Wasted
Overheard: Yeah I’m going to get wasted. I’m going to get chocolate wasted. Hell, I’m gonna get impregnated wasted.
Snuggle List
Overheard at work:
Co-worker: Yeah. He’s on my S-list today.
Me: Does that stand for ‘snuggle-list’?
Co-worker: Yes, Andy. He’s on my f–kin’ snugglelist.
From NYTimes:
The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley. Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population. More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic. By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Robins See Magnetic Fields
Wild:
Katrin Stapput from Goethe University has shown that this ‘magnetoreception’ ability depends on a clear image from the right eye. If it’s covered by translucent frosted goggle, the birds become disorientated; if the left eye is covered, they can navigate just fine. So the robin’s vision acts as a gate for its magnetic sense. Darkness (or even murkiness) keeps the gate shut, but light opens it, allowing the internal compass to work.
via Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp
Moral Purity vs Economic Incentives
A comment from Metafilter:
Give me a break.The housing crash can be explained entirely in terms of incentives that were completely out of whack. Implying that we as a society would have avoided disaster if only we still had humility and moral fiber is shrill and useless, and will not help us fix this crisis or prevent the next one. When the incentives are screwed up, individual people will make decisions that harm everyone else, without malicious intent. The way to prevent the next crash isnt to bewail the collapse of sanity, but rather to change the incentives. What incentives am I talking about?
1. Mortgage brokers that made loans they knew would go bad, because they could just sell them to Fannie, Freddie, or private banks and take the commission. Fannie and Freddie are backed by the government, so why worry about one loan that might go bad? Better to put someone in a home and get a nice commission than turn them down and make no money.
2. Investment banks that could bet against their own investors – see Goldman Sachs latest debacle with mortgage-backed securities. The guy in one part of the company betting against the securities gets a nice bonus even if he makes the salesman in the other part of the company lose his bonus, and even though the net result for the economy was lost wealth.
3. Government regulators that are paid by the companies they regulate. Dont bite the hand that feeds you!
4. Debt rating agencies that are paid by the companies whose securities they rate. Again, dont bite the hand that feeds you! The crash did not just “happen”; it was inevitable with those incentives in place.
via Strategic Default and The Unceremonious Fall From Entitlement
Tighter and tighter:
The Schwarzenegger administration today ordered State Controller John Chiang to reduce state worker pay for July to the federal minimum allowed by law — $7.25 an hour for most state workers. The instructions from the Department of Personnel Administration exclude roughly 37,000 state workers in six bargaining units that recently came to tentative labor agreements with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.Some employees, such as doctors and lawyers, would get no pay because federal exempts them from any minimum wage requirement.
As we all suspected:
Testimony before a Senate investigative panel this week is expected to reveal what many have suspected about BP all along; they don’t care about the environment, the animals that are dying, and the lives that are being destroyed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In a shocking interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 29th, Allegiance Capitol Corporation V.P. Fred McCallister said that BP is deliberately sinking oil with the toxic chemical disbursant Corexit, to hide the size of the oil spill. By sinking the oil before it can be collected, BP won’t have to pay fines on it.
via Whistle blower to testify on oil spill worst fear:BP deliberately sinks oil with Corexit as cover up.
From Bloomberg:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner told senators on April 3, 2008, that the tens of billions of dollars in “assets” the government agreed to purchase in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. were “investment-grade.” They didn’t share everything the Fed knew about the money. The so-called assets included collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed bonds with names like HG-Coll Ltd. 2007-1A that were so distressed, more than $40 million already had been reduced to less than investment-grade by the time the central bankers testified. The government also became the owner of $16 billion of credit-default swaps, and taxpayers wound up guaranteeing high-yield, high-risk junk bonds. By using its balance sheet to protect an investment bank against failure, the Fed took on the most credit risk in its 96- year history and increased the chance that Americans would be on the hook for billions of dollars as the central bank began insuring Wall Street firms against collapse.
via Fed Made Taxpayers Unwitting Junk-Bond Buyers – Bloomberg.
Sharron Angle: God Planned Your Rape
‘Manders asks her whether there is “any reason at all for an abortion,” and she answers: “Not in my book.” For clarity, he says: “So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?” And Angle replies with this reasoning: “You know, I’m a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.” You see, God planned your rape and pregnancy. Isn’t that reassuring?’
Sharron Angle: God planned your rape, don’t abort! – Abortion – Salon.com.
Rand Paul Won’t Say How Old the Earth Is
Paul, a Presbyterian layman, campaigned at a Christian Home Educators of Kentucky convention where he was peppered with questions about his religious beliefs, brushing aside one about the age of the earth that he later described as ridiculous. ”I’m not running for minister,” Paul said later. “I’m more than willing to stand up and say I’m a Christian, but I don’t think I have to go into every detail of what my religious beliefs are. If I were going to be the minister of their church, they’d have a right to ask me that.”
And if you were going to be making legislative decisions based on your beliefs that might also be important.
Jackass.
Andrew Willis of Elizabethtown, who teaches his four children at home, said he hoped Paul’s answer would jibe with his own belief that the earth is about 6,000 years old. ”I’m not at all surprised that he didn’t want to answer that question,” Willis said shortly after posing it. “I know that is hugely controversial.”
It’s only controversial to the people that are wrong.
via Paul courts Christian home schoolers in Kentucky – U.S. Senate Election – Kentucky.com.
Why the EPA Turned Down the Dutch
“Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company’s expense. “The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Millionaires vs the Unemployed
From Yglesias:
Temporarily cutting taxes on the children of multi-millionaires would have a minor stimulative effect. But it’s not well-targeted, and the effort to reduce taxes on the kids of multi-millionaires is about permanent tax cuts anyway, which don’t stimulate anything. Yet the very same Senators who said deficit concerns wouldn’t allow them to vote for targeted job creation tend to support budget-busting giveaways to the kids of the very rich. Debbie Stabenow vented a bit about this yesterday, specifically targeting Senator George LeMieux: I note that Senator LeMieux’s indifference to the unemployed is particularly hard to understand. You can chalk some of the congressional politics of stimulus up to regional variations in the labor market, but Florida is one of the highest-unemployment states. His constituents are in desperate need of help.
So happy to know they have crazy assholes down under:
The outspoken Steve Fielding, from the conservative Family First Party, [presumably implying all opponents hate families] said women could attempt to cheat the centre-left Labor government’s plans for paid leave by deliberately conceiving a child they never intended to have. ”Drug addicts and welfare cheats can go out there and get themselves pregnant and then after 20 weeks have an abortion and still pocket the government’s cash,” he said.
James Cameron to Help with Oil Spill
Can they at least pretend to give a shit?
Federal officials are hoping film director James Cameron can help them come up with ideas on how to stop the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.The “Avatar” and “Titanic” director was among a group of scientists and other experts who met Tuesday with officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies for a brainstorming session on stopping the massive oil leak.The Canadian-born Cameron is considered an expert on underwater filming and remote vehicle technologies. “Avatar” and “Titanic” are the two highest-grossing films of all time.
And that makes him credibile how?
11 dead, 17 injured and entire ecosystems and industries hang in the balance:
Barely a month after the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers, the company announced at a meeting that it would pay its shareholders a total dividend of $1 billion this year. Last week, the company held a closed-door meeting at its office in Switzerland where the decision to make the dividend payout was made.
via Transocean to Make $1 Billion Dividend Payout to Shareholders
Bordering on Euripides:
An abusive Australian husband wrote down the names of his four children and demanded his wife pick which one he would kill, a Brisbane jury has been told. Mrs Falls, 42, has pleaded not guilty to murdering her husband by lacing his dinner with crushed sleeping pills then firing two bullets into his head as he dozed in his favourite recliner at their home on May 25, 2006. The shooting took place in front of two of the couple’s teenage daughters, while another daughter was also in the Nicholas Street home and the Falls’ three-year-old son slept nearby.
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