Posts from — April 2011

So Standard & Poors issued its warning about the risk of US bonds and the interest rate on 10-year bonds goes down.

A news flash for Standard & Poors: no one believes you any more. Go away and take Moody’s with you. The melt-down pulled back the curtain and we know you are frauds, ventriloquist dummies for your clients.

Not that it matters, obviously, but Standard & Poors basic claim that the Republicans are going to screw up the debt limit process, like everything else they do, is accurate. The real players already knew it, and have made their adjustments.

The media will play up the sturm und drang, unless there is a white woman missing somewhere, but the Constitution requires that the debts be paid, and Congress has already appropriated the money until October 1^st, so the “debt limit” is a device so bad it should only appear in a opera.

The Miami Herald reports that Bogus tax returns filed with cops’ IDs

Tax Day this year is bringing an unpleasant surprise to many South Florida police officers and firefighters — someone stole their identities and filed fraudulent returns in their names.

The culprits accessed personal information, possibly through city pension funds administered by a private company. The breach initially appeared to affect up to 400 cops and firefighters in Oakland Park and Delray Beach, but has expanded to include about 125 employees in Davie and at least one police officer in Lauderhill.

The company involved had earlier to contacted a few of its clients to say that is was possible that some records might be compromised.

The scam involved e-filing using the stolen information, and including a bogus $1000 educational tax deduction to increase the refund checks.

Maybe after they catch some of the perps, they can have them do a PSA on how easy e-filing is.

To err is human. To really screw up you need a computer.

One day after it was announced, the TEPCO timetable might need to be tweaked.

The CBC reports that Japan nuclear control plan panned

Meanwhile, a robot sent into units 1 and 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi plant detected radiation levels that still make it prohibitive for humans to enter.

“It’s a harsh environment for humans to work inside,” Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

However, he said it is still possible to reach Tokyo Electric’s goal of the shutdown of the reactors within six to nine months.

“I do believe we must be creative to come up with ways to achieve our goals,” Nishiyama said. “I still think the plan … is as appropriate as we can get at the moment.”

They can’t get into the buildings because of the high levels of radioactivity, but they will stay with the plan.  Wow, that was a “ringing endorsement”.

In a related note, the Toronto Sun reports that Ukraine seeks more funds for Chernobyl. They need the money to replace the “permanent” concrete cap that was supposed to seal up the radioactive mess forever. It is crumbling after 25 years. Actually, 25 years isn’t bad for Soviet era concrete.

Part, probably, 1024 – they don’t want to pay, and the legislature passes laws to help them do it.

From the Miami Herald: Sinkholes spur debate in Legislature

TALLAHASSEE — Complaining about fraud, frivolous claims and people who spend insurance payouts on items other than home repairs, insurance companies have convinced lawmakers to free them from providing comprehensive sinkhole coverage.

But look at the numbers and it’s clear the recent increase in sinkhole claims has less to do with fraud and more to do with an increase in the number of sinkholes because of weather, geologists say.

This is the same crap the insurance companies used to get “tort reform” passed in Florida. The insurance lobbyists lied to the lege and told them that medical malpractice insurance was high because of “frivolous law suits”, and the lege passed a law to make it even more difficult to sue doctors for malpractice. Of course, it had no effect on the cost of malpractice insurance, because the settlement of law suits has never been a major expense, and premiums were going up because the insurance companies lost money at the Wall Street gaming tables.

This time they don’t want to pay out if less than your entire house is swallowed by a sink hole. Sink hole coverage is required by some banks to get a mortgage, so home owners are screwed again, paying for insurance policies that won’t pay off when there’s a problem.

Insurance companies exist to make money, not to protect policy holders.

The BBC reports that the Japan nuclear crisis ‘over in nine months’

The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has said it expects to bring the crisis under control by the end of the year.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) aims to reduce radiation leaks in three months and to cool the reactors within nine months.

The utility said it also plans to cover the reactor building, which was hit by a huge quake and tsunami on 11 March.
…

Radiation levels in the sea near reactor 2 rose to 6,500 times the legal limit on Friday, up from 1,100 times a day earlier, Tepco has said, raising fears of fresh radiation leaks.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, the chairman of Tepco, Asia’s largest utility, told a news conference in Tokyo on Sunday they would need up to nine months to bring the power plant to “cold shutdown”.
…

Japan’s government had ordered Tepco to come up with a timetable to end the crisis, now rated on a par with the world’s worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

But the BBC’s Roland Buerk in Tokyo says it is still not certain that the nine-month deadline can be achieved.

They were required to produce a timetable and they have. They probably had it printed up in color and handed copies out at the press conference.

It’s a bit mean-spirited for Roland Buerk to point out that there is no indication as to how they are actually going to accomplish any of the activities mentioned in the timetable. The requirement was to produce the timetable and they have accomplished that task. Actually doing anything meaningful about the disaster at Fukushima is a separate task and not part of this press event.

Note: There will be no discussion of Underwear Gnomes. I mean it.

Spring has sprung, and it is extremely nasty.

CNN reports that U.S. storms kill more than 40

Among the worst-hit places was Bertie County, North Carolina, a rural area in the northeast part of the state. The weather service reported 14 deaths in the county. Zee Lamb, county manager, said there were 11 fatalities.
…

The death toll across six states includes another nine in other parts of North Carolina; four in Virginia; seven in Alabama, two in Oklahoma, seven in Arkansas and one in Mississippi.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center said it received reports of at least 230 tornadoes across the region during the past three days, though some of those reports were likely sightings of the same twister.

I was watching the system on the weather radars and you can see the super-cells explode and throw off the vortexes that can become tornadoes. We were under watches most of yesterday, but the worst stayed inland to the north.

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Those were the days back under the Hedgemony when St Alan of Greenspan, a Very Serious Person, warned about the danger of paying off the National debt with budget surpluses on January 25, 2001. Needless to say the Shrubbery averted that “disaster”.

Now I read that the IMF warns US to make a ‘down payment’ on deficit. Well, we could invest the $100+ billion line of credit that we extend to the IMF in a passbook savings account, if it would make them happier.

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If you wondered why everyone keeps talking about Social Security and Medicare as if they have something to do with the National Debt, when they have been running surpluses for years and have a large trust fund – well this is the answer.

The trust fund is invested in Treasury bills, and when the revenues from the separate tax that pays for the program, no longer covers the costs of the program, those T-bills will be redeemed. By law, the system cannot run a deficit. The politicians don’t want to pay back all of the money they borrowed from the trust fund to hide the real size of the deficits they have been running.

The entire surplus that the Shrubbery gave away in tax cuts to the wealthy was from the Social Security trust fund, not from income taxes.

Just over a quarter [26%] of the debt is owed to the Social Security Trust Fund, and the retirement systems of the Civil Service and military, but all people want to talk about is the 7.5% that China holds.

“US taxes are too high, we have to cut them to compete.”

We compete with Australia in Olympic swimming – cutting taxes won’t help. After all of the terrible weather events that Australia has had recently, they will probably have to increase taxes to cover the costs, so the US will drop to the bottom of the rankings.

I hope everyone notices how much the super-low corporate taxes have helped Ireland. That really worked out well as a policy for development. 😈

The policy of “borrow and spend” becomes SOP [standard operating procedure] for the GOP [groveling operatives of the plutocrats].

The failed dogma of Supply-side “trickle down” economics is introduced under Reagan, and continued by Bush, père et fils [the Connecticut Yankees in cowboy hats].

Note: This is a post from April, 2011. I’m going to leave it at the top for a while to remind people.

When I wrote about fixing Medicare, I knew the solutions were too obvious not to be noticed by other people.

One of the people who noticed was Austin Frakt of The Incidental Economist, and he joined others to ask the question: What if Medicare’s drug benefit was more like the VA’s?

The short answer is that Part D would be 40% cheaper than it currently is, saving $14 billion per year, if the plan did nothing but accept the VA’s pricing. If there was a merger of the VA, DoD, and Medicare drug plans, the savings could certainly be expected to be more for all concerned.

Remember, no one is requiring the drug companies to sell to a merged buying group like this, but an entity buying at these quantities has a right to expect the best price available. No one sells to the local independent retailer at the same price that WalMart gets and everyone knows it.

The crown for corrupt elections may have been stolen by a County Clerk in Wisconsin.

Via Attaturk, the Wisconsin State Journal reports that the State [is now] investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years

The results for the 2006 attorney general’s race, for example, show 174,047 votes for either Democrat Kathleen Falk, Republican J.B. Van Hollen or write-in candidates, a total that is 17,243 votes higher than the total ballots cast recorded elsewhere in the results.

In her note, [Waukesha County Clerk Kathy] Nickolaus said the reference to ballots cast “is the number of ballots that were fed through the election machines at the polling places and the results were collected using a modem in the office” but does not include “any hand-entered results.”

The State is rather interested what Ms Nickolaus means about “hand-entered results”.

While it is very normal for the totals for any individual contest to be less than the total number of ballots cast, there is no legal way for it to be higher. Whether you are faking financials or election results, it is rather basic to make sure that the column totals reflect what you are reporting. This tends to make me believe that Ms Nickolaus wasn’t actually telling a “big lie” about losing data from not saving an ACCESS data base, but that she was too stupid to know her answer was wrong.

The ABC reports that Scientists teleport Schrodinger’s cat

Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionising quantum communications and computing.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Tokyo, say this is the first-ever teleportation, or transfer, of a particular complex set of quantum information from one point to another.

They say it will make possible high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via communications networks.

You have to really love it to understand what they are talking about, but this is great if they can replicate it on a reliable basis. Be warned that both “teleport” and “Schrödinger’s cat” are being used as jargon, so the meanings may not be what you thought they meant. [There is more than a little Alice in Wonderland in the world of quantum computing.]

Decades ago I started writing a science fiction novel that depended on instant communication across space. My solution was to have devices that all contained a flake from one large crystal that had the property of sympathetic vibration no matter how distant the individual pieces were. That is close what “entanglement” is all about.