Looking around this weekend you’d think the Nor’easter had been a small storm because so much of the foot of snow that fell has already melted away. The same can be said of the snow piles created during snow removal. The roof of The Gulch and surrounding homes are bare, the snow having melted away in a couple of days. Then again, March snows tend to melt away pretty quickly because of the warmer temperatures usually seen this time of year.
I have to wonder if last week’s snowstorm was my fault. After all, I did renew my lease for the boat slip where we berth the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout during boating season and asked the boatyard where I store it to have it ready by the second week of May. It’s the late winter version of washing your car in the summer – it rains.
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Watching the collapse of a number of banks, many heavily leveraged into both crypto-currency and being woke, does not fill me with the dread so many others are feeling.
This isn’t a repeat of the banking meltdown during the first years of the Obama Administration where banks were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, most of the mortgages being risky sub-prime, interest-only, and NINJA mortgages, i.e. ‘junk’ mortgages. Mortgages were handed out like toilet paper in a high-end restroom to people who really didn’t qualify for them, the banks having been pressured into doing so under the Community Reinvestment Act. When the toll of the recession started making itself felt, a rapidly increasing number of those mortgages defaulted because people couldn’t make their payments. Mortgage-backed securities collapsed and took a lot of investment banks, commercial banks, and other financial institutions with them.
The only thing that will be a repeat of last time is the unethical (and probably illegal) privatization of profits and socialization of risks. If these banks and other financial institutions make profits, their shareholders make money. But if those same banks and other financial institutions make bad investments or other financial moves, they are made whole by the the taxpayers. To all intents and purposes, there is no real risk to investors because Uncle Sugar will make sure they get paid. That isn’t supposed to be how it works. The American taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for other people’s bad financial decisions.
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I find it interesting that a New York D.A. is going after Trump for allegedly paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and a number of other women. But when Bill Clinton did the same thing – in his case paying off Paula Jones – there was nary a peep from anyone about Clinton’s illegal act.
Former President Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones a whopping $850,000 to keep her quiet over sexual harassment claims — but was never arrested for it.Double standards much? But then that’s all we’ve come to expect from the Democrats these days.
The case stands in stark contrast to reports that former President Donald Trump will be arrested on Tuesday for an alleged $130,000 hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 over an alleged sexual encounter that the two had in 2006.
Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to charges over the payment in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison.
In 1998, the Washington Post reported, “President Clinton reached an out-of-court settlement with Paula Jones yesterday, agreeing to pay her $850,000 to drop the sexual harassment lawsuit that led to the worst political crisis of his career and only the third presidential impeachment inquiry in American history.”
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How do we correct deficiencies in Math and English in our schools? There are a number of tried and true ways to do so, but it looks like New York State is trying something different:
Lowering the minimum scores for proficiency in Math and English.
Yeah, that’s going to work out well for the kids who are struggling to become proficient.
New York will change what it takes for students to reach “proficiency” on state math and English language arts tests, calling last year’s lower scores the “new normal.”Lowering the minimum scores doesn’t fix the problem. It hides them. How the Board of Regents thinks this is going to help anyone escapes me. What it’s going to do is push more kids out of the public school systems and leave the kids stuck in the public schools nowhere to go, nowhere to get the help they need in order to become more proficient.
A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight to determine whether schools are showing improvement from year to year. On Thursday, the committee wanted to clarify that they must also reset scores because the tests will have new performance standards.
Last year some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet again, the “state” pushes a policy that pushes everyone to the lowest common denominator, i.e. equity.
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From comments I posted elsewhere in the net come this, something that is becoming ever more important in light of SloJoe’s ill advised push to make washing machines even worse in their ability to actually get clothes clean:
As I have commented elsewhere and in public, increasing energy efficiency reaches a point of diminishing returns, sometimes quicker than most people realize. Whether one is talking about lighting, heating, appliances (washing machine, clothes drier, refrigerator, dishwasher, etc.).Spending a lot of money for a minuscule increase in energy efficiency doesn’t make sense on any level, particularly if that increase energy efficiency comes with a large decrease in the ability of that more energy efficient appliance to do what it’s supposed to do.
My employer went through an efficiency upgrade program in our facility a few years ago, changing all of the lighting over from fluorescent, sodium vapor lamps (for outside) and incandescent lamps to LED lighting, replacing 40 and 50 gallon electric water heaters with point-of-use demand heaters (including timers to disable them when the building is unoccupied overnight), using automatic switches to turn interior lights on only when rooms are occupied, increased ceiling insulation, and replacing seals on exterior doors and windows.
Our electrical usage for lighting decreased by over 30%. Our heating/cooling costs dropped by 20%.
While we could have done even more to reduce energy usage, we had reached the point of diminishing returns, that point where any additional monies spent would not see a return on investment, costing us more than anything we would save.
It isn't much different with the washing machines that SloJoe wants to make so efficient that they won't work. We saw this already during the initial Energy Star push for energy efficiency. It got to the point where the machines used a fraction of the water and electricity of pre-Energy Star machines...but clothing was coming out of those machines as dirty as when they were put in.
Consumer Reports tests all kinds of appliances and there was an issue the then-missus and I read through that had tested a plethora of Energy Star rated machines because we were in the market for a new washing machine. For the first time in their history they couldn't recommend any of the 35+ machines they tested because none of them were able to clean the test loads of dirty clothing CR used to evaluate machines. With one or two exceptions, none of the machines provided enough water to get the interiors of the test loads of clothing wet. If the clothing isn't wet, then it isn't getting washed.
It looks like SloJoe wants to go past even that level of 'efficiency'. The machines will cost even more money, will not last nearly as long as old machines, and you'll still have to wash your clothing by hand.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where temperatures are going to in the 50’s this week, where preparations for the new boating season are already being made, and where the snow is rapidly melting.