Wordless Wednesday
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Pants on Fire, Part Umpty-Seven point Three
The Post Office is going to sue Lance Armstrong for running “the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping program” that the world has ever seen which apparently hurts postal customers’ essential concept of the Post Office.
Yeah, I’d hate ever to think the Post Office might have the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful program for anything. That would definitely give us the wrong idea about the Post Office.
The Postal’s Services own studies show that the service benefitted tremendously from its sponsorship — benefits totaling more than $100 million in sales.
Speaking of sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping programs: Sequestration? Budget cuts?
I’ve been looking for a straight answer on how much will be cut from actual Federal spending this week. Best I can tell, the boogeyman will slice about $85 billion from the federal budget. And also, best as I can tell, total Federal spending for fiscal year 2012 reached $3.6 trillion and is due to rise for fiscal 2013. What do you bet the increase will be more than $85 billion? For the record, fiscal year 2012 marked the fourth consecutive year of trillion dollar deficits.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: everyone is afraid that their personal ox will get gored.
Wow. That never happens in business.
Texas Instruments laid off 1,700 people. NBC dumped 500. Solel fired 140 of their remaining 430 workers. Xerox restructured 2,500 current employees into former employees. Stryker closed their facility in New York and plans to counter the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 1,170 jobs, some 5% of their global workforce. And those were just some of the announcements last November alone.
Nobody said boo when Citigroup slashed 11,000 jobs, when Dow “retired” Rufus, or when Motorola did the same for Liz Arden, but the Feds can’t handle a 2% cut in money they haven’t even spent yet?
Yesterday, Governor Martin O’Malley (D-MD) said, “We can’t cut our way to prosperity.” Perhaps not, but the stock market is up on news of the layoffs and faith in government is down on news of higher spending.
As Gail Collins wrote in the NYTimes, “Did you know one of the most popular TV shows in Norway was about firewood? Maybe you should have this discussion with a Norwegian.” Better yet, maybe we should have this discussion in Norwegian.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the certification of the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
From ourdocuments.gov: “In 1909 progressives in Congress again attached a provision for an income tax to a tariff bill. Conservatives, hoping to kill the idea for good, proposed a constitutional amendment enacting such a tax; they believed an amendment would never received ratification by three-fourths of the states. Much to their surprise, the amendment was ratified by one state legislature after another, and on February 25, 1913, with the certification by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, the 16th amendment took effect. Yet in 1913, due to generous exemptions and deductions, less than 1 percent of the population paid income taxes at the rate of only 1 percent of net income.”
My, how things have changed.
Wordless Wednesday
Brrrrrrrrrr
I had a blissfully hot shower this morning. I closed the bathroom door and kept all that hot, moist air inside. Ahhh.
Winter has come to South Puffin.
Wind chill advisories went up on Saturday night for “feels like” temps of 28-32°F. In South Florida.
That was up in the United States so it never actually dropped that low here. But it has been that windy. I put the blanket on the bed Saturday night and laid out my flannel shirt for Sunday.
Most houses in the Keys don’t have central heat so when the outside temperature drops, the inside temp follows. Up to North Puffin it was 9° Sunday morning and partly cloudy with a 30% chance of snow, although all the snow on the radar was over New Hampshire and Maine. The forecast 19° high temp there was not a warming trend.
It was 52° here after a couple hours of solar heating and the Wind Advisory stayed in effect for winds from the North at 15-25 mph with gusts to 35-40. Same 10° thermometer climb here Sunday as up north. We went all the way to 63°.
We broke our fast at the Cracked Conch. The old fogies who gather there on Sunday mornings always take over the “Crank Corner,” a counter out on the deck.
Noooooooo.
Everybody moved inside. The Conch doesn’t have air conditioning but they do have windows. All the windows were shut. And, it turns out, they have heat which was turned on!
Whoda thunk it?
I spent the day yesterday in the living room, reading and poking the ‘puter. Having the patio stone1 in my actual lap was quite nice. I did cover my feet with a blanket although the temp rose to 56° outside and 60°(!) on the porch.
My next door neighbor has company. They had all the doors open there when he got up yesterday morning; he was seriously cold. He complained a bit about that when he came over to warm up. “I’ll do outside when it drops to 70°,” he said. “I don’t do 68°!”
My lap blanket felt pretty good.
It got even colder overnight. I woke sometime in the darkest hours and thought about getting up for the second blankie. I didn’t because it was all the way at the other end of the house. I guess I didn’t need it but it surely was cold this morning. 60° here in the sunroom first thing. It was 54° and mostly clear when I arose at sunrise. We’re allegedly headed for a high of 70° but with a windchill as low as about 45° on breezes from the NNE at 20-25 mph. 16 mph “breeze” right now.
I don’t understand why my friends in North Puffin aren’t more sympathetic.
1Patio Stone: Liz Arden’s pet name for my 26 pound square, black, laptop with its 17″ screen. It puts out a fair dinkum amount of heat.
Monetized
First rule of writing: write what you know.
I write a blog which means I do occasionally read OPB (Other People’s Blogs). And when I read, I often comment.
So.
I seem to have a couple-three logins at different blogging softwares but they all come back to the gmail account associated with the No Puffin Perspective. They display my own name and everything, since I don’t snipe anonymously.
A friend sent me a link to a LiveJournal blog today. It started an interesting discussion about ownership and privilege; I logged in to make a comment. LiveJournal gave me a couple of options: LiveJournal itself, Facebook, Twitter, Openid, Google, MailRu, Vkontakte, or Anonymously. I won’t autolink my blogging to Facebook or Twitter because you never know what might end up tweeted on your wall. MailRu, founded by Yuri Milner, is the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world. I don’t speak Russian. Ditto for Vkontakte. I’ve never bothered to get an Openid because, well, I have gmail.
So I clicked the GooglePaw and gave LiveJournal my email address, fully expecting to see my name and the North Puffin avatar show up. I saw “ext_1649750” and a crash test dummy.
Went looking for a way to change the avatar. Did so.
Google Plus now probably has a low res bird on my page instead of my smiling mug.
Went looking for a way to change the user name. And that’s where the story gets interesting. LiveJournal is perfectly happy to change my public name from what they assigned to what every other account uses. For $15.
I have a better idea.
I deleted my LiveJournal account and I recommend everyone else do the same.