Category Archives: Life

Help! I’m bein’ REPRESSED!

Most of the faculty and staff at Princeton University who donated to a presidential candidate donated to Bronco Bama. By “most” I mean “all but two.” I know, ho-hum, so what? It is, after all, the school that employs Peter Singer as an ethicist. But the interesting thing is who those GOP big shots were. One was an engineer, or, rather, a visiting lecturer at the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Probably has a day job foreclosing loans on Wall Street. What about the other plutocrat-for-Romney?

The only other donation to the Romney campaign from a University employee was contributed by Mark Oresic, a custodian in the 1903 Hall.

Too bad. Except for his politics, Mr. Oresic probably could have expected a lot of lunch invitations to the faculty lounge.

Walter Olson via Ilya Shapiro.

Now what?

Okay. Lady parts are safe now. And, now that he’s lost, Mitt Romney’s a statesman and not Jack the Ripper any longer. Who knows, maybe he’ll get a cabinet post, like Huntsman before him. Failing that, maybe an ambassador. (“Anywhere but Benghazi, Mr. President.”)

And with that out of the way, then what? I sure hope there’s something up the President’s sleeve to get the economy moving. Upward, I mean. I doubt it, but I sure hope I’m wrong. We’ll see.

With Leftists You Just Can’t Win

For … well, it seems like for ever, I’ve heard leftists complain about Wall Street and its obsession with the next quarter. Instead of basing our economy on short term profits, we need to base it on politics.
Then you can call taxes “investments”. Because Congress and Presidencies always take the long view.

Well, not really, of course, but let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that politicians aren’t worried as much about profits as doing the right thing. That would be great, wouldn’t it?

It would be sort of like Amazon is doing.

Except that when a private enterprise acts that way, it’s “terrifying“:

what makes Amazon not just amazing but downright dangerous is that as a financial matter it has something even better than profits—the boundless faith of the investment community. … Wall Street is on board with an Amazon business strategy that doesn’t require it to actually make profits as long as it increases sales volumes. And if you’re in any line of business where you compete with Amazon–and Amazon is in a lot of businesses, and seems to get into new ones each year—that should terrify you.

It’s this “tails you lose, heads I win” thing — goalpost moving at its most obnoxious — that I find most objectionable about conversations with leftists, and why, increasingly, I just assume there’s no point.

Car Stereo – Progress Report

I always dread doing work on my car. Today’s project was to install a new stereo.

I bought the car back in March. It already had an aftermarket stereo: the JVC KD-G200. There’s nothing wrong with it. I got something like it for my previous old clunker back in ’01 or ’02 so I could listen to CDs as I drove to Greeley. But that was 10 years ago, and nobody uses CDs anymore. (In seven months, I haven’t even unpacked the ones we moved here.)

What I want now is something that will let me play my iPod through the car stereo. So for my birthday, I got the BOSS 612-UA. It doesn’t have an optical disk slot. Instead, it’s got

  • AUX IN for the iPod or other consumer electronics
  • USB socket (for a thumb drive, e.g.) (and, possibly, to provide power to your iPod if you’ve got a long drive)
  • SD card slot (you can just leave it there so it’s no big deal if you forget the thumb drive)

Pretty cool, yes? Continue reading

Recovery?

From the “It Sucks to Be Us” Dept.:

The recent census report shows that despite (extremely slow) increases in national GDP and employment, inflation-adjusted household income—an indicator with far more impact on the lives of most Americans—has been dropping since 2009. As the New York Times notes, median household income is now 8.1 percent below its level in 2007.

Kudus: a 2008 Obama voter Via Meadia.