brainiac conspiracy

Easter Eve Faith Blogging

Because man does not live by chocolate bunnies alone.

---Baron V

Random Thought III

While we're celebrating the resurrection of our Lord today, it might be prudent of our nation's leaders to spend a little less time inveighing against sinners and a little more time engaged in thoughtful reflection, pondering what lessons they can learn from the trials and teachings of a Galileean carpenter who was deemed such a threat that he was put to death by the legions of the Roman Empire.

---Baron V

The Jokes Write Themselves

But if you have to put your money at risk, at least you should have a sporting chance to win it all back:

Cyprus is to lift a ban on casinos as part of measures to counter the economic shock of a much larger than expected 60% raid on the savings of the island's most wealthy depositors.

---Baron V

Scared Little Rabbits

Sure doesn't take much to make them skittish:

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. stock market had plummeted. In only 15 minutes, the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen about 1,000 points, razing the stock prices of some of America’s biggest companies to a single penny. It would later be known as the “flash crash” and would be chalked up to strange technical factors. But in the heat of the moment, it flashed a different sort of danger. To the leaders of the European Central Bank who made up the Governing Council, who that very day had dismissed risks to their financial system, the crash seemed a striking referendum on what they had done---or rather, not done.

So they saved the world from a total financial meltdown. But it begs the question that if our global economy is so fragile that it can be brought down by a fucking software glitch, wouldn't that suggest some underlying structural weaknesses (inflated equities bubbles, excessive derivatives exposures) that trillion-dollar asset purchases are only papering over and not really correcting? Seems to me the proof is in the aftermath: it's nearly three years later now, and despite their dumping massive amounts of liquidity into the global banking system, that same global banking system is still basically illiquid.

---Baron V

"A" For Effort

It's always amusing to watch people who were wrong about everything 30 years ago coming out of the woodwork to launch jeremiads against all the other people who ever heeded their advice for being wrong about everything too. I mean, it takes quite a bit of creativity to have spent the better part of 20 years making a bundle of money by acquiring companies in leveraged buyouts and driving a lot of them out of business, and yet somehow be able---after the fact---to excoriate the irresponsibility of leveraged buyouts that drive a lot of companies out of business. I guess you could call it "Not Me-ism" or contrarianism or cranky curmudgeonicity, but whatever you call it, it's generally not informed criticism. Makes for fun reading, though!

---Baron V

Random Thought II

I really wish I could be consistently wrong about everything since it seems to be the most proven and reliable road to success if you're a bloviator/pundit type like your humble blogger. Heck, I might even be able to land a weekly op-ed column at a respectable media outlet, where I could argue that the reason why homo marriage is so icky is because homos can't have children, and when homo marriages are recognized by society as legitimate, then childlessness will be legitimized, too, which means that all the married heteros will want to stop having children because childlessness is now a groovy thing and we're all gonna die.

Snark aside, I've never been to figure out this obsessive desire to sublimate the manufacture of little humans to the bonds of matrimony when throughout most of our history as a species, the exact opposite has been our nature. Then again, I guess that's what it means to be consistently wrong about everything.

---Baron V

Easter Morning Faith Blogging

Because we can all use a little spiritual uplift. if you didn't make it to church today, here's the next best thing!

---Baron V

Legacies

There's been no shortage of chatter on the subject lately, and while the administration's various domestic and foreign-policy initiatives may qualify for "legacy" status if successfully pursued, one begins to suspect that for many (if not most) Americans, the legacy item that's going to be the most vividly recalled---and the most acutely felt over time---will be the one that comes phrased in the form of a question: Are you better off now than you were eight years ago? Things could change between now and 2017, but for most people now, the answer would be resoundingly "No." That's really too bad because things didn't have to turn out that way, and frankly, they still don't now.

---Baron V

Random Thought

Regular readers of this blog are well aware that only a fool or a Fabian socialist would dare to think that our particular version of corporate capitalism is founded on a business model that deliberately seeks profits off the sickness and suffering of millions of people. Unless, of course, it is.

---Baron V

Unintended Consequences

Sure hope that Team Democrat is preparing itself for the small army of angry voters it's going to be minting just in time for next year's midterms:

“The provision was not thought out all too well,” says Elise Gould, the director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank. “It creates a cliff, and we never like to see cliffs in policy.”

More awesomely, the greatest number of pooches-to-be-screwed are likely to be in poorer states with lower-wage workforces and the fewest worker-protection laws---you know, the kinds of states Team Democrat needs to win next year to keep from losing control of Congress altogether.

It really is amazing, the choices we voters have: Between a party that doesn't give a shit about good governance, and a party that's pathologically incapable of it. Bring on the 2015 impeachment hearings!

---Baron V

April Fool's Came Early, Obviously

Economic policymakers just love a good practical joke, now, don't they?

Major depositors in Cyprus’ biggest bank will lose around 60 percent of their savings over 100,000 euros, the central bank confirmed Saturday, sharpening the terms of a bailout that has shaken Europe but saved the island from bankruptcy.

Initial signs that big depositors in the Bank of Cyprus would take a hit of 30 to 40 percent---the first time the euro zone has made bank customers contribute to a bailout---had already unnerved investors in European lenders last week.

But the official decree published Saturday confirmed a Friday report that the bank would give depositors shares worth just 37.5 percent of savings over 100,000 euros ($128,200). The rest might never be paid back.

Now, this isn't all Russian gangster money---and who knows, none of it may be at this point---but money that businesses need to purchase inventory, pay their creditors, make their payrolls, etc. And it's not as though they're only targeting large corporations and billionaires. I mean, $128,000 isn't an exorbitant amount of money anymore, and there are plenty of small- to medium-sized companies that would need to keep that much cash (or more) on hand to keep operating every day. So what happens to your economy when orders for goods are rescinded, creditors don't get paid, and workers miss a payroll or two? Whatever the outcome, it's probably not good!

---Baron V

Government Regulations

Yes, they can sometimes be burdensome, and sometimes beneficial, but if you don't have any actual regulators around to enforce them, they're kind if like dead letters:

While the number of inspectors has grown under the Obama administration, OSHA still has just 2,400 responsible for overseeing roughly 8 million work sites---roughly 1 inspector per 60,000 workers, a ratio that has not changed since 1970. The federal budget for protecting workers is less than half of that set aside for protecting fish and wildlife.

Good thing we're agreed that the era of big government is over:

It’s not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.

Now, I'm not suggesting that increasing OSHA's budget tenfold or a hundredfold would eliminate every workplace hazard or injury because some occupations are, well, more inherently hazardous than others. But obviously we could save a lot of money in health-care costs and lost productivity if we trained some more regulators and issued some new directives that reflected the dynamics of the 21st-Century workplace. It's all a question of what our priorities are, even if we agree with the serious persons that we can't afford to grow the federal budget! You know, if we have a finite amount of money to spend, do we want to spend it trying to prevent workers from getting sick on the job, or do we want to spend it building killer robot jellyfish? Like I said, priorities.

---Baron V

Tear 'Em Down

Or we can keep throwing money at a problem that will never, ever truly go away:

The Beltway is just one roadway among the tens of thousands at the end of a long life span. Now, 210 million U.S. drivers, and the commerce on which they rely, ride aging roadways. Maryland and Virginia just passed tax increases to address transportation needs, high among them deteriorating roads such as the Beltway. But it will take time more than money to tackle the Beltway’s worst sections, because simply closing several lanes for months would have nightmarish consequences.

No. It. Wouldn't.

Yes, it seems counterintuitive, but there's fairly sound research out there that strongly suggests that building more roads increases traffic congestion, and conversely, that building fewer roads reduces it. We saw this dynamic play out here in Los Angeles during our recent "Carmageddon" highway closures, when we were told that disaster loomed!---and then it didn't happen. What did happen was that people drove less---which, besides alleviating congestion, also reduced smog. Win-win!

The long stretches of rural Interstate that connect commercial centers are vital to freight traffic---it's the reason the Interstate system was built in the first place---so they need to to be kept in good condition; and if I ran the show, that's where most of our federal highway dollars would be going, not to keep patching up urban Interstates that act as magnets for congestion, increase pollution, and turn huge swathes of potentially valuable real estate into municipal storage lots and homeless squatters' camps. Besides, making it harder to drive in urban cores might persuade people who work there to lobby their political leaders for more diverse transit options than what's available to them now. It's certainly worth considering.

---Baron V

Killer Robot Jellyfish

Because there's nothing more productive that our money could be spent on:

Talk about military surveillance and images of unmanned drones come to mind. But typically they are air and ground based units. The US Navy wants to get in on the action, though, and has tasked Virginia Tech College of Engineering with developing an autonomous robotic jellyfish.

The project has been ongoing since last year thanks to a 5-year grant from the Office of Naval Research. A lab in Virginia Tech’s Durham Hall has been outfitted with a tank containing 600 gallons of water that forms the hub of the research. The task is to figure out how a jellyfish functions, and then apply it to a robotic version that could be launched and left to function in the ocean for anything from a few weeks to months and even years.

We are governed by a regime of insane control freaks. Is this a recent (postwar) development, or have our leaders always been that way?

---Baron V

Light Blogging Day

Gotta ride the Orange Line out to Goldwater Country this afternoon, and I gotta do some cooking before I depart. So go munch on some chocolate eggs or cut down a few trees while I'm away. It's Easter time!

---Baron V

19 Guys With Box-Cutters

Besides killing a bunch of people, each one of them cost us $315,789,473,684.21. Because freedom isn't free!

Snark aside, this is yet another reason why all of the serious persons who ever supported the war should spend the rest of their days begging for the forgiveness of those of us who saw through the con. But they haven't, and likely never will, because we don't live in a society that places any penalty on being consistently wrong about everything. Too bad it cost us a ton of money and 100,000 innocent lives.

---Baron V

Vegetarian Conversion Moments

Most of us experience them from time to time because, well, this.

Naturally, our political leadership class isn't terribly perturbed by this practice, even though it is killing thousands of people in this country each year. Not to mention the fact that all of those drugs that are going to plump up farm animals are drugs that aren't available for, you know, people who might need them. At least one person has been trying to do something about it. Maybe someone would lend her some support?

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Non-corporate edition: Generalissimo Bloomberg.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he’ll veto a plan to require all New York City employers with 20 or more workers to give employees paid time off when they get sick.

“While this compromise version of the bill is better than previous iterations, it will still hurt small businesses and stifle job creation,” Bloomberg said in a statement released by his office.

Corporate edition, runner-up: These people.

The National Restaurant Association, the biggest industry trade association, is part of a coalition of business groups opposed to mandatory sick-leave policies.

Because it's so much smarter to force your waiters to serve the public when they're sick with the flu than to pay them $2.50 an hour to stay home for a couple of days. You really can't teach genius like this, can you.

---Baron V

Out of The Mouths of Babes

When I was a kid in Sunday School, I remember learning about Easter Week when I was around six years old. The subject of Good Friday came up, and I asked what was good about it. "That's the day Jesus was crucified on the cross," the Sunday school teacher replied. "That's horrible!" I said. "What's so 'good' about that?!?"

Now fifty years have passed since then, and to this day, I still have no idea what was "good" about the day our Lord was tortured to death by the same people who would later feed his disciples to wild animals in the arena. Not to get all snarky over this, but is there some alternative meaning of "good" that I haven't divined, or was a six-year-old kid smarter than 2,000 years of Popes?

---Baron V

Give Them an Alternative

Following up on the previous post, it probably bears mentioning that a lot of folks who spend three hours (or more) per day commuting back and forth from their homes to their jobs aren't doing it so much because they love driving as much as there aren't any viable transit alternatives that can get them to their destination more quickly than a car. This is especially true for people who live in outer-ring suburbs or exurbs, and while we city-dwellers can scold the suburbanites for their wasteful and profligate lifestyles, we need to acknowledge that some people would rather live away from the city center for any number of reasons that are perfectly legitimate to them (school districts, for example). Now, this doesn't mean the suburbanites---or even country folk who live 100 miles away---should have to settle for long commute times as the cost of living away from the city when there are modes of transit that could lure them out of their cars and speed up their commutes. We simply need to build them.

---Baron V