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An animation of the increase in unemployment rates by county, nationally. The choice of colors rather exaggerates the situation, a situation bad enough that it hardly requires exaggeration.
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In Northern California, a high school junior has been kicked out of school after going hunting in the morning and parking his truck off of school grounds. The school claims that they have the right to expel him for his out-of-school action, in which he broke no laws, and has follows through by doing so, after a nearly two-hour public hearing.
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Very impressive.
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Hey, don't look at me: I'm doing my part.
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Microsoft is interested in paying Rupert Murdoch to remove his media properties from Google's index, giving Bing the exclusive right to index them. Anticompetitive concerns aside, I think Microsoft might be starting something that will be bad for everybody, including them. Many years ago, working in a coffee shop, I once got Valentine's Day evening off of work only by paying a coworker $50 to cover for me. It worked out for me on that occasion, but it totally changed the economic standard and expectations for all of the employees. I'd started something that I hadn't fully considered the ramifications of.
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This lengthy New York Times Magazine piece looks into the terrible situation of fathers who discover that their children are the result of a cheating wife. The main character in this piece is a man who got a divorce after he discovered via a DNA test that his nine-year-old daughter was not his, genetically-speaking. His wife has remarried, to the girl's biological father…and the court has ordered the cuckolded man to pay child support. If he forces the issue, he could lose all visitation rights to the girl, what with not being her father. What a mess.
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Last year Goldman Sachs paid a 34% effective income tax rate. This year, 1%. How? Easy—offshoring. If they funnel the money through companies without income taxes for businesses, they don't have to pay taxes. This hot mess of a company is paying just $14M in taxes for FY2008, and that's worldwide—we get less. Sen. Jim Webb is, to my mind, the best guy to crack down on this. If American companies want to move their assets offshore, fine—then we should treat them like foreign companies, and give them none of the benefits that come of being American. If they like Bermuda so much, they should move there.
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I'm making vanilla extract, and liked this recipe the best, of all the ones that I found. It's actually really, really easy: soak vanilla beans in vodka for a couple of months. You're done.
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Dumbasses parking trucks with (hunting) guns in them was a near-weekly problem at my last GA high school (cf. the first GA high school, where the guns came into the school with them). Was always happy to see these morons get popped for that. But if you’re parked off property? Step off, school board.
I love the link posts and I have a suggestion. Sometimes one of the links will be especially good and I’ll want to share it (with your description) through Google Reader or some other RSS reader. Any thoughts about posting the links as separate posts so they show up as separate items so and are therefore easier to share, email or “like” individual ones.
Also there are definitely ones that I would paste on facebook or elsewhere, which I could see being appealing as it might bring additional people to your site.
You know, I’ve been wanting to do that, JJ, but it hadn’t bubbled up into my forebrain until you mentioned it. :) Lazily, I’ve just been using Delicious‘ native “post this to my blog” function, but I should really look at breaking them up. Thanks for the suggestion!
That’s going to be a very expensive dumb move by the Chico school.
I wonder if they thought this fit in with some dumb ass ‘zero tolerance’ policy.
I wonder what the ramifications of mandatory at-birth paternity tests would be.
We create a bureaucracy and give it huge control over a population of people who have no recourse against it, and it’s no surprise when it oversteps its bounds. Our school systems are set up like the Standford prison experiment, and they encourage and attract the sorts of people who enjoy having that sort of power over people.
That’s not to say I think many teachers are like this, and even most school administrators I’ve dealt with aren’t, but there are enough to be a serious problem. We need to work harder to design our institutions intelligently.
I wish I had time to write about (and think more about) the offshoring tax avoidance story and the paternity test story, but for now, I’ll just say thanks for the interesting links!
I salute those men who decide to keep paying child-support for their non-biological children that they nonetheless love. Their predicament is heartbreaking, though. I’m not surprised the courts are all turned around on how to handle cases like these, but it seems to me that the law has got to catch up with the complexity of modern life. They’re working from these centuries-old definitions of and assumptions about paternity.
Regarding mandatory at-birth paternity tests: it’s an interesting idea, and there are probably really good reasons for the state to pursue such a policy. It would go down hard, though, I think. I know I would have been insulted if my husband had to submit to such a test when our kids were born. That’s not necessarily rational of me, but there it is. I think you’d have a lot of outraged women who felt they were essentially be accused of infidelity.
Check out how insulated Virginia is for the most part in that animation. While the rest of the east coast turns dark, VA stays relatively okay.
I’ve been making vanilla that way since I saw this blog post awhile back. (http://tinyurl.com/2y8d3m) Even using top quality organic beans from Madagascar, I get the most amazing vanilla extract for cheap, cheap, cheap!