If not, claim your money back.

The disappearance of the middle class...

...might just as well be referring to western civilization.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

I have just walked about 4 miles and dug part of the veggie patch and now my knees are screaming.

If I weren't out drinking for the next 3 nights I'd be tempted to self-medicate

keep to the Fen Causeway

The Case Against Romney: At Heart, He's a Delusional One-Percenter

Every election is a choice between imperfect alternatives. I will examine both choices in turn, but the first one, Mitt Romney, has rendered the normal analytic tools useless.
[...]
Starting with the transformative first presidential debate, Romney has wafted the sweet, nostalgic scent of moderate Republicanism into the air. [...] This hopeful vision immediately runs into a wall of deductive logic. If Romney were truly planning to govern from the center, why would he leave himself so exposed to Obama's attacks that he is a plutocrat peddling warmed-over Bushonomics? [...] if he fears such a revolt now, when his base has no recourse but to withhold support and reelect Obama, he will also fear it once in office, when conservatives could oppose him without making their worst political nightmare come true as a result.
[...]
Barely any points of contact remain between party doctrine and the consensus views of economists and other experts. The party has almost no capacity to respond to the conditions and problems that actually exist in the world.
[...]
To think of Romney as torn between two poles, then, is a mistake. Both his fealty to his party and his belief in his own abilities point in the same direction: the entitlement of the superrich to govern the country.

-----
sapere aude

Ha, the fix is in. Too many democrats voting it seems, so Florida is throwing out absentee ballots

keep to the Fen Causeway

Found out last night that one of my favorite bands of all time, Soundgarden, got back together and has a new record out in two weeks.

It's the little things.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Me, watching the Sf Giants victory parade, complete with heroes past (Willie Mays, Stretch McCovey, Gaylord Perry) and present (well, the Jints), and suddenly my eyes begin to tear up. Because this was such an amazing postseason win? No. Because the Giants did it a second time in three years? no. Because they won six straight elimination games? No. Because they swept the finals? No.

Because one of the floats had a model network helicopter flying over the bay area's landmarks...

with the Golden Gate bridge leading to model windmills from the Altamont Pass, where I built the first projects so long ago. Of all the landmarks from Frisco Bay... wow.

Can you imagine my feelings?

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

So the  Labour candidate for police comissioner in my local are has been forced to pull out as he had a £20 fine for something 30 years ago, which leaves me with a choice between UKIP, Tory, Liberal, and Independent., and I bet the Independemnt is a lunatic right winger

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

It's really hard to write a succinct, rational, White Paper when restraining oneself from throttling idiots.

Was on my daily perambulation when I saw an older gentlemen, with anti-Obama stickers stuck all over his car, walk into the Senior Citizens Center to grab a government subsidized lunch.

 

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

PMQs and EU budget vote: Politics live blog | Politics | guardian.co.uk

The coalition government has suffered its first significant Commons defeat as MPs voted by 307 to 294, majority 13, to back a Tory rebel call to cut the EU budget.

The deputy political editor for the Daily Mirror, James Lyons tweets:

JamesLyons @MirrorJames

That was a proper thumping for David Cameron. So much for Sir George Young getting Tory MPs back under control.

Andrew Neil predicts further problems ahead for Cameron:

Andrew Neil

Tonight's vote suggest Cameron will have huge problem getting any EU budget increase through Commons.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Rial devaluation and inflation -- without the hype « Tyranny of numbers

This is pretty much what happened this summer to Iran's foreign currency market.  Iran lost about half of its supply of foreign exchange  because of sanctions, and the government decided to protect its population from the worst part of its consequences.  It abandoned the unitary exchange rate regime that had brought a decade of economic growth to the country in favor of multiple rates.  As in our example, there is a single supplier of foreign exchange -- the government -- which allocates a part of its forex to basic necessities (at 12260 rials per dollar) and sells the rest to licensed buyers in the recently set up Foreign Exchange Center (at about 25,000 rials per dollar).  It may be supplying some of its forex to the so-called free market (at widely fluctuating rates, between 30,000 and 45,000 rials per dollar) but we do not know how much, if any.  The latter price is equivalent to the price of auctioned stadium seats.  So, as in the example, calculating the rate of devaluation by dividing the rate in the free market by the previous singular rate (say 33,000/11,000, or 300%) is incorrect.

A more reasonable estimate of the extent of devaluation in Iran should take into account (at least) three rates of devaluation: the official rate (10%), the Exchange Center rate (about 200%), and the free market rate (about 300%).  But, unlike in the example, we do not know the shares of the forex going to these three markets, so even a simple weighted average of these rates is not available.  If the share of forex allocated to the three markets are o.40, o.55, and 0.05, the weighted average would be 129% (= 0.40 x 10 + 0.55 x 200 + 0.05 x 300), which is much lower than 300%.

Any devaluation over 100% is a huge shock to the economy, so the point of this exercise is not to minimize the gravity of the situation, nor to simply offer a formula to estimate size of the devaluation.  Understanding the mechanism is the important point.  If we cannot quantify the rate of devaluation, we can analyse its consequences if we have the right model.  The consequences of a single-market devaluation are very different from one that involves transition from a unitary to a multiple exchange rate system. Put this together with the fact that the government is the main supplier of forex, and you can see why hyperinflation is a misleading account of post-devaluation Iranian economy.

Note this, because when Syriza wins and Greece decides to leave the euro they will hopefully institute rationing of basic necessities and imports for their own industry. Then the price of the rest of the goods will rise and that will be claimed as proof of hyperinflation. It is even likely that the resulting "hyperinflation" will be claimed to cause the rise of Golden Dawn.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

maybe this belongs in  the Tony Bliar thread but I read an article about how he uses interns as free labour in the Guardian today.  Since he is the one who passed the minimum wage law, this looks very bad for him.  He is done.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/oct/31/tony-blair-office-unpaid-interns

oh,and the uk govt' just lost the vote in the House of Commons over the budget.  could this lead to a vote of non-confidence and bring down the government?

the Communists hold the balance of power. This point was rather lost in the joy at a majority for the left for the first time ever, but is becoming interesting...

They voted down an energy law (i.e. voted with the right to defeat the government) because it was too ecologist for their taste. Now they have voted down the five-year budget program, for good reasons : they want to increase the upper income tax rate, among other things.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

If yu're a UK voter sign this now

http://isupportpatspetition.blogspot.co.uk/

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

TED Blog: The complexities of the psychopath test: A Q&A with Jon Ronson (15 August, 2012)

It's a contradictory thing. Because on the one hand I do believe that the Robert Hare checklist really is as admirable and as scientific as psychology can ever be. From my two, three years' research in the book -- I do believe that psychopaths exist and that the nuances of their behavior can come out when somebody is trained to use the checklist. However, an awful lot of people -- and Hare himself complains about this -- an awful lot of people misuse his checklist and become power-crazed when they use his checklist. You know, I became a bit power-crazed. Parts of my talk are a cautionary tale to not do what I did -- to not start diminishing people through labels.

...

Certainly -- or three, four, five. I remember Robert Hare told me that he would give himself like a four or a five, with the top score being 40. Hare would say, "Even though it is a spectrum, there's a big difference. When you meet a high-scoring psychopath, the difference is stunning." I agree with that. So with all this talk about gray areas, I think it's important to remember that psychopaths really do exist. I'm sure of that, even though that goes against all my liberal instincts to consider everybody to basically be the same, to basically be good. That's a fundamental rock of my belief, yet some people do seem to be different.

...

If I could have made one point stronger in the talk, I would have made that point that with me it doesn't matter, because I'm not a scientist. I'm a journalist who's writing as a thoughtful cautionary tale for people. But what I went through, the way I succumbed to confirmation bias, is actually really real, and people's lives are destroyed by it. I think Robert Hare cares about his checklist and really wants it to be administered properly and it really troubles him that there's a lot of people out there who don't administer his test properly. And so I suppose the point I would have made -- and I wish I had -- is that my story happens every day in the real world in places where it really matters, where people's lives are destroyed by it.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

No it's not global warming or the gays. Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak has the reason.

He implied that the storm was a message from God against the State of Israel's dependence on the United States, and that he had a more efficient and simple answer to all its needs. "God has no problem helping his sons, but the sons must recognize their father," he explained.