Another opportunity lost

It hit me today just how terrible the last three years have been for me. I came into work earlier and my company was offering a voluntary separation deal, full pay, full benefits, job placement help, for three to six months. It would be perfect for me. But I haven’t been here quite long enough to qualify.

It’s not just that the economy has been terrible for the last three years, it’s that it happened at the worst possible time it could have happened in my life, when a couple of loved ones were diagnosed with deadly diseases, when the layoffs began in earnest and my friends and family and me all lost our benefits when we needed them to literally survive, when I begin to hit age fifty and could count on obvious age bias in trying to find any job that paid a basic living wage, even one far below what I’m used to making, etc. On top of which every goddamn job, relationship, or source of money or happiness of any kind that might have worked out in my favor over the last three years instead fell through completely, or worked out against me in some way, the separation deal above being only the latest such opportunity lost. And when I did have a heads-I-lose tails-you-win decision to make, inevitably it turned out I chose the worst of the two. It seems improbabale my luck could continue being so lousy, but I’ve said that time and time again for several years now and it just gets worse.

It’s just been awful. The worst, most horrible, joyless, agonizing, hopeless, loneliest three years of my life. Nothing that ever came before even remotely prepared me for it.

Bank still refusing to pay woman for stolen items

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It looks like First National Bank of Wellston of Ohio has a bigger problem than they thought: Katie Barnett, the lady they ripped off and are refusing to pay full value to, is photogenic and not a minority. Which means even local teatards might sympathize.

The President of the bank is a fellow named Eric Emmert, let’s make sure that incompetent buffoon never escapes the consequences of his greed and stupidity. This all could have been avoided had the bank simply paid Katie Barnett back for what they stole. She was only asking $18,000, the bank refused, demanding receipts for a life’s worth of possessions, receipts the bank had thrown out anyway along with everything else she owned. Click the image to sign the petition.

ABC News/WaPo abortion poll

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The con played on social conservatives is to make it look like conservative politicians are fighting tooth and nail to outlaw abortion and a bunch of other reproductive freedoms, without actually doing anything about it. Because outlawing it would be hugely unpopular and, more importantly to the scam, take it off the table as an issue to marry the real policies such as tax cuts and deregulation to. You can see why the 20 week deal is suddenly so popular in many states now.

Weiner’s weiner strikes again

Yes, I know it’s not fair, democrats don’t run around being all high and mighty decreeing who can put their divine what in a gutter sinner’s where. Nevertheless, I said this with Clinton and I’ll say it with Anthony Wiener, please, fucking stop. If Clinton had been able to keep little willie in his pants, Gore might well have prevailed in 2000. [Read more…]

Generational economic mobility in easy to read map form

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I’m not going to be the first one to say this — you’d have to be blind not to notice it. Dixie is damn near a third-world hell-hole within our borders. We can argue about which fucked up idea caused most of it, and it’s seems fair to infer no one policy could fail quite this spectacularly, but there is no denying the anti-economic correlation between the know-nothing fundamentalist-ruled neo-confederate non-unionized racist deep south and the rest of the nation.

GOP head assures fundamentalists his party not serious about being tolerant

The Republican Party has a terrible problem, too many people think they’re a bunch of old creepy white guys who only care about a few creepy old, rich religious fanatics! Some conservatives have even been running around saying they might be more inclusive to immigrants or gays and lesbians, perish the though! So party chairman Reince Priebus took to the fundie airwaves to quietly assure the right-wing faithful that his party will not waver from a course of religiously inspired hatred and intolerance, but they will rename hatred love and intolerance they’ll call grace: [Read more…]

An economic experiment

It’s no secret around these parts that I’m looking for a real-life job with better pay and more advancement opportunity. I just saw exactly such a job with a great company, the physical site is very close by — I could almost walk to it. The qualifications include familiarity with online commerce, strong customer service experience, ability to navigate the Internet, clear and concise verbal and written skills, and the ability to keep cool under pressure. A background in online community management, sales and analytics was listed as a plus. [Read more…]

A message in the mud

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Our local lake is still — barely — capable of supporting wakeboard boats, something I tested out yesterday in the photo above. It won’t be much longer, Lake Travis will simply dry up into Baked Mud Canyon if we don’t get a veritable deluge of rain in the next few months. But if present trends continue there could be plenty of water. Scientists working with Antarctic sediments have found a disturbing signal: the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest ice sheet on earth today, melted partly or wholly during the Pliocene. And that pushed global sea levels up almost 200 feet (65 m), the only thing between us and the kind of rise is time, the GHG concentrations are about the same [Read more…]