Something mildly amusing one of our students found while looking for pictures of kittens on the internet.
New Car, New Savings, New Pictures
We recently bought a Jetta turbo diesel, with the eventual aim of going bio-diesel. Until we get the filtration system set up, we’re just using regular diesel.
On our trip to the Outer Banks (pics coming soon), we averaged 41.09 MPG, with a high of 47.48 MPG. In other words, to travel 248.8 miles, we consumed 5.24 gallons of gas. At the price we paid (2.89, if memory serves), that’s $0.06 per mile!
Okay — I’m getting nerdy with all the numbers.
We filled up before leaving the Outer Banks and still have a quarter of a tank left…
Outer Banks 2
Outer Banks 1
Traveling Not-So-Light
There was a time when Kinga and I regularly packed all the belongings we thought we’d need for an entire week or more into bike panniers and still be convinced we’d taken too much. For the trip to Budapest, we even took (I’m embarrassed to admit it) three cameras. Oh, and a tripod.
For this weekend’s trip to the Outer Banks, we’ve almost filled our new car’s trunk — Jetta turbo diesel (40 mpg average!) — and we haven’t even finished packing yet!
Pressing Flesh For Effect
This Monday I participated in an education flesh fair: an education career fair. Hundreds of us unemployed teachers (or at least not employed teaching in one’s subject area) were queuing in front of tables where representatives from various school districts sat, taking resumes and asking assorted questions.
I’d checked all the websites of districts I knew to be participating and found very few jobs listed there. “Perhaps they’re just not listing them on the site, opting instead to wait until after the career fair to see what jobs remain open.” Wrong.
There were very few school systems looking for English teachers, and a couple of them that had posted vacancies just about two weeks ago had already filled the positions. That’s fast – two weeks to get resumes, conduct interviews, make the first selection, call back those who made the cut, interview a second time, make a decision, make an offer, and have the offer accepted. At some point in that process one would think that the district would update its vacancy page to reflect the filled position, but that’s a bit naive I guess. Two of them are still there.
At any rate, I went from table to table (county to county essentially), flashed a smile, answered questions, and generally schmoozed. The outcome: one interview set for mid-June, with two more schools expressing interest. “We’ll call you,” they said.
I’d interviewed at this same school near the beginning of the school year when an unanticipated vacancy appeared literally days before the school year began. My first interview in years. It obviously didn’t go so well. It also didn’t go so badly, it seems, for the director of personnel remembered me and was willing – interested, might I even say? – in having me “come by to talk again.” The downside: the school is forty miles away.
Not So Loose Change
Loose Change has been steadily moving up "Google Video's Ranking. It's up to the number one position, after sitting at two for a couple of days.
Well, at least part of it appears to be proven wrong: Flight 77 not a hoax
Of course, they still haven't released the video from the service station or the hotel, so Dylan and the boys still have part of their film intact.
Higher Standards?
What do you make of a bank that offers auto loans only through an automated online process? What do you make of a bank that provides no customer support regarding auto loans? What do you make of a bank that denies you a loan of less than what you currently have in a savings account of that very bank when you have a credit rating in the top 10 percentile?
My answer: not much -- at least, not much that's not heavily laced with profanity.
The bank in question is Bank of America, which is currently the institution that provides us with our banking "services." After yesterday's experience, we will have absolutely nothing to do with Bank of America and their "higher standards"
The story: Kinga and I have decided to go bio-diesel, and the first step in that process is, obviously enough, buying a diesel car. We found a 2000 Jetta diesel sedan for a good price and made an accepted offer.
I called my local branch office of BOA (Bank of America) to ask what documents I would need to bring to apply for an auto loan. The young man who answered the phone politely asked me to hold on while he checked with a banker. He returned to the line and told me that I would need two forms if ID -- exactly what I’d suspected. I arrived at the location to be told that actually to apply for the loan I would have to use Bank of America’s online services. Essentially I’d driven all the way there to be told not that I could do it at home, but that I must do it at home. Why I wasn’t told this over the phone is a complete mystery that can only be explained as incompetence.
I returned home, filled in the necessary online forms, and almost immediate was told,
We are unable to approve your auto loan application at this time. […] You'll receive a letter in the mail within 30 days. This letter will include more information about your decision.
Given the balance in our bank account and my credit rating, what could be the cause? Simple: I do not make enough money as a teacher’s aid to get such a loan on my own (which says as much about the nation's education system as it does about the bank), and Kinga, as a Pole, has no credit history.
Now, I could understand this if we were applying at another bank, but at my own bank? An institution that has immediate access to my account and can confirm a steady, consistent stream of deposits and a large savings account?
To top it all off, I was not even asked for how much the loan would be. It would have been, in fact, around 70% of what we've already deposited in savings!
Needless to say, I was more than furious. I was even more enraged to learn that there is actually no human being I can talk to about a car loan from Bank of America. Everything refers me to BOA's online “services.” This means that my loan application was processed entirely and rejected by a computer.
On the recommendation of a friend, I called the local SunTrust branch, talked to a human being, and was still receiving phone calls and help from her after business hours at seven in the evening!
As an aside, the kind woman at SunTrust told me that I was the third person that day to contact her looking for a better banking experience than what they'd received at Bank of America.
SunTrust has won our trust and business, whereas Bank of America has lost it permanently.
What is most infuriating is the fact that my credit rating is now lower because of BOA's unwillingness to pay people to talk to those of us wanting a small loan. The online bio of the president of BOA, Kenneth Lewis, web site bio brags that he runs “one of the world’s largest financial institutions, the fifth most profitable company in the world and the ninth most highly valued company in the world by market capitalization.” Reuter's reports that BOA "posted a $4.99 billion profit last quarter" (Reuters), so they're pretty good making money, not fairly dismal at helping people.
But there are more compelling reasons for changing institutions. According to Reuter's,
In February 2005, Bank of America said it lost track of computer tapes containing account data for about 1.2 million federal government employees, including some U.S. senators.
Three months later, New Jersey authorities charged several people over the compromising of accounts at several banks, including some 60,000 Bank of America accounts.
Bank of America was also one of many credit card issuers affected by a breach affecting some 40 million cards and traced to CardSystems Solutions Inc., a third-party processor. (Reuters)
So they're have significant security vulnerabilities and they're worried only about their bottom line.
Cosa Loro
Really the only difference between a bank and a mafia loan shark is the amortization frequency and the penalty for default.
Both the mafia and the banking industry make it even more difficult for you to get a reasonable loan (i.e., one that you can repay in your lifetime) by putting unreasonable stipulations on the loan. If you're a risk to a bank -- in other words, if you have a bad credit rating -- the bank offers you a loan at a higher interest rate, thereby making it more difficult to repay it.
"We don't think you'll be able to pay this back," bankers say, "So we're going to make it more difficult for you to pay it back."
Where's the logic in that? It doesn't even make sense from a banker's point of view. If a bank has to foreclose on a house financed with a high-interest loan, they'll up auctioning it off for a substantial loss.
Still, they get their money no matter what. It's a good gig, this money-lending scheme the banks have...
Exodus
From The Observer:
So many young Poles are leaving to find jobs and a better life in Britain that bosses back home are desperate for them to return to keep the wheels of Polish industry turning, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Wroclaw. [...]
More than half a million Poles have moved to Britain to find jobs since Poland joined the European Union two years ago. They have fled a country with 18 per cent unemployment, the highest figure in the 25-nation bloc. But now the drain of talent has speeded up to such an extent that Poland is complaining of a drastically reduced population and the lack of a suitable workforce to help the country develop. (Source)
But why would an educated twenty-something want to return to this:
Poland is still anchored in its anti-Semitic past, says Gabriele Lasser in Berlin's die tageszietung Consider the output of Radio Maryja, one of Poland's main radio stations and virtual house organ of the governing Law and Justice Party. (Between the hymns and prayers, ministers use it to announce policy.) This Catholic station, which spews out right-wing propaganda for the benefit of its 3 million listeners, surpassed itself last month with an anti-Semitic diatribe from the pundit Stanislaw Michalkiewicz. Polish "kikes," he bellowed, have manufactured a "Holocaust industry," in order to "extort" compensation from the taxpayer for property expropriated during World War II. Poland's telecom watchdog, which recently imposed a heavy fine on another radio station for satirizing Radio Maryja and "damaging the journalistic ethic," didn't utter a peep of protest. But the comments incensed Pope Benedict, and the Vatican fired off a furious letter to Poland's bishops, demanding they stop turning a blind eye to this extremist claptrap. Benedict is due on an official visit next month. If the bishops want to avoid a spanking from the pope in person, they had better do something, and soon, about Radio's Maryja's hateful programming. (From The Week news magazine).
And now Andrzej Lepper is Agriculture Minister and Roman Giertych is Education Minister. There's already talk about "cleaning" homosexuals out of the education field...
"It could be worse," Kinga and I said when PiS (Law and Justice Party) got elected in Poland last year.
It is worse...
Sign Language
I find it interesting that so many of the signs in yesterday's anti-immigration-reform protest explicitly gave "proof" of the validity of the opposition's argument. In other words, the cries, "They don't assimilate! They don't even learn the language!" were born out in so many of the signs that protesters carried.
Now, I'm not an advocate of creating legislation that makes English the official language of America, but one would think that this time, of all times, would be when immigrants use English. And I'm not even suggesting that it should be even close to correct English.
And that's why I love the sign at right so much.
(Pictures swiped from NYT. Click on them for larger versions.)
Joy
Recently found an Asian food market…and the sweating began!
Effective R&D
Excerpts from an article from Bloomberg.com:
- crude supplies will stay tight through the end of the decade.
- The situation will persist until 2010.
- Oil prices have climbed 23 percent to more than $75 a barrel this year
- Persian Gulf states that don’t allow international companies to develop their oil reserves, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, should invest more to expand output themselves,
- The International Energy Agency’s Mandil told reporters today in Doha that OPEC would “just about” meet the expected 25 percent growth in global demand over the next three years. (Source)
The most amazing quote is the third:
Persian Gulf states that don’t allow international companies to develop their oil reserves, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, should invest more to expand output themselves
They’re making billions at these prices. Why the hell should they increase output? Eat up their resources for decreased revenue? There’s absolutely no incentive for them to do so.
Oh, this is all just cruel justice for America, which has grown fat and lazy on its cheap gas. Think about it — gas is just now getting to be more expensive than milk! We’ve brought it on ourselves with our short-sightedness. We’ve had almost thirty years to prepare for this oil crisis that is revving up, but what did we do instead?
Invent the SUV.
Tyranny and Giggles
The funny thing about conspiracy theories is that their existence disproves them. World governments, fluoridated water, governmental control of drug trafficking, Illuminati plans for world domination — all are simply and easily disproved with one simple question: “How would I get this information?”
Take Alex Jones’ New World Order conspiracy: the global elite (which he calls the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group, the Bohemian Grove, and any number of other terms depending on who knows what) have been out since the turn of the century to take over the world. Highlights of the theory:
- Communism was a creation of international bankers at the turn of the 20th century to submit people to a police state.
- Hitler was simply playing his small role in the grand scheme of world domination.
- The Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 were planned and executed by the U.S. government in order to justify a gradual implementation of a police state.
- The U.S. government has been systematically poisoning its citizens through chem trails, fluoridation of water, vaccinations, and other methods.
- Cartoons are systematically conditioning children to chip implementation and complete police-state control of citizens’ every move.
Look at that — everyone’s involved, even sworn enemies. Communists and Fascists are on the same team. Clinton and Bush are two sides of the same evil. Conspirators and secret police are everywhere, watching our every move and…
And clamping down on anyone who exposes them? Well, that would make sense. If someone has untangled the whole ugly scheme and presented it to the world, he should be shut up immediately, right? One word and it’s silence. After all, if the federal government can engineer 9/11 and coordinate it all in real time from World Trade Center 7 (as Jones asserts), then they can easily take out a radio host and make it look like a natural death.
And there’s the rub: the fact that people like Jones can carry on continually like he does shows the conspiracy doesn’t exist. Jones has made many “documentaries” and written books about the coming New World Order tyranny, detailing their plans and warning people about it, and yet this supposed world group, which has conspired to kill millions, hasn’t shut him up?
Cold, Colder, Getting Colder
Notes from my journal after watching a little of TBN's "Praise-A-Thon" (View online, if you dare.) before heading off to bed.
If you throw enough vagueness out, some of it is going to stick. Those who claim to speak with the dead rely on this. It’s called a cold reading. Most people are worried about love, health, and money. Stick to those topics and say that something -- the ghost of a loved one, the Holy Ghost, or anything really -- is providing you with insights about a given individual’s love life or heart condition, and there’ll surely be someone listening who’s now convinced you’re talking to him.
Cold reading involves asking questions then repeating back the answers in a way that makes a subject think the reader -- a psychic or faith healer -- got that information from some third party -- God, Uncle Marvin, whomever.
James Randi provides the following example:
Reader: Did your husband linger on in the hospital, or did he pass quickly?
Subject: Oh, he died almost immediately!
Reader: Yes, because he's saying to me, “I didn’t suffer. I was spared any pain.” ("Source)
Later, the subject will be convinced that the reader “knew” her husband passed quickly and without pain. Randi explains that readers’ success stems from their manipulation of your perception:
So, you see, it's your perception of what's actually being done, rather that the reality of the procedure, and your ignorance of other subtle clues and methods, that misleads you in your observations of these "psychics. (ibid)
Of course what on-air televangelists do is significantly different, because they’re just getting “the word” from “the Lord” as they’re preaching. They don’t get immediate feedback, so they stick to the ultra vague. “A heart condition has just been corrected,” a televangelist might say, and anyone with a diagnosed heart condition sitting at home will be convinced he’s talking about her. And all she has to do is show a little faith and that healing will come to fruition. And how is that faith shown?
Once the money is offered and the healing doesn’t come to pass, why not call back and ask for your money back? Simple -- it’s your fault you weren’t healed because you really didn’t believe. Or your still living for the devil. Any number of clever explanations.
Happy Easter
