links for 2009-11-23
On 23 November 02009 with 10 comments
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.
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.
Very impressive.
Hey, don't look at me: I'm doing my part.
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.
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.
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.
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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