Category: Quick Hits

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The fine print where I was instructed to put the name of my campaign committee reads "Paid for with a milk jug full of nickels"

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Bestowing this website's most prestigious award will have to wait just a bit longer; I couldn't resist the opportunity to make two points about the (god, I can barely stomach the sound of this phrase anymore) "fiscal cliff" "deal" reached to absolutely no one's surprise at the last minute.

First, from "Bart to the Future", Season 11 Episode 1 of The Simpsons.

Lisa: If I'm going to bail the country out, I'll have to raise taxes, but in my speech I'd like to avoid calling it a, "painful emergency tax."

Milhouse: What about, "colossal salary grab."

Lisa: See, that has the same problem. We need to soften the blow.

Milhouse: Well, if you just want to out-and-out lie … [Lisa doesn't object] Okay, we could call it a "temporary refund adjustment."

Lisa: I love it.

Milhouse: Really? What else do you love, Lisa?

You've no doubt heard that payroll taxes are going to "increase", which will (insert your own trite jargon like "take a bigger bite out of your paycheck") in addition to making your AM talk radio-loving coworkers shit themselves in agony. See, this is the brilliance of right-wing framing, which the media swallows unquestioningly time after time. The reduction in the payroll tax was passed as a temporary (stimulus) measure. I suppose it's semantic, but the expiration of something that was supposed to be temporary is not a "tax increase." And this is why we should run screaming from hare-brained schemes like "gas tax holidays" and other "temporary" tax cuts because they have a way of becoming permanent – or providing this easy, disingenuous talking point about "voting to raise taxes!" if they do not.

Moreover, the legislation was laden with tax breaks for the Right People.
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Most interesting is the millions in "incentives" for mining companies to purchase safety equipment and train workers in safety techniques. And this is perhaps everything you need to know about what's wrong with Congress, in a nutshell: if an industry pays enough lobbyists and donates enough money to the right members of Congress, we end up paying them to do what the law obligates them to do.

Why are we incentivizing this? If we want mines to have a certain level of safety equipment, require it by law. If they don't have it, shut them down.

But business doesn't obey the government in our system – government obeys business. We end up having to bribe them to obey the regulations and laws that we already allowed them to write for themselves.

Pretty exciting that we get to listen to all the same horseshit again in two months, though.

Another year is in the books and I want to take a moment to address some new developments in the corporate boardroom of Gin and Tacos, Inc. (a subsidiary of Nordyne Defense Dynamics). I'll resume throwing content at you tomorrow, starting with annually beloved Ginandtacos.com CotY award presentation.

Our crack team of product development specialists would like to make you aware of several things.

1. If you haven't already, follow G&T on the ol' Facebox. I am investigating adding a Twitter account. The benefits are obvious to me, but the character limit bugs the hell out of me and I'm not sure I need another online time-suck. We shall see.

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2. I need to gauge the level of potential interest in podcasts. I hate podcasting in the sense that they're usually done on a schedule (i.e., weekly) irrespective of whether the host has anything interesting to talk about. Often they do not, and podcasts devolve into painfully self-indulgent and boring exercises in ad-libbing into a microphone for extended time periods. What I'd like to do is an infrequent series of podcasts based around a guest or guests in a discussion/interview format. The goal will be simply to find interesting people to talk to about a wide range of issues. Rather than a chance to make you listen to Ed flap his gums for 30 minutes, I'm looking at it more as a potential way to introduce you to some interesting people, topics, and issues. If I don't have a guest to talk to or something interesting to say, there will be no podcasts until I do. They would be available for free, of course.

3. Speaking of, even though traffic has increased consistently over the years the site remains and will remain free of advertisements. If you have to ask why, you must be new. Sticking to that principle has a downside that becomes apparent in late December when the annual hosting bill arrives. So here is where I give you a number of options.

You can do nothing and continue to enjoy the site for free. This is called "free riding", and it's an entirely rational behavior. I have done (for ten years!!) and will continue to do this every day whether I make a million bucks, nothing at all, or I have to pay out of pocket for the privilege.

You can use this tip jar / donation link to contribute an amount of your choosing to defray the costs of this site. If you happen to be saddled with extra cash and feel like donating fifty bucks, I will be extremely grateful. However, if donating fifty cents (or zero cents) is more in line with your current budget, my gratitude will be no less. Your tips and contributions are (obviously) voluntary but greatly appreciated.

4. Merchandise. Coffee mugs. I know you want mugs and whatnot. Here's the thing: I'm a perfectionist when it comes to this sort of thing, which is both annoying and counterproductive. I could just slap the background image on a white surface and call it a day. I'd rather offer you something more creative and appealing than that. So the tale of the Gin and Tacos Coffee Mug will be like Shellac's Terraform album, which was recorded and then sat unreleased for almost three years because the band couldn't get the cover art and packaging done to their liking. I've had a few design folks take a whack at it and I haven't seen anything I like yet. When I get something that I feel is good enough to charge money for, you'll be the first to know.

5. I want to start doing a Link of the Day post in the afternoons; a quick, random item of interest, possibly along a weekly or monthly theme. The longer, ranty-style posts you're used to will continue to appear every night at midnight.

6. Thank you all for making the site more interesting than it would be otherwise with your comments and contributions. Even though I've progressed from zero to one to fifty-plus comments per post, I still read every single one. If you can take the time to say something, I can make the time to listen.

Onward.

I guess we shouldn't ask questions like, "I wonder how far House Republicans will go to avoid voting for token, largely symbolic tax increases on people making over $1,000,000 annually" unless we're prepared for the answer. The crazy, crazy answer.

It was fun to watch Lindsey Graham forced to eat a pile of his own dung on Sunday morning, no matter how sarcastic his "Hats off to the President. He won." might have been. I guess that makes him smarter than Boehner's Commandos, who do not appear to have figured it out yet.

Are these people terrible at politics or secretly brilliant? By setting this deadline after which many unpalatable consequences will happen – tax hikes, draconian spending cuts, etc. – you'd think they'd realize that under no circumstances could they "win" politically by forcing that outcome.
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And with the other two parts of the process controlled by the other party, they're kinda bent over.
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Then again, it could be an excess of political cunning that brought them here; I'm sure there are plenty of House Republicans sleeping poorly tonight knowing how the primary challengers will line up the second they vote for anything with the word "taxes" in it. The pant-shitter caucus of the GOP is going to draw and quarter these guys, no matter how many excuses they make.

That could bode well for the Democrats in the short term, as we've seen the stellar track record in general elections of the Tea Party-backed primary challengers who unseat Republican incumbents. Maybe Sharron Angle will give it another go.
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My 10 year-old nephew has been Nintendo Wii-crazy for the past few years. Accordingly, he received the usual passel of game cartridges from relatives (and Santa). I have never played a Wii. Video games are no longer my thing, with the exception of maybe five PC games purchased in the last ten years (mostly CoD games, rarely played). As a kid, however, I played them copiously. I spent hundreds of hours on the NES, Super NES, and N64, which was the last console I owned.
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The bottom line is that while I have blown a lot of hours on video gaming, it was mostly between the ages of 10-20 and thus my knowledge of the current state of the hobby is very limited.

I sat back and watched him tear into his new game – can't even recall the name, to be honest – and after about 45 minutes I noticed that he was more than halfway through the number of levels in the game.
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He did not appear to be particularly good at it, as his character advanced through the game largely by walking into the enemies, sustaining a huge amount of damage, and never dying. When his character did die, it re-spawned immediately in the same spot. And this is when I grasped what 25-40 people who play games probably figured out a long time ago: games appear to be a hell of a lot easier now.

Not to engage in pointless cane-shaking, but at my nephew's age I was playing games like Legend of Zelda, Kid Icarus, Contra II, the Mega Man series, and Castlevania, all of which required weeks and sometimes months to complete. When your character died, you started over at the beginning of the level (or in some cases, of the game itself). If I recall accurately, I think I spent a good part of three years trying to defeat Ninja Gaiden and Bionic Commando…and never did. That shit was hard.

Even I know enough about modern games to understand that some do require huge investments of time (World of Warcraft, for example). On the whole, however, I'd be stunned if the 20 most popular console games today could hold a candle to those from 1990 in terms of complexity, difficulty, and time to completion. What does that imply? Maybe game developers have realized that their target audience – which is expanding to include both the very young and older people – doesn't really want to be challenged. They appear to believe that today's 12 year-old just wants a game he can play without a learning curve and complete immediately so he can tell everyone how great he is at video games. I wonder how well my nephew and his 5th-grade friends would do if I handed them the original Legend of Zelda.
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I'm certain that they could figure out how to play it pretty quickly. I'm not so certain that they would not walk away in frustration once they realized that the game was not simple enough to master immediately.
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Yes, yes, I know this is some old man shit. It also appears to be an open secret in the gaming industry that the games are not as demanding as they once were. People who waste lots of time playing video games often try and have tried to justify it by pointing to potential benefits – improved hand-eye coordination, problem solving skills, and ability to focus on something to completion. With this current generation of tweens/teens and their fruit fly attention spans, I'm not sure what they're getting out of the activity anymore except sensory overload and the idea that if things are hard they're not worth doing.

Boy, the internet is just buzzing with Responsible gun owners letting everyone know how unfair it is to "punish" them for the actions of a Few Bad Apples. Lately I find it quite interesting to press a little on this issue of responsible ownership. Rarely are more than a few questions necessary to reveal that most individuals' conception of Responsible Gun Ownership means that they have never murdered anyone with their gun. While commendable, I'm not sure that alone qualifies.

I may have forgotten a lot since the last time I fired a gun (about two weeks ago, at a range) so I consulted an owner's manual (2010) from Smith & Wesson. As I recalled, the manual contains a very clear list of precautions to take with one's firearm to use them in a safe and responsible manner. The next time you encounter one of the internet's apparent millions of Responsible gun owners, try out some of the following.

1. Is your gun kept in a locked safe? Failing that, is it locked in a case? Or is it in your closet, in a drawer, under the bed, or lying on a table? A cabinet with a glass door that a 10 year old could break is not a safe.

2. Is your ammunition kept in a separate location, away from the firearm? Or is it in a box next to or under it? Or is there a loaded magazine right there? Or is it just flat-out loaded?

3. Is a trigger lock installed? This is required by law in some places and recommended by all manufacturers regardless.

4. If you have no safe and your house was burglarized, would your gun(s) be difficult to find? Or have you "hidden" it where a complete moron could find it (under the bed, in the bedroom closet, etc.)?

5. Have you ever fired your gun in an unsafe manner – in the air, indoors other than at a range, or without being fully aware of your background (i.e. in the dark, in the woods, etc.)?

6. Have you ever fired overpowered or hand-loaded ammunition beyond the manufacturer's specifications for safe operation of your gun?

7. Do you use hearing and eye protection at all times? Do you insist that others in your party do so as well before you fire?

8. When outdoors, have you ever fired intentionally at something that could cause a ricochet (a rock, the ground, etc)?

Some of these things fall into the "Only a Total Moron Would…" category, yet I'd be willing to bet that more than a few self-proclaimed Responsible owners have flouted some of these rules. Oh, they'll have lots of excuses posing as reasons – I'm experienced, I live alone, I know not to blah blah blah – but what they really mean when they call themselves responsible is, "I have never walked into a school with my gun and used it to murder children." This is certainly a key part of responsible ownership, but the bar is set a tad higher. The data would be impossible to collect, but I'm sure that we could find plenty of Very Responsible people with loaded guns laying in a closet or dresser drawer. You know, real responsible-like.