Ignoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OMG

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...

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

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...

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

Black Hole

Posted Without Comment

Physics Lesson

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

The Big Man is dead at 69.

Hangin' In There

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'

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.