…but I think I know why they’re so anxious to pass it. Check out this graph of job losses over on speaker.gov:
job losses in the last 3 recessions in the US
Focus your eye on that green line. If things continue on that pace there’ll be mass protests in the streets before 2009 ends – no wonder the politicians are in a frenzy. Cross your fingers folks, we’re in for an uncomfortable year.
Check out this excellent sattelite photo of the inauguration day ceremonies:
popsci.com sattelite photo of the inauguration
There’s another image plus links to larger, higher resolution photos over at the original article. Cool stuff!
Last year my resolution was to give up my daily diet coke habit, and I actually succeeded, so this year I’m going to go for two resolutions. We’ll see how it goes. My first resolution is similar to last year’s, but this time I’ll focus on coffee. I drink way too much. My daily intake looks like: 2 cups before I get to work, a cup at work in the morning, and another cup in the afternoon after lunch. Things are even worse on the weekends, when I often drink three pots of coffee with Susan. For this year I’ll keep it simple, and resolve to lose the cup of coffee when I get to work.
My second resolution is to revisit one I madeand failed to keep a couple of years ago. You may notice the new lifestream in the right column of this site, and I’m going to do my bit to populate it by resolving to record every book and movie I read this year, much like I started to do in this booklog and movielog back in 2006. Part of the reason I abandoned the logs back in 2006 was it started to feel like a chore. To make this easier, this time around I make no guarantees as to how much I’ll say about a given book/movie/whatever – the resolution is to simply at a minimum record the fact that I did it, and maybe a sentence or two about what I thought. We’ll see how it goes.
I’m obsessed with the economy these days, to the point where I occasionally drive Susan a bit nuts at dinner chattering about it, but it’s pretty clear we’re entering into a significant recession and possibly worse. Evidence supporting the worse angle would be this article on engadget, , where they report that Black Friday sales declined… for the first time ever. There’s perhaps no greater indicator of the collapse of US consumer culture than this, folks. For the record, sales were down by 8%, which hardly seems terrible until you consider companies were already forecasting lower sales to begin with, to the point where companies like Circuit City already were facing bankruptcy. Another way to express it would be: if the black friday sales can’t get gluttunous US consumers to pull out their walletts, what can?
So next up from the economic crisis: no more credit for you, Joe Consumer. Check out this article over on Reuters‘ site. It’s a bit longer on speculation than fact, but this is not the only piece I’ve seen suggesting the banks are going to radically reduce the amount of available consumer credit, and I’ve already been contacted by one of my banks letting me know they’re jacking up my interest rate and fees. If you’re living your life off your credit card and you don’t have a stellar credit score, watch out.
Here’s an idle bit of speculation to ponder, too. How long do you suppose it will be before the insurance companies start dropping clients? All of this stuff is deeply intertwined, and offering insurance requires capital and access to it. Insurance is heavily regulated and there are more stringent requirements on capitlization than the banking industry was coping with, but where do you suppose those funds the insurance companies are required to hold are actually sitting? And how much do you suppose they’re actually worth versus how much they think they’re worth? I have no facts to back this up, just idly wondering how far this unravelling will go.
You have to be a gamer and have spent some time on xbox live or played some other online competitive game to appreciate this animated gif that tells the tale of WWII as if it had been fought as an online game, but if you have this is funny as hell. Warning though – harsh language, not politically correct by any stretch of the imagination, and it runs for a couple of minutes. Kudos to whoever came up with this though, it cracked me up.
So I’m driving to work. I normally take this backroads way to the office during the school year because the major road passes through South Hadley and the campus of Mt Holyoke College, ie it’s slow when the students are here. The road’s speed limit varies from 25 – 40 depending what section you’re on, and normally my speed is between 40 and 50 on it – everyones’ is, it’s a little back country road. There are kids catching their school buses though and I guess the cops decided to crack down, or maybe I’m just unlucky, because today as I came down a hill doing maybe 45 a cop pulled out behind me and flipped on his lights. I thought I was busted. I slowed down and started to pull over but there was a crossroad, so I decided to pull over after the junction. There was a car there waiting to make a left, and I guess the driver decided to try and bolt out in front of me so as not to be slowed down by the cop pulling me over etc, or maybe they were impatient, or…who knows, whatever they were thinking they suddenly pulled out in front of me, causing both me and the cop to have to jam on our brakes, nearly causing an accident. Apparently this pissed off the cop because he blared his siren, did a u-turn in the middle of the road, and took after the other guy. I was like ‘whoo hoo!’ and proceeded on my merry way to work. Three cheers for good luck!
… if you’re not a carpenter. Andrew asked me to post some pics of the work I did on our basement staircase, so here they are. First, a beautiful illustration of the problem:
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As you can see, the staircase has some almost paper thin joints on it, and before I shored it up it was very wobbly as you walked down it.
Next, what I did about it:
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Not much to look at, but effective. The staircase is definitely much sturdier than it had been.
Image via Wikipedia
Susan and I ordered a pellet stove in July, figuring on the most expensive heating oil ever this winter. While that’s looking less likely to be true, we still have a pellet stove coming this month, and part of the installation involved the removal of a cast iron steam radiator that sat where the pellet stove ultimately will. We had a plumber disconnect it a couple of months ago, but we’ve been waffling about what to do with it until recently. We decided to save it for the day when the house is sold in case the new owners want to install it in one of the rooms rather than selling it off to a scrap dealer. The only problems were it was too heavy for Susan and I to move, and the basement stairs were rickety to the point where we were afraid anyone trying to cart it into the basement would end up going through the stairs with it.
The first problem was easy enough to solve: we hired a moving company. The second problem we put me on, though I’m no carpenter. We picked up about 40′ of 2×4 on Saturday, and I spent the afternoon bracing the staircase. The end result looks a bit ramshackle, but the stairs are definitely sturdier than they were.
Our plan when the movers arrived was to have them slide the radiator into the basement on a skid plate, using a rope to control the descent, because while the stairs were much stronger structurally after my bracing them, some of the individual steps are still pretty rickety. The movers came, took a look at our plan, seemed to agree with us, then appeared around the corner with the radiator in hand and lumbered down the stairs before Susan and I could say boo about it. I sort of quietly freaked. I was sure they were going to plunge through, but all went well in the end, me at the top of the stairs like a nervous nellie encouraging them not to step in the center of the stairs. Now I think we could have gotten away with me doing absolutely nothing, but oh well. At least the stairs will be stronger when someone is looking to cart that radiator back up out of the basement.
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Dave's Place/Metamusing 