I lost my temper in a discussion of salaried and exempt employees over on Askville.

"I'm exempt (salaried) employee in CA, I'm suppose 2 work 8-6 w/1 hour lunch, which means 10hr day is that illegal?"

"Be glad you even have a job right now."

What I hate about that sort of statement is that it could be used to excuse any kind of abuse by an ( Read more... )

Someone asked an anti-Obama question about the government owning GM (which is SOCIALISM!!!). I didn't feel like getting into it, so I was brief:

Don't know. Don't care. If you're stupid enough to buy a GM car, you deserve whatever breakdowns you get.

She responded that I didn't seem to like GM, so I gave her a bit that I made up long ago:

In ( Read more... )

Seen standing on a street corner near Fenway Park today, handing out flyers: a well-groomed middle-aged man in a business suit. The flyers were for Citibank.

Weird!

I ended up writing a letter to Salon about the "Infinite Debt"/Dateline NBC takes on debt:
There's another article on the same topic which absolutely horrified me recently: "Infinite Debt" by Thomas Geoghegan in Harper's. It lays out in stark detail how the abolition of usury laws in the US (under the tender ministrations of credit-industry ( Read more... )

I just read an interesting article over on the New York Times about A.I.G. It explains what happened quite well...but I wanted to express it in slightly more graphic terms.

Propping Up a House of Cards

Let me see if I've got this right. In simple (and earthy) terms, A.I.G. used its golden reputation - its rating - to gild turds for other entities ( Read more... )

I love Jon Stewart.

Click to view

As you might remember, at the height of the recent gas price surge there was a strange event. All sorts of products started shrinking. Ice cream in particular went from 2 quarts (the standard half-gallon) to 1.5 quarts; a 25% reduction in product with no corresponding reduction in price ( Read more... )

A comment I made over on Askville in response to a post someone made about stopping the bailouts and letting the chips fall where they may.

I'm afraid that it's easy to talk of "chips" falling. That way, you don't have to think of them as people. Hard-working people, most of them, many with families...children. Children who, when the "chips" fall ( Read more... )

A couple of things I forgot to mention ( Read more... )

Looking at the wildly see-sawing graph on the New York Times website that represents the stock market this morning, I have to say that it reminds me of nothing so much as the EKG of someone having a heart attack.