The ski areas up north are certainly happy, seeing as the 10” plus snowfall certainly helped them during this long holiday weekend.
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Cole still wanders around looking for Bagheera, something I didn't think would last this long. He's also become quite 'clingy', requiring constant attention when we're home. I don't know if this is insecurity on his part or some other feline condition that makes him appear emotionally needy. He's also been more affectionate, if that's possible.***********
Wirecutter presents us with an interesting table showing the percentage of cabinet members under each president with experience in the private sector. The list goes back as far as Teddy Roosevelt up to present day. One of the commenters links to information for the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.Care to guess which president's administration shows the lowest percentage, by far?
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (Socialist – VT) wants to further burden those who help finance new jobs by increasing the capital gains tax from 15%to 20%, a 33% increase.Yeah, that makes sense. Let's create even more disincentives for people to invest in businesses by punishing them for doing so. That ought to help the unemployment numbers.
NOT.
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Now the SEIU is stealing Medicaid money from Michigan families with disabled children. If it weren't a state employees union doing this they would be considered mobsters and prosecuted under the RICO Act.Unions served a useful purpose in their time. Public employee unions have served no other purpose than to siphon taxpayer money into Democrat campaign coffers. It's time for them to go.
(H/T Maggie's Farm)
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Some people are just too damn stupid or too damn corrupt to hold public office. One of them is Grant County (Wisconsin) District Attorney Lisa Riniker, who is pressing felony sexual assault charges against a 6-year old boy for playing doctor with the 5-year old daughter of a well know political figure. (The girl's brother, who was also playing doctor with them, has not been charged.)Should the boy's family knuckle under to prosecutor's demands he will have to register as a sex offender once he turns 18.
Riniker's defense for going forward with the charges? "The legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute if it wanted to. The legislature did no such thing."
To me (and many others) this proves the legal system is seriously broken as common sense no longer exists within it.
Were I the judge involved with this case I would dismiss the charges out of hand and censure the District Attorney for wasting the court's time with something that should have easily been handled by the parents.
(H/T Maggie's Farm)
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It's not all that surprising to me that jobs are going unfilled despite the high unemployment rate. It all comes down to applicants having the required skills needed to fill the jobs. Unfortunately there appears to be a dearth of workers in the trades needed to fill those positions, but plenty of people with college degrees in subjects that do no make them any more employable than someone without any education beyond high school.My soon-to-be ex-brother-in-law is having problems finding experience machinists for his shop. That means he ends up taking on inexperienced people and training them on the job. That takes time and money and raises his costs. What's worse, as soon as someone is trained to a level that allows them to work independently there's nothing stopping them from leaving and going to another machine shop. It can be a lose-lose situation for someone like him.
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Being an RF kind of guy, the fact that Smart Meters may interfere with other wireless devices in a home is not surprising by any means. Seeing as they use a couple of what are called ISM bands (Industrial/Scientific/Medical), basically radio frequency bands that allow low power unlicensed operation of various transmitters for a variety of purposes, interference is to be expected.Considering one of the bands being used is 2.4GHz, interference to some cordless phones, home wireless networks, and other wireless devices like computer keyboards and mice is inescapable. One solution is for the phones and wireless routers to use a different ISM band, like 5.8GHz, a band that for the moment is underused. (There are plenty of these devices available and most laptops of recent vintage, tablets, and smart phones are capable of using this band.)
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I had no intention of writing or posting anything more about the OWS protests, but I'll make an exception in this case, where the unhappy, miserable souls have decided it's perfectly OK to disrupt Christmas shopping at Union Square in San Francisco.(H/T Pirate's Cove)
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There are more shenanigans coming from the NLRB branch of the AFL-CIO, with a new rule that subverts the right of employers to have adequate time to respond to unionizing efforts. The lone Republican on the NLRB has considered resigning in order to force the two Democrats (and former union officials) to stay within the law while denying them the quorum required for them to pass the new rule. (One of the two Democrats was a recess appointment by Obama and that appointment expires at the end of the year, hence the haste to ramrod the rule change.)We must also remember that this is the same NLRB contingent that has decided Boeing doesn't have the right to build new factories in right-to-work states even though such a move has not affected union employment in their factories in Washington state. In fact, Boeing hired an additional 2500 employees in Washington even though they're opening a new plant in South Carolina.
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You may have seen the story about a New Hampshire soldier's death in Iraq and the puppy he'd adopted on ABC's 20/20 this past Friday night. The soldier's family worked to bring the puppy to their home and with the help of then Congressman Paul Hodes, succeeded in doing so. They named the dog Hero. But that's not the crux of this story. Rather, it's this.As ABC reporter Kimberly Launier wrote, the photo she took of Hero was not Photoshopped.
Go see this for yourself.