BO-Ring

Well, that was the most boring week of "work" in my life. In five days, I did exactly 4 returns, all of them on Saturday. The only break in the tedium was when the IRS finally fixed its computer system and unleashed several weeks of refunds all on the same day. When I came in on Friday, I had a two-foot stack of files to sort through, call clients, hand out checks, etc. But the rest of the week was phttttt. Next week is the so-called Fifth Week, allegedly the busiest week of the tax season. It wasn't last year and I don't expect it to be all that busy this year either. With more and more companies making W-2's available on the internet, people don't have to wait to the second week in February to do their taxes. And when you buy fake W-2's, make up imaginary Schedule C businesses and claim random strangers' children as dependents in order to maximize your EIC "refund" of taxes you never paid in, you can file in the second week of January. Why wait? (Someday, one of these little rambles will be my If-I-Were-Emperor-For-A-Day tax reform plan.)

Summer went away. Everyone is looking for it under bushes and behind trees, but so far, no luck. The ten-day forecast hasn't changed in a week; cold (for Florida, meaning high in the 60's) and cloudy today, then sunny and 70's or 80's as far as the eye can see. It looks like the clouds have finally gone away as of this morning, so maybe.....? I realize our more-northerly readers will laugh at the idea that high's in the 60's and lows in the 40's is cold, but when you live in a poorly insulated, drafty building with single-pane windows and electric heat, it ain't much fun.

We had some technical difficulties this week. When we were both off work on Tuesday for dentist appointments, we finally ventured out into the worst part of the ghetto to trade our regular cable box for a high-def cable box. We brought it home, plugged it into the HDMI port on our TV and BEHOLD. High def TV. It's pretty underwhelming, actually; if we had paid extra for it, I'd have been royally pissed. Not much programming is in high def, so even when you're watching a high def channel, it really ain't all that spectacular. But the box looks all high tech and cool instead of the original ghetto cable box that looked like it had literally fallen off a truck. And the actual high def programs on actual high def channels do look very pretty (mostly 24-hour local weather channels, which I've discussed before). Then a couple days ago, we turn on the TV and nothing. Wiggle the cables. Nothing. Call the cable company and suffer through the script reader from Jamaica-man that has never operated a TV manufactured in the current millennium. (The TV/Video button? Seriously? I have eleven inputs on my cheap-tastic four-year-old Best-Buy-special TV controlled by four separate buttons plus a fifth that pops up a menu of all eleven. Any TV old enough to only have a TV/Video button on the remote doesn't even have an HDMI port to hook a high def cable box to.) Still nothing. Earliest appointment is Sunday morning. We had plans, which we canceled so we could be here when the cable guy showed up.

So. I get home last night and a thought occurred to me when I turned on the TV and hopped on the internet; I was using the VGA port for the computer because I had lost audio over the HDMI connection. Port problem? Luckily the TV has three HDMI ports, so it was a ten-second job to switch to the second port. Voila! On a whim, I dug out the HDMI cable for the computer and plugged it into the third HDMI port. Voila! (OK, this is a Windows machine, so it was more like curse, reboot, niggle around in control panel, curse some more, reboot, reboot, curse, reboot, then Voila! Or more like, "Holy crap could that have been any more painful?") So all the problems starting months ago, were caused by a flaky port on the TV. I just wonder how long before the other two go south as well. With any luck, they will last long enough for 42" LED screens to become more reasonably priced. The super-thin ones they have right as you walk in the door at our Sam's Club cause some serious gadget-lust.

So anyway, the dentist. We both take a day off work to go in for our initial appointments and a cleaning. No big, right? Well, it is when you live in the ghetto. Every piece of furniture and equipment looked like it had been purchased in a rummage sale in 1978. Everything was clean, and the people working there seemed competent and were doing the best with what they had. Sort of like the doctors on the TV show Off the Map. But my x-rays were nearly unusable because the machine was long over-due for maintenance and adjustment. (Side note to any dental technicians out there; that is a very scary thing to say to a patient whom you just zapped two dozen times with hard x-rays with said machine. Just sayin'....) The tools on the dental tray had all seen better days; I'm not sure how a dental mirror that pitted and scratched is even usable. But the show-stopper was the constant chaos. We were there over three hours and both had to make follow-up appointments because all they managed to do in that time were the x-rays and our "probing". I've had root canals that have taken less time. We paid our part of the office visit, which I'm sure we will be paying again when we go back to finish what should have been done in one visit. And I'm equally sure they will bill the hell out of our dental insurance (the only kind we have at the moment) for both visits as well. I pray to the gods we never need serious medical attention while we live here.

There is a great deal of noise about the recent "plunge" in unemployment, but a bit of perspective is in order. In order to make things look a little brighter back in the 1970's the government created a new category for people who have stopped wasting their time looking for non-existent jobs. That means there are two ways for unemployment to go down; unemployed workers getting jobs, and unemployed workers giving up ever finding work. One of those is a good thing; the other is Detroit. So which was it in January?

Their conclusion–that a recovery in the US labor force is now underway–is not warranted, and not supported by the data. Why? Because not only did the US economy lose at least 8 million jobs in the crisis, but, in the three calendar years of 2008, 2009, and 2010 barely a million net jobs have been created. During that time the US economy instead needed 4.5 million new jobs just to maintain equilibrium. Last month’s payroll data is simply more noise, therefore, that takes place around a horrid, terrible bottom in the US job market.

The full article has more bad news along with some pretty pictures to hammer it home. The bottom line is that a larger and larger fraction of the US population is not working. This has been true for 40 years and no amount of cooking-the-books government statistics can hide that. The official labor force participation rate is 64.2%, a 26-year low, but even that understates the problem. Only around 60% of the population is considered part of the labor force (those between 16 and 64). What that all boils down to is out of every 100 people in the US, fewer than 40 are working. And there will be even fewer working as the population continues to age. At least until all the pension scams and Social Security finish their on-going implosion. What comes after that will be, um, interesting.

Speaking of imploding pension scams, the Post Office is in financial trouble. Again.

Excluding costs related to retiree benefits and adjustments to workers' compensation liability, the Postal Service said it had net income was $226 million in the first quarter, which ended Dec. 31.

...The agency said it will be forced to default on some of its financial obligations this year unless Congress changes a 2006 law requiring it to pay between $5.4 and $5.8 billion into its prepaid retiree health benefits each year.

"The Postal Service continues to seek changes in the law to enable a more flexible and sustainable business model," Patrick Donahoe, the Postmaster General, said in a statement. "We are eager to work with Congress and the administration to resolve these issues prior to the end of the fiscal year."

Whenever a bean-counter starts talking about changing the law to "enable a more flexible and sustainable business model", everyone needs to keep a close eye on their wallets; in this case, USPS retirees. And if the USPS does manage to get what it wants (the legal authority to screw over their retirees), expect every state to want the same "flexibility" when it comes to their trillion-dollar-in-the-hole pension plans.

More economic green shoots: Gas prices are up; food prices are up; foreclosures are up. And of course, the stock market is up, because that's a perfectly logical thing for it to do. Does anyone remember when we had a real economy? This is now 2011; even in the worse-case scenario, we were supposed to be back where we were in 2007. Other than the stock market, we haven't even managed to get the numbers going in the right direction. The hard question is, will they ever?

And related to that question (and our adventures at the dentist office; connecting the dots is left as an exercise for the reader), we have another serious natural gas explosion. Is it just me, or are these happening more and more frequently? Isn't this the sort of thing that only happens in screwed up African or South American countries?

The GOP is mercilessly wielding the budget ax, hacking away at the nation's $1.5 trillion budget deficit, reducing it by an unprecedented 5%. Well, really only 2%; the rest are reductions in increases, which only in the wacky world of federal budgets can be considered "cuts." For this courageous and history-making effort, in what will surprise exactly no one, they are labeled heartless pricks who want to starve old people, slap infants and kick puppies. We are so doomed.

Egypt continues to simmer. The military continues to tacitly support the protesters and have even protected them from the Mubarak counter-protesters in some cases. Mubarak has agreed to leave immediately rather than finish out his term, after some nasty words to the US on the side. He has learned the hard lesson that so many US allies have learned in the past; it is dangerous to be considered a friend of the United States. So now what? If we are lucky, the Egyptian military will follow the example of Turkey, allowing "democracy" only as long as the people choose their leaders wisely (meaning "not Islamic"). More likely, we will get the usual Middle East "democracy" we've seen in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran; one man, one vote, once, to elect a radical Islamic government that will establish Shariah. Personally, I'm glad we got to see the pyramids when we did; it may be a while before it is safe for Westerners to do so again.

Well, we need to get off our collective butt and get ready for some major shopping. We're down to nothing but Cap'n Crunch, Hamburger Helper, and ramen.

Summer is Here!

Two 80-degree days have brought the hordes of fence lizards and brown anoles out of their two-month "winter" hibernation. They're still a bit groggy; I nearly squished a couple that didn't scurry quite fast enough. But they're out and about! Some places know that winter is over at the appearance of certain flowers or birds; here it's three-inch long lizards running under your feet and trying to get into your apartment.

Tax season lumbers on; I only wish that 80% of the returns I complete were something other than complete frauds. I wouldn't care so much except my personal PTIN is on every return. This has to be my last big-box tax season. I don't know for sure what I'll be doing next year, but I won't be doing this again.

Egypt is on fire. I know there is a significant percentage of this country that are expecting Egypt to emerge from this as a liberal Western democracy. Sorry. I've visited there. Ain't gonna happen. Radical Islam will finish doing to Egypt what is has already done to Lebanon and will soon be doing to Turkey: create yet-another festering boil on the planet. Thank the gods that so far the Egyptian military seems to be taking a neutral position. I don't know which would be more disgusting; the carnage what would result from a modern military opening fire on civilians, or that they would be using hardware we gave to them.

Seger is touring in 2011!!! Woohoo!!!

Volkswagen is playing with a plug-in hybrid that gets 261 miles per gallon. Of course I'm betting that the price will be well into six figures. VW only plans on building 100 of them; sort of half-way between a concept car and a production vehicle. I do note that it sports a diesel engine; if we would get even semi-smart we could put a huge dent in our oil consumption by getting over our fear-and-loathing of diesel passenger vehicles.

And VW scores another advertising win:



Either that kid is the world's best actor, or the producer/director never told him the car was going to actually start. Somehow, the second option makes it even funnier.

I was only two when the Apollo 1 fire killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, so I don't remember it first-hand. (For anyone interested in the Apollo program, I recommend the HBO series From Earth to the Moon.) I was at a client's office doing a field audit when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch, and was driving home from work when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry. In all three cases, the crew knew what was happening, knew they were helpless to do anything about it. Knew they were going to die.



Lyrics are here.

I while back, I expressed some mild hope that at least some airports' survival instinct would kick in and they would replace the TSA with private screeners. It wouldn't have been a big improvement, but at least the Iron Law's kung foo grip on air travel would be slightly lessened. A few days ago, I received my reward for allowing myself a moment of guarded optimism:

A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was "neutral" on the program.

The number one reason to be a pessimist: You are never disappointed. I'm sure someday, people will look back fondly to a time when we had a functioning air travel system. Sort of like they do now with trains.

In economic news, we have oil over $90/barrel and steadily creeping upwards. Other juicy bits from the week:

Maryland is dimming the lights on highways.
New-home sales hit 47-year low.
Federal deficit will be 1.5 trillion this year.
Rand Paul proposes to cut the deficit to a mere trillion (cue peals of laughter from the rest of Congress and the mainstream media; that Rand is such a gas!).
Medicare official breaks ranks and states the blindingly obvious; health care reform will not save money.
The US Senate considers allowing states to officially go bankrupt (as opposed to the de facto bankruptcy all of them are in now).
Metal prices are back up to levels that encourage metal thefts.

Meanwhile, the stock market, continuing to demonstrate a complete lack of connection with reality, has doubled its value since it hit bottom with the Dow closing over 12,000 yesterday.

Speaking of Obamacare, a federal judge has ruled key parts of the legislation unconstitutional. Not that something so quaint as the US Constitution will actually stop its implementation. Meanwhile, several states have started muttering about nullification, a polite way of telling the US Congress to fold its health care bill until it's all points, then shove it up their collective ass. (I believe the bill was large enough for a two-page-per-Congresscritter minimum.) Meanwhile meanwhile, HHS continues to hand out waivers to the politically-favored like candy on Halloween. Ya know, it's kinda fun watching Obama's legacy turn to ash.

We are all insane. At least, that's what the creators of the latest version of the DSM want us to believe. I probably should buy stock in the drug companies now that doctors will be able to put every person in the US on Prozac, Wellbutrin et al. Think of how great it will be! America will be one giant Disney Land from sea to shining sea! Nothing but happy faces while we slide down Hubbert's peak!

Well, I'm off to read some happy-clappy predictions about how all 7 billion people on the earth will be able to live like middle class Americans. At least National Geographic has really cool pictures to distract you from the gruesome reality. Have a great day!

Bob Seger is touring again!

Two dates/places announced so far. One is Saginaw Michigan and one in Ohio.

The one in Saginaw is on a Tuesday in March -- no way I can manage that one. Hopefully he will have an extended tour and make it down to Florida. Otherwise I will definitely be watching for when he ends in Michigan and those dates.

It Continues

Tax season continues to drag on. I was talking with a coworker today and mentioned that working tax season is awesome because you know it isn't going to last forever like a "real" job; you have a definite date when it will all be over and you can forget any of it ever happened. Then after nine months, you've forgotten how horrible it was and are all teed up for another run at it.

The biggest challenge so far this year is that I never know how late I'm going to end up working. People show up whenever they want to for their shift (if they bother to show up at all) without any consequences, likely because the manager herself never gets to work on time. Nearly every day I end up running the entire office single-handed (or worse, my "help" is someone with zero knowledge of taxes, the software, how to use a PC...) because someone is late or a no-show. The first week or so, that was no big deal. Now it is. People are getting their W-2's and are pouring into the office in a steady stream.

Flickr has a photo set taken in Detroit that documents what catabolic collapse looks like. It's interesting to see people's reaction when other places in the country experience the inescapable results of 40+ years of economic mismanagement that have been life in the Rust Belt the whole time. Whenever a client who went from productive member of society to parasite (which is nearly every client I've had so far) starts whinging about how bad things are, all I have to do is mention that I'm originally from Flint and they immediately nod and say something about how I know all about it. Yes. Yes I do. Unfortunately, what could have served as a wake-up call has instead become the first over the cliff.

It's good to see that the battle for the hearts and minds in Afghanistan is going well:

After two failed attempts at clearing the village resulted in U.S and Afghan casualties, Flynn’s response was to take the village out. He ordered a mine-clearing line charge, using rocket-propelled explosives to create a path into the center of Tarok Kolache.

And that was for starters, Broadwell writes. Airstrikes from A-10s and B-1s combined with powerful ground-launched rockets on Oct. 6 to batter the village with “49,200 lbs. of ordnance” — which she writes, resulted in “NO CIVCAS,” meaning no civilians dead.

...As Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”

...“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook...

How unreasonable of those goat herders to place more value on their homes than on over-grown children making things go boom. Towelheads are so ungrateful. And it isn't like we won't rebuild their stupid little huts. Someday. Maybe. If we get a round tuit. Don't they understand that we are building a Democracy one flattened village at a time? Graveyard of empires indeed.

Anyone who has played sports has been on both sides of this:

It's been called unsportsmanlike. It's been called ugly. The question now is whether Christian Heritage (Utah) High, which routed West Ridge (Utah) Academy, 108-3, in a girls basketball game last week, actually did anything wrong by blowing out an overwhelmed opponent.

The winning coach did what little he could. With only a nine-person team, he didn't have a full scrub team to put on the floor. He (rightly in my opinion) felt passing the ball around playing keep-away or intentionally tanking on defense would be more humiliating to the losing team than the wildly lopsided score. I'm not sure what the whiners expect. Play with only three players? Play on their knees? Would it have really made any difference if they had? Three points? Three points? No full-court press, no man-to-man defense and you can only manage three points? And you expect the other team to apologize? For what exactly? Having a pulse? Not tying their shoes together at half-time? Not forfeiting at the end of the first quarter to save the fragile egos of the losing team? (From the news story, it sounds more like the "adults" were the ones with the fragile egos, not the kids.) It's called competitive sports. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you win really big. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get pounded into the floor. If you're afraid your poor little tykes can't handle it, don't have sports teams. And as always, the real entertainment is in the comments.

Well, that was interesting. We just experienced our first Florida squall line. I've been watching it coming towards us on the radar for the last couple hours. When it got here, it was pushing some sort of massive pressure wave in front of it that would have busted open our door if I hadn't had the dead bolt thrown. That was followed by a drop in air pressure that made my ears pop and... er... not sure what to call it. Saying it was raining would be like calling Niagara Falls a little water splashing on some rocks. But the whole thing was over in five minutes. Of course, the Energizer Weatherman was jumping around in front of his weather map showing how we were in for a rough night with huge storm after huge storm lasting until four in the morning. He must have access to some Sooper Sekret weather radar, because all I see is about three more hours of plain ol' rain followed by exactly nothing. I guess "five minute gully washer followed by a few hours of perfectly ordinary rain" doesn't sell ad time. [Update: Every single network channel has preempted regular programing to show a downed tree. Holy. Crap. Thank the gods for Hulu.]

Everyone knows that all of us fat people are destroying the planet. We eat too much, shit too much, take up too much space on the subway, reduce fuel economy on jets, and use too much health care with our diabetes and heart disease. Like so many things we all "know" the story proves to be a bit more complicated:

Recent estimates suggest that approximately one in three obese individuals remain metabolically healthy (displaying normal blood glucose, blood lipids, blood pressure, and a healthy cytokine profile) despite their excess weight. These same individuals may have a similar risk of developing heart disease and diabetes as their skinny counterparts and they may actually become less healthy by losing weight!

Every dataset has its outliers; if the story was "one in 1,000 obese individuals remain healthy" there wouldn't have been a story. But one in three? Sounds like over-simplified story-telling is getting in the way of reality. Again.

And from Information is Beautiful:

 

We already have computer generated nonsense getting published in peer-reviewed journals. I wonder how those same programs would do on horoscopes?

I guess I should go mop up the water leaking in the window. Love our cute little ghetto apartment.

In-laws

The in-laws are on their way over here today. Ric has another Saturday off from Liberty Tax, so we are all going to Blue Spring State Park to visit the Manatees. (Blue Spring is a designated Manatee Refuge and the winter home to a growing population of West Indian Manatees)

Of course, we are running around to do some cleaning before they get here! (Ya know: vacuum, dust the major surfaces, dishes from the last two days and the bathrooms)

Just Workin'

Yesterday was likely my last day off for the next 16 weeks or so. As of right now, I'm working six days a week on taxes and the other day at the library. I was hoping to be able to take a day or two off here or there, but a returning tax preparer that the owners have been planning on working full-time was a no-show on her first day. Why they continue to operate under the delusion that this person has any desire to work for them is beyond me. She has consistently ignored all attempts at contact for five months, yet hope still springs eternal. Of course, given the complete lack of traffic in the office so far, it may not matter that much. I think word is getting around the illegal immigrant community that we won't be violating Federal law this year. Nor will we be printing out documents you bring to us on a USB drive, allowing you to use our phone and fax machine anytime you want for free, or calling your bank to clear up all your bounced checks for you. (I had requests for all of the above, some multiple times, in the last week.)

Other fun stuff that comes with working in the ghetto: listening to the rats running around fornicating in the ceiling, cleaning rat shit and piss off every horizontal surface in an office that I was told had been thoroughly cleaned, watching drug deals going down in the parking lot, and trying to talk to a client while someone stands right outside the window next to my desk screaming "Fuck You!" for ten minutes non-stop into a cell phone. This place just keeps gettin' better.

Debbie's work has (thankfully) taken off; she is booking more cabins now in one day that she was doing in a week back around Christmas. It helps that her employer goes through employees like Lindsey Lohan tearing into a bag of coke. Another one bit the dust just this week, further reducing the competition for bookings.

Other than work, we haven't done a thing. We want to try to find a day we can take my parents up to see the manatees, but I'm not sure when that's going to happen, unless we do it later in the day after I get out of work. I guess there's always next year.

The big story of the last week was the shooting in Arizona. The politicians did (and continue to do) what politicians always do; use any and every tragedy for personal political gain. The situation is really as simple as it is tragic: Jared Loughner is criminally insane. It doesn't matter what nonsense he spouts on his blog or on Youtube, what excuses he cooked up in his deranged mind to justify killing other human beings, what political agenda the media can concoct from the rantings of a likely-schizophrenic. The. Dude. Is. Nuts. Full stop. No one of any political stripe or party affiliation is responsible for the actions of someone whose mind has gone off the rails. And as far as the "toxic political atmosphere" is concerned, I would love to know when this supposed Golden Age of civil political discourse existed. Politicians have always had the morals of junkyard dogs, since the invention of human government. Some of the cartoons from the early years of this country couldn't even be printed in a modern newspaper. In 1804, the Vice-President of the United States shot and killed the former Secretary of the Treasury. Compared to that, what exactly is so horrifying about the passionless nonsense bandied about on the 24-hours news networks and talk radio on topics of no importance? Has no one noticed that it is all theater? That once in power, every politician toes the same line? Does anyone believe the droll stupidity of Sarah Palin, delivered with less skill than that of a bad middle-school debate team, could inspire a murder rampage? Maybe it's best to mourn the dead, move on, and leave the politics out of it.

And forgotten in all the political posturing is what we really need to talk about:

Madhouses are expensive. Moreover, many were confined to them long after they were no longer dangerous to themselves or others -- "cured" manics and schitzes were very useful as trustees and unpaid orderlies in madhouses, and were often kept long after they legally should have been released, often because the doctors couldn't figure out how they would live outside the asylum environment. There was a wave of sentiment for letting the non-dangerous mad out into society, and this certainly resonated with legislatures since it would save a lot of money. In theory there would be "mental health" clinics for outpatient servicing of the recently released; in practice those proved to be too expensive and went away even as the number of clients for them increased by an order of magnitude.

Thus we had, and have, many who in earlier times would have been considered mad turned out on the streets. Others were released with medications that kept them calm, but the side effects induced many to go off their meds. We all know the results. Watch the relevant Law and Order episodes for more.

I haven't any profound observations on this dilemma: the price of liberty is that many who are considered mad are allowed to live their mad lives among us. Note that it was not all that long ago that many behaviors, including homosexuality, were considered treatable disorders. Note that there are very strange protesters who act in ways that others consider utterly mad. So there are counter protesters to the protesters, and sometimes one and sometimes another faction appears to be insane. Once in a while both protesters and counter protesters seem to be stark raving mad.

Allowing the non-violent madmen to live among us is a price of liberty; and allowing physicians and police to lock people away without judge and jury because they are mad is conceding a power to the authorities that often proves unwise, and sometimes is simply an adjunct to tyranny. 

The Enlightened used cases of abuse as an excuse to close the asylums while simultaneously discovering the right of the insane to live on the streets, defecate in doorways, bath in public fountains and eventually die a painful death by starvation, exposure or drug overdose. Not in the areas of our cities frequented by The Enlightened, of course. How dare anyone suggest they be daily confronted with the predictable results of their own actions. And yet, the abuses were very real; we all know what effect absolute power has on individuals as well as institutions.

Speaking of messes with no easy answers, Haiti one year after the earthquake is not much different than Haiti a couple weeks after the earthquake: masses of people living in tents; inadequate food, water and sanitation; bodies being dug out of rubble piles; roving rape gangs; ineffective foreign aid. Instead of worrying about someone else's mess on the other side of the world, maybe we should take care of the mess in our own front yard. A mess we played a significant role in creating. Oh! I forgot; Haiti doesn't have oil. My bad.

World food prices are up significantly. Good thing we don't include food in our inflation figures; otherwise everyone would realize they are paying more for their groceries. Anyone with an ounce of common sense and a calculator has been saying for 40 years that it is not possible for the entire world to live the American Middle-Class Lifestyle®. This is exactly what was predicted to happen if the attempt was made. Same story with oil. Which is also not included in government inflation figures. How convenient.

Elsewhere in the economy, don't expect housing or anything related to it to recover in 2011:

"2011 is going to be the peak," said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac Inc. The firm predicts 1.2 million homes will be repossessed this year.

The blistering pace of foreclosures this year will top 2010, when a record 1 million homes were lost, RealtyTrac said Thursday.

I'd like to know the rationale behind the 2011-is-the-peak hope-speak. Is everyone who still has a job in a year going to run out and buy second and third homes? Are banks going to simply forgive all their mortgage debt? Are those foreclosed on going to jump back into the real estate market next year? Are the banks going to stop closing long enough to start lending money? Are the all the states' Attorney Generals going to stop hounding the banks over mishandled paperwork? Or is this a back-handed prediction that the 5 million households behind on their mortgage will continue to grind away at the economy for the next four years or so instead of all going down at once?

Holiday spending hit a new record in 2010!! As long as you ignore inflation. And the extra 8 million people added to the US population since 2007. And the discounting. And the compression of the prior two months' spending (and likely January and February's as well) into the two-month Christmas Shopping Season®. Other than that, it was a great year to be in retail!!

And The Bernanke is hopeful! Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-LAAAAA!!!

Speaking of civil political discourse, someone is testing mail bombs in Maryland. These cannot be mistaken for serious attempts at blowing something up. I expect something big in a couple months after everyone lets their guard down.

And in climate news, the British government wants to know why it spends millions of pounds on weather predictions that are never correct while a couple dudes with laptops get it right year after year. I'd say it had something to do with observer bias on the part of the Met Office climatologists, but we all know those selfless public servants working inside the government bureaucracy would never allow politics to influence their work.

NASA has announced the next-to-last shuttle launch will happen on February 24, 2011, more than three months late. All the cracks are now thought to be related to a bad batch of metal. NASA is testing a repair to see if it actually fixes the problem or makes it worse. I'm not sure we should do this.

Well, time to hit the shower and go practice my ABC's.

Job!

It's official: Another tax season. I'm currently standing in as the office manager given that the person that was expected to do the job seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. I start tomorrow and as of right now will be working six 8-hour days a week. I'm sure that won't last long, but not a bad start. The pay sucks, but that's going to be the case no matter where I work. A real live job. For the next 16 weeks, anyway.

Job?

Not to get everyone excited for no reason (again), but I may have paying work starting as early as Saturday. Paying work: what a concept.

Not much else going on other than a tax class that is of limited utility given that the IRS has not finalized the changes Congress made to the tax code around Christmas. And from what I've seen of those changes, there will be some unhappy people when they see their shrunken refunds. Add in the doubling of the bank fees for refund anticipation loans and I'm predicting a very interesting tax season. We are already seeing a great deal of hostility from people walking through the door and no one has even done a 2010 tax return yet. Tings be gettin' ugly in da ghetto.

And that's all I really have time for. Off to day five of tax class.

Happy New Year!!!

It's 2011 and we find ourselves in Florida. It is currently sunny and 75 degrees outside with people outdoors enjoying the day off.  We are considering a trip somewhere today or tomorrow (when the temps are supposed to top 80), but given that today is pretty much over (it will be dark in a couple hours) and tomorrow I work at the library right during prime time (1:30-4:30), we will most likely stay home and do some cleaning and organizing, or maybe some shopping given that we only have chips and Klondike Bars for lunch.

So it's a New Year and everyone is supposed to give a wrap-up or a top-ten list or make some predictions and/or review how last year's predictions turned out.

The wrap-up is pretty easy: Personally, 2010 was another giant turd for us. Not as big a turd as 2009, but a giant steaming one none the less. At least we got out of the snow in time for winter. I think we are going to enjoy Florida; just not the particular part of Florida we are currently in. Don't misunderstand; I've spent my entire life living on the wrong side of the tracks (both metaphorically and, in the case of our place in Flint, literally), but this place is just, well, yeah. The problem is, as always, money. As in we don't have enough of it to live anywhere else except in the ghetto. That won't be changing until I find some kind of job. Just like last year, the only thing that seems to be working out involves tax preparation. Again. Same gig as last year only less money and probably not full time. Like most people south of the Mason-Dixon, the people in charge move slower than molasses in January, so no one has any idea what is going on in spite of tax season being two weeks away. Next week is the 2010 tax change class, so maybe I can get some answers then. After tax season is over, I have no idea. Every job here has hundreds of applicants, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Peaking outside of our little Ric-and-Debbie bubble, 2010 was a bad year to work in the energy sector. Things started with an explosion at a Middletown, CT power plant that killed five people. Twenty-nine miners were killed in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in early April, only to be pushed off the front page by the 11 killed in the Gulf oil spill. (The total coal mine deaths for 2010 hit 48, the highest in nearly 20 years, but they were virtually ignored in favor of dead shrimp and oiled beaches in the Gulf. The priorities of the news media are nothing if not endlessly fascinating.) All of these have been blamed on intentional disregard for safety due to constant pressure to go faster, better, cheaper. As everyone knows, you can't have all three; the energy industry defaulted to faster and cheaper with the expected result. We blame the usual suspects; greedy company owners/stockholders, short-sited managers engaged in ass-covering, insufficient/inept/corrupt regulators. Here's my take: look in a mirror. Those people died because we are a nation of wastrels.

As far as top-whatever lists, I don't have one of my own, so I'll just coast on the work of others. Gotta love them internets. The first goes along with the whole job-hunting theme that predominated 2010 for us. We've all been there: You're in an interview when out of left field, the interviewer comes up with the most ludicrous, off-topic, nothing-to-do-with-anything question. Well, the good folks at glassdoor.com have compiled a list of the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions of 2010. If you want to know how people without the common sense to come in out of the rain ended up running our banks, one look at the questions they were asked in their interview explains it all. On a more positive note, we have the Top Ten Scientific Breakthroughs of 2010. My personal number one spot is a tie between water on the moon and knowing what color the feathers were on dinosaurs.

I'm not big on predictions because in a chaotic universe, being correct means that a) you made predictions so obvious or so general you have no chance of being wrong; b) you are good at twisting events to match your predictions; or c) you got lucky. In spite of that, I took leave of my senses last year and made some anyway. Let's look at how poorly I did:

Bachelor degree that cost 10's of thousands and took 27 years to finish helping get me a job. Um... yea. Parents; if your kid wants to go to college, encourage them to instead do something that may prove useful in their life. Like taking up curling.

The War Against All Rational Thought continues to be waged by the global warming hysterics against anyone who dares to question orthodoxy. The public seems to be taking note of the arrogance and lack of integrity among the politicized "scientists" that dominate the IPCC and the UNFCCC. My fear was that as awareness that political manipulations have trumped the science became widespread, the politicians would do what politicians always do: abuse their power to double down rather than change course. This is one case where I would have loved to have been wrong. Expect more of the same in 2011.

Obama: After signing two of the most disastrous pieces of legislation in the history of these United States then watching his own party gutted in the mid-terms, Obama seems to have withdrawn into some sort of shell. The good news: Obama is still on track to a one-term presidency. The bad news: two more wasted years that we can ill afford. Expect another year of inaction in DC in any matter that doesn't directly inflated the Swiss bank accounts of Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, et al.

Our personal and the national economy will pick up in 2010. Heh. Do I even need to go there? Sure; the fat-cats got fatter and the stock market, in response to direct manipulation by the Fed and the Treasury had a good year. In fact, stocks had a great year. Too bad every other indicator went nowhere or dropped in 2010. I predict that 2011 will be more of the same; the politically connected will do well while the rest of us struggle. Meanwhile the experts say that consumers will finally shake off their funk, quit worrying about that $800 billion in outstanding credit card debt and hit the mall. (When financial experts talk about "pent up consumer demand," what they really mean is "those idiot marks aren't borrowing enough money from us to buy crap they don't need.") My prediction assumes that people who have recently experienced financial near-death or complete financial death, will act in their own rational, short-term interest; while the experts' predictions assume that people are complete idiots. Early indications are that the idiots have it.

One thing I love about the internet; I can always find someone with a darker outlook than I have. A flock of black swans....

I had expected us to stay in New Hampshire for at least all of 2010. That obviously didn't happen. We knew we wanted to go south and we were aiming to get close to some part of my family. We just didn't expect things to happen quite so fast. One minute we're all settled into our New Hampshire apartment, the next I'm loading up a Penske truck for the fifth time in four years. While we expect the move to benefit us financially in the long run (our Florida rent is just over half what we were paying in New Hampshire), in the short run, it killed us. But it is done and we have partially recovered already. I expect tax season should get us back where we started.

I said that in 2010, computers and the internet will continue to embed themselves more deeply into our lives even as we become less and less aware of them. This was certainly true in big ways and little ways, but this was pretty much a water-will-continue-to-run-downhill-in-2010 prediction. What I didn't predict was the first proven use of malware as a weapon. Stuxnet broke new ground in many ways, none of them good. It also showed that even scary-smart people, working in a secure facility where breaking protocol didn't just get you fired, but could earn you prison or even a death sentence, routinely violate basic computer network hygiene. And that should scare the frickin' pants off everyone.

As I expected, Spirit rover went silent during the Martian winter and has yet to be heard from. There is still a thin hope among the rover team that it will recover during the Martian summer (March 2011), but it's not a hope I share. Still, a 90-Martian-day mission that runs for 2,210 Martian days isn't a bad bit of engineering. Meanwhile, the Opportunity rover just keeps on rolling.

On the other, not-so-shiny side of the NASA coin, we have the sorry state of human space flight. The last Shuttle flight is currently scheduled for February 2011, but the next-to-last flight has been delayed, pushed back, then delayed some more due to structural defects where the external tank mates with the orbiter. I doubt this is anything new; rather I'm guessing that it is yet-another serious problem that has been reported repeatedly by the engineers doing the real work and ignored by the put-on-a-happy-face management. Just like the O-rings and shedding insulation that killed two other orbiter crews, and the gods only know how many other serious problems that have not (yet) caused catastrophic failure. If this is the best we can do, we don't deserve human space flight capability. Fortunately, the fine folks over at Space-X are doing great things with the Falcon Nine.

OK, enough of that crap. On to some 2010 numbers. Between the two of us, we read 138 books over the last year. That's an unexpectedly high number even for us, especially for a relocation year. Probably not a record, but definitely in the top ten. Unlike our reading, our blogging has slacked off with only 233 posts. That puts 2010 dead center of the pack; of the seven full calender years we've had this thing, three years had more and three had fewer. I expect the downward trend to continue with us settling somewhere between 50 and 100 posts per year. The number of visitors has also fallen off as well, which is totally expected. We've also lost the vast majority of visits from people hitting Blogger's Next Blog button. I expect Facebook, Twitter, etc. are to blame for that. People have only so much time and why waste it reading a complete stranger's opinion about Obamacare when you can read what people you actually know in real life are up to. Over 85 percent of our readers are running Microsoft PC's, and of those, nearly three-quarters are still on XP. It seems the adoption of each new generation of Windows takes longer with each iteration. That can't be good for Microsoft. Yet while Microsoft has had trouble getting people to upgrade their OS, the users have shown themselves more than willing to upgrade their browser. IE8 is the top dawg around these parts by a wide margin. Firefox is a distant second and Chrome is lost in the noise. It should be interesting to see what happens when IE9 (which only runs on Vista and Win7) and Firefox 4 (which as far as I've heard, will also run on XP) are released in 2011. Will this be the year that The Empire Strikes Back or the Return of the Jedi?

Anyway, that should be enough for a while.

Happy New Year!

Make it a great one --- or at least a little bit better than last year.

Happy New Year to all!

A Manatee Christmas

Christmas was sunny and in the mid-70's, so we did what we were planning to do last weekend and ventured out to find Blue Springs Park. Like most of Florida, the whole place looked like the set for an episode of Scooby Doo; neither of us would have been surprised to hear Velma exclaim, "Jinkies! I have a clue!" (Click on any of the photos for bigger versions):



We saw our first real live Florida Alligator:



A dare-devil Turtle (Look ma! No feet!):



It wouldn't be Christmas without a partridge in a pear tree:



And the stars of the show; the manatees:



The manatees hang out in the hot spring when the water in the St John's river gets cold. There aren't too many yet; they'll be more or less stacked in there in January and February. My parents want to go see them when they get done enjoying December in Michigan and get back down here to Florida. [Edited to finish what I was trying to communicate: We should have better manatee pics in a month or so when we take my parents to Blue Springs. This is what happens when you trying to write at 1am.]

A while back, Debbie got to chance to tour the Norwegian Epic. From the outside, the ship looks like the unholy spawn of an oil tanker and an aircraft carrier:



But the chandelier is cool:



and the carpet is guaranteed to increase requests for sea-sick pills by 70%:



I also finally got around to putting up the photos I took of the inside of our apartment back in August. I'm nothing if not timely and efficient.

And Mickey's big hand says it is waaaaaaay past my bedtime.

Flotsam

In all the random debris on the Internets, the occasional jem:

Next year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occur on the same day, February 2nd.

As Air America Radio pointed out, "It is an ironic juxtaposition of events: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication while the other involves a groundhog."

I'm sitting here in our ghetto apartment with no running water for the fifth time since we moved here in August. I have no idea what the problem is, but given all the crap we had to go through to simply get the kitchen sink hooked up to the sewer instead of running out on the floor, I can guess.

And just to keep things interesting, the power goes out at least once a week.

Yea. Gotta love the ghetto.

Merry Christmas!!!!

Merry Christmas to all you wonderful people out there. Wish we could spend the holiday season with you. Hugs to all!

Monkey bread is in the oven and almost done -- our traditional Christmas breakfast.

Merry Christmas!!

I'm posting this now just in case we get too involved in the Criminal Minds marathon to post later.

On Christmas Eve, 42 years ago, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first humans to directly observe the far side of the moon. While they were there, they took what has become one of the most iconic photographs ever:

I was one of those privileged to witness the first humans walk on another planet. It's looking more and more likely that I will also be witness to the last. We seem to have lost our nerve, but at least the Chinese are running hard; lets hope they can out-run Hubbert's Peak.

On a lighter note, how geeks get marshmallows into their hot chocolate:



Merry Christmas!!

Almost Something Interesting

I almost had something interesting to write about, but we got shut down by some serious rain. Given the general lack thereof and local concerns about drought, it was hard to complain, but it still sucked slightly. We had planned to make a run out to the local hot springs where the manatees spend the winter. Would have been cool. Ah well. I doubt the state park will be open over Christmas, so maybe sometime in January if I'm not buried in taxes.

This is from the Library of Congress photo archives. Apparently a cat wandered in during a photo shoot.

That's one cool cat.

From the What World Do You Live In department:

According to a new study conducted by the Parents Television Council (PTC), Hollywood is shockingly obsessed with sexualizing teen girls, to the point where underage female characters are shown participating in an even higher percentage of sexual situations than their adult counterparts: 47 percent to 29 percent respectively.

This isn't a Hollywood problem. This is a social problem. Teen girls are sexualized in every way possible in our culture: clothes, magazines, movies, TV, books. Advertisers use sex to sell useless crap to them, and use them as sex objects to sell useless crap to everyone else. Meanwhile, our government works tirelessly to jail any girl caught taking a photo of herself in anything more revealing than a chadri. And people wonder why so many teen girls have mental problems.

If you or I were to dump our trash some random place, we all know what the government would do to us. As if it were needed, more proof that our overlords expect far less of themselves than they do of us:

Bush Stadium in downtown Indianapolis was built in 1931 as a field for Negro and minor-league baseball teams. Today, it’s a historical relic holding hundreds of rusting vehicles traded in under “cash for clunkers,” a spooky memorial to waste.

The perfect monument to the stupidity that flows like an open sewer from Washington DC.

Another great idea in crowdsourcing:

DriveMeCrazy, developed by Shazam co-founder Philip Inghelbrecht, is a voice-activated app that encourages drivers to report bad behavior by reciting the offender’s license plate into a smartphone. The poor sap gets “flagged” and receives a virtual “ticket,” which may not sound like much until you realize all the information — along with date, time and location of the “offense” — is sent to the DMV and insurance companies.

Yea, I don't see any problems here. For every report of someone driving impaired (drunk, texting, arguing with kids in the back seat, reporting to DriveMeCrazy, etc.), there we be fifty from the steady line of asshats acting out scenes from Grand Theft Auto on their morning commute complaining about everyone else getting in their way. I predict this will last until the first lawsuit against any DMV or insurance company stupid enough to use this data.

One reason why I feel voting is a complete waste of time is that so much of what the government does is no longer controlled by elected officials. The FCC's insistence that it must fix a problem that doesn't exist is one high-profile example.

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling. 

This isn't a case where Congress or the courts left things a muddle and the agency needs to make it up as they go along. That happens every time Congress passes one of its 1900-page bills that no one has bothered to read or the Supremes hand down a decision more opaque than their ridiculous robes. No, this is a case where Congress and the DC Court of Appeals directly told the FCC, "Do Not. Do. This." And they do it anyway. Regardless of your position on net neutrality (and nothing the FCC is considering sounds like net neutrality; more like rent-seeking), this is terribly disturbing. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's name has never appeared on any ballot in any election. If he cannot defer to those who have, he needs to be removed.

Speaking of disturbing (and sexualizing teens), Amazon has stopped selling a number of books that contain fictionalized accounts of incest. This includes deleting books already purchased by Kindle owners from their book archive and refusing to refund the purchase price. Here is the dark side of e-books and the cloud. Granted, this particular instance isn't likely to garner a great deal of sympathy, and it is likely that "Erotic Incest Fiction" isn't a category Amazon is eager to blaze across its home page. And as a retailer, Amazon has every right to not sell any particular title or author for any reason or no reason whatsoever. It has the right to remove any title or author that it currently sells for any reason or no reason whatsoever. It DOES NOT have the right to remove previously-purchased items from individual's Kindles for any reason, no more than it has a right to break into my home and remove a physical book that I purchased and Amazon later decided to stop carrying. Sorry Amazon; you are completely, absolutely, 100% wrong on this one. And before anyone gets all prudish, I do find it interesting that Amazon continues to stock countless versions of a popular book that contains what it claims is a factual account of incest, involving likely-underage girls and their father.

Well, time to go apply at potential employers that I'll never hear from again.

Christmas Economy

Before getting to the economics, more from the stupid season files:

Atheists vs. Christians: Score-keeping taken to the absurd.
Nina Totenburg apologizes for speaking the word "Christmas".
Rescue a deer that breaks through the ice, get a fine.

Here in the United States, jobs are still in the toilet with the worst states being the usual suspects: Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, California, Nevada, etc. None of this is news to anyone looking for a job. Any openings here have 100's if not 1000's of applicants. The last time the library I volunteer at had an opening for someone to shelve books (the very bottom entry-level job that I do for free), they had over 100 applicants, most with Masters degrees. One factoid from the article that I found interesting: The employment hotspot of America is North Dakota with 3.8% unemployment. Maybe we should move.... I also got a giggle:

Another report showed the economy is poised to pick up in 2011. The index of leading economic indicators increased 1.1 percent in November, the biggest gain in eight months, the New York-based Conference said today.

Would that be the same index that showed the economy picking up in 2010? I think we need to go back to chicken entrails.

More banks closed on Friday including one in Florida. I don't know about other states, but the problem here has moved beyond residential real estate (which isn't doing well, just less bad) to commercial real estate. Plenty of empty strip malls and abandoned projects everywhere you look. If the recession is over, you can't tell it from driving around Seminole county.

Cities and states are in trouble. Tax receipts from sales, property and income taxes are all in free-fall. A logical person might think that all the extra money raked in during the boom decade would be enough to carry through a couple bad years, but like a bunch of ignorant children, not only was all the extra money spent, record amounts were borrowed besides. Perfect.

Our clueless overlords at the Federal Reserve keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. What they have managed to do is shove food and energy prices up, both of which are excluded from the inflation figures used to calculate such trivial bits like the COLA for Social Security benefits. Ya know; because food and energy are such a small share of household budgets and not nearly as important as flat screen TV's and iPhones (which are included).

An article about Michigan and how the decline in auto manufacturing has decimated the economy there. No big surprises to anyone who has lived there other than the over-educated who continue to believe in the fantasy of re-training:

Gluskin Sheff's Rosenberg says that if he were in charge "I'd have a shovel in the hands of the long-term unemployed from 8am to noon and from 1pm to 5pm I'd have them studying algebra, physics and geometry."

Yea, right. Because those on the left side of the bell curve are so good at algebra, physics and geometry. Even assuming we live in Lake Wobegon where everyone is above average, just what are these newly-minted geniuses going to do? Instead of trying to turn everyone into Stephen Hawking, how about just teaching them how to add? To read? To tie their shoes? To show up on time? To shut up, sit down and listen? I'll make it real easy: How about teaching them the alphabet so I don't have to spend half my time at the library cleaning up behind the illiterate high school volunteer who thinks M comes after D? Oh right; that's "drill-and-kill" learning and we can't have that interfering with Self-Esteem Training.

Meanwhile, the Europeans continue their death spiral with the Euro looking like a worser idea by the minute, France looking to lose its AAA bond rating and riots in Greece, the UK and Italy. Kunstler may be right; the idea of Europe being the world's tourist destination may itself be going on holiday.

Merry Christma... Oops! Sorry about that! Happy Saturnalia!!

Climate

Here in Florida, we are getting back up around normal temperatures after a week in the deep-freeze. Which means getting back to high-60's/low-70's instead of high's in the 50's and lows in the 30's. I realize that's a joke to people who live up in the tundra in places like northern Michigan, but our apartment got a bit nippy; contractors in Florida assume that because it doesn't get very cold that buildings don't need such amenities as insulation, double-glazed windows, exterior doors with less than an inch-wide crack around them, functional heat, etc. Europe is still having a mini ice-age complete with people camping for days at airports trying to get on a flight home. (Remember when snow in England was a thing of the past? You would think the global warming hysterics could get something right even if by accident.) China's coal stocks are running low due in large part to politics as well as the cold weather increasing demand on the centralized heating systems.

All this should be expected, of course. Our overlords were in Cancun discussing our future. They thought they would be safe from the Gore Effect this year by 1) not having Al Gore at the conference and 2) holding it it the tropics instead of Europe like last year. It didn't work. Cancun set record low temperatures for six days straight during COP16. And unlike the fake record low temps elsewhere (lowest temp since 1998 or 1973 is not a record regardless of what the hysterical Energizer Bunny weatherman says), these were all-time low temps. I've yet to figure out the point of these conferences: The richest 0.00001% of the people from all over the world get together to generate more CO2 with their private jets, limousines, built-to-order hotels and conference centers, and flown-in food, booze and whores, than will be saved by the Mexican president's announced ban on incandescent light bulbs in 100 years. This is going to save the planet how? A four-part series from the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley gives a flavor for what these little shin-digs are really about:

From Nopenhagen to Yes We Cancun
Yes, we have no bananas
The abdication of the West
Mercury rising

And while we are on the subject of alarmists and never getting it right, global cyclone activity continues to defy the hysterical WORST YEAR EVAAAR predictions made by the climate politicians. The crazy old lady at the county fair with buggy eyes and a crystal ball is better than these guys.

14 Years Ago Today

December 20, 1996: Carl Sagan Dies.

I remember watching Cosmos. Surreptitiously, of course; Sagan is only one letter away from Satan, a common argument made by teachers in both my school and church as to why good little Christian boys shouldn't watch such filth. Seriously. Anyway, I re-watch the series on Hulu at regular intervals. It has aged well.

Understanding Southerners

Lego Antikythera Mechanism

Once again, Lego Rocks!

Sports Video of the Year

Yea. I could so do that.

The North Point iBand

This is the kind of stuff that gives me serious Apple-lust:

The Problem with Work

Other than it being work, of course:

Bohemian Rhapsody

I don't think I'd want to live in a universe devoid of a Jim Henson.

But Seriously...

I'm past due for a normal post. Not that we've done anything other than freeze our tukases (what is the plural of tukas? Tukases? Tuki? Anyway...). We did venture out yesterday to spend the day with my parents before they head up to the Great Frozen North. They were in their church's Christmas program last night, and they've been after us to come hear their pastor. So we dragged our butts out of our nice warm bed at 6:30am and drove over in time to meet them at their place and do the morning church thing, then joined the rest of the Baptists at the buffet. We did the gab-gab until it was time to head back for the program. It's not a very big church, but the program was a fairly large, well-done production. We had a lot of fun and managed to get back to the apartment by 10:30pm.

And that's the highlight of our exciting week in Sanford, Florida.

Speaking of Sanford: Several numb-nuts broke into a local jewelery store with sledgehammers. A number of errors were made by said numb-nuts. First, their brilliant heist was witnessed by a long line of people with their children waiting to see Santa. Second, they made no attempt to avoid being ID'ed by the store's video cameras. Third, they helpfully left behind blood samples, fingerprints and the sledgehammer. And to cap off a fine day of stupidity, they made off with mostly cheap junk the store carries to sell to numb-nuts.

Just in time for the holiday driving season, oil is poking its head above $90/barrel in some markets. The current blast of global warming over the entire eastern half of the US certainly won't be helping.

FoxNews has a good summary of the Stuxnet code that crippled Iran's uranium processing. How it got into a secure facility with no connection to the internet is instructive: It infected home PC's physically located around the plant and waited for someone who worked there to bring documents home to work on. I'm not sure what bright boy thought it was a good idea to allow write-able media to be carried in and out of a "secure" facility, but I wouldn't want to be them. The $1 million question is still unanswered: Who wrote it? It must be killing them to know they wrote one of the greatest hacks of all time, but can't talk about it.

'Tis the stupid season: The nativity must go, but the Menorah can stay because it isn't a religious symbol. I'm sure that will come as an immense surprise to practicing Jews everywhere. And Santa gets fired after 20 years on the job for telling "naughty" jokes. What did he say that was soooo horribly offensive?

"When I ask the older people who sit on my lap if they've been good and they say, 'Yes,' I say, 'Gee, that's too bad,' " Toomey said Monday.

"Then, if they ask why Santa is so jolly, I joke that it's because I know where all the naughty boys and girls live."

I'm not sure why an adult willing to lap-dance a complete stranger in a red suit could be offended by a joke far more mild than the constant toilet humor and sex jokes in a typical SpongeBob episode. It sure is nice to know that every other problem in the world has been solved.

Two more stories from the Schools-Are-Day-Prisons category: Riots in NYC high school after principal bans taking a piss at school. With any luck, they'll burn down the school with the principal in it. And a school is reversing a ban on "dangerous" writing implements. I realize that schools stopped teaching quite some time ago (obvious from how well our best and brightest compare to the rest of the world), but most at least pretend. By banning writing implements, this bold principal had dropped the facade and completed the transition from school to day-prison.

Uh... say what? Oh. It seems the ban stemmed from something far more serious:

The superintendent provided another fact by noting that "[t]he student who was found with an altered pen was suspended ...." What diabolical instrument had this pen been altered to create?

A spitwad-shooter.

"The student showed me how it worked," said the local police chief, who said he had been approached by the student's parents after the boy was suspended for having the "altered pen." Based on his testing, the chief did not think the device posed any great threat. "I'd be surprised if the spitball traveled 4 feet," he said. "And at that, I'm not even sure it had any spit on it."

In these post-9/11 days, though, you can't be too careful. No, actually, yes you can. Searching underpants is being too careful, and so is suspending a sixth-grader for possession of a spitwad-shooting device. The superintendent suggested darkly that the police chief might have had a different opinion if he knew more about the "incident," but he did not elaborate, so I guess we'll never know.

Ye. Flippin'. Gods. No wonder alcohol and drug use is rampant in our schools; it's the only thing keeping the students from beating school administrators senseless.

Everyone knows that Bill Clinton is a media whore. That a sitting president would intentionally share a stage with the man says a great deal about said president's judgment. That he would walk off the stage and leave Clinton alone with a room-full of reporters is, well, I guess fascinating is the kindest thing I can say. We're being ruled by a complete rookie.

Obamacare is such a great deal that 222 companies employing over 1.5 million employees, including several of the unions that pushed Obamacare, have applied for and been granted waivers to keep them from dropping coverage completely. Under the new Obamacare guidelines, our insurance that we already couldn't afford will increase by another $150 per month. Remind me again how all this was supposed to make my life better?

Economic recap:

Home values likely to take another leg down in 2011.
Cities and towns swamped with property tax appeals as governments continue to ignore reality.
Food stamp rolls continue to increase.
Unemployment won't be going down anytime soon.

On the positive side, our completely-rational, totally-not-rigged, perfect-reflection-of-reality stock market is heading back up.

Well, that's enough holiday cheer for one day.

Camel Crash

Why using live animals in a Christmas program is a bad idea:



Local EMS says no one called 911, so one can assume that camel and crowd were both OK.

Tis the Season...

...for silly YouTube videos. How do monks who have taken a vow of silence sing the Hallelujah Chorus?



Now you know.

What Religion Should I Be?

Hard Freeze!!

Like most of the eastern half of the US, we're at the leading edge of around 10 days of below-average temperatures. Against my better judgment, I flipped on the local news last night to see what was up. As usual with any local news show, the weather was the lead story. The following may or may not have actually happened during our local station's 11:00pm "news" broadcast:

(Scene: Bob, dressed in a suit he stole from Herb Tarlek, stands in front of a color-coded map of east-central Florida. One line in the pattern of his plaid jacket is the same color as the green screen behind him, causing little bitty strips of color-coded east-central Florida to appear to be shining through his body.)

We're in for a coooooold night! From here (gesturing wildly at color-coded map) alllll the way down here is gonna see a Hard Freeze! And over here is gonna have a Freeze! Not a Hard Freeze like from here allll the way down here! But it's still gonna be a Freeze! This dark blue area from here alllll the way down here is the Hard Freeze Area! This area of lighter blue is the Freeze Area! Not a Hard Freeze! Just a Freeze! (Launches into 10-minute dissertation in which he utterly fails to explain the difference between a "Hard Freeze!" and a mere "Freeze!")

For more, we go on location to Babsy Bimbo! Take it away, Babsy!

(Scene changes to barely-dressed "reporter" standing in the parking lot of one of the innumerable abandoned strip malls.)

Thanks, Bob! (giggle) It sure is coooooold out here! These babies (waggling breasts at the camera) could cut glass! (giggle) I can see my breath! (Exhales loudly) Can you see that?!?! (Exhales loudly again) I don't know if you can see that, but you know it's cold when you can see your breath! (Pulls out giant clown-sized thermometer showing the current temp as 45 degrees.) As you can see, Bob, we're closing in on the freezing point out here!

Back to you Bob! (giggle)

(Scene changes back to Bob.)

Thank you, Babsy, for that insightful reporting from ground-zero of tonight's Hard Freeze! And watch where you point those high-beams! You could put someone's eye out!!

(Camera shifts to the main "news" desk occupied by the obligatory pair of androgens ostensibly of opposite genders. Male-ish androgen speaking:)

And now for some sad news. Today, a school bus driver became agitated after learning, three days from his retirement, that his entire pension fund had been given to Goldman-Sachs executives as part of their year-end bonuses. In his blind rage, he drove through a group of children waiting to get on his bus. Just so sad. (Pauses exactly three beats with exaggerated sad face, then flashes a 100-Watt Smile® off camera.) So Bob, why don't you update us on tonight's Hard Freeze!

(Camera shifts back to Bob.)

Thanks, Male-ish Androgen! (At this point, whoever is running the green screen gets out of synch with Bob's script as he attempts to quickly run through current temps, current wind chills, predicted lows and predicted low wind chills. Sensing that things are going horribly wrong, he stops mid-sentence and begins to repeat the entire Hard-Freeze-vs.-Freeze bit from the top of the weather forecast.) ...and we're warning everyone! Both the Hard Freeze and Freeze areas! Cold! Parents! Bus stops! Children! COLD!

(Camera shifts back to now-thoroughly-confused pair of news-desk androgens. Female-ish androgen speaking:)

Um... OK, Bob.... Moving on! Now to prove how relevant and internet-savvy we are, we have a YouTube clip of some German moron who was injured doing something moronic as a participant on a moronic German reality TV show! We realize that with 500,000,000 views, it's a near-certainty that our entire audience has seen this a dozen times. But we have to fill up air time somehow!!

At this point, I shut off the idiot-box, recalling why I don't bother watching the local news....

Computer History

This is what a 5MB drive looked like in 1956:

The drive consists of 50 24-inch platters running at 1,200 rpm, and likely dimmed lights over several city blocks when being spun up.

The photo is from a Wired article listing Steve Wozniak's 9 Favorite Gadgets. Having used several of them, I don't know if I'd consider them "favorites" so much as "necessary evils."

How to Conduct an Interview

A great deal of material on life, death, regrets, cancer, and Pascal's Wager.

...and now it's December

Winter must be here. I wore a long-sleeved t-shirt with my shorts this morning, and we had to get our summer blanket out of storage because it was getting a bit cool with just the sheet. Next week, the highs will only be in the upper 50's. I don't know if we'll survive. In the event we get snowed in, we (along with about 7.3 million other people) hit Walmart to stock up on staples (chips, Snickers bars, Lucky Charms, and a ham). We were mildly disappointed that we only saw one guy who should be featured at People of Walmart; the cold weather seems to have forced everyone else to cover up. A Saturday trip to Wally World normally serves up at least a half-dozen candidates.

Other than that, not much happened this week. I thought I had a temp assignment for the next few weeks, but given that it starts Monday morning and no one has called me with such minor details like who I'm supposed to be working for, where they are located or what time I'm supposed to be there, I guess I didn't get the job. Ah well; gives me more time to work on my last tax test. I made an attempt yesterday, but was foiled by Sec. 179 recapture rules, filing requirements for J2 visa holders and what tax credits you can claim for your non-working, live-in girlfriend's bastard child. I'll take another shot at it Monday morning when I have a four-hour block of time to work on it.

This weekend's big project is Christmas letters. Given that we hardly did anything in the last year (other than move again) it's a short one. One of these years, we'll stay in one place for two whole years so we can just send out cards instead of relocation notifications. Probably won't be next Christmas; if I manage to land any sort of job between now and next August, we're outta this ghetto apartment even if we just move a block up the road to where we wanted to live in the first place, but couldn't afford.

I did have an interesting little computer glitch when I went to print envelopes. Our printer has a bypass feed for printing directly onto envelopes, so I had the bright idea to save 75 cents in labels by hand-feeding 120+ envelopes, one at a time, through the printer. (It seemed like a good plan at the time....) I typed in the return address and mailing address, fed the first envelope and voila!! It worked! Changed the address to whomever was next in the Rolodex, fed the envelope and.... Crap! Everything is shifted like it thinks it's printing on letter-size paper. I messed with some settings, did it again and voila!! I fixed it! Changed the address to whomever was next in the Rolodex, fed the envelope and.... Crap! Shifted again. Long story short, nothing I did would fix the problem; one would print correctly, the next one shifted. Then correct. Then shifted. I spent a couple hours poking around on the web and I couldn't even determine if Open Office or the printer was the problem. I finally gave up and bought some labels while we were already at Walmart. Why fix a problem when you can ignore it? I remember a time when I would have dug around until I found an answer. Now? Meh.

Nobody will admit anything, but someone wrote a nice bit of malware that targets frequency converter drives used in uranium enrichment:

Frequency-converter drives are used to control the speed of a device. Although it’s not known what device Stuxnet aimed to control, it was designed to vary the speed of the device wildly but intermittently over a span of weeks, suggesting the aim was subtle sabotage meant to ruin a process over time but not in a way that would attract suspicion.

Iran is finally admitting what everyone suspected all along; the virus borked their entire uranium enrichment program. My guess is Israel as the source; if anyone at Langley had written it, they would have been arrested for DMCA violations.

Apple recently banned a magazine app because it primarily discussed the Android. Granted, this incident is in one sense, trivial given that 99.9% of people who would pay to read about the Android probably are not going to do so on an iPhone. But this does raise an interesting question: how is Apple's end-to-end control of the hardware, software and even the subject matter one is allowed to view, any different from Standard Oil in 1911 or Ma Bell in 1974? I have to admit to some serious gadget-lust whenever I see a MacBook or an iPad, but I'm not sure I'm ready to be borged by Steve Jobs.

Another sob-story about absurd amounts of college debt:

Kelli Space, 23, graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a bachelor's in sociology — and a whopping $200,000 in student loan debt. Space, who lives with her parents and works full-time, put up a Web site called TwoHundredThou.com soliciting donations to help meet her debt obligation, which is $891 a month. That number jumps to $1,600 next November.

Poor Kelli. Went to one of the most expensive universities in the country where she racked up $200,000 in debt getting a useless degree, and now is reduced to the web equivalent of begging on a street corner because the big, bad, meany bank expects her to pay back the money she borrowed. My take-away is simple: Any bank stupid enough to loan $200,000 to a clueless teenage rich girl for a degree in sociology deserves to lose their money, and any clueless teenage rich girl who would go $200,000 in debt for a sociology degree deserves to live in Mommy and Daddy's basement for the next 20 years while she digs herself out.

Breitbart is breathlessly reporting that out of 70 million people with credit cards a year ago, 8 million have gotten rid of them (or more likely, had them forcibly taken away by the issuing bank). Personally, I call that a weak start. I would have thought that number would be much higher by now. At least things are moving in the right direction.

I'll end with this:

Take a few minutes and check out some other storm photos by Sean Heavey.