when the status quo frustrates.

Look at the bright side: nobody will even care about a depression when global warming’s kicking our asses

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

I guess when a country ponders approving a 3 trillion dollar budget when it’s already 9 trillion in the red, the idea of anyone ever actually paying off their bills must seem like a sucker bet. At least, that’s what certain “optimists” are *hoping* is the case when our little tax rebates start showing up in the mail:

The tax relief is intended to jump-start the economy. Politicians, worried about a recession in an election year, put aside their normal bickering to speed the proposal through Congress.

Nonetheless, there is debate over how effective it will be. Critics say debt-burdened consumers will use the money to pay bills rather than spending the checks and spurring growth.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that only 19 percent of those surveyed said they planned to spend their rebate checks. Forty-five percent said they would pay off bills, while 32 percent said they planned to invest the money.

Supporters of the proposal said they have faith that people will spend the money when they get it.

“When you ask people what they will do with the money, they often say they will pay off their credit card bills,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York. “People may mean it when they say it, but when you look at what they actually do, most of the money gets spent.”

Emphasis mine. Poor word choice is the AP’s.

The logic goes like this: people get their tax rebates, and instead of paying off new bills, they simply acquire more stuff. That infusion of cash into the economy supposedly turns our recession into more of a mild downturn. Disaster averted… today. But personal American debt is as out of control as the government’s and the legislators and economists supporting the rebate are literally banking on it staying that way. These bills will come due someday, though, just like they did in the subprime mortgage fiasco.

Economists and legislators pray that Americans continue to mismanage their long-term financial health so that we might nibble upon the tiniest morsel of temporary economic relief. And this is the norm. American economic policy of the last 30+ years has been designed to continually keep us afloat for the present moment, but by pushing back so many of the normal valleys that are supposed to accompany our peaks, we’ve simply collected all of them into a giant clump of gunk under the bed. One of these days, that clump’s going to become sentient, open its eyes, and in its repressed rage lay waste to everything around it.

But hey, hopefully that won’t happen in an election year, right?

09.02.2008 Governmental Failures, Moola, Sprawl will kill us all, Ze Goggles! Zey Do Nothing! 6 Comments

Next, economists create a new kind of recession that doesn’t cramp the wealthy’s style.

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Great news for homeowners! While the current housing market is not so hot, if you’re lucky enough to own a house whose value falls in a narrow range of the “that’s fucking expensive” spectrum, then sell, sell! SELL!

“The homes that are having a hard time selling are the average-priced homes,” said Vanessa Justice, a real estate agent with Pacific Union GMAC in the Bay Area, where the median house price is about $750,000. For upper-end homes, she said, “it’s actually pretty crazy right now.”

Before we start getting all snarky about how the wealthiest of the wealthy are getting wealthier while the rest of us are getting shafted, let’s be clear that people aren’t going crazy with greed, here. Mansions and sprawling vacation home sales are still sluggish. Sales are especially brisk only in the area of absurdly luxurious homes that the owners plan to spend most of their time living in. True, times are hard for all of us.

Even as foreclosures keep rising and overall sales continue to plummet, more expensive homes have staged a bit of a comeback in recent months. They’re spending less time languishing on the market than others, and their prices appear to be holding up better…In fact, the very top of the housing market — the sprawling vacation homes and 10,000-square-foot mansions — seems to be doing considerably worse than merely expensive homes. Ines Hegedus-Garcia, an agent in Miami, recently looked at sales volumes there and found the market for homes that cost $1.2 million to $2.5 million to be holding up decently. The situation was much worse for those priced above $2.5 million.

It seems like this is a perfect example of the Littlest President’s not-so-secret economic policy of enriching the rich while screwing the rest of us:

As Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, summed up the market: “The low end is getting creamed. The middle is struggling. The high end is running on its own dynamic.”

…but like all seemingly perfect plans, there was an Achilles heel. The law of unintended consequences makes its mandatory appearance: the rich here are getting richer, but their dollars are worth less and foreign rich people are taking their condos.

The upper end of the market has also been helped by an influx of well-off foreign investors whose buying power has grown with the recent decline of the dollar. Hard as this may be for an American to imagine, New York, San Francisco or Miami can now seem like a bargain, compared with London, Moscow or Sydney. Jason Haber, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan, said he had recently taught himself how to convert square feet into square meters — you divide by 10.8 — because of all of the international buyers traipsing through New York apartments.

11.07.2007 Moola, Shame on you for not being rich white and privileged No Comments

Sprint sez providing proper service cuts into the profit margin, so if you’re going to bitch about our every little mistake then you’ll have to leave.

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

If AT&T starts doing this, I promise to start calling them twice a day every day.

If you persistently insist the Sprint fix their numerous errors you will be dropped as a customer, according to reader Michael. He’s been having trouble with Sprint but instead of resolving his problem, they’ve decided to drop him as a customer according to a letter he received yesterday.

Michael claims that he had to call Sprint customer service all the time because they kept making the same errors in his bill over and over again, plus he was unable to get a satisfactory resolution to an expensive phone repair. I think that sounds plausible. Sprint prefers to emphasize the fact that guys like Mike, with their neurotic obsession with not overpaying each and every month, are sucking up valuable and expensive customer service resources. They’ve graciously given him 30 whole days notice and aren’t even charging him the early termination fee, so what else could the man possibly want?

There seem to be two main schools of thought on the situation: the first says that Mike was treated unfairly and should continue to bitch all the way to court. The second says Mike is better off without those douchebags. A third, minor contingent defends Sprint’s right as a profit-making company to eject particularly unprofitable customers; I’d have more sympathy with this viewpoint if the high volume of calls that these customers are making didn’t mostly stem from Sprint’s employees own repeated errors.

The big problem that I see here is that Mike wasn’t able to cancel the contract without heavy fees back when he first realized that Sprint’s service was not satisfactory. Yet somehow, Sprint can drop his ass with a letter that manages to imply that they’re doing him a favor simply by not charging the early termination fee that would apply if he had tried to drop them. I don’t think that Sprint should be forbidden from dropping needlessly expensive customers, but it is not right that the customers can’t drop Sprint if halfway through their contract they find that they are not getting the service that they pay for. Which, you know, *cough* *hint* would be a nice piece of legislation for a certain Congress to pass if they want to show they’ve got the balls to stand up against big business interests, hint, hint. It would make a lot of citizens very happy and probably not cost the poor phone service providers as much as they’d want you to think.

07.07.2007 HUH!?, Moola, Technology 2 Comments

And U.S. assholery should end when Bush is deposed, but that doesn’t mean it will

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

With his approval ratings dropping to fascist levels of sub-30% in the US of A, George Bush has apparently decided to move on and tackle the problems of a smaller nation:

Communist rule of Cuba should end when ailing leader Fidel Castro dies, U.S. President George W. Bush said as he prepared for a Latin American tour this week.

Kudos to him for biting off a smaller piece of the world’s pie, but I’m afraid Bush may still be in over his head. When asked at the same press conference about Hugo Chavez’s plans in Venezuela, Bush put a pot on his head and called the kettle a poverty-maker:

“I strongly believe that government-run industry is inefficient and will lead to more poverty,” Bush said when asked about Chavez’s nationalizations.

“If the state tries to run the economy, it will enhance poverty and reduce opportunity.”

How cute. Bush is suddenly and deeply concerned about poverty and its causes. I wonder if he realizes the percentage of Americans living in poverty recently reached a 32-year high, with at least 16 million living in “deep or severe poverty” on his own soil. And the growth of that number under his watch? 26 percent. Those numbers mean he’s either wildly ignorant about ways people become poor, or — *gasp* — he’s a massive freaking hypocrite.

Given that rock and hard place, maybe Bush isn’t equipped to tell any country, no matter how small, how to care for its people. I doubt Cuba will take him off our hands, though. The poor bastard couldn’t even straighten out a baseball team, and if that’d make anyone suspicious of his economic leadership abilities, it’d be the Cubans.

07.03.2007 Bush is a cock, Moola 3 Comments

The Hate Boat

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

As you might’ve heard, today is the two year anniversary of Jonah Goldberg offering a wager to Juan Cole that, within two years, Iraq:

won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it.

Staring down the barrel of his own foolishness, you’d think Jonah would be humble, or apologetic, or at least more realistic about the quagmire his idols created. Instead, he’s decided to gloat over Juan Cole’s refusal to take him up on the wager! Never mind that Juan didn’t think it was cool to wager money on the odds of human misery — Jonah dodged having to pay out, and that means it’s time to PARRRRR-TAY!

And how do wingnuts properly celebrate further abdication of responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents? Why, by taking an official National Review Cruise to Alaska, of course!

(more…)

08.02.2007 Moola, Wingnuts 4 Comments

We were going to conquer space, until NASA told us how much it would cost to get a flag on mars.

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Space, the final frontier. These will be the voyages of some other country’s ship, possibly that of a country that didn’t blow its wad on a trillion dollar war back when dollars were actually worth something.

NASA may not be able to launch the space shuttle’s replacement by 2014 as promised, according to the agency’s 2008 budget request to Congress.

The president that promised us a man on Mars in our lifetimes is hoping that maybe he’ll get a ride from Virgin Galactic.

This could increase the gap between the retirement of the space shuttles in 2010 and the launch of their successors, the Orion spacecraft and Ares I rocket, forcing NASA to rely on Russian Soyuz and future commercial spacecraft to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

A NASA budget cut wouldn’t normally bother me too much – any program like that would always love more money and is used to making tough choices when it doesn’t come through. It wouldn’t even be hypocrisy if Bush hadn’t been dangling space stations, moon landings, and Mars missions in our faces since at least 2004.

Today I announce a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system. We will begin the effort quickly, using existing programs and personnel. We’ll make steady progress — one mission, one voyage, one landing at a time.

Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started, we will meet our obligations to our 15 international partners on this project.

Not to mention their “Wild wild West” national space policy:
(more…)

06.02.2007 A million ways to mortgage the future, Governmental Failures, Imperialism for Dummies, Moola, Politics 5 Comments

Men’s Health wants to see you poor and alone

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

Have you been reading Men’s Health online content for weeks, if not months, treating their words though they were the bible and scrupulously following every inane lifestyle suggestion? I know. Me too. Yet, I still find myself occassionally not sitting alone and in the dark, abandoned by all who loathe my vapid mind and compulsive need to quote movies.

Perhaps a zany money-making scheme is an order. And if the schemes are listed in the form of a list, of course MSN will snap that sucker right up.

The Instant Entrepreneur
We’ve whipped up six businesses you can start with as little as $100 in seed money. Next stop: the Ferrari dealership.

I have a hundred dollars, and could totally use a Ferrari. Show me how to live the American Dream.

Internet T-Shirt Store
You’ll use zeitgeist-surfing slogans to sell shirts online.

Startup costs: About $300. Let turnkey companies like cafepress.com handle ordering and printing, says Rodney Blackwell, who runs t-shirtcountdown.com.

I like this one, because all of my fellow graduate students know that they have a spot in my soon-to-be-lucrative garage t-shirt making business after we all fail exams in August. Of course, in my fantasy, at least I have a couple of silk-screen printing stations in my garage after the whole lame-ass idea goes bust. Rodney would deny me even that. And a quick glance at t-shirtcountdown suggests that the world has little need for more offensive t-shirt makers. How many “I’m the 14 year old girl you cyber with” t-shirts does one society need?

Alas, we already have a threadless, and if I can’t be that awesome I don’t want to do it at all. Next!

Digital Photo Scanning
You’ll rescue dusty-but-priceless photos from shoebox purgatory.

Odds of making money: Very good. You’ll break even if you scan 800 photos at 25 cents each. “It’s a no-brainer,” says Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a successful entrepreneur. “Your friends and family are built-in customers.”

800 photos at a quarter a piece times 30 seconds to scan plus 1 to five minutes to touch up the photos using my stolen copy of photoshop that is nowhere on your start-up cost list and I’m still bored out of my mind with this crappy, low-return nickel and dime job. At that price, it would take over half a million pictures to get that Ferrari you’re dangling in front of my face, assuming that someone else is paying for my food, shelter, taxes and electricity. Ok, fuck that one as well.

Garage-Sale Surfing
You’ll convert hidden gems into cold, hard eBay cash.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding. Next!

Blog Or Online Forum
You’ll channel a passion — tennis, Star Wars — and build traffic until ads roll in.

Startup costs: $160 for forum software like Bulletin; $60 a month for service.

Odds of making money: Excellent. You’ll know quickly if you’re not attracting eyeballs, so you can ditch fees before they add up. The key: Choose a fresh topic, says Chris Leckness, who runs seven sites. Then self-promote with e-mail blasts to other bloggers or postings in related forums.

Ok, this one is for real. However, I have only enough energy to help generate content for one site, and while it is a lucrative one punkassblog doesn’t provide enough money for me to both fill my Olympic-sized money pool AND buy a sports car. Since I refuse to cut into my swimming time and I don’t have enough time to blog for two sites, this is also out.

Although we haven’t been doing too much spamming. Perhaps if I dedicate more time to blogwhoring, I can get that Ferrari yet. Everyone pays attention to a blogwhore.

Board-Game Creation
You’ll make your own fun.

We are now at the point of the list where the return-on-investment becomes less certain than that of blogging. Only one money-making scheme could be more ridiculous:

Documentary Making
You’ll score funding support from art-friendly investors.

Startup costs: Nothing, if you create a legal company and issue shares, advises Amy Sewell, writer/producer of Mad Hot Ballroom, which scored a $3 million advance from Paramount Classics. If it bombs, investors can write off the loss.

Be sure to helpfully point out that “writing off the loss” thing to potential investors, especially if the investors are your family who are wondering if they’re ever going to get their fucking photos back anytime this century. It shows planning and confidence. Also, be sure to seperate your friends and family into two groups: those you will ask for money and those whom you will ask for volunteer crew work. Trust me on that one.

04.02.2007 Punkass!, Advice, Brilliant Ideas, Moola 11 Comments

But, wait! There’s more! Stop the war now and we’ll include a lovely set of Ginsu knives for every household in America!

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

In war, like in home redecorating or computer upgrading, your initial guess about how much money and time you’ll be spending is always a bit low. Part of the reason it’s important to set a strict budget for yourself is so that you have a baseline against which to judge how insane you are going when you, inevitably, run over.

With that in mind, could you imagine how fucked we’d be if Bush & Co. hadn’t planned for a modest $50 billion war? Because we’re now up to $700 billion in what the Times calls “direct spending,” and it estimates a total eventual expenditure of 1.2 trillion dollars.

And that’s the conservative estimate.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so…

…over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

Let’s pause and reflect on the term trillion. A trillion is a 1 with 12 zeros at the end of it:

1, 000, 000, 000, 000. I can’t even deal with that many zeros. I think of it as 10^12.

It’s a million (1,000,000) piles of a million.

If the objects in your pile are dollar bills, great! We’ll need between one and two of these sets of piles to:

-pay for the direct costs of the war
-take care of the vetrans
-replenish our military hardware and readiness (I guess we’re seeing some savings here by not giving the soldiers the proper gear in the first place)
-and other sundry expenses

If that doesn’t piss you off enough, the business section of the New York Times engaged in a little thought experiment: what else could we have done with that kind of cash?

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

But we’re not done yet! Why, we could even buy security, real security, the kind that doesn’t eat our children’s economic futures while growing newer and angrier terrorists!

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

So for the cost of the Iraq war, we could immunize the world’s children, educate our own, fix New Orleans, make ourselves safer, actually help out Darfur and complete the job that we initially set out to do three years ago in Afghanistan! Remember Afghanistan? That tiny detail? The slightly more justified part of our use of military force in the Middle East? The part of the war people actually signed up to fight? Because that’s where the terrorists were? Back before we made sure they were everywhere?

If that bit doesn’t make your head explode, nothing ever will.

If you’re not depressed enough, then take a break from these cold, hard numbers and look for a more human facet of the story:

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Dammit, Appletree, I was having an OK day until I found that link on your blog.

18.01.2007 Bush is a cock, Governmental Failures, Moola, War, War HUH! What is it good for? 6 Comments

Question 133: if your customer has a notable rack, when is the proper time to make a joke about “headlights”?

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

a) while she is examining the headlights of the vehicle
b) after she has agreed to buy the car
c) after she has left the showroom floor
d) all of the above

Via Twisty, someone, somewhere has finally clued into the fact that women also drive and purchase cars, and would prefer not to be treated like children while doing so. Twisty gets to the heart of the matter:

AskPatty.com isn’t just a handy website of “automotive advice for women.” Here men , too, may take advantage of the perpetually shocking information that women actually buy cars by learning from an actual fake woman (’Patty’ appears not to exist, at least in human form) how to communicate with the alien sub-species. AskPatty.com sells car dealers a book called How to Get Rich Selling Cars and Trucks to Women, a training course, and an exam. Dealers who pass the exam get ‘certified’ as ‘female-friendly’.

…A search produced the disheartening result that there are no certified female-friendly auto dealers — not even, alas, Aston Martin, Lotus, or Porsche — within 100 miles of the Twisty Bungalow, or I would certainly have gone out and bought a car just so I could report back on the experience.

…God forbid the readers of the Clarion-Ledger should think DeVere is one of the Humorless Hairyleg Army. Comfortingly, AskPatty.com was founded by and is currently CEOed by a dude.

And is immediately spammed by askpatty.com, where their eMarketing Manager takes a break from effective marketing to reinforce every stereotype about Marketing that has ever been featured in a Dilbert cartoon:

Thank you for posting about Ask Patty! I want to let you and your readers know that although Patty is a figurehead, we do have 24 automotive expert women who are real and will answer any automotive-related question you might have.
On our panel there are women who work in all aspects of the industry, including dealerships, sales, financing, auto care and maintenance, as well as certified technicians. So send in your questions and we would be glad to help!
Also, if you don’t find a dealer near you that is Female Friendly certified, let your local dealership know about us. We are certifying dealers continuously and would be more than happy to pass along information to newly inquiring dealers.

Thanks again!
Breanne Boyle
eMarketing Manager
AskPatty.com, Inc.

Now, let’s ignore for a second that painting something unisex, like car advice, with pink and purple and girling it up is not going to help evaporate the sexism that runs around the automotive industry. In fact, it may just make it worse. My dad, a former mechanic who knows that ignorance of cars is rampant in both genders, absolutely hates my sister’s turquoise tool set (“Barbies first tool kit,” he calls it) and was very pleased when someone gifted her with a superior, grey toolset that was a smidge less flamboyant. There’s a reason tools are metal-colored, you know: it’s because if you’re using them at all properly they’re going to be filithy and scratched in a manner that makes a shiny pink frufru coating kind of silly. Having a set or girlie tools advertises to all know know what they’re doing with a tool that you have no freaking idea what is going on. Get a used set of tools if you want to impress people. If you need to, lay them next to your pink set and stare at them until you are satisfied that they are the exact same thing.

And I don’t think I’m the only vagina-American out there who would scoff at a certified “female-friendly” auto dealership or repair place. My local Monro Muffler and Brake features a “Ladies Day” every week (I think it’s Wednesday) – they even have a banner! And that’s fucking hilarious because when I was 17, I went to a different Monro for an exhaust system problem and their mechanics pointed and laughed at me through a window while I was staring at them then called me back to look at the car. The bigger of the two Monro Muffler and Brake employees began whap on a pipe with a wrench, causing a gasket of some sort that was clearly missing a fastener to spin around the pipe, making a shrrring! shrring! sound. Without even trying to maintain a straight face, the guy told me that that sound was my catalytic converter which would need to be replaced right away or else it would explode! I insisted on taking the car back and, the ignorant 17 year old that I was, had to resort to a higher male authority (“I wanna talk to my dad first”) before I could wrest the car from their evil clutches. Considering the area that we lived in, the mechanic (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) probably thought that my dad was a lawyer or businessman or something, and instructed me to tell him exactly what I told you probably in the hopes that I would return a few hours later with my frightened father’s credit card. So I did, and dad said exactly what I thought he would (“Bullshit.”) and I decided that I would have to abandon my dream of getting my tiny little problem fixed quickly. I turned the car over to the septuagenarians who ran an autoshop near the Monro Muffler and Brake, and when they were damn well good and ready they replaced the pipe and the gasket that were giving me problems.

The point of this still-hilarious story is that my experience was so bad, and reflected not only deeply ingrained sexism but also deeply ingrained (and probably even unofficially encouraged by corporate) dishonesty, that nearly a decade later I can only interperet “Ladies Day” as a cynical attempt to get women to feel a bit more comfortable with how badly they’re about to be reamed by the assholes in the store. I don’t, for a second, think that the smug, condensending sexism that I experience at (mostly franchise) auto repair shops reflects how they treat women, exclusively. It’s just a little extra icing on the cupcake they serve anyone, male or female, they think is an easy mark. Of course, the sexism declares all women easy marks where men may get a cursory once-over before the reaming, but still.

So when I read this:

To be certified, members of a dealership’s sales team must read a book on how to communicate with women, titled How to Get Rich Selling Cars and Trucks to Women, and take a training course. Then they must pass a 134-question test, which takes about an hour to complete.

my first reponse isn’t “Well, thank god things are finally going to change!” it’s “134 questions in about an hour??!!? I got more time per question on the GRE.” Somehow I doubt that askPatty’s exam is a probing examination into the success of the course in changing the attitudes and assumptions of the men that lead to their industry-wide piss-poor reputation as a bunch of sexist dishonest fucks. Between that and the title of thier text, I am going to have to assume that a “certified female-friendly by askPatty.com!” certificate on the wall means exactly jack-shit. In the meantime, I will continue to use the only method worth a damn for finding a reputable dealer or auto repair place: word of mouth and reccommendations from trusted mechanics.

26.12.2006 For the ladies, Media hackery, Moola, My Brain Hurts, Technology 2 Comments

The Dick Cheney School of Finance meets The Robert Palmer School of Beauty

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

A few weeks ago, Entertainment Weekly did a puff piece on a popular new prime-time game show hosted by Howie Mandel, Deal or No Deal. Apparently, answering questions a la Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was too brainy; now contestants just have to point at numbered suitcases with money in them and pray for wealth.

Seriously, this is how the game works: A player picks one of 26 numbered suitcases. The player either gets however much money is in that case, which could be anything from 1 million to less than 1 thousand dollars, or an offer from the Banker, a hidden dude who calls down to Howie with offers to which the contestant can say “deal” or “no deal.” They generate these offers by pointing at certain models to open their cases. If the models open small dollar amounts, the Banker’s offer can go up, because there’s a greater chance your case is full of big money, but if the models reveal large sums, his offer decreases. People can walk away with essentially nothing.

The casting director of the show clarifies its intent: “I love people who never stop talking, says Neal Konstantini. “I want to keep watching them jump around and go nuts.” Yes, dance, dance for the rich Banker, you poor bastard! If you possessed any knowledge or skill, you’d be as fabulously wealthy as Howie Mandel! But you have nothing to offer save your histrionics, so how about you make an ass of yourself for the country’s amusement while we try to screw you with lowball offers from The Man?

I have to say one of the moving picture’s most notable achievements is the elevation of debasement to a mainstream career path. It used to be you’d have to toil away in a carnival side-show or as a magician’s assistant, but these days you can go on any reality TV show or game show and earn a shitload of money during or after just for playing the dunce. Deal or No Deal manages to take this idea to a new level.

Meanwhile, after noting how berserk the audience gets when the models arrive on stage, Howie Mandel says, “I don’t know what it is. There is something incredibly powerful about 26 stunning women dressed exactly the same.”

Mmm, yeah, a total lack of individualism is fuckin’ hot! I hate it when teh bitchez remind me of their personality and stuff. I just want to abstract them into service-oriented Fembots, and the best way to do that is to just make them dress scantily/identically while moving in unison. Then I can just concentrate on what I’d do to them.

Naturally, the show’s a huge hit.

02.10.2006 Entertainment, Moola 5 Comments

Color me jealous: first female space tourist ready to go

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Next week, the first female space tourist will spend a couple of days at the international space station.

Anousheh Ansari is of course filthy fucking rich, and paid about $20 million for the ride. But you need to be rolling in disposable income to make this kind of history – only three guys got up there before her.

Anyway, she seems to have earned it: she’s been as devoted to space as a non-astronaut could possibly be, putting her money where her mouth is and contributing part of the X-prize as well as supporting other space-tourism ventures. I have to admit I kind of like the idea of space tourism and hope she makes it affordable for me by the time I’m 40. Since I don’t plan on being a millionaire, that’ll have to be pretty damn affordable.

I’d like to be able to zip about in space for a few hours myself one day, although today I’d settle for a hot air balloon or blimp ride.

15.09.2006 Punkass!, Moola, Yay! Science! 4 Comments

Worshipping the false idol of opportunity

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

Yesterday, hilzoy celebrated Labor Day with more damning evidence of the myth of American “opportunity.” Canadians are almost three times as likely to be able to jump income classes as Americans, and the Swedes are almost twice as likely. As hilzoy’s data source confirms, Americans are living a lie:

“The correlation between the income of parents and their children is so high that it would take a poor family of four with two children nine to 10 generations – over 200 years – to reach middle-income status.”

Americans worship opportunity. To it we ritually sacrifice all notions of civic duty or collectivism; we think this will help the individual curry its favor and achieve excellence. Taxes come from the devil of bureaucracy, and we reject its tempting fruits of national health care and improved public education for fear of paying for it with our opportunistic soul.

But the data confirms we’re already empty inside. The system of “keep what you earn and fuck everyone else” serves to keep you right where you are and dramatically increases the odds your children will do the same.

We pray to this god because we live in a lottery culture. Americans dream of hitting it big one day, sleeping on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies as a reward for our well-deserved luck. How one expects to hit it big is often vaguely described, but it usually involves reality TV, some can’t-miss invention/scheme/website, or a screenplay. And when we do cash in, we want to keep as much of that money as possible. As a result, the regular citizen actually feels sympathy pains over the tax rates for the wealthy, believing s/he’ll pay the same rate when his or her ship comes in.

Ambition is a fine quality. Of course, its much more actualized in countries like Canada, our tax-crazy hippie sibling up north. To hear the opportunity-worshipper tell you the tale, though, Canada is where dreams go to die because their government takes from you to give to someone else, and surely that means you’d rather drop dead than work for a bigger paycheck.

This completely discounts the obvious truth that you’d be much more likely to write that script or prototype that invention if you knew you’d have health insurance while you did. So even if you like our lottery culture, you’re buying the wrong ticket here. With a better public education system, you’d probably have better tools to achieve “regular” success, too.

The myth of opportunity teaches Americans lessons like “if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying,” and “you can’t win if you don’t take a shortcut around everyone else.” It paints us as one another’s adversary in the struggle to acquire as much as possible. Naturally, these myths are told by the people who already have what we want and, like the lessons they teach, will do anything they can to keep it.

The result is a culture feverishing worshipping a god via a belief system working overtime to kill it.

05.09.2006 Governmental Failures, Moola 18 Comments

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