The Mighty Fang disappeared. I couldn't find him anywhere. Then I noticed that the closet door in the music room was just barely open, so I slid it to the left and peered in -- into a furry face. Here it is when I slid everything wide open to the light of day:
Just another day in a cat-owned penguin's life, heh!
- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
In computer clustering we have an issue we call "ping-ponging", where system A comes up and assumes mastership of the cluster, system B comes up and becomes secondary, system B looks at system A and says "uh oh system A is sick" and reboots system A and assumes mastership, system A comes back up and becomes secondary, system A looks at system B and says "uh oh system B is sick", then reboots system B and assumes mastership. The cluster ends up ping-ponging between A and B as master, with a brief service interruption each time it ping-pongs due to the amount of time needed to transfer services.
So anyhow, this reminds me of the way The Romney switches between positions. A few weeks ago, The Romney supported an increase in the minimum wage. Today... not. Ping. Pong. Position A. Position B. Position A. Position B. Wash, rinse, repeat.
My personal belief is that The Romney is based on an early version of Windows 95 which gets a blue screen of death regularly and has to be re-installed from scratch because you can never get it to boot up again once it's blue-screened like that. That is why The Romney never seems to remember what The Romney said last week -- it's because the current install of the Romneybot 2.0 software didn't *exist* last week.
Hey, it's a theory ;).
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Ray Wylie Hubbard, "The Last Younger Son", off of 1997's Dangerous Spirits.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
There's a wide variety of folks who claim that employer-paid health insurance was a side-effect of wage freezes during WW2. The claim is that employers couldn't raise their employees' pay due to the Federally-mandated wage freezes, so they instead started providing health insurance.
The thing is, this is unadulterated balderdash. If it had been a response to the wage and price controls, then employers would have immediately dropped the health insurance plans once wage and price controls were lifted after the end of the war and instead raised wages by that amount. But the reality is group health insurance is cheaper than individual health insurance, and that's why it became standard even for employers where 100% of the cost was paid by employees. The tax break is one reason, but by far not the only reason -- until recently, the cost of health insurance simply wasn't big enough to make the tax deduction a big deal, I paid something like $40/month for health insurance when I was a young adult for example, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and penguins lived in Antarctica rather than in the Silly Cone Valley.
So anyhow, why do I say that group health insurance will invariably win out over individual health insurance in a free market for health insurance? Let us list the reasons why:
In short, in virtually every country that doesn't have centralized socialist healthcare where everybody is automatically insured and automatically gets the money taken out of their paychecks as taxes, you'll find employers directly involved in the enrollment and provision of insurance, because it's simply cheaper. There is only one Switzerland (where insurance is provided on an individual basis rather than group basis), and even Switzerland has been Switzerland for less than twenty years (before that the primary funders of healthcare were employer-based group plans like the USA) and individual insurers haven't been driven out of business by cheaper group plans there only because group plans have been banned by government fiat. When you have group plans and individual insurers in the same system, people buy individual insurance only when they're self-employed... because otherwise, it's simply cheaper to buy it through your employer, even if you're paying 100% of the cost out of pocket.
-- Badtux the Healthcare Economics Penguin
Yes, that's right, 50% of the human race has a *whole day* all for itself!
A dude at work asked, "so when's International *MEN'S* Day?". And I replied, "That's the other 364 days a year." Just sayin' ;).
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Toby Keith, "I'll never smoke weed with Willy again", at Willy's 70th birthday party.
And the story behind the song:
I'm not much of one for Toby Keith, but hell, this is a funny-ass song ;).
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
This is a great day for robot-Americans. Just sayin' ;).
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Chris Knight, "North Dakota", off of 2001's A Pretty Good Guy. A song as bleak as the countyside it is set in.
Chris is four years older than me, and worked as a mining engineer before he heard Steve Earle on the radio and decided to write songs. Mostly he's written songs for other folks, because his bleak voice isn't really suited for stardom. Sample comment from YouTube: "Chris Knight is every welder I've ever known wrapped up in a song writer."
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
It took five years for them to find a prostitute in Manhattan. In another five years they may actually be able to find their ass to wipe it without assistance.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Vladimir Putin won election as President of Russia again in elections blasted by the opposition as "corrupt" and "unfair". Thing is, opinion polls and exit polling by independent organizations seem to say that Putin has the support of around 55% of Russians, so in a fair election he'd win anyhow. Pumping up the total to 65% is just habit or arrogance on his part, apparently. You know how it goes, you're a secret policeman, there's some things you do just because that's how you've always done it, even if you don't need to do them anymore...
In other news, thanks to recent tuition hikes at the University of California system, it is now cheaper for the average middle-class student to attend Harvard or Princeton than to attend UC-Berkeley. WTF?! This is just fucked up. But what can you expect from a state that spends more on prisons than on higher ed? Of course that's not why the state is bankrupt -- the state is bankrupt because of Medicaid costs combined with a tax code that is one loophole after another for the Ciscos and Intels of the world so that corporate taxes flowing to the Franchise Tax Board today have plummeted to almost nothing -- but still, it just goes to show California's priorities. If I didn't have to live here to work... SIGH!
And finally, Comcast is being Comcraptastic again. Sigh! They had it fixed for a couple days, then it went right back to crap again. Thus why no links to the stories above, I just don't have reliable enough Internet to do the web searches for the right links (those stories came out of the dead trees).
-- Badtux the News Flash Penguin
Holly Miranda, "Joints", live. I actually prefer this to the overproduced studio version on The Magician's Private Library, Holly originally wrote the song on acoustic guitar and when you try to tart up a song written like that, sometimes you can just go too far trying to make it sound like something other than what it is.
Holly is working on a new album. This time she's going to have complete creative control because she's funding it via PledgeMusic. Hopefully it won't get overproduced in hopes of turning her into a mainstream artist this time... she's far too raw -- and too good -- for that to work with her.
- Badtux the Music Penguin
The neighbor in the unit on the other side of the duplex now has flowers and fresh mulch in his flower bed. I dunno how that happened, they just sorta appeared there in the middle of the night :).
-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin
The Offspring, "The Kids Aren't All Right", off their brilliant 1998 album Americana.
I was born on a street about four miles long that started at the front halls of an elite private Methodist university, went for a mile or so with large and spacious homes on the hill and, across from them, the smaller homes of the college professors, and ended in the most abject segregation-era black poverty at its far end, where the streets were tar dirt and the smell of raw sewage permeated the air as beat-down black faces looked out the windows and small children played in dirt yards with sticks and rocks. My childhood home was on the dividing line between the college professors and the working class neighborhood of plumbers and cops and factory workers that was in the middle of all of this, and my childhood friends were from from both sides of that line.
What happened to them? Life happened to them. The son of the college professor that we all envied for his muscular build and swift intellect that got an "A" in every course he took at the college-prep magnet high school... he ended up a drug addict, living on the streets, spotted from time to time digging food out of dumpsters when he's not in jail for breaking into people's homes to steal stuff to use to buy drugs. The son of the rich doctor? He married his childhood sweetheart then abandoned her with their kids to live in abject poverty, and spends his days living on the road in a minivan to avoid process servers, occasionally popping up from nowhere to get his latest trust fund check. The cop's kid? He ended up being institutionalized when he had a psychotic break, then nobody knows what happened to him after he was released. The skinny tow-headed kid from down the street who lived with an abusive grandfather, who everybody assumed was going to be a criminal because he was always getting in trouble? He moved to the West Coast and learned how to handle boats and recently got his pilot's certification, and married a girl and has two kids and they are all spectacularly ridiculously happy. The weird drugged-out kid who lived in the run-down ghetto house and ran with the cops' kid and the doctor's kid and the professors' kid? Erm. He grew up to be a well-paid engineer in the Silicon Valley.
But for the few success stories, by far the majority of stories from that street are the stories in this song, the stories of kids of all sorts who ended up with broken lives and shattered dreams in the land once known as the land of the free(*) and home of the brave(**)...
-- Badtux the Reminiscing Penguin
(*)Prior to Patriot Act
(**)Prior to "cower! cower in fear!" message beamed into everybody's mind by 24/7 news channels, and subsequent cowering in fear and willingness to give up freedoms by majority of Americans.
... I spent the day gardening. I removed the old bark from the flower bed out front and started digging holes to plant flowers. Ugh. Disaster. Turns out that at some point in the past a tenant had ornamental rocks in the flower bed out front, then at some *later* point soil got put on top of the ornamental rocks, then bark got put on top of the soil... so anyhow, ended up moving a lot of dirt around to get most of the rocks out. But I got about half the flowers planted today and fresh bark spread amongst them, it looks good, a lot better than tired old bark with weeds growing inbetween, hopefully will be able to finish planting the rest later.
Off to go grocery shopping...
- Badtux the Tired Penguin
Townes van Zandt, "Nothing", off his 1971 album Delta Momma Blues. The footage is from the movie Heartworn Highways, well worth having for a lot of music and footage from that era of "alternate" country.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Oh yah, and while I'm at it, hey yo, World Nut Daily, I do *not* want to know the day of Jesus's return. If you're a Christian ya oughta live as if today is the day that Jesus comes back and judges ya, i.e., that ya can't just fuck over a buncha people like a real-life Gordon Gekko on crack, wait 'till Sunday, bend the knee at the pulpit to "wash your sins away in the blood of the Lamb", and go to Heaven, 'cuz five minutes from now before you get your chance to bend the knee Jesus, like, levitates from the sky like some skinny-ass kinky-haired olive-skinned big-nosed dress-wearin' Jewboy angel without wings and booms in a big scary voice "you're going to HELL Mr. Sinner for that evil shit you just did" and foosh, down ya go, burning in Hell with folks like Mark Twain and George Carlin whose ass you hate, now ya gotta have them haranguing ya in person, like, forever. If you claim to be Christian and you *don't* live like Jesus is coming back five minutes from now, you ain't a Christian -- you're just some poser liar pretending to be Christian. So don't give me that shit about "knowing when Jesus comes back", if you're a Christian the whole point is not knowing when Jesus comes back, 'cause otherwise why bother tryin' to act like, well, Jesus woulda wanted ya to act?
And for folks who aren't Christian, we don't give a shit when you think some zombie-ass Jewboy is gonna start, like, lurchin' around moaning "brains.... BRAAAAAIIIIINS...." cuz, like, we're already sick of all that zombie apocalypse shit. Zombies are overdone. Jumped the shark, tragically unhip, as over as vampires now that we got fuckin' sparkle vampires (what the fuck? Vampires aren't suppose to fuckin' sparkle!), I mean, we got zombies driving fuckin' Honda Civics, for cryin' out loud. Over. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
So World Nut Daily sez the U.S. Marines need to be "more of a fighting force and less of a social experiment" 'cuz of a photo of two male Marines hugging and kissing at a base in Hawaii? WTF? Has Crazy Joe lost his fucking mind? The Marines have been kicking ass left and right in Trashcanistan and the World's Biggest Catbox for the past eleven years, they been fucking enemy's shit up like no other fighting force in history has fucked enemy's shit up, has he been on fucking Quaaludes all that time and sorta, like, forgot about that? Oh wait, that's right, we don't call him Crazy Joe Farah for nuttin'.
Way to go supportin' our troops, right-wing asshole. My suggestion to you: Do *not* go to a bar outsida Camp Lejeune and proclaim that Marines are pussies just 'cuz a coupla Marines groped each other. Your ass goin' to da *HOSPITAL* you try that shit in the presence of Marines that ain't got their commandin' officers around to order'em not to. Just sayin'.
-- Badtux the Known-a-few-Marines(*) Penguin
(*)Male, Female, gay, straight, don't matter, they were all kick-ass.
Well, not exactly. First, I went to Costco and cashed my American Express cashback check and bought a bunch of stuff that I needed (ink and paper for my printer, toothbrush refills for my sonic toothbrush, kimchi noodles, tissues), then went to the hardware store and got a new soap dispenser for the sink to replace the one with the broken stem. I also looked at the dishwasher and did a Dr. McCoy on it -- "she's dead, Jim", i.e., fixing it would require a new pump and new racks and that would cost more than a new dishwasher. Unfortunately it appears the dishwasher is pretty much tiled in... there's a half-inch lip where the subflooring for the tile was put down and there's not half an inch above the dishwasher to pick it up over that lip. It looks like some subflooring will have to be ripped out to make enough room to get the dishwasher out and a new one in, though maybe you could replace the pump and racks with it in place. Oh well. I'm not going to deal with that mess right now, I'll tell the landlord when I move out that it's broken, and he can fix it (or not) then (I don't need a dishwasher, given how few dishes I dirty hand-washing them is quite viable). In the meantime I unplugged it and disconnected the water to it so that nobody tries to run it and ends up making a mess.
TMF is still psycho. One moment he's curled up against Mencken warming his nose in Mencken's fur, a minute later after he jumps down from my bed to follow me to the kitchen he looks back at the sound of Mencken jumping down from my bed and lets out a gut-curdling howl and screech at this strange cat in *his* territory. Mencken's starting to get a bit of a dazed look to his eyes, like, "I'm living in a madhouse!". I don't blame him. TMF was curled up against me in the music room purring, Mencken came in, and... err. You know the rest of that story.
- Badtux the Tired Penguin
The Austin Lounge Lizards with some of that good ole' gospel music: "Banjo Players in Heaven", lamenting the poor state of gospel bluegrass music in Heaven.
Sample lyrics:
"It's hard to find a banjo player up in heaven,
There's some things even Jesus won't forgive."
Bwhahaha!
-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin
One thing that the Austerians are fond of saying is that government spending doesn't increase production in an economy, it just retargets production from the private market to the government market. They have an accounting formula that "proves" this -- an accounting formula that conveniently disappears slack resources, unemployed people and idle factories (or, rather, their formula claims that such are impossible to exist -- ignore our lying eyes, those unemployed slackers aren't unemployed, they're just taking a long vacation!).
Of course, this ignores the fact that we only count as unemployed those who are looking for work -- i.e., people who are *not* taking a long vacation (they wouldn't be looking for work if they were vacationing!) -- and that the current stats show a *lot* of idle resources all over that could be put to productive use if there was demand for the goods. Joe the Sandwich Shop owner, looking gloomily at his empty shop, isn't making sandwiches. But if someone came in and wanted a sandwich, he'd make one for that person. Duh.
So what creates demand? Well... money, and the willingness to spend it. And it doesn't matter, from the viewpoint of the economy, whether that money is "government" money or "corporate" money. If Joe the Sandwich Shop Owner sees someone come in his shop with the money to buy a sandwich and the desire to buy a sandwich, he's going to make a sandwich for that person -- a sandwich which did not exist until Joe produced it. And Joe's going to do this regardless of whether the guy who wants the sandwich was paid with "government" money or "private" money, money is money, from Joe's perspective -- he's a businessman, not a theologian or ideologue, he's in business to sell sandwiches, not to query people about where they got the money to buy his sandwiches.
Now, one argument is that the government can only spend by taking money away from other people that would otherwise be used for consumption. That ignores the fact that the Fortune 500 has literally stuffed $2 *TRILLION* under a mattress -- it's just sitting there, consuming *nothing* -- that could be taxed without reducing consumption by one iota, but also ignores the fact that the government possesses this wondrous invention the printing press and thus could actually print the money that it intends to spend. Now, mind you, this has to be done cautiously since hyperinflation can cause Joe to not sell sandwiches too (because he can't haul wheelbarrows full of cash to his suppliers fast enough to get the stuff to make sandwiches before it inflates to worthlessness), but hyperinflation is a worry only under certain circumstances that don't exist at present.
So the government *can* increase consumption without reducing consumption elsewhere, and thus *can* increase actual production of goods and services. Joe the Sandwich Shop Owner produced one more sandwich because the bridge builder who had been paid with freshly printed government stimulus money bought a sandwich there. That sandwich is increased production of goods and services that otherwise wouldn't exist. And if you say otherwise, Joe will just look at you like you're some crazy-ass lunatic and point you at the fresh green in his cash register and say "what, are you a fucking moron? You think that government dude gave me this money just 'cause he liked my fucking face? Get outta my shop, asshole!" Multiply by thousands of Joe the Sandwich Shop Owners, not to mention steel mill workers now working because of all the steel needed to build that bridge paid for by government money, and so on and so forth, and you have a significant difference. *IF* the government consumption is big enough to make a significant difference. If not... (shrug). You get today's economy, where increases in federal government consumption have been offset by a collapse of state and local spending as their tax revenues dive. Just another reason why WASF.
-- Badtux the Economics Penguin
