Thank a Republican for shitty mail service

From The Atlantic: Who Killed the Postal Service?

Today, the Postal Service announced roughly $3 billion in service cuts that will slow down the delivery of first-class mail for the first time in 40 years. Starting in April, it plans to shutter more than half of its 461 mail processing centers, stretching out the time it will take to ship everything from Netflix DVDs to magazines. One-day delivery of stamped envelopes will all but certainly become a thing of the past....

And should you wonder why, (hint: it was a privatization scheme), from Think Progress:

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

The outgoing Republican controlled congress of 2006 did this for the express purpose of making the USPS go bankrupt so they can sell off its assets to private companies like UPS and FedEx. Fuckers.

And for the uninformed who says "gee that's no so bad, I like UPS!", look at the fucking costs. It costs $.44 to send a letter anywhere in the United States by mail. The absolute cheapest UPS option is over $26. Assholes.

Crazy laws? Subversion of democracy? Look to ALEC

This is fucked. And wrong. From BusinessWeek: Pssst...Wanna Buy a Law?

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit based in Washington, brings together state legislators, companies, and advocacy groups to shape “model legislation.” The legislators then take these models back to their own states. About 1,000 times a year, according to ALEC, a state legislator introduces a bill from its library of more than 800 models. About 200 times a year, one of them becomes law. The council, in essence, makes national policy, state by state.

ALEC’s online library contains model bills that tighten voter identification requirements, making it harder for students, the elderly, and the poor to vote. Such bills have shown up in 34 states. According to NPR, the Arizona bill that permits police to detain suspected illegal immigrants started as ALEC model legislation. Similar bills have passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah, and have been introduced in 17 other states. Legislators in Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, and New Mexico have sponsored bills with identical ALEC language requiring states to withdraw from regional agreements on CO2 emissions. Sound a national trend among state legislators, and often you will find at the bottom of your plumb line a bill that looks like something that has passed through the American Legislative Exchange Council.

These are the assholes that brought you SB1070 in Arizona and the new anti-immigrant legislation in Alabama that resulted in millions of dollars of crops rotting in the fields because no one wanted to pick them. Classy fucks. Check out the whole BusinessWeek article for more depth.

Telemarketers are the spawn of Satan

Have you ever been robo-called for some product or service you want nothing to do with? Maybe five, six times in one day from the same number? Then you know.

Call this number: 302 394 9573. Or text it. Or spread it around. Make these terrible bastards pay! Perhaps I'll print up flyers listing this number as the source for free hookers or the best crank in town? Ideas?

Sometimes it's the smokes, not the booze.

I have, on occasion, noticed that the worst part of a hangover seems to be too-many-cigarettes-last-night feeling rather than the ill effects of overindulgence in amber-colored liquids. Someone should do a study.

That said, I'm sure I'll do it again, and I expect you will too.

Labor 65 Years Ago

On this day in 1946, the AFL and CIO workers of Oakland Caligfornia staged a general strike to protest insufficient wages during the post-war price boom.

From Libcom.org comes this fine account: This Day in Labor History: The Oakland General Strike.

And, fuck you if you don't like unions.

Rich dude speaks sense

This guy is not talking like a Galtian asshole: Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators.

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

Great googly-moogly! It's as if the Randian poison is not the ultra-contagious virus we thought it might be!

This shit is pretty cool

Wolfram Alpha.

Tunes that are good

In other news:

Still awful:

Soda still tastes like shit. The corn-syrup hyper-sweetness is not as some may think, refreshingly delicious, but rather leaves a cloying aftertaste that makes one thirst most thirstily for a frosty cold brew or even some really cheap tannic box wine.

I probably only have 6 sodas a year or something on that level. It usually takes about two months for me to forget how shitty the last one was and then dupe myself into getting the Sprite or Mountain Dew for the extra $.25 cents or whatever the fuck it is in the special at the sandwich shop. This isn't really a health thing at all; I consume an ungodly amount of bear and cheap liquor, which must be a drain on proper organ function somewhere in the realm of high-fructose corn syrup. What I suppose I'm really getting at is that I don't like sweet things to hit my tongue unless they have booze in them. Whiskey, wine, ale, gin etc. are all tip-fucking-top fine by me.

On a last note, not at all fond of soda with booze in it. It ruins perfectly good booze. If you need to sweeten your drinks to enjoy them, just fucking put some simple syrup or grenadine or red vermouth in it. Fuck.

Last last not: Mexican Coca-Cola is delicious if you can find it. The above rant does not apply.

Iran Contra broke 25 years ago today. Reagan still sold weapons to Iran and started an illegal war in Central America.

Outsourcing to Charles Pierce: The Lost Opportunities of Iran-Contra, 25 Years Later

Rich assholes save more than you and I make

From ThinkProgress: The Average Bush Tax Cut For The 1 Percent This Year Will Be Greater Than The Average Income Of The Other 99 Percent.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who co-chaired the super committee, explained that the major sticking point during negotiations with the GOP was what to do with the Bush tax cuts. With that in mind, the National Priorities Project points out that those tax cuts this year will give the richest 1 percent of Americans a bigger tax cut than the other 99 percent will receive in average income:

The average Bush tax cut in 2011 for a taxpayer in the richest one percent is greater than the average income of the other 99 percent ($66,384 compared to $58,506).

Looks like I'm in the bottom half of the 99%. NOt surprising, because I'm still quite young. Hopefully the 1% will keep taking a disproportionate share of US income, and you and I can get poorer together and then everything will be fine.

Thanksgiving

Tis the time to offer thanks for Squanto, manifest destiny and so on

Get some.

Fuck Steve Jobs, he was an asshole and a shitty aesthete

As usual, something excellent from the Awl: Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple.

The widespread admiration for Apple's design ethos is in two parts: one functional, the other aesthetic. The functional aspects of Apple's products can indeed be magical and thrilling. But the vibe of Apple's product design is uniformly cool and impersonal, and the monolithic sterility of their glassy retail palaces is really something shocking. So far as design goes, it's an imperial aesthetic, entirely lacking a human dimension—or a potted plant. And this remains so, no matter how much the marketers have tried to soften things up with the aid of Justin Long, John Hodgman and sassy dancing silhouettes. Bow down, Apple seems to say. And in the cold, Big Brotherly sway of uniformity that it holds over millions upon millions of people, Apple seems to deny or even thwart the natural world, and with it the individual, the mutable, the unscientific, the instinctive, the flesh and blood. It won't surprise me a bit when they provide snow-white Matrix plugs to poke tidily into the back of your head. Or maybe even the heart plugs from Dune.

Steve Jobs was also a shameless exploiter of Chinese laborers, had bad taste in literature, and was an unrepentant hoarder of his wealth for no purpose. John Galt anyone?

Stay classy cops

From Crooks and Liars: Pregnant #occupy protester miscarries after police abuse.

After being pepper sprayed and hit in the stomach, a Seattle woman miscarried.

Apparently, she questioned their authority.