Even though I like him, I won't get too upset if they fire Rex. I thought Sparano was a bad choice from the beginning and will only be too happy to be rid of Tebow. He'll never be a good quarterback in the NFL, though Jacksonville is welcome to try it out. Sanchez took a team to the AFC championship too, for whatever that it worth.

This season isn't even that bad by Jets historical standards, so I don't feel like I should wallow any self pity. I remember the Kotite years with a records of 1-15. I think part of the issue is that Jets are victims of their hype machine. The owner seems to be pursuing a get our name in the paper by any means strategy. It seems to be working, but I can only assume it isn't having the expected effect on revenue. I know I'm not planning on getting season tickets at the prices they're charging for the crappy product they put on the field.

I just had my first taste of Fireball whiskey, courtesy of BD Jr.

Jameson's isn't cheap, it's pretty damned good Irish whiskey.

BTW Darth I pass a couple meaderies almost every day in town here. If you ever find yourself in the NW let me know ahead of time so I can warn them.

...the Obaaama logo, maybe I can't see it clearly...but what is the problem with it?

Traveller

it is pretty nsfw if someone were to walk by and glance at the screen.

nt

it doesn't look trivial, and I'm not sure how much of a site redesign it would require. I think I have some ideas of the kinds of things we could do with it, but I'm not a Facebook user so maybe not.

Take a look at these:

Activitystream for Facebook

Drupal for Facebook

Facebook Style Micropublisher

Facebook Social Plugins integration

Post It Everywhere

and let me know which ones provide what you're looking for.

...opposion in me is fairly strong...or, to put it clearer, very strong. So Facebook wouldn't be a matter of convenience of inconvenience, it is an existential question as to the very nature of The Forvm.

People are here because they want to be here, it takes some effort, and that is good. Often I read the comments under CNN or other sites, Kevin Drum often even, and it is a vicious Wasteland where there is absolutely nothing of interest being said.

The larger web is often pretty terrible.

Best Wishes, Traveller

Like I said, I don't use it much except as a links database.  Definitely do not put any personal stuff on my page.

Will linking to FB attract spam?

It is clear and crisp down here in the lowlands! 

An American airplane has been stuck there for three weeks. No information at all about crew, plane ownership, or anything. Curious.

to governments that enrich the wealthy and impoverish the poor.

Not overly concerned, though.  The idea that the income gains of the last couple of years would have tended to go to the upper end is no surprise whatsoever.  Segments of the upper end depend a great deal on capital gains, investment income, etc.  They took a hammering during the Crisis and recession, a proportionally greater one than the bottom end, for precisely that reason.  And once the panic was over, all those temporarily undervalued assets bounced and you were bound to do okay so long as you weren't one of the panicky ones.  Or, as I said at the time, "Potter's not selling, Potter's buying." (Big winners last year?  Bank stocks.  Not that you'd be up on holdings you carried forward from 2007.  But if you could buy intelligently during/after...)

As to the longer-term distribution, dunno.  You can make the argument that the fast post-war growth in places like Taiwan and South Korea was predicated in part on an authoritarian regime conducting a land reform and distributing farmland (read: capital) widely and then letting the chips fall where they might, thus allowing new winners to drive the state-of-the-art forward without too many entrenched interests in the way.  But then you're not talking about income redistribution, you're talking about a one-time non-distorting capital levy.  Also, you're not really worried about whether the incapable poor are doing well outcome-wise, the idea is to get resources into the hands of the competitive in order to let them build up wealth.  i.e. The revolutionary French government's selling the biens nationaux confiscated from emigres and the Church to local middle-class strivers, which constructed a dynamic (and not incidentally deeply pro-regime, for fear of having it all taken back) entrepreneurial class.

But OTOH, poverty-stricken in the U.S of 2013 is not the same as poverty-stricken in France in 1795 or Korea in 1950.  You have to be close to being an incompetent loser to be short on calories or even vitamins, or the children of such.  I'd worry as much about crappy admissions policies to good schools, the general rise of credentialism in all fields, the general cultural lack of interest in any difficult course of study and the overwhelming preponderance of red tape if you're trying to do anything of consequence, if we're talking about stifling innovation.

A separate argument would be that high-wage environments naturally tend to encourage investment in capital in order to save labor costs wherever possible.  i.e. if a French McDonalds has to pay $25/hr, minimum wage, to fry-jockies, it will work much harder to install robots, self-service, higher-efficiency processes, etc, all leading to innovation-> productivity gains -> actual increases in wealth, eventually.  This is true (see early U.S. advances in agricultural productivity because really cheap labor was not available) but takes a proposition that only applies under specific circumstances and incorrectly tries to generalize it.  The French McDonalds example is good because the high wages can be combated by the entrepreneur via innovation.  OTOH, if GM figures out (or buys from a smaller outfit) a concept that would cut labor inputs in half while increasing quality, but is blocked by either rigid work rules or a generalized (and understandable) hostility on the part of the UAW, you have a result that supports high wages but actually stifles innovation.  The same, of course, applies to any entrenched interest that would lose thereby and acts to preserve its position, regardless of whether you want to label it "labor", "capital", "stakeholder", "government" or whatever.

So possibly the patter is: High growth comes via a starting position that is relatively flat but is then allowed to concentrate naturally.  Neither a permanently skewed distribution nor one that is permanently flat via enforcement is useful in this regard.  But then, the question is how to set up a structure that encourages that perpetual renewal (or, depending upon your political bent, substitute either "creative destruction" or "permanent revolution".  Soulmates!)  You probably need to target large, immobile concentrations of wealth, but at the same time you don't really want to penalize income, much less striving for it.  And the natural human tendency is to want to provide as much security as possible for the kids, and the folks you're trying to keep from doing that will, of course, be the most talented.  Etc.

so I'm not going anywhere for the next four years. Brazil still seems nice, not sure how well I'd do at learning Portuguese from scratch.

I have to laugh at your analysis of Venezuela. Unless you predict oil prices will go down in the long term, revenue is one thing they don't have to worry about. Now they do have problems, like with the murder and violent crime rates, that are puzzling since they're reduced their poverty rate significantly. In virtually every other country through history, that has helped to reduce crime rather than increase it. You can criticize Chavez for not bringing the crime rates down, but at least he's trying to fix it using historical trends as the basis for his policies. And it's not as if Venezuela is that much of an outlier, most Central and South American countries have ridiculously high crime rates.

... eventually. 

It doesn't matter that he hasn't and these predictions have been wrong for 10 yrs. or so, but keep at it.

The real reason the current level of 5.5% growth isn't likely to be sustained is b/c it was partly based on increased government spending intended to goose the economy before an election.

But here's Chavez's record the past 8 yrs (counted from 2004 after the coup and recession ended):

As you can see, tho growth is likely to go down a bit, if Chavez manages to whip his cancer there's every reason he'll continue averaging a respectable 4+% growth, beating out CHile, Brazil, and of course the awful conservatives in Mexico.

Inflation isn't a big deal - it's up in recent months but overall lower this year than the past two and entirely within historical precedents for periods of growth. 

You've been complaining about the lack of investment into the oil infrastructure for years, which I believe is a problem, but which your posting history shows is exaggerated.

You could've made $ in Venezuela this year if you weren't reading right wing garbanzo. The stock market was up 300%. 

Speaking of making money and your right wing bias, how far do you believe Venezuela's growth is going to fall? Perhaps we can make an actual wager this time, since I'm getting better at taking misinformed conservatives' $ over bets on macroecon events. Got a prediction?

VEnezuela's inflation rate started growing in the final months of 2012, but inflation for the year was: 19.9%

In 2011: 26.1

In 2010: 28.2%

As I said, the actual trend is downward. This sounds really high to a westerner, but it is not out of whack for Venezuela, and hasn't meant low growth:

As for GDP growth "largely" being due to unsustainable government spending, my recollection is that most of Venezuela's growth was in the private, not public sector (but I couldn't locate a report just now with a breakdown).

it's textbook economics for a developing country. So is joining mercosur, the South American trade pact.

Look, the conservatives have been calling Chavez a failure ever since he was elected to office. The fact is that he's done some great things in Venezuela, specifically halving the poverty rate. He's been no worse, and often a lot better, than other leaders in Central and South America - including the ones we "like".

That particular Saudi Arabian emir got a well-deserved comeuppance at the hands of Rudy Guiliani with FoxNews leading the chorus of attacks against the emir. There's an old saying that comes to mind: "If you can't beat them, join them."

"...versus a Qatari emir now heavily invested in an American left-wing news organisation."

Reading a little deeper into the (projected) dynamics of the Al-Jazeera/Current TV deal, it seems more like AlJ was buying it mainly for its existing channels/cable access, and that the specifically "left-wing" orientation of Current, as well as, apparently, its entire current payroll, will be a thing of the past, as AlJ seems to planning to set up a completely new US-based news network (separate from the present Al-Jazeera English).

In a bricks-and-mortar analogy, it sounds as if Al-Jazeera have bought a failing store, changed its name, hung a new sign out front, redecorated the inside, and will be selling their own product line henceforth through their own sales staff. Only the street address will be unchanged.  

A hero of the viet nam war. A twice elected president whose grandfatherly appearance and stirring speech at the 2012 GOP convention brought the divided nation to its feet in admiration and love... Oh wait, he didn't even show up at the last GOP convention...

Ran multiple businesses into the ground. Exploded the national debt. Created an entirely new tentacle of the US government, the dept. of homeland security. Then got us into 2 decades+ long wars, costing over a trillion dollars.

But a hell of a Saudi's man -- with this I bid you good night.

remember, no tongue.

And some judges have already smacked down Republican gerrymandering on that basis. 

But it hasn't been enough to overturn a baked in 7% advantage.

To make progress, I think you need judges who view this kind of gerrymandering as inherently unConstitutional, as upsetting the idea of proportional representation for which the House was designed.

Naturally our liberal media is all over this topic.

One I'm less sure about, and one I'm certain about.

The first: please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that "racial gerrymandering" follows judicial rulings that are constitutional, and thus can't be overruled by a law.

And the second: it is a well-known dynamic (in the South particularly) that the GOP is a significant beneficiary of racial gerrymandering. It concentrates Democratic votes in a few districts, making the rest of the districts less competitive. I doubt that the GOP cares more about not electing black people than they do about electing themselves.