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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
pacotelic's LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | | 9:31 pm |
Grimmness
Read today why the horse latitudes are called that: ships would dump their horses overboard to pick up speed in he slow winds. Carencro, Louisiana is named after carrion crows, after the emancipation proclamation was signed. I have recently discovered another perched cemetery in the parking lot of the Ikea in Woodbridge. I wonder how many small cemeteries are wedged in the traffic islands, easements and neglected backlots of our sprawling landscape? I now know of four. | | Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | | 4:12 pm |
Hachintosk Mini9
Got the Mac Netbook up and running. Protip: don't buy the box set, you can install the whole thing with the $30 upgrade DVD. | | Friday, October 9th, 2009 | | 2:55 pm |
| | Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | | 10:33 pm |
| | 12:26 am |
Campaign Finance Reform
Make a condition of licensing for all broadcast stations an channel a block of free advertising to political candidates. Dedicate this advertising to only the time devoted to the news. (free speech) Prorate time for candidates inverse to paid avertisements in other time slots. (Equity) Serve. | | Sunday, October 4th, 2009 | | 9:32 am |
Descartes error
So. Was up with the chickens after getting to sleep after a ruinous sugar buzz brought on by damned delicious cupcakes from damned cupcake shop in Georgetown. I'm calling the 2012 trend for the astute urbanite : Artisan LardMade breakfast/cleared dishwasher/loaded same/got dressed in a multitentacled frenzy. The casualty was too much salt in the scrambled egg whites. Knew I should've omitted NaCl. Dropped Pyari of at all day conferecne as world was wkaing up. Didn;t see anoter car until we got on I-66.Said good morning to the same huge moon we said good night to the previous dusk. Then blinded by the sun heading east. Fun. Starbucks has the before nine set cornered in Georgetown. Banged out a section on cheapness and nails in the one table between 31st and Wisconsin. Lacking wireless, and wanting to check on things, present company included, I cast about for places to get free connections. Unfortunately, the only place in G-town with free whiffy serves cupcakes and coffee. See above. I only need so much coffee and sugar. So here's Descartes error. I go back to the car, freely parked in Georgetown mere steps from the conference, and try to work out the math. Leave the car there for her to use when she's done 8-10 hour later? Will she be too tired to drive? Hang out in G-town for 8-10 hour hemorhagging cash form one dining establishment to another. Subsist on cupcakes for the day? Leave the car there and take metro back home for the day? When at home, sit around there (never as productive as it could be), or get on the bike and drive someplace more conducive? what kind of time would that take? I do need to keep riding though, but if I did that I'd probably just be getting back to Vienna now. Have a lotta writing I want to do today, its true. Don't I have the courage of my convictions? Can't I get work done while waiting for and on the train? Sat there for five minutes gazing blankly at the C&O canal bridge, mulling over a mode split decision. Then I turned the key like an American and exercised my right ankle again. | | Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 | | 1:17 pm |
He never writes, he never calls
/Andy Rooney: What cheeses me off is that I tend to be in sync with Morning edition in my morning errands. I'll get in the car, with the radio faithfully tuned to 88.5 (90.9 in Philly, 90.1 in Atlanta, and 88.1 in Greenville IIRC). Wanting to write and wake up, I"l head to a coffee shop to get my ticker revved to dangerous levels and, if I'm lucky, enter a fugue state it takes me most of the morning to recover from. Just think, no one's even suggested making coffee illegal, but it can do a number on you, I assure you. The problem is, I usually write/read for an hour and change, which is precisely as long as the NPR news cycle on morning edition. So when I get back in the car to actually go to work, I"m hearing the same stories I did an hour ago. I'm sure in a decade that things will be more a la carte, but right now it's a vexation. | | Friday, September 25th, 2009 | | 7:13 am |
Cheap
Reading Cheap by R. Shell these days, and somewhat beguiled by her exploration of economic and behavioral mechanisms for demanding the lowest cost at any cost. This was not always the way of things, and there is no reason to think that it will always be. That's heuristic handwaving however, and I'd like to know how to tease apart the ball o' yarn. Anything is better than "this is really bad, so we should stop it". So I propose this as a brick in the "chinese wall": A Pigouvian tax on corporations proportional to the ratio in pay of their higheest paid worker versus their lowest paid worker. While it's a blunt instrument, I can't see another way to correct the urge of management to cut workers to the bone to improve short term profits at the cost of long term survival and public goods. Right now, the conflict is all worker on worker, andthere is little to no feedback loop in place to disincent management beyond the next quarter and protection of the executive pool at the expense of the labor pool. | | Sunday, September 13th, 2009 | | 6:53 am |
Monticello
Going to see that original suburbanite and violator of building codes, Thos. Jefferson. Should be interesting. | | Friday, September 11th, 2009 | | 11:56 pm |
In which I go off and google some graphs.
First off, I'd like to introduce this graph, which doesn't answer the question completely but is a better illustration of fiscal conservatism combined with activist conservatism:  Check that abscissa! I know your alibi for this. Now, to the matter at hand. Mind you, the secular leader of a Shi'ite majority sate has no real motivation to ally himself with a Sunni/Wahhabist Jihadist form two state over, but there you go. Sometime I think the right was informed on their axis of evil policy by close study of the "He-Man" series from the 80's. If that were the operative model, why didn't you wait for them to doublecorss each other like they always did? I forgot, you needed an inflexible musclebound homoerotic to ave the day in all cases.  Now, adding up the annual budgets doesn't wuit get us to a trillion dollars (Though that would've been a lot of highways, bridges, schools (urp, sorry about that), and dare I say it, transit. Let's assume that we paid for all that "as we go". Alas, just before Bush launched us into a campaign that jacked up the oil price and devalued the dollar, he cut taxes. I know you don't like the term "foregone revenue", but here it is:  A pretty gross graph, covering the time from 2001 to 2006. So here's a graph with a time series covering the same period in question. BTW, the Y-axes are labeled poorly, but perhaps this was done to avoid the unreality of huge numbers. The dollar range is from 1.5 to 3.0 trillion dollars.  All in all, declining revenues plus rising costs puts us squarely in the red throughout dear leader's first and second terms. While this might not be a trillion dollar war (of our or our grandchildren's money), it sure was at least a 850 billion dollar war. Every chimerical reason given for this war has rung false. I'll pull up the list some time if you'd like. I'm sure you voted libertarian democratic during this period, but many republicans here should be reminded in forceful terms that they've been had. Unless of course they like putting the country into hock for some crusade. The term I use for that is repugnican. Finally, there's these equally irrelevant, but pretty damning to your peer's inherent argument, graphs.    In conclusion: fiscal conservatism is a fig leaf so long as it is wielded by the flavor of revanchist conservatives we've been afflicted with for the past few decades. True, a balance of powers between R and D does seem to do better than a one party solution, but there is little to no evidence that R, given total power, will do better with the taxpayer's money than D. Except one thing. D may actually try to pay down debt, while R will put it on the credit card. That's solid fiscal policy! Ah the imperial republican presidency. Do you have any idea what Goldwater, Buckley or Burke actually stood for? | | Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 | | 9:48 pm |
| | Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 | | 7:52 pm |
| | 9:01 am |
How do you spell incentivised?
In response to this great post: http://wildcelticrose.livejournal.com/897844.htmlPowerful. Insurance companies are incentivised to withhold care because it cuts into their profits, doctors are incentivised to order more test and prolong the diagnosis because it protects them from lawsuits, lawyers are incentivised to sue doctors for malpractice because there's no limit on torts and no no way to litmus test cases for frivolity until they've already been tried, insurance companies are incentivised to charge doctors amounts you and I could live on because of the danger of a malpractice suit, doctors are incentivised to seek high paying positions (instead of GP) because med school is so expensive, consumers are incentivised to ask for expensive treatments because insurance shields them from being sensitive to costs, doctors offices and hospitals are incentivised to overcharge because figuring out who to bill and how much is not simple, consumers are incentivised to be unhealthy because the USDA and DOT have been winning the war against healthy food and physical activity for the last 60 years. Break any one of those links, and you'd be on your way. My problem with a 1,000 pages of text is that its bloated and tries to do everything, when a phalanx of smaller bills could tear at the problem and address it more nimbly. | | Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | | 10:10 pm |
Bannination
I know why I've been banned from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) conservatism. I was being a child I know why I've been banned from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wock. He was being a big baby But why have I been banned from paste42? Puzzlement. | | Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | | 8:17 am |
Time to make the best of this day. | | Friday, August 28th, 2009 | | 10:54 pm |
Well, that was stupid
Got a "exclusive" invitation to review a couple of TV pilots a coupe months ago. Threw these away summarily, as we do not won a TV for a reason. This afternoon, pyari, tells me that a friend invited us to a TV pilot review. Seemed vaguely familiar. I was hurtling back from Leesburg, and something about driving and TV just goes together. So I said sure, figuring it would at least be a unique experience. So we get to the Sheraton on Columbia Pike, meetup with the friend, and get ushered into their largets ballroom with 200 other gullible Americans. The shows Stunk on Ice, obviously pulled form the remainder bins of shows that never were. One was a dead-again remake called "Soulmates", and the other was a dumber version of Full House called "Dads" We tittered amongst ourselves. The commercials were excellent, in most cases. See where that's going? So we figured we'd better answer in the most generic way possible to the surveys, lest we get barraged with mail as a likely rube custoemr. Whatever we could do to get our questionaire thrown out, we did. Pyari double answered on some questions. I put my email as haywood@jablome.com, and aother assorted hilarity. We had a good time. Not uplifting, but hilarious. | | Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 | | 7:46 pm |
A very instructive 2.5 hours
In order to truly bike within a city, you must bike to a place that you thought could only be reached by car. -When I was 10, me and my friend Matt would bike to Emory to play Dig-Dug at Jaggers. We could swear it was 10 miles round trip. -When I was 15, I first biked to Stone Mountain. I got a flat tire while I was there, which taught me the virtues of having a pump and patch kit with me at all times. I had jobs from age 16 to age 23 that were five miles away from my house. This was the apex of my biking, as I was able to repair my bike on a semiregular basis, and riding it was pretty much my nature. Because of this, I did not get a drivers license until I was 22, in Atlanta. Around 21 t 24, I saw it as complete freedom, having the necessary endurance and bike skills to go anywhere anyone else could go in twice the time, but under my own power. I would not be stranded. Between age 25 and 29, I moved to a country town, and my biking fell precipitously with the vision of a can of Miller to the back of the head. After moving back to Atlanta, I managed to get my legs back to some extent. The true fall was the realization that my job would give me a Marta pass, gratis. Most days I would bike there and train it back. After moving to Philly, I had perhaps one of the most beautiful bike commutes available in the US, along the Schuylkill River, but the approach to hone was a quarter mile of solid hill. I got used to the commuter ail, and memorized the timetables. I could be stranded if I stayed out past 12:14. So I even resorted to the Volvo. Of course, finding parking for the blasted thing was a chore. Between age 35 and 37, like most newly married men, my biking fell off and was almost non-existent. Today, I biked from Vienna to Ballston, and back. | | Saturday, August 15th, 2009 | | 12:24 am |
Nitelation
Dru k and satiated in Philadelphia 10 hours ago I was quite stressed Tomorrow we weed, write and get parts off bikes. Such is the condition. To sleep! | | Friday, August 14th, 2009 | | 4:17 am |
| | Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 | | 11:58 pm |
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