From Batocchio:
I thought all BJ commenters received a set of pearls to clutch. That’s the only reason I’m here. Hey, free pearls. And swine. What more does a blog need?
Also, a commentor whose name I’ve misplaced linked to this, which I found entertaining as an example of how philosophical opposites, taken to a sufficiently high level of purity, seem to end up moving in a circle:
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“It is immoral to use private property to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property! There is a certain type of misanthropy which is much better as a social attitude than this cheap, charitable optimism!”
How badly could we shock Megan McArdle by telling her she was nodding in agreement with a committed… Socialist?
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FYWP margin problems: “In IE, the margin problem goes away if you turn off javascript (Tools>Internet Options>Security>Custom Settings>Disable Active Scripting). This is comparable to using the High security setting.”
Hope that is helpful.
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asiangrrlMN
Thanks for the open thread, Anne Laurie. I’m hot, cranky, and in general, bitchy (more so than usual! That’s a LOT of bitchiness, my friends), but at least I know for whom I am voting tomorrow.
Phil
Looks like Barry is going to keep using this as a tagline as he leads his Democratic lambs to slaughter in November:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/obamas-latest-joke-republicans.html
Remember folks, stick with Barry. We cannot go back to the failed policies of the past. We must stick to the failed policies of the present.
suzanne
Ahhhh, not even McMegan can fuck up my mood. We found out today that the Sprog is a healthy baby girl, due to make her appearance on or around December 29. I’ve already asked my OB for an induction if she doesn’t come on time, because I want my tax deduction, goddamnit. (Wouldn’t McMegan be so proud?!)
asiangrrlMN
@suzanne: Woot woot! Congratulations, suzanne. That’s wonderful news, indeed, and yes, MM2 would be very proud of you for thinking of the pragmatic angle!
Ailuridae
Woot! Open Thread!
I stood in a wedding in Indianapolis this weekend and was pleasantly surprised how unawful it was from a walkability perspective. I prefer not to drive so my trip to downtown Chicago to Downtown IND (and back) was on megabus where I was provided free wifi and an outlet for my puter. I checked into my hotel, went to the rehearsal dinner, out for drinks after, brunch the next morning, getting gussied up in tux before hand, the ceremony, reception and drinks afterwards and never entered a car or taxi until Sunday morning when we headed out to the outskirts of IND for the bride’s family brunch thingmajig. And I had always thought all of the Crapolis was just sprawl sprawl sprawl. Glad to find out I was wrong.
About the only thing I would have needed to do that a car would have been helpful with is grab the tux but another groomsman took care of that for me.
Yutsano
@Phil: Troll-fu needs much improvement. 2.4
@suzanne: @suzanne: :: does happy dance in chair ::
Although Capricorn babies are uhh interesting. :)
asiangrrlMN
@Ailuridae: Stood in a wedding is such a weird phrase. Glad it went well. When you moving?
@Yutsano: I actually put him in pie (a la) mode the first time he commented. A record!
suzanne
@Yutsano:
I was one. Maybe that’s why I’m such a stubborn pain in the ass. ;)
I just wish I could start the epidural NOW. ***whine***
Anne Laurie
@suzanne: Congratulations! (Or, to the sprog: minor condolences, since s/he’ll never have a birthday party that isn’t Xmas-themed. My youngest sibs were born in mid-December and they are still pretty damned bitter about the whole “this gift is for your birthday and Xmas both” excuse.)
Ailuridae
@asiangrrlMN:
I turn eleventy something the Friday after the election and will not be in Chicago at that point. Where I’ll be is still up in the air but its looking like NO, Austin or Saint Paul.
Is Stood in a Wedding really that goofy? Maybe its a dialect thing (although nobody has ever mentioned it before). Hrmmm, now I am a wee bit self conscious.
How are you?!?
suzanne
@Anne Laurie:Maybe if I raise her Satanist? I wonder if that would avoid the shared-present bullshit…
Thanks, y’all, for the congrats. :) We’re excited to have a new little liberal join us.
dms
AL:
Funny what sibs will hang onto. I once complained that all of my sibs got professional (as professional as one could get in small-town Illinois) bakery birthday cakes, while I got a homemade one (homemade being adding eggs and water to a box mix). My mother (a teacher) informed me that she thought she was being extra nice to me. She never had time to make the other kids a homemade cake (school and all), but since my birthday was during the summer, she took the extra time and made the extra effort to make me one herself. I felt like a major schmuck.
Of course, that never explained why my oldest brother, whose birthday was at the end of July, got a bakery cake. School didn’t start ’til the end of August. I guess it was those lesson plans.
Ms.B
Ahhh, bits of very good news tonight, huh?
Elizabeth Warren may well be nominated for the head of the Consumer Protection Agency next week, and, one degree away from suzanne, I’m gonna be a grandma of a baby girl around the cusp of 2010/11. (Congratulations, suzanne.)
Go girls!
asiangrrlMN
@Ailuridae: Sorry! I have heard the term before, so I didn’t mean it in that way. I was just thinking ‘stood in a wedding’ as opposed to ‘sit in a wedding’. Of the three, I would choose St. Paul, but I may be a bit biased.
Me? Hot grumpy and bitchy, so the same old, same old.
@suzanne: Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like it would bring on a whole different mess of problems.
@Ms.B: Woot woot! Congrats to you, too! And here’s hoping Elizabeth Warren’s confirmation process is not too terribly dragged-out.
Amir_Khalid
@suzanne: Have you considered raising your kid in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? (Someone was going to suggest it sooner or later.)
bago
So the real question to be asked is what ending John got in Mass Effect 2. I’ve seen what happens if you blow the collector station, if you give it over to the Illusive Man, and both sides of the geth overwrite decision. Now I’m gonna go for the Shepard dies ending.
Ailuridae
@asiangrrlMN:
I am a little biased towards St Paul as well. I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks reminding myself that moving to Lowertown would only solve one of my two problems with Chicago (not seeing my SO enough) while still leaving the winter daylight issue. We’ll see. I miss SP a lot.
My feeling as an entirely portable earner is to go to NO – if not me, then who(m)?
Hrrm ‘Sit in a wedding’? My friend I stood for is also from the Adirondacks so maybe it is totally regional. I think other times I have been asked to ‘be a groomsman’ or “be in the wedding party’.
Hot and bitchy sounds fabulous!
Yutsano
@Amir_Khalid: I was actually going for Anne Laurie’s traditional animism, although if you really want to get adventurous go for Shinto. That will turn some heads.
So I’m sitting here playing around on YouTube and all of a sudden I hear flopping in the turtle tank next to me. I look and one of the snappers has bitten my softshell and has clamped on good. Then I saw what he was biting on the soft shell: his manly unit! (It’s proportinately very large in comparison to his body so I guess could be mistaken for a worm, but I digress.) There’s blood gushing in the water and I’m trying to get the snapper to let go. Finally he does and I get the poor softshell out and into the bathroom sink where I’ll keep an eye on him for a couple of days. He bled a lot and it’ll take him a little bit before I let him back into the general population. Ahh the joys of animal ownership.
mclaren
Speaking of swine, here’s the latest example of dementia from the Wall Street Urinal:
Why I’m not hiring.
Notice the sheer quantity of outright lies in this op-ed.
The first lie comes when this so-called businessman claims he’s not hiring because the government makes employees cost too much. BZZZT! Wrong. He’s not hiring because he’s grossly overpaying people. The example he gives involves paying someone with a high school degree $59,000 a year.
That’s $28.36 per hour. Protip: high school graduates are not worth $28.36 per hour. Even post-doc PhDs are not worth $28.36 per hour. A senior engineer in charge of a design team is worth $28.36 per hour. Not someone whose total educational background consists of high school.
So that’s his first lie — claiming he’s not hiring Sally at $28.36/hr because of the damn gummint taxes…instead of because Sally would be grossly overpaid as a high school graduate.
Now we come to his second lie. His math is deliberately dishonest: Sally is actually making $74,000 so when you deduct taxes, the employer pays nothing for her health care.
Now his third lie: the employer’s payment for Sally’s health care along with most of his other payments are tax deductible. That means they’re partly paid for the governent. At the stated 33% federal corporate tax rate he claims he pays, that means he gets a deduction of $18,000 times 33 percent, or $6,000 chopped off his corporate tax just on Sally’s medical benefits. Similar deductions pop up for other payments required to Sally. Naturally, our businessman didn’t mention these little accounting details, since he’s too busy whining about how much the big bad evil government makes him pay to employe people.
And this brings us to his fourth lie, the lie by implication that America has high tax rates. In reality, America is one of the lowest-taxed countries in the developed world. Our total tax rates are much lower than any other advanced country…yet those other countries seem to be doing just fine. In particular, Germany, with vastly higher tax rates than the U.S., is kicking our ass with exports and running the tables with its manufacturing base.
Why? Well, maybe because German business, you know, actually produce things instead of making whimpering and whining excuses to blame the big government for their own gross incompetence as businessmen, as this American does.
And now we arrive at his fifth lie: the lie by implication that there’s only one alternative to Obamacare — namely, forcing individuals to pay for their own insurance out of pocket. (Which of course is tantamount to ending insurance for everyone. Without group bargaining power, no one in America but a millionaire would be able to afford health insurance.) This is a particularly stupid lie, since the obvious alternative to the grotesquely unworkable Obamacare non-solution of forcing businesses to pay for individuals’ insurance to greedy corrupt monopolistic insurance cartels would be health insurance nationalization. Strip the profit out of health care, and the cost goes away. No problem for anyone. Health care costs plummet to sane levels, as in Europe, where in Germany an MRI costs $150 compared to $1500 in America.
MRIs don’t cost $1500 in America because of the American government’s high taxes. They cost that much because of the greed of doctors and hospitals and insurers and medical devicemakers, who charge as much as the market will bear in assessing fees for every little medical service. So cotton balls in hospitals wind up costing the patient $10 and aspiring get billed at $20 each. Strip out the profit, and those costs drop to the real cost of the medical services — a few cents per cotton ball, a dime per aspirin, $150 per MRI.
So, as usual, this businessman’s arguments are a pack of lies from start to finish. No surprise. Businessmen are such dishonest assholes that they won’t even deal with each other without hiring lawyers to gin up massive contracts full of boilerplate to make sure the other businessman can’t screw him. Out here in the real world, those of us who are not businessmen don’t need contracts to deal with each other, because we’re not greedy lying assholes who live by cheating and swindling everyone in sight.
Yutsano
BTW AL that whole lecture is a delicious exercise in word salad. I especially found it hilarious that he undercut every single argument he was making and doubled back on himself so many times as to make his original point meaningless. Succinctness ain’t just for breakfast anymore.
asiangrrlMN
@Ailuridae: OK, that was a joke (sit in the wedding). I’m sticking with ‘be in the wedding’, myself.
We have loads of sun here, even in the winter. And, your SO is here! But, yeah on NO. That would be cool, too. TEMPERATURE hot, which is what’s making me bitchy. God, I hate the heat.
@Yutsano: I now haz a sad. I hope the softshell recovers. Get better, little (or not so little, apparently) guy.
@dms: Ha! Funny how things can grate on you and then you find out the real reason, and oops!
Ailuridae
@mclaren:
Also been covered a thousand places already.
Also an open thread. Stop being an idiot.
They cost that much because of the greed of doctors and hospitals and insurers and medical devicemakers, who charge as much as the market will bear in assessing fees for every little medical service.
At least your lies are less untrue than six months ago. That’s progress.
Ailuridae
@Yutsano:
If mclaren had a blog its website would be:
http://www.akkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkgl;j r90tuaojgjtrioejticbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbcbajjkgl;dfjkag’sdjgjkopbop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop qerkml;sdkgl;akgl;ksdg;kl;kl;k;lkdagl;dkgl;fkgopriqejopiofnlzdkjl;kajjdihyoqerpeyri.com
Ailuridae
@asiangrrlMN:
For me its the hours of available sunlight (MN winters are stunningly awesome). A lot of mornings I am waking up at 11 or later and well, that gets a little hairy if I am going to roll out of bed and work.
In this era of craigslist and pods and all of that I am thinking about snowbirding and spending my summers in the TC or CHI or Madison etc.
The heat is absolutely brutal here too. Uggh.
Yutsano
@Ailuridae: I iz good at double entendre commentary. :)
@asiangrrlMN: He’s sleeping right now. I’ll see how he feels in the morning then decide if I want to let him back in. At least I haven’t seen him bleed in the sink so that’s a big plus. Plus he has the high class food in there too so he’s getting a little bit of pampering. I just don’t have anything for him to burrow into is the only big negative right now.
Ms.B
@asiangrrlMN:
Here’s hoping it IS really Elizabeth Warren. Seems likely but oh, my, if it isn’t–Blogplosion ahead.
Been reading thready arguments elsewhere about whether a recess appointment of her would be good or bad. Can’t decide yet.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I actually couldn’t watch the whole thing because it was driving me bonkers. P.S. I am glad Mr. Softshell is sleeping for now. Pamper away.
@Ailuridae: Oh, I hear that. Yes. In the winter, the sunlight hours are very short. VERY. Why not split your time if you can? I’m going to a St. Paul Saints baseball game on Thursday. I am looking forward to it, but not the heat. I should look up what is the minimum amount of clothing I can wear in public and not be arrested. P.S. That Fleischer article has been covered on this blog’s front page, just a few entries below. Imagine!
@Ms.B: I want to be diplomatic and say, oh, go the traditional route, but my puerile gut says, “Any way she can get in is good by me!”
Yutsano
@Ms.B: My personal feeling on that: she will be, but not until after the election. I want the Republicans on the record as supporting evil bankstas and credit card companies. If they were smart they’d just let her go through without a peep and pick a different hill to die on. If Dodd really is being the tool here that’s a different kettle of fish.
Batocchio
D’oh! Glad you liked the quip. And thanks, I love the RSAnimate videos.
Yutsano
@Batocchio: Best part of that is I can’t figure out if that’s just one big massive mockery or they’re trying to present that guy’s idea and leave it up to the world as far as interpretation. Of course when the product is half-baked in the first place the mocking just flows.
@asiangrrlMN: The softshell’s name is Jar-Jar. Looks just like the Star Wars character, except for the floppy ears. He’s very cute.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: You just ruined it for me (your softshell’s name). Thanks.
Ailuridae
@Batocchio:
I like your blog a ton. Well its painful to read from a visual perspective but from a content angle its awesome
Ms.B
@Yutsano:
Ah, but Republicans are cocks who have to crow and crow again about about anything they see as “feed” in their strange barnyard.
re Dodd–My mental jury needs to figure out the Sheila Bair vs. Warren thing he has going on where Bair wins. I’m sure others know, just haven’t had time to catch up. Am lame that way.
Yutsano
@Ms.B: Bair is the head of the FDIC, is totally happy where she is, has influenced policy all over the place from her current position, and AFAIK has shown zero interest in heading up the new commission. Plus she and Warren get along famously, so there’s no competition there either.
@asiangrrlMN: The other two are Ed and Fred, although right now I’m seriously considering calling them Turtle and Soup.
Oh and thread needs more duck:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONrJErL3BDs
Ms.B
@Yutsano:
So, business as usual with the blank vs. blank thingie.
And, by the way,
duck, duck, goose. (Nice video.)
MTiffany
Or…
Use Firefox. And then lots of other problems go away too.
Yutsano
@Ms.B: QUACK!
And I’m spent. Night y’all.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@MTiffany:
Or not. On my laptop, Firefox seizes up and I have to kill the process about once for every three BJ pages I try to load. The ad server cdn4.specificclick.net (which I’ve bitched about here multiple times) is the problem. It’s trying to run some sort of script that my laptop hates. It’s not a problem if I use Opera on my laptop, but then the right margin is broken.
Firefox has not yet crashed on my computer here at home, but it does stall a bit every time that ad server gets going. Not, usually, for very long, but it is noticeable.
Andy K
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
Were you running Firefox with the NoScript and Adblock Plus add-ons?
Peter J
The right margin bit on Opera (might be more browsers) has to do with a google ads javascript. Block that script and the problem goes away.
I would prefer not to block it, but then I prefer being able to read this site to not being able to.
oliver's Neck
Anne – regarding ZIzek, you do certainly get that he’s in favor of a wholesale change in the way our economy works, right? Whereas McArdle would nod about charity being a bad thing but want the economic status quo, Zizek wants anything but the economic status quo. Also, he’s a communist – not a socialist.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Cute vid. Glad Mr. Softshell is better.
@Ms.B: That would be duck, duck, gray duck in these here parts.
Ab_Normal
@bago: I haven’t been able to do the Shepard dies ending; I like my Shep’s too much :(
Batocchio
@Ailuridae:
Thanks. I’m just using a slightly modified Blogger template – I’m guessing you don’t like the column width or colors, or is there something else that you find makes it hard to read?