe, Curiosity, is on its way to Mars.

I won't make any predictions for 2012 other than these: The economy in general will continue to sputter along making a small number of people wealthier than anyone ever in the history of the human race. Meanwhile, the rest of us who don't have politicians on our personal payroll will watch the slow erosion of our standard of living. And speaking of the Mayan Apocalypse, John Michael Greer has suggested that we call December 21, 2012 Nothing Happened Day. I think it's pretty safe to assume that the day everyone expects the world to end on will be the most extraordinarily ordinary day anyone can remember. The universe has a sick sense of humor.

I think I'm going to cut this off here and watch the House marathon. Everyone have a happy/productive/sexually satisfying (that's mostly for our noisy neighbors)/whatever-kind-of-year-you-want 2012!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T00:09:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year to all my family and friends!

Make it a great year!

It's Not Christmas Without...

2011-12-29T08:40:00.002-05:00

Porky Pig doing Elvis! With all the traveling over the weekend, I completely forgot.

And new this year (to me, at least): Jim Carrey slaughtering White Christmas!

Merry Belated Christmas!

Christmas Pics

2011-12-26T11:38:00.000-05:00

A selection of our Christmases (plural because we had more than one celebration, not because I built a time machine so I could relive December 25, 2011) in pictures. We did more this year than we normally do, which isn't saying much as we almost never do anything. Beyond monkey bread and the NCIS Christmas Marathon, that is. We started with early Christmas at my parents' snowbird nest:

And because she's a mom, we had a formal table setting with real plates and everything! It took me a minute to remember how to sit at a table and eat after years of eating on the couch in front of the TV. And yes, the knobbly knees are mine.

Here's Mum slaving away in her travel trailer kitchen. I'd really like to help, but I'm not sure where I would stand.

Christmas at our place was the usual simple affair. Our only Christmas decoration was Herman sporting a rather festive bow.

Because we both had a few days off around Christmas day, we decided that we would drive over to Mobile for Christmas with my niece and her family. We got into Mobile on Friday evening after a 10-hour drive to find that we had scored a sweet suite:

We were completely whacked out, so we made our excuses to my niece and went to bed around 7pm. Ten hours in a car made a very plush bed with a big stack of fluffy pillows irresistible. We are seriously getting old.

Christmas Eve day was spent with my niece, her husband, and the cutest kids in Alabama. I may be slightly biased.

So that was pretty much our month of December other than working and sitting around our ghetto apartment.

Speaking of photos, I'm putting Flickr on probation along with Facebook. I no longer use Flickr for anything other than off-site photo backup. There is certainly value in that, and at $20/year it's cheap. But Flickr is getting nearly as creepy as Facebook, getting all bossy about how I can use my own frackin' photos. According to my Flickr stats, only two people ever look at them anyway; for $20/year, I can zip of all the year's photos onto a couple USB drives and mail them to my two viewers and not have to deal with Flickr's crazy EULA. Like Facebook, I haven't made any decision, but I won't be posting the full set of December pictures just yet. We'll see.

Well, I need to go empty the big green gobs infecting my sinuses. Thank the gods for my sinus pump. The last time I used it, something the size of a hamster popped out.

And yes. You needed to know that.

...And We're Back

2011-12-25T23:03:00.001-05:00

We just arrived back at our apartment after a quick jog up to Mobile, AL to visit with some of my family for Christmas. We're also back in the sense that our internet and telephone crapped out Thursday evening around 7pm, but is now working. I called the help desk, but they were pretty far into the Christmas eggnog when I called Thursday around 11pm. They couldn't fix it remotely (hardly surprising given their obvious inebriation), so I set up an appointment for Monday 8-10am. When we got home tonight, there was a Sorry We Missed You card hanging on the door and the phone and internet seem to be working fine. The card says they came out Christmas day at 9:30am. I guess when you're half in the bag, "Monday" sounds a lot like "Sunday" especially when several of your office mates are merry-making in your cubicle.

My Christmas gift was a raging sinus infection. Thanks Santa; right back at 'cha. So I'm off to self-medicate and probably pass out on the couch.

Oh yea; Happy Whatever Makes You Tingly.

Bah Humbug

2011-12-22T18:40:00.001-05:00

I'm waiting for Debbie to get home from work so we can get ready for our Christmas weekend. She is making a quick stop for gas at Sam's Club. Unfortunately, the line starts about three miles down the road. I think I hate Christmas a little more each year. We need to start saving up money for a vacation on a desert island during the last two weeks of December.

Having said that, now I want Christmas 2012 to get here NOW!

Awesome.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

2011-12-15T09:58:00.001-05:00

Looking like Christmas in Florida mostly means plastic wreaths on palm trees and overnight lows in the 50's. At this moment, I'm sitting in the living room in shorts and a t-shirt thinking I should close the windows because my toes are getting a bit cold.

Our Christmas plans are still up in the air; we should have a plan after we do Christmas with my parents over the weekend. Then we can decide whether we sit here and have Christmas in front of the TV or drive up to Alabama for Christmas with some of my family.

As usual for us, not a lot going on other than work and (for me, at least) studying tax code. I scheduled my last test, but due to limited seating and a bum-rush by everyone trying to get their Enrolled Agent testing completed before tax season, the first available day was January 13th. Not ideal, but I'll still get the thing done and move on to the next step. The hardest part will be to keep up on what I need to know for the test. I'm ready now, so I'm stuck forcing myself to review the same material over and over for the next month to keep it in my head. It would suck dead bunnies if I have to make multiple attempts at the easiest of the three tests.

We made a quick road trip over to Tampa on Sunday to do an NCL ship inspection. This is my second encounter with NCL and I'm still not impressed. Part of the deal was free lunch which, like our NCL cruise we did in September, was nothing to write home about. The ship itself is nice enough, although there were bits of it that looked... well... shabby is probably the right word. Maybe they need fewer staff dancing around squirting people with hand sanitizer, and a few more polishing the brass. There are some impressive suites if you have the spare cash, and we loved the Villa, with three full suites, a living area big enough for two seating areas and a baby grand piano, a full kitchen for the butler who brings up your meals, and a private outdoor area with a hot tub, eating area, Japanese koi pond (sans koi; maybe you're supposed to bring your own?), and seating areas in and out of the sun. You could basically pretend you were on a private yacht and never leave your Villa. But even as nice as it was, surely with a price tag to match, there were things like woodwork that needed a good sanding and refinishing that threw the whole thing off for me.

Because it's Christmas:

For nearly four decades, Star Trek and Star Wars fans have been at each other's throats. George Takei is calling for Star Peace so we can all focus on the real threat:

I always suspected Sparkle Tits was a threat to humanity.

More (barely) controlled falling off a cliff, otherwise known as skiing:

Given my hatred of cold and snow, you will never see me on a pair of skis, but it's nice that there are insane people willing to kill themselves for my entertainment.

One for all the doomers that think the world is ending because of the recent spate of earthquakes:

Even the Tohoku, Japan earthquake, as horrifying as it and the resulting tsunami was, is small beans when compared to the 1960's earthquakes in Chile and Alaska. Which can happen again, by the way. Something to consider given the massive increase in population in both areas.

And finally, something that people should be thinking about instead of worrying about the Mayan-Calendar-is-ending non-event (there is nothing in Mayan mythology that gives the last day of it's calendar any more significance than December 31 on the Gregorian calendar holds for us):

The mismatch between the economy we’ve got and the economy we can afford has many implications, but one of the largest is precisely the issue I raised earlier in this post: across the industrial world, there are very few bankable projects to be found, even at a time when there are millions of people who need work, and who would happily buy products if they had the chance to earn the money to do so. Our economy is burdened with an unproductive superstructure it can no longer support. The globalization fad of the 1990s, which arbitraged the difference in wage costs between Third World sweatshops and industrial-world factories, was in effect an attempt to evade the resulting difficulties by throwing the industrial nations’ working classes under the bus, and it only worked for a decade or so; as so often happens in the declining years of a civilization, a short term fix was treated as a long term solution, and a brief remission of symptoms allowed the underlying crisis to worsen steadily.

While I greatly appreciate the bags of shiny rocks I was given as a COBOL programmer, I thought at the time that I could have done more for the accounting departments I wrote code for with a box of Blackfoot #2 pencils and a stack of 13-column paper than I ever did with 10's of thousands of lines of COBOL code, not to mention the millions of dollars in hardware and infrastructure, including (pre-internet) the launching of a communications satellite. Our motto at one job was, "[Name of proprietary software package redacted]: Turning user input into error messages at the speed of light!"

And that's probably enough for now. I need to wrap some Christmas gifts.

Brrrr!

2011-12-08T08:24:00.002-05:00

Well a cold front finally hit us in Florida. It got down to 47 last night and right now it is only 49. Today's high is suppose to reach 65. The past few days it has been in the high 70's/low 80's.

Another SWAT Shooting

2011-12-03T10:09:00.000-05:00

A Pima County, Arizona SWAT team gunned down an ex-Marine in his home with his wife and 4-year-old son in the house. Some random thoughts in no particular order.

Once again, in a repeat of the Branch Davidian mess at Waco, Texas, military-style tactics that were unnecessary and inappropriate were used instead of police tactics. Instead of a simple arrest outside the home, lets pull out all this cool storm trooper gear we got here in the back room and go make a big media splash. Operation Showtime Part II.

Five supposedly highly-trained officers fired over 70 rounds in a matter of seconds with less than a third of them hitting their intended target located a few feet away. Spray and Pray. With a four-year-old in the house. Ye flippin' gods. Maybe next time they should put their storm trooper helmets on backwards; it may improve their accuracy.

The family lawyer called SWAT "an overly excited group of poorly trained law enforcement agents." I hate to agree with a lawyer, but I have to go with him on this one. The cop retort of "We're not a bunch of country bumpkins... with big bellies and cowboy hats" may or may not be true, but doesn't address the point: You provably are a bunch of "overly excited", "poorly trained" bumpkins in storm trooper gear. As evidence, see above.

All it takes to be a drug kingpin is to be related to someone who knows someone who at some point had been in still-another person's house where marijuana was delivered. And ride in the truck of someone who owns a large roll of plastic wrap. Which is sold at U-Haul. For packing furniture. I have two sizes of the stuff in my closet left over from our last move. I'm also most likely related to someone who knows someone who at some point had been in still-another person's house where marijuana was delivered. I guess SWAT will be smashing in my door at any time now.

The fact that the suspect is a Marine is irrelevant. Plenty of Marines and ex-Marines engage in illegal activity. Being a Marine doesn't remove you from the human race. Especially when you're an ex-Marine trying to raise a family in one of the most economically depressed areas of the country.

The fact that the suspect had a crappy job is irrelevant. In fact, having a crappy job with long hours is just the sort of motivation needed to ask a drug-dealing relative's twice-removed friend if they need a hand with the family business.

The fact that "everyone" says the suspect is a great guy is irrelevant. That's what everyone says about the nice guy next door who coaches Little League. Right up to the moment the cops find the videos he made of himself banging the center-fielder.

I'm not sure what "problems with his vision" would allow the suspect to serve in the Marine Corp, but would disqualify him from any kind of job in the Border Patrol. Unless the vision problem was caused by over-ingestion of his brother's twice-removed friend's product. Maybe he should have signed up for Pima County SWAT; they seem to prefer people with vision problems.

Anyway.

Here's what will happen now: there will be an "investigation" in which SWAT will be found to have acted bravely while defending the innocent citizens of Tucson, and will be given medals and promotions. The investigation into this alleged drug cartel, which may very well exist, will be forgotten. The media will get distracted by Snooki's tits or the next fake Kardashian sister's wedding or bashing whoever the current Republican not-Romney front-runner is, and forget all about our dead ex-Marine and his family. No one will question why we need military units patrolling our streets and gunning down anyone with the misfortune of being related someone with a twice-removed friend in the drug trade.

And I need to go make the donuts....

Another One Bites the... Hey!!

2011-11-30T09:42:00.001-05:00

Thanks for stealing my post title, Debbie!

Anyway, as someone has already mentioned, I passed the second part of the SEE. By all accounts, the third section is the easiest of the three. I started going through the material last night and it does look to be way more straight-forward than part two. If all goes well, I may yet complete the testing by the end of the year. Then it's just paperwork and waiting on the IRS.

We're trying to make holiday plans, but I still don't have my December schedule, meaning as of Wednesday, I don't know whether or not I'm working this coming Sunday. Of course, I also don't know if I'll be getting paid as the time card system appears to be broken, as is the system I'm supposed to use to request time off. Once again, some half-wit computer programmer using the latest in software development tools has made a simple task impossible. Back in the dark ages when we wrote software in such archaic languages as COBOL and RPG, this sort of screw-up would get you fired. Now everyone simply accepts it as business as usual. I've yet to figure out how this is progress.

Anyway, we are planning on doing a ship inspection in Tampa Sunday the 11th and maybe visit the aquarium, but as I mentioned, no word yet on whether we will be able to. We're also planning on doing Christmas with my parents the weekend after that, but, well, ya know. Christmas itself* will be spent as usual; in our apartment watching an NCIS marathon. Anyway, that's the big holiday plans. We are planning to be good little consumers this year and buy at least token gifts for people. I figure as long as I'm sucking at the government teat, we may as well use some of that money to boost the GDP of China.

[*And not to be a Grammar Nazi or anything, but what is up with "it's self" instead of "itself"? I'm seeing this everywhere and not just in blog posts that are done in haste and where no one expects perfect grammar or spelling or punctuation. I'm talking about published books! How is it possible to be functionally literate and not instantly recognize how wrong that is?]

And for no particular reason other than an arbitrary date on an arbitrary calendar:

Well, I need to go de-stress the ol' noggin' with something mindless.

Another one bites the dust!

2011-11-29T17:53:00.002-05:00

Ric passed his second of three tests to become an enrolled agent!

Animal Kingdom

2011-11-27T15:02:00.000-05:00

The photos from our latest trip to Animal Kingdom are finally on Flickr. I'd forgotten that we had already visited there this year, so the two trips ended up combined in one set. The latest photos start with the picture of Goofy and some people we don't know.

Still Cramming

2011-11-27T10:45:00.001-05:00

I'm down to two days until my SEE Part 2 test; I think I'll do OK as long as I don't get a brain aneurysm from trying to squeeze in yet-one-more obscure fact about partnership liquidations or IRC Sec 357. Today's agenda is property basis. Woo. hoo.

We spent Thanksgiving with my parents and had a potluck dinner at their clubhouse. Not surprisingly, we were the youngest of the group by a couple decades. In proper Thanksgiving tradition, we ate way too much, then headed over to one of my parents' friend's mother's house (got that?) so we could eat some more. We came back home Thursday night because Debbie had to work the Black Friday cruise sales, which, for the second year in a row, were a complete bust. But next year for sure!!

Meanwhile, the once-proud nation known as these united States spent Thursday night and Friday in what has become an annual orgy of violence and mayhem, featuring fist fights, shootings, pepper spraying's, muggings and other assorted stupidity in order to "save" money on Chinese-made crap that no one really needs. We saved money by staying home and not spending money. What a concept. I'm sure in the tens of thousands of new diagnostic codes in the updated DSM, one of them describes this annual decent into mass insanity.

The internet is still buzzing over UC Davis campus police hosing down protesters with pepper spray. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. Of course, I'm ambivalent about the whole Occupy Everything protests in the first place. But one thing is certain; this is a PR nightmare for the college administration and the campus police. In the age of instant, globally-broadcast video from anyone with a cell phone, the people with the guns are going to have to get a lot smarter. First, lose the storm trooper gear. Like the original Star Wars storm troopers, I can't decide if you look menacing or ridiculous. Second, why after weeks of protest did this particular group have to be removed RIGHT NOW?!? Isolate them from all outside assistance and wait. The protesters will eventually have to pee. Maybe even provide bottled water to hurry along the process while making the campus police (dressed in their standard uniforms, of course) look compassionate. If they are dedicated enough to sit in their own urine, keep waiting and handing out bottles of water while reminding them that all it takes for it to be over is to stand up and walk away. They will eventually get bored or hungry or cold or fall asleep or have to take a dump. Most importantly, it would all make for some incredibly boring video.

From a student perspective, college has become a complete waste of time and money for most of them. Kids, with no understanding of what they are signing up for, are being pushed by the so-called adults in their life to take on ruinous amounts of debt while learning nothing that will enable them to earn enough to ever pay it back. In other words, anyone currently in, or recently graduated from, college has every right to be pissed off. I'm not sure how pitching tents on the quad or volunteering to be hosed down with pepper spray fixes that, but it likely feels more satisfying than writing a strongly-worded essay for the college newspaper. Either way, it certainly helps make the case for the protesters when the cops can be counted on to play the part of heartless storm troopers to the students' wide-eyed and virtuous Princess Leia/Luke Skywalker.

Not that any of it matters much in the big pictures. The United States has been in decline since the mid-1970's and no amount of tent pitching or pepper spraying is going to change that.

And now, property basis. w00t.

Crunch Time

2011-11-22T16:27:00.000-05:00

I have exactly one week to cram as much corporate tax information into my head as I can before I attempt to set another $100 on fire... er... pass the SEE Part Two test. There are still some parts that I'm a little shaky on; either I get them down in the next seven days, or hope whatever software algorithm selects which 100 questions I draw from the pool goes light on the parts I'm weak in. Fingers crossed.

We spent a Friday and Saturday visiting my parents' snowbird home. Last winter, my mother asked us to bring our bicycles next time we came to visit so we could all go for a bike ride around their park. I figured my parents' idea of a bike ride would involve a slower pace than what I usually do, but nothing could have prepared either of us for the creeper-gear pace combined with random stops in the middle of the road. Debbie actually went down trying not to ram the back of my mom's adult-sized tricycle when my mom made a sudden stop to snoop on a neighbor. When we started out, my dad had told us that he had switched from two to three wheels several years ago out of self-defense; now I understand what he meant.

Friday night, we took them out to Carrabbas for my birthday (yeah; we take my parents out for our bithdays... long story). My dad is generally not a big Italian food fan, but they had spaghetti and meatballs without "stinky cheese", so he was happy. My seafood cannelloni and my mom's manicotti were both good. Debbie's BBQ ribs were a bit of a disappointment; instead of sauce, they were cooked with a spice rub. They were OK, but not something we are likely to get again. As the Birthday Boy, I got a hunk of free tiramisu more than large enough for myself and my parents. Debbie, not being a big tiramisu fan, snagged one of the dessert shots. We rolled ourselves out to the car and went back to the parental units' trailer for Chicken Little. Saturday was more eating, visiting with some family I hadn't seen since middle school, another bike ride, UP!, and the drive home. It was a nice two-day break from the ghetto.

Finally. A political party I can get behind: The Futility Party:

The best thing — the brilliant thing — is that in the end, the Occupy movement will fail to make any lasting changes in politics, thereby proving its own point.

Follow along. If the vaguely defined “1 percent” have all the power, then no amount of sign-waving, slogan-chanting or locale-occupation will have any influence. It’d be like trying to get the Pope to let someone else be infallible once in a while. So if the protests end in any status other than quo, then the 1 percent is a myth, normal people have plenty of influence, and the protestors were just wasting everyone’s time.

...I’m officially founding a new political party, the Futility Party. Our main platform will be a commitment, once elected, to ending the corruption and cronyism that keeps us out of office. We will reject any funding that might help us get the word out, avoid coalitions and compromises that will turn us into a viable political entity, and make sure our candidates and backers lack the influence to disrupt even the closest election.

Our slogan will be “Unimpeachable. Unassailable. Unelectable.”....

That should be made into a bumper sticker. It could double as the slogan for the Libertarian Party.

[Aside: The brilliant coders behind Blogger have now managed to screw up block quoting. Yes, block quoting. If I have to hand-code all the HTML for this thing, I may as well go back to a straight-up hosting service and writing my posts in Notepad. Is it really that hard to not break things that work?]

I haven't made any recent posts about how uniformly horrible the public schools in the United States are, but there may be a bright spot:

For all I complain about public schools and NCLB, there are occasional success stories. For example, the Dallas News reports on the stunningly good math and reading test scores achieved by third-grade pupils at Field Elementary school. There was a minor downside, though. They achieved those high math and reading test scores by devoting essentially all of their effort to teaching these kids math and reading, which of course meant they had to skip science and other subjects almost entirely. Not to worry, though. The kids still got grades in those other subjects. Of course, those grades were faked, sometimes assigned by teachers who’d never even taught the subjects in question. If I had school-age children, I’d do whatever it took to either homeschool them or get them into private schools. I don’t believe public schools–any public schools–can any longer be trusted to educate kids.

OK; maybe "bright spot" isn't the term I'm looking for.

While I've been a fan of renewable energy in all its various forms since I was a kid, largely because I take issue with running an uncontrolled experiment on the only inhabitable planet we have access to, I also understand that no renewable source or sources of energy will provide us with anything like the amount of energy we currently obtain from fossil fuel. In the past, I've done entire posts showing the absurdity of, say, running our cars on bacterial poo. Another darling of the renewables-will-let-us-keep-business-as-usual crowd is pumped storage. I've been saved the trouble of doing the math by some professor dude who writes a blog called Do the Math. As you can probably guess, pumped storage at the scale needed to replace all fossil fuel is as absurd as every other renewable. But setting all that aside, his closing paragraph is the most important:

Let’s be clear that I am not making any claim that large scale storage at the level we need is impossible. But it’s far more daunting than almost anyone realizes. It’s not a matter of “just” building up when the time comes. We could easily find ourselves ill-prepared and suffering insufficient energy supplies, intermittency, and a long, slow economic slide because we collectively did not anticipate the scale of the challenges ahead.

A nation that cannot contemplate a plan to reduce currently-legislated increases in federal spending from 7% to 6% without going into paroxysms most certainly cannot contemplate the sacrifices that would be needed to undertake a multi-decade engineering feat the likes of which humanity has never seen. Sorry professor; this is impossible for the USA. We cannot even accomplish that which humanity has already accomplished, like flying humans to low earth orbit. And we've been in a "long, slow economic slide" for four decades.

I've been thinking of ways to free up time. I feel like everything is universally neglected: I'm not spending enough time preparing for my SEE test, not writing enough here or at The Tax Geek, not doing enough to make The Tax Geek into something other than a lame website, not reading enough, not getting enough exercise, not getting enough sleep.... I could go on for pages. I started by looking at what I spend my time on and immediately went on a purge of the Hulu queue. Some good stuff likely ended up in the dumpster, but "good" is no longer good enough to make the cut. Flickr is now what I originally used it for: on-line backup of, and internet access to, our digital photos. All the Contacts and Groups and all that social crap is gone. I also need to take a hard look at the list of sites I routinely visit. Just what is it that I get out of them? Do I even enjoy going to them or does it feel more like a chore or obligation to go there and skim through their posts? If so, why do I continue to have them on the list? Expect some of them to disappear. I'm also cutting out Yahoo Finance's Breakout and The Daily Ticker, another hour every day I cannot afford just to listen to people make excuses for why the market isn't doing what economic theory said it ought to be doing.

But the big one is Facebook. Even though I'm not on it anywhere as much as the average Facecrack addict, it's still an hour or so every couple days, plus dealing with the flood of e-mail notifications clogging up my Yahoo account. Not to mention Facebook's assumption that everything you do on the internet is somehow theirs to pull into the Facebook Profiling Engine and sell to the highest bidder. Is it worth it? Is it worth the time and aggravation, the constant threat to my personal data from malicious game designers and Facebook itself, just to know that someone I barely know is going shopping with someone I've never met? Probably not. I don't get the whole social media thing anyway. Sure it was fun connecting with people I hadn't seen in years or decades. At first. Then I realized that other than reliving the Glory Days (Thanks, Bruce!), we have absolutely nothing to talk about. Again, given what I could be doing instead, is it really worth it? I'll be making the decision sometime this week. It's not looking good for Facebook.

Back to corporate taxes.

Happy Birthday to Me

2011-11-18T01:34:00.000-05:00

I can't sleep, so instead I'm blogging. It's not quite my birthday yet, but it will be by the time I finish this, hence the title. We're heading over to my parents' winter place in Zephyrhills in the morning to spend a couple days with them. No real big plans other than dinner at either Carrabba's or Charlies Steakhouse and maybe a movie or two. We're taking Chicken Little and Up! with us, so it certainly won't be an intellectual weekend, but at the very least, we'll get out of the house.

The library job continues. Not really anything else to report other than I don't think I've ever worked a job where the managers seem so terrified to tell me what to do. It's usually obvious what needs doing, but I always ask in case some other part of the library is short-handed and needs some help. The answer is nearly always the same: "Whatever you want to do." Huh? But other than that little quirk, it remains the perfect job; no stress and no responsibility other than just showing up. Sweet.

I stumbled across a couple videos shot from the International Space Station. The first is a series of time-lapse videos taken from August to October when the Northern Lights were really going at it. If you thought the view from the ground was impressive, well...

Unfortunately, you have to go to Vimeo to view it in HD. You'll want to do that. And view it full screen of course.

The second video is older and doesn't have any Northern Lights, but there are a couple very impressive thunderstorms that can be seen:

It continues to be relatively quiet for us just keeping our heads down, working, and (in my case) getting ready for my second SEE exam currently scheduled for November 29th. I don't feel like I'm prepared, but maybe a serious cram session over the Thanksgiving weekend will fix that. I'll be really pissed if I just end up wasting $100.

Duqu, the bastard son of Stuxnet, is still out there floating around the internet. Who is behind it and to what purpose is still not known, but Microsoft is putting defenses in place to stop it. Yet another means for people to break things. As if one more were needed.

Occupy Wall Street has been cleared out with surprisingly few arrests and no real violence. The eviction was only to be expected, especially once diseases started sweeping through various Occupy camps as a result of people living in close quarters and crapping on the ground. I'm unclear why a movement with a half-million dollars in the bank couldn't use a bit of it for porta-johns. I guess I don't understand modern protest movements. With winter on the way, the camp was likely to be breaking up anyway. What happens in the spring could be interesting, especially when some police departments seem to be spoiling for an all-out fight in the streets. What other reason could there be for an Oakland cop to shoot a photographer with a rubber bullet seemingly for kicks? If you want a possible preview of 2012, check out a timeline of 1968.

Enough. Maybe I can get some sleep now that it's after 1 am.

Pale Blue Dot

2011-11-11T19:21:00.000-05:00

I missed posting this on his actual birthday by a couple days, but it's always worth a watch:

Where Does the Time Go?

2011-11-06T07:44:00.001-05:00

I just realized I haven't posted anything for over a week. Time flies when you are having fun.

One reason for not spending much time here is that I started working at the library on Monday. As jobs go, it's OK; I show up, I do my list, I barely talk to anyone, I go home, I get a check every other Thursday, and I'm not stuck in a cubicle staring at a computer. It's the perfect job, as far as I can tell. Like any government entity, there is plenty of things that make you go, "Huh?!?!", but I'm so far down the food chain that it really doesn't matter. It's only part-time, but at least it's permanent (or at least as permanent as anything these days).

I'm still working on the Tax Geek thing, mostly trying to cram enough tax code into my head to get past the testing. I'm scheduling the second test for the first Friday in December, which is about a month later than I had hoped, but I'd prefer to take it later than planned and pass, rather than rush things and waste $100. The downside is that I'm unlikely to have my Enrolled Agent status solid for tax season. In any case, my hours at the library are very unsettled at this point and will likely remain so for the next few months, so we decided that instead of spending $6,000 or so on rent plus another $3,000 for furnishings, computer, etc. so I can have an office that is empty most of the time, we will hold off for a tax season. By next year, we will be in a better financial position plus I will have a more predictable schedule (or no schedule given how long most of my jobs last...). So that's the plan for now. It may be different next week.

We didn't bother going down to Animal Kingdom last Friday because it rained the entire day. So we sat around the apartment getting caught up on the bookkeeping, clearing out the Hulu queue, doing some reading, etc. Sunday, the weather was perfect, so we made a run down there and got what we went for:

His name is Jabali ("strong as a rock" in Swahili) and he was born on August 24 and weighed 311 pounds at birth. We had to do the safari ride three times to get that shot. The first time, Jabali was playing hide-and-seek:

The little dude went bookin' behind that rock as soon as our vehicle came around the curve. This was only a few minutes after the park opened and most of the animals were still eating breakfast, so he may have been heading for some food. Our second time through, he was standing in a group with strong back-lighting, so you can't really see him:

Anyway, that was what we did all day Sunday. I have more photos that I'm still sorting and touching up, then I'll toss them up on Flickr. I also had the chance to play with the camera in low light. I've never used the higher ISO settings, so while we were watching the Lion King show, I cranked the ISO up to 3200 and gave it a go. Most didn't turn out because of the wide range and rapid changes in light intensity, but these weren't bad for hand-held shots with our glorified point-and-shoot:

Those are straight from the camera with no processing. I normally don't do much low-light photography other than sunsets (and I have a preset for that), mainly because I've not been impressed with the results I've seen from point-and-shoot digital cameras. But I may have to invest some time playing with our current camera and see what I can get out of it.

And the federal tax code is calling me.

7 Days Without Firefox Makes One Week

2011-10-28T00:50:00.001-04:00

I've been using Chrome exclusively for a week. It works well enough, although the zoom thing is still annoying. Setting the page zoom to 144% for all pages works well enough for most sites, but I still miss each domain having its own zoom. It's not a deal breaker, especially given the alternative of trying to use a browser that crashes five times a day. I'll stay put for now.

There has been a lot going on in the tech world recently. Dennis Ritchie died a couple weeks ago. Not that the news media noticed nor are they even aware of who he was. In many ways, he was far more important to the IT world than even the biggest fanboy can make Steve Jobs out to be. But Dennis wasn't in the habit of parading on stage in black turtlenecks, so his passing doesn't unleash a spasm of national mourning.

Speaking of Steve Jobs, it looks like the reality distortion field that enveloped him immediately after his death has began to lessen as of late. Stories of his smelly hippy days when he convinced himself for a couple years that he didn't need to bathe, his violent temper and his autocratic management style are beginning to circulate. Not that any of that diminishes what he accomplished, but it does serve as a useful counterweight to the Saint Steve movement.

Probably the biggest irony of the whole Apple/Steve Jobs story is how by creating the walled garden of "i" products and the Apple Store, he became the very thing he/it were supposed to be against:

Apple right now has the second-highest market cap of all companies in the world and more cash in the bank than almost any country you care to name. Apple has out-IBM'ed IBM.

While we're on the subject of Apple, why is it that every innovation for the iPhone makes people act in ways that are indistinguishable from schizophrenics? Introducing Apple's latest method for pretentious douche bags to annoy us normal people. Gods help us.

Remember the Stuxnet worm? Remember how a number of people mentioned that it might be a bad idea to give everyone on the internet a road map for how to shut down another countries infrastructure? Well, guess what:

The new malware, dubbed “Duqu” [dü-kyü], contains parts that are nearly identical to Stuxnet and appears to have been written by the same authors behind Stuxnet, or at least by someone who had direct access to the Stuxnet source code...

Someone is following the map. Who and to what end is not known. I assume we will find out sooner rather than later. Joy.

Matt Taibbi cuts through the BS about the OWS'ers:

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

I have issues with the OWS thing, but portraying people who are pissed off that so-called private businesses are having their losses back-stopped by taxpayers while keeping their profits as anti-capitalists is propaganda aimed at the ignorant. Here is a list of charts that spells out what some people have been saying for a long time: The bottom 80% of America has been in steady decline since the 1970's. That's what has people worked up. Not that some people make more money than other people, but that the 20% get to live by a different set of rules than the 80%; rules that benefit the 20% enormously while killing the 80%.

Because of that, we can probably expect more of this:

The group surrounded the 21-year-old woman's car and began beating on it with an object that shattered her driver's side window. One of the boys involved in the attack also pointed a handgun in the direction of a passenger in the car, but didn't make any threats or attempt to open the door.

The title of the article is Teen Mobs Harass Motorists. Whoever came up with that needs to look up the meaning of the words "harass" and "assault" and see which fits the facts better. Notice also the down-playing of the race angle; if a mob of white teens "harassed" a black woman by blocking the street, smashing her window and pointing a gun at her, it would be all over the national media, the FBI would be investigating the "hate crimes", the victim would be on every news network, the local schools would cancel classes and force the entire student body into sensitivity training... well... I could go on for pages. Instead we have this tepid article in the local paper. But what is really interesting is the action down in the comments. It's still mostly words with maybe a minor scuffle here and there, but it won't take much to blow things into something seriously ugly.

Well, it's late and we're supposed to get up early for a trip down to Animal Kingdom to see the baby elephant! We'll try to get some good pictures!

Buh Bye, Mozilla

2011-10-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

I've been running Mozilla Firefox pretty much since the first day it was released. At the time, the only other options on Windows had major issues of compatibility, speed, security, etc. Since then, Microsoft seems to have mostly gotten it together with IE and Google Chrome came on the scene. I have all three browsers pinned to my taskbar, but I still used Firefox almost exclusively. Part of that was inertia; the devil you know and all that. Part of it was annoyances with the other two options: Chrome's zoom feature doesn't remember what you zoomed a page to from one visit to the next, and IE is still noticeably slower than either Chrome or Firefox. So I stayed with Firefox in spite of its recent problems with releases, speed, memory leaks and whatnot.

About a month ago, Firefox and Adobe seem to have gotten into a pissing match, at least on my computer. Freezes, hangs, crashes (both Adobe and Firefox) became a routine part of my web browsing. I've put up with it mostly because I've been up to my eyeballs in tax code and just didn't want to deal with it. Today, I decided to take a break from all things IRS and try to fix the problem. Adobe has a separate uninstaller app that is supposed to remove all traces of Flash from a PC. I ran that, then did a clean install of the latest version of Flash (11.something). As soon as I started Firefox, I knew there was a problem; Firefox informed me that I was missing a plugin. Specifically Flash 10.something "or higher." Now I'm not a math genius, but I'm pretty sure 11 is "higher" than 10. I tried to play some videos; some would play, but fullscreen still showed the Firefox window and the taskbar, or the video would randomly freeze. Others would refuse to play at all saying I needed at least Flash 10.something to play this video. Again, did I miss the memo that made 10 greater than 11?

I still had no idea if the problem was Firefox, Flash, or the combination of the two. I fired up Chrome and... well, long story short, the problem is almost certainly not Flash, unless the folks at Adobe have declared war on Firefox and added code to Flash that borks Firefox. (There is precedence for such a thing; Microsoft's software team's unofficial slogan in the late 80's and early 90's was, "Word's not done until Lotus won't run.") So Chrome it is, annoying zoom malfunctions and all. Maybe Firefox will fix the problem, but by then I may be over my anti-Chrome pissyness and won't bother switching back.

Freaky

2011-10-18T15:06:00.002-04:00

So while I'm taking a break from taxes this morning, I'm over at The West Virginia Surf Report reading Jeff Kay's latest blog post. He used the line from the song Ironic as part of his post that goes, "Like rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you’ve already paid." Whenever I'm reading, the little voice in my head is usually what I imagine (or in rare cases, know) the author's voice sounds like, but when I got to that line of Jeff's post, it didn't "sound" right. Some other part of my brain said, "Huh?" and cocked its head to one side like a dog trying to track down the source of a noise. Yet some other part of my brain told the head-cocking part, "Shadup already; we're trying to read in here," made a mental note to check my meds, and kept reading. I made it about two sentences further when the Jeff voice in my head gets interrupted by someone repeating, "Like rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you’ve already paid." What the...?!?!

At the exact instant I was reading "Like rain on your wedding day..." Songbird was playing that exact line over the computer speakers. It was so closely synch'ed that I didn't realize what was going on until the line came up again in the song. I must have stared at the computer screen for a good five minutes muttering, "How the.... What the.... Holy crap!"

I'm not sure whether this means I should set the apartment on fire and run naked and screaming out into the middle of the street or buy a Powerball ticket.

Five Years Ago Today...

2011-10-15T18:01:00.001-04:00

...we began this weird little journey we've been on after leaving behind everything (and everyone) we've ever known. Thanks to technology, we still have contact with all those friends and family, unlike my great-great-grandfather who left everything and everyone behind to (eventually) homestead in northern Michigan. But in spite of that, life has been very different on a day-to-day basis since walking away from our support structure. For one, we now depend on each other a great deal more instead of always looking to others. There are times when working without a net can be terrifying, but I'm glad we did what we did.

What sent me down Memory Lane was a Facebook conversation yesterday with someone I hadn't talked to in 25 years or so asking what I've been up to lately. I realized that October 2006 was five years ago and I wondered just when in October we headed out to Arcosanti via Florida (the shortest distance between two points is sometimes a line in the opposite direction). After digging around in the blog archives, it turns out that October 15th was the day. In some ways, it seems like Michigan was an eternity ago. Yet it seems impossible that it was five years ago when we crammed the back of the Durango with everything we thought we might need for the next year or so and rolled out.

That conversation ended like most similar Facebook conversations I have with long-lost acquaintances: "Sorry to hear things didn't turn out how you planned." While I appreciate the sentiment, it misses an important point; Like the secret ingredient in the secret ingredient soup, there was no plan. We didn't have the first clue what we were doing or where we were going beyond the Arcosanti workshop, which was merely an excuse for me to go back to Arizona. We went and did stuff, until we wanted to do something else somewhere else, then went somewhere else and did something else. Rinse and repeat. Now we're here. Doing this. For now. And our plans always turn out exactly how we didn't plan them. Don't think that isn't a horrifying way for a couple OCD list-makers and planners to try to live, but the longer we do it, the better we get at it. I still make all sorts of to-do lists and time lines, but I now forget about them almost as soon as I write them. When I stumble across one, sometimes months or years later, I note that everything on the list is still not done and all the deadlines made a really cool whooshing sound as they flew by, and yet the universe didn't end in some titanic matter/anti-matter explosion. We're both still standing, together, with a roof over our heads, food on the table and a family-sized bag of crunchy Cheetos on the top of the refrigerator.

At the end of the day, what more is there?

Full Week

2011-10-12T00:32:00.000-04:00

The last week or so has been rather full of news. The most obvious is the death of Steve Jobs. I find all the gushing over him to be a bit creepy. Jobs was good, no doubt about that. But the equal of Einstein? Sorry; don't think so. He was a glorified Billy Mays in a black turtleneck who managed to convince 10's of millions of people that they couldn't draw their next breath without an electronic doohickey glued to their hand that didn't even exist five years ago. That was his real genius. And ripping off the Xerox Alto, but then everyone did that eventually, making it hard to find fault with Jobs simply for being the first. It will be interesting to see what happens at Apple over the next five years or so. I don't envy the guy who gets to replace him as the face of Apple.

In her last post, Debbie mentioned us trying and failing to get down to see La Nouba last weekend. Because it was dead at her work on Friday, she came home early. We jumped on line and were able to find two seats together. They weren't the best seats, but they ended up being good enough. So we made a run to Downtown Disney to wander around a bit then see the show. La Nouba was good (I put it not quite as good as O, but much better than Ka), although we saw something not normally seen in a Cirque du Soleil show: a hard crash. One of the acts was four little girls (looked to be maybe 8 at the most) doing acrobatics while working diabolos. The last trick involved one girl throwing her spool 20 feet or so in the air and a second girl jumping up onto the first girl's shoulders to catch it. On the first try, the toss was off, so they made a second attempt. That time she kinda sorta caught it but took a hard fall and was a bit slow getting up. The third try was successful with a great deal of wobbling around, but they held it together long enough to call it good. Of course, they got the biggest applause of the night.

Other big news is that I finally got a job. Sort of. Since we moved down here, I've been volunteering at the library one or two days a week as a page (shelving books, pulling holds, etc.). They had a part-time page job open up, so I went ahead and applied for it not expecting to get it. Typical for central Florida, there were over 160 applications for the part-time job including large numbers of people with freshly-minted graduate degrees in library science. Why would they hire someone who makes all sorts of grandpa-noises when he has to shelve on the bottom shelf when they could have 20-somethings with college degrees? Then I was called for an interview. I went and was my usual charming self during the interview, followed by their standard library page test, which involves alphabetizing six groups of four words, six groups of four authors, and most challenging of all, putting six groups of four Dewey decimal numbers in numeric order. I still didn't expect to get the job. I got a call on Friday just as we were leaving for Disney that I got the job. When I was at the library on Sunday, I found out I was offered the job because I was the only person that managed to get a perfect score on the test. Wow. Knowing the ABC Song and how to count pays off big time. If you can call a part-time job the big time. At least it's permanent.

So now I need to see what my schedule there is going to look like and decide what to do about the whole Tax Geek thing. I'm hoping I can do both, but we'll just have to wait and see. I don't start the library job until the last day of October, so that gives me time to get through the second section of my SEE tests. I figure I've gone this far so why not finish up the Enrolled Agent thing? I can use the library job to backstop the first few years of The Tax Geek and see which one turns into a full-time job first. Or something like that. It's all a bit squishy right now.

The bicycle riding is going much better now that I have a back wheel that turns. My average speed is way up (12.8 mph), so tomorrow I'm getting back to adding miles. Other than three straight days of rain over the weekend, the weather has been much more pleasant as well; 20 degrees cooler and about half the humidity. I may hit my 15-miles-in-an-hour-or-less goal by the end of the year after all.

Well, it's late so I should try to get some sleep. I can't keep my eyes open during the day, then I'm suddenly all perky and awake at 11pm. Grrr.

Beautiful Day

2011-10-01T09:52:00.003-04:00

It is suppose to be a beautiful day today -- bit cooler (in the low/mid 80's) and no rain. Last nite I told Ric I wanted to do "something" today -- get out of the apartment and outside.

I didn't join him for his bike ride this morning though and we just finished up going through old posts on FB and seeing the comments on his new Tax Geek caricature. Now, time for him to jump in the shower and then we are heading down to Disney World for the rest of the day. I tried to get tickets for the Cirque show (La Nouba), but they did not have two seats together for either show tonite. Maybe another nite this month while they are running some specials.

Cruise Photos

2011-09-28T11:03:00.001-04:00

I finally finished up the photos from our cruise. A few samples:

This photo most likely violates a dozen or so federal laws. This was some sort of chase vehicle that followed us out of port as part of the 9/11 10th Anniversary Celebration along with police check points and a bunch of people with Big Scary Guns who would probably kill more bystanders than terrorists if they ever opened fire.

Boat for sale.

Really expensive places for people to live in Miami.

The most interesting thing in Freeport, Bahamas: crumbling ruins.

James Bond lives here. (I saw it in a movie; it must be true.)

Our last night at sea.

Flying

2011-09-28T07:15:00.000-04:00

Best at full screen and the highest resolution your connection can manage:

Starting Over

2011-09-27T12:34:00.001-04:00

I finally got a phone call from the bike shop telling me my bike is ready. I've ridden once in the last 18 days; I wonder how many months of progress that will cost me. But at last I can stop going stir-crazy. Without my morning ride, I can't focus, have zero energy, and spend most of the day pacing around the apartment. It will be nice to get back at it.

And I'm still neck-deep in tax code. September is almost over which means I'm still behind (maybe even a little behinder) schedule. I did build in some slack, but that's now more or less gone. I'm hoping to schedule a test date during the second week of October. Assuming that goes as planned, I should be able to get my application into the IRS before December. It will be tight, but I think I'm still OK.

I'm still working through the cruise photos on my breaks from all things IRS. That little project should be done in the next day or so. We didn't take many photos because we hardly got off the ship, but we did have an awesome sunset our last night thanks to some droppings from Tropical Storm Maria.

I haven't really talked much about Greece and the whole European/Euro mess. The problem is in some ways quite simple. Greece has been on a borrowing binge that makes every other western country look like rank amateurs, largely because the citizens of Greece like to have lots of stuff, but aren't much interested in working for it, combined with tax evasion being the favorite national past time. There is no possible way Greece can ever pay all, or even most, of the money back even if the government completely shut down and all tax revenues went to debt relief. Greece must default. This is familiar territory; countries have defaulted before. The entire South American continent defaulted in the 1970's and the world didn't end. It wasn't pleasant for people living in those countries for a long time, and anyone foolish enough to loan mountains of cash to countries run by men with a passion for funny hats and military uniforms, insisting they be addressed as "General" when the closest they'd ever been to a battle was watching The Sands of Iwo Jima, saw their investments wiped out. But the world went on much as it had been going on. The difficulty with Greece is that so much of their worthless debt is held by banks in other European countries (something that wasn't supposed to happen under the Euro-zone treaties) that if Greek debt is written down even 50% (90-100% being more likely), the entire banking system would seize up. Today, the financial world celebrated the news that the fund that is supposed to prevent that is being increased from a paltry €440 billion to €3 trillion. Not to be the kid who points out that the emperor has no clothes, but just where exactly is this €2.5 trillion going to come from? Germany is tapped out, most of the rest of Europe is running deficits, England is already killing itself with austerity measures, we certainly don't have it, Japan is busted, Russia is East Timor with nukes. China maybe? Warren Buffet? Or will Europe simply wave a magic wand and "leverage" €2.5 trillion into existence? I'm betting it will be that last one, and that it will accomplish even less than our version of wand-waving has over the last three years.

One idea for lowering the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been to use crystals called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to absorb CO2 and lock it away. The problem has been that until now, MOFs were created using a lot of toxic chemicals and petroleum, making them expensive to create in bulk and a more-immediate environmental problem than the CO2 itself. College campuses are notoriously short on petroleum, so some students at Northwestern University used materials readily available in any dorm room, sugar, salt and alcohol, to create MOFs. The reaction takes place at room temperature and is easily reversible should our over-due ice age show up unexpectedly. The next step is for the global warming jihad to block further development because it doesn't promise to do sufficient damage to the US economy.

The internet is buzzing angrily like a hornets' nest that's been whacked with a stick because Facebook has made some tweaks to its interface:

It’s not hard to irritate people on a social media site, of course. The two easiest ways to do it are:

1. Change something.
2. Don’t change anything.

...Facebook, ever the traditionalist, prefers the time-tested approach of making constant changes that range from the inexplicably superficial to the confoundingly substantial. By keeping users in a constant state of agitation, and simultaneously providing them with a place to express that agitation, Facebook maintains its huge base of extremely unsatisfied users.

At least it gives people something more interesting to post about than what their last bowel movement looked like.

Everyone is pretty much aware that our medical system is broken. We spend more money per capita and have less to show for it than any other industrial nation. While there are a lot of ideas for how to fix it, I doubt any of them involve upping the number of ICD codes from the current 18,000 to 140,000 under the new ICD-10. As one would expect with such a change, its affect will largely be to increase costs while not providing any new useful information. Note I said "useful":

...a code for recording that a patient's injury occurred in a chicken coop.

...codes for injuries in opera houses, art galleries, squash court and nine locations in and around a mobile home, from the bathroom to the bedroom.

...R46.1 is "bizarre personal appearance".... R46.0 is "very low level of personal hygiene".

...W22.02XA, "walked into lamppost, initial encounter"

...W22.02XD, "walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter"

...Code V91.07XA, which involves a "burn due to water-skis on fire"

...72 codes about injuries tied to birds.

...There are separate codes for "bitten by turtle" and "struck by turtle."

And the literal money quote:

Some companies hope to grab business from the shift.

Imagine that. Anyone want to bet that the businesses in a position to grab the most were up to their necks in the creation of the ICD-10?

From the "Holy crap!" department, we have live video reconstructed from brain activity:

UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

The entire process is fairly crude at this point, but the mere fact that it can be done is very cool.

We used to do the Netflix thing back when we lived at Arcosanti, but we stopped after getting tired of a certain individual stealing our movies from our mail slot. We've thought about restarting it several times over the last few years, but just never got around to pulling the trigger. Then the price went up. Then they lost their contract with Starz. Now they've split the company into two separate entities; Netflix for streaming content and Qwikster for the DVD-by-mail business. From the user's perspective, this is a disaster. Now instead of one account, one website, one catalog, etc. there are two of everything. Last I checked, there have been a million cancellations since this was announced and the price of Netflix stock has been cut in half. But there are good business reasons to do this. It's pretty obvious that streaming is the future of movies, and physical DVD's are going to the same place as CD's and paper books are going. Spinning off the DVD-by-mail business to sink or swim on its own is probably a smart business move. Also having people specifically subscribe to the streaming content gives Netflix a more solid figure to use when negotiating with the studios. However, smart business moves that are sprung on your customers with no explanation and look on the surface to be a ten-story middle finger directed at your entire customer base usually turn out to be bad for business. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out over the next several months. Meanwhile, we will continue to wait for a while longer and see how it plays out.

The TSA has always been a joke from day one, but now it seems like a test just to see how ridiculous they can be and still continue to exist. Now the TSA is at war with big hair and people who take too long to take a dump. It's tempting to just write this off as more of the typical government stupidity we all have to live with every day until you take a moment to consider what scrambling an F-16 escort means:

Let's just stop for a second, helpful passengers, and remember that the F-16s are not there to help you. They are there to shoot down the plane if necessary. What else could they do? So the TSA is out there scrambling armed fighters to intercept passenger jets out of "an abundance of caution," just because somebody reportedly spent too long on the john. Does that make you feel safer?

I know I certainly feel safer knowing the level of intelligence necessary to sic an armed F-16 on one of our own passenger airplanes. Ye flippin' gods.

Well, back to the tax code.

"Your bike is a POS and you're fat."

2011-09-20T17:29:00.000-04:00

After eating for five days straight, I attempted a bike ride on Saturday. I made it through my route, but I would have made better time walking it. I'm sure all the cruise ship food was part of the problem, but a bigger problem was the back wheel wobbling all over the place. Tightening it up didn't help at all, so back to the bike shop where my fears were confirmed: new back wheel. I asked the salesperson why a bike ridden as lightly as mine is blowing out bearings. The short version of her answer is the post title. I only paid $350 when I bought it new over ten years ago, and I'm fat, so I really shouldn't expect more than a couple thousand miles from a wheel. My $20 Schwinn I got when I was six lasted for three generations of serious abuse with nothing more than some rare oiling, but my "mountain" bike that has never been ridden on anything rougher than a graded dirt road needs a whole new back wheel once a year. Nice.

And don't even get me started on why I need to buy an entire wheel to replace the hub bearings. Good thing I took it to the "experts".

And you kids get off my lawn!

I'm not sure what's going on with our apartment. The three women that normally work in the office are gone and have been replaced by some clueless dweeb that doesn't seem to know his ass from his elbow. But everyone now has these really cool matching blue polo shirts, so there's that. As Debbie mentioned, the Blue Polo Shirted Dweeb working in the office seems to have forgotten all about scheduling our carpet cleaning while we were on the cruise. And we still don't have any idea who was in our apartment messing with the smoke detector. I cornered a maintenance guy this morning; he just repeated the party line about how they never enter an apartment without leaving a work order stating why they were there. When I pointed out that we were fully aware of what was supposed to happen which is why Debbie called the office raising holy hell because someone had apparently been in our apartment while we were out of town and didn't leave a note as to why, he responded that the people upstairs must have been jumping up and down a lot and knocked it off the ceiling. Yea. I'm sure that's what happened.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love our ghetto apartment?

Anyway. The cruise. We spent most of the time laying around in the sun on the pool deck except the one day we got off the ship to lay in the sun on the beach. The rest of the time we were in line for the buffet. We were generally disappointed in our first NCL cruise; there wasn't any major problems, just a lot of little things that left us sort of let down. Most of it involved the large number of crew standing around looking puzzled and not doing things that clearly needed doing. Things got better towards the end of the cruise making us wonder if there had been a major crew change when we left port. Debbie always tells her clients not to judge a cruise line by a single cruise and maybe we just caught NCL on a bad week. But even if everything had been perfect. I'm not sure I like NCL-style cruising. Being constantly assaulted by loud music and crew members jumping around yelling, "Let's party!" in my face everywhere we went isn't my idea of relaxation. The rarest of commodities on an NCL ship is peace and quiet. At times the intentional audio assault was simply ludicrous: we hit one of the twenty or so bars on the ship (because NCL is the partyingest cruise line so Let's Party!) late one night looking for something different for our second dinner (or maybe it was our 11pm snack), and they had four TV's, all playing a different station with the sound turned up and music playing over the PA. All in a space not much larger than our living room.

And you kids get off my lawn!

Now that vacation is over, it's back to tax code. I finished up the initial pass through the material for the second test. Most of the basic concepts haven't changed since I was doing this stuff in the 1980's, but there is a lot of little details that I've either forgotten or that have been added. One thing in particular has changed; back in the day is was standard practice to have the business on a fiscal year and the taxpayer on a calendar year so you could defer taxes by floating money between the two. Now there is a whole stack of rules specifically intended to prevent that which I have to learn. Woo. hoo.

Cruise pictures are still on the camera; I want to get to that this week. I also want a million dollars. We'll see. And Debbie is going to be home soon, so I should be looking busy when she walks in instead of sitting here blogging.

We're back

2011-09-16T16:40:00.002-04:00

We made it back from our Bahama cruise -- now, we have a week of feeling ever so often like we are back on a ship!

Our biggest complaint coming back (as Ric will expound on later, I"m sure!) is our carpet never got steam cleaned while we were gone. Ric had walked down to the office to tell them we would be out of town from Sunday afternoon until Friday afternoon and to schedule the carpet to be cleaned sometime while we were gone. Before we left on our trip, we picked, moved and stacked as much as we could off the carpet and vacuum, dusted the whole place. Came home and NOTHING WAS DONE! We had to get some things back to their original places, so we could put the milk and insulin in the fridge. We grabbed the mail box key, picked up the mail and headed to the office. The guy working was new to me and apparently the guy Ric talked to about scheduling our carpet cleaning. He had no idea what we were talking about. Just keeps getting better and better here! (yeah, that was sarcasm!) We then came back and put most of the apt back together since they can't steam clean while Ric is here.

Then while sitting for a moment, Ric happened to look up and noticed one of our smoke detector was hanging by the wire. Guessing, maybe maintenance came in to check them and change batteries? Of course, no note that they came in our place. I called the office and said we thought maintenance had been in to check on smoke detector and left it hanging, even though there was no note that came into our apt. He said he didn't think they had. I said well then it magically "fell off the ceiling by itself" and they needed to come fix it. I can't wait to see when one of the "regulars" is in the office and we can let them know how things are!

Finally Got a Round Tuit

2011-09-10T18:09:00.000-04:00

Photos from our day at the beach from the end of July. Cleaning off the camera in preparation for hopefully filling it up again in what's left of the Bahamas. At least Maria looks to make herself scarce before we get there, making a nice right turn out into the middle of the Atlantic instead of being in the Bahamas waiting for us. We still expect a rough ride; today Debbie picked up something called Bonine (which sounds more like an OTC version of Viagra instead of sea-sick pills) just in case. None of that stuff does much for me, but it seems to help her. I just need to be able to see the horizon occasionally, and I'm good. The real fun is when we get back on dry land; it takes about a week for us to quit grabbing onto the walls and furniture because the apartment is moving.

Well, we have to get our butts in gear and finish cleaning up and rearranging the apartment. The landlord gives every apartment a free carpet cleaning when you renew the lease, so we figured the easiest time to do it would be while we were gone, meaning we have to get as much off the carpet and shoved into the bathrooms and kitchen as we can. We figure they should be able to get to at least 80% of the carpet and the rest is places like under our bed that never get walked on anyway. At a minimum, it should knock down the worst of the dust in here. Florida is worse than Arizona in that department, which really surprised me. How there can be so much dust when it rains twice a day is beyond me, but we literally scoop it off everything in the apartment with a snow shovel every time we clean.

Anyway, later. Photos sometime after we get back. Hopefully less than six weeks after we're back, like the last batch, but no guarantees.

One Down; Two to Go

2011-09-08T00:05:00.000-04:00

I managed to get through the first section of the SEE covering individual taxes. The best part of the whole thing was the security; I thought for a minute I was going to have to take the test bare-asss nekkid. I had to surrender my drivers license, then empty my pockets of everything else and lock it in a little gym locker. I couldn't even wear a watch. I followed the lady who had my drivers license into the next room where my license was checked against the name on my registration, scrutinized under ultra-violet light, then checked a second time against the name on my registration. I had to stand on a tape mark on the floor, turn all my pockets inside out, get wanded front and back, and sign in and time-stamp my signature. I was issued a calculator, two #2 pencils and an eight-page booklet of scratch paper with the top third of every page filled with a heading informing me in 36-point bold type that it was an official piece of scratch paper, then was led into the test room. The mini-cubicle I took the test in was monitored and recorded in video and audio. I had to leave my drivers license on the desk while I took the test so the person watching the video could be sure I was at the correct computer. When I was done with the test, I turned in my pencils, scratch paper, calculator and drivers license. My letter certifying that I had passed the test was printed, checked against my drivers license, signed, dated, and raised-seal stamped by the monitor, then handed to me along with my license. After retrieving all my stuff from the little gym locker, I was allowed to leave. Missile silos have looser security. Holy. Crap.

The next test will be even more fun to prepare for; it covers partnerships, all three flavors of corporation, estates, etc., which I haven't done anything with since I worked in public accounting back in the 1980's. But before I dive into all that, I need to spend the next couple days getting ready for our cruise. I doubt Debbie will let me take my flash cards on the cruise with us, so it looks like I get a 10-day break from taxes.

We had a bit of a scare last night. While we were in the middle of watching the latest episode of Misfits, the computer did an emergency shut down and wouldn't fully reboot. It is an HP, so I wouldn't have been surprised if it had suffered a catastrophic hardware failure after a mere three years. I already had to replace the video card when it was less than a year old, and I thought that may be the problem again this time. When I could coax a bit of life out of it, the blue screen that flashed by as it powered itself back off had a bit about an invalid video mode or some such. It was late, I wasn't really in the mood, and I didn't have the brain power left after three days of non-stop tax code, so I left everything powered off and went to bed. Today when I came back from my test, I tore the whole thing to pieces and started cleaning out the major dust bunnies. And I do mean major. The heat sink on the CPU was completely clogged with gunk. I just cleaned everything the last time we moved, so Florida must have really gunky air for it to be that bad already. Bottom line is that after a thorough de-gunking and re-assembly, it seems to be working fine. Dodged that bullet. For now.

When I logged into Blogger today, I was greeted with a message asking if I would like to try the new, "lightweight" and "clean" version of Blogger. Because I enjoy pain, I agreed. I guess "lightweight" and "clean" are now synonyms for "butt ugly" and "grossly obtuse". I can only hope that it looks and works better on an iPad, because for the rest of us that still use old-fashioned PC's, it sucks dead bunnies. The good news is that I can switch back to the old interface, at least until They force me to use the "new and improved" one. What would be nice is if instead of wasting resources wrecking what works, maybe Google could fix the problem with the editor tossing the cursor randomly around the text in response to the cursor keys. In the process of fixing what wasn't broken about two years ago, that bug was introduced and has been a "feature" of the text editor ever since.

Well, brain is mush, so off to bed.

Little over a week

2011-09-04T01:03:00.002-04:00

Next Sunday we will be heading down to Miami. We have a hotel to stay at, parking our car for the week free and heading to the pier on Monday. We are doing a 4 night cruise to the Bahamas on Norwegian Cruise Lines. (which I won in a contest at work -- not totally free, but close!) Side note, Ric was excited when I told him we both were going -- that it was NOT an agent only cruise!

This will be the first time I've been on NCL. They are the first cruise line to introduce the "freestyle dining concept" and the first time I will experience the "anytime dining". I like the idea of no set table number and set time and set table mates. Though, not too interested in so many "specialty restaurants" with a surcharge.

We've been to Nassau before, but not Freeport. Not sure if we will bother to get off the ship to check out either of those ports. But we will definitely be taking advantage of NCL's private island port of call. I love the to have lunch served on the island and we may be checking out cabanas to rent. One of the ports in the Bahamas did have a Segway shore excursion that sounded interesting that we might splurge on too.

Biggest thing will just to relax and enjoy ourselves. Hopefully Ric passes his tax exam test on Tuesday, so it will be a celebration week for him. He can take time out from studying and testing for a week, before starting on the next set of tax tests.

It will be interesting to see if Tropical Storm/Hurricane Katia tries to interfere with the cruise. Keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn't.

City of the Future

2011-09-03T12:43:00.000-04:00

"Detroit is the city of the future. Either it's going to rise from the ashes, or every other city is going to end up like we are. We get to decide." -- Tony Barlow, New York Times.

Death on the Highway

2011-08-30T23:58:00.000-04:00

The title isn't referring to the short film that every drivers ed student is forced to suffer through. (Aside: Given that most drivers ed students today own the entire Saw series on DVD, I'm pretty sure it has even less of an affect than it had back when I had to watch it. (Aside to the aside: Do they even use Death on the Highway any more, or is it considered too graphic for the little kiddies who own the entire Saw series on DVD?)) Instead, I'm referring to the Interstate of Death, otherwise known as I-4, which claimed another victim early this morning. I had a crazy bike ride this morning with lines of cars everywhere and a three-car pile-up just down the street from our apartment. I had to make a big loop just trying to get across a two-lane residential street that looked more like I-4 at rush hour. Then Debbie, fortunately as it turns out, tried to go into work early only to end up stuck in traffic for half an hour (her work is only five miles from our apartment). Just another day in Sunny Central Florida.

I seem to have hit a wall with the whole bicycle thing. It feels like I've got a boat anchor dragging along behind me all the time and my average speeds seem to indicate that as well. I can barely keep above 12mph average on the best of days; any wind and I'm down in the 11's. I've checked tire pressure, adjusted the brake pads, looked for any indication of some moving part rubbing on some other moving part, etc. I certainly hope that it isn't a bearing problem; there are nowhere near enough miles on this bike for something like that. Maybe it's just the insane heat and humidity and things will get better in a couple months. Or maybe I'm just old.

More "good" news on the human spaceflight front. Since we no longer have the ability to launch humans into space and are instead hitch-hiking rides on the only other spacecraft capable of taking humans to the International Space Station, there is a single point of failure. Which of course, failed. If the investigation into the failure and whatever modifications need to be made take too long, the current crew of the ISS will have to return before their replacements show up, meaning that the ISS will be empty for the first time in in a decade. Coming this close to the end of the Shuttle program, that could be bad news for Americans in space. The only bright spot is that the Russians don't waste a lot of time with competing panels of inquiry pointing fingers; they find the problem, they fix the problem, they get the thing flying again. Let's all hope they can pull off a quick turn-around on this issue. And thank the gods this was a cargo flight and not a crewed mission.

In local news, there is a planthopper from Texas that kills palm trees by puking on the fronds (you can't make this stuff up). There is no cure once a tree is infected and the planthoppers are spreading slowly east from the Tampa area. It's not a big problem, but no one has a workable solution so that's temporary. Yeehaa.

This just in: The sun causes climate. I know! Who knew! Ok, ok; seriously, cosmic rays create clouds, and variation in the sun's magnetic fields alter the number of cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere which affects the amount of cloud cover which affects climate. This would be just another data point, another factor in the climate models. Except:

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory credence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

Of course, because nothing says science like good ol' fashioned politics.

Dr. Pournelle has a good what-if:

Suppose that the Global Warming/Climate Change fears are all well grounded. Increases in CO2 will doom civilization and threatens the stability of global climate, and the ability of the Earth to sustain civilization. What is it that we – by we I mean the people of the United States – should do, and what is the meaning for the rest of the world?

The short answer is, "Nothing good." But you already knew that.

Irene was a bit of a bust in New York City, but that doesn't mean that it just disappeared when the news industry lost interest and went back to discussing what color Lady Gaga dyed her pubes this week. Our old stomping grounds in Swanzey, NH seem to be doing Ok, but Vermont got seriously clobbered. Brattleboro, where I worked the 2010 tax season is a lake. It's going to be a long process to put things back together.

First we had to suffer through Bush's Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and his looney-toons Christian Reconstruction crap. Now we have the New Apostolic Reformation being all cozy with front-runners in the Republican primary race. I know fear makes people do stupid things; lets just hope this isn't one of those times:

Tabachnick says the movement currently works with a variety of politicians and has a presence in all 50 states. It also has very strong opinions about the direction it wants the country to take. For the past several years, she says, the NAR has run a campaign to reclaim what it calls the "seven mountains of culture" from demonic influence. The "mountains" are arts and entertainment; business; family; government; media; religion; and education.

"They teach quite literally that these 'mountains' have fallen under the control of demonic influences in society," says Tabachnick. "And therefore, they must reclaim them for God in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth."

Wow. That is so not what we need right now.

Every so often, there is a story about some kid who gets his lemonade stand shut down for not having a business license or violating the homeowners association covenant. Initially, this story looks like yet another one of them, only serving green tea instead of lemonade. But was this really a kid selling drinks on the front lawn? It sounds more like it was Dad's green tea stand that was some distance from home in a public place. Dad leaves his 12-year-old in charge while he runs back to the house and returns to find the operation had been shut down. That's a lot different than a kid selling glasses of lemonade in the front yard. Public spaces have rules and unfortunately, most of those rules came about because of grifters and scam artists making it impossible for the public space to be used as intended. Now certainly, in a nation where less than half of all murder investigations result in even an arrest, I would think whatever version of cop took the time to hassle a kid selling green tea needs to think about his priorities, but there is more to this story than we're getting.

More serious is that Gibson has been raided by the feds for the second time in two years because the feds suspect their wood is improperly sourced. I would think a couple of suits could check on that without the military raid tactics and seizure of Gibson property. The name of the case from the first raid, United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms, demonstrates just how idiotic our "justice" system has become. The federal government is borrowing money from the Chinese to put a stack of wood on trial. At least the prosecutor and the stack of wood are evenly matched in the wits department.

If you want to get a PhD without doing much, head on up to our neighbor to the north and enroll in the University of Manitoba:

The University of Manitoba said it is reviewing its policy on how to accommodate students with disabilities despite winning a victory in court this week over a controversial decision to grant a PhD to a student who failed his courses due to “extreme exam anxiety.”

...The university had defended its decision, saying it was legally required to accommodate a student’s disability, in this case, exam anxiety.

It's nice to know we'll have company as we're swept into history's dustbin.

And Micky's big hand says it's time for bed.

All Eyes on Irene

2011-08-26T15:48:00.000-04:00

Looks like all we'll be getting from Irene is rain and a bit of wind. I'm skipping my morning bike ride because it looks like a line of severe storms will be passing over us just about when I would be farthest from the apartment. [Later: Four hours gone by and it still hasn't rained a drop. There are large storm bands being thrown off by Irene, but they fall apart before they get this far inland.] But it looks like the weekend will be interesting for everyone around the Imperial City and NYC. The current predicted track looks pretty solid; NOAA hasn't made significant changes to it in a couple days.

I scheduled my first of three Enrolled Agent tests yesterday. I'm still not entirely comfortable in a couple areas, but I have a bit over a week to keep reviewing tax code before I have to head over to the IRS office. Got all my fingers and toes crossed, especially since the test costs a hundred bucks whether I pass or not.

And just because the gods enjoy screwing with us, I have an outside chance at a job at the library I volunteer at. I'm not really expecting to get it, but just because we have already spent money we can never get back on this whole Tax Geek thing, it will come through.

Anyway, today will probably be a day of catching up on everything that I've been ignoring while I've been buried in tax code. I still have pictures sitting on the camera from our trip to the beach, and the apartment needs some serious attention. The dust on the TV stand has piled up high enough to block the bottom of the screen. Yesterday, I saw a spider the size of my palm patrolling the living room. Not that I mind having spiders around to keep the cockroach population in check, but my arachnophobia starts kicking in when they get to be the size of Aragog. Time to hit all the dark corners with the vacuum.

Speaking of giant bugs, I've had a rash of recent encounters with some of the Florida's larger six-legged residents: Six-inch metallic grasshoppers, two giant (4-5") beetles in our apartment that the Googles say don't exist, and three-inch cicadas in addition to our eight-legged house guest. Along with my daily encounter with Sandhill cranes that are as tall as I am when I'm on my bicycle and have a prehistoric-sounding call, I feel like I'm living in Jurassic Park.

While wandering around the internets in a tax-induced fog earlier this week, I ran across an interesting critique of the Four Spiritual Laws (in five parts; I, II, III, IV and V). This was something frequently debated when I was in high school and was still being debated during my last year of college in 2009. My opinion on that particular religious issue has always been the same: if God is such a fussbudget about how one goes about avoiding an eternity of torment, then He should have made his intentions clearer, or picked better spokespersons. That's not to say Infamous Brad doesn't make a good argument against a particular form of evangelicalism, but rather that if its popularity has truly "condemned tens of millions of people to eternal damnation in the fires of Hell", then God cannot be said to exert much authority over his creation, and maybe we're all better off just finding out own way after all.

Speaking of gods and their messages to humanity, we had some wind blowing from Jackson's Hole in the form of a speech by Ben Bernanke. Expecting to hear the economic equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, markets cratered when Uncle Ben revealed that the secret ingredient is that there is no secret ingredient. Then the markets shot up after Helicopter Ben shut up because, what the hell? If the apocalypse is coming, we may as well party like it's 1999.

The Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi's latest revelations of massive market fraud and manipulation by Wall Street and the government agencies tasked with keeping them in check. If anyone can read that and still believe the average retail investor has a snowball's chance in hell of coming out ahead, you may want to check your meds. Oh, and someone just dug up another $1.2 trillion handed out to multi-national banks. Given the amount of money dumped into the banking industry, I'm not sure it wouldn't have been cheaper to just pay off every mortgage in the US, personal and business. Instead, trillions to the banks, trillions more over the next decade(s) for Fanny and Freddie, and we still have a collapsing housing market and 9%+ unemployment.

Meanwhile, politics gets crazier by the day. The SEIU has been plastering anti-Republican ads all over the TV and cheering for left-coast politicians who think dialog means screaming "the Tea Party can go straight to hell" during a speech. (Everyone remembers the conduct of those gentle SEIU folks at the last election, right?) Meanwhile, on the Republican side of things we have Snow White and the Seven Dwarves being stalked by the Wicked Witch of the West, who refuses to either shut up and let the adults talk, or put up and run for office. A serious candidate could give Obama the race of his life, but it seems the opportunity will be squandered in favor of continuing the destruction of the very notion of "conservative".

In local news, we may be getting a train station and routine commuter train service. We've been hearing talk of this since we moved here, but this looks a bit more concrete. The construction jobs will all be taken up by illegal Mexicans and the permanent jobs will be filled by people shipped in from other parts of the country, but at least people using their car as an apartment will be able to get to Disney easier.

In cheerier news, we have more photos from Opportunity. The rover is in good shape all things considered and we should be seeing some data on its first target soon. Meanwhile, the dolphins in Shark Bay have been observed using conch shells to catch fish. Only a few are currently doing it, but it seems to be catching on. Maybe dolphins have fads; anybody seen one sporting a mullet?

Off to be productive-ish.

Duct Tape

2011-08-23T10:44:00.000-04:00

Because even duct tape is more fun than tax code:

Dog and Otter

2011-08-23T09:05:00.000-04:00

Because it beats reading tax code:

Jetman at the Grand Canyon

2011-08-19T11:49:00.001-04:00

You will definitely want to watch this at 720p and full-screen:

Brain Bender

2011-08-19T10:13:00.000-04:00

Ignoring

2011-08-17T18:19:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure who West Asset Management is (probably these twats), but they call our land line twice a day and never leave a message. I guess they've never heard of the Do Not Call Registry. I filed a complaint today (not that it does any good) after getting at least one call a day for the last several months. Normally, telemarketing morons figure out after a few failed tries that we're ignoring them and stop calling, but these jerks seem to be a special kind of stupid.

Speaking of ignoring things, I just tried to contact the Sanford Ghetto Pharmacy to see why I don't have my next batch of Lantus. Of course, like any taxpayer-funded "service" intended for poors, there is no way to talk to a human being. In fact, calling the pharmacy number gives you no option other than to give your name, phone number, birthday, and prescription refill number. No "Press # to speak with a pharmacist" or any other options. Luckily I had a prescription number so I could get past that bit of wonderful customer service only to get dumped into the Sanford Ghetto Clinic phone tree which fortunately had an option to dump me back into the Sanford Ghetto Pharmacy phone tree where I was "allowed" to leave a message with the promise that someone checks messages every 30 minutes. Not that they'll return the call in 30 minutes, or ever; just that they promise to listen to my message. Thanks. [Update: I did receive a call back from a human and was informed that what I was sent in the mail was wrong, and how I should go about getting my Lantus in the future. The human also informed me that everyone hates the phone system and whenever management asks what can be done to make the "patient experience" better, they're told the first priority should be to fix the damn phone system. Which management ignores, of course.]

Then I tried to refill my Pulmicort, which thank the gods I don't get through the Sanford Ghetto Pharmacy, and noticed that my Ghetto Doctor at the Sanford Ghetto Clinic didn't give me any refills when he wrote the script. This is not a new med for me; I've been on the same dosage of this stuff for ten years. Luckily, my Greedy Bastard For-Profit Pharmacy has a way for me to talk to an actual human who offered to call my Ghetto Doctor and get some fracking refills.

And then people wonder why poors go nuts and set shit on fire.

School started this week which means every driver on the road instantly became stupid and blind at 7am Monday morning. There is a new school that just opened up along my bike route and I swear everyone is determined to christen the new blacktop with some little kid's guts. I seem to have turned completely invisible to the I've-got-the-Justice-League-on-my-cell douche-nozzles; I've been brushed by SUV mirrors twice in two days. That normally only happens once every week or so. I guess if you ignore something, it doesn't matter if you run it over with your Hummer.

The mainstream media seems absolutely determined to ignore Ron Paul in spite of a statistical tie for 1st place in the Iowa Corn-holer's Buy-A-Vote Jamboree, and in a solid second place (at least according to the latest numbers I could find in 30 seconds on Google) in the far more important fund-raising race. And yet the entire television news industry is trying to pretend he doesn't exist:

Nice work, MSM. Way to completely de-legitimize yourself. Again. (And don't worry if you get some message that ads won't load; just wait the 30-second time-out and the video will start. Someday, Hulu will figure out all this complicated internet stuff.)

The first PC I ever used turned 30 years old last week. IBM's 5150 was so heavy, it could anchor a building in a hurricane. The ones I used had dual 5 1/4 floppy drives that sounded like a blender trying to grind up a peach pit. Combined with the fan noise, they probably exceeded OSHA noise regulations. I know the dot matrix printers attached to them did. Ah the good ol'd days.

Opportunity made it to Endeavour Crater. This is a chance to sample some bits unlike any of the bits that have been sampled before. Let's hope the old girl can keep chugging along for a few more months. I never thought she would make it without getting stuck like Spirit, or having one or more wheels lock up for good.

By now, everyone has heard about Warren Buffett's little diatribe about how it isn't right that rich people like himself pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than his office staff does. My response to him is the same response I give to anyone who thinks they're not paying enough in taxes: Nothing is stopping you from paying more right now. The IRS will gladly accept any amount of extra money you would like to chip in without any need to involve Congress, the President or other US citizens who feel they are better at allocating their funds than the Imperial City. There is one point he makes that I agree with completely: Capital gains and all other investment income should be taxed at the taxpayer's marginal tax rate. Furthermore, the separate and highly-regressive Social Security/Medicare tax should be rolled into the regular income tax rates. None of which eliminates the need to make real cuts in spending, not just reductions in already-planned increases, but it's a start.

With all the yappy little dogs in the media, it's hard to get a feel for just what the London riots have been about. Simon Marcus works with what we in the US would call "at-risk kids" in the neighborhoods where the riots started:

A while ago two of my students said they were going to 'turn over' a large house in a wealthy area near them. I asked why? They said they had it tough, they wanted a new TV, and it was something to do.

...Outside our Tottenham branch, drug dealers operate openly as if they were selling fruit, while PCSOs hand out parking tickets a few hundred yards away. We used to sit in the café opposite their strip and watch them. They would get up late, usually after lunch and trade would begin. Sometimes you would be in a random café and one of the dealers would come in and hand over a wad of money to his mum behind the till.

...We are a strange lot, the human race. We learn in funny ways. Once you break a taboo it is gone, once you break a boundary it is gone, if you get away with something and you enjoy it, you do it again. When kids attack teachers, (and it happens thousands of times a year) being sent to the cooling off room is pretty much a reward, a fixed term exclusion often makes no odds either. If a social worker tells a teenage mum the word ‘no’ emotionally damages a child, a message goes out. If an adult admonishes a gang of children for littering and gets a police caution a message goes out. If a father is reported to the police for smacking a child a message goes out. If an adult is arrested for grabbing a child who is stealing, or assaulting another child, a message goes out. If knife criminals receive community sentences, a message goes out. If people tell you about your rights as a child, and never about your responsibilities, a message goes out. If teenage girls are given flats for having babies a message goes out. If the police arrest you fifty times and nothing happens a message goes out.

...In a political world obsessed with sending out messages we have sent out some bloody stupid ones in the last few decades, and haven't listened to the ones that have come back. But they have come back, whether in studies that show we have the most miserable children in the world or the anarchy of the last few days. Our fatherless, ghettoized children have told us: I have no love and no hope, so I can say what I like and do what I like. I know adults are scared of me and are scared of doing what is right. I am entitled to what I want, to take what is not mine and I will not be punished. If you defy me I will fall on you with an insane fury you cannot imagine or understand. The work is nearly complete; the British child as manufactured psychopath.

...Our strange, hybrid liberal establishment has placed us in this position. Some of them read ‘Lord of the Flies’ and thought it was a guide-book. We have set up a bureaucratic, unfair, unjust, target and equality driven centralizing system or ‘poverty industry’, that perpetuates itself, has no incentive to achieve its aims, bullies and [paralyzes] decent people trying to help and now allows anarchy to flourish.

...Our children are showing us all we need to know. We have betrayed them, they are in agony, the liberal experiment is over. We need a moral counter-revolution. Our children have told us and we were old enough to know better.

And from a slightly different perspective:

"A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers' money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute."

...Why do they need a Dutch hooker? Just another hardworking foreigner doing the jobs Britons won't do? Given the reputation of English womanhood, you'd have thought this would be the one gig that wouldn't have to be outsourced overseas.

While the British Treasury is busy writing checks to Amsterdam prostitutes, one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day's work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.

...Her Majesty's cowed and craven politically correct constabulary stand around with their riot shields and Robocop gear as young rioters lob concrete through store windows to steal the electronic toys which provide their only non-narcotic or alcoholic amusement.

...Yet a police force all but entirely useless when it comes to preventing crime or maintaining public order has time to police everything else. When Sam Brown observed en passant to a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, "Do you know your horse is gay?", he was surrounded within minutes by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed, tossed in the slammer overnight, and fined 80 pounds. Mr. Brown's "homophobic comments," explained a spokesmoron for Thames Valley Police, were "not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area." The zealous crackdown on Sam Brown's hippohomophobia has not been replicated in the present disturbances. Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the past two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid.

...This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: "Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity." The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: "For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population."

That last sentence leads nicely into what the mayor of Philadelphia has to say to his fellow blacks:

“Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer,” Mr. Nutter, the city’s third black mayor, said in an angry lecture aimed at black teens. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”

“If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ‘cause you look like you’re crazy,” the mayor said. “You have damaged your own race.”

No white person in the United States would ever dare say anything even close to that. Thank God we have people like the mayor and Bill Cosby to say what needs to be said.

Well, break time is over; back to taxes. I should be scheduling my test this week if all goes well.

Budget Cuts

2011-08-08T14:27:00.000-04:00

Excuse me while I lecture a bit on the so-called budget cuts.

First, no one is cutting anything. Not the Tea Party or the Republicans, and certainly not the Democrats or our illustrious president. No one. Is cutting. Anything.

Explaining that requires a bit of a digression. The first joke I ever learned was, "How can you tell a politician is lying? His lips are moving." Politicians lie. I don't mean they occasionally stretch the truth or omit an inconvenient fact. I mean they outright lie. All the time. Everything a politician says is a carefully crafted, focus-grouped lie. Every. Single. Word.

Most people reading this are smirking and nodding their heads in agreement. Allow me to wipe the smile from your face. Nearly every organization in this county has become political. Which means every word they say is also a carefully crafted, focus-grouped lie. Your union? Every word is a lie. AARP? Every word is a lie. The whole cadre of 24-hour news programs? Every word is a lie. Whatever non-profit group you pay dues to? Sorry. All lies. Every. Single. Word.

I know this sounds like tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory nonsense. But all you need to do is consider our political incentive structure. Whether we are talking about a member of Congress, a talking head on CNN, or an AARP newsletter, what happens when someone is caught lying? Nothing. There is zero down-side to lying. Telling the truth, however, is a guaranteed short drop and a sudden stop. (Metaphorically. At least here in the United States. At least for now.) What would the odds of re-election be for any member of Congress who stood up at a town hall meeting and told his constituents not to bother sending their children to college because they will never make back the money spent on a degree in an economy in permanent decline? How many seniors would continue to pay dues to AARP if their newsletter began advocating the roll-back of Medicare or means-testing Social Security benefits? How long do you think a UAW president would have his cushy unlimited-free-donuts-and-coffee job if he told his membership that none of them would ever make as much as their fathers and grandfathers, or that the once-in-human-history confluence of events after World War II that made pensions possible are gone, and with them any hope of working for 30 years, then being paid to sit on their asses for the next 40? So instead of stating the provable truth, they all run screaming in the other direction. No conspiracy necessary; lying is self-preservation. That careful selection of what they chose to lie about also increases their political clout is just frosting on the cake.

Lying takes many forms. Given the illiteracy, innumeracy and general ignorance of Americans, thanks to our world-class public education system, simply stating something as fact that is easily proven to be untrue works passably well. But a better way is to use familiar terminology to mean something, as in our present case, the exact opposite. If I say Debbie and I are cutting our budget for next year, you would assume that we meant for every dollar we spent in 2011, we would, on average, spend some fraction of a dollar in 2012. If our rent in 2011 is $625/month, you would be safe in assuming that we were figuring on doing whatever was necessary to pay some amount less than $625/month in 2012. That's what a budget cut means to the average person on the street. It's is the exact opposite of what a politician, whether elected or not, means when he uses the term. (Because I don't want to get carpel tunnel syndrome typing zeros, I'll stick with household-budget-scale numbers. Feel free to multiply by whatever power of ten suits you.) What they mean by budget cuts is that if the government is paying $625/month for X in 2011 with an already-planned increase to $650/month in 2012, reducing that increase to $645/month is a $5/month budget cut. Which is a lie.

Part of the resolution to the manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling was just this sort of "budget cutting". Congress is supposed to "cut" $2 trillion dollars over the next ten years from a ten-year budget that, under existing legislation, has already-planned increases of (very conservatively) $9.5 trillion built into it. This is budget cutting so severe that there will be the dead bodies of our elderly and poor piled in the streets. This is budget cutting so severe that the lefty talking heads and politicians are labeling its proponents "terrorists". This is the government "austerity" that is causing the stock market to crash and sending us into a double-dip recession.

But the lying doesn't stop there. Nothing happens until 2013, meaning all the "budget cuts" come after the 2012 game of musical chairs in Congress and the White House is over. Constitutionally, no session of Congress can require a future Congress to do anything, which is why we have one of these god-awful ten-year plans at least once a year. After the lying political talking heads on CNN and Fox News whip everyone up into a lather over these "draconian cuts", whoever ends up in the Imperial City after the 2012 elections will kick this budget deal to the curb faster than a bucket of week-old dirty diapers, and the United States debt will continue its asymptotic climb. At least until the Chinese, Germans, Swiss, et al. cut us off like so many trust fund babies who just crashed their fifth Ferrari. Then we will see what real budget cuts and austerity measures look like.

End lecture.

More Dogs

2011-08-06T14:30:00.001-04:00

Gus wants his swimming pool inside the house:

Which makes perfect sense to me. Why would anyone want to be out in full sun when a nice, cool, shady, house is sitting right there?

Debbie's cranking out cruises like crazy. More people have quit/got fired while the business keeps pouring in. At every other place she's worked, this time of year is dead, but this place seems to work by different rules. Which is good, considering the alternative. I'm still neck-deep in tax code; at some point next week, I should be ready to sign up for the first test.

And I'm still doing the bicycle thing, running the same 10.4-mile route in gradually shorter times. I managed to keep my average speed above 12mph for the last two weeks except one day that I fell below that. In my defense, the humidity was so high, I had problems seeing because my glasses kept fogging over even though the temperature was over 80 degrees. I'll probably stick with my current route until August is over and the temps and humidity start to back off a bit, then switch my focus from increasing my average speed to increasing distance while maintaining average speed. I'd like to be doing 15 miles in an hour or less by the end of the year. I'd also like to win the lottery. We'll see which of those happen in the next five months.

Standard and Poor's followed through on its threats and down-graded US debt. I'm sort of on the fence on this. It's certainly true that the US, like many of the recipients of liar loans during the housing bubble, has neither the ability nor intention of ever repaying its debt. (Or repaying it in currency so debased that it may as well default.) On the other hand, this smells political. S&P, along with other ratings agencies, have been taking a beating from politicians for slapping AAA on complete junk during the last bubble, making this seem like petty revenge rather than a carefully considered decision. Lending support to the political angle is the countries that S&P still considers AAA, like Britain and France, whose economic and political situations are even more buggered than ours is. After last week's drop in stock markets all over the world, it will be interesting to see what next week will bring. We can hope that having a couple days to mull this over will mute the reaction somewhat. We can hope.

Meanwhile, it looks like a few people are finding paying jobs, even though manufacturing is slowing and consumer spending is down. It's pretty simple: we spent more than we made at every level from households to the federal government, for decades. It will likely take just as long to work out the consequences of all those accumulated bad decisions, both large and small. Part of that will be a deep restructuring of our economy that is currently based on borrowing money from the Chinese to buy useless crap from Vietnam. You cannot solve a debt problem by going further into debt; you have to fundamentally change how things are done. Until that restructuring happens, we will continue tumbling down the staircase like ol' Aunt Bessy after she's had a few too many at the family New Years Eve party.

The Post Office is threatening to default on money it owes to the federal government. I know that many people who use the internet think that the USPS needs to just dry up and blow away. I mean, we have this cool internet thing that we can use to send all those letters and cards that we used to send by snail mail, so who would miss it, other than the banks, who send us no fewer than a dozen credit card applications a week, and other junk mail purveyors? My opinion is that of all the stuff the federal government does with my money, the postal service is one of the few that it is constitutionally required to do. (Which is why I'm not clear on why the USPS is being treated as if it were separate from the rest of the federal government in the first place, and how the federal government can default on a payment to the federal government in the second.) Sure it can use a major overhaul, but how does that make it any different from the Parks Service or any other part of the federal government? And then we have the question of just how long will our shiny new internet toy will be around. The postal service was seen by our nation's founders as an essential part of keeping the republic intact. If we give that up in favor of some high-tech toy that proves to be unsustainable, what then?

Oh, and Fanny Mae needs another $5.1 billion. Obama needs to ring up the Chinese. Or not.

For anyone wondering what a sustained economic contraction looks like, we have a couple examples. The first is life in Greece. The riots may have abated for now, but that doesn't mean everything is fixed. A second example is Detroit. Unlike the rest of the country, Detroit (and its mini me, Flint) never fully recovered from the late-1970's and early-1980's recession(s). For anyone bothering to pay attention, they are showing us our future.

One way for the federal government to save money:

Which would also be a way for it to save American lives.

Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee put up the first ever web page. Contrary to popular belief, the internet existed before the web; they are not one-and-the-same. But Berners-Lee laid the groundwork that made the internet "useful" (to the extent that things like Facebook and this blog can be considered useful). Unfortunately, the web has had some undesirable side effects:

Way too many people in that last category, which is bad enough, but nothing compared to your neighbors being able to disable your alarm system through the power lines (which is one reason why the best home security system is still a good deadbolt and a chihuahua), or even shutting the power off completely with 14 bytes of code.

In health-related news, anti-oxidants don't actually work as advertised and may cause harm. Not that such a minor quibble means much when we seem bent on bringing back whooping cough. We have also had yet-another reminder that raw ground meat must be cooked before being eaten. It doesn't matter what kind of meat it is. All ground meat must be thoroughly cooked before being consumed. I do love the solution being pushed by the author: more authority given to the federal government. Or people could, ya know, just use some common sense and take a bit of personal responsibility. Ha! Just kidding. More federal government on the way!

And that little thing that happened over in Japan earlier this year? Something about an earthquake and a lot of water where it wasn't supposed to be and something about a nuclear reactor? Still a problem. Nothing earth-shaking (heh) like the incoherent ramblings of brainless sluts, but still somewhat important.

Another flash-mob robbery; this time a Victoria's Secret. First beer and chips, now lacy undies. Next up: Jewelery store? Bank? Maybe the whole ubiquitous cell phone thing wasn't such a great idea after all.

Add dolphins to the growing list of tool-using animals:

It was in 1984 that researchers first observed the dolphins fitting basket sponges over their beaks, then scraping through seafloor mud to disturb hidden fish. Research subsequently showed this behavior to be full-blown tool use, taught by mothers to their daughters and representing a profound difference in lifestyle between them and Shark Bay’s other bottlenoses.

Yes, but have they invented collateralized debt obligations? Didn't think so. Humans still Rock!!

We also have the possibility of liquid water on Mars. Not at some distant time in the past, but now. Today. That certainly raises some intriguing questions. Maybe we can get some answers before NASA is completely de-funded.

I haven't posted much lately about the whole global warming/climate change/climate weirding debate because for a long time, it was just more of the same: the original data is suspect, the data is intentionally being manipulated by those with political agendas or economic interest in creating warming, the models don't work, the IPCC is a political organization rather than a scientific one, the consensus is not nearly as complete as we are lead to believe, blah, blah, blah. So up pops this article with the typical inflammatory title we've come to expect from our "news" organizations. The article itself doesn't live up to the hype, as expected, but instead reveals yet-another real-world data point that indicates we don't really understand how energy flows through the system and that the models are once again shown to be inadequate because we really don't understand how energy flows through the system. The response from the IPCC politicians was also predictable, complaining about a paper being published that shows real-world data in disagreement with their precious climate models. What's troubling is that the paper in question points the way to more-accurate models. While the map is never the territory, it would be nice to have climate models that can at least land in reality's general neighborhood.

Oh, speaking of maps and territories, Tropical Storm Emily was a complete bust. It stalled well south of Florida on Thursday, then fell apart sometime early Friday. We are closing in on our first anniversary of living in Florida without having any major cyclonic activity anywhere in the state. It will happen sooner or later; I'm just hoping we get something small as a warm-up before a big one comes grinding in. But for now, all is quiet in the Atlantic.

Well, off to do a bit of running around, then spending the rest of the day cleaning up the apartment and rearranging our stuff.

Dog Days

2011-08-02T10:05:00.001-04:00

We finally made it to the beach on the Atlantic side of Florida after living a mere 45 minute drive from it for nearly a year. We of course got broiled to well-done; either our sunscreen is too old, or it isn't water-proof, but in any case we are both sporting some rather unusual pink and red blotches right now. The beach was nice; a county park on the Ponce de Leon inlet with access to the ocean and the inlet all within a couple minutes walk of the parking area. There are bathrooms, a place to hose off the salt water, several small pavilions with grills, boardwalks, etc. Clean, well-maintained and best of all, not all that crowded. We got there early and nearly had the place to ourselves for the first few hours, but even when the parking lot filled up, the beaches were never the shoulder-to-shoulder crowded like some of the more well-known beaches. It's only five bucks for a day pass or we can get an annual pass if we find we're going over there frequently. As usual, we have photos, but they are still on the camera. They may migrate to our Flickr page at some point, but I don't know when I'll have the time to do it.

The main beach on the ocean side didn't allow dogs, but the smaller beach on the inlet side did. Naturally that's where we spent most of our time so we could play with other people's dogs. The people next to us had a young boxer and some sort of puppy. (It was still a fuzzy, yellow butterball; too young to look like any kind of breed yet, but may have been a golden retriever given how well it did in the water.) The next group of people down the beach had an older dog that looked like a blond lab gone nearly white. He came over to play with the other two in the water. People and dogs all got tired and came back on shore and flopped out for a nap. The puppy got bored with all the laying around and found an empty water bottle that made a really cool sound when he chewed it. The boxer decided he wanted to play with it, took it away from the puppy, and held it just out of reach while crunching it in his mouth. Those of you with children know exactly what was going on. The lab came over to intervene on behalf of the puppy and the boxer took off down the beach with the water bottle looking over his shoulder with the classic "Nya nya! You can't catch me!" expression. The lab stood watching him for a second, then casually strolled over to the open cooler that had the boxer's water in it, unloaded about a gallon of piss right into the cooler, then sauntered back over to his people and laid down. We nearly died laughing.

After a weekend of fun-in-the-sun, it's back to the grind with Debbie selling cruises and me plowing through the tax code. If I can keep on task (rather than spending time doing stuff like this), I should be ready for part one of the test by the end of the week. Then I get to do it all over again. And again. I'm planning to have this all wrapped up by the end of October.

Meanwhile, our Congress has taken another giant step towards turning the US into one of the PIIGS. Not that the debt ceiling means, or has ever meant, anything. The original idea was it would prevent Congress from doing exactly what it has done for the last four decades; spend like a drunken sailor with someone else's American Express Black Card. But constitutionally, no session of Congress can impose anything on a future session of Congress, so the whole thing was a majestic fraud from day one, just like Social Security. At least with this particular bit of Kabuki theater out of the way, our "leaders" can get on with the next act where they pretend that lowering the annual increase in federal spending from 8% to 6% is somehow cutting the budget. I, like millions of other Americans, can only dream of struggling with those kinds of "cuts" in our family budgets. And yet we keep sending in the clowns. (Or would that be kuroko?)

Of more immediate interest to us is our newest friend, Emily. She doesn't look to be anything more than a tropical storm and is expected to stay off-shore, but we could get some substantial rain over the weekend if the forecast holds up. Whoo hoo! Our first tropical storm!

And I need to get to work. First topic for today: Sale of principal residence.

Taxes, Taxes and More Taxes

2011-07-24T10:21:00.000-04:00

I've been spending most of my time over the last week learning more than I ever wanted to know about the tax treatment of the gain on the sale of Section 1244 stock acquired through a like-kind exchange with your brother. The IRS is kind of like Apple: Yea, there's a law for that. I'm giving myself another couple weeks to get ready, then I'll take a crack at the first of three tests I need to pass to be an enrolled agent. We'll see how that goes.

Other than that, about all I've been doing is my morning bicycle ride and a bit of light reading when my brain turns to mush from too much tax code. I'm still riding my same 10.4 mile loop and seem to have finally broke through my 12mph barrier; I managed 12.1mph average speed Friday and Saturday. I'm taking today off, so tomorrow we'll see if this is real or if I fall back into the 11's.

The light reading has been a re-reading of John Michael Greer's The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future before reading his third in the series, The Wealth of Nature. All three are fairly quick reads at about 250 pages each. The Wealth of Nature gets into a bit of economics, but nothing as heavy as a typical Econ 101 text book and great deal more logical. If you care at all about your grandchildren, read these.

Like Debbie posted, we were originally planning on heading down to Disney on her day off, but we didn't get up and around until after 10am. The weather liars said is was going to start storming around 2pm, we really really needed to do some grocery shopping, and it was supposed to be in the mid-90's, so we decided to skip it this time. Of course, the rain was a no-show, but at least we now have something more for food in the house than Ramen, Cap'n Crunch and Klondike bars.

Nothing special today other than my usual stint at the library shelving books. I've started another purge, so I have a couple bags of books to donate while I'm there. I'm trying to get rid of our 5-foot-by-7-foot bookcase that takes up half the office as part of the on-going Shrink-the-Crap-Pile project. We've been working on this for five years now. We're slowly making progress, although more Crap appears every time we turn our backs. I swear it breeds in the corners when we're not looking. Moving a lot certainly helps with motivation; it's easier to sell/donate/dumpster than it is to pack/haul/unpack.

The big news of the week is the terror attacks in Norway. Bombing government offices is bad, but hardly anything new. What makes this incident truly horrifying is the second attack at a youth camp; nothing more than the pointless slaughter of a bunch of kids at summer camp. They have the guy and he supposedly has some diatribe he wants to deliver through his attorney. I expect it to have the usual anti-government ranting, but I'm morbidly curious to see what twisted logic makes shooting a bunch of kids at camp "atrocious" but "necessary".

The Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed without incident. There's a lot of people both inside and outside of NASA that keep trying to put a happy face on this. I'm not one of them. The United States will never again launch another manned vessel into space. From walking on the moon to bumming rides into low earth orbit from our former mortal enemies in my lifetime. I'd have never believed it. At least our little remote control car is still chugging along on Mars. It's getting a little glitchy, but it continues to trundle along towards Endeavour crater.

One of the problems of "progress" is that at times it doesn't feel that way. Scott Adams has a short bit on cell phones. I have to say, the more I hear about smart phones, the more I'm glad I still have my $30, four-year-old flip phone that I can't make phone calls with instead of blowing several hundred bucks on something I can use to run an app that makes fart sounds but still can't make phone calls with.

Speaking of progress, here is a good TED Talk on the fight against computer viruses and how it has changed since the days of the Centipede virus. The discussion of the implications of Stuxnet is a bit... um... terrifying?

Most everyone believes we are screwed. There are still one or two optimists left, but the current stupidity in the Imperial City is steadily eroding their ranks. What is being debated is who we should point the finger at: Democrats? Republicans? Bush? Obama? Osama? Banks? Hedge funds? That dude staring at me from my mirror every morning? (Note that piece was written in 1936.) Nah. Can't be that. Must have something to do with the Mayan calendar.

Poverty ain't what is used to be:

Each year for the past two decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty.” In recent years, the Census has reported that one in seven Americans are poor. But what does it mean to be “poor” in America? How poor are America’s poor?

...if poverty means lacking nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, relatively few of the more than 30 million people identified as being “in poverty” by the Census Bureau could be characterized as poor. While material hardship definitely exists in the United States, it is restricted in scope and severity. The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines.

...In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

...the typical poor American had more living space than the average European.

...Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill....

Real poverty certainly exists; for being the wealthiest nation in human history, the number of people living under bridges and in cardboard boxes ought to be a source of deep shame (not that Americans even know what that word means). But if I see one more "poor" person bitching into her iPhone about how unfair it is that the school is only giving her brat free breakfast and lunch and not free dinner as well, someone's gonna get hurt.

Bob Seger is going to be in Florida in November. Unfortunately, he is part of one of those two-day Lollapalooza-type things along with several dozen other bands playing on four separate stages. Just going for the one day that Seger is supposed to be playing is $80 a person, plus having to hang around for 12 hours just to get to hear him play for maybe and hour at the most. We're not jumping all over the tickets just yet. We have no idea what will be happening next week not alone in four months, so I'm not anxious to blow $160 on something we may not even be able to go to.

Well, I need to get ready to go shelve some books.

Sleepless again

2011-07-21T01:24:00.002-04:00

Wow, what a hectic week and a half at work. Good for cabin counts, bad for my sanity.

I feel exhausted, but can't seem to sleep. I got up and did some quotes for work from home and checked my emails. We stayed up til almost midnite watching stuff on Hulu since I didn't get home until after 9p tonite and was trying to wind down.

Tomorrow we have a few errands to do in the morning and then we are running down to Disney World to be care free and worry free for part of a day.

Barriers

2011-07-15T15:08:00.000-04:00

I seem to have hit some sort of wall with the whole bike riding thing. All week I've been trying to break through an average speed of 12mph and cannot seem to get past it. I suspect it's one of those pesky physics things that have to do with air resistance, or at least that's what I keep telling myself. It can't possibly have anything to do with the extra 40 pounds around my still-rather-squishy center. (I've been called many things in my life; aerodynamic has never been one of them.) Or that I'm not 15 years old anymore like I was when I rode my bike 30 miles round trip to and from summer soccer practice five days a week. Nah. It's physics. Yea. That's it.

Not much else going on other than me trying to get the whole Tax Geek thing going and Debbie working. That's mainly due to summer weather in Florida. The 10-day forecast never changes; high in the 90's, humidity at 100%, scattered thunderstorms from 3-7pm. Every. Single. Day. We are currently planning to venture out somewhere on Debbie's day off next week. We'll see if we actually do it, or if we chicken out and stay in for a Sliders marathon. The stereotypical lethargy of southerners isn't a character flaw; it's a survival mechanism.

A woman rams the vehicle of someone she thinks is Casey Anthony causing her vehicle to roll over twice. Looking at the photos of the victim and Casey Anthony, I can't see any resemblance other than they are both white females with dark hair. And the attack happened in Oklahoma which, unless they moved it recently, is a fair distance from Florida. The police suspect drugs may have been involved. May?

Do you ever feel like the people who run things are completely out of touch with reality?

According to the Times' "cold hard math," this [living on $500,000 per year] is virtually untenable given expenses that include $32,000-a-kid private school bills, $96,000-a-year mortgages, $96,000-a-year co-op maintenance fees, $45,000-a-year nanny tabs and, of course, the undebatable requirement that very rich people take "at least two vacations a year, a winter trip to the sun and a spring trip to the ski slopes." And mind you, the Times was quick to inform us, this doesn't even include other "prerequisites" to living in New York City like "restaurants, dry cleaning... kennels for the dog when the family is away, summer camp, spas and other grooming" and $1,000 suits from Brooks Brothers.

Median household income in New York City is $38,000. I'm pretty sure their idea of necessary expenses doesn't include private schools, nannies, or Aspen ski trips. No fracking clue.

Ten reasons why we are already circling the drain of the next financial crisis. I can't think of anything to add.

Geithner says that the hard times will continue for many. Not for him, of course, or any of his buddies at Goldman Sachs. Just us little people. Thanks for the sentiment Timmy, but it don't buy my increasingly-expensive groceries.

Minnesota is still shut down. The world hasn't ended and I don't see mushroom clouds or dead bodies stacked like cord wood in the streets of St. Paul. Which tells me Minnesota could probably get by on a lot less government. That's likely true of other states as well in spite of the breathless articles about cuts to the number of state employees that reduces the number of jobs back to those horrifying times in the early 2000's. Because government must always expand. Budgets, laws, taxes and debt are all one-way ratchets that can only be increased. Suggesting otherwise makes you Hitler.

Well, I need to go study for the Enrolled Agent exam. I received the materials Wednesday and started working through the stuff for the first of the three tests. It's supposed to take 100 or so hours of study for each test, and I only have about 8 in so far. Don't expect much from me for the next few months.

Awesome

2011-07-10T22:08:00.000-04:00

I'm not at all into skiing mainly because it involves snow, but this is just wicked. You'll want to watch this one full screen with the volume on max:

The End

2011-07-09T22:50:00.000-04:00

For the first time since Alan Shepard flew the Mercury Freedom 7 capsule into orbit on May 5, 1961, the United States has no manned space launch capability. I watched the last shuttle launch yesterday live on NASA TV, and it just seemed surreal to think that I may be watching the last human to ever go into space from American soil. I realize there are plans for shuttle replacements, but none can fly people today and several still only exist on paper. Now Congress is aiming its budget ax directly at NASA. As much as I hated the shuttle (a motor home with a dump truck welded to the back end) and as little use as I have for NASA's wasteful bureaucratic approach to space, I fear that without those things our space ambitions will be reduced to sending out probes and running RC cars around on Mars and maybe the Moon. From there it's a short hop down to no NASA at all. The Peak Oil folks will shrug and say that it's inevitable, but I never expected to see it happen in my lifetime.

I'm still putting a lot of miles on my bicycle. I've stuck with my 10.4 mile route and trying to up the pace. In a week, I've managed to add one mile-per-hour to my average speed (hit 11.6mph average speed this morning), and two and a half to my max speed (17.9mph). The problem is that nearly all the gains were over the first three days, then I seem to have hit a wall. Part of the problem is the weather. Not only is it 80 degrees when I head out, the humidity has been a killer. Wednesday was the worst; I came in looking like Tony and Leo after six hours of non-stop polka dancing. The last couple days have been better, but it still feels like I'm riding at the bottom of a swimming pool.

As Debbie mentioned in her last post, we hadn't experienced nearly enough narcissism and sociopathology in our day-to-day lives, so we went to the Magic Kingdom on the Sunday before July 4th. The fireworks were good. Not much else was. We had planned to head to the waterfront in downtown Sanford for fireworks on Monday, but we just couldn't convince ourselves it was a good idea. We were able to see most of the fireworks from our parking lot with the added bonus of watching all the amateurs try to set the apartment buildings on fire. Good times!

I have intentionally avoided talking about the Casey Anthony trial because a) I wasn't all that interested in it and b) I figured most people reading this were not from Florida and would likely be even less interested. I'm only bringing up now after the verdict to say that, as I suspected from what little news of the trial that was forced into my eyeballs while trying to watch something else, this was OJ Lite with an incompetent defense team that won merely because the prosecution team was even more incompetent. As a result, a woman who at the minimum was criminally negligent in caring for her child and who likely killed her, walks away with time served plus one week. If this is the best that can be done in a high-profile, money-is-no-object show trial, imagine how piss-poor the routine level of courtroom activity is.

Richard Dawkins has stuck his foot into it big-time. I'm not surprised. Dawkins is a schoolyard bully who beats up on whoever he thinks his audience will enjoy watching him beat on (verbally, of course; physically, Dawkins couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag). This time he simply misjudged his audience. Maybe those who have supported him in the past will finally see him for what he is.

Since the 1970's, the middle class has been going backwards in terms of real wealth. That reality has been papered over with debt for the last thirty years, but now the party is over. There is no quick fix for where we are; most people will have to get used to having less for at least a couple generations.

The talking heads are all in a tizzy because the June jobs numbers sucked dead bunnies when all their spreadsheets told them otherwise. This is one of those cases where the only people surprised are the reality-challenged who live in the bubble that most economists reside in.

The Atlanta public schools have been cheating on student tests. If anyone believes that Atlanta is alone in this, let me know; I have a Rolex I'll sell to you for five bucks. If anyone bothered to look, I'm certain that nearly every school district in the country would have some measure of administration-organized test fraud going on.

It's pretty well accepted fact that the stimulus bill did no lasting good for the American economy. Now even Obama's own people are saying so.

Well, it's getting late so I'll just stop there.

Happy 4th of July

2011-07-04T13:04:00.004-04:00

Hope everyone is enjoying the long holiday weekend.

We couldn't find much online down here about any happenings like parades and such. Maybe they don't do parades around here. Oh well. We did hit Magic Kingdom last nite after Ric got done at the library and got to see the special fireworks display for the 4th of July. Awesome -- even being behind the castle -- they were great. Tonite we hope to catch the Sanford fireworks. We'll venture out later today to scope things out and try to figure out where things are happening at around here. Ric found something else online that said it was from 5-10p. This is all I found online about it: A July 4th family-oriented extravaganza full of live entertainment, games, family activities and concessions, the Festival on the Fourth culminates with one of the largest fireworks shows in Central Florida. The festivities take place along the city’s brand-new RiverWalk overlooking Lake Monroe in historic downtown Sanford.

After seeing the fireworks for the Cherry Festival in Traverse City so many times, I compare all others to that. So, it will be interesting to see "one of the largest fireworks shows in Central FL" and compare it to Cherry Festival's and DisneyWorld's.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in this great country!

Another Tax Geek Post

2011-07-03T11:27:00.000-04:00

Part III of the New-and-Improved federal income tax is posted over at the Tax Geek.

OMG

2011-07-02T09:18:00.002-04:00

I made it in one piece -- shaky and sweaty -- but I made it.

I went out with Ric this morning on a bike ride. I didn't do his whole trip (10.6miles), but I did do about 6 miles. This is the first time I've gone that far in one trip, and the first time on my bike since hmmm.. April? or so. Not too bad. Also after I got back, Ric checked my tires since I said it felt squishy. My back tire had about 5 lbs of air in it. No wonder it felt sluggish! I told him I get extra bonus points for riding with a low pressured tire.

Luckily today was not too hot or humid out yet. We've had a line of thunderstorms and torrential downpours almost every day this week. It's funny to look at the 10day forecast and see T showers every single day for 10days. Oh well....it is hurricane season!

Rain, Rain...

2011-07-01T22:44:00.000-04:00

The dry spell in Florida is officially over. It's been raining mostly non-stop for the last three days. I picked a good week to be bike-less. Speaking of which, I no longer am. Bike-less, that is. During a brief respite in the rain, I stopped by the bike shop and picked up my now-noiseless bike. While it was there, I had them install a taller riser for the handlebars. HUGE difference!! Way more comfy and better for seeing down the road now that I'm not all hunched over. While they had everything in pieces, I had them stick one of those cool little doohickeys on it that tracks miles, speed, time, etc. so I can keep better tabs on how far I'm riding and what kind of pace I'm setting. I also looked at luggage racks, which are way cheaper than I thought they were going to be, but I'd already dropped a C-note and a half, so I didn't pursue it beyond a bit of tire-kicking. Maybe I'll blow my Christmas money on that stuff.

We were planning on a possible Disney trip over the weekend, but it looks like at least Saturday is going to still be rain. I hope to catch a break in the morning so I can at least get in a couple rides this weekend to make up for the week of couch-sitting. Between the Michigan trip and a broken bike, I probably only rode ten days in all of June. Gotta do way better than that.

Taibbi on Bachmann and the attention she's been getting in the press:

This to me reflects a few things, but most notably it shows the fascination that the mainstream media (including jerks like me, of course) has with Bachmann. Which is theoretically meaningless, except that voters pick up cues from reporters. If the national press treats Bachmann like the alpha dog in the Republican pack, voters will catch on to that. Subconsciously, she begins to be thought of as a frontrunner. I think all this attention actually enhances her credibility, unfortunately.

We've been here before; Democrat in the White House looking rather vulnerable but who wins re-election by a wide margin because the Republican candidate was chosen from the Seven Political Dwarves. So what's it going to be, GOP? 1980 or 1996? You need to decide fast, because right now it's lookin' a lot like 1996.

The job market is so good that 55-year-olds are sucking up (mostly-unpaid) internships that are traditionally taken by college students and recent graduates. This is going well. And note that even mainstream publications now readily admit that unemployment is over 15%, not the government's official rate of 9.1%.

Public-sector unionized workers view the rest of the population as a resource to be mined for high pay, extravagant benefits and a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted pension for life after working for 1/5 their expected lifespan. The rest of the population is less than enthusiastic about the role they are supposed to play. As the decline in real household incomes continues, the situation will only become more insupportable than it already is. We should all hope that what's happening in Minnesota is an aberration rather than a fiscal Lexington and Concord. What we desperately need right now is for everyone, public-sector employees, their unions and politicians, to act like adults for once in their lives. I know that's asking a lot. But try.

Lore Sjöberg's Alt Text column at Wired.com is usually humorous, but not this week:

Google+ might hit the big time by surfing the wave of Facebook resentment while eluding dead rats and discarded styrofoam cups. If so, its time will eventually come to an end as people realize that it, too, fails to provide the sense of community and closeness that we keep expecting to find on the other side of our keyboards.

Is the solution to somehow recapture the personal ties of years long past, when we knew our neighbors and the front porch was the main locus of information exchange? Will we create true community by embracing our humanity rather than our technology?

Nah. As soon as they invent a sexbot that can pretend to care about how many plots of tomatoes we planted in FarmVille, we won’t need other people anymore.

We have become seriously pathetic.

Debbie should be calling soon for me to come pick her up from work, so I need to wrap this up. Later.

Hackers Erase Orlando

2011-06-28T16:58:00.001-04:00

Anonymous declared war on the city of Orlando, promising to remove the city's web site from the internet today from 10am to 6pm. I just tried to go to the site and it looks like they've manage to slow the site to inutility, although with some patience, it does sort of come up. Of course the rest of the internet feels like someone poured glue into the tubes, but it has felt that way for several weeks. It's intermittent and hasn't seriously effected us above the level of minor annoyance. And then I remember what it was like on a dial-up connection and stop being annoyed.

Of more concern is that the power companies will stop regulating the frequency of the electricity they deliver. So when stuff plugged into the wall stops working or dies prematurely, be sure to thank the power company for running an uncontrolled experiment at your expense. But I'm sure their stock will go up.

There is a commercial running on TV that just cracks me up. The basic message is that America doesn't have to worry about oil because of all that tar sand up in Alberta, which as everyone knows is part of the 51st state of The United States, although it looks like the locals didn't get the memo:

William Cohen, who was secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, said any Chinese-Canadian oil partnership must be done "with some diplomacy and care," in a way that isn't "a threat to the United States."

Canada can do whatever it wants, but "Canada knows it has a very close and vital relationship with the United States. I'm sure there will be discussions," he said in Toronto after a public debate about whether China will dominate the 21st century.

Eddie Goldenberg, chief of staff to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said in an interview that Canada should care less if some American officials are leery about Canada selling oil to China.

"We're not the 51st state. It's not the business of the United States to decide where Canada sells its resources," he said.

So we have a former member of the US military establishment making thinly-veiled threats, and a member of the Canadian government telling him to fold it until it's all points and shove it on a slant. All of which ignores the bigger questions of net energy and environmental damage from trying to wring heavy, sour crude oil out of naturally-occurring asphalt.

I have other things I'm supposed to be doing, but I can't get my brain in gear. I've been bike-less since my Friday morning ride. I had some annoying noises that, as it turns out, were fairly minor to fix but will require a week-long wait for parts. I should have my bike back by Friday at the latest, but not being able to ride has put me in a bit of a funk. So instead of doing all the stuff that I need to get done, I'm posting random stuff on the internet.

Coming to a taco stand near you: lab grown meat. The take-away quotes:

Even if the initial results do not taste quite the same as proper meat, scientists are convinced the public will soon get used to it, especially if they do not have a choice.

A colleague of Professor Post said: ‘When we are eating a hamburger we don’t think, “I’m eating a dead cow”. And when people are already far from what they eat, it’s not too hard to see them accepting cultured meat.’

(Emphasis mine) So it's OK that it tastes like crap (and is likely a nutritional nightmare) because you won't have a choice and nobody really knows what they're shoving in their pie hole anyway.

State taxes will have to be raised $1,400 per household per year for the next 30 years to pay out government pensions. Given that most households don't gross $42,000/year not alone have that much in disposable income, I'm not real sure where this money is supposed to come from. Growth, I suppose. Now if we only had some....

Another flash mob hit a Walgreens on Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Again, it was only petty theft (drinks and sandwiches) against a pretty insignificant target, which means either Chicago is lucky these people have no imagination, or these are training sessions. Note out of a mob of 50, police managed to grab three. I grew up with a lot of people that would take those odds even if all they got was a hoagie and a Coke. How long before they grab some oxycotine?

Matt Taibbi on Michele Bachmann. Maybe we won't. Maybe. But then there is that whole history thing.

James Kunstler on cities. It's a bit long, but worth the effort. Maybe we'll smarten up and avoid the worst of what is likely to be coming our way over the next couple centuries, but given that we can't plan further ahead than the next paycheck (and that's being generous), I wouldn't bet on it.

Another list of essays from James Altucher. I've probably linked to some of these before, but it can't hurt to hit them again.

How to Deal with Crappy People
The Crappy FAQ: All Questions Answered about Crappy People
10 Things You Need to Do if You Were FIRED Yesterday
Suicide, and 13 Other Ways to Deal with Failure
How to be THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE PLANET in 4 Easy Steps

OK, I really got to get something done today other than blogging.

Quickly...

2011-06-25T23:13:00.000-04:00

...before I fall asleep at the keyboard: New post over at The Tax Geek. Enjoy!!

Black Hole

2011-06-24T09:37:00.000-04:00

Posted Without Comment

2011-06-23T11:29:00.000-04:00

Physics Lesson

2011-06-21T17:17:00.000-04:00

Took my first fall this morning. No damage to me or (more importantly) my bike other than fine-grit sand everywhere. The northwest portion of Michigan's lower peninsula is infamous for its talcum-powder sand that can swallow an entire bicycle and rider whole without even a belch. This morning I discovered they have that stuff down here, too. My first mistake was a wrong turn down a dead-end while trying to enlarge my route a tad. The second was leaving the blacktop while setting up for a quick U-turn. The bicycle stopped dead and I... well.... Let's just say that while airborne, I heard my high school physics teacher's voice in my head: "A body in motion tends to stay in motion until it meets an opposing force." Like the ground.

Anyway. The only casualty was my dignity. We'll see how I feel in the morning, but so far no bruises or twinges.

Speaking of being outside, today is the summer solstice. Our low temperature at six o'clock this morning was 79 degrees. Yea, it's summer all right. In Florida, dripping with sweat is not metaphorical.

Here's a question: when I was a kid and the phone book was the only way to find someone, we got one phone book every two years. We've lived here for less than a year and I just tripped over the fifth phone book we've had dropped on our doorstep. I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't cracked a phone book in a decade. When our congresscritters are so concerned with the environment that they make incandescent light bulbs illegal, why is someone (or someones) dropping a forest of flat dead trees on my doorstep every couple months that I never asked for and have no need for? If Al Gore would like something useful to work on, have him give me a call.

Flash mobs are discovered by the criminal class. I'm sure this will end well:

The same technologies that for years have brought together the mostly benign and goofy "flash mobs," in which groups suddenly break into dance at a mall or stumble around like zombies at train stations, is being used to plan and execute bold robberies.

I don't know that "bold" is the correct adjective to describe a bunch of kids mobbing a party store to steal chips and beer. Maybe when a flash mob robs Tiffany's or Saks. Or a bank.

The Misery Index (inflation added to unemployment) is back up where it was when I was a college freshman 28 years ago. But the stock market is up!

It's not just children who believe in Santa Claus:

A restructuring of Greece's 340 billion euro ($481.5 billion) debt is not on the agenda and would damage the country's credibility on bond markets, the European Union's internal markets commissioner said on Saturday.

So no restructuring or write-down on a debt that can never be repaid. OK. Hope Santa has a big frackin' bag of Euros to stuff down someone's chimney.

I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that making up your data is frowned upon. Oh wait! Not when you're a climate scientist. My bad.

Opportunity has passed 19 miles and is a bit under two miles from Endeavour crater. It should get there later this year. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that it has something left once it arrives. It would suck if it got there so broken down it can only snap a few pictures.

A man self-immolated in our old stomping grounds up in Keene, New Hampshire. Yet another man persecuted beyond his endurance by our government. I trust everyone understands that when the pendulum swings back, it will be beyond ugly.

Parenting advice from Cracked magazine:

7 Things 'Good Parents' Do (That Screw Up Kids for Life)
5 Horrific Ways Bad Parents Turn Their Kids into Good Money
5 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Make Kids Smarter

None of which are safe for work unless your employer isn't a prude about the Seven Dirty Words. Funny thing is, the advice is a good deal less goofy than most of what one finds in "serious" parenting magazines.

And that should do it for the day. Off to make some dinner; baked beans and kielbasa with added brown sugar and barbeque sauce, all bubbling away in the slow cooker for a couple hours. Mmmmm!

Clarence Clemons, RIP

2011-06-19T11:14:00.000-04:00

The Big Man is dead at 69.

Hangin' In There

2011-06-18T16:41:00.000-04:00

If the humidity gets any higher, we're going to need scuba gear to go outside. A line of storms blew through last night, so I expected my ride this morning to be a bit dryer. Silly me; if anything, the rain made it worse. I had to hang my t-shirt over the shower rod because it was actually dripping sweat. Because of the weather and missing a full week of riding, I didn't add anything to my route this week. I'll start adding small chunks next week, but I'm running out of grid, so I won't be able to add much more. It will take me a while to get my speed up to where I want it, so there's no problem for most of the rest of the summer. After that...???

There is finally some real content at The Tax Geek. If you enjoy geeky posts about taxes, you should like it. I'm hoping to get on some sort of regular posting schedule, but no guarantees.

Just a few quickies from the news as I really need to get the dishes done before Debbie comes home:

Homeowners turn the tables and show up with moving trucks to "foreclose" a bank for refusing to pay court-ordered restitution to the homeowners. The bank had attempted to foreclose the homeowners even though they had paid cash for the house, then refused to admit they had screwed up forcing the homeowners to spend 18 months in court. Do I need to say that this is in Florida?

A short list of some of the new "rights" that the god's have showered on us over the last few years. Those rights come with no responsibilities attached to them, of course. This is the thinking of small children.

A two-part essay on how we got to where we are:
The Death of the American Dream Part I
The Death of the American Dream Part II

That's it; gotta scamper off.

Still Truckin'

2011-06-16T16:39:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, Debbie had the day off. We had a bunch of running around to do (mostly futile) so while we were out putting gas through the engine, we clocked my current bike route. It's currently 9.8 miles, which I rode this morning at an average of 10.4mph. (Hey; if the global warming hysterics can claim to know the temperature of the earth to tenths of a degree, I can calculate my average speed to tenths of an mile-per-hour....)

Yesterday, we once again engaged in a completely futile attempt to "buy local." We had a list of miscellaneous items that had been building up for the last couple months. So off we trundled into the Florida heat and humidity. Complete and total strike-out. So today, Amazon.com got another c-note from us. We wasted several hours and a quarter tank of gas for nothing. This makes twice; there won't be a third time.

I don't have much else to say right now, so here is a bunch of videos that sort of piled up while we were out of town.

Watching that made me realize that I spent waaaaaay too much time in front of the boob tube in my youth. Probably still do. I recognized far too many of those clips.

A time-lapse video:

The Arctic Light from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Amazing stuff.

Impressive bit of violence on the sun. At the scale in this video, the earth would be a dot, just to give some perspective on the size of the explosion.

Another amazing time-lapse:

Plains Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Yes; I'm a sucker for these things. Sue me.

I may have posted this one before, but it's worth a second watch. These are raw shots from the Cassini Mission from Chris Abbas on Vimeo. Amazing stuff.

Last but not least:

It's so awesome that there are crazy people in the world so us normals can watch video of them doing spectacular stuff.

[This post is complete trash on Firefox, but looks OK on Chrome and IE9. Closing and re-opening Firefox does not fix things. I'm going to assume that something is borked on my system. Given the problems we've been having with the Internet in general, I'm not surprised. Anyone reading this from outside my household, let me know it things look squirrely.]

Sweaty and Sore

2011-06-13T11:36:00.000-04:00

After a week of sitting on my butt and stuffing my pie-hole, I finally got a chance to go for a ride this morning. Naturally, after yesterday's experiment in sleep deprivation, I over-slept and didn't get out on the road until 8:30am. which means I was out in 80-degree temps and full sun after a week off. I did manage to keep the time to less than an hour for somewhere between nine and ten miles. I need to clock my current route (or get an odometer for my bike) to get the exact mileage, but at worst I was still over the 9mph mark, which isn't bad after a week of feasting on Koegel meat products and sitting. Sitting in the car. Sitting on the plane. Sitting on various couches. Sitting at dining room tables. Sitting in restaurants. No wonder we're the fattest nation in human history; it wasn't even possible to get any real exercise. Most of the week, I was tired and barely able to move. Even my brain wasn't working right most of the time. I feel 100% better after a single ride even if I have Jello-legs and my shirt is dripping with sweat.

Speaking of my brain not working, I thought I was starting to hallucinate shortly after I started riding. Every time I put my head down, I caught a whiff of Mexican and would flash back to when I worked in the kitchen at Chi-Chi's back in 1982. (For those who don't ride, not a lot of mental work goes into piloting a bicycle, which leaves the mind free to wander a fair bit. Add in the endorphin rush from the physical exertion and things can get a little weird.) I was starting to seriously consider that I was finally goin' completely 'round the bend when I remembered that I had dripped some queso dip on myself last night while sitting on the couch without a shirt on. So I'm not crazy after all. Yet.

Anyway.

Michigan is still leading the way to a de-industrialized future. The freeways continue to disintegrate in spite of massive maintenance projects everywhere we went. Even the runways at Metro airport reminded us of driving down a washboard road. The northern portion of the lower peninsula was worse than the southern third or so, but it was all bad. Because we've been away for a while, we had to jump off I-75 at Bristol Road for a real, honest-to-gods Coney dog at Capital Coney Island, then head around the corner down South Saginaw to Edmonds Dairy Queen, still the best Dairy Queen we've found anywhere in the U.S. Rather than back-track, we headed up I-475 for a tour of Flint. The only positive thing I can say is that it never takes Mama Gaia long to erase the works of men. Even heavily contaminated industrial areas are going to scrub and many of the former residential areas have progressed to broad-leaf forest. In any case, it was depressing to see what has become of my home town, as it always is whenever we go back. Fortunately, we spent most of our time in rural areas of the state that never "progressed" all that far and so haven't changed much now that it's all falling apart.

Well, I need to unpack, sort and sift the foot-high pile of credit card offers for the few things we care about, catch up on my internet reading, schedule a carpet cleaning (free once a year), arrange for a light fixture to be installed on the living room fan, call about a couple possible jobs, blah, blah blah.

Later.

Home

2011-06-12T18:20:00.000-04:00

We're back in Sanford. We spent a few days in northern Michigan to visit with my family, then a few days at Debbie's mom's place to help set up the graduation open house for my god-daughter/Debbie's niece. It was nice to see a lot of people again although we didn't get to see everyone we wanted to. Somehow, we never do. But it was the best we could do in the limited time we had.

When we got to Michigan, we though the airplane had done a U-turn and dropped us back in Florida. It was 95 and humid when we landed in Detroit. But just in case we forgot where we were, it was in the 50's when we left Detroit this morning.

We caught an early flight and only had four hours sleep last night. Neither of us can sleep well on a plane, so time for a nap.

Memorial Weekend

2011-05-30T22:02:00.001-04:00

So what do you do for Memorial Weekend?

If you're in Tasmania, you can do some insane surfing.

If you're Jed Mildon, you can do the first-ever triple back flip on a BMX bike:

If you live in south Florida, you could smash into a bunch of other cars and get in a shoot-out with the local LEO's:

[Looks like whoever shot this video thinks he's the next Abraham Zapruder and wants to cash in on his dumb luck. Or he was threatened by the cops for documenting what will likely end up as yet-another police brutality case.]

We just went to the zoo, then watched NCIS And Criminal Minds reruns.

Cha-Cha-Cha Changes!

2011-05-30T08:11:00.000-04:00

After six years, we've dropped our Web-stats service. I can get most of the same information for free from Blogger, so we decided to stop paying for it. The only bummer is that we lose the cool little world map showing the locations of the last 100 visitors. I'll need to find some other widget to replace it; things look a bit nekked without it.

While we were out on our thrice-weekly banana-and-ice-cream run yesterday, I clocked my current bike route at 7.7 miles. I rode it this morning in 41 minutes which works out to an average speed of 11.3mph. I haven't hit that kind of pace since my ride home from work being chased by tornadoes back in March. Must have been the ice cream.

Ice Cream: The New Wheaties.

Customizing the Tax Geek

2011-05-28T11:46:00.000-04:00

Still fussing around with the mechanics of The Tax Geek web site. Still no real content, but it now features a rather handsome portrait of me in a suit. It's an older picture; I have hair.

Expect light blogging both here and at The Tax Geek while I continue to fiddle under the hood.

Quiet Week

2011-05-26T12:43:00.000-04:00

We've had a quiet week here in central Florida mostly because the summer heat is kicking in big time. The daytime temps are up in the 95 degree range with things "cooling down" at night to the high 70's. The humidity is always 100%; water actually condenses on my glasses when I'm out riding every morning. We were hoping for some excitement when we got rid of a bunch of the worst sort of lunatics Saturday at 6pm, but that didn't seem to pan out.

Speaking of bike riding, I'm continuing to add to my distance. Last week, I ended at 6.9 miles at an average speed just over 9mph. With the distance I've added on this week, I should be getting close to 8 miles (especially today; got lost on the back streets of Lake Mary and ended up taking a bit of a detour). Once I get up to 10 miles, I'll start working on getting my average speed back up to 11-12mph, then start adding distance again.

I did finally get the photos from our second trip to Epcot sorted and uploaded to Flickr. I added them to the end of the set from earlier this year. It's mostly shots of all the gardens and topiary put in by HGTV. Not that there is much else in the back part of Epcot. It all seems a bit pointless unless you are into eating a full meal every three feet and buying useless tchochkies (a word that spell-check wants to change to "crotchless"...). But the gardens are nice.

I see Flint, MI is number one at something: violent crime. Again. It was the murder capital for two or three years running back during the crack cocaine wars in the mid-1980's until our nation's Imperial City bumped Flint out of first place. Good to see the ol' hometown getting back on its game.

Whenever illegal downloads have been in the news, I've stated that if you make legal downloading logical and cheap, you could print money. Well, Netflix seems to be proving that out. Granted, there will always be a group of hardcore geeks who copy and/or download illegally. They are impossible to stop because if I can listen to it or watch it, I can copy it. A 1080p video camera on a tripod pointed at our 1080p 42" TV and plugged into the headphone jack can easily make a better-than-VHS copy (and probably better-than-standard-DVD copy) of any Blu-Ray movie. Copy that to a bag full of cheap 5G memory sticks and pass them around to a hundred or so of my closest friends. No existing or proposed copy protection method will even slow me down. But if I and my closest 100 or so friends are willing to go to all that trouble and expense to avoid the $1 Redbox rental fee, it's unlikely that even if the MPAA could somehow completely shut us down, that we will ever buy your damn movie. But what Netflix has done with streaming video is to make is so cheap and painless to legally watch movies on computers, game consoles, smart phones, etc., that for the masses, trying to save the $9/month fee for unlimited TV watching simply isn't worth the headaches of BitTorrent.

In news from Mars, Opportunity broke the 18-mile mark in early May. The Energizer Bunny ain't got jack on this little guy. Spirit seems dead-dead although attempts are still being made to make contact. I sincerely hope someone sticks a fork in the Spirit Recovery Committee before it becomes another mohair subsidy.

More good news:

Well, it looks as if one investigator is getting started: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating the mortgage securities operations of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley....

If Schneiderman's investigation -- and other others (hopefully) to follow --show the banks operated legally and merely were caught in proverbial 100-year flood, as industry defenders claim, all the better. If that's the outcome, Americans can take some solace and (perhaps) move on from this nagging feeling the "rule of law" has been suspended for those with the money, power and influence to buy more money, power and influence.

About damn time. Maybe the state's will finally do what Obama's AG is too chicken-shit to do. Maybe. We'll see.

Speaking of criminals in high places, Matt Taibbi has an interview with Vice about Goldman Sachs that is worth reading. Fair warning: some of the language will probably set off klaxons and flashing red lights in your employer's IT office, so save reading it until you're at home and the kids are in bed.

A pretty picture for everyone to think about:

And while everyone digests that, I'm off to digest a pot of ramen.

Finally

2011-05-18T22:35:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to doing something with the rdfrost.com domain other than having it forwarded here. For now, it will serve as the home of The Tax Geek. I don't have a clue what I will be doing there other than it will be tax-focused while the completely random stuff will still be here. If I like how things work over at GoDaddy, I may do more over there, but for now it's just The Tax Geek. One thing I already like: support people who speak and understand standard English available 24/7 on the phone without having to navigate a phone tree designed by Satan himself or sitting on hold so long I grow a beard.

So anyway, that's what I've been doing instead of posting here.

Friday the 13th

2011-05-13T16:14:00.000-04:00

Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.

The bike riding thing continues. I can now average 10mph for a bit over six miles. Not that impressive, but it's slowly getting there. At the rate I'm increasing my distance, I'll be ready for the Iceman Cometh Challenge in time to enter the geezer division. At this point, I can't even imagine riding 27 miles in one go.

I'm still puttering around with The Tax Geek thing. This weekend, I'm going to give serious thought to domain names and e-mail addresses and web space. If there isn't someone already using The Tax Geek, I may do some sort of Facebook thing. Or maybe not. Facebook annoys me in a number of ways and I enjoy the occasional hiatus from it. Having a business page would commit me to being a regular user. I also found a couple places in Lake Mary that would probably work for office space. One has better visibility, but the rent is more than I'm comfortable with. I've talked to a couple people about setting up shop together, which would help, but that complicates the whole thing by a lot. I found one space that was only $500/month and had a storage area. We would be able to ditch the $65/month we are paying to store our moving supplies as well as give me an office. The problem is that the place is completely invisible. The landlord had told me it was a second-floor office. We had been routinely driving by the building ever since we moved here and never realized it even had a second floor. Worse, there is no external signage other than a small plaque next to the door that leads up to the second floor offices. The plus side is that it's cheaper than anything we've found and he is only asking for a six-month lease instead of a full year. Still a lot of money for what I'm likely to generate in income. I'm also resurrecting an idea from last fall: jumping into an established office. I still have a guy's name who offered me that option. The problem is that his office is a fair jog away from here. It wouldn't be as crazy logistically as it was in New Hampshire when Debbie and I were sharing a car and I worked in Vermont, but it would be close. I could have Debbie dump me off, then bike home, but I would be riding nearly 20 miles. I'd like to think that I'd be up to that sort of trip by the end of summer, but that could get grueling as a permanent thing.

I realized the other day that I had not been uploading photos to Flickr after I took them off the camera. So over the last few months we've been to:

A beach near Bonita Springs. My aunt and uncle have a winter place there so we drove down to visit for a couple days.

Disney's Epcot. These are from mid-April. We just went there again Wednesday, but those photos are still on the camera.

Disney's Hollywood Studios. Twice. The second time was to meet up with some friends we haven't seen in close to 20 years.

Nice thing about having the Florida resident annual passes is that we can drive down anytime we have a free day and hit one of the parks. We don't pay for parking, and even the food is usually free using the Disney points we rack up on one of our credit cards. It's a great excuse to get some sun (OK; a lot of sun) and people-watch.

One sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result each time. A Florida developer has a new program called "A-Dollar-and-a-Dream" that allows someone to buy a brand new $150,000 house for a $1 down payment. Didn't we already try that one? I've also noticed the local car dealers are back with their no-money-down, no-payments-for-a-year deals. We really are quite insane.

Speaking of housing, Zillow's housing data is still showing housing in a complete free-fall, down another 8% year-over-year with no end in site. Sixteen million families are upside-down and will likely never see prices get back up to what their mortgage balance is. Good times!

Breathless Headline of the Week: No Breakfast for Kids Wearing 'Wrong' Shoes At Gradeschool.The basic story is that after ignoring a dress code violation for the entire school year, some bored school administrator decided to deny a couple kids their free-to-them-but-very-costly-to-the-taxpayer breakfast because they were wearing black tennis shoes instead of black dress shoes. Mom is so confused. But the real gem comes from the boys' auntie:

“I don’t care if they had on orange shoes, they were in line to eat,” Robin Price says. “I’m not going to feed you because you have the wrong shoes? Shoes? No, no.”

Here's a thought: Why don't the two "adults" in these boys' lives drag their drug-and-alcohol-addled asses out of bed early enough in the morning to fix breakfast? It's not all that hard. I'm not suggesting laying out a six course spread or anything. What does a bowl of oatmeal or grits (Cream-o-Wheat for you Yankees) cost? Maybe a nickel if you include the cost of boiling water on the stove? And it's done in less than five minutes so Mom and Auntie can go back to bed to sleep off whatever they ingested the night before.And then schools could focus on oh... I don't know... teaching something? Other than entitlement, that is:

“I felt sad. We’re always supposed to have breakfast,” first-grader Noah Nicholson says.

Yeah kid. You are "always supposed to have breakfast." At home. You need to talk to the big people that live in your house with you about getting on that.

Pigs are petri dishes for evolving human diseases. Thanks to factory farms, those diseases are now evolving under selection pressure from antibiotics. The bottom line: nothing good will come of this. And we'll keep right on doing it anyway.

The federal government stopped building the border fence, so now Arizona is taking donations. So far, $1.5 million from nearly 35,000 donors. Anytime the economy tanks, immigration becomes a political hot spot. Living in an area of heavy Mexican immigration (legal and illegal), I can tell you things are already getting ugly.

I almost skimmed right past this one: a former coworker decided to give herself a $1.1 million raise. Lack of controls was an ongoing concern when I was there. Maybe now those in charge will stop sticking their fingers in their ears and la-la-la-ing when the subject comes up.

Well, I need some lunch and then start sorting the 230 or so pictures from Epcot. The biggest advantage of digital is also the biggest pain: it costs nothing to take photos so I keep pulling the trigger. Then I get home and have to sift through all those photos.

Later.

"Maximum shields, Mr. Worf!"

2011-05-09T20:47:00.003-04:00

Our lease says we can't change the outward appearance of our apartment. Technically, what that means is that we cannot change out the blinds (for ones which are actually capable of keeping out light, for example) or hang anything between the blind and the window. Walking around the complex, what it seems to really mean is that it's OK to rip your blinds half down or allow your dog to eat the slats, but don't you DARE hang anything between the blind and the glass that would save energy or even block out light.

There is clear heat film that goes on the glass, but it would have cost around $50 per window. I doubt we would ever recover the cost in the time we are likely to stay living here. So after wasting time and gas trying to "buy local", I headed over to Amazon.com and picked up a few things [edited to add - total cost was about $50 with enough leftovers to do our next apartment]:

It only took a total of about three or four hours to do all the windows in the apartment except the office. (The way we have it set up, it would be impossible to open and close, and in the 10 months we've lived here, the sun has shone directly in that window exactly once.) It's a little dark, but that's the whole idea:

And we can open up to the outside world if we wish:

Now we know what it feels like to be a Hershey Kiss.

The hope is that by keeping the heat shields down during the day, then opening them and the windows at night, we can keep the electric bill below $100/month. (Doing the opposite in the two months of "winter" will likely eliminate the need to heat.) Today was the first full day with them all in place and it seemed to work pretty well. The indoor temp stayed below 79 degrees F even in our little sunroom, which usually runs up well over 80 when the sun starts cooking the windows.

We got our letter today from the front office telling us what our new rent will be. They only jacked it up by $25, so it looks like we won't have to send out an address change with our Christmas letters.

Gotta go; dinner is getting cold.

Debbie Says "Watch this!"

2011-05-07T10:14:00.000-04:00

Up Hill Both Ways

2011-05-07T10:08:00.001-04:00

When I started out on yesterday's ride, the wind was hitting me head on. I figured that was perfect; I'd have a tailwind for the ride back. Nope. Strong headwind. Both ways. Huh?!? Today I get a bit of a break; Debbie is riding with me so we're only doing a couple miles.

I see oil is below $100/barrel this morning. So much for $5/gallon gas. Not that we're out of the woods in the long term, but this will give people a bit of breathing space over the short term. Given the amount of froth in commodities in general, we'll likely see oil prices driven into the ground again, then bounce back up. Speculators don't change the direction of commodity prices; they only increase the volatility. Which makes the long-term picture for oil even more bleak. With prices whipsawing from $140 to $30 to $110 and now dropping again, all in a three-year period, it makes the sort of long-term planning and investing needed to significantly increase future oil production very difficult. In any case, at least the pressure is off for now so we can all go back to sleepwalking off a cliff.

Another Florida bank bit the dust yesterday, bringing the 2011 total to 40, well off last year's pace. And it was a pretty small bank, relatively speaking. Losing 40 banks in four months is disastrous by historical standards; that it's good news tells you just how bad things have been over the last three years.

The other good news is that businesses are hiring, which ironically caused the unemployment to go back up to 9%. The just-so story is that the increase in hiring caused people who had stopped looking for work (who are not considered "unemployed") to start looking again (causing them to be counted as "unemployed" again). Statistics brought to you by the same people who run Amtrak.

The backlash from killing bin Laden begins:

Pakistan's army broke its silence Thursday over the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden, acknowledging its own "shortcomings" in efforts to find the al-Qaida leader but threatening to review cooperation with Washington if there is another similar violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

...The tone of the army statement was in sharp contrast to the initial response to the raid by the country's civilian leaders. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had hailed the operation as a "great victory" but made no mention of any concerns over sovereignty.

This will not end well. And for the gods' sake, can we have just one military operation that doesn't feature the mechanical failure of a helicopter?

The Mozilla team tells the Department of Homeland Security to go piss up a rope:

Mozilla's legal department didn't immediately comply with ICE's request to take down MafiaaFire and instead asked for more clarification. "Our approach is to comply with valid court orders...but in this case there was no such court order," Harvey Anderson, a member of Mozilla's legal team, recently explained on his personal blog. "Thus, to evaluate Homeland Security's request, we asked them several questions...to understand the legal justification."

Bravo!

Hobby or obsession:

A Storm has Arrived (NSFW):

AT&T will no longer provide unlimited broadband. This has little to nothing to do with keeping prices down or the cost of bandwidth. This is a blatant attempt to bollix up Hulu, Amazon UnBox and Netflix Streaming:

The blunt-force approach of a bandwidth cap does have the advantage of making users think twice about streaming HD movies from Netflix. That is, perhaps not coincidentally, doubly to the advantage of most big ISPs, because they’d rather have you spending money on their video services than paying a third party. Bandwidth-intense services threaten to turn the likes of Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable into utilities — a dependable business, but not one that has the huge profit margins these companies have come to enjoy.

For now, the caps are high enough that most people won't ever hit them. An hour of high-def video is around 2.5GB, so a 250GB/month cap is 100 hours of streaming video. That's a lot in our case, but could be a problem with a connection shared by a family. And I'm sure those caps will come down once they are in place.

First we had earthquakes, then fires, and now floods:

Government engineers will blow up a third section of a Mississippi River levee on Thursday to manage flooding, as a wall of water roared down the nation's largest river system, threatening towns and cities all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

What next? Famine? Pestilence? We've been able to ignore the Four Horsemen for a century due to our cleverness. But Nature always wins in the end.

It looks like yet-another computer worm has targeted Iran. No information yet on what specifically is being attacked. This is all great fun until the retaliation starts. To imagine that only the US and Israel are smart enough to create these is to be dangerously naive.

Well, gotta go make Debbie some waffles; she's sitting next to me whinging about getting her breakfast before it's lunch time.

Thighs Be Burnin'

2011-05-05T15:14:00.000-04:00

I realized that since the end of tax season, I haven't been on my bike one single time. I've been looking at office space in Lake Mary for The Tax Geek, so I decided to see if I could ride from here to there. It's only 2.6 miles each way, a bit more than what I was riding to my old job, but I've been pretty much flat on my butt for the last couple weeks. The first attempt was yesterday. I made it. Barely. I had to jump off and stand in the shade for a bit when I got to Lake Mary, which is when I noticed that my tires were low on air. No wonder I felt like I was riding on loose sand the whole way. When I checked them this morning, there was only 25 pounds of air instead of the 60-65 I usually run when I'm on pavement. This morning was a much easier ride. I made the round trip in about 35 minutes which is a bit more leisurely than my usual pace (9mph vs. my more typical 11-12mph). In my defense, there was a stiff headwind for the return leg; hence the burnin' thighs. I hope to gradually increase my ride over the next couple months and see if I can get up to 10 miles or so. We'll see how it goes when morning temps are in the 80's instead of the 60's.

Well, I need to go wash off all the sweat.

Happy Star Wars Day!

2011-05-04T23:50:00.000-04:00

May the Fourth be with you....

Mission Accomplished (?)

2011-05-02T09:16:00.002-04:00

[Edited for a few minor details.]

I woke up this morning to news of dancing in the streets. The Great Satan, Osama bin Laden, is dead and his body thrown into the sea:

Osama bin Laden, the face of global terrorism and architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was killed in a firefight with elite American forces Monday, then quickly buried at sea in a stunning finale to a furtive decade on the run.

Some random thoughts in no particular order:

I certainly hope our soldiers thought to wrap Osama in a fresh pig skin before they tossed his body ~~out the chopper door~~ over the side of the ship.

Whoever fed President Obama this line has a dark sense of humor:

The U.S. official who disclosed the burial at sea said it would have been difficult to find a country willing to accept the remains. Obama said the remains had been handled in accordance with Islamic custom, which requires speedy burial.

Heh. I'm sure our special forces were very concerned about Islamic custom as they dumped a bullet-riddled corpse ~~out the chopper door~~ over the side of the ship the instant they had proof that the body was indeed bin Laden.

This concerns me:

"Intelligence analysis concluded that this compound was custom built in 2005 to hide someone of significance," with walls as high as 18 feet and topped by barbed wire, according to one official. Despite the compound's estimated $1 million cost and two security gates, it had no phone or Internet running into the house....

The compound is about a half-mile from a Pakistani military academy, in a city that is home to three army regiments and thousands of military personnel.

A compound that cost a million bucks to build surrounded by 18-foot walls was built a half mile from three Pakistani regiments and a military academy. And no one noticed. In the movies, the super-villian can build a massively-fortified compound complete with nuclear missiles and a small army of guards in complete secrecy without the need to purchase or transport any of the necessary materials. Sorry, but this is the real world. The materials for those 18-foot walls and whatever was inside them had to come from somewhere. I don't care how well hidden in the hills the site itself was, the materials and people needed to build it didn't just materialize in situ. The most likely source for said materials and people is the near-by town. Ya know; the one with "thousands of military personnel." Which probably tells us all we need to know about how trustworthy this particular "ally" in the War on Terror really is.

[No attempt was made to hide bin Laden's compound. It was built in full view in the middle of a suburb populated by military personnel two New York City blocks from Pakistan's equivalent of West Point. As John Stewart observed on Sunday, if the military academy was a Domino's Pizza, they would deliver to bin Laden on foot. And again, this tells us all we need to know about our Pakistani "allies". ]

On a related note, how will this impact Pakistan's stability? The government that the US recognizes has at best a tenuous hold over what the lines on our maps identify as "Pakistan". Now imagine three regiments of the military pissed to the teeth that Islamabad allowed US forces to kill and body-snatch bin Laden, whom they were likely protecting, from right under their noses.

Personally, I feel the world is a better place with Osama bin Laden a corpse in an undisclosed location at the bottom of the sea. I hope this gives closure to the families of those who died on September 11, 2001. But I doubt this is over.

Derren Brown

2011-05-01T22:27:00.000-04:00

Texas faith healing fraud exposed by Derren Brown.

I especially love the Sheriff Lobo wanabe threatening Derren Brown and his crew. With the economy in the toilet, I expect these faith healer and prosperity gospel douche nozzles to spring up everywhere just like they did when I was in high school.

If you don't remember, Derren Brown is this guy.

Why?

2011-04-25T15:29:00.000-04:00

Because we can:

Days Off

2011-04-23T09:51:00.003-04:00

In keeping with our recent tradition of using our days off to spend money we don't have on medical procedures, we hung out at the ghetto dentist for several hours Friday. Also in keeping with tradition, I was taken back 20 minutes after my appointment even though I was the second person of the day. Luckily, my cleaning only took half an hour, which put the hygienist back on schedule. Unluckily, there was another person between my appointment and Debbie's. Luckily, he got done on time and Debbie didn't take very long as they were only doing half her mouth. (Long story that ends with, "Yet another scam to milk extra fees in any way imaginable.") Now they want me back in a couple weeks for a follow-up. It was a cleaning! What the frack is there to follow up on?!?!

Anyway, when we got home I had two letters from the ghetto lab where I had blood and urine tests done last week. The first letter informed me that my urine was completely normal and there was no need to schedule a follow-up appointment. Thank the gods; I can still pee straight. The second letter informed me my blood results were in and I needed to schedule an appointment ASAP. I'm guessing the news isn't so good. I was hoping to get the results without paying for an additional office visit. While I was out to the ghetto clinic to visit the ghetto pharmacy to see if we was po' 'nough to get a discount on my insulin, I asked if there was any way I could get my lab results. The answer was an emphatic, "NO! Someone has to explain them to you!" I started to say that maybe there wouldn't have to be so much splainin' to us simple po' folk if they would stop printing everything in the Windows Wingdings font, but after 12 years working in healthcare, I knew it was pointless. A priesthood maintains its power through obscurity; hence the persistence of the Latin Mass, speaking in tongues, and medical paperwork written in pure gibberish.

Ran across this video of Cookie the Ticklish Penguin:

I note that our lease allows us to keep a bird. Might have to crank the AC a bit, though. And I want that sound he makes as a ringtone.

While we were out and about in Lake Mary, we cruised around collecting phone numbers in the windows of empty offices. We found a couple promising ones. Given that it was Good Friday, I didn't have a lot of luck getting in touch with people, but I was able to get a few figures. They ranged from the reasonable ($.80 to $1 per sq ft including trash and all utilities) to the silly ($3 per sq ft not including anything) to the sublimely ridiculous ($15 per sq ft; couldn't stop laughing long enough to asked if that included a weekly massage with a happy ending). This may yet work out. I'm certainly not going to jump into anything just yet. I'm still looking for that perfect place that can we can live in, have an office in, and have room to get our stuff out of the U-Haul locker. We had one that looked promising from the outside, but I don't think we can live in it due to zoning.

Florida is a weird place. More precisely, Florida is full of deeply weird people. The number of times a resident of the state of Florida is featured on Lowering the Bar (a blog devoted to bizarre court cases) should be disturbing to those in charge. But it most likely isn't:

Workforce Central Florida spent more than $14,000 on the red capes as part of its "Cape-A-Bility Challenge" public relations campaign. The campaign featured a cartoon character, "Dr. Evil Unemployment," who needs to be vanquished.

That's just... um... wow. I have no words.

We've all known the Fourth Amendment is dead, buried, forgotten and rotted away to dust. But yet-another story to just hammer that home:

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

..."Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps."

And just in case you think you only need fear the government:

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

Follow-up stories have Apple claiming the whole thing was just a bug. Yah. Uh huh. And my name is Kate Middleton and I'm off to jolly ol' England to shag Prince William.

Meanwhile:

The U.S. government plans to sell a significant share of its remaining stake in General Motors Co. this summer despite the disappointing performance of the auto maker's stock, people familiar with the matter said.

Never mind the $10 billion in taxpayer money flushed down yet-another rat hole. That's loose change swept up by the night janitors in the Senate chamber these days. The simple fact that the federal government of these United States owns shares of General Motors is astounding. That not one WTF has been forthcoming from... well... anyone, ought to be terrifying.

Generally, I don't pay much attention when someone on the internet starts screaming that something people have been consuming for decades is somehow magically responsible for everything from cancer to bad breath. (The aspartame hoax e-mails, for example). When I started reading this New York Times article with the unfortunate title Is Sugar Toxic, my first thought was, "Great; here we go again." But instead of yet-another no-nothing running around screaming like their hair was on fire, the author lays out a pretty good case that it is possible that ingesting too much fructose does more than make you fat, that there is some research into that possibility but it isn't conclusive either way, and that follow-up studies are badly needed. In the meantime, good luck cutting out all sources of fructose outside what occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables. I read this article Thursday night, so I paid attention to what I consumed all day Friday. It was a little frightening. Other than beverages (water, unsweetened ice tea, Diet Coke) and some grapes (which naturally contain fructose), everything I stuffed in my pie hole had added fructose. I'm not sure how we would even go about avoiding the stuff. It's not like we can grow our own food or even make food from scratch living in our little ghetto apartment.

Because gas prices are getting up to the level that people are starting to squawk, energy is a hot topic. The typical conversation starts with "Well, if we'd just [insert impractical idea], we could go on consuming energy as if the earth were infinite," then goes downhill from there. One problem is that it's difficult to wrap your head around just how much energy we use and how it gets used. A second problem is understanding how inefficient our methods of energy use are. Here's a picture that helps:

You will need to click on that to view the full-sized image unless you're big into eye-strain. There are two things to note: all renewable sources amount to 8% of energy consumption. If you limit that to wind and solar, it's .8%. We cannot continue business as usual on renewable energy. The second thing to note is the amount of energy we consume that drifts off into space as waste heat without doing anything useful on the way. Nearly 58% of the our energy use goes up the chimney. Maybe instead of spending billions flying politicians to climate conferences for free food, booze and whores, or subsidizing energy sources that will never contribute anything meaningful, could we work on nudging that percentage down? I'm aware that most of that is the inevitable result of converting energy from one form to another and can't be eliminated any more than we can save energy by eliminating gravity. But can we do better? Are there inefficiencies that can be eliminated? Can we remove some of the conversions?

Or maybe we need to use less energy?

Nah! What am I thinking? This is America! It's a basic human right to leave lights on when we're not home, drive around in circles, hop on an airplane at the drop of a hat, and annoy the neighbors with our giant, lighted plastic Santa heads. We just need to drill baby, drill!

And speaking of which, we're off to visit Mickey again today while we have some time off.

Done

2011-04-19T12:47:00.000-04:00

Another tax season is in the bag. It wasn't much of one; the office did more tax returns the first full week than we did the last six. I don't expect the franchise owners will bother with it next year. I'm guessing we barely made enough to cover payroll. Not that it matters; I won't be there either way.

Finishing up tax season also means I have to get my butt moving to make The Tax Geek more than just a pricey bit of paper in the file cabinet. I have a good idea of where I want to set up shop, but I have no idea what the rent is going to be. I'll likely do a bit of driving around on Wednesday and get some hard numbers. I should have the software I plan to use sometime today. [UPS dude just dropped it off! Woohoo!] Intuit gives the 2009 version away for free as part of their sales pitch. I was completely underwhelmed by their on-line version for tax preparers. I'm hoping their stand-alone software is more what I would expect from using QuickBooks and TurboTax. And of course, I need to find a starving artist somewhere than can come up with artwork for business cards, etc.

[Aside: I hate when I can't remember something I've seen a hundred times. I know there is a website where you can put work out to contract; virtualsomethingorother.com. The "somethingorother" part is an old word for someone you hire to get stuff done (like "majordomo" only more Southeast Asian). It's been discussed endlessly for over a year on Scott Adam's blog and now because I'm trying to think of it, it's just gone. Normally I write stuff like that down or at least toss it into my bookmarks, but for some reason I didn't. Or I did, but now can't remember where I wrote it down or in what folder I stuffed the bookmark. Getting old sucks dead bunnies.]

The government didn't shut down, but we still don't have a budget six and a half months into the budget year, and won't likely have one before summer. If there is any question our federal government is broken, there is no better sign than the fact that the single most important bit of work will still be incomplete nine months after the due date and a mere three months before the next version is due. If the reason for the delay involved coming to a middle path over some deep philosophical divide, I would likely be less harsh. Instead, we have over-grown children quibbling over crumbs while the nation slowly grinds its way down the slope of decline. I'm waiting to hear some adult conversation about what in Afghanistan is of such strategic importance to the US that we continue to borrow billions from the Chinese to fund our bumbling around in that particular hell hole. I would love to have it explained to me what penumbra formed by an emanation obligates me to pay for someone else's healthcare. Or make them whole after they lose their ass gambling in the derivatives markets. Or to pay for three meals a day for school students whose "parents" trade their food stamp cards for cash to piss away on drugs and alcohol. But our president claims that anyone who dares question the neo-liberal agenda is a stomper of puppies and strangler of babies, and advocates killing anyone over the age of 30. Returning the federal government to the size it was for two centuries will be a disaster. Thus Speaketh The One. Hear ye subjects and tremble.

And we accept this with barely a murmur.

Meanwhile, Big Sis says that adults can stuff their hand down the front of a six-year-old girl's pants and call it "proper screening procedures" as long as the adults come two by two with hands of blue. I think we all know what I would be called if I made a habit of stuffing my hand down the front of little girls' pants, disposable nitrile gloves or no.

And we just line up and take it.

We so deserve what is happening to us.

Speaking of which, we are up to 34 banks closed so far in 2011. That's significantly off last year's pace and the size of the banks involved remains of the small and regional variety. That may be due to the slower pace of foreclosures, or it may be due to smaller banks not being able to borrow billions for 0% interest from the Fed then use it to purchase T-bills paying 3.5% like the too-big-to-fail banks.

So, enough of my babbling. Here is someone that makes me look optimistic:

And a couple essays that run along similar themes:

Gaming Our Own Asses by James Howard Kunstler:

...Barack Obama has waited a bit too long to change the national storyline using the authority of his high office. It's not about "growth" and "recovery." It's about managing contraction and becoming a different sort of American society. Observers of the scene have made a mistake about Obama. He's not "eloquent." He's merely respectable. Being able to speak in grammatical sentences is not the same as having anything to say. It will be a sorrowful day when he is replaced by a genuine idiot like Michele Bachman, but it will happen because he wasn't able to set the tone for his times with something like a straight story....

Alternatives to Nihilism, Part One: A Dog Named Boo by John Michael Greer:

Any of my readers who would like to see how much of this fixation on hunting for scapegoats unfolds from an uneasy conscience need only suggest in public that ordinary Americans might bear some modest degree of responsibility for the unwelcome trends of the last few decades. The shrillness with which most Americans will insist that all the blame lies elsewhere makes it tolerably clear just how sensitive a nerve has been touched. What Carl Jung called "projecting the shadow" has become a potent political reality in America, but you don’t need a degree in Jungian psychoanalysis to realize that people who spend their lives pointing fingers at other people are trying to paste a villain’s mask on the rest of the world in order to avoid seeing it when they look in the mirror.

As usual, the real fun is in the comments. Greer's commenters are generally polite and provide useful input (something enforced mercilessly by JMG); Kunstler's are... um... not. Which just increases the unintentional humor factor to the stratosphere.

Well, I should go find something useful to do with my unemployed self. Maybe a nap.

It's Official

2011-04-12T10:21:00.003-04:00

Now all I have to do is find cheap office space in a better part of town than I now work in.

The Federal Budget Pie

2011-04-09T14:13:00.000-04:00

Just in case anyone isn't already aware of just how worthless the Congress and our president really are:

Pay Cuts and Gettin' Sued

2011-04-08T13:05:00.000-04:00

Debbie found out on Wednesday that her work is "restructuring" their pay system; a turd-polishing way to say everyone is getting a 25% pay cut for all but the busiest three months. So we may be hitting the road again this summer. Our lease is up in August and if either of us can find something in the way of paying work over on the "good" side of Florida, we'll likely jump.

In other news, I received a letter addressed to me at the office where I work informing me that I'm being sued by one of our upstanding clients. It seems back in 2002 she stole money from the bank we use, and has been dodging them ever since. This year, they caught up with her and grabbed her entire Federal refund as repayment. There are at least three places in the paperwork that say applying for a bank product means that you agree that the bank has a right to do this. Of course, because I'm not psychic and didn't know that she owed the bank money from nine years ago, it's all my fault. So she is going to sue me. Not my employer or the bank that actually took her money. Me. Personally. Good luck with that.

And just because this tax season hasn't already been the Tax Season from Hell what with all the IRS software glitches and delays triggered by the large number of fraudulent tax returns we filed back in January, now we are looking at a government shutdown just in time for what is supposed to be the second-busiest week of the tax season. (I have my doubts on that score; one return for the entire office last week and only four returns so far this week.) It isn't supposed to affect most returns, but you can believe as much of that as you want.

The price of oil continues to creep upwards, toying with $112/barrel. No real surprise there other than the complete lack of any adult conversation regarding energy use. Obama's energy speech is the same speech made by every president since Nixon; business-as-usual must continue because we say it must and the energy necessary will fall from the sky because we are the Chosen People. Declining fossil fuel supplies combined with increasing global demand means nothing. We will burn food in our gas tanks while millions starve, and power our homes by magic pixie dust (otherwise known as nuclear fusion, a technology that has been 20 years from widespread deployment for my entire lifetime).

Yes. I'm in a bit of a mood.

I'm also bored out of my skull. In three-and-a-half hours, I've had a single phone call. Woo. I've already read all my regular web sites and read all the stuff I had in my backpack. I'm cranking through books like crazy with 4-5 hours of uninterupted reading time every day. There's a good chance I may have to make an emergency library run before I work there on Sunday. Ah well, in ten days, I'll have a great deal of free time.

I did run across a cool bit of video:

A Cosmological Fantasia from BDH - Burrell Durrant Hifle on Vimeo.

There is some amazing stuff in there. Watching is good for perspective. With titantic events like these happening in the universe, nothing that happens on this insignificant ball of mud really matters. I especially like the bit about three minutes in where our sun goes off its main sequence and burns Earth to a speck of soot. Right now, that makes me smile.

Have a great day!

Not a winner

2011-04-08T09:20:00.003-04:00

Well, neither myself or any family member won the HUGE Powerball drawing Wednesday night. That means we all still have to go to work. Darn!

I got news Wednesday at work that they are changing our pay structure once again. This is the third time since I've started (Aug 2010)! So much for that pay raise for a few months! Ric is in the last part of tax season with [name of big-box tax place redacted], so his job is about done for the year. He is not too sure what will happen next. He would like to start his own business doing taxes. This will involve looking for "office space" since we can not "operate a business" out of our apartment. It will involve a bunch of other things too, but the office space will be one of the first to figure out. If we could find a place that has living space also that would be a bonus. Or at least big enough to have the extra storage room that would mean we could get rid of the storage space at UHaul we are currently paying an extra $65/month for.

Marjoe

2011-04-05T18:45:00.001-04:00

A 1972 documentary of the "ministry" of Marjoe Gortner. The video quality isn't the best, but the content is... interesting.

A Bit of "Me" Time

2011-04-02T18:49:00.001-04:00

I actually have a day completely off. No reason to drive anywhere, no to-do list; just a day to spread my butt on the couch. Woohoo!

Yesterday was International Weirdo Day at work. The first one was an old one-armed man, driving himself naturally, who didn't want to spend money on a lawyer and asked me to help fill out his divorce papers. When I told him as politely as I could that there was no way in hell I was doing that, he demanded that I tell him who would. Um, a lawyer maybe?

Weirdo number two was another old man lugging a hockey bag around full of stuff he was selling; queen sheet sets, remote control toy helicopters, etc. He became rather pissed when I told him no thanks; I was all set on helicopters and sheets purchased from dubious sources.

Weirdo number three was one of our fraudulent tax clients. Imagine Chris Rock if Chris cut his hair with hedge trimmers and lived on a nothing but meth and you get a good picture of how this guy looks and acts. He was coming back with a great deal for me: a whole trunk-full of pizzas from Dominoes (which were oddly enough in Papa John's pizza boxes; I guess Dominoes ran out...) for $20. I told him no thanks; I was about to leave and I didn't have any money anyway. He stood there staring at me for nearly a minute, then finally left, also pissed to the teeth. What gives? Just because I bathe regularly and wear a tie doesn't mean I have my pockets stuffed with $100 bills to buy random crap with.

Other than the weirdos, work is getting slower by the day. As of yesterday afternoon around 2pm, the entire office had managed to complete exactly one tax return for the entire week. The upside is I'm getting a lot of reading done and getting paid for it. The other upside is that I'm nearly 100% certain I'll be out on my own next tax season; I'm getting that together to the extent that I can while still working. Once tax season ends on April 18th, I'll be motivated to kick it into high gear given that I won't have a fall-back next year. The real trick will be finding office space. There's a lot of empty places around here, but based on the prices I'm seeing, you'd think empty office space was at a premium. I'm sure it's just a matter of looking around. Or maybe everyone around here really is delusional.

Speaking of delusional, does anyone sincerely believe the government is making money from owning General Motors? To paraphrase another honest politician, I guess it depends on what the meaning of "is" is:

In Obama's world, success means taxpayers only lost as much as $84 billion.

There are two possibilities; our president is either delusional or he is a liar. Given that he's a politician, do I really need to say which I think it is?

More delusion: we can continue to live our current lifestyle using only renewable energy sources:

Eco-campaigners who built a classroom powered by the sun believed they were paving the way for the future.

...But there is snag - its solar panels only provide enough energy to power a few lightbulbs.

As a result the classroom is bitterly cold and uninhabitable for lessons.

To begin with, whoever wrote this article clearly doesn't understand the different between photovoltaic panels and solar heating panels, unless he thought they were going to use electric heat run by photovoltaic panels. Given the level of delusion (and lack of basic math skills; calculating the amount of sun you have at any given site and what you can do with it is hardly rocket science), that may be the case here. Or just the usual lack of basic understanding we've come to expect from the media.

The cynic in me says the contractor likely knew full well that there was no way the thing would ever be usable and took the £25,000, minus a kick-back to the school official that signed off on the project, and ran. Looking at the photo, I don't see any possible way it could have ever worked as a classroom.

A study of who is most likely to cheat on their taxes:

The typical American tax cheat is male, single and under the age of 45.

I'm sure the local demographics skew things a bit, but the typical tax cheat in the office I work in is as likely to be a married Mexican couple working in the US illegally as a young single male. Both are cheating for the same reason: refundable tax credits. Get rid of those, I'm willing to bet that billions in fantasy income will evaporate from the economy over-night, and illegal Mexicans can stop wasting everyone's time and money, and go back to not filing tax returns like in the old days. I really need to do a post on tax reform one of these days.

Well, Debbie should be calling in a few minutes to tell me to get dinner started. Vacation is over.

Counterpoint

2011-03-24T04:24:00.000-04:00

As an antidote to that last post, there's this:

Autumn Dawn is a relative of someone we knew back in Michigan. Amazing stuff.

The Hits Just Keep Comin'

2011-03-23T19:13:00.000-04:00

Our most recent war seems to be going poorly.
Hamas is back to its old tricks, blowing up buses and lobbing rockets into cities.

Syria is killing protestors. (Will our Tomahawks fly into Tishreen Palace?)
Oil is up.
Gold and silver are up near record territory.
New home sales are at record lows.
Food prices are up.

But, hey! Stocks are up!