The New Songs of the Doomed

Monday, September 19, 2011

My, my. The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the world.

Give this a gander:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/09/employment

Thursday, September 15, 2011

AWEsome.

http://continuitygame.com/playcontinuity.html

Good to know.

What Burger King shakes are made of:

A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

And you thought there were strawberries in that shit!

Surprise, surprise!

Or... not.

From Brad Plumer at WaPo: Study: Privatizing government doesn’t actually save money.

The theory that the federal government should outsource its operations to private firms usually rests on a simple premise: It saves money. But why should we believe it saves money? Often the argument is made by pointing to salaries for public- and private-sector employees in comparable jobs and noting that the private-sector employees make less. So outsourcing the task to the private worker should be cheaper, right? That’s the theory, at least. But a new study from the Project on Government Oversight suggests that this theory is quite wrong. In many cases, privatizing government turns out to be far more costly.

Golly gee. But this flies in the face of accepted knowledge and conventional wisdom! It is obvious that if we let private companies bid on contracts and then pay some poor bastard less to do the same thing that someone with a decent paying gov't job decent benefits used to do, that we'll all save boatloads of money, isn't it?

Well... no, not really. The issue with this brilliant scheme is that while the poor bastard is making less money than the gov't employee did, his boss/the owner of the private firm makes a veritable shitload of cash, making the total cost to the taxpayer in many cases far more than it was before privatization.

Calls for privatizing government services, at the local, state or federal levels are invariably just clever ways of enriching those who run private service contractors at the expense of the taxpayer. Privatized means for profit. We must not forget this.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Go Corporatist Capitalism!

From Ezra Klein:

Chart of the day: America’s surprisingly tiny small-business sector.

The one thing every American politician can agree on is that small businesses are a crucial driver of the U.S. economy. So it’s somewhat surprising to discover that, as John Schmitt of the Center on Economic and Policy Research points out, the United States actually has the smallest small-business sector among wealthy countries.

Click through for the chart. The constant cries of "Raising taxes on the wealthy will cripple small business and small business is the engine of our economy!" seem a bit hollow, don't they?

Monday, September 12, 2011

Phlogiston!

Hooray for the atavistic political climate we find ourselves in today. Rick Perry professes to believe that Social Security is a scam, when it is in fact one of the most stable and successful programs in the history if the United States. Paul Krugman notes that we have apparently abandoned reasoned economic theory in the current discussion of our country's fiscal woes. Krugman goes on to suggest that perhaps we will soon be reexamining other outdated hypotheses such as the following.

The Theory of Phlogiston:

The theory holds that all combustible resources contain phlogiston, a substance without colour, odour, taste, or mass that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx.
"Phlogisticated" substances are those that contain phlogiston and are "dephlogisticated" when burned; "in general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body."^[1]

Thus, phlogiston was described in a way basically the opposite of the real role of oxygen in combustion.