I do love the X Prize

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Oscar Gordon

During the Deepwater horizon mess, an X-Prize was created for oil cleanup technology.  The winner was just announced, a team out of Illinois that was able to suck up oil from water at nearly 5000 gallons a minute with an oil to water ratio of 89.5%!

This is what I don’t get about government, why do they feel the need to pick winners & losers?  Why can’t they just say, “Here’s a goal, here’s the prize, first person to meet the goal gets a check.”?

Better yet, why don’t they just give any private organization willing to front money for an X-Prize a big tax break (since politics & egos would just ruin any such government run program)?

Anyway, congrats to the winners, that is some shit-hot engineering!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I Weep For This Generation

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Alaska

So the wife’s colleague mentioned that her daughter and boyfriend are both staying with her while they try to find jobs following graduation from college at U BC in Canada. They’re hippies, of course, like our daughter and her fiancee — which means they don’t bathe or flush, to conserve water (despite British Columbia being a FREAKIN RAINFOREST), etc….. Anyway, they decided the other day to visit the Occupy San Francisco protest.

In his dad’s open-top BMW.

Which he’s driving until his trust-fund kicks in and he can buy his own.

You see where this is going.

My wife’s colleague politely suggested they should park in a garage somewhere away from the protests, or the car would likely be stolen.

“Well maybe that just means somebody needed it more than I did,” he replied.

If it ain’t stolen, I’ll bet a nickel it ends up with some nice fecal redecoration to the exposed interior.

Meantime the wife and I are wondering about logistics for our daughter’s preferred wedding spot — a hippie ranch above Santa Barbara that’s supposed to host 200 friends — most of them also literally unwashed — and family, in the middle of summer, with no toilet facilities aside from some composting piles next to the yurts and straw bale huts.

Sigh.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Proof of Global Warming

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Alaska

Via Barcepundit.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Loving It!

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Phil Kadath

This is the beginning of Week 4 of my Econ101 course. I’m currently running at 92% overall in the course, but that isn’t the reason I’m excited about it.

It’s the textbook!

I blurbed on it back in August before Fall Quarter started and liked the reviews enough to think I would enjoy the course.

No nonsense. No farting around with generalized this-or-that theories. No Touchy-Feely. Just straight, to the bone, real world thinking and instruction on how the real world operates individual-to-individual, individual-to-business and business-to-business.

Yes, it is a pricey beast, but the content makes up for it. If you’re raising up some yungins in a home-school environment, this investment is definitely worth it.

They should be using this book and course in junior high school. But that would actually educate the little darlings, and we can’t have that!

Posted in Phil Goes to College | 1 Comment

Who do you think you are?

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Phil Kadath

The person who pays their salaries or something?

The city of Redmond, Washington decided last week that it had no intention of putting the issue of red light cameras and speed cameras to a vote of the people. The mayor refuses to transmit the completed petition signatures for an initiative on the topic to the county auditor, despite a state law that sets a three-day deadline for the city administration to do so. On Tuesday, Redmond police released data that show accidents have increased since at the photo enforced locations since the program started in February.

You’re just a taxpayer. Why should you get a say in how laws are enforced?

Posted in The Government is Not Your Friend | 6 Comments

Wheel in the Sky

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Phil Kadath

Indeed

You’ll want to go full-screen with this one.

Posted in Kewel! | 2 Comments

Moral Equivalence

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Alaska

As a dog owner, I consider the killer in this video to be the moral equivalent of the killers in this one. The victims, I’d note, were equally submissive in each. Neither video is probably SFW due to violence, albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Posted in Evil walks the earth | 4 Comments

This made me smile

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Oscar Gordon

Home CNC & The Death of Gun Control

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Flying the (fictional) Friendly Skies

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Oscar Gordon

Oh I wish

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Stay away

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Phil Kadath

Whatever you do, do not come to Washington State on your next vacation. It only encourages them.

Washington’s Minimum Wage to Increase to $9.04 Next Year

Washington’s minimum wage will increase to $9.04 per hour beginning Jan. 1, 2012, the Department of Labor & Industries announced today.

L&I calculates the state’s minimum wage each year as required by Initiative 688, approved by Washington voters in 1998. The 37-cent increase reflects a 4.258 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI­W) since August 2010.

No verbal communication skills necessary. No writing skills necessary. No ability to prove you can show up on time and sober necessary. Your first day on the job will net you more in one hour than I made in three hours when I was 16 and washing cars at a Dodge dealership not too many years ago. More than a person with a similar lack of skills in New York, California and Illinois would make in an hour by almost a dollar.

And I have to pay $8 for a Big Mac meal. Before supersizing. Because, apparently, the leftists who run this state think [1] The there is only a set amount of money in the world (duh! inflation comes from somewhere), and [2] That increasing labor costs won’t increase the cost of consumer goods and these newly minted $9-plus per hour lunkers won’t have to deal with the increased cost of goods around the corner from where they earn their checks.

Stay away. Starve the beast.

Posted in The Left is Never Right, Too Stupid to Live | 4 Comments