Blame the POLAR VORTEX!!!

Right?

US created 142,000 jobs in August vs 225,000 est; jobless rate at 6.1% vs 6.1% est http://t.co/ANmzYM3ybz

— Pradheep Shanker MD (@Neoavatara) September 5, 2014

I Read This News Article This Morning and Thought

…“Hmmmm. Schmaybe it’s just not the economy/ObamaCare closing this factory…” Two interesting sentences jumped out at me amid the tale of woe…

400 out of work as Hostess shutters Schiller Park plant again

Workers at Hostess Brands’ Schiller Park bakery were blindsided by news Wednesday that the company plans to close the plant where the iconic Twinkie snack cake was invented more than 84 years ago.

“When we heard the news, it was shocking to us as well as our membership there,” said Donald Woods, president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 1. “They were working like 12 hours, six days a week, and they were looking for this plant to be a part of their future.”

Hostess said Wednesday it expects to close the plant in October “to enhance its production and distribution capabilities and efficiencies.”

About 400 employees will be affected by the closing. Roughly 85 workers are employed on a contingent basis at the plant, which also makes Sno Balls and Ho Hos.

“The employees feel devastated because in May of this year the workers there voted to rejoin the [union],” Woods said. ”We were in the process of negotiating a contract with the group.”

Twinkies and other Hostess snack cakes returned to store shelves in July 2013 after the former Hostess company filed bankruptcy during a battle with its union workers.

…The Schiller Park bakery is the company’s last remaining bakery in Illinois. Two other bakeries operated in the state closed in 2012…

To steal a phrase, “Do you see what I see?”

Sounds more like unions and the well-known business friendliness of Illinois causing them to LEAVE to enhance to company’s “efficiencies”.

Unexpectedly!

Get ready for the “It’s not Obama’s fault really it was the weather” excuses to fly fast and furious

The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter by the most since the depths of the last recession as consumer spending cooled.

Gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annualized rate, more than forecast and the worst reading since the same three months in 2009, after a previously reported 1 percent drop, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. It marked the biggest downward revision from the agency’s second GDP estimate since records began in 1976, owed primarily to a slowdown in health care spending.

Total suckage on everything he touches.

More better:

The revision reflected a drop in spending tied to health care services. The Bureau of Economic Analysis had estimated that major provisions of President Obama’s signature health care law would boost outlays. A quarterly services survey released this month showed the assumptions were too optimistic. Outlays for health spending actually dropped in the first quarter, subtracting 0.16 percentage point from GDP. The Commerce Department previously estimated those outlays added 1 percentage point to GDP.

I would suggest to the editors that when you predict a policy will increase spending and it actually causes it to drop you are not “too optimistic” but in fact what we in the real world call “dead wrong.”

Ah, Italian Justice

My name is Bonds, Fake Bonds

Two smartly-dressed men armed with forged bond certificates worth trillions of euros have been caught while trying to talk their way into the Vatican’s bank, in a spectacularly bungled fraud scheme.

The middle aged men, an American and a Dutch citizen of Malaysian origin, arrived at the main gate of the Vatican on the morning of March 11, telling Swiss guards they had an appointment at the bank, which has been dogged by scandals over the years.

When bank staff said they had no record of an appointment, the two men said cardinals were expecting them – arousing the suspicions of Vatican police, who called in colleagues from Italy’s tax police.

“When we arrived, the Vatican police had opened the men’s briefcase to find bond certificates valued in US and Hong Kong dollars, as well as euros, worth €3 trillion,” said Lt Col Davide Cardia, a tax police official.

… “We noticed the grammar of the English used on the certificates was full of mistakes – it looked like they had been written using Google Translate,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Searching their hotel room we found the seals used to forge the bond certificates.”

Since the men were stopped before carrying out a fraud, they were released under Italian law and have now likely left Italy, said Lt. Col. Cardia.

I guess the Italians consider forged bonds worth trillions to be mere literature until one actually deposits them.

And then they’ll shout “squirrel!” and try Amanda Knox again.

Truth In Advertising

4realz RT @JonRichard: Malaysia airlines really did live up to their slogan. pic.twitter.com/5wfpRNa6q9

— Barbara McMahon (@southsalem) March 16, 2014

I Guess Warren Buffet’s Not Getting a White House Christmas Card Next Year

Talk about your old man wandering off the proverbial porch…

Warren Buffett: Supposed Increase in Extreme Weather ‘Hasn’t Been True So Far’

Any climate alarmist will tell you that climate change is increasing extreme weather events, but liberal billionaire Warren Buffett easily destroyed that argument.

…Buffett said the supposed increase in extreme weather “hasn’t been true so far, Joe. We always think it’s cold. We always think it’s cold in Omaha. But, it was cold in Omaha 50 years ago.”

…Specifically, Buffett rejected claims that hurricanes have increased due to climate change, citing his experience in hurricane insurance. He said “we’ve been remarkably free of hurricanes in the United States in the last five years.”

He added “If you are writing hurricane insurance, it has been all profit.“

…In that same interview, Buffett rejected two other liberal talking points. He expressed concern over an increased minimum wage, agreeing with the Congressional Budget Office that wage hikes would kill jobs. He also expressed support for the Keystone XL pipeline, calling it “useful.”

Bacardi Fires Off a Big “UP YOURS, FIDEL” in Their Latest Print Ad

It is a thing of BEAUTY.

#Bacardi sends a big Up Yours/Bite Me to #FidelCastro in their latest print ad. #Cuba Thing of BEAUTY. pic.twitter.com/BphljqQajd

— tree hugging sister (@treehuggingsis) February 26, 2014

IN 1960, THE REVOLUTIONARY REGIME IN CUBA ILLEGALLY CONFISCATED ALL THE BACARDI COMPANY’S CUBAN ASSETS WITHOUT COMPENSATION AND FORCED THEM OUT OF THE COUNTRY. THE BACARDIS LOST THEIR BUSINESS AND THEIR HOME, BUT AS HISTORY HAS PROVEN, NOT THEIR SPIRIT. THEY SIMPLY STARTED OVER SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Bet Cuomo Spit Coffee and Masticated Danish All OVER His Copy

Great economic message for New Yorkers in the Sunday New York Times biz section today. #HoosierDaddyNowBitches #Cuomo pic.twitter.com/0GPMCZuQhO

— tree hugging sister (@treehuggingsis) January 27, 2014

Alias

So I call Comcast yesterday because our modem is rather antiquated and can’t provide the bandwidth that Comcast is charging me for. Their website gives a list of recommended modems and a very convenient link to order one directly from Amazon. Very smart and efficient.

Anywho, I picked out one and before I clicked “order” I called the 800 number for Comcast to double check that it would work and the installation woul be seamless. There was the usual delay as I was routed to the call center in Bangalore and then that little extra delay that tells you that you are now talking to someone wearing a headset sitting in a room with three hundred other such folks, and then this nice fellow says, in accented English that checks off every box on the Official Stereotype Indian English Form, “Hello, thank you for calling Comcast. My name is Larry, how can I help you?”

Larry.

Larry.

So now companies are giving these folks fake Gringo names.

What a hoot.

We Had To Destroy The Environment To Save It

My goodness, there will be no love for the Associated Press when the Administration goes through this story

The secret, dirty cost of Obama’s green power push

November 12, 2013 7:18 AM ET
By By DINA CAPPIELLO and MATT APUZZO

CORYDON, Iowa (AP) – The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America’s push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.
Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama’s watch.
Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

All of these subsidies and mandates (and a hell of a lot else, frankly) need to be eliminated and stripped out of that ungodly abomination that the the Farm Bill.

The corrupt alliance between the hyper-regulatory state and agribusiness must be pared back.

I Must Admit I’m Mostly In This Guy’s Camp

I think this Fed-created bubble in equities, combined with their destruction of saver’s income, has the potential to be a disaster of epic proportions.

And it all has been done with the explicit guidance and blessings of most especially the White House but also Congress.

Sloppy Procedures And Oversight

Via ZeroHedge, who wants to bet that these same programmers were hired to set up the Obamacare Exchanges?

This is probably the most painful bug report I’ve ever read, describing in glorious technicolor the steps leading to Knight Capital’s $460m trading loss due to a software bug that struck late last year, effectively bankrupting the company.

The tale has all the hallmarks of technical debt in a huge, unmaintained, bitrotten codebase (the bug itself due to code that hadn’t been used for almost 9 years), and a really poor, undisciplined dev-ops story.

It sure sounds like the folks at HHS put in the same level of care during the beta phase, too.

But of course the real difference is that the company paid for its sloppiness, whereas we are the ones who will continue to pay for our government’s incompetence.

Oil’s Under $97, Funemployment Still Very High

The percent of people able to work who actually are continues to decline…

I guess there must be some “glitches” in this latest Recovery Summer.

So All Those “SUCCESS STORIES” Lined Up Behind Jug Ears at His Press Conference Today?

Kinda like his signature legislation and damn near everything out of his pie-hole ~ a big, fat fraud.

At the White House: Obamacare success stories that aren’t

President Obama invited a number of people to stand behind him as he delivered his speech on the state of Obamacare at the White House Monday morning. One of them, Janice Baker, a small business owner from Delaware, introduced the president, and Obama spoke of Baker and the others gathered there as people who have benefited from Obamacare. But after reading the White House-provided descriptions of each of those behind the president, it’s clear the administration was stretching to present people who, beyond supporting Obamacare, have actually gained from it in any tangible way.

For example, a Pennsylvania man named Malik Hassan was in the group, and this is the White House description of his situation, in full:

“Malik Hassan works at a restaurant in Philadelphia. Hassan, who does not receive coverage through his employer, is looking forward to enrolling for health coverage this fall. He recently used Healthcare.gov. to process his application and is waiting for the options for potential plans in Philadelphia.“

So, Hassan is employed, not covered, and has not yet succeeded in finding coverage through Obamacare. That is, in the White House’s estimation, an Obamacare success story.

Then there is Nathaniel Hojnacki, who recently finished his schooling. Here is the White House description of his situation, again in full:

“Nathaniel Hojnacki recently received his Master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University SAIS and is in an employment situation without benefits. Hojnacki recognizes the importance of coverage and is planning to enroll after he explores his coverage options on the DC exchange.“

So, Hojnacki has a job, does not have coverage, and is planning to explore finding coverage through Obamacare. Another success story.

Then there is LaJuanna Russell, of Virginia. Here is the White House description of her situation, in its entirety:

“LaJuanna Russell is the owner of Business Management Associates, a consulting company in Alexandria, Virginia. Russell says she is proud to offer her employees health insurance but that it can be difficult for a small business. Russell believes that the ACA provides stability for her and her employees and is exploring what new coverage options will be available to her company under the exchanges.“

So, Russell owns a business, has employees, and believes Obamacare might help her in the future. Another success story.

There’s a couple out of the 13 folks profiled who have been “helped”, but “success“?

For SIXHUNNERTANDTHURDYFOURMILLIONSDOLLARS and counting?

Pffft.

Liar.

“It’s a Holy Shit Moment.”

No kidding. When you’ve got the HuffPo screaming “WTFO?!?!?!“, you’ve got yourself a quagmire.

Obamacare Website Failure Threatens Health Coverage For Millions Of Americans

More than two weeks into the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website created by President Barack Obama’s health care reform law still isn’t working right.

…And anyone who isn’t able to get coverage because of the exchanges’ problems could confront the prospect of tax penalties through no fault of their own.

For Obama and the Democrats who’ve stood behind Obamacare during four years of relentless attacks from Republicans — including a face-off that led to a 16-day government shutdown and a threat of U.S. default —

failure of this magnitude would discredit a core premise of this presidency, that government can do big things to improve Americans’ lives.

…Under these circumstances, the lion’s share of the people who do whatever is necessary to sign up through HealthCare.gov are likely to be the sickest and most expensive to cover because they have the greatest need, Laszewski said. That would make the pool of people covered very costly, causing health insurers to lose money and likely rethink whether they want to participate in the exchanges, he said. “The fundamental threat to Obamacare is we don’t get enough healthy people in the pool to keep the rates reasonable, and they are in grave danger of that problem,” he said.

If these problems persist longer — weeks, months, a whole year — the entire Obamacare project falls apart, Laszewski said:

“It’s a holy shit moment.”

H/T Instapundit

If You Weren’t Sure That the ObamaCare Exchanges Were a Government (Vice GOP Intransigence) Induced Disaster Before…

….you can rest assured NOW.

Tech experts: Health exchange site needs total overhaul

WASHINGTON — The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY.

The site could be perfect, but if the systems from which it draws data are not up to speed, it doesn’t matter, said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, a cloud computer service provider.

“It is a core problem in the sense of it’s fundamental to this thing actually working, but it’s not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to,” Engates said.

“Even if they had a perfect system, it still won’t work.“

That’s the rubber stamp of a federal project FER SURE: designed and built-in obsolescence.

For a BAZILLION dollars.

So Now We’re Told That Because Yellen Is A Woman

We’re supposed to be enthusiastic and ecstatic that her being nominated to be Chair of the Fed will be so “historic.”

Just how well has placing people in important positions because of their skin color or what’s between their legs worked out for us?

You know would be really historic?

Nominating someone sensible.

Stock Futures Pointing Lower

Down about 136 as I write this. Yes, the stock market will have to fall and fall quite a bit because what has driven its near doubling in the past 5 years has not been the unqualified success of the endless “Recovery Summers” that we have been blessed with but rather the money that the Fed has been pumping into the system.

But anyone who’s not a politician or an economist knows there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the bill is huge and coming due.

As I said below there is no danger of a default now unless the players in Washington specifically choose to do so, as we have more than sufficient income to cover our obligations. Yes, painful cuts will need to be made but it can be done if the will is there…which in all likelihood is not given our “leadership.”

So President Barrycade Goes on CNBC This Afternoon

You know ~ just to whip up a little stock market crash fever ~

Obama to Wall Street: This time be worried

Wall Street needs to be genuinely worried about what is going on in Washington, President Barack Obama told CNBC in a White House interview Wednesday.

While gridlock in D.C. is nothing new, “this time I think Wall Street should be concerned,” Obama said.

POTUS telling Wall Street to react: "I think this time is different. I think they should be concerned." // Dow may drop big tomorrow?

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 2, 2013

…but then he says something genuinely bizarre.

…On Obamacare, the president’s most significant legislative accomplishment, Obama said that despite certain polls showing it was unpopular with specific segments of the population—namely white people—the law would ultimately be accepted by the population at large.

Tenets of the bill are popular among “all races” the president said.

“The majority of the people who will be helped by the ACA will be white,” he said.

Because…WHAT?!

When Your Current, BESTEST Idea on EARTH to Stop Radiation From Leaking From Your Crippled Reactor IS:

…FREEZING THE GROUND UNDER THE PLANT…

Japan to build $470M ice wall to prevent nuclear leaks

The Japanese government announced Tuesday that it will spend $470 million on a subterranean ice wall and other steps in a desperate bid to stop leaks of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant after repeated failures by the plant’s operator.

The decision is widely seen as an attempt to show that the nuclear accident won’t be a safety concern just days before the International Olympic Committee chooses among Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid as the host of the 2020 Olympics.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has been leaking hundreds of tons of contaminated underground water into the sea since shortly after a massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami damaged the complex. Several leaks from tanks storing radioactive water in recent weeks have heightened the sense of crisis that the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., isn’t able to contain the problem.

…WHAT kind of MAH-ROONS would give them an Olympic Games?!

TOKYO WINS VOTE TO HOST 2020 OLYMPICS

Well, they should save an assload on lighting costs, with all the glowing going on by then.

The Parking Spot: Update

As you may recall I had a rather unfortunate incident at the Parking Spot a few weeks back:

As you know I was out of town for most of the week. I really didn’t feel like paying the $30+ per day to park at Newark, and I didn’t want my Bride to come and pick me up late Thursday night when I got home (especially if there were delays) so I decided to give The Parking Spot right across from EWR a try. They’re right there, cost only $9/day, and

As the leading near-airport parking company in the nation, The Parking Spot provides full service parking to 21 major airports in the U.S., with a total of 33 parking lots. When you reserve a space with The Parking Spot, you can expect more than cheap airport parking. You’re getting a superior airport parking experience. Our lots are spacious, fully-fenced, well lit, and open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We offer: friendly shuttles every 5-7 minutes, earn free parking with The Spot Club, luggage assistance, complimentary newspaper & chilled bottled water.

What’s not to love? I’ve seen their vans zipping about the airport all the time, so I figured what the hey.

Well, you can get the measure of a company (and of people) not by how they do things right when things are running smoothly (heck that’s the easy stuff; as Jane Austen wrote “Everything nourishes that which is strong already.”) but rather by how they perform and act when things go really, really, reeeeeeally wrong.

I parked my car there on Monday afternoon. I had reserved a spot, pulled into the secure gated drop-off area, left the keys with the attendant and was soon on the shuttle bus; ten minutes later at most I was in the terminal and preparing to expose my inner-most secrets to TSA. So far so good.

Fast-forward to Thursday, sitting in the Las Vegas airport creatively whiling away the time while my flight was delayed 3 hours, making my eta back to Newark now 1am instead of 10pm, so I was glad I hadn’t drafted my poor Bride to come pick me up. She’d get to sleep!

So after a reasonably uneventful 5 hour flight we land around 1-ish, I walk off the plane and call them to send the minibus around. It shows up very quickly (yay!) and me and a couple of other folks hop aboard for the short drive to the lot. The nice fellow driving helps them with their luggage when we get there and the cars are all lined up and off they go.

Except me.

My car’s not there.

The manager comes up to me and very apologetically says to me “Oh Mr. Bingley, I’ve been waiting for you. I’m sorry your flight was so delayed, but um, well we seem to have lost your keys.”

Exsqueeze me?

You know, I’m a little tired and not focused terribly clearly here at this late/early hour, why by gum I almost thought I heard you just say you’ve LOST. MY. KEYS. ?!?!?!?!

My car keys, which also had my house keys and several other keys, as well as the all-important key id tags for various beer and wine clubs I belong to. Oh and the gym tag (what, you think this body was sculpted for free?).

Now I guess some folks would react to this sort of thing rather violently or emotionally but that’s really not my style; the deed was done, the milk was spilled and the coop had collapsed on the chickens. The big question, the only question that mattered was what do we do now.

The manager explained their system for tracking the keys (which is, after all, the core of their business) and, well, they knew which employee screwed up. In a nutshell, the keys are scanned in and out every time they are touched to move a car and this fellow simply grabbed a couple sets of keys to “save time” and dropped mine somewhere (in another car, on the ground) after he moved mine. As they say in The Hobbit “short cuts lead to long delays.” In this case my delay. The manager again was very polite and apologetic and offered to rent a car for me to get home or to have someone drive me home and I could come up the next day…strike that, later the same day because it was now 1:30am on Friday and get the car. I said no, drive me home, I will get my spare keys and come back with your employee and get my car now, I didn’t want to wait and who knows, if the gods were smiling perhaps the keys were dropped in my car and not someone else’s and are now god-knows-where.

So my poor Bride (so much for sleep!) gets a phone call from me at 1:30 (which is an hour when everyone just loves to have the phone ring) and I ask her to put the spare car key outside and leave the door open as I have no house keys now. We drive 45 minutes from the airport to Chez Bingley, I run in, drop off my bag, pick up the keys and run back out. Then 45 minutes back to the airport. The fellow who gave me a ride was a very nice fellow, btw.

Get there, open up the car, the manager and everyone is crossing their fingers that my original keys are in the car. Nope. Damn.

Now life has just gotten a lot more complicated and expensive. I talk to the manager and tell him that I am going to have to spend the next day getting new car keys and all the locks on the house changed and that I expect them to pay for it. He says “of course” and gives me the contact information for his supervisors and apologizes again. I get in and drive home, getting there at 3:30. Yay me.

After a few hours of sleep I get up and head out, going first to the locksmith to arrange for new locks (they came Saturday and installed them) and then to the dealership to get a new key and fob for the car (I sat there for an hour or so as they made/programmed them). During the day I got phone calls and emails from various managers at the Parking Spot assuring me that they would cover the charges and apologizing again for what happened. I will repeat again: every Parking Spot employee I had contact with was courteous and polite and promised to make it right (as much as they could).

So we shall see: tomorrow I’m emailing them the receipts for the roughly $700 I had to spend (I didn’t charge them for my time, but I’m giving that way) and their words will be put to the test. Key control is the core of their business and they messed it up. It happens occasionally and unfortunately this number came up for me last week and not Powerball. Based on all my interactions with them over the past few days I fully expect them to honor their commitments to me and I will keep y’all informed on how it goes.

Quite honestly, assuming they send me the check reasonably quickly I wouldn’t hesitate to use them again. Oh sure I’ll joke about it and annoy their employees by saying “now don’t lose my keys this time!” when I drop the car off but losing my keys aside they do a great job. Now I know that sounds kind of like saying “well aside from that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” but seriously: they’re polite, inexpensive (in theory…) and close to the airport.

So the ball is in their court.

Stay tuned.

Well I am very happy to report that a few days ago I received a check from them for the full amount, so Huzzah for them and, as I said, I will use them again in the future.

Only this time I will not give them all of my keys.

Again, Well Done Parking Spot.

(yes, I probably didn’t need to reprint everything here but by gum I am so sick of writing about this Syria disaster that I wanted some cheap-n-easy filler)

(and a drink)

Mike Rowe Eviscerates Newspaper Writer

…who made the mistake of using Mike’s picture to illustrate an article on “BAD” jobs.

A sample below, but DO read the WHOLE thing.

YOUR HEADLINE, MY FACE

From: Mike Rowe
Re: Your Headline, My Face.

Hi Steve,
Mike Rowe here, Dirty Jobs. Thanks to the necromancers over at Google, I’ve been alerted to your most recent Question of the Day: “Are Bad Jobs Good for the Economy and the People Who Work Them?” Immediately under your headline I noticed a photo of me, taken on the Mackinac Bridge while filming a segment on Dirty Jobs.

Given the juxtaposition of my face with your headline, a reasonable person might conclude that a “Dirty Job” and “Bad Job” are one and the same. This sentiment is not only inconsistent with my own view of hard work, it’s completely at odds with the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct, a collection of life lessons painstakingly compiled from the men and women I’ve met on Dirty Jobs.

…SK – The Muskegon Chronicle and Mlive just finished the second segment in a months-long series of articles about jobs in the Muskegon area. In the most recent segment, we wrote about low-paying jobs, and the “shadow” economy of people who hack out a living by mowing lawns, scrounging odd jobs, and anything else that comes their way.

MR – I read it. Nowhere does the writer congratulate anyone for their resourcefulness or self-reliance. Instead, you wrote that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” a clear infraction of the Hyperbole Restriction. According to the DJCC, desperation means selling a kidney to ransom your wife and kids.

Desperation is not a $10 an hour construction job with no benefits, as you suggest. That’s just work.

SK – Not all, but some, employers of low-wage workers give their employees opportunity to advance, we wrote.

MR – I have never seen a job that didn’t come with the opportunity for advancement. Union, non-union, high pay, low pay, part-time, full-time, freelance or salaried.

Any worker who consistently shows up an hour early and stays late will quickly become indispensable on any job site. That’s still a great truth in the wide world of work.

Unfortunately, you didn’t mention that. Instead, you implied that a worker’s only hope of advancement lies with the employer, another screaming inconsistency with the Personal Responsibility Clause.

SK – People working odd jobs or doing day labor for money under the table sometimes do so because it’s the only option they have, we wrote.

MR – Agreed. But nowhere do you suggest that having one option is better than having no option. Certainly, these people are struggling, but they have not given up. They have not become wards of the state. They are looking for and in many cases finding a way to get by in a brutal economy. Certainly not ideal, but the Glass-Half Empty Restriction and the Context Clause of the DJCC both prohibit my endorsement of all “one-sided comparisons that fail to illustrate how things could always be much, much worse.”

SK – Some people might take an optimistic view of these jobs.

MR – Of course.

Some people still see hard work as something to be respected in all its forms.

The point is, fewer people share that view than ever before. The majority of people in your poll voted “no” to every question. They believe that whole categories of jobs are “bad” for the worker and “bad” for society at large. That’s a clear infraction of the Work Is Not the Enemy Clause of the DJCC, and a radical departure of the attitude I encountered in my previous visits to the great state of Michigan.

Get the Signal, Kenneth?

“We’re boned”, I think it keeps repeating.

President Peace Prize wants to tap your cell phone bill for funds for his little give-aways (as if it weren’t already hefty enough).

We Can’t Wait … To Nominate Another Lobbyist

“John McCain can’t see or won’t acknowledge what’s obvious to all of us here today — that lobbyists aren’t just part of the system in Washington, they’re part of the problem.”
— Then-Sen. Barack Obama campaigning in Montana, May 19, 2008.

President Obama wants to place a new tax on your monthly cell phone bill to pay for his plan to put WiFi in more classrooms. And all he needs to do it is one more lobbyist in his administration.

Getting American consumers to cough up the billions needed for Obama’s “ConnectEd” initiative doesn’t depend on Congress or anything so tedious as winning bipartisan support. The president’s initiative instead rests squarely on his ability to push through the nomination of Tom Wheeler, a telecommunications lobbyist and Obama campaign bundler, to head the Federal Communications Commission.

The tax would seem a certainty, then, because Senate Democrats succeeded last month in cowing their Republican colleagues into abandoning the use of the filibuster on presidential nominations. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid succeeded in his “nuclear option” gambit and now even a lobbyist riding point on a new tax would seem to be a shoo-in for confirmation.

The Computer Knows Better

So it changes the numbers

Xerox (XRX) is now saying that some of its scanners can alter numbers in documents, even at the highest resolution setting. It blames a software bug for which it does not yet have a fix. “We continue to work tirelessly and diligently to develop a software patch to address the problem,” the company said in an Aug. 11 statement.

…The problem came to light when German computer scientist David Kriesel scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that it changed numbers on some of the room measurements.

You’re not going to argue with HAL, are you?

The Parking Spot Review

As you know I was out of town for most of the week. I really didn’t feel like paying the $30+ per day to park at Newark, and I didn’t want my Bride to come and pick me up late Thursday night when I got home (especially if there were delays) so I decided to give The Parking Spot right across from EWR a try. They’re right there, cost only $9/day, and

As the leading near-airport parking company in the nation, The Parking Spot provides full service parking to 21 major airports in the U.S., with a total of 33 parking lots. When you reserve a space with The Parking Spot, you can expect more than cheap airport parking. You’re getting a superior airport parking experience. Our lots are spacious, fully-fenced, well lit, and open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We offer: friendly shuttles every 5-7 minutes, earn free parking with The Spot Club, luggage assistance, complimentary newspaper & chilled bottled water.

What’s not to love? I’ve seen their vans zipping about the airport all the time, so I figured what the hey.

Well, you can get the measure of a company (and of people) not by how they do things right when things are running smoothly (heck that’s the easy stuff; as Jane Austen wrote “Everything nourishes that which is strong already.”) but rather by how they perform and act when things go really, really, reeeeeeally wrong.

I parked my car there on Monday afternoon. I had reserved a spot, pulled into the secure gated drop-off area, left the keys with the attendant and was soon on the shuttle bus; ten minutes later at most I was in the terminal and preparing to expose my inner-most secrets to TSA. So far so good.

Fast-forward to Thursday, sitting in the Las Vegas airport creatively whiling away the time while my flight was delayed 3 hours, making my eta back to Newark now 1am instead of 10pm, so I was glad I hadn’t drafted my poor Bride to come pick me up. She’d get to sleep!

So after a reasonably uneventful 5 hour flight we land around 1-ish, I walk off the plane and call them to send the minibus around. It shows up very quickly (yay!) and me and a couple of other folks hop aboard for the short drive to the lot. The nice fellow driving helps them with their luggage when we get there and the cars are all lined up and off they go.

Except me.

My car’s not there.

The manager comes up to me and very apologetically says to me “Oh Mr. Bingley, I’ve been waiting for you. I’m sorry your flight was so delayed, but um, well we seem to have lost your keys.”

Exsqueeze me?

You know, I’m a little tired and not focused terribly clearly here at this late/early hour, why by gum I almost thought I heard you just say you’ve LOST. MY. KEYS. ?!?!?!?!

My car keys, which also had my house keys and several other keys, as well as the all-important key id tags for various beer and wine clubs I belong to. Oh and the gym tag (what, you think this body was sculpted for free?).

Now I guess some folks would react to this sort of thing rather violently or emotionally but that’s really not my style; the deed was done, the milk was spilled and the coop had collapsed on the chickens. The big question, the only question that mattered was what do we do now.

The manager explained their system for tracking the keys (which is, after all, the core of their business) and, well, they knew which employee screwed up. In a nutshell, the keys are scanned in and out every time they are touched to move a car and this fellow simply grabbed a couple sets of keys to “save time” and dropped mine somewhere (in another car, on the ground) after he moved mine. As they say in The Hobbit “short cuts lead to long delays.” In this case my delay. The manager again was very polite and apologetic and offered to rent a car for me to get home or to have someone drive me home and I could come up the next day…strike that, later the same day because it was now 1:30am on Friday and get the car. I said no, drive me home, I will get my spare keys and come back with your employee and get my car now, I didn’t want to wait and who knows, if the gods were smiling perhaps the keys were dropped in my car and not someone else’s and are now god-knows-where.

So my poor Bride (so much for sleep!) gets a phone call from me at 1:30 (which is an hour when everyone just loves to have the phone ring) and I ask her to put the spare car key outside and leave the door open as I have no house keys now. We drive 45 minutes from the airport to Chez Bingley, I run in, drop off my bag, pick up the keys and run back out. Then 45 minutes back to the airport. The fellow who gave me a ride was a very nice fellow, btw.

Get there, open up the car, the manager and everyone is crossing their fingers that my original keys are in the car. Nope. Damn.

Now life has just gotten a lot more complicated and expensive. I talk to the manager and tell him that I am going to have to spend the next day getting new car keys and all the locks on the house changed and that I expect them to pay for it. He says “of course” and gives me the contact information for his supervisors and apologizes again. I get in and drive home, getting there at 3:30. Yay me.

After a few hours of sleep I get up and head out, going first to the locksmith to arrange for new locks (they came Saturday and installed them) and then to the dealership to get a new key and fob for the car (I sat there for an hour or so as they made/programmed them). During the day I got phone calls and emails from various managers at the Parking Spot assuring me that they would cover the charges and apologizing again for what happened. I will repeat again: every Parking Spot employee I had contact with was courteous and polite and promised to make it right (as much as they could).

So we shall see: tomorrow I’m emailing them the receipts for the roughly $700 I had to spend (I didn’t charge them for my time, but I’m giving that way) and their words will be put to the test. Key control is the core of their business and they messed it up. It happens occasionally and unfortunately this number came up for me last week and not Powerball. Based on all my interactions with them over the past few days I fully expect them to honor their commitments to me and I will keep y’all informed on how it goes.

Quite honestly, assuming they send me the check reasonably quickly I wouldn’t hesitate to use them again. Oh sure I’ll joke about it and annoy their employees by saying “now don’t lose my keys this time!” when I drop the car off but losing my keys aside they do a great job. Now I know that sounds kind of like saying “well aside from that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” but seriously: they’re polite, inexpensive (in theory…) and close to the airport.

So the ball is in their court.

Stay tuned.