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by Daniel Foty
This little news release got lost in all the Irene hype last Friday (and cynics of course can make a good case that this was not a coincidence, since it was a good day to "bury" bad news).... but in case you missed it....
The GDP numbers for 2Q11 were revised downward - with the growth number being reduced from the earlier estimate of +1.3% to a revised +1.0%. That's on top of the still-standing (at least for now) 1Q11 estimate of +0.4%.
by Art Woolf
Vermont's most well-known environmentalist, Bill McKibben, argues in the Free Press that
It's not mere chance that we've had one of the biggest snowpacks on record, followed by the wettest spring on record, followed now by a hurricane bearing almost unprecedented loads of water. It's simply physics.
I haven't read any meterologists, or physicists, making that claim, although I confess that I don't read their reports or blogs.
He continues
Not quite two weeks ago, Senator Sanders – who is always protesting something – was on the warpath over the proposed closing of post offices in some small Vermont towns. The USPS wants to shut down a number of its facilities across the nation, not just in Vermont.
Well, actually, it doesn't "want" to shut down the post office in any town. No big organization – from the Pentagon to General Motors – likes to downsize. When it does happen, it is because there is no choice. It is no longer "grow or die," but "shrink or die."
And why does the USPS need to downsize? It has a monopoly on the delivery of first class mail, after all, and isn't shy about raising the price of a stamp. Obviously, e-mail is a competitor. As are UPS & Fed Ex, especially in the delivering of packages and overnight mail. Still ... these are long term trends and it seems unlikely that executives at the USPS just noticed them. They've had time to plan and adjust. Why, all of a sudden, is the USPS in such drastically bad shape that it has lost $20 billion in the last four years – $8.5 of that in fiscal 2010 – and just announced it will be insolvent within a month?
by Tom Evslin
February, 1984: Big Brother is not in power but Apple’s famous Big Brother ad did run during the SuperBowl. Also their less famous ad in which an endless stream of pin-striped lemmings with attache cases march off a cliff. Clearly these were the MIS managers who believed “no one ever lost his job because he chose IBM.” Now the Macintosh is due to be introduced at SoftCon in New Orleans. Dow Jones hired our company, Solutions, to develop a Mac product to show in their booth to keep a promise which Dow Jones Executive VP Bill Dunn had made to Steve Jobs.
Our software is done. Well, not exactly done but we have a really sexy rolling demo with pull down menus to get more information about the product. What I’ve done is make a slideshow out of all pictures in the scrapbook (the one piece of Macintosh software I’ve really mastered) and a text crawler from text in the scrapbook. We can change the slideshow by having graphic artist Patty draw a new picture and cut and paste it into the scrapbook. Cool!
by Daniel Foty
The great American philosopher Yogi Berra once opined that "Making predictions is difficult - especially about the future."
However, there is one general area of "predictions" about which we can easily make predictions. Essentially, every "prediction" related to something "green" will not be based on any underlying reality - but will instead be based solely on wishful fantasizing. And when those "predictions" (sic) don't pan out, they're just quietly dropped - with the notion-and-hope being that they'll just slide quietly down the ol' memory hole, so that they can be supplanted with further "predictions."
Given the continuing waste of scarce time, energy, and resources on a variety of nutty "green" ideas, it is incumbent upon us to keep track of the failed "green" predictions - and hold the predictors to account, so that they can be prevented from further wastes of scarce resources in the future.
One example is the confident predictions made (and that appeared in a variety of quarters) two or so years back - that a "practical" and "affordable" electric vehicle would soon emerge from China. You might have noticed that today.... you don't see any of them around, or hear much about them.
So let's examine the present situation, below the fold.
Continue reading ""Electric Cars" - Still Shorted to Ground" »
by Tom Evslin
At 1:36PM yesterday the lights went out for 1103 members of Vermont Electric Coop (VEC) in South Hero, including us at our summer place on the Lake. No surprise; tropical storm Irene was raging up Vermont. No need to call VEC in a panic, though; I could see immediately from their website that they knew about the outage including the exact number of customers affected. VEC was the first utility in Vermont to install smart meters and they know immediately when a meter goes silent. Unlike other utilities who haven't installed smart meters yet, VEC doesn't have to wait for customers to call in. Equally important, they can tell from their monitoring system almost exactly where the break is BEFORE the trucks roll so the linepeople can go straight to the problem rather than having to search along the road or through the woods.
Continue reading "Irene Lesson # 1 – Smart Grid Great for Power Restoration" »
by Art Woolf
Senator Sanders' proposal to "reform" Social Security is pretty simple:
His bill would apply the same payroll tax already paid by more than nine out of 10 Americans to those with incomes over $250,000 a year.
The proposal seems to have only one leg. According to VPR's story
There are currently no co-sponsors of the bill.
Here are some problems with SSSSS:
Continue reading "Senator Sanders' Social Security Solution" »
by Chris Campion
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a friend to all tax increases, especially in time of recession, recently advised his adoring legions that he's going to help Americans by increasing the costs of employing people while unemployment hovers at 9%:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Thursday that he will introduce legislation that would expand the reach of the payroll tax, as part of an effort to give further support to Social Security.
In other words, the "Independent" from Brooklyn thinks that an additional fee slapped onto each currently-employed person is good for the economy - in that it will (in his mind) increase payments to Social Security, thereby perpetuating the hoax that there's a Trust Fund, and, um, the payments you've made all your life are still in there. Yep, just ask a Congressman - he'll tell you, he swears that the money is there. In a box somewhere. In Virginia. He promises.
Republicans, and some Democrats, are looking to resolve the deficit crisis by dipping into Social Security, Sanders suggested.
But that's just it - Congress has repeatedly dipped into Social Security funds and used them to pay for other things. Why was that OK before, but it's not OK now?
“We have to deal with that (the deficit), but Social Security hasn’t contributed one penny to the national debt; it’s funded by the payroll tax,” Sanders said.
We were out of commission yesterday and expect to be posting from a remote, undisclosed location for the next several days. That, anyway, is the word from CVPS central.
We were fortunate. What is an inconvenience for us has been a disaster for many.
Our thoughts and prayers.
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