(Reuters) - Taxes were on track to rise for many Americans this week unless lawmakers could cut a last-minute deal on Monday to avoid the "fiscal cliff," an outcome that seemed unlikely, but still possible.

Financial markets were on edge only hours before the midnight arrival at the long-awaited "cliff," an assortment of $600 billion in tax hikes and broad federal spending cuts on defense and domestic programs that has defied a political solution.

Is this the real End Of The World As We Know It? Was the 21st just a dress rehearsal? Will the fiscal cliff stop you partying?

Can 2013 be worse than 2012?

Yes.

(This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.)

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

i just watched an interview with the 'water assessor', some citizens, (none too thrilled), and the environment reporter for rai.

citizen A to water assessor: "i would like a rebate for the water bill this year, since it has been turned off twice, once for 20 days, once for 60."

reporter: "but if you didn't use any water you won't have to pay, right?"

citizen A: " no, the counter rotates when i open the tap, even with no water coming out"

water assessor nods ruefully...

citizens advised to avoid bathing if prone to dermatological problems. they queue to fill 20l. containers from a water truck in the town square. a member of Lega Ambiente comments that it is the side effect of so much construction on the area.

VV italia!  no wonder that confused fatalism is the resultant philosophy so common here.

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

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

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

I hope everyone can be as happy as we are throughout the new year. Whatever comes, we'll deal with it or go down with it together.

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

May the troll force be with me.

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

Canadian Inuit Gangnam Style

let the good times roll!

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

a salmon run to the motherboard.

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Phoebe Rudomino whose stunning underwater photograph, featured in our photography exhibition, was our most popular post of 2012. http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/photography/

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Monday Dec. 31

Required listening ... wait till next year at this time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wp4O7v5320

ET has brought much goodness to my life, fascinating snippets that provoke deeper exploration, witnessing exchanges that broaden perspective, learning from those generous enough to share what they know, a collage of international life-experiences, a culture mash, a haven of good-hearted people with a passion to communicate...

best of all the laughter, this blog has made me guffaw, chuckle, giggle, snort and bellow more than any, and i bless the day i arrived here, following the rotor-beats of jerome's turbines over from the orangerie.

you all make me think, further and further each day, and it never seems to falter, let alone end.

so in that spirit of gratitude, i give you this:

Why Being Generally Grateful is a Bad Idea | PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement

I have been keeping my own gratitude journal for the last three months and I can say categorically without doubt that I do feel happier because of it. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it has turned me into an ever smiling optimist. To be more accurate, I would say that rather than worrying if my glass is half empty or half full, I'm now just grateful to have a glass in the first place.

may you/we all have the best ever year of our lives, and spill some of it onto these pages, to keep the fun flowing, even as we walk through the 'valley of the shadow of death' together.

if 'brains trust' means anything, it must be this feeling that i can trust my brain gets its daily workout at ET, and if there is a way to see amusement in today's mixed scenarios, some of you wags will have found it!!!

off to fix the fence where the donkey gets out now...

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like.  Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour.  This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York.  

This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary.  Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they're earning by turning this mindless crank.  A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day...at much harder jobs than turning a crank.  This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.  

The wealth gap may not be growing, but wealth continues to be redistributed upwards - Comment - Voices - The Independent

The big divide in the UK is less between the top, the middle and the bottom than between a small group of the super-rich and nearly everyone else. Rentoul's answer to the way the over-sized rich has been accumulating larger and larger fortunes and securing a bigger chunk of the economic pie is to dismiss them as `untypical'. This may be true in a literal sense, but viewing them in this way is a grave error. The behaviour of the super-rich has a greatly leveraged effect on the rest of us. Most of the rich's income surge has come not from the building of a more robust economy triggered by an entrepreneurial leap forward but the very opposite - a clever process of wealth and income transfer from the bulk of the working population.

This sustained process of upward redistribution is not just a matter of social justice. By stifling demand for productive output while fuelling the asset bubbles that took us over the cliff in 2008, it has made the economy weaker and less resilient.

That Gloria de Piero was not going to have an easy time at the Tuesday lunchtime aerobics class in Billericay, Essex, was obvious before it had even begun. It had taken several phone calls and rejections before she even found a class that would let an MP come along.

When she got there at the end of the jazzercise session, most of the women were on their way out, leaving De Piero sitting in Emmanuel church hall with just five women and one man who had agreed to help her find an answer to her query: "Why do you hate me?"

They were the first of six groups of people De Piero met on a national quest to find out why people seem to dislike politicians so much.

I have to say I think it was a worthwhile endeavour, most MPs have lived in a little Truman show bubble of privilege from an early age.

However, although I think the answers the article mentions are part of it, I think the biggest problem is that there are no alternatives on offer anymore. As the article says, people are not apathetic about politics, it's just that the Westminster show is increasingly irrelevant to people's lives. None of the parties offer anything other than submission to the Corporate requirement.We might vote for the pols, but the laws they pass are for corporate convenience, not ours.

keep to the Fen Causeway