Michael Alan Miller

As one commenter noted, “Would they take the whole country down to protect the banks?”

“Yes.”

Yes, they will.

Think Japan’s 11-year recession was bad? They had a current-account surplus and a huge savings rate when they pulled this bullshit. We have, well, the opposite.

See you on the other side. If I live that long.

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Over 20,000 people have visited this site since its inception in January.

Let’s see, assuming that each person spent five minutes each on here reading the “nutcase” rants of this “douchebag” (all epithets from some of my more lovely commenters!), that’s more than 1,666 hours wasted. I’m responsible for reducing world productivity, and I’m quite proud of that fact.

Past performance is no indication of future results, but here’s to hoping I can do my part to further reduce world productivity as time goes on.

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I was skeptical in the past, absent hard data, that revolving doors saved much energy.

It turns out that they do.

Next, prepare for the Republican war against those “sissy revolving doors.”

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Incidentally, all this ridiculous worry about plastic bags, designed to distract us from the real issues at hand, is more misplaced than I thought. Turns out that paper bags, over their life cycle, require far more energy to make (making paper is hard and energy-intensive), and even the cloth or other-multi-use bags people are being encouraged to buy are almost worthless. Turns out you can make something like 100,000+ plastic bags for the energy that it takes to make one of those.

Just FYI.

If you want to help the environment more than anything else you could do, get rid of your car and plant some trees.

These dumb retrograde measures like banning plastic bags are worse than useless.

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I’ve seen much hay made about the supposedly slowing of the decline in housing prices.

Remember how house prices used to go up in summer, before all this mess happened?

What you’re seeing is that bump, except applied to a market going down. Year-over-year, house price declines are still accelerating, and will continue to do so. Just wait until fall.

Also, I think house price declines will democratize as the economy goes into deep recession. Markets that hadn’t yet been much effected, such as Seattle, Charlotte and Austin, will also begin to feel more pain, though nothing like the bubble markets in Florida, Nevada, Arizona and California.

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Good. (NSFW)

I’ve never understood the male (and female, alas) obsession with enormous breasts.

Keira Knightley nixed the upsizing of her breasts on publicity photos for some movie of hers, and unlike most Hollywood starlets, has not gotten breast enlargement.

Also good, because I think she’s great just how she is. I don’t know anything about her other than she’s quite cute, seems to have a decent personality, and was great in Love, Actually, but congrats to her for sticking it to idiots.

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I do hope all the yuppies and their clones move back into the city, and leave the countryside alone. We live in a city now and don’t much care for it, and probably won’t be repeating that mistake.

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This is a somewhat balanced view by the New York Times of Obama’s years teaching at the University of Chicago, but I have one quibble.

Without ever quite saying it, the piece seems to knock him for having ambition, something that Democratic politicians are routinely slammed for having. For some reason, Republicans rarely, if ever, are slammed for this. Why it’s unseemly for a Democrat to have ambition while it’s peachy for a Republican, I haven’t a clue, but that’s the narrative the press is trying to feed you.

Look. All politicians, especially anyone who even has a remote chance of becoming President, has more ambition than any 10 Morgan Freemans put together. That’s true of Obama. It’s true of McCain. It’s true of Edwards, of both Clintons, of Bush I. Strangely, now that I think about it, it might not actually be true of Bush II, as he was kind of tossed gently into the office by his daddy’s friends.

Anyway, you generally don’t get anywhere in life — much less become the President of the United States — without a whole heap of ambition. Why this is viewed differently for Democrats as opposed to Republicans is a mystery to me.

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I have to applaud MSNBC, even though applauding such low standards feels like clapping when a baby takes it first steps, but they actually reported the housing numbers correctly, using year-over-year rather than the utterly irrelevant month-to-month numbers that most other sites are conned by the NAR into using.

Watch other sites. Most others will get this utterly wrong.

Good job, MSNBC.

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Rip currents are one of the most deadly perils in the ocean, and also one of the easiest to avoid.

Well, not avoid, really, but they just aren’t at all dangerous if you don’t panic.

When I lived in Florida, I’d try to find rip currents because I’m lazy and I liked getting away from the shore. For me, they were like an escalator beyond the breakers.

If you find yourself in a rip current, do exactly what the article says. Don’t fight it. Ride it out, and maybe swim parallel to it. They usually aren’t very wide. When you don’t feel the current any more, swim back to shore.

The most any rip current ever pulled me out was maybe a quarter mile. That’s a good, long swim, but it’s better than dying, right?

I’m a good swimmer, but I’m dense. I sink like a log even in salt water — so if my dense ass can prosper in rip currents (I used to seek them out, remember), there’s no reason anyone should die because of one.

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Something missed when people talk about “house prices” is that they are mostly talking about land prices. A house in Lake City, Florida, costs almost the same to build as one in Palm Springs, California.

But two identical houses in Lake City, Florida, and Palm Springs, California will have quite different prices. For instance, a two-bedroom might sell for $1.5 million in Palm Springs, and $90,000 in Lake City, even if built with the very same materials by the very same builder with identical amenities.

Why? The land underneath the house, of course. The old realtor’s chant of “location, location, location,” actually does have some meaning, when divorced from its slimy sales connotation.

A tile costs the same wherever you buy it, but the land underneath that tile can have a vastly different price.

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You’d think an organization like Bank of America would be a paragon of efficiency.

And you’d think wrong.

I worked there for a year, or thereabouts. What I mostly handled was Exchange server, Outlook troubleshooting, some Sharepoint, and anything else that came up. Don’t worry, this isn’t a technical post. This is a social post. (Someone told me a few months ago they didn’t read my blog as it was a “tech blog,” and after reviewing my posts, only 5% of them are even remotely technical. Strange definition, and phobia, of tech there, really, but bizarrely common in our culture.)

In all of Bank of America, when I first got there, there was no way to keep track of the work coming into my team. None. This was an 18-23 member team spread out across the world, and there was no electronic (or other method) of keeping track of our tasks. It had been this way for years. And my group wasn’t some podunk team that no one cared about. My boss was one of the favorites of some of B of A’s senior staff, and is probably going to be high up in the organization one day, if he’s not already.

We were above level 3 support — the team that problems got sent to when absolutely no one else could figure them out — and in that capacity, we dealt with all of Bank of America’s help desks and technical teams. To put it in military terms, we were the Special Forces of techs at Bank of America. We jumped in and kicked a problem’s ass when everyone else said it couldn’t be done.

And, despite all that, we had no automated way to transfer tickets to the help desk, and they had no way to transfer anything to us. And the same for all the other teams that we dealt with. Everything was a phone call, no matter how minor, and often multiple phone calls as most of the other teams had no way to keep track of their tasks and duties, either. This was, needless to say, chaos.

There was a ticketing system, but it was mainly used to keep track of things that had already been completed, and was thus useless for any true tracking.

Needless to say, many, many things fell through the cracks, despite most people on my team being quite competent. Keeping track of 700-1,000 tasks a week is simply impossible for anyone, no matter how competent, with no automated way to do so. And to be fair, the team I worked with in Charlotte were all exceedingly competent at their jobs, and we all worked together well. The people on my team were not the problem — the processes and bureaucracy were.

The rest of Bank of America’s organization was no better, from what I saw of other teams. And B of A is one of the more successful banks in the industry. Just imagine how the bottom tier banks are doing. It just goes to show that in the competition of capitalism, you don’t have to be truly efficient, just more efficient than your competitors.

Admittedly, at the and, there was some effort to change this, but I left before that could be instantiated — but this was after being worse than bad for two decades, or more.

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A maroon dragonfly, taken at Mercer Slough Sunday.

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America might be moving to a more matriarchal society.

Sounds plausible. My guess as to why men don’t go to college in greater numbers relative to women is that men do not respond to social pressures as readily as women do, for whatever reason.

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I’d be willing to bet that many of the “studies” that purport to show increased brain cancer risk due to cell phone use are the first salvo of lawyers who intend to sue the telecom companies for oodles of undeserved money in class action lawsuits.

Lawyers against telecom companies. I have no idea who I’d want to win that one.

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