Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, I use the side door – that way Lumbergh can’t see me. After that I just sorta space out for about an hour. Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."

– Peter Gibbons in Office Space

Source: Nielsen NetView

Today, my boyfriend hacked my facebook account and set my status to say that I was in love with my boss. Seeing the post, my boss called me into his office, and told me he loved me too… FML

“Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past–without accepting the inevitable conflict.  Like Hoover, his is bound to fail.” (2

– He increased taxes on top wage earners from 25% to 63%
– He increased government spending by 47%
– He ran a deficit of 4.5% of GDP
– Against the wishes of over 1000 economists, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, effectively shutting down international trade
– He established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make loans to the state governments
– He appropriated money for public works construction (think Hoover Dam)
– He met with major industry leaders and put significant pressure on them to maintain wages at current levels, despite the amount of money in the economy falling by one-third. This led, predictably, to massive unemployment. (4)

FDR and Hoover; Much More Similar Than We Are Lead to Believe

“A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop… [however] this misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier… After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business… The logical conclusion from all this would be… that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor… But the shopkeeper will be out $250 that he was planning to spend on a new suit… They have forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor… They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made.” (8)

“Harding inherited [Woodrow] Wilson’s mess—in particular, a post–World War I depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit. The estimated gross national product plunged 24 percent from $91.5 billion in 1920 to $69.6 billion in 1921. The number of unemployed people jumped from 2.1 million to 4.9 million.” (9)

Warren Harding: Depression Fighter Extraordinaire

1. Clean up your credit
2. Build up your savings
3. Study your craft
4. Make sure your loan proposals are impressive

1. FHA Financing
2. Traditional Banks
3. HELOC's (Home Equity Lines of Credit)
4. Seller Financing, Subject To's and Lease Options
​5. Partnerships and Private Lending

“It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.” (1)

“[H.R. 2454, the cap-and-trade bill] is regressive. Free allocations doled out with the intent of blunting the effects on those of modest means will pale in comparison to the allocations that go to polluters and special interests. The financial benefits of offsets and unlimited banking also tend to accrue to large corporations. And of course, the trillion dollar carbon derivatives market will help Wall Street investors. Much of the benefits designed to assist consumers are passed through coal companies and other large corporations, on whom we will rely to pass on the savings.” (3)

“A lot of business leaders are changing their positions. New businesses and CEO’s and corporations every week are now joining this new bandwagon saying ‘we want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.’” (4)

“The third subsidy that ADM depends on is the 54-cent-per-gallon tax credit the federal government allows to refiners of the corn-derived ethanol used in auto fuel. For this subsidy, the federal government pays $3.5 billion over five years. Since ADM makes 60 percent of all the ethanol in the country, the government is essentially contributing $2.1 billion to ADM’s bottom line.” (13)

“If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.” (17)

“What’s needed is a market in child-abuse credits. Somewhere in the world there is a parent who is slugging his kid every night. For a price, he would refrain for a night, or even two. By paying that parent not to slug his kid twice, you gain the right to slug your kid just once.” (1)

“Ecologically speaking we do have the makings of a tragedy here…ragweed is poisonous plant and cattle won’t eat it. And it’s an indicator plant of overgrazing…for the past fifteen years [ragweeds have] been taking over this meadow as there has been an increasing overgrazing problem… which is of the city government’s own making. Fifteen years ago they asked each commoner how many animals he would like legal rights to graze on this common land. Naturally each of them, being human, submitted his own selfish estimate of the most he could possibly want. All those bids got accepted. So even if each farmer is only grazing what he’s legally entitled to, there’s a huge overgrazing problem.” (5)

“Streams and rivers are drying up all over the northern half of the country… Acid rain falls over 30% of its territory…The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently reported that a third of the nation’s lakes and nearly a quarter of its rivers are now so polluted with mercury that children and pregnant women are advised to limit or avoid eating fish caught there.” (7)

1. Strictly enforce property rights. We’ve been getting away from this for years, but in obvious cases where a company causes significant harm to other people or property via pollution (be it air pollution or otherwise), they should be liable for those damages. In some ways, regulation can simply allow a company to violate other people’s property rights to whatever extent the regulation deems acceptable.

2. Deregulate nuclear power. Nuclear power certainly poses the risk of a catastrophic meltdown, but no one in the United States has ever died from it. We had one accident 30 some years ago at Three Mile Island, and although no one died, and we’ve had 30 plus years of technological improvements, we haven’t built a new plant since. On the other hand, we hear stories of coal miners dying every other week. Nuclear power is very clean burning (it boils water), produces almost no waste and the little it does can be fairly easily stored away. 80% of France’s electricity is nuclear; they are a net energy exporter, have the cheapest energy in Europe and very low CO2 emissions. (8)
​
3. Reduce our military presence abroad. How much oil do we use funding two wars, one of which certainly did not need to be fought? In addition, how much unnecessary oil is used by having our military spread over the world with over 700 bases in 130 countries?

4. Eliminate subsidies to oil companies and corn-ethanol companies such as pork barrel champion of the world, Archer Daniels Midland. It’s obvious that we should eliminate the subsidies to oil companies; however, corn ethanol subsidies are even dumber. Corn ethanol requires an enormous amount of energy to produce and must be transported in trucks instead of pipes because it degrades. University of California Engineering Professor, Tad Patzek, wrote that corn ethanol requires 29% more fossil fuel energy than the ethanol contains. (9) Furthermore, by pushing resources into a faulty method of emission reduction, the government discourages capital from finding its way to an effective method, such as…

5. Legalize hemp. The government wouldn’t even have to legalize marijuana (although they should do that, too). Hemp ethanol, unlike corn ethanol, does significantly lower emissions. Hemp can produce a whole host of other products as well. Yet, hemp is illegal to grow in the United States, despite the fact we have a fertile climate for it. (10)

“[One possible solution is] a cloud whitening scheme. Dark things absorb a lot of heat and the oceans are very, very dark. There are not very many clouds over the ocean because there are not the nuclei that seed the clouds which is usually from dust. There’s not much dust over the ocean. Salt can also seed clouds. And so what you need to do is figure out how to spray some salt water up into the air and that can serve to make the clouds. The belief is, from the models, that if you can just have 10,000 little, solar powered dingies that just puttered around in the ocean and flipped up some salt water into the air, that that would generate enough cloud cover over the oceans that would reflect enough of the sunlight that through that channel you could also lower the temperature of the Earth to offset any effects of warming.” (12)