The lawn (what there is of it) tends to be wet after a warm humid night, making it very difficult to mow in the morning. I usually have to wait until late in the afternoon mow, otherwise the Official Weekend Pundit Lawnmower bogs down with wet grass, greatly slowing down the mowing process.
The deck can't be stained when the surface is wet. It's wet due to the condenser runoff from the air conditioning in BeezleBub's bedroom. All I need is three dry days in a row and the deck will be dry enough to stain.
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BeezleBub has learned yet another lesson in personal economics, in this case the cost of maintaining a vehicle. While he has had some experience with his 1975 Jeep CJ5, it's not quite the same thing as the Jeep is more of a classic vehicle used only during the summer months. However, his main ride, a 2003 Dodge Dakota 4x4, is his everyday transportation and it required quite a bit of work to make sure it passed its annual state inspection. BeezleBub dropped a substantial amount of his hard-earned money into his truck to have the upper and lower ball joints on both sides replaced and to have a new O2 sensor installed.While I could have done both myself, I told him that it would take me considerably longer than our favorite garage and that I was not inclined to do so. It was his truck, his responsibility, and if he didn't want to have the garage do it that I would help him do it instead, but I wasn't going to be the one actually doing the work. After thinking about it for a few microseconds, he decided he had better things to do with his time and had the local garage do the work instead.
One of the lessons learned? Time is money. If he doesn't want to spend the time then he'll have to spend the money.
And so it goes with another economic lesson.
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To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds quoting a line from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, I'd have to say these folks chose poorly.Immediately following the Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Fluke contraception controversy, a number of sponsors dropped Limbaugh in protest. But it turns out that may have been a hasty decision that in the end hurt them far more than it did Limbaugh. One example – Carbonite.
So how has dumping Limbaugh worked out for Carbonite? Not so well. Turns out alienating Rush’s fans may have been more damaging than alienating his critics.As is always said, actions have consequences. And as one commenter to the linked piece wrote, “It's true Darwinism at work!”
--snip--
On August 1 Carbonite released its 2d Quarter 2012 results, the first full quarter after dropping Limbaugh in March. The results shocked Wall Street, as Carbonite did not meet its growth targets, causing multiple analysts to drop the target price. The stock dropped 15% in a day.
What’s more, in a conference call, [Carbonite CEO David] Friend linked the decline to the Limbaugh action.
Later in the comments comparisons are made between Carbonite and Chick-fil-A and the moral stands between the CEOs of these two companies. The biggest difference? Chick-fil-A is a privately owned company and CEO Dan Cathy was risking his own family's money with his moral beliefs. Carbonite is a publicly owned company and CEO David Friend risked the stockholders' money with his 'moral' stand. That's not his job. His job is to make money for the stockholders, period. In this case, he didn't do that.
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Assistant Village Idiot makes a comparison between the US Postal Service of the past and Britain's National Health Service, showing how the latter isn't as good as many in the UK (and elsewhere) believe it is, and showing how the former isn't as good as it once was, and why.A good friend of us here at The Manse is married to a fellow from Eastern Europe and he commented upon the lack of socialized medicine here in the US and how great it was 'back home'. But my missus countered with, “Yeah, but how long do you have to wait to get treated if you were actually sick?”
There are lessons to be learned from both of these examples. Unfortunately the socialist Powers-That-Be in the US (the White House and Senate) have chosen to ignore them and are pushing hard for us to make the same mistakes again. (Insert definition of insanity here...)
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Bogie disproves Obama's claim that “the private sector is doing just fine.” Thursday afternoon she became a part of that “fineness” when she was laid off from her job.She spent part of her now-free time getting the last of her things from her former employer and taking care of a large number of chores around her home.
To quote Glenn Reynolds, “How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for ya'?”
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Harvard Economics professor Greg Mankiw points out how the Obama administration's rosy scenario about the economy doesn't even come close to what most private forecasters are predicting, and that overly optimistic forecast is being used to predict tax revenue. The problem: the projected revenues won't be there and that will drive the budgets that much deeper in to the red.(H/T Viking Pundit)
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Neo-neocon posts about “speaking truth to perceived lack of power” and the risks that entails, using both Bill Cosby and Mitt Romney as examples of how outrage can be directed towards people telling an unwanted and unpopular truth to the so-called victim classes.Telling them that their misfortunes are based upon their own uninformed decisions and allowing those who say they are 'helping' them to take control of the narrative isn't something they want to hear. But that doesn't make what they're hearing any less the truth.
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Mike Rogers of GraniteGrok quotes from David Brinkley's book, Washington Goes To War. It's telling, at least to me, that Brinkley and I were on the same wavelength when it came to the installation of air conditioning in our nation's capitol.I have always believed that HVAC in the Congressional offices and the Capitol Building was the beginning of the end for our great nation. After all, it gave the Congresscritters more time to come up with unnecessary laws, over the top spending, political machinations, and ways to take even more money away from the American people. I firmly believe HVAC should be outlawed in all Congressional offices and residences. That way, when it's too hot or too cold, they'll go home. If they're home they can't cause problems or do things in an effort to justify all their time in Washington.
Congress doesn't need to be in session most of the year. It doesn't even need to be in session for half the year. Almost all of the important things can be handled in only a few months. Everything else is surplusage, wasteful, and in the end, non-productive.
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Amy Payne asks, “Has any administration policy not killed jobs lately?” Unfortunately the answer is a resounding “NO!”She goes on to list just a few of them, including foot-dragging on free trade agreements, moratoriums and new heavy-handed regulations on offshore oil drilling, delaying the Keystone XL pipeline, over-reaching regulations imposed by the EPA that go well beyond their charter (both Congress and the court system has tried to rein it in, to no avail), greatly extending unemployment benefits (something that always seems to make unemployment last longer), the “stimulus” program that did nothing but stimulate graft and corruption, and of course, ObamaCare. And it appears Obama and the Congressional Democrats want to do even more to kill jobs, one of the biggest being increasing taxes on small businesses. It's the small businesses that create most of the jobs and Obama, Reid, and Pelosi want to add an ever greater burden upon them.
Talk about a disconnect from reality....
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I managed to finish up most of the outdoor work here at The Manse just before the skies opened up and dropped a lot of rain. Deb had been lounging out on the main deck out back and managed to get herself and her things back inside just as the rain started to fall.Not a bad way to end a Sunday afternoon.