Singin’ Dollar Dollar Bill Y’all

This is just weird:

Over at TPM, Ryan Reilly has an intriguing post about the interest of some tea partiers for a new circulating dollar coin because it supposedly will save the federal government money. This follows a story in the Huffington Post from a week ago about how Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduced a bill that would eliminate the dollar bill and substitute dollar coins.

Here’s some very personal and U.S. history about the dollar coin and why this is a terrible idea that is really nothing more than a corporate subsidy.

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In theory, a dollar coin absolutely saves taxpayers money compared to a dollar bill. When the golden dollar was released in early 2000, it cost the government about 12 cents to make and it was expected to last about 30 years before it had to be removed from circulation because of normal wear. Each dollar bill cost much less—about 4 cents—but most bills only remain in circulation for a short time because they deteriorate so quickly. That means that the savings over 30 years are significant: it cost 12 cents to have a dollar coin but 80 cents to have a dollar bill. So from a budget perspective, changing to a dollar coin makes a great deal of sense and having a bill instead could be included in the waste-fraud-and-abuse category that most taxpayers demand be cut.

But…and it’s a big but…rather than save money, a dollar coin actually costs the government and taxpayers a great deal if it’s not going to be used. The government will still have to manufacture bills to meet the demand and mint coins that few will ever use to meet the legislative mandate. Pure and simple…creating a new dollar coin will be the equivalent of building a new highway right next to one that already exists and is working just fine.

Read the whole piece. Personally, I just don’t understand some of the things that motivate these folks. As James Joyner notes, the only way to handle the transition effectively would be to ban paper dollars after a set period, forcing everyone to make the transition. But if the mint even though about that, we’d have another group of teahadists screaming about punishing job creators and the heavy hand of government. We’d spend months with irate elderly scooter drivers attending rallies with George Washington’s face super-imposed on tread on me flags.

Besides, who wants to walk around with pockets weighed down with dollar coins? When I lived in Germany, all I did with the damned mark pieces was throw them into a jar and then very now and then exchange them for paper.

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Sometime the Lights are Shining on Me

I know I am going to get flamed for this, but I just don’t understand what the goal is for the occupy Wall Street crowd. I confess that I don’t have much use for crowds, so that always has to be factored in as part of my cynicism. And, I suppose, at least these folks are doing something, as opposed to sitting on their asses behind a computer bitching about Wall Street, which is all I have done. But you know what I think when I see shit like this:

I see that, and I don’t think of a coherent message to talk about how Wall Street and the Financial sector and their political influence are ruining the country. I see a bunch of trustafarian nitwits who should be braiding hair and drinking wheat beer in the parking lot of a Phish concert, weaving in a few bong hits and a couple games of hacky-sack. We’re just making it too easy for Wall Street and the money boys if this collection of motley fools is the opposition. It’s so fucking depressing.

Which gets me back to at least they are doing something. Having said all that, this kind of bullshit is outrageous:

There is no need for this kind of behavior from the cops. That man needs to be fired, promptly. Of course he won’t even be penalized in any way.

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Change for the Sake of WTF

Netflix has decided to split their DVD and streaming operations into two sites, “Qwikster” and Netflix. Qwikster is going to get its own web site, and here’s the rub (from the email I got this morning from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings):

A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated.

That’s a pretty big negative, because right now on Netflix, when you search for a movie, you have a choice. If it’s available on streaming, you can add it to your streaming queue. If not, you can add it to your DVD queue. That’s one simple operation. Hastings thinks it’s somehow better that I’ll soon have to log into two different sites and launch two separate searches to accomplish the same task I can do today with one.

This weekend, I found out that my local, huge grocery store decided to rearrange the location of grocery items. My shopping trip took quite a bit longer, and I was surrounded by bewildered shoppers and clueless employees who didn’t know where the fucking pasta was, either. Like Qwikster, somebody decided that a different arbitrary arrangement of the same old offerings would somehow be better for consumers. Well, it wasn’t. It was confusing, frustrating and a waste of time. The only difference between Qwikster and my grocery store is that Netflix changed their name to a stupid, turn-of-the-millenium dot com handle. At least my grocery store is smart enough to keep the same name while they turned their user experience to shit.

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Open Thread

Temperature dropped 30 degrees in the past couple of days, and now I have a headache.

Bitch moan complain.

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I’m Begging Now

Front pagers- stop making new categories for every whim. Use tags to be clever. We now have fifty categories with two posts or less in them. Some of the categories don’t even begin to make sense.

We have a category titled ‘eh.’ WTF does that mean? What the hell does “Balloon Jobs” mean? Why? Tire Swinging is so 2008?

Or Rick Perry Presents Rick Perry? Africa? Lizard blogging? Crab-Bucket Politics? Malkinfreude? “We don’t need another hero,” but that’s ok, because “we don’t need to know the way home.”

“The stupid speaks for itself?” If it really did, you wouldn’t need a god damned category pointing that out, would you?

We even have one for resveratrol, and I can’t figure out if one of you made it or spammers have access to our code.

Work with me. Make as many damned tags as you want. But stop creating a category for each individual post.

PRETTY PLEASE.

Tags: EVERYONE CAN SEE HOW CLEVER I AM WITH MY PITHY TAGS, Look how fun it is tomake tags, Look I am doing it again, OMG SO MUCH FUN ▲

Tonight’s Speech

I gotta admit, I have no desire to watch Obama speak tonight. Not because I don’t like him, but because I’m just feeling sort of fatalistic today and not really sure anything can be done to solve this crisis that has been developing for 3-4 decades. Plus, he’s not crazy, and will give a sober, rational speech, so there won’t be that train wreck in the waiting effect that you get with the GOP. Besides, we already know what is going to happen.

Obama will propose something moderate and completely reasonable, but we all know it is not going to be enough to get us out of this mess, and that assumes we can even get it past the teahadist House (we won’t- they are in full on tilt mode). He’ll get flayed alive by the usual suspects on the left, Paul Krugman will be mainlining thorazine by the end of the speech, and someone at FDL will call for a primary or impeachment.

The right, of course, will ignore everything he said and scream about the program costing too much, and trumpet deregulation, offshore drilling, claim Obama is over his head while making teleprompter jokes, and then go back to wailing for tax cuts and screaming Obama is doing nothing about jobs.

The media will spend the night focusing on how many Republicans refused to clap, or comparing Obama to Perry, insinuating that Perry is manly and Obama is a pussy, Maureen Down will write another column calling him a wimp, and we’ll have a rogues gallery of rightwing dickheads from Ed Rollins to Mark Halperin to whomever the Politico shits up spewing bullshit on every channel. Each network will be sure to include one milquetoast corporatist Democrat like Evan Bayh for balance, because all the left’s effective communicators are busy sending dick pics to random women on twitter or lunching at AIPAC. Glenn Kessler will find one minor mistake in grammar and give him four pinnochios.

In the long term, assuming a plan gets through the House (it won’t), then we get to go through our usual drama of the blue dogs from Red States (Manchin, Nelson, Landrieu, McCaskill, etc.), Lieberman just so he can continue to be the world’s preeminent douchenozzle, and some others I am sure I am missing. They’ll cockblock it on the Senate side, moaning about the program being a deficit buster while conveniently ignoring the fact that each one of them represents a welfare state sucking at the federal teat. Finally, at the 11th hour, Snowe and Collins will swoop in and offer tax cuts for the ultra-rich as a sweetener and they will support it. At this point, Bernie Sanders or whatever progressive hero of the moment will claim he can’t support anything with tax cuts for the rich in it. This will bring things to a standstill for a couple more weeks until another shitty jobs report comes out, and the Senate, acting in the fierce urgency of when-the-fuck-ever will pass some piece of shit that is too small, unfocussed, and does nothing other than provide the left with another opportunity to fracture and start flinging shit at each other. Republicans will have spent the entire time using procedural tricks to slow things down while having Frank Luntz work on the framing of the issue so that by the time it is about to hit the President’s desk, they will already have a cute name, the talking points will be distributed, and we’ll all be hearing about the new “Porkulus” or “Obamacare” or whatever the fuck childish name they come up with. In three months time, when employment hasn’t picked up because we are actually in the same god damned depression we’ve been in since 2007, Rick Perry can claim that Keynesian ideology has once again been disproven. Because everyone hates the bill, Friedman, Brooks, and other members of the Centrist jihad will claim this as proof that the bill is great.

Alternately, Obama might propose an extension of the payroll tax cut, at which point I get to read 500 progressive posts on how this is Obama’s secret plan to enable the catfood commission to gut social security. Regardless, no matter what happens, if the market drops tomorrow, it will be Obama’s fault.

So fuck it. Why should I put myself through this again? I’m tapping out. Someone else can deal with this clusterfuck, because I’ll be watching NFL. I’ve already told you what is going to happen- use this post as a check list (I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I am wrong). I honestly don’t know why anyone wants Obama’s job.

*** Update ***

Two other points. What would I do if I were Obama? Other than resigning and spending the rest of my life writing a book every couple of years, living a pretty damned good life, watching my children grow up, and telling everyone in the country to eat a bag of salted dicks, fix this mess yourselves? I’d go all in. Nothing he is going to propose tonight is going to get passed without being watered down to nothing. The House and Senate dysfunction will see to it. So go for it. Use the speech to propose everything you can. Massive infrastructure spending, extension of unemployment benefits that will be automatically renewed every six months until unemployment is under 7%, a public investment back to free up capital for small business, you name it. GO BIG. Hell, propose putting a million Americans to work building that god damned wall around Mexico the Republicans are so fired up about. Just go nuts and use the event to frame the Republicans as do-nothing. And if they start their usual bullshit in the stands with the ‘You Lie” crap, go off. Break out a metaphorical STICK and beat some pudgy wingnut with a southern drawl and a shit eating grin in the audience with it. Call them liars and frauds and point out the bullshit they have been peddling for decades is what got us here. If someone so much as mentions inflation or the bond market, take your shoe off and throw it at them. If you miss, throw the other one. That’s what I would do.

Point two. I will put up a post with a livestream from the White House so you all can watch without having to hear Luke Russert’s deep godddamned thoughts before and after.

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Open Thread

I’m so mad about the current state of politics I’m going to write lots of angry blog posts about how Obama sucks and do nothing to change Congress!

That will show the Republicans I’m fucking serious. Clearly they didn’t get the message when I chained myself to the WH fence and sent Sheehan money to primary Pelosi.

ALSO TOO, ABL USES ALL CAPS. WHY WON’T JOHN COLE GO BACK TO THE GOP WHERE HE BELONGS?

Tags: I may be trolling..., Many of you are so stupid you deserve posts like this ▲

On Failing to Appreciate Our Technological Good Fortune

It’s the Silly Season, a/k/a Pickled Gherkin Summer, so Slate looks to harvest pageclicks with a “special issue” on The Rise of the Twins. Complete with a scienterrific article on the “skyrocketing” increase in the rate of (surviving) multiple births:

According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the U.S. twin rate has skyrocketed from one pair born out of every 53 live births in 1980 to one out of every 31 births in 2008. Where are all these double-babies coming from? And what’s going to happen in years to come—will the multiple-birth rate continue to grow until America ends up a nation of twins?...

... which talks wisely of older mothers, IVF treatments, and follicle-stimulating hormones. But one very significant factor in the number of same-age siblings doesn’t get mentioned at all: There are more twins (and triplets, and even octuplets) because we have the technology to identify multiple births in utero, to delay premature labor in multiparous pregnancies, and to keep extremely premature infants alive. One reason we’re seeing a lot more twins on the streets these days is that a lot more of them make it into the “live birth” statistical category!

When my youngest siblings were born in the mid-1960s, the boys were just on either side of the three-pound birthweight which was then considered the limit of viability—it was a modest coup for the NYC hospital where they were delivered that both of them not only survived, but did well enough to go home after only five or six weeks. My mother’s obstetrician was completely unprepared; since he never heard more than one fetal heartbeat through his stethoscope (state of the art!), he paid no attention to her “prediction” that twins ran in the family. Even since the 1980s, the chances that a twin pregnancy will be identified in time for a mother and her medical providers to take extra precautions has increased by a factor of… multiples.

And yet, all the hard science work and technological funding that lets modern mothers discuss the exact gestational age, sex, and probable birth weight of the “pre-born” babies whose ultrasound pictures they’re posting on Facebook is just invisible. Women gush that God has “blessed” them—or, in the NYTimes demographic, fret that perhaps they should consider fetal reduction, to “ensure” the most stress-free, high-resource outcome for a single precious survivor. But the fact that we’re having debates that would have been impossible outside of science fiction less than a generation ago is so routine that it’s not worthy of mention.

We literally have forgotten, or overlooked, how lucky we really are.

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HP

When I need to do some calculating, I pull out my 20-year-old HP calculator and calculate the fuck out of whatever needs calculation. When I need some marks on paper, my five-year-old HP laser printer prints the living shit out of that piece of paper, and I expect it will be fusing toner for many years to come. I’ve also got a couple of HP computers that work just fine, and they’re a slight cut above the usual commodity crap you get at Best Buy—that is, they appear to be the product of an engineering team that had a little more on their mind than wringing every last, single penny of optimization from their PC design.

So, it’s hard to watch yet another American company that is clearly capable of producing decent products get run into the ground by the morons in charge. First, Cara Carleton Fiorina bought Compaq with a big flourish, and all that got HP was two of everything in its PC line. HP never integrated Compaq, so it ended up selling PCs that looked like HP PCs, and PCs that looked like Compaq PCs. That’s death in a commodity business where making a lot of one thing is the key to profitability.

Then, Leo Apotheker flew in and bought Palm (WedbOS) almost exactly a year ago. Yesterday, he announced that they’re killing the Palm unit they just bought, in part because the rushed-to-market, crap Touchpad that was introduced a couple of months ago was a flop. From what I’ve seen, WebOS had a lot of potential if it was running on the right hardware. It takes more than a year to get that right, so Leo might as well have invited Carly to a bonfire and burned the $1.2 billion he paid for Palm.

I get that the commodity PC business is morphing into a non-commodity device business, and that Apple is eating everyone’s lunch because they’re building 30 million of one thing instead of one million of 30 things, but weak management at companies like HP is making it really easy for them. The rumbling sound being heard around Palo Alto today is Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard spinning in their graves.

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Both sides to a contract understanding the terms of the contract shouldn’t be controversial

I was looking around the Consumer Financial Protection Burea site.

The CFPB is the new federal agency that Elizabeth Warren invented and set up, and Rich Cordray has been named to run.

Richard Shelby (R, Lenders) has vowed to fight the CFPB, presumably because he’s opposed to the idea of both parties to a contract understanding the terms of that contract. That would be horrible, if borrowers understood contract terms as completely as lenders do. Must tilt playing field towards lenders or they all crawl under their desks and start weeping at the unfairness of it all. It’s a hard, hard world out there, and they’ve gotten used to an awful lot of coddling.

Two areas on the CFPB site may be of interest to Balloon Juice readers.

The CFPB has been “market testing” a simplified mortgage disclosure form. The voting period ended on August 10, so BJ readers missed the deadline and won’t be able to vote in the current round.

The CFPB wants to know which form is most helpful to borrowers.

Some background:

What is a mortgage disclosure form?
For most Americans, buying a home means taking out a mortgage loan. If you recently applied for a mortgage loan, you received two forms required by federal law: A two-page Truth in Lending disclosure form and a three-page Good Faith Estimate. They’re supposed to help you pick the mortgage product that’s best for you. But if you’ve actually applied for a mortgage recently, what you probably remember most are lots of technical terms and long lists of fees.
These disclosures don’t work if they give you too much information or if the information they provide isn’t what you need.

Why are you combining the two forms?
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which created the Consumer Bureau, mandated that we combine these two forms into one. So, we are going to combine the two forms into one and make them simpler to understand.

Here are the two proposed forms. Azalea or Camellia (pdf)

Here are the factors we are to consider when choosing the better form:

Would this form help consumers understand the closing costs associated with their loans?
Could lenders and brokers clearly and easily explain the form to their customers?
What would you like to see improved on the form? Is there some way to make things a little bit clearer?

The second area that may be of interest is an online complaint form for people who have a problem with a credit card. That’s here.

h/t Credit Slips

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Political Negotiation is Hard and Puzzling

Today it’s being reported that Obama offered up raising the Medicare eligibility age as part of a package deal on the debt ceiling. As ABL posted below, this could be an extremely smart example of offering a sacrifice you know the other side won’t take to get some credibility and to put Boehner in a box. It could just be an example of Obama’s raging corporatism. Perhaps Obama thinks he needs to show extreme flexibility because the “both sides do it” media won’t recognize that Democrats are the reasonable ones in this negotiation unless it’s jammed down their throats. Or maybe raising the Medicare age to 67 is a giant slice of nothingburger, since everyone who can’t afford insurance will be subsidized once HCR kicks in.

You know what? I have no fucking clue. I don’t know how much of the “Pelosi will stop this” drama is a reflection of a real break between Pelosi and the White House, and how much of it is political theater designed to show the Republicans that they can’t take House Democrats’ votes on the debt ceiling for granted. I don’t know if Obama’s “wait until the last minute” negotiating strategy indicates weakness, vacillation and indecision, or if it is a reflection of his cool character and ability to let his opponents burn out before he enters the fray.

All I know is that we wouldn’t be having this absolutely goddam tedious and infuriating discussion about one of the longest hostage dramas in history if more Democrats had come out to vote in 2010. Whatever evil a Democratic Congress would have perpetrated at the behest of their corporate masters, I know with great certainty that they wouldn’t be risking a financial disaster by holding up the debt ceiling vote as we hurtle towards the second dip of the Great Recession.

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You believe what you want to believe

Just responding to comments this morning since I crashed out after posting last night. First, when I say I’m “sort of” dating this guy, I mean we’re not a couple. We’re never going to be a couple. We’re companions of convenience. I call it dating because he mostly pays for the outings and we do things old couples do, like taking day trips to tourist sites. But I’m not hanging out with him out of desperation for a date. I do it because he’s a really nice man and I find him interesting.

I Ioathe the GOP power brokers as much as the next liberal, but I don’t hate ordinary Republicans, even if they harbor wrong-headed beliefs. I have lots of hard core conservative friends. They are decent people, basically kind, and generous to a fault. Sure, they live in an echo chamber. It’s human nature to seek to belong to a group of like minded individuals.

I’ve always deliberately sought out groups with opposite ideologies. Many of them are still reachable and not seeing how you change their minds unless you engage with them. The ones I befriend are not evil. Neither are they stupid. Mostly they’re just scared by the rapid pace of change in society so they form social enclaves that reinforce their own norms where they feel safe. How different is that really from what we do on the left?

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Leaving Out the Good Parts

I thought one of benefits of being an atheist is that you didn’t have to care about church camp. Not so: “the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view” can go to Camp Quest. This is one of the many things I learned after visiting Blag Hag, the blog of an interesting, intelligent capital-A Atheist who was on the Savage Love podcast this week.

As a non-card-carrying, definitely lowercase atheist, I don’t get organized Atheism. I don’t want to attend seminars, read magazines or drop in at meetups to discuss how I don’t believe in God, Buddha or Krishna. I realize that people feel really beat down by the oppressive Christianity in our society and may want some support, but I don’t see how organizing some kind of counter quasi-religion is a happy solution.

I thought the point of atheism was that you just didn’t have to waste your time on the bullshit that occupies the life of true believers. You don’t have to care whether you’re going to heaven or hell, or wonder if some sky fairy will smite you for this or that indiscretion. Your sexual experience isn’t clouded by guilt over whether the placement of your sexual organs is in accordance with the oral tradition of some illiterate desert tribe. You don’t need to spend years of hard work to get schools to teach your horseshit theory of how humans were beamed into existence. And, as for the disposition of the contents of the uteri of every gravid woman on the planet: Absolutely none of your concern.

Those are all wonderful benefits, but the big win is that you don’t have to sit in an uncomfortable chair for physical hours that stretch into mental eternities, listening to someone talk about religion. To put that back in your life seems to me to miss a major benefit of the whole enterprise.

And what the fuck is a Bright?

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Cinco de Mayo

Don’t let this get in the way of your tequila blackout, but:

Cinco de Mayo is NOT Mexico’s Independence Day, the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico, which occurs on September 16th. Cinco de Mayo is a holiday that is virtually ignored in Mexico.

My mom’s the kind of Mexican who is still smarting about the Cession of 1848 and wouldn’t set foot in a chain Mexican restaurant. Along with sour cream on tacos, she thinks Cinco de Mayo is strictly for gringos. I didn’t even know the holiday existed until after I left home for college. But, enough about that—this is an open thread.

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Why does Peggy Noonan hate America?

I adore plane travel.

I love the sheer improbability of nine hundred thousand pounds of steel, people and fuel flitting through the air like Nijinsky on a coke binge. I love the fact that there are beautiful women and handsome gay men whose sole function for eight hours is to bring Grammy more champagne. I love not having to elbow incontinent old people in the head in order to watch what I want on TV.

Most of all, I love the fact that I can have a nap and wake up in Amsterdam or Barcelona or Sydney or Rio de Janeiro. I’ve spent most of my life trying to travel to as many foreign places and meet as many foreign people as possible, even if I’ve had to hock my shoes to get there.

One of the other advantages of plane travel is that the enforced down-time waiting in airport terminals gives me a chance to browse around those corners of the internets I usually don’t get to. For example, the other day, while I was at LaGuardia waiting for Gloria’s plane to be refueled, I stumbled across an unusually coherent article by little Peggy Noonan.

I’m not suggesting it is a great article. After all, when Peggy writes, you’re usually just happy if the piece uses recognizable words and the smell of vodka doesn’t filter all the way down through the printing process and transpire off the page. However, I thought her conclusion was interesting, if only because it looks like Peggy has managed to stumble in the gutter and land on her hands and knees next to half a truth:

The whole world is in the Hilton, channel-surfing. The whole world is on the train, in the airport, judging what it sees, and likely, in some serious ways, finding us wanting. And, being human, they may be judging us with a small, extra edge of harshness for judging them and looking down on them. We have work to do at home, on our culture and in our country.

My real problem with Peggy’s conclusion is that the real situation is much worse than she thinks.

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