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A curious San Francisco innovation:
The city's latest attempt to deal with one of its most vexing problems will be announced in coming weeks in the form of 10 old parking meters installed in some of the most heavily panhandled areas.... Money deposited in the meters would go directly to charities that help the homeless. The goal, officials say, is to reduce panhandling and to educate tourists and residents about the problem of giving money directly to people on the streets.
It should surprise no one that the Homelessness Industry is not keen on this notion:
The worst, he said, was a failed proposal during Willie Brown's administration to equip homeless people with credit-card machines like those used for retail purchases. People could swipe their cards and choose how much to donate, with 80 percent going to homeless programs and 20 percent to the individual panhandlers.
I'll give Boden this much: that card-reader idea was indeed insane. Of course, in the unlikely event that this scheme actually helps, he's out of a job.
(Via e-Claire.)
If you know nothing else about Christian Louboutin's shoes — and I don't know a whole lot — you know that the soles are colored red. It's been a trademark for years.
Martha Stewart doesn't like it. Tucked away inside this entry on The Martha Blog, there's a photo of Martha's "wardrobe mistress" Karena taking a Sharpie to a pair of Louboutins because, says Martha, "I am not a fan of the signature red soles and always change the red to black."
I'm of two minds about this. She wrote a rather large check for this footwear and can do with it what she darn well pleases. Still, something about the de-Louboutination seems so wrong: it's like slapping a truck bed on a BMW.
(Via ShoeBlog.)
There are those who believe that you can't put something on television if it isn't true. Tam will tell you otherwise:
While we're at it: what's the difference between one's cakehole and one's piehole?
From the "Why the hell not?" files, a rotary iPhone interface.
Though I'd want an explanation of how the O, which properly is a 6, wound up as a zero.
(Out of BoingBoing via Sophistpundit.)
You want people to take public transit? Improve public transit, says Ezra Klein:
And it's because those subways go to places they want to go, at a more-or-less reasonable price. (Parking in DC or New York or Toronto is expensive enough to make the train look a whole lot better.)
Of course, as James Joyner notes, the options used to be better in a lot of places:
The one time in my life when I rode public transit regularly was when I was a kid in Charleston. The bus line back then was owned by South Carolina Electric and Gas Company. The route, it appears, hasn't changed much from the 1960s. And fortunately for me, it was a single route: no changes or transfers, just a long ride followed by a long walk.
Today in Oklahoma City, there's no conceivable combination of transit options, the buses we have or the trains we're allegedly going to get, that will get me from home to work or back again without at least one transfer. On the plus side, the walking distance to the present bus route is not too daunting.
Power all along the Treadmill Avenue corridor (not its real name) was down for about 45 minutes this morning, which makes for a whole lot of fun, if fun can be defined as "trying to figure out how to shut down the server farm in the absence of the emergency lights, which failed in mere seconds."
A group called Prince Market Research — do they survey like it's 1999? — has determined that the worst road rage in the country is in Miami, and has been for the past three years.
Boston, New York, Baltimore and Washington followed; the least rage was to be found in Pittsburgh.
What's the deal with Miami, anyway?
Which suggests that things will eventually improve in south Florida, once the geezers perish and the yuppies are outsourced to Bangalore.
This is Gwyneth Paltrow, as she appeared at the UK premiere of Iron Man, and her outfit is problematic, says Style Spy:
But maybe that's just me....
I will say only that horrifying as it may sound, there is such a thing as too short a dress, and that a Google Image search for "judi dench in a rudi gernreich" produced no results.
It would never occur to me to flash a Google Maps Street View camera van.
On t'other hand, I can't do a blessed thing about their damned satellite.
I admit up front, as it were, that I had no idea why anyone would want a solar-powered bra:
Of course, to gather all this power, it's got to be exposed to sunlight, and now that Madonna's pushing 50, undergarments on the outside seem to be dreadfully passé.
Maybe a future enhancement will allow the wearer to discharge some of that accumulated electricity into that lowlife on the subway who's always trying to cop a feel.
Without making a fuss about it, Carl Icahn has piled up about 50 million shares of Yahoo!, about 3.6 percent of the company.
Now he's going to make a fuss: Icahn plans to nominate as many as ten directors to the Yahoo! board in an effort to prod the company into accepting a takeover bid.
Notes Paul Kedrosky:
I doubt this will be the mother of all proxy fights, but it ought to be interesting.
Addendum: MG Siegler at Venture Beat provides the appropriate artwork for the title.
Apparently there exist policies which insure against the failure of the market system:
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even "the big one," a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was "a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington."
This would seem unlikely — even the leftiest of incoming Democrats are run-of-the-mill Marxists at best — but just the same, the premium has increased of late:
I'm not sure if I'm even going to be able to make much of a trip this year, but I have finally gotten around to setting aside the vacation time.
And it's not in July, for once.
More as things develop.
First it was the bloody dismemberment of CompUSA. Now comes the liquidation of PC Club, in comparably-dramatic fashion:
His brother took over the company, and shortly thereafter ~15 store were abruptly closed citing reasons of ineffectiveness. Of course many of these stores had yet to be open for 2-3 years. Those stores were in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, etc.
Roughly about a month ago, maybe a little more — the current president, the vice-president, and a couple of regional mgrs were "separated" from the company. Then came a massive reorganization in which HQ was restructured from the top down. It seemed as if the company was consolidating and preparing an effort to return to the old days of focusing on the "brick and mortar" business that it was founded on. In the weeks following, cost cutting measures were implemented and more staff rearranged and removed … including the heads of accounting and HR. Still, we were all reassured that this was being done for the good of the company.
Then come the inventory issues. All stores in the company are running short of product and the distribution center has no inventory on hand. We are told this is because new purchase accounts are being established and the lull is only temporary. District managers are plainly telling store managers as recent as yesterday that inventory problems should be taken care of soon and that we may just have to deal with it for a couple of more weeks. In the mean time, customers continues to ask if we're going out of business — resellers are openly pissed about not being able to get product.
Then there's today. And all of you already know what happened. Senior management disappeared and were unreachable by the company attorney during the "meeting of doom". We closed the store, made final deposits, got our stuff, and left.
PC Club built me a machine a few years back. (How few? It was recent enough to have Service Pack 2 for XP in place.) Apart from blowing up a video card on day two, which they fixed in a couple of hours, it's been pretty reliable.
(Via SEKOconcepts.)
News Item: Republicans will counter the Democratic push for change from the years of the Bush administration with their own pledge to deliver, drum roll please, "the change you deserve."
Top Ten political slogans rejected by the Republican Party before deciding on "the change you deserve":
- "Staff white people like"
- "We pick our losing candidates early"
- "Wingnut > Moonbat"
- "We put the 'Old' in 'Grand Old Party'"
- "Rule 6: No Clintons"
- "You deserve a tax break today"
- "Our babes are hotter than their babes"
- "Now 100% Berkeley-Free"
- "2 Centuries 1 Idea"
- "We're good bad, but we're not evil"
(Suggested by Michelle Malkin.)
I've suggested that the ongoing Seattle vs. Oklahoma City wars might be good theater, if nothing else; it hadn't occurred to me that what we're seeing might simply be a deeply dysfunctional business plan, and we're the enablers:
Playing off the feelings of inadequacy in Oklahoma City (and that is not intended [as] an insult at all; it is clear from their language that they want the NBA so they might be elevated to a "major league city"), Stern has managed to create a sense of urgency in both cities, to the point where a total approaching half a billion dollars is being proposed to reconstruct existing arenas.
When I wrote about this last year, my argument was that the whole debate was upside-down, and that rather than having the cities chase the NBA, it should be the NBA chasing the cities. Let's face it, the NBA needs markets more than the markets need the NBA.
After all, do you think people in Las Vegas or St. Louis woke up this morning and cursed themselves for not having an NBA team? Do you believe residents of Memphis are patting themselves on the back with glee that they don't live in a hellhole like San Diego, a city barren of NBA basketball?
Given the Griz' attendance, I'm sure there are residents of Memphis who think, "What? We have an NBA team?"
I do like the idea of an inverted perspective, but David Stern still has scarcity on his side: artificially created to be sure, but still scarcity. And if playing one town against another turns out to work, it's prudent to assume he'll keep doing it until such time as it stops working.
I can't speak for anyone else in the local Sonics Thunderbirds Barons fan base, but I think things would have gone much more easily if Clay Bennett had written a check to the NBA and Stern had decreed, "For a new team shall be yours, and we shall add another one to the East for balance." As though the East would ever be balanced. And the Sonics? They'd be in Seattle, as they'd been for four decades.
Meanwhile, if anyone comes up with an explanation of why David Stern is so resistant to expansion, I'd like to hear it.
Clear Channel goes private; speculation is rampant that their stations will finally have deeper music libraries than your local ice-cream truck (Linked to this.)
Speaking of drugs, I'm coming through the intersection at 50th and May, something I've done, oh, a thousand times before, and there's a new sign up at Walgreen's: WE ARE NOW A COMPOUNDING PHARMACY.
And sure enough, across the intersection was the embryonic form of another pharmacy. Eventually, assuming nothing happens to interfere, there will be nothing but pharmacies for two or three blocks.
Oh, and the pool hall. They're not going anywhere.
Dear Mail-Order Pharmacy:
I placed a refill order from your Web site — which means, I shouldn't have to point out, that you've filled this prescription at least once already — and paid for it with a Visa card, which means you're not waiting on your money.
Did it occur to you that calling me on the phone half an hour after the order was placed to try to talk me into some cheaper drug was incredibly frakking stupid? It certainly occurred to me. "How I can save up to $500 a year," my ass. I paid your absurd five-times-the-price-of-generic copay because this stuff works and there are no generics. Simple as that. Ninety days from now, I'll be happily paying six times the price, just so I don't get any more phone calls from you addlepated schmucks.
In the meantime, three words you should learn: "dispense as written."
My ballot at 5:55 pm was the 206th to be cast in my precinct, which suggests that turnout will be something less than huge: in fact, I got all the way home before I realized Oh, crap, there's an election today and set out for the polling place, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people have memories at least as short as mine.
Forget those old-fashioned gas pumps. These are better:
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most pumps go up to 3.99?
Nigel: Exactly.
Marty: Does that mean it's more expensive? Is it any more expensive?
Nigel: Well, it's one dollar more, isn't it? It's not 3.99. You see, most blokes, you know, will be pumping at 3.99. You're on 3.99 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 3.99 on your credit card. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty: I don't know.
Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty: Put it up to 4.99.
Nigel: 4.99. Exactly. One dollar.
Marty: Why don't you just make 3.99 the highest and make 3.99 be the top number?
Nigel: [pause] These go to 4.99.
Geez. Imagine the delight when they go to 11.
(Thanks, Ash.)
And seen at Autoblog, an hour and a half later:
To recap: The Japanese are already doing 8-speed automatics, and the Germans will follow; the Americans are just now getting around to disposing of 4-speed automatics.
This isn't entirely fair to the General — Toyota still sells econoboxes in the States with only four cogs — but this doesn't help Detroit's image as technological laggards.
Dash it all, Princess Sparkle Pony, why must you put these images into my head?
Still, Sean Gleeson's imagination is way better than mine.
There are five of them, and four of them look pretty good.
Propositions II through V inclusive would pay for courthouse renovation ($10.5 million),