Les Jones

Those were the days

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I remember when Netflix was the Internet’s number 1 source of direct-to-your-door DVDs instead of the Internet’s number 1 source of popup ads.

Cost of bailout tops all other big government programs

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

To be fair, most of the bailout is in the form of loans and guarantees to back bad loans. Presumably some of them will be repaid, maybe even most, but it’s a huge commitment and a great risk. Worse, the bailout isn’t close to being over. Expect more companies to line up for Federal bailout money, followed by cities and even states.

Found here.

The coming commercial real estate crisis

Friday, November 28th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Report on Business - New U.S. mortgage crisis looms:

Even as the holiday shopping season begins in full swing, the same events poisoning the housing market are now at work on commercial properties, and the bad news is trickling in. Malls from Michigan to Georgia are entering foreclosure.

Hotels in Tucson, Ariz., and Hilton Head, S.C., also are about to default on their mortgages. That pace is expected to quicken. The number of late payments and defaults will double, if not triple, by the end of next year, according to analysts from Fitch Ratings Ltd., which evaluates companies’ credit.

“We’re probably in the first inning of the commercial mortgage problem,” said Scott Tross, a real estate lawyer with Herrick Feinstein in New Jersey. That’s bad news for more than just property owners. When businesses go dark, employees lose jobs. Towns lose tax revenue. School budgets and social services feel the pinch.

Mall development and management firm General Growth Properties has lost 95% of its stock price this year and was delisted from the S&P 500.

What I’m thankful for this year

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Natalie is growing fast as ever. She’s talking more and more and loves our cat Felix. She’s progressing quickly with her potty training. We’re sort of amazed she’s still in her crib. She could easily climb out of it if she wanted to, but she’s a very content kid. Very easy going.

Katie is growing into a little lady and is very polite. She likes taking care of people and nursing them. Katie has stopped wearing pullups at night and can get through the night without panties now, like a big girl. She’s smart, too. She’s barely four and is already reading.

Love you, girls.

Patterico looks at the Chuck Philips/Anthony Pellicano connection

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Patterico is reporting on former LA Times reporter Chuck Philips’ work covering the trial of disgraced PI to the stars Anthony Pellicano. Philips had used Pellicano as a source and later covered the trial, which some consider ethically questionable, but there’s more. In never before seen letters Patterico shows that Philips contacted potential witnesses before the trial and made statements to them that might constitute unwanted influence on their testimony.

Intuit releases world’s most boring chat software

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 2 Comments |

The new QuickBooks accounting software has a built-in chat feature. Sheesh.

Midway USA just shipped my Glock magazines

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Midway was backordered on Glock magazines last week, but they just sent an email saying the order had shipped. They’re showing as in stock now. Good prices, too.

Brownell’s has their AR-15 magazines

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Last night I ordered a half dozen Brownell’s 30 round AR-15 magazines. They were listed as backordered, but I received email tonight saying they had shipped.

Chris Byrne has a comparison of different AR-15 magazines, and he liked the Brownell’s, so that’s why I bought those.

Word of the Day: Misdemeanant

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

People who commit felonies are felons. People who commit misdemeanors are misdemeanants. Found here.

Previous WOTD - Cabotage

Light blogging is over

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 5 Comments |

I’ve been under the weather since late last week, but I’m back to my old self now.

It could be coincidence, but I started feeling bad a day or so after getting the flu shot. So did Melissa. I’ve never gotten a flu shot before. Is it normal to feel bad, or to be susceptible to a cold or somesuch after the shot?

Those wacky ballot initiatives

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Massachusetts voters passed a measure to decriminalize possession of less than one ounce of marijuana.

The ballot to name a San Francisco sewage treatment plant after George Bush failed 70-30.

Citizens of my hometown politely declined to pay a higher sales tax.

California had a whole slew of initiatives. The one that caught my eye is the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act. That’s the wildly optimistic bullet train I blogged about a few weeks ago. From the ballot description (emphasis mine):

• State costs of about $19.4 billion, assuming 30 years to pay off both principal ($9.95 billion) and interest ($9.5 billion) costs of the bonds. Payments of about $647 million per year.
• When constructed, additional unknown costs, probably in excess of $1 billion a year, to operate and maintain a high-speed train system. The costs would be at least partially, and potentially fully, offset by passenger fare revenues, depending on ridership.

And how likely is that last point to actually come true? Take it away, P.J.:

The Heritage Foundation says, “There isn’t a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides.” Heritage cites the Minneapolis “Hiawatha” light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.

Patterico’s showing the proposition winning 52% to 48% with 92% of precincts reporting. I’m amazed the California voters went for this boondoggle. California can’t balance its budget. People are fleeing the state to escape high taxes. The real estate market there is crashing worse than almost anywhere in the country. And now they’re committing to $1.5 billion per year for passenger rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Crazy.

A little X on Election Day

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

honest to goodness
the bars werent open this morning
they must have been voting for a new president of something
“do you have a quarter?” i said yes because i did
honest to goodness
the tears have been falling all over the countrys face
it was better before before they voted for whats his name
this is suppose to be the new world
flint ford auto
mobil alabama
windshield wiper
buffalo new york
gary indiana
don’t forget the motor city
baltimore and d.c.
now all we need is
don’t forget the motor city
this was suppose to be the new world
all we need is money
just give us what you can spare
twenty or thirty pounds of potatoes
or twenty or thirty beers
a turkey on thanksgiving
like alms for the poor
all we need are the necessities and more
it was better before they voted for what his name
this is suppose to be the new world
don’t forget the motor city
this was suppose to be the new world

X, The New World

Did Bill Ayers ghostwrite “Dreams From My Father”?

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

The first time I saw this I didn’t buy it, but the claim that Ayers ghostwrote much of Obama’s second book is starting to look credible. From Jack Cashill:

Yavelow contacted me and I sent him some relevant materials. When he ran the two books nominally by Barack Obama, the 1995 Dreams From My Father and the 2006 Audacity of Hope, through FictionFixer, he concluded, “They were written by different people.”

As Yavelow explains, authors don’t go from a 3.8 percent use of the passive voice in 1995 to an 8.3 percent use in 2006. For developing writers, the use of the passive almost always diminishes with experience. Yavelow cites a score of other characteristics that change too conspicuously from one Obama book to the next, among them the Flesch Reading Ease score, the use of gender words, sentence starters, adverbs, discouraged words, sensory triggers, and more. When, however, Yavelow compared Obama’s Dreams with Bill Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days, he found the similarity of the two books “striking.” He then quickly corrects himself: “’Striking’ is an understatement for the relationship FictionFixer uncovered between Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father.” For instance, Dreams averages 17.61 words and 26.48 syllables for non-dialogue sentences. Fugitive Days averages 17.62 words and 26.27 syllables. Another example is what Yavelow calls “attributions”—e.g., he “asked,” she “said,” they “wondered.” Some authors use as few as three. Many use fewer than twenty. Dreams, however, uses 36; Fugitive Days 34, and with only four exceptions—three of these used only once—the two books use the very same attributions. Yavelow compares the two books on any number of other characteristics and concludes, “There is a strong likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recorded or notes). Alternatively, another scenario could be possible: Ayers might have served as a ‘book doctor’.”

Systems engineer Ed Gold, with twenty years experience in pattern recognition and classifier design, ran tests of his own. His conclusion: “The statistical style analysis performed by our research team suggests that the writing style of Dreams From My Father is significantly more similar to the style observed in Fugitive Days than to the style found in other works by Barack Obama such as Audacity of Hope. “

Gold continues, “Even more interesting, when we extract those sections of Dreams From My Father that Dr. Cashill believes to be Ayers’ writing and treat this as a unique document, the style analysis software identifies a stronger correlation between this sample and Ayers’ Fugitive Days than we see between this same sample and the remainder of Dreams From My Father! Thus we have reason to believe that Dreams From My Father had at least two authors, and one author’s measured style features more closely match those of Ayers than they match those of the other author(s).”

Obama flip-flops on video

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Cola and nuclear power, Israel, campaign financing, gun control, meeting with our enemies, the surge, and more.

Thinking about switching from MovableType to WordPress?

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Quit thinking about it and just do it. There’s no comparison.

I used MT for about four years. I upgraded to the new version and (in the short time before it blew up) was completely underwhelmed with four years worth of changes. They hadn’t even updated the default template choices in four years. Meanwhile, plug-ins and templates were hard to come by because everyone had switched to WordPress.

WordPress has better comments, endless plug-ins and templates, easier template editing, and you don’t have to rebuild to see your changes. And it’s free, to boot. There’s no contest.

Claim: Obama campaign poll manipulation, false flag operations

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 11 Comments |

This is an anonymous claim and therefore unverifiable, but it’s interesting. If true it explains an awful lot of odd things in this election. It’s supposedly written by a former Hillary campaign worker who went to work for Obama’s campaign and became disillusioned with him. From Anonymous_14’s Diary at RedState:

A spirited campaign has been made to infiltrate many pro-Hillary sites and discredit them. A more disorganized, but genuine effort has also been made to sow doubts among the unapologetically right wing sites such as redstate.com. Don’t you guys get it? This has been the Obama campaign’s sole strategy from the very beginning! The only way he wins is over a dispirited, disorganized, and demobilized opposition. This is how it has been for all of his campaigns. What surprises me is that everyone has fallen for it. You may point to the polls as proof of the inevitability of all of this. If so, you have fallen for the oldest trick in the book. How did we skew these polls, you might ask? It all starts with the media “buzz” which has been generated over the campaign. Many stories are generated on the powerful Obama ground game, and how many new voters were registered. None of this happens by coincidence. It is all part of the poll-skewing process. This makes pollsters change their mixes to reflect these new voters and tilt the mix more towards Democratic voters. What is not mentioned or reported on is not the “under-reported cell phone users or young voters” we hear so much about. What is underreported is you.

The false flag operation sounds believable. There’s no shortage of Obama supporters on conservative Web sites making less-than-credible claims that they’re died-in-the-wool Republicans who have seen the light of Obama. They’re called Mobies after techno musician Moby advocated for exactly this sort of thing in 2004.

Instapundit keeps saying that the polls in this election have been very volatile. Manipulation would be one reason for that.

What truly bothers this campaign is the fact that some pollsters get up to an 80% “refuse to respond” result. You can’t possibly include these into the polls.

Jerry Pournelle made the point that McCain supporters are much less interested in talking to pollstersabout their choice, as opposed to those innocents who are eager to announce their participation in the New Pepsi Generation Obama Nu Wave of Hope and Changamication.

Biden, by the way, has been a disaster inside the campaign. Everyone cringes whenever he gives an interview, and he creates so many headaches as the campaign has to stay on their toes in order to disseminate information and spin whatever it was he was trying to say.

I believe it.

Obama promises he would bankrupt any new coal plants

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Instapundit has a roundup. That sort of thing won’t play well in coal-producing battleground states like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

LATER: It’s even worse than just wanting to bankrupt new coal operations. From the same interview with the San Fran Chronicle, via Ace:

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

Mary Steyn weighs in.

I’m Twittering. I’m a Twitter-er.

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I have a Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lesjonescom. It’s basically my RSS feed run through Twitterfeed, which SayUncle turned me on to.

So long Yahoo Finance, hello Google Finance

Friday, October 31st, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

After using Yahoo Finance for ages I’ve switched to Google Finance.

Here’s why. Compare Microsoft’s quote page at Yahoo and Google. Google puts more information on one page so you spend less time hunting. I’ve also noticed they update P/E and EPS data sooner after the company reports.

Where Google Finance really wins is their charting tool.

• The chart defaults to linear charts rather than logarithmic, which are easier to understand.

• You can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to expand and shrink the time range shown on the chart.
• The chart shows both splits and dividends.
• News items on the right are mapped onto the chart so you see what events might have triggered price changes.
• You automatically see a list of related companies in that sector.

• Google’s charts aren’t broken like Yahoo’s. On Yahoo’s long-term charts the most recent prices on the far right are wrong.

Typical for Google, the Finance center is in beta but is already better than many of its competitors.

Obama’s Internet fund-raising shenanigans

Friday, October 31st, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Patterico - The Obama Campaign’s Fundraising Operations Are Akin To Illegal Money Laundering:

Late yesterday Beldar posted over at HughHewitt.com the stunning revelation taken from this Washington Post article yesterday that of the $150 million raised by the Obama campaign in September, $100 million came by way of the Internet. The only mechanism for donating money via the Internet to the Obama campaign is to use a credit card.

One subject of conversation over the past several days has been the fact that the Obama campaign chose to disconnect all available anti-fraud mechanisms commonly used by merchants receiving credit card payments over the Internet — things like requiring the name and address of the person using the credit card to match the data base information for that credit card as verified through the company that issued the card. Hence Obama’s campaign has been able to receive donations for such persons as “Fake Voter” and “Saddam Hussein.”

In addition there is no mechanism — besides after-the-fact analysis by the campaign staff — to determine whether a contributor has given previously and whether the current contribution is in excess of campaign contribution limits. The Obama campaign claims it is refunding the improper funds as it determines them to have been made, but only after the money has landed in the campaign’s coffers and been available for use.

The one new revelation in yesterday’s Washington Post article is that the Obama campaign also accepts contributions from “pre-paid” credit/cash cards such as those that you can buy in grocery stores. These cards are not registered to any particular person and payments made with them are impossible to trace.

I think this is the tip of the iceberg. Win or lose, we’re going to find out a lot more about Obama’s dirty tricks in the next couple of years. Here’s that Washington Post article: Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations.

Patterico now at Patterico.net

Monday, October 27th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Patterico’s domain got swiped, so he’s now at Patterico.net.

UPDATE: He got his domain back, though it may take a day or so for the DNS changes to propagate.

McCain pulls even with Obama

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

That according to the polling organization with the most accurate polls in 2004. From Investor’s Business Daily:

McCain has cut into Obama’s lead for a second day and is now just 1.1 points behind. The spread was 3.7 Wednesday and 6.0 Tuesday. The Republican is making headway with middle- and working- class voters, and has surged 10 points in two days among those earning between $30,000 and $75,000. He has also gone from an 11-point deficit to a 9-point lead among Catholics.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

“Stock market’s down? I’d better sell! I’ll buy again when it’s back up”

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

With the markets down lots of people are getting out of the stock market. When it goes back up they’ll be happy to buy their positions back at a higher price. Everyone knows the rule is “buy low, sell high.” It’s the easiest advice to give and the hardest advice to live. What many people do is to buy buy high out of greed and sell low out of fear. As Hawkeye Pierce said, “the basic human emotions are greed, fear, and greed,” so there are lots of opportunities to get it wrong.

One of the better things I’ve read about money is Bruce Tognazini’s How I made a small fortune at Apple Computer (out of a much, much larger one):

Principle 8: Buy low, sell high

Buying low and selling high is good. Unfortunately, when I went back and looked at the trades that had actually taken place, that wasn’t what had happened at all. I had more often bought high and sold low.

With the broker’s help, I was doing the most natural thing possible: I was buying on exhilaration and selling on despair. When the stock was going up, I desperately wanted to ride that train. When the stock plummeted, I wanted nothing more than to get off. Unfortunately, by the time you realize a stock is going up, it’s up. And by the time you panic, the real drop has already taken place.

And Principle #5 involves a Delorean, which ought to be the official car of LesJones.com. I am also in complete agreement with Principle #6.

For Steve K.

Monday, October 20th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

who’s always looking for something good on YouTube. Not one, but two sword safety videos featuring swearin’ safety spokesmodel Trip Fisk.

Bonus! Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Trip and the gang get more ambitious with each video. In part 3 he takes on the corrupt mayor who’s in cahoots with the sword manufacturers and becomes a superhero. In part 4 we learn about Trip’s dark past, and how he lost his eye. (If you don’t get the reference, watch this.) In part 5 he meets Batman.

PPS Did I mention these aren’t safe for work unless you own a pair of headphones?

Obama and Ayers group shared same floor of office building for three years

Sunday, October 19th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

That’s what Verum Serum found. Barack Obama and Bill Ayers’s Small Schools Workshop were in the same building for three years. Same address. Same floor.

And it apparently was not a big building. If Ace is correct the building was roughly 50 feet by 50 feet, about the size of a five bedroom ranch house. What are the odds you could live in the same five bedroom ranch house for three years and not know one of your housemates?

Hat tip to Treacher’s history of Obama’s Ayers denials. The best link is to Obama’s Chicago Tribune review of an Ayer’s book, a book which mentions Obama by name.