The Legatum Prosperity Index assessed and ranked the prosperity of 142 countries based on eight sub-categories: economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, health, governance, education, safety and security, personal freedom, and social capital.
via Business Insider.
We are now 12th.
Embarrassing. No wonder people are leaving in droves.
This government, our government, a supposedly moderate government of Barack Obama (he has an iPad and a Spotify playlist and likes dogs and is funny on Jay Leno! He must be moderate!) is now claiming the legal right to install surveillance cameras in your home or on your property without a warrant. And is doing so, in some cases.
If they hate us for our freedoms over in Pakistan or wherever, I’m pretty certain the hatred will dry up soon, because this is not freedom. As CNET reported, “Police are allowed in some circumstances to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant, a federal judge said yesterday.”
The government has evidently lost its mind, as have our federal judges.
via Business Insider.
Clear 4th Amendment Violation. Need to get these cases up to the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible.
I love this author’s taken on the matter. It’s clear that we’re not hated for our freedoms. We have so few left. We have sold our liberty for the illusion of security and now have neither.
Very sad.
Bloomberg has reportedly turned down additional help from the U.S. National Guard. “We don’t need it,” Bloomberg insists, despite pleas from the boroughs for back-up. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”
via TheBlaze.com.
Do I have this right?
New Yorkers would rather starve than have someone with a firearm bring them something to eat? If so then they deserve to starve.
In the wake of hurricane Sandy we’re hearing stories of hungry New Yorkers being forced to dumpster dive for food. This is in addition to the stories of looters dressing like Con Edison workers to get access to houses, elected officials expressing their frustration with the Red Cross, state troopers being deployed to N.J. gas stations to help keep the peace, and Staten Island residents pleading for food. It’s safe to say that the government is not really all that organized when it come to preparing for a disaster.
With all the Sandy coverage over the last week I was reminded that in 2011 the Missouri, Mississippi, and Souris Rivers all flooded in North Dakota. The town of Minot had to be nearly completely evacuated. Lest there be any doubt, homes and cars were simply washed away. Thankfully, not one person in North Dakota was forced to dumpster dive for food. … But I digress.
Where the government sucks, the private sector rocks. Here’s a few stories over the years about Walmart and strawberry Pop-Tarts:
Survival gear and canned goods weren’t the only go-to categories. “We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,” a Wal-Mart rep says. “And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.”
via Adweek. (11/14/2004)
—
The Only Lifeline was the Walmart
Jessica Lewis couldn’t believe her eyes. Her entire community–Waveland, Miss., a Gulf Coast resort town of 7,000–had been laid waste by the storm, and Lewis, co-manager of the local Wal-Mart, was assessing the damage to her store. The fortresslike big box on Highway 90 still stood. But Katrina’s floodwaters had surged through the entrance, knocking over refrigerators full of frozen pizza, shelves of back-to-school items, racks of lingerie. Trudging through nearly two feet of water in the fading light, Lewis thought, How are we ever going to clean up this mess?
That quickly became the least of Lewis’s worries. As the sun set on Waveland, a nightmarish scene unfolded on Highway 90. She saw neighbors wandering around with bloody feet because they had fled their homes with no shoes. Some wore only underwear. “It broke my heart to see them like this,” Lewis recalls. “These were my kid’s teachers. Some of them were my teachers. They were the parents of the kids on my kids’ sports teams. They were my neighbors. They were my customers.”
Lewis felt there was only one thing to do. She had her stepbrother clear a path through the mess in the store with a bulldozer. Then she salvaged everything she could and handed it out in the parking lot. She gave socks and underwear to shivering Waveland police officers who had climbed into trees to escape the rising water. She handed out shoes to her barefoot neighbors and diapers for their babies. She gave people bottled water to drink and sausages, stored high in the warehouse, that hadn’t been touched by the flood. She even broke into the pharmacy and got insulin and drugs for AIDS patients. “This is the right thing to do,” she recalls thinking. “I hope my bosses aren’t going to have a problem with that.” …
And if that wasn’t enough:
At the urging of CEO Lee Scott, its truckers hauled $3 million of supplies to the ravaged zone, arriving days before the Federal Emergency Management Agency in many cases. The company also contributed $17 million in cash to relief efforts. Wal-Mart also demonstrated how efficient it can be. As of Sept. 16, all but 13 of the facilities that Katrina had shut down were up and running again. The company had located 97% of the employees displaced by the storm and offered them jobs at any Wal-Mart operation in the country.via CNN Money. (10/03/2005)
More recently:
Walmart and its warehouse store Sam’s Club managed to send 7,000 generators to its stores in the Northeast that were in the path of superstorm Sandy at the last minute, reports Shelly Banjo at the Wall Street Journal.
It was quite a feat, but how did they make it happen?
Thousands of truck drivers from Walmart’s supply chain have been scurrying around the Northeast to get things where they’re needed.
They’ve been constantly going between Walmart’s huge distribution centers and the big box stores.
“We kick into emergency mode,” one driver in the middle of a 14-hour shift tells the WSJ. “There’s loads of rain, store managers are anxious asking us when their next shipment of water is coming in … But we know it’s up to us to get water and other supplies to the stores and customers as fast as possible.”
Customers had emptied the shelves by Monday night, so employees from all over the region came into New Jersey to get the stores running by 7 AM the next morning.
And, like home improvement chains Home Depot and Lowe’s, Walmart has years of experience responding to disasters. It sets up charging stations and stocks up on the right items beforehand for the hundreds that come by in the storm’s immediate aftermath.
via Business Insider. (11/01/2012)
You see, this is what the Walmarts, the Home Depots, and Lowe’s do — LOGISTICS!! (It’s a lot like a UPS commercial.) FEMA does not do logistics; and frankly they’re terrible at it. After everyone’s got some dry clothes and had something to eat, FEMA comes in and passes out checks. That’s what FEMA’s good at.
Good luck to those eating from the dumpster. Maybe if you were just a little more prepared self reliant you’d be at home under a blanket listening to the radio and having cup-o-soup and a roll instead. Maybe you will learn from this experience that the government cannot take care of you the same way that you can take care of you. Maybe.
Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan has many advantages as he tries to extend his nearly uninterrupted three-decade control of the Illinois House.
His Democrats have more campaign money. His party has home-state President Barack Obama to drive the vote. Perhaps most important, Madigan drew the district boundaries for each of the 118 House contests that will play out in Tuesday’s election.
Given all that, Madigan is positioned to add to his 64-54 majority.
via Chicago Tribune.
Someday Michael Madigan’s daughter will not be the Illinois Attorney General.
Someday the people of Illinois will realize just what self serving piece of garbage Michael Madigan really is and demand that he be thrown in jail, burn his house down, and then burn the ashes.
All of Illinois’ problem can be laid at the feet of Michael Madigan. The debt, the fraud, the corruption, the bad roads, the pension fiasco, … everything. It’s been his piss poor planning for the last 30 years that has brought us to this point in time where the state is bankrupt and looking for a federal bailout.
We need to Kill the Machine.
Blatantly stolen from Second City Cop:
Is the lure of a $25 gift card enough to persuade a parent who’s not involved in their child’s education to get involved?
Seventy Chicago Public Schools that have struggled to engage parents are about to find out.
At Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request, Walgreen Co. has agreed to provide $25 gift cards to parents who pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during report card pickup days.
“This is a way, in my view, of incentivizing responsible parenting,” Emanuel told a news conference at Field Elementary School, 7019 N. Ashland.
Is he serious? “incentivizing responsible parenting?” In what parallel universe is this unmitigated ass living in? If you “incentivize” (which isn’t even a real word) bad behavior, what do you get? More bad behavior.
Every study in existence proves this. Example A is the entire welfare system – you pay someone not to work, you get a shitload of people not working. You give someone a check for pushing out babies, pretty soon the birthrate skyrockets and you have 15, 14 even 13-year-olds having babies. You know what reduced the teen birthrate back in the 1990’s? Stopping the checks.
Emanuel said he got the gift card idea during one of his morning workouts.
“That’s what happens when I start swimming. I start coming up with ideas,” the mayor said.
The mayor then approached Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson, who jumped at the opportunity to “give back” to the city where the company has operated for 112 years and now has 150 stores.
This explains part of where he keeps getting these fucked up ideas – chlorine poisoning.
via Second City Cop.
So that’s kinda entertaining. But I fail to see how giving away gift cards to parents who come pick-up report cards and sit for parent-teacher conferences is exactly creating an incentive for bad behavior. Seems like good behavior to me.
The bigger problem with this is like Chris Rock (and Barack Obama) have pointed out that we keep setting the bar so low.
Another comparison, though, is illustrated by an old Chris Rock joke: “People say Colin Powell speaks so well. What’d they expect him to say? ‘Ahmma drop me a bomb’?” There’s something incredibly condescending to think of saying that a man who has risen to the ranks of 4-star general or United States Senator is “articulate,” but it’s always meant as a compliment. In reality, though, it’s a backhanded one.
Obama is more than “articulate,” of course; he’s a truly gifted orator. And he was editor of the Harvard Law Review and otherwise has some mighty impressive credentials. It does seem, though, that the bar is set much lower for Obama than most men who would be president.
via Outside the Beltway.
Isn’t there a soft bigotry in saying that these parents need this incentive to do things that other parents do [without the incentive]?
I actually believe — from what I’m seen with my own eyes living on the West Side for 9 years — that the vast majority of parents want to help their kids get a good education. They want to be a positive influence in their children’s lives. They just simply do not know how because they were never taught by their parents.
What we need to do is help train parents to be better parents. Not throw $25 in gift cards at them and expect them to suddenly become Ma and Pa Cleaver.
Like hundreds of thousands of Chinese who leave each year, she was driven by an overriding sense that she could do better outside China. Despite China’s tremendous economic successes in recent years, she was lured by Australia’s healthier environment, robust social services and the freedom to start a family in a country that guarantees religious freedoms.
“It’s very stressful in China — sometimes I was working 128 hours a week for my auditing company,” Ms. Chen said in her Beijing apartment a few hours before leaving. “And it will be easier raising my children as Christians abroad. It is more free in Australia.”
via NYTimes.com.
No story in the NYT about the intellectual flight from the U.S.
Funny how that works. Guess that’s not news worthy.
Tens of thousands of homeowners who suffered wind and storm damage this week will get financial relief from rulings by several governors that insurers must treat Sandy as a tropical storm and not a hurricane. …
“Whether they call it a hurricane or something else, that translates into the percentage I have to pay to get my apartment redone,” she said before Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that homeowners would not have to pay hurricane deductibles. “I had no idea. It’s crazy, and it’s going to cost so much money.”Homeowners’ insurance policies in coastal areas almost always include a provision that the deductible will be higher when damage is caused by a hurricane than a lesser windstorm. The difference can be steep — in the thousands of dollars — because the regular deductible is a flat dollar amount, while the hurricane deductible is connected to the replacement value of the house.
via NYTimes.com.
Right about now dozens of actuaries at all the big insurance companies tossed a huge pile of paper in the air and started to bang their head against the wall.
The title of this story at the NYT is “Governors Promote Lower Deductibles for Homeowners” which is one way of looking at it. The other way is to say, “Governors pander for votes, interfere with the insurance system, annual premiums going to go up up up.”
You don’t get to negotiate your insurance policy terms after the fact. If you wanted a lower deductible then you could have purchased insurance with a lower deductible. If you wanted hurricane replacement value insurance then you could have bought that as well. But if you went cheap and bought the typical policy… then you got the typical policy.
So when the insurance companies start running the numbers they will figure out how much more they’re going to pay out as a result of Gov. Cuomo’s unilateral action. Then they divide that amount over all the policies in the area over 5 or 10 years.
So take your joy now. Because when you get your insurance bill next year something tells me the NYT will not be writing a story about how you can’t afford to pay it.
