The Presidential Hamburger and the Idiocy of American Conservatives · 56 days ago
So, the president walks into a burger joint and orders a burger. He wants a mustard that tastes more than just “yellow” so he orders “a spicy mustard, maybe a Dijon mustard or something like that…” according to Epi-log
Next thing you know, conservative buzzards are all over him. About the mustard. Yes, some of these jackasses want to make sugared tomatoes (ketchup to you) obligatory for all Americans ordering hamburgers in restaurants.
So much for smaller government.
Why is everything that tastes good (or has any taste at all) “elitist” to these morons?
— Guido Veloce
Ryanair: Driving Down The Cost of Air Travel One Turd at a Time · 120 days ago
Evidently, Ryanair is so intent on charging to tinkle they’ve started negotiations with Boeing to make a door that operates only when a credit card is slid through a slot.
So, how do you think this is going to look on your credit card? Are they going to have a keypad below the slot and ask you which you’re planning to do in there, 1 or 2? Perhaps 3. You have to make allowances for the mile high club. Are there different charges for each?
I trust Boeing engineers to make a toilet door impervious to the desires of card-free peers. Maybe Ryanair will have a guy going through steerage with a plastic cup for the poor. No doubt they’d sell the resulting liquid to athletes looking for a little dilution solution to their steroid-tinkle.
Now that would drive down the cost of flying—and help athletes do what we expect of them, namely the humanly improbable.
Ryanair chief says he’s serious about pay toilets
— Guido Veloce
Upper-Income Taxpayers Are Idiots · 123 days ago
President Barack Obama’s tax proposal – which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more — has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay, even if it’s just by a dollar. ~ Upper-Income Taxpayers Look for Ways to Sidestep Obama Tax-Hike Plan
Well, good, that ought to make them more “productive.”
The mantra is repeated word for word by each and every one of these overcompensated assholes who need bail outs and government hand outs. “Why kill yourself working if you’re going to give it all away to people who aren’t working as hard?”
Um, well, I’ll take a crack at it. Does a corporate executive making 10 million bucks really work 600 times harder at running his company into bankruptcy than a guy flipping burgers for a living at minimum wage?
When you rich jerks can answer that one honestly, then you’re on the way to curing your mental illness.
— Guido Veloce
Conservatives Sure Love Their Smut · 126 days ago
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.” ~ Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
Whatever data you use, you’ll find that folks who hate the idea of other people makin’ love, love seein’ other folks humping away on stained couches for money.
Of course, porn is part of “old-fashioned values”. When the Romans found a way to mass produce oil lamps, they turned out a whole lot of pornographic ones, with the humpers and humpees raised up in hard clay for that tactile titillation.
Scary what modern folks these days can do with a whole buncha credit card data from heaven knows where though.
— Guido Veloce
Lowering Standard of Living by Design · 187 days ago
Distortions in the way inflation is calculated contributed to today’s financial mess and the 2000-02 tech crash. Unless the problem is fixed, you can count on another crisis ahead.
So says Jim Jubak. It’s all about the CPI, or Consumer Price Index and some “statistical flimflam” used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to make inflation smaller than it really is by using “Hedonic quality adjustments” to measure changes in the value of the product over time. So, a car today might cost three times what a typical car cost in the ’60s, but it’s safer, more fuel efficient, and it generally goes where you steer it—so it has more value than a ’60s car. In the end, the government argues, a car today doesn’t really cost three times as much because its value is more. So there’s little inflation and they don’t need to raise interest rates or make bigger Social Security payments.
Of course, how much value is it to people to have a safe car if they don’t crash it? How much does extra engine efficiency add to value? Yes, people buy those idiotic SUVs because some moron is shown tearing up a desert going 130 miles per hour over the rocky and dusty roads, yet when these consumers cross that little dip in the road in front of their driveways they always slow down to less then a half mile per goddam hour because they are quaking in their boots worrying that their poorly made “car” will fall to bits if they go any faster over that quarter inch dip. So where’s all that extra “value” that they show in the tee vee? Value is subjective, you see.
The problem doesn’t end there, of course.
In the 1990s, the government also started to include substitution pricing in its inflation measure. In this adjustment, government statisticians assumed that if the price of something went up, people would use less and would substitute a less costly product or service. So when steak went up in price, consumers might buy more pork or chicken.
Yippee! There’s no inflation because we’re all eating a monomolecular coating of peanut butter on Wonder Bread instead of real food! Gosh, isn’t that sweet!
So where do we go from here?
Anyway, read the article. It’ll make you spit up a gizzard, or whatever steak substitute you’ve been gnawing on.
Fake inflation numbers masked crisis
— Guido Veloce
