Best political Onion of the year

Barack Obama Defeats Barack Hussein Obama | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

In one of the most hotly contested and pivotal races in U.S. history, Democratic candidate Barack Obama emerged victorious on Nov. 4, beating out the one man who could have taken the presidency away from him, Barack Hussein Obama.

According to sources, the socialist Muslim radical, who had close ties to known terrorists, smoked crack cocaine in the back of a limousine, and was by all accounts the Antichrist himself, emerged out of nowhere in late 2007 to challenge the progressive junior Senator from Illinois.

Almost poetic in its, well, truthiness... :)

once again...

If these weathermen don't stop using the phrase "dodged a bullet" ever time we have a winter watch, warning, or advisory that ends up with just rain or jack shit (that's a technical term to meteorologists, I've been told, but they can't say it on the air), I'm going to be very, very pissed off.

Trust me, weathermen: my shoes smell a lot worse than that Iraqi reporter's.

so, any of you think this will work?

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . End Game | PBS:

My last prediction for 2009 has to do with venture capital. While investments in technology will continue, the really smart VCs will realize there is a much better and more certain way to make a ton of money in the short term: start a bank. Look for the rebirth of community banks, in this case backed by VCs. Work with me on this one. There is no credit available because the big banks won't lend. But it takes only about $20 million to start a very fine little bank that WILL loan money because the cash can be acquired from the Fed for almost nothing and lent at high rates to technology companies that can pay it back. By creating banks the technology industry will become self-funding. And when the big banks finally stop being frozen with fear and want to take back the lending business, they'll have to buy all those little banks for at least a 10X multiple. It's not like starting Cisco or Dell, but a 10-bagger business model that can be replicated over and over again while actually helping the nation can't fail.

I realize that he's right about starting a bank effectively being "free money" (given the Reserve's current non-rate), but the attitude of the VCs has always been "fund 20 things - the 1 success will pay for the other 19 failures a thousand times over and you can sometimes sell what's left of those 19 anyways".  A bank is more reliable in making money, but it takes longer (and all the attempts to make it faster to make money in banking is what keeps causing these market collapses, from S&Ls to the current mortgage-caused fiasco - there's a reason I like Credit Unions: they don't want to make huge profits for somebody, they simply want to survive).  I'm not so sure a VC would want to wait for 20 little successes to keep successful vs having that one big hit that he could retire on.

can we get realistic?

There's a difference between "do not call" registries, the "do not call cell phones ever" laws, spam, and junk mail.

That difference: cost. more specifically the cost to who, and whether or not they can endure it without having to massively change their infrastructure to deal with it (in the SHORT term - i understand the "green" factor but that's too long term a view right now).

Do Not Call registries support the idea that it costs us money in productivity if we're interrupted for marketing calls.  The phone companies like limiting it because those calls are usually made on fixed-cost unlimited local plans that cost them a bit to support if they're flooded.  Local calls are actually not very profitable and like with cell phone plans, the cost to the customer is based on "average" usage, rather than flooded usage by one customer - local phone companies get much of their money from serving calls for the long distance companies.

Do Not Call Cell Phone law benefits are two-fold.  The customer base likes them because it costs them money to receive a call.  The phone companies like them because it keeps their cell lines clear for the real phone calls (and phone-web traffic) and thus keeps them from having to add more cells and more expensive lines to the towers.

Do Not Spam laws are beneficial for similar reasons: they flood the networks of companies that pay fixed and usage costs, and flood the mail boxes of users with limited disk space, especially corporations that would rather have their networks available for their job.

Junk Mail?  It's paid for, by companies, to the government.  It's a major piece of what keeps the USPS in business.  By being paid on a per-item basis (the ultimate in profitability, unless that per-item cost is a loss, which it (barely) isn't).  It makes up for the fact that generally as far as personal mail goes, the only profitable month of the year is December (just like retail sales and Black Friday).

If you take out junk mail, you take out a major cash-cow for the USPS and guess what: we're already subsidizing them in tax dollars.

All you'd be doing is stopping companies from wasting money and making the tax payers pay to keep the USPS afloat (and competitive with FedEx and friends) instead.

NO government is going to go for that, no matter what party and no matter what the "green" effect might be.

Best you could hope for is a law requiring all 3rd class and below (junk) mail be done in 100% recycled paper.

I once wrote...

...that I thought Jesse Martin (of Rent and Law & Order) would make a perfect Muppet Show guest.  And now here he is on the new Muppet Christmas Special.

I wonder if they read me out there?

nah...