At Long Last

I finally convinced someone to give me an interview yesterday. I thought it went OK (meaning that no one flat-out told me to go piss up a rope), so.... And Debbie's news I mentioned last week was that she'll be getting a 20% raise. This week was too hectic for her to have any blogging time, so I get to blab it to everyone.

Because of our schedules, we don't seem to be home on the same days anymore, so we've done zero exploring or picture-taking. Not that there is much to take pictures of around here unless you're into abandoned strip malls and boarded up houses. I did spot a couple Sandhill cranes standing in the grass strip in the middle of the road this morning. They're a bit creepy; I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a bird that can stand on the ground and look me in the eye. A tad too Jurassic Park for my taste.

While spending some time on Facebook last night, I noticed a theme: everyone wants to tell all the politicians to SHUT UP! Not that members of the ruling class ever listen to us mere plebeians. Otherwise, there would have been no bank bailouts or Obamacare; but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. From what I've seen of political ads here in Florida: If they are capable of convincing anyone of anything other than all politicians are moral and mental defectives, then we need to bring back IQ testing at the polls. And fast.

[We interrupt this blog post to bring you the following message: Blogger decided this morning that it no longer recognizes the user ID I've been using for years. In the attempt to figure out what the heck it was doing, Blogger may have sent e-mails to anyone who signed up waaaaaaaay back in the dark ages to post to this blog. If you get an e-mail from Google, just ignore it. Anyway; back to our regularly scheduled blog post.]

Two more Florida banks did the ol' face-plant last week along with five others, bringing the year-to-date total to 139. That's just one shy of last year's 140 bank failures. Good thing the recession is over and we're in a recovery. In a glimmer of good news, it doesn't look like any banks were shut down yesterday.

Food prices are back in the news. The so-called "core price index" (yet another doctored government statistic) has been flat or showing deflation for a couple years, but as anyone who eats or drives has probably already noticed, food and energy, both of which are excluded from the core index, have been pushing steadily upwards. Naturally, the linked headline is alarmist, along with the prominent link to an article stating that the UN views any food shortages or price increases as an opportunity to meddle. For perspective, we're not even back to where food and energy prices were in 2008. What should be noted is the cause of increase in food prices: Biofuels. I'm all for turning inedible stuff into alcohol, assuming it can be done economically without tax subsidies, but burning food in our cars is just plain stupid.

After extracting its pound of flesh, Big Green is allowing a full-scale solar electric plant to be built. I've liked the idea of solar power towers since reading about them back in the 1970's. Like all solar, they can't be used for base load, but they may make sense for daytime peak load in desert areas. Given the billions we've pissed into the sands of the Middle East, $6 billion to see if the thing will work is probably worth it.

Still more on the is-higher-education-worth-the-cost question:

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

...the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.

Many years ago, Scott Adams imagined Dilbert's garbage man being a member of Mensa. It seems less funny now that reality has caught up.

What I do find amusing is the constant use of religious terms by supporters of anthropogenic global warming/global climate change/global climate disruption/global whatever-term-they're-using-this-week:

The title of the article itself is rather astonishing.  The Wikipedia defines heresy as: “Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.”  The definition of dogma is “Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.”   Use of the word “heretic” by Lemonick implies general acceptance by the “insiders” of the IPCC as dogma.  If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic.  The story should not be about me, but about how and why the IPCC became dogma.

That's from a blog post by Judith Curry, a climate scientist who was completely on-board with AGW and accepted the work of her colleagues at face value, just as most scientists do in every field of science. All was well until she started asking inconvenient questions regarding the IPCC; now she's been branded a heretic by (un-)Scientific America, and labeled a "monster" that will undue all scientific progress if she isn't silenced. We live in interesting times.

Some good news: At least one US car company is capable of building cars that people want to drive and making money without sucking on the government teat. Go Ford. This is certainly good news for an area of the country that has had three decades of consistently bad news.

A prominent black on the education of minority children:

The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before, when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been successful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families.  Yet the educational dogma of the day is that you simply cannot expect children who are not middle-class to do well on standardized tests, for all sorts of sociological and psychological reasons.

I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why assuming black kids cannot be educated like other kids and cannot do well on standardized tests isn't just as racist as Black Codes and Jim Crow. Guess I'm just a hopeless Florida cracker.

Anyone who thinks being a cop in the US is a tough job should try it in Mexico:

All 14 police officers in Los Ramones, a rural town in northern Mexico, fled the force in terror after gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets and flung six grenades at their headquarters on Monday night.

Yet more collateral damage in the drug wars, but it's no big; just some poor brown people.

And I'm off to do some laundry.

Time Keeps on Slippin'

A little blast from the past for those old enough to remember...



No real changes here; Debbie - working. [Updated: Debbie got some good news at work today, but I'll let her tell everyone.] Me - not working. At least not for money. I shelve books at the library for a few hours a couple days a week, but that doesn't pay. I'm still in tax class, which of course doesn't pay either. So it's not like I sit on the couch all day playing Farmville, but I'm still not contributing anything to household budget. And that's life in Sanford.

This article is supposed to be about the 15% unemployment in Las Vegas, but a throw-away line caught my attention:

Warnock, who also has industrial experience and a military background in explosives safety, said he's had a few nibbles from potential employers, but mostly for positions for which he's overqualified.

Several of us unemployed people (meaning everyone) at tax class were discussing this concept of "overqualified." Just what the hell does that mean? Other than "I'm a sniveling weasel of a manager who is terrified of anyone with a personality or any demonstrated ability to do complex tasks like show up on time or make the occasional semi-intelligent remark." My last five jobs were census, tax prep, pot scrubber, pot scrubber, pot scrubber. And yet according to a recruiter in New Hampshire, I was "overqualified" for every job in Keene, NH. Whatever, sniveling weasel.

The Worst Schools in the Country will now be feeding its students breakfast, lunch and dinner. I realize that schools lost all interest in their primary purpose decades ago (see Pournelle's Iron Law), around the same time parents lost all interest in their primary purpose, but since when did our schools become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Burger King? This article popped up the same day that I had to listen to a couple women going on and on about the horrible injustice of it all that their kids will now have to pay some pittance (less than two bucks) for breakfast and lunch at school. The horror. I guess feeding them breakfast for a few cents at home is completely out of the question, and I won't even bring up the dreaded sack lunch for fear of the permanent scarring the precious little tykes would suffer.

Speaking of the Imperial City, it's nice to know that while the rest of us are wallowing in the after-effects of the None-Dare-Call-It-Depression Recession, the District has been enjoying an economic boom that will be paid for by our great-grandchildren. We seem to be doing everything possible to make our generation the most hated in the nation's history.

It's likely a hint or a sign or an omen that you should pack it in when you are a 18-term incumbent senator and your senate campaign can only attract a single, $500 donation. It's 1994 all over again.

The banks are still trying to dance around the huge mess created when the Masters of the Universe decided that the pesky laws regarding property titles were bogging them down. Now the Cook County (Chicago) sheriffs department is refusing to enforce evictions even if the banks restart the foreclosure process. This is bad:

Nobody dares to buy or sell property because there is no way of knowing who actually owns it, whether the chain of title is on-the-level, whether (or not) there is a document somewhere with coffee mug rings and taco sauce stains denoting the past and current owners of, say, a half acre of sawgrass scrub with an abandoned harlequin brick ranch-house full of mold feasting on damp sheet-rock in the unspeakable South Florida humidity.

Not that any of this seems to register with the stock market.

One of the major annoyances we've had since opening an account at Chase Bank is the constant bombardment we get every time we walk in the door about how we should use our debit card more because not using it is "dangerous." This is, as anyone with half a brain knows, complete and utter crap. The only reason banks want people to use debit cards is so they can make millions in over-draft charges. The problem for the banks is that people are catching wise, which will likely mean a return to the Good Ol' Days of monthly fees just for having a checking account. As far as I'm concerned, it can't happen soon enough. I'd much rather pay $9 a month or keep a certain balance in my account than have my bank actively working to wreck my personal finances for fun and profit.

More fun on the church-state front:

The city council decided last month to remove the [Christian] flag from above the monument in Central Park after a resident complained, and after city leaders got letters from the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State urging them to remove it.

These cases always leave me conflicted. On the one hand,  it's like the ACLU et al never want this issue to die, going around finding obscure places no one has ever heard of and, literally in many instances, making a federal case out of nothing. I'm betting that prior to all this, 90% of the Christians in King, North Carolina wouldn't have known the Christian flag if they saw one. All that's been accomplished is to harden the position of those who already see the ACLU as evil incarnate, as well as convincing those who simply didn't care that the ACLU is a group of cry-babies who grow faint at the mere sight of a manger or bit of cloth on a pole. The other side of the argument is that if you expect everyone to pay for your little memorial in the middle of town, don't get all pissy when one of those everyone's has a problem with the flag you fly over it. The answer is simple: pay to put whatever display you want on your private property and the ACLU will be right there next to you defending your right to do so.

I stumbled across an interesting story about Albert Einstein. As with most historical figures, he is reduced to an icon; the mad scientist with wild hair, scribbling equations and mumbling deep thoughts to himself. While the wild hair thing is certainly accurate:

there was a great deal more to the man than most people today are aware of.

That's it for this week.

Still awake

Of course, since I have get up around 345a, I can't fall asleep. I'm glad I'm not the one driving tomorrow! I'm sure Gelinda will keep me awake with talking, but I would sure love to nap during the 3 -4 hr trip down. Oh well .... I can sleep all I want as soon as I get back and Sunday.

NCL Epic

Tomorrow morning have to be up before the birds to get ready to meet a coworker and head down to the port of Miami. We are doing a ship inspection w/ luncheon aboard the Norwegian Epic. It is one of the new design concepts ship. Curved walls -- supposedly "interesting bathroom accomodations" in the staterooms and much more. I can't wait to see it. Too bad we can't find a place to hide out and just "happen" to not leave the ship when it leaves port. After this week at work, I need a cruise.

We had a huge Travelzoo promotion -- teamed up with NCL and offered some unbelievable prices on the Jewel and Gem sailing from NYC in Jan and first of Feb for a 10nt eastern Caribbean cruise. Inside cabins are starting at $499 plus $159.xx taxes per person and we are offering a shipboard credit of $100 per cabin! Can you believe it?! Our phones have been ringing non-stop since the sale started Wednesday. Majority of the the week, we have had calls backed up in the phone queue. Swamp city ... don't get paid overtime, but ended up working until 8/830p Wed and Thurs and 9p tonite. If anyone wants to cruise and can go in Jan or early Feb, just let me know. I think the sale ends Monday or Tuesday. I need the bookings.

Random Catch-Up Post

Still not much happening here in Florida. Debbie has had a couple crazy-busy days at work, which is great. My days are still filled with rejection when I'm not simply being completely ignored.

For a change of pace, we'll start with good news. The world celebrates the rescue of the Chilean miners. The rescue was an amazing feat of engineering. For the men and their families, this is far from over, but they are out of the ground. And another technological marvel hits a milestone: The Opportunity rover is closing in on 15 miles total driving. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but given the original expectations, it's as close to miraculous as we're likely to see. Still not a peep out of Spirit; I'm guessing it froze to death over the winter. There were just too many strikes against the poor little guy.

In less happy news, at least two states (Illinois and New York) are doing their best to screw out-of-country military personnel out of the vote. Just how stupid to you have to be to piss off heavily-armed men with your gross incompetence? The mental and moral bankruptcy is truly astounding.

School gives out "free" laptops to students. School uses installed software to spy on kids in their bedrooms using the laptops' web cam. School gets busted and ends up paying out $600,000 of taxpayer money. No school employees are found guilty of any wrong-doing. Because, ya know, they meant well and weren't really perverts who got a kick out of watching teenagers undressing in their bedrooms and that one kid definitely looked like he was doing drugs when he was really eating Mike & Ikes and we really can't figure out what everyone is getting so worked up over.

In anticipation of Ben "Helicopter Drop" Bernanke rev-ing the printing presses back up to 110%, the dollar is crashing against pretty much every currency. This would be good news for US exporters if the US actually made anything the rest of the world wanted. It is also widely believed that the Fed action will have little or no impact on employment, but given how miserable the average economist is at fortune-telling, it may, in fact, work. Or not. Being a pessimist can be a lot of work figuring whether two pessimisms cancel each other out or become a pessimism².

Speaking of pessimism, here is one view of the next 30 years. Personally, I think the guy is too optimistic; generalized increases in the cost of energy will play havoc with the high-tech future we all have come to feel entitled to.

Speaking of entitlement, French students are trying to shut down the country because the government has proposed to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62. Personally, I hope the students get what they want; one less country we have to worry about. If the French want to become part of the PIIGS economic disaster, I won't stand in their way. Remember the Third Chinese Curse: May you find all that you seek.

So what in hell would cause someone who is, at least chronologically, an adult to harass a dying seven-year-old child by putting their face on a skull-and-crossbones and parking a coffin in front of the family home? Mental illness? [Update: Mental illness is looking more likely.] Well, not exactly:

A member of Kathleen's family says the bad blood started about two-years ago after the two families had a falling out over a birthday party at the Rose house.  At the party, kids were using a "bounce-house" and playing games in the front yard.  The source says that Jennifer Petkov texted someone in the Rose family, asking if her kids could come to the event.  A response to the text did not come quickly enough and it angered Jennifer.  According to the Rose family, she's been harassing them ever since. 

Wow. Because diss-ing you is the only possible explanation why someone hosting a giant kid party at their home doesn't drop everything and respond instantly to your text message. It's very simple: Your desire to speak to me does not constitute an obligation on my time. Right now, one of the people in my tax class is flunking out because he spends the entire three hours texting people. When the instructor told him point blank to put his phone away, his response was, "Tell people to stop texting me!" Are you serious? Do you and your homies belong to the International Federation of Superheroes? Shut the damn thing off!! Texting someone does not obligate them to respond at all, much less instantly. Calling someone on their cell phone does not obligate them to answer. NOTHING YOU HAVE TO SAY IS THAT IMPORTANT! Get over yourself.

One of the big news items from the last week or so is that banks have basically thrown in the towel on foreclosures. Not out of any altruism, but because modern wonders like Ditech botched the paperwork so badly that no one is sure who owns what:

Did nobody, for instance at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, review any of the paperwork fluttering in from places like Countrywide or Ditech and scores of other boiler rooms where mortgages were hatched like Peking ducklings?  There was an awful lot of it, I'm sure, but aren't there a lot of seat-warmers at Fannie and Freddie who collect their salaries for the express purpose of reading mortgage documents? Was nobody the least bit suspicious about the mysterious flurry of "restaurant employees" and "lawn-care technicians" buying million-dollar condominiums with no money down at terms that would make a three-card monte dealer weep with laughter?

Apparently not. And now anyone buying real estate could find themselves facing foreclosure even though they paid cash for their house.

Well, I need go practice doing taxes.

Why Our Schools Suck

I know this is beating-a-dead-horse territory, but this is from Jerry Pournelle's Thursday View:

I note that Michelle Rhee has resigned as DC Public Schools chancellor. Teachers unions are cheering wildly, thus proving once again that the purpose of the public school system is to pay bad teachers and make sure that teacher performance does not affect teacher pay or job retention. Once that mission is accomplished the public schools are encouraged to do other things, but first the bad teachers must be assured their jobs.

Michelle Rhee was making some headway in cleaning up the worst and most-expensive school system in the nation, but just as Jaime Escalante learned, the goal of the education industry has little or nothing to do with education. The unions cannot tolerate any teacher who teaches, nor any administrator who rewards teachers who teach and fires those who cannot.

At Long Last

Finally got caught up on photos (at least the ones taken prior to moving to Florida):

When we arrived in Michigan, the first thing we did was to invite ourselves over to my nephew and niece-in-law's house for free food and some Rock Band. A couple days after that, we made a run over to Lake Michigan with my niece and nephew-in-law. Then it was further north for the 2010 Wiklanski Reunion and Debbie's niece's graduation open house.

On the way back to New Hampshire, we finally saw a moose. It had a sidecar. And no, I don't get it either.

I still have Florida photos on the camera. I think they are all of the apartment because that and WalMart are the only places we've been since we landed here. We really need to get out more.

Speaking of which, after two weeks of run-around, I start volunteering at the library on Sunday. As of right now, it's just a couple days a week for a couple hours a day. More an excuse to leave the apartment than anything else. Still no word on any sort of paying job, so I guess I need to get busy with my house-husbandy chores.

Another Week Slips By

Another week gone and not much new to report. I'm still floundering around looking for work, we're still in Florida, Debbie is still plugging away at her job, I'm still in tax class, and it's still in the mid- to high-80's here in the Sunshine State. Which pretty much wraps up the week.

As much as I hate the idea of more regulations coming out of the Imperial City, I can certainly sympathize with the desire to force people to hang up and drive. I've been nearly run down twice in two weeks by people paying more attention to yapping on their cell phones than on where they are going and what is happening around them (like traffic signals turning red; they're sneaky that way). Of course, it would be nice if law enforcement set the example. I know, I know; that's just crazy talk.

Speaking of stupid people, there is a new book that I may have to spring for; The Dumbest Generation. From a review at The Boston Globe:

Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.

Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?

I'm not sure I buy into all the gloom and despair; as the reviewer points out, some of this is the result of technology. My shoes have Velcro instead of laces and my sandals have Velcro instead of buckles and I have every intention of keeping it that way. A generation raised with Velcro shoes isn't going to know how to tie shoelaces any more than I know how to milk a cow or any woman under the age of 80 knows how to lace a corset (or even what a corset is). But when large numbers of people are incapable of personal hygiene or feeding themselves or simply getting through an ordinary day without outside intervention, there is a definite nincompoop problem.

Brazil elected an illiterate clown to its congress:

Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, whose clown name is Tiririca ("Grumpy"), got more than 1.3 million votes, more than twice the number of votes received by his next closest competitor. How did he do it? With complete honesty.

"What does a congressman do?" Grumpy said in campaign ads. "The truth is I don't know. But vote for me and I'll [find out and] tell you." He promised, in fact, to do nothing during his term other than finding out what they do in Congress and telling the voters about it, and voters seemed to think that was a great idea. Or they may have been swayed by Grumpy's slogan: "It can't get any worse!"

If this guy manages to actually take his place in Brazil's congress (there were attempts to disqualify him from even running due to his illiteracy), we'll not only have an example of an honest politician and the Worlds Best Campaign Slogan EVAAAAR; we'll have to stop calling politicians ass-clowns as that now seems to be giving them too much credit.

Here is a basic lesson in insurance:

Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.

Everyone is all upset because some hick "forgot" (yea, right) to pay for fire protection, and the fire department allowed his house to burn down. The fire department did EXACTLY the right thing. If the fire department allowed the homeowner to pay after-the-fact, why would anyone bother to pay? If AAA or Allstate allowed you to buy car insurance the day after you have an accident and fixed your car, how many people would bother with car insurance, and how long would it take to bankrupt the insurance company? For extra credit, what does this have to do with Obamacare?

This week's economic news:

The IMF utters the "D" word.
People with too much debt refuse to take on more debt. Damn them!
Record number of people on food stamps.

At the current rate of "recovery," it will take ten years to get back to December 2007 level of employment. That's a straight-line projection, not the more-likely U-shaped recovery. Even then, this will be the longest and deepest post-war drop in employment.

The stock markets, being completely rational, screamed, "Damn the torpedoes! Ramming speed!"

A second Chinese probe successfully entered lunar orbit. This was a backup of the first orbiter, but instead of doing a NASA and laying it out as a lawn ornament/owlery, they intelligently decided to go ahead and launch it. Their schedule is an unmanned lander on the moon in 2013, a sample return mission in 2017 and a manned lander in 2020. There is no law of the universe that guarantees the primary language spoken in space will be English. The writers of Firefly may turn out to be prophets.

And we need to get motivated and make a library run.

Peak Oil

As explained by Big Oil:

Whatz Matter?!

I have no idea what is the matter with me. I am still getting "sick to my stomach" each day I have to go to work. Today I made another major mistake --- those that know me, know this is not the norm with me. I feel like quitting, but I can't. I hope things get better really soon. Please pray for me or come over and bang my head against the wall and tell me to straighten up! Thanks :-)

It's October?!?!

I can't believe it's the first of October. My brain is still back in July or August, or maybe early September. But the calendar says we're in the final quarter of 2010, so it must be true.

The job situation hasn't changed. I actually had an offer, but turned it down. I would have had to buy the hardware and software, done all the marketing on my time and my dime, then give someone else 20% of whatever I made as a, well, a fee of some sort. Not sure what for. No thanks. I can do all that and keep 100% of what I make at no greater risk and at lower start-up cost completely on my own, which is what I was figuring on doing once we settle somewhere for more than 12 months.

In the meantime, I've been sending out a dozen or so applications/resumes a day and not single word in return. Not even rejections. Just nothing. It's like the whole thing is some sort of sick joke. And it isn't just me; I've talked to a number of other people around here that are having the same result. There also seems to be something called "group interviews" that, as far as I can tell from people who have suffered through them, are like some sick reality show. Who the hell comes up with this stuff? Anyway. Job search. Not going well. Moving on.

What is it that compels people from New York to always, always, announce that fact within the first 10 seconds of any conversation? First, the fact that you mispronounce the name of your native state/city is a dead give-away of your geographical origins. Second, no one is impressed in any way by the accident of your birth place. No one believes that being from "New Yawk" or "Brawklan" automatically makes you tough or gritty. Neither do the stories of the never-ending string of conflicts that make up your so-called life. Just. Shut. Up.

Yes; it's been one of those weeks.

The month of September was a quiet one on this site; only eleven posts and 193 unique visits. Referrals were nearly non-existent given the lack of linking and posting in other places. What few referrals we did get were people searching for Debbie's boobs, farting unicorns, and Arcosanti scams. The internet is such an, um, interesting place sometimes. Nothing really new on the OS and browser front: IE8.0 (58.5%) and Chrome (17.2%) continue to nibble away at Firefox (20.7%), and 92% of you are running XP, Vista or Win7. That doesn't really leave a lot of oxygen in the room for anyone else. Firefox 4, due out later this year, may shift the browser pie slices around a bit, but I wouldn't expect any major changes. As long as blogs remain a desktop thing (which is the case for this one at least), I don't expect to see any big OS changes either, other than some of the XP hits shifting to Win7 around Christmas. Assuming that anyone buys anything more expensive than sock monkeys this Christmas. I can guarantee that there won't be any new computers around here for a long time.

The myth of retirement is dying a long-overdue death.

A study of wealthy individuals around the world conducted by Barclays pokes holes in the notion that an individual should stop working at a pre-defined age, as it is more of an illusion than a reality.

Which more or less substitutes one problem with another:

Some believe that in an age of limited employment opportunities, a pool of talented and experienced workers who continue to work will block opportunities for younger workers. But some argue that individuals who work longer will increase the opportunities available and add to the GDP.

Given that employment opportunities have been limited for three decades, I'd go with the former.

I love when news people confuse causality with coincidence:

The recession took a dramatic toll on the institution of marriage in America last year, new figures show, with weddings for people 18 and older at the lowest ebb in over a hundred years.

Or it could be that the majority of men under the age of 40 have decided that there is no need to buy the cow when they can get the milk for free. Or that two generations of women have been told men are useless for anything other than sperm donors. Or that family courts make marriage a suckers bet for men. But no; it must be the recession.

More unstimulatin' stimulus:

The 2009 federal stimulus money that paid Hill and 84 other job counselors to teach at the state's 46 workforce centers ends Friday. Without funding, those workers must move on.

Green shoots everywhere.

As further proof that an education doesn't make you smart:

Guests at the new Vdara hotel have been complaining that because of an architectural flaw on the glass skyscraper, the sun's rays are being magnified and reflected onto an area of the pool, causing severe burns. There have been reports that even plastic has melted from the heat. 

It takes a great deal of education to make you dumb enough to build a giant concave mirror in the middle of the desert.

Martin Robbins has written a meta-science article that makes all popular science reporting obsolete. It must be aggravating to put the kind of blood sweat and tears that goes into the typical scientific paper only to see some clueless hack completely miss the point.

When a private business experiences a decline, they cut costs by laying off people, cutting hours, closing underutilized facilities, etc. When the Post Office experiences a decline, they run a $6 billion loss that is covered by taxpayers. First class mail is going the way of classified ads in the daily newspaper, and can no longer be expected to subsidize hard-copy corporate spam. Unfortunately, adapt or die never applies to government agencies. 

Rolling Stone has a great bit about the Tea Party movement. Of course, being the Rolling Stone, there are the expected cheap shots, ad hominem  attacks, and vulgarity, but the main point of the article is spot on. The Creeps in the Republican Party will do everything in their power to pull any Tea Party candidates into the fold and get them on-message. National politics in this country has enormous institutional momentum. Just because a couple Creeps get knocked off in the primaries doesn't mean they will all fold and go home.

Not that the Nuts in the Democratic party have any intention to go gentle into that good night. It looks grim for them right now, but as past elections have shown again and again, what people say to pollsters and what they do in the election booth are not always the same thing.

My take on all this is probably somewhat off, but from where I sit, everyone said "Enough!" and threw the Creeps to the curb in 2008. Unfortunately, they voted in the Nuts. Now they want to throw the Nuts out as well. The Creeps are taking that as a sign that everyone has repented and wants them back. That is dead wrong. From what I can tell, no one gives a damn about party; they want to get rid of the Creeps and the Nuts, and replace them with people who can govern regardless if they are Republican, Democratic, Tea Party, Libertarian or Beer Drinker. Unfortunately, we don't have a none-of-the-above option and, at least here in Florida, every single "person" running for office seems to be doing everything they can to make normal people despise them. That can actually be good strategy for the mid-terms; the middle is so disgusted by the campaign, they declare a pox on both houses and stay home, and the election will go to whichever side can whip their lunatic fringe into the fiercest feeding frenzy. This could be interesting.

Gold set a record again for the fifth or sixth day in a row. I had it all set up to buy sometime in 2002 or 2003 with an out-the-door price of less than $400/ounce. I spent in on college instead. Should have went with the gold. So far, the college degree has been a complete and utter waste of money. If I had went for the gold instead, I'd be sitting on $100K. Coulda, woulda shoulda.

You know things are getting bad when our overlords start trying to mellow us out with pot. I think they may be getting a bit scared. The ganja is one of the better ways to keep the pitchforks safely in the shed.

I should get off the computer and go to bed, but I'm really not tired. I'll probably end up sitting here half the night watching old Nova episodes on Hulu.

Week Six

This is the start of our sixth week in this particular place. We still don't have a real routine down, but things are starting to settle. Unfortunately, things are settling into me not working. If I dusted off my good ol' BS degree and fed out a nice, steaming line cow flop tomorrow, I could fix that, but there are just too many things that are making me hesitate. Any one of them alone, I wouldn't think twice, but given the whole package of things that made me go "Hmmmmm," I'm going to tell the guy that I'm going to take a pass. If it was a year or so from now and we were more sure of what we were doing, then maybe. But right now, the whole thing doesn't feel right. I'll probably still end the day with a gig, just not a paying one. More when I know more.

In a headline straight from The Onion, "Tycoon who took over Segway firm dies in freak accident after riding one of the machines off hillside and into a river."

The multi-millionaire owner of the Segway company died in a freak accident yesterday when he rode one of the high-tech two-wheel machines off a cliff and into a river.

I'm trying real hard to suppress the little movie in my head where Mr. Heselden is riding at top Segway speed towards a cliff, yelling in a George-Jetson-esque voice "Jane! Stop this crazy thing!" then disappears over the edge. Yes, yes; it's so very wrong. But I can't help it. And if you think that makes me a horrible human being, wait until John Stewart and Stephen Colbert start in.

Speaking of which, in a move seemingly designed to prove no one in Congress has clue one about what goes on in the real world, Comedy Central comedian and host of fake comedic news talk show The Colbert Report, is invited to testify before a House panel, who then asks him to leave because he makes jokes like this:

This is America. I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian.

Wow. I confess I would never has seen that coming from Colbert; he is usually such a fountain of reason and seriousness. Remind me again why we let these idiots run the country?

So, now that Congress has decided to not seek the advice of comedians on important policy, maybe they can get to work:

Congress is deadlocked over virtually every major issue still pending this year, including key economic matters such as a detailed federal spending plan and extending Bush-era tax cuts, yet lawmakers still hope to leave Washington by Friday and not return until mid-November.

Or not. Of course, given what this congress has managed to accomplish, it's probably safer to have them either deadlocked or at home.

At least the FDIC is keeping busy:

Regulators on Friday shut down small banks in Florida and Washington state, bringing to 127 the number of U.S. bank failures this year on a wave of loan defaults and economic distress.

Something freaky going on in space:

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

This is potentially huge. What next? Is someone going to bring back the aether?

Of course, the last time the laws of physics were about to get tossed, it all turned out to be a false alarm. (Maybe.)

Is someone from Microsoft working for Google now? I just looked at the HTML being generated as I type and Blogger is packing my post with useless div's and span's. There is more HTML code than text, and it doesn't accomplish anything. And auto-save is failing about two out of three times. And a huge storm is rolling in, so I'll likely lose power and my post. I am in serious need of an on-line UPS down here in the lightening capital of the world.

Obama throws gays under the bus. Again:

A former U.S. Air Force flight nurse expelled from the military after revealing she is a lesbian was ordered reinstated by a federal judge on Friday in a closely watched court challenge to the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

The Obama administration on Thursday, however, asked that judge to keep the policy mostly intact, rather than issue an injunction against it, while Congress debates the issue.

At least with McCain/Palin, you wouldn't have gotten your hopes up. Also note our Commander-in-Chief seems somewhat confused about the chain of command; I wasn't aware it went through Congress.

Someone released a computer virus designed to break one of Iran's nuke plants in the worst possible way. It may have succeeded. Cyberwar is no longer Sci-fi.

And to round things off before I go make dinner, here is a more-or-less balanced essay on who should be in college and for what. This is required reading for any parent currently paying, or who will soon be paying, for a college education.

Gotta run.

Getting Closer to Home

As Debbie already mentioned, we finally got the art on the walls, which is usually what makes where ever we are "home." This apartment has been different than our others; it's taking us a lot longer to settle in. Probably because we were so pissed off at the condition of the apartment when we moved in. The kitchen sink wasn't even hooked up to the sewer line and was dumping water into the cabinet. We were very close to walking away from the place when I came back from New Hampshire. This is how landlords treat low-income people. We don't even deserve a superficial cleaning or properly functioning plumbing. I remember much the same attitude when I worked in apartment maintenance back in the early 1980's: Don't bother to fix or clean anything because Those People will just trash the place anyway. Nice to see nothing has changed.

So the place will probably never completely feel like home; more like an extended-stay hotel room that we're trapped in for the next year or so. Anyway, I need to finish up some cleaning and organizing, then take some photos of the place. I realized this morning that I still haven't sorted and uploaded the pictures from Michigan (the Wiklanski reunion and Debbie's niece's graduation open house), so maybe I'll get to that as well. And the homework for tax class. And figuring out something for dinner. Or maybe just a long nap. We'll see.

Best Star Trek ads ever:





These are from Germany, of course. No American ad agency could ever be this clever. The phrase at the end translates to, "They are among us!" There are several more on YouTube, but these two were my favorites.

In news that I am sure will shock everyone, our government is lying to us:

"The Government is lying about the amount of debt. It is engaging in Enron accounting," said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and co-author of The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future.

Any private company that did accounting the way the government does would be fined and the principles jailed. Meanwhile, it's nice to know that a chunk of that debt the government is lying to us about is going to teach African men how to wash their dicks:

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "stimulus spending."

On the economic front, U.S. household net worth is falling. And those same people watching as their assets continue to shrink in value are supposed to somehow feel sorry for the morons on Wall Street because their 10's of billions in profits have shrunk to mere billions. Big frackin' boohoo.

On the tech front, in yet-another example of Just Not Getting It, Intel is threatening to sue anyone who uses the recently-released HDCP crack. HDCP was supposed to "plug the analog hole" between your Blu-ray DVD player and your TV. Of course, any system that is built into millions of devices will be trivial to hack for someone with the appropriate skills, but even the brains at Intel can't seem to grasp that. So now HDCP goes the way of Digital Audio and DVD encryption. Obviously, none of this addresses the human analog hole in the form of eyes and ears; pointing a consumer-level video camera at my 42" flat screen would likely yield a copy at least as good as a standard DVD. Anyone attempting to plug my "analog hole" is going to have a fight on their hands.

In the medical field, we have a new super-bug that is resistant to all antibiotics, and a brain amoeba that is spreading through organ transplants. In any race between medical science and the little microscopic beasties that feed on "higher" forms of life, always bet on the wee ones. Sure; doctors may win here and there, or for a time. But long-term, we lose.

Peak Oil, when it has been acknowledged at all in the media, is usually relegated to the "doomer porn" category. Sometimes that is with good reason; there is certainly a strong current of the old fashioned "grab the shotgun, the canned beans, and the wife and head for the hills" storyline if you poke around in certain internet neighborhoods. Maybe it's just because I've been spending time on John Michael Greer's blog which is making me more aware, but Peak Oil seems to be working its way up the respectability food chain; for example, a recent article in Forbes that just lays out the bare facts without any of the usual assertions that all will be well because technology will race to our rescue.

So after all that good news, I want to finish with this. Keep in mind this kid is ten years old:



When I was ten, I spent my time mastering Pong and trying to find new and innovative ways to kill myself on my bicycle. (My cousin Greg probably remembers some of the "awesome" ideas we came up with when we got bored over the summer.)

I should probably cut this off and do something constructive.

Art is on the walls!

Finally, we have the art unpacked and hanging on the walls! We took the last of the bins and cardboard coverings to the storage unit at UHaul on Saturday. The office and my card working space still has to be organized and one shower curtain bought, but other than that I think we are settled in. We've decided for the moment to not unbox and display all my Precious Moment figurines and most of our knick knacks. The only thing we have in the two curios is all of our matryoshka dolls -- and they just sitting there, not opened all up displayed as of yet. Oh well ... another project for another weekend.

I finally got my Florida drivers license on Thursday -- between my work hours and the govt work hours, it was hard to do. Saturday we went to the library and I got my library card. (Ric had gotten his last weekend when we finally went to find the library) Now I have lots of books to read! YEAH!

I'm sure sometime in the next month Ric will get a picture link up to show anyone who is interested our new apartment. Keep checking back ....

Cruises

Anybody need to book a cruise? I know work for a company that discounts or adds "value add ons" unless NOT allowed by the cruise line. They offer some pretty sweet deals. Let me know if you want to price something out!

This is the first time I've worked as a travel agent anyplace that does discounting. Sometimes when I see how much we discount or give the client as an on board credit, I cringe since the net commission is way low. How on earth are they staying in business? I know they have the volume, but still.

This Sucks

I've now been messing around for over a week in order for Debbie's XP laptop to be able to write files to a Win7 share. I just doesn't work. I've done everything suggested by every tech site on the internet, and none of it works. I know Microsoft is desperate to get people off XP, but completely borking things up seems an extreme and counter-productive way to do it. There is an answer, but it costs $200 which we don't have at the moment. I must be getting too old or too stupid for this. In any case, I'm giving up.

After two tax classes, we have made it through chapter 2 in the textbook. We are supposed to be through chapter 6. At this rate, we should be done around January 2012. The upside is that the instructor gave me a job lead; it's far enough away we would have to buy a car for me to take the job and it doesn't sound like he is willing to pay enough to make that worthwhile, but we'll see where it goes. I also have a couple more prospects that I'll be checking on today. If nothing else, I gotta get off this couch before my butt grows right into it.

This weekend is the final push to get the apartment into shape; we're tired of walking around bins and piles. We'll probably have to make some hard choices about what we realistically have the space for in order to get the job done, but it is past time to do that anyway. Downsizing was easy when we started in 2006; we had soooo much crap we had no use for, we had no problem filling a 26' moving van for the auction plus giving away at least that much again. Several iterations later, we're getting to things we... well, use isn't the right word because a lot of it is dust collectors. Meaningful is probably the right word.

Debbie's job is still going well and her numbers are looking good. Not good enough for the bonus to kick in, but getting there. Once she gets a check for a full pay period, we can start re-figuring our budget. If we did the back-of-the-envelope calculations correctly, her check will cover all the routine bills so whatever I make can go straight into savings. We've put a serious dent in our funds over the last two years and we really need to get back on track. We plan to live like monks for at least the next year; two or three would be better yet. We've never gone on a material fast for that long before; we'll likely fall off the wagon a couple times.

All things come to an end: TV series, vacations, roller coasters, M&M Blizzards, societies:

What did your friend the musician tell you after his band, which was successful on album two but not so much by album five, broke up?

“We just drifted apart. Didn’t have much in common anymore, we were heading in different directions.”

That is also how societies die. When they start out, they have a clear mission, and through years of struggle and violence they prevail over their enemies, beat out their own inner demons, find a stable system of values they agree on (the “social consensus”), and then use that value system to blow off everything else and drive hard toward self-improvement.

Once they reach that, these societies are in trouble. They lack wars to unify themselves; they invent internal wars, and spend time chasing Communists, Racists, Satanists, Hackers or other Demons. When that behavior runs out on them, they spend time chasing nothing; the individual becomes more important than the society, and soon what you have is a giant pool of selfish people who barely tolerate each other because they have nothing in common except a desire to manipulate past each other so they can continue their selfish pursuits.

If you read the entire essay, you are sure to find quibbles, but the basic premise is sound: all things end. It's how things end that makes a difference.

Well, off to look for work.

Sleepless in Sanford

Guess it's my turn to do the not-sleeping-at-night thing. We'll see how I get by tomorrow on three hours of sleep. At least I had a chance to catch up on bookkeeping and filing, making the to-do pile in the office somewhat smaller. I'm still sorting through computer problems as well; trying to get a Win7 and a WinXP machine to play nice is nearly impossible. I know it can be done, but getting it all to work last time involved me making random changes and rebooting both machines until it started to work. I have no clue which random change actually made things work and I frankly don't have the patience at this point to deal with it. Sneaker-net still works (or will as soon as I can figure out which bin has my thumb drive rattling around in it).

Yea; it's been that kind of a week.

Speaking of which, either Win7, iTunes, Songbird, or some random cosmic ray decided that around 700 or so of our MP3 files didn't really need metadata. Song title, artist, album, comments, everything. Poof. I have not a clue. So while they are available, I'm re-ripping our 350 or so CD's. It needed to be done anyway. Most were ripped many many years ago when relatively low bit rates were the norm and embedded album art was still a distant fantasy. I set up a little mini photo studio in the office to get digital copies of the album art (at least half of the album covers for our CD's are nowhere to be found online) and have been ripping and rebuilding our MP3 library. Now that I have what amounts to unlimited disk space, a copy of said library will be tucked away someplace safe where the crapware can't get to it so I don't have to start over every time some pimple-faced geek living in Mommy's basement fat-fingers the code for something I use.

Anybody remember when computer software used to be tested by the people who wrote it instead of unwitting users? I seem to recall something like that waaaaaay back in the mists of time.

With all that going on and some heavy-duty reading on the to-be-read pile, I'm still relatively out of touch with the goings on in the big wide world. I did notice that Roubini is expecting around half of the 800-plus banks on the fed "watch list" to go under. Given that yesterday saw bank number 119 make its last trip around the drain, Roubini seems to be implying that the economy isn't going to make a big bounce in the last quarter of 2010. It will be interesting to see if Roubini is a broken clock or if we should start taking what he says a bit more seriously that we have been. Or not; ramming face-first into brick walls is way more fun.

A meme regarding the usefulness (or more accurately, the complete lack thereof) of many college degrees is gaining traction, this time in the Washington Post. Many of the subjects studied in college used to be taught by apprenticeships. Why are people racking up debt they will be paying off for decades to take college courses in auto mechanics, HVAC and interior design? One point from the article, then I'll shut up. About this. For now:

"There's a billion other things you could do with your money," Altucher says. One option: Invest the money you'd spend on tuition in Treasury bills for your child's retirement. According to Altucher, $200,000 earning 5 percent a year over 50 years would amount to $2.8 million.

Few families have that kind of money lying around. But if you can give your child $10,000 or so to start his own business, Altucher says, your child will reap practical lessons never taught in a classroom. Later, when he's more mature and focused, college might be more meaningful.

Well, it's now about the time I usually get up anyway, so may as well have breakfast and get at it.

No Comment

Miscellaneous

We are still digging out after The Attack of the Plastic Bins 2010. We can see most of the carpet now and the bicycles are no longer sitting in the living room, but we still have a ways to go. Today we hope to at least get everything out of the bins and into piles so we know what we have to find room for. We did end up renting a storage space for our empty bins; the closets here are just too small and there isn't any storage space on-site. That was something we had budgeted for when we chose this place, so no big deal. It would have been nice to not have to do that, but we are still ahead of the game money-wise. In any case, we continue with the Great Shrinking we started in 2006. Progress has been slow with occasional reversals, but we're getting there.

Given the distractions, I haven't been keeping up with the news much lately; I assume that the systematic dismantling of the constitution continues, and the stock market is still dithering around where it was ten years ago, and unemployment is officially still 10% with the real percentage being double that, and both commercial and residential real estate continue to spiral downwards, and the politicians and media talking-heads insist it isn't all that bad and all I need to do is quit whinging and go buy some socks made in China.

Anyway.

I think I'm set for employment for the 2010 tax season. I'll continue to look around for something more permanent, but that will keep me busy for at least a few months. I did find out that the IRS is now charging for PTIN numbers. I assume this is yet-another step towards full-blown licensing of tax preparers. Inevitable, I suppose given that you need a license to braid hair or hold a road sign. I had hoped to strike out on my own this tax season, but the timing of the move screwed that up for this year. There is always next year.

Debbie's job is going OK; the company has what I'll charitably call a few odd quirks, but her first paycheck had a bit of a surprise in the form of extra money, so it's not all bad. She now has a permanent desk and is working with real clients, although she has mostly been cleaning up messes left by recently-departed employees and itinerary changes from the cruise lines. Like our apartment, the job may end up being temporary, but for now it's money and it's close by.

I realized this morning after looking at the site stats for the first time in several weeks that I skipped annoying my readers for a couple months. With all the time spent on the road and moving, we only had 14 posts in August, so I was surprised that August had 271 visits vs. the 206 for July (which had 23 posts). I expected August to be somewhat inflated from our own visits (harder to exclude them when accessing the internet from hotel rooms) as well as a single post which got a great deal of one-time traffic from a link I left at the Archdruid Report. But even taking those into consideration, August traffic held up surprisingly well under the neglect.

Google continues to be nice to us by sending around 15% of our visitors. People coming here seem obsessed with flatulent unicorns and scams run by Paolo Soleri (the architect behind Arcosanti). We didn't get our usual quotient of humorous/disturbing search phrases, but we did get "post bypass surgery cognitive dysfunction". So the next time a friend or family member says they did some internet research on your medical condition, do understand that they'll likely be quoting from someplace like this.

Not much has changed on the operating system front with two-thirds of visitors still running Windows XP. Vista was a distant second (14%), Mac in third (11%) and Win 7 in fourth (8%). Given the collapse in the retail PC market, I expect more of the same for at least the rest of 2010. Browsers are a bit more interesting as users fragment over a increasing number of browsers and versions. MSIE 8.0 is still top dog, accounting for just over one-third of visits, followed by Firefox 3.6 (27%). The rest of the visits are more-or-less evenly spread over a baker's dozen of other browsers and/or versions.

And that's probably enough rambling for a day or two. As we continue to empty bins and try to find a home for everything, keep an eye out for some great deals on Craigslist!

PS: Debbie wants me to let everyone know that for the second day in a row, I walked out the door with my shirt on inside out. The heat must be getting to me.

Address Change

Today's task is to work through the three pages of organizations to contact with our new address. We try to keep not just a list of names, but addresses, phone numbers, web sites, account numbers, etc. Every time we do this exercise, I'm amazed how often companies change things around, especially their web sites. I know all those Indian web programmers have to be kept busy some how, but is it really necessary re-hide the address change link every six months or so? We just did this last December; it's not like our list is ten years old or anything.

Found on the label of our new frying pan: Caution For safety, please keep pet birds out of the kitchen.

Of course, this immediately launches a little mini-movie in my head where Mom is swearing and swinging said frying pan around wildly in an attempt to keep the pet bird from crapping in the sauce and accidentally whacks her kid upside the head.

I have no idea what the safety implications are of having pet birds in the kitchen, other than my personal flight of fancy. And given the wording, one assumes wild birds in the kitchen are OK.

Back to work.