Les Jones

No-tax Botox ends, Nancy Pelosi hardest hit

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Senate bill includes the Botox tax.

Pelosi appeared shocked by the news

Tags: X ends Y hardest hit

Camp Montvale to re-open in 2011

Thursday, September 24th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

The (Maryville-Alcoa, TN) Daily Times - Friends of Camp Montvale still working to reopen camp:

Continue reading the rest of this post right here ›››

New BigGovernment.com video at noon today

Monday, September 21st, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Teaser here.

Here’s the Daily Show’s coverage of the James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’ video sting on Acorn offices across the country.

UPDATE: EXPLOSIVE NEW AUDIO Reveals White House Using NEA to Push Partisan Agenda

Kanye West rudely interrupts Patrick Swazye’s death

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Why comparisons with WWII deficit levels are nonsense

Monday, August 31st, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

How Big is $9 Trillion? – Willful Omissions From Paul Krugman:

Continue reading the rest of this post right here ›››

Google Maps is now a real estate search engine

Monday, August 10th, 2009 | Economics, Misc, Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Just visit Google Maps and select “Real Estate” instead of “All Results.”

Tags: google

The disappearing mortgage burning party

Monday, August 10th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

NPR - Mortgage-Burning Parties Almost Extinct.

Watching “All in the Family” as a kid was my only exposure to the idea of a mortgage-burning property. My mom paid off her mortgage a long time before she retired, but didn’t burn the mortgage.

The larger point of the story is how few people actually pay off their mortgages these days. Refinancing and moving have kept many people hitting the reset button on their mortgages.

Obama keeps healthcare execs’ names secret

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

LA Times - White House declines to disclose visits by health industry executives:

Invoking an argument used by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Secret Service asking about visits from 18 executives representing health insurers, drug makers, doctors and other players in the debate. The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.

And yeah, I criticized Cheney for not revealing those energy execs, too. If you’ll recall Cheney eventually had to disclose the execs by court order.

Hat tip to Mark Peacock’s Facebook page.

Tags: obama

Cheap used cell phones in Knoxville?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 7 Comments |

My mother-in-law’s cell phone is kaput. They’re expensive new and I’d rather not sign a new contract to get the subsidized price.

I plan on prowling eBay, but I could swear there’s a place in Knoxville with cheap used cell phones. Anyone know it?

LATER: PDB came through with the solution: Craig’s List Knoxville, which has dozens of Verizon cell phones listed in the past few weeks. Better prices than eBay, too, with no shipping charges or waiting time. PDB for the win.

Douches and Doritos

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

I few years ago I mentioned something funny about buying condoms.

I got over buying condoms a long time ago. I will say that I prefer to buy them either by themselves or with a bunch of other stuff. Why? OK, true story. One time I went to Walgreen’s to buy condoms. That’s it. Nothing else. But while I was waiting in the checkout line I noticed they had blank videotapes on sale. Buying condoms and blank videotapes at the same time with nothing else - what does that look like?

Another time I stopped by Walgreen’s on the way home to buy the two things we were out of and couldn’t do without. I wonder what the cashier thought about a guy buying rubbers and cat food and nothing else.

I mention it because now there’s a Facebook app called Items, if bought together, Would Make The Cashier Wonder About You. You enter yours and your friends guess which of the five items you actually bought together.

SEC: Cali. IOUs should be treated as securities

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Sacramento Business Journal - SEC rules that IOUs should be treated as securities:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday issued its opinion that California’s IOUs should be treated as securities under federal securities law.

Under that opinion, holders of the notes, which carry a 3.75 percent interest rate, are protected by securities laws that prevent fraud. And it means that people who attempt to make a market in buying and selling the notes may have to be registered as “brokers, dealers or municipal securities dealers, or as alternative trading systems or national securities exchanges.”

The SEC did not make any determination on whether California has the authority to issue or repay the registered warrants.

Any lawyers in the hizzouse?

Previously - Cash4IOUs

Tags: california

IDNKT - swimming pools edition

Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

John Stephens in comments: “If the water table’s high enough, you can’t drain the pool or they float right up out of the ground. It’s a real problem in the swampier parts of Florida, and probably elsewhere.”

IDNKT - I Did Not Know That. And haven’t confirmed it, but it sounds reasonable in coastal Florida, where there’s nowhere for the water to go because the whole state is so close to sea level. Whenever I’m in beachy Florida I’m amazed at how surface streets are flooded 10 seconds after a storm begins.

Cash4IOUs

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

San Francisco Chronicle - Investors eye IOUs:

The California IOU has become the prey of so-called vulture investors who hope to profit by buying them on the cheap and redeeming them later. State IOUs, issued starting Thursday, are payable Oct. 2.The first batches of the State of California IOUs.

The idea is that “distressed asset investors” (their nicer name) will pay less than face value to mom-and-pop businesses that receive IOUs but need cash immediately to meet payroll or other expenses. Once the IOUs mature on Oct. 2, the investors will cash them in for their full value plus the 3.75 percent interest the state is offering.

As jwz would say, welcome to the grim meat hook future of bankrupt government.

Hitting the road for July 4th weekend

Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

We’re out of here for the long weekend. All the best to you and yours.

Top: 2006 roadtrip down highway 30. Bottom: From last year’s July 4th trip to Hendersonville, Saluda, and Flat Rock, NC. Both girls are wearing the same dress - that’s the advantage of having kids close together.

Does decriminalization make it easier for drug users to get treatment?

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 3 Comments |

This interview about drug decriminalization in Portugal reminded me of an issue where I’ve had a change of heart. Does drug legalization or decriminalization make it easier for drug users to get treatment? That’s something I used to believe. Now I’m not convinced. For those who haven’t read this before, my older sister was a drug addict for 15 years before the drugs did her in at age 43.

Over the years I had reason to tell many people in a position of authority that my sister used drugs. When my sister would wind up in the ER as she frequently did I made sure the staff knew she was taking drugs and would try to con them out of prescription drugs. No one ever said “Oh my gracious a drug user! We must alert the authorities!” Never happened. Hospitals see drug users all the time.

When I was trying to get the police to help find my sister when she was on a drug binge, getting their help in tracking down something of my mother’s she had pawned, or trying to get back a car she had loaned out in exchange for a crack rock I’d tell policemen she was a drug user. They never said “Drugs? Oh my God we’ve got to put out an APB to track down this terrible drug user!” It never happened. Police see drug users all the time.

Insofar as the authorities are concerned, the illegality of a drug is not an impediment to speaking to authorities about the issue, in my experience.

Rehab

As far as treatment, my sister got all she wanted and then some. When she was in high school my parents paid for an expensive treatment program out of their pocket. When she got divorced in her mid-twenties and moved back to our hometown she fell in with her old friends and started using again. A few years later she was in a bad way. When I confronted her about it she agreed to go to rehab and our mother paid for another expensive drug rehabilitation program out of her retirement funds. A year later she was using again.

Later on we persuaded my sister to enter state-run rehab programs three times. (There was no more money or will to pay for another round of expensive private treatment that hadn’t been effective.) The first time was after a united family intervention. The second was after a suicide attempt. When we cajoled her into a third stint in rehab she didn’t even try and left as soon as she could.

Rehab isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When I was much younger I though rehab was to drug addiction what antibiotics were to infection. You go to rehab and when you come out you’re cured. It isn’t that simple. No rehab program is anywhere close to 100% effective, and most addicts will relapse at some point.

Several doctors and social workers told me that the longer people stay on drugs and the more they go to rehab the less likely it is they’ll ever quit. Finally, you can’t admit people to a rehab program against their will unless they’re a danger to themselves or others. It’s voluntary.  If they don’t want to go, you can’t make them.

Still, some people do benefit from rehab. My sister was lucky to have a family that could - through my mother’s great sacrifice - afford private care, and was likewise lucky to have TennCare later on. Even though it didn’t work for her I certainly would never say it doesn’t work for anyone. If decriminalization caused government money to be diverted from law enforcement to treatment then it would in fact improve the current situation. However, there’s nothing stopping anyone with the resources to afford drug rehab to take advantage of it today. The phone book is already filled with treatment centers, and decriminalization can’t improve accessibility any further without funding.

Free 411 calls

Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

From Consumerist:

Free directory assistance is available from both Google and Microsoft (under the Bing brand):Free directory assistance is available from both Google and Microsoft (under the Bing brand):

1-800-GOOG-411
1-800-BING-411 (also 1-800-CALL-411)
1-800-FREE-411 (requires listening to a short ad)

Tags: frugality, This Here De-pression

Latest Comments sidebar is back

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I removed it as an attempt to cure CPU usage problems on the old server. That turned out not to be the problem, but I left it turned off. Now I’m on the new server and I’ve turned it back on. I love it, and I know some of you do, too. Here’s how I configured it to work the way it does.

Testing the Read More Right Here plug-in

Friday, June 5th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Testing

Continue reading the rest of this post right here ›››

P.J. O’Rourke wrote his second-best piece about cars

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

The End of the Affair.

The best piece he ever wrote about cars was How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.

Notes on the WordPress server move

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Things didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. Here are two problems I had - one my fault and the other WordPress’s fault.

When Iwas uploading images to the new server I could tell something was wrong. The file counts didn’t match. So I tried uploading the missing files over and over. No good.

I eventually realized I had reached the disk space quota on my hosting account. I had planned on hosting multiple sites on the account so I got what I thought was a beefy hosting plan with 700 MB disk space. On my old host I had upgraded accounts several times to get extra bandwidth, which happened to come with extra disk space, so I never noticed how big my images directory had gotten. I worked around the problem for now and I’m upgrading account plans this week.

The other problem was that I was depending on WordPress’s import/export feature for my posts and comments. It turns out that the 16MB export file only contained about half of the six years worth of posts. I had to start all over.

After reading the WordPress support docs (which are very good) I used phpMyAdmin to export the MySQL database. Then I reinstalled WordPress on the new host and used phpMyAdmin to import the database. WordPress asked permission to update the database (which was from a slightly older WordPress version). I let it. After that I was cooking with gas.

Moving the blog to a new server

Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I’m moving the blog from Westhost to HostingMatters. When the move and domain change is done everything will look the same as before and all of the old URLs will still work. The blog will still be here at this address. It’s just on the machine behind the blog that will be different.

This will be the last post on the old blog host. See you at the place soon.

Un-classiest pregnant mama pics

Friday, May 29th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Sure, Demi Moore appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair showing her pregnant belly. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but the results aren’t always going to be pretty. Demi Moore was Demi Moore and she had Annie Leibovitz taking the pictures.

Sebastian found a pregnant belly example that’s just a wee bit less tasteful. At least when Heather Armstrong did it, she was being ironic.

Fantasygoat was ahead of his time when he found this pic:

Look at the size of that paddlefish

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I first saw paddlefish at the Chattanooga Aquarium. They’re cool-looking fish with enormously long snouts. The ones I recall seeing in the aquarium were small - up the size of a smallish large-mouth bass.

I was amazed to see the monster paddlefish a guy caught at Melton Hill Lake in Oak Ridge last week. He estimates it weighed over 75 pounds. He took a picture and released it back into the water so it would live. The state record is 125 pounds.

Hat tip to Michael Silence.

Getting ready for a server move

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I mentioned a while back that my WordPress blog had a problem with excess CPU usage. I’ve never been able to get the CPU usage under control. I tried WP SuperCache. I tried disabling plug-ins. Nothing really worked.

I eventually downloaded WP-DBManager and used its repair and optimize functions. That made the biggest difference by far. I’ve gotten my CPU usage down from 20%+ to 3-5%, but it’s still not good enough. I suspect some database corruption.

All the same, I’m moving the site to HostingMatters along with some other domains and projects. If the site goes down this week, it’s because the old server went down before the new server came up. I’m trying to avoid that if at all possible, but it could happen.

Work in e-commerce or online content? Read Rex Hammock.

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Lately I’ve been praising Rex Hammock’s blog to people I meet in the online industry. I met him a few years ago at BlogNashville. Rex has roots in the print magazine world, but is a visionary for the new digital age. Here are some recent links from Rex.

Analyst: Kindle Will Generate $1.6 Billion InRevenue By 2012 - A publishing platform with a revenue model and backed by the infrastructure of the world’s most popular shopping cart and one-click checkout system. What’s not to love?

Look at This Article. It’s One of Our Most Popular - The perils of self-reinforcing “most popular” lists.

Welcome, Wired. We call this land “Internet” - Wired magazine, which documented the Internet explosion, had a hard time transitioning from print to the Internet. The real story is in the comments, where past and present Wired staffers sound off. I loved this souvenir of the painful transition from print to the Web at Playboy:

At Playboy.com, the people who made the major decisions about what would and wouldn’t happen on the site sometimes didn’t even have browsers on their computers and for a while the magazine wing charged the web wing anytime they printed the URL in the mag as if it was an advertising.