Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Do Democrats Believe in Democracy?

Posted on by

Maybe not.

“All politics is local.”

Speaking of shopping, the Vermont Supreme Court last week ruled in favor of construction of a Walmart in St. Albans. Developer Jeff Davis expects the store to be open for business by the end of next year. The unanimous decision, the high court’s second in the case since 1997, upheld a 2010 decision from the Vermont Environmental Court. The Vermont Natural Resources Council had opposed the development.

Vermont was the last state in the union to receive the Walmart blessing; the first store opened here in 1995. Some Franklin County residents have fought off the megaretailer for nearly 20 years. We didn’t need Wally back in ’95 because we had Ames but Ames closed its retail stores here in 2002. Since then, pretty much everyone in Northwestern Vermont has had only a couple of choices for sox and underwear: buy them at the supermarket or the Dollar store or pay the I-89 tax to drive an hour to the big box center in the next county.

The Vermont Environmental Court decision had already granted Walmart permission to build the 147,000-square-foot store in Franklin County over VNRC objections. The court required Wally to pay the Town additional “public service costs” (such as for fire and police) that its presence cause the Town to incur.

That’s not unusual. Municipalities often charge developers impact fees before allowing them to build houses and stores.

And now the Supremes have upheld it. Again.

“This is such a bad decision for the governance of Vermont,” VNRC spokesman Jared Margolis told WPTZ News. “Really gives the green light, opens the floodgates to local boards to act however they want because the Supreme Court has condoned pretty awful behavior.”

Atty. Margolis ain’t from around here or he would know that local control is the governance of Vermont life.

Former Vermont Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, also a Democrat, wrote, “…One-size-fits-all solutions from the state will not work as well as allowing our cities and towns to develop their own responses to local problems… Over the years our legislature has given us local control over many issues — from animal control to zoning.”

Ms. Markowitz got some of that right. Citizens and their local boards do have control over issues ranging from animal control to zoning but not because the legislature in its beneficence granted it. Citizens and their local boards do have control over issues ranging from animal control to zoning because we kept those rights while constitutionally ceding some affairs to the legislature.

Creepy, crawly, encroachment. That’s the way erosion works. Take a little here. Take a little there. Pretty soon the legislature grants us leave to shop for the little parts of our little lives.

Sooner or later they’ll notice that a local board might act however it wants and the sky falls down.

This is not the first time the Vermont Natural Resources Council has come down on the side of interference. They support major property tax increases on private lands to punish bad land uses, unremittingly denounce anyone who might allow a (gasp) snowmobile to cross his farm, and oppose the planned Lowell Mountain wind project.

I’m thinking the elected local boards might think VNRC’s self-appointed behavior pretty awful.

SODDI

Posted on by

Ex-presidential candidate and Vermont’s former governor, Howard Dean told Bob Schieffer this morning that George Bush and the Tea Party caused the financial crisis.

Some other dood did it.

The SODDI defense, sometimes including “Plan B,” comes up in a criminal trial when there is no question that a murder, assault, or theft happened, but somebody else was in the room as a convenient fall guy. “Black guy, big head” actor Steve Harris liked to say in the television legal drama The Practice. The Other Dude can often remain unnamed, just a wraith who creates reasonable doubt. The real Plan B is invoked when the Other Dude gets a name.


AAA Rating

Republicans in Congress and on the street, of course, blame President Obama for all of the nation’s problems. “Hold the line,” Jim DeMint told Speaker John Boehner.Some other dood did it.

One of Rufus’ good friends, the very liberal born-again Zoroastrian musician Tom Minor, posted a Youtube video showing “How The Bush Tax Cuts Blew Up The Deficit And Debt.” It has easy to understand pictures, he wrote, “for all your friends who try and sell the BS that this debt is Obama’s fault.”

Some other dood did it.

If George Steinbrenner were still alive, how long do you think Barack Obama would last as the manager for the hated (in Vermont, at least) New York Yankees? I reckon he’d get tired of keeping power hitters Reid, McConnell, Inouye, Durbin, and Kyl, Boehner, Cantor, Pelosi, McCarthy, and Hoyer on the payroll when they couldn’t do anything but fumble.

Some other dood did it doesn’t work on the diamond.

Howard, and Jim, and Tom all missed the boat. They should have used the Shaggy Defense.

Reggae artist Shaggy’s number one hit song It Wasn’t Me portrays a man who asks his friend Shaggy what to do after his girlfriend caught him with another woman. Shaggy’s advice is to deny everything. Say “It wasn’t me,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

The Shaggy Defense described singer-songwriter, arranger, performer and record producer R. Kelly’s position when charged with child pornography after cops found a video of Mr. Kelly having sex with an underage girl. “You say that was me on camera, butt naked, face hanging out, banging on the kitchen floor? Nope. Wasn’t me.”

Worked in court.

Probably wouldn’t keep the manager or the players on the roster in the real world, though.

Citing the ongoing deficits and the unlikelihood that the current crop of politicians would ever solve them, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States debt from AAA to AA+ yesterday. It is the first debt downgrade in U.S. history.

I know. S&P must be the Other Dood.

Dow Dumps

Posted on by

The market tanked this week as we experienced the worst single day drop and the worst weekly wash out since 2008. The Dow drained $512 points yesterday alone. 25 months and the only reason the unemployment figures dropped today is that more people stopped looking for work.

The pundits will tell you it’s not
the “Debt Crisis.” The pundits lie.

I’ll be the first (actually the 9,386th) to tell you that stock brokers, bond buyers, and currency traders still aren’t thinking much about the national debt. They’re thinking about unemployment and whether earnings are going down. Again.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

If Mr. Obama and the Congress hadn’t frittered away most of 2011 so far engineering a Debt Crisis (and naming a post office in Peoria), they would have had time to fix the economy and get million Americans back to work.

And now they are on vacation. Again.

Oh.

Wait.

Maybe they had to engineer the debt crisis to hide the fact that they haven’t (dare I say can’t) fixed the economy.

Chester Gould Would Be Proud

Posted on by

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out!

Chester Gould created the hard-hitting, fast-shooting police detective who used forensic science, high tech gimmicks, and his wits to track down the bad guys Sunday after Sunday. There have been many (not terribly successful) incarnations of Tracy’s famous two-way wrist radio and his later two-way wrist TV.

Cell phones, particularly the push-to-talk varieties, may have outshone that clunky cartoon version but Skype is the real Amen, boys, hitch up two-way wrist TV.

Amsterdam has about 20 times
the average Internet speed of North Puffin.
Hold that thought.

I really didn’t want to Skype. See, I didn’t much want to put on clothes just to answer the phone. I never understood why women in my mother’s generation checked their hair in the hall mirror before picking up the receiver.

The patio stone deliberately has no built in web cam, so I bought a video cam when I needed to pack up the seven tons of astro gear Rufus left in my little house in South Puffin. I got a deal, see, on a pair of [famous brand] clip on bugs that sit atop my monitor. The two of them, in OEM packaging cost a little less than one good one from anyone else. And the quality wasn’t too too bad once I figured out how to turn the darned things on.

No, I don’t use them both at once for 3-D. I have one each in North and South Puffin.

The more we Skype, the more I’m liking this Skyping thing. I’ve been hanging out a bit.

Skype is addictive. On Saturday, I watched Liza Arden eat a Bagel-Shaped-Object as we puttered and hung out and Skyped the morning away.

Skype is addictive. The mobile app works on both Android and iPhones. Unfortunately, the fine print shows it restricts U.S. users to Wi-Fi only calls. Naturally, a developer hacked the app within days of its release to work over 3G. Still pretty clunky there.

Skype is addictive. Seventh graders in Calgary, Alberta, participated in the year-long “Cigar Box Project.” The kids learned Canadian history by using technology to blend historical images and artifacts into their own creations. And they Skyped with National Museum curator Sheldon Posen.

Skype is addictive. Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust in Reading, England, is working on giving the people the option of using Skype to speak to their relatives in hospital rather than visiting them each day. The next best thing to being there and, so far, bacteria haven’t figured out how to travel over fiber-optic cables.

We’re sorry. Your Internet Connection Speed
is too slow to support decent video.

Ms. Arden and I have experienced that pop-up recently as her cable provider switched her from her previously rocketing reach to dial-up speeds. She put in a trouble ticket but our North American infrastructure lags the European fiber-optic networks with their gigabit speeds. The company Level 3 now has ultra-low-latency routes with circuit speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second on some city-to-city cables.

Facebook has announced the launch of
video calling in partnership with Skype.
Can Google Plus be far behind?

Skype is addictive but does Skype — now the face of Facebook — toll the end of social networking? Whether we FOOF or FOOG, the “normal” use of those pages is slightly delayed conversations between a potentially big number of peeps (how many FB friends do you have?). The social part works because we can time slice a little piece out of our other activities to stay in touch.

Video conferencing is real time in a way a traditional phone call never has been.

I’ve written before that time is a finite resource. Balancing expectations remains the hardest part of our juggling lives.

“I do enjoy seeing what we’re doing, but find it tethers me too too much,” Rufus said. “It (can be) a good, clear connection, but I prefer being able to move around and do other stuff while we yatter, so hanging out doesn’t eat into my ability to get other things done.”

The next great addition to our communications arsenal may be a (wait for it) cordless phone. Actually it will be a cordless remote for the computer-with-the-Skype-connection that makes at least the talking and listening from afar easier. Or Skype on the tablet. Or on a two-way wrist TV.

And a faster Internet connection.

Glossary:
FOOF /v intransitive/: Faffing Off On Facebook
FOOG (formerly “GOOF”) /v intransitive/: Doing the same on Google Plus
Gigabit /n/ Really really fast. For now.

Interest-ing

Posted on by

“Vermont is a AAA rated state,” former State Treasurer and current Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding said yesterday.

The AAA Diamond Rating system “is North America’s premier rating program. Whether you seek simple roadside accommodations or a destination resort experience, trust AAA’s reliable Diamond ratings to guide your decisions. Some 32,000 hotels in North America and the Caribbean have achieved AAA rated;” many are right here in Vermont.

Being pathologically parsimonious, I stay exclusively in Motel 5s. (OK, there was that Motel 4-1/2 in South Carolina and my personal favorite, the 16 $CDN/night Bumblebee just over the border in New Brunswick.) No AAA surveyor worth his salt has ever stayed in a Motel 5 even with a broken down car.

I stayed in a jail once when my car broke down in central Jersey but that was free. Pretty nice cops in that town to take in a college kid in the pouring rain.

“When an accident is waiting to happen, it eventually does.” Economists Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M. Reinhart wrote in This Time Is Different.

The Outstanding Public Debt as of noon on Monday, July 25, 2011:
$ 1 4 , 3 5 7 , 3 1 7 , 9 8 3 , 8 9 2 . 0 4

Three months and a week ago, Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook for America’s long-term credit rating from stable to negative. At that time there was a one-in-three chance that S&P would downgrade the nation’s AAA credit rating. Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P rate the likelihood that businesses and sovereign nations will repay their debts.

Three months and a week ago, President Obama called for a bipartisan group in Congress to “begin negotiating” a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership

Three months and a week ago, the Gang of Six — three Democrat and three Republican Senators — said they would deliver their own bi-partisan plan when Congress returned from its May recess.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that congressional leaders have trotted out yet another new set of “competing debt-crisis solutions.” This is so serious that President Obama “canceled fund-raising appearances” today. But the two parties still have no agreement about what to do before the August 2 default deadline.

Am I the only observer to notice that banks want interest rates to go up so the United States government wants interest rates to go up?

About $5 billion of municipal bonds are in default today. Yawn. Nobody cares.

Countries “can default on stunningly small amounts of debt,” Dr. Rogoff wrote.

I predict another week of Lindsay Lohan and Roger Clemens in the news.

Kenneth S. Rogoff is an economics professor at Harvard and a former research director of the International Monetary Fund. Carmen M. Reinhart is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She directed the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland and was Chief Economist at Bear Stearns.

Stunningly large amounts of debt notwithstanding, the U.S. has plenty of cash flowing in to service the debt, so the country won’t default to its creditors. Nope. No chance. Won’t happen. Instead, President Obama announced that he won’t send Anne her Social Security check.

And we let these people who can’t figure out how to run the medical system and who stole General Motors from us use our credit cards to stay in the Five Diamond motels.

Talk about a train wreck.