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…that I didn’t blog about Bill O’Reilly blunt statement that the Saints didn’t have a chance. It had reminded me of the episode of “The Capital Gang” with Steve Sabol who predicted that the Pats had “no chance” against the Rams.
There is a reason why you actually play the games.
I had the post written in my head and never bothered to write it. Just goes to show he who hesitates is lost.
It has been proven axiomatic that when tax rates are too high you can increase revenue by dropping tax rates thus producing more economic activity and because of it more overall tax revenue. This is the basis for many conservative arguments on taxation.
For tax rates there is a “sweet spot”. That is the point where both raising taxes decreases revenue (due to less taxable activity). and lowering taxes decreases revenue (because the drop can’t stimulate more taxable activity). If a taxes’ goal is revenue based, your goal is to find that sweet spot and keep your tax rate there.
Going to the unemployment office in Massachusetts apparently works under the same principle. The Office starts servicing customers at 8:30 a.m. but the doors of the office are unlocked as soon as the first employee shows up (Usually around 7:30-7:40 a.m.) If you want to avoid a 2 hour + wait you need to get there as soon as possible so you need to turn up before the “official” opening time of 8:30 a.m.
On the other hand if you end up showing up an hour before the place opens and wait an hour to be seen, you are still waiting 2 hours. The trick seems to be to find that “sweet spot” where you show up early enough to be seen to get ahead of the massive crowd that comes after opening while not spending the same amount of time waiting before they open as you would after.
Today I showed up at 8:05 a.m., it is the earliest I ever came and was totally surprised to be #11. Ten people already there ahead of me taking numbers. At precisely 8:30 the people who have taken numbers are invited 2 at a time in order to sign in to the relevant list to be seen by someone.
Apparently between 8:00 & 8:05 is the “sweet spot” or pretty close. I was seen in just under 90 minutes. I was early enough to get a good parking space and beat the crowd but late enough to still do part of my normal morning routine.
I was told that my benefits for the next 3 weeks (and last week) will turn up as a lump in about two weeks and I should ignore the phone message concerning benefits as the computers haven’t been updated yet.
My bills tend to fall due between the end of the previous month and the 15th of the month. I always pay them 10 business days early for mailed bills and at least 2 days early for in person bills. (Whenever possible I always pay in person. You are not a number in that case.) I tend to pay them between the 20th and the 31st. Due to sheer luck the “lump day” falls just as I will be starting to pay. This means with the wife’s pay I can handle the early bills and will still have something left to pay the late ones.
If it turns out that they are late, then I have to go to my reserve but that reserve is not large these days.
I’ve not reached the panic point but it is never far away and I’m better off than many.
Hidden within the Clark Hoyt’s NYT public editor piece on if there is a conflict of interest in the Time’s middle east reporting since Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military:
I asked David K. Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, what he would do. Shipler was The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief a generation ago and its chief diplomatic correspondent until he left the paper in 1988. He said foreign correspondents operate in far more nuanced circumstances than readers may realize. They may rely on translators and stringers with political ties or biases that have to be accounted for. They develop their own relationships that enrich their reporting, just as Bronner’s son’s military service could open a conduit for information that other reporters might not have. emphasis mine.
This is something that the MSM has not emphasized in the past, but blogs on the Right have. In the words of Ralph Peters at the time:
The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.
To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other “boys” might lie and steal, our house-boy’s a faithful servant.
The result is that we’re being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what’s actually happening.
To hear the NYT finally (albeit accidentally) admit that there are biases involved in stringers is long overdue.
Oh and BTW. It is a conflict, but as long as it is disclosed to the reader then I don’t have a huge problem with it. If the reader knows the source for a potential bias they can adjust judge a piece accordingly. NOT disclosing the conflict would be a dishonorable breech of journalistic ethics and we all know how important that is to the NYT. HA!
Before he became Mr. Hyde Charles Johnson used to touch on the use and the biases of these stringers.
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