Book Of Norm

Follow this logic: "a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product [GDP] due to climate change is about 3 percent…by [the year] 2100" " Reducing the risk of climate change would come at some cost to the economy. For example, the Congressional Budget Office…concludes that the cap-and-trade provisions of H.R. 2454…would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) below what it would otherwise have been—by roughly ¼ percent to ¾ percent in 2020 and by between 1 percent and 3½ percent in 2050. By way of comparison, CBO projects that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP will be roughly two and a half times as large in 2050 as it is today, so those changes would be comparatively modest." Yeah, and even more "modest" in 2100. The cost in 2050 is still $500billion, which is $500billion less to divide among American citizens - lower standards of living, less economic opportunity, less housing, less social welfare, less everything. And why?...

I dont normally read comments on articles (it is one of the most useless aspects of Web 2.0 in my opinion), but fortunately the crowd at NewScientist seems to be better than most, so I read more of the comments. And today, I was rewarded, coming across this: "The FAA doesn't comission/build and operate aircraft, so why does NASA have to comission/build and operate space craft?" While I think NASA should be involved on the science and research side, I dont think it should be building the rockets anymore. Let private companies do that, NASA can pay to fly, and we might actually be able to move ahead.

I usually spend time yelling at people in front of me to find the skinny pedal on the right. Often they are driving sport/luxury/SUV/crossovers. However, in this case, one such driver found the skinny pedal on the right at just the wrong time.. hilarity ensues.

The basic premise of a board of directors is that it is independent from the company and does not have conflicts of interest. As the varied companies of USA Inc. are finding out, the 535 new "board members" they picked up when the government bought them out are heavily biased, have agendas, and have serious conflicts of interest. I speak of course of the members of Congress, who right now are fighting GM, Chrysler, AIG etc etc to not close that office, reinstate that contract with a mine in their home state, re-open a dealership that was meant to be closed etc etc etc. In other words, business as usual for the conniving idiots who run this country (on both sides of the isle, in every corner of Washington, they all love their pork and bullshit). The end result will of course be that those companies dont do very well. If you force companies to do things that are in your constituents "best interests" instead of the companies best interests and at the same time scare of...

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY? This article, through its tone, its implications, it stupidity and its anti-capitalist, anti-competitive, fuck the principles and people that built this country premise pisses me off so fucking much I cant think straight right now. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/27aig.html?em Do people out there actually read this and think "wow, Hank Greenberg, he's really ruining this country because he is hiring away executives from a failed fuckup of a govt. bailout where a communist pay czar who was not elected and has no fucking legitimate powers at all just decided to cut their pay by 50% and completely violate their contracts, but still it's un-American to compete for talent with a goverment owned company." The tone of the article is just so totally fucked. It keeps saying things like "exploit," "lure," and the line "While America generally loves stories of entrepreneurs making a comeback, Mr. Gree...

Fiat has a hot little hatch they want America to know about: the 500. The original 500 is an Italian icon, this one is a popular, and very nice retrofuturistic remake. Fiat, now owner of Chrysler, has repeatedly stated that the 500 will be the first and perhaps the only Fiat badged vehicle to be sold Stateside. Interestingly, the first one to be brought over with be the Abarth - the factory tuner special: I like the 500. I like the reviews I have read. But I dont think that the Abarth is really going to get Americans all hot an bothered. And let me give you two reasons why: 133hp $19,000 Lets think about this. That is $142 per HP. A Ford Mustang GT is about $83 per HP, with 300hp/$25,000 A Mazdaspeed 3 is also $83 per HP, with 263hp/$22,000 Even a Mini Cooper, which I have always regarded as expensive, is $127 per HP Now, HP is not all of the battle. Neither is 0-60 times. To a degree, those are outdated ideas on performance, I will be the first to say. But they are outdated in part be...

Turns out Renault made a bit of an iffy decision to invest in the Russian company behind Lada cars. Back in 2007, they got locked in a bidding war with GM and Fiat, and ended up buying 25% of the company for $1 billion. Today, that stake is worth about $250 million, meaning it has already been a disaster for Renault. What they did not count on is the Russian version of "bailout." Turns out that Putin the Russian People own 25% of the company as well, and they Putin is demanding that Renault gives about $850 million in loans to Lada... or else. In other words, in Mother Russia, the bailout comes not from the ever generous government, but from whatever foreign company had the screwed up idea to try and operate in Russia, and is now faced with the option of paying up or writing off the entire investment, and the Russian market overall.

Want to recover 50% better than Gatorade? Turns out that Chocolate milk is just the thing: article pulled from an ultimate training website (as in the sport, ultimate): A study published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism earlier this year has shed some light on the best way for endurance athletes to recover after exercise. The study pitted fluid replacement (FR) drinks (such as Gatorade), carbohydrate replacement (CR) drinks (such as Endurox ), and Mars Refuel (chocolate milk) to see which would help replenish muscle glycogen the fastest after exhaustion for cyclists. Participants were given the recovery drink immediately after and at 2 hours following cycling till exhaustion. The effectiveness was measured by a second bout of exercise 4 hours after the first where time to exhaustion was measured again. The results showed that those who ingested chocolate milk cycled 51% and 43% longer than those who ingested CR and FR, respectively. They concluded that choc...

IT'S A WOOTOFF $ 4.99 + $5 shipping Condition: New Product: woot woot woot I Want One!

Saw this sign in Davis the other night.

Incredibly interesting article from New Scientist on a possible origin of life - one could help explain how cells which require so much to work properly could have developed in stages and in the right environment. Also, how eletrical energy not just chemical energy is the key to life. Read on: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427306.200-was-our-oldest-ancestor-a-protonpowered-rock.html?full=true

Story on Sunoco closing a refinery and focusing instead on retail had this as a final quote: "Most people are wrong. Personally, I'd would be investing in retail," Cheng said. "People still need a place to fuel their car. I don't care if you are using biofuel. You still need a place to recharge your battery." Mmm yeah, those biofuel batteries... Ok, extra dorky post, but you get what you get.

How is the new Senate bill going to keep health care "deficit neutral?" Well I have already written about how this is a sham to begin with, and the actual cost will be a couple trillion, its just a matter of who will pay. But there is another devious plot afoot. In the Senate, Obamacare has been split in two. The best way for me to tell you about it is.. because I am short on time.. posting this whole article from the WSJ: The Doctor Fix Is In Adding lots of 'dimes' to the deficit. President Obama has made serial promises that he will not sign a health-care bill that "adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future, period." This was never plausible, but now we can begin to understand what he meant: Democrats plan to make ObamaCare "deficit-neutral" by moving nearly a quarter-trillion dollars off the books, in the fiscal deception of the century. Later this week, or maybe next, Senate Democrats plan to vote on a stand-alone bill that s...

Windows 7 tallied up more sales on Amazon UK in the first 8 hours than Vista has since its launch. If that was not enough, it broke the pre-order sales record set by the last Harry Potter book. Impressive.

This thing is for real... in concert with the launch of Windows 7, Burger King Japan is launching the Windows 7 Whopper, with 7 beef patties. Available only for one week, it costs 777 yen (about $8.50). And oh my god do I want one.

I can't stand Fox News. I never watch it, it is clearly partisan, and I almost never even bother hitting the link when a blog or news article links to a Fox News page. But, I love it because right now it is showing just how hypocritical and dangerous the current administration is. Obama et alia have decided they do not like Fox News, because Fox News does not like them. Now this is an interesting and rather dangerous and stupid step. Major news sources are allowed to like or dislike whoever they want. The government is not allowed (this is not a legal sense, rather a political sense) to dislike news sources. It shows weakness, it shows partisanship, it shows a lack of respect for freedom of the press and a lack of respect for democracy, all things that get you in hot water with the voters. The administration went so far as to call Fox News "a wing of the Republican Party." By that logic, the whole rest of the main stream media, except for the WSJ, would have been a wing o...

And now for the blooper reel...

This is quoted from another blog, I thought it was pretty damn hilarious. And kind of amazing - given how just damn big and empty a lot of the western US is, the fact that anywhere in this country you are within 145 miles of a McDonalds is really impressive: There are over 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the US, or about 1 for every 23,000 Americans. But even market penetration this advanced doesn’t mean that McDonald’s is everywhere. Somewhere in South Dakota is the McFarthest Spot , the place in the US geographically most removed from the nearest McD’s (*). If you started out from this location, a few miles north of State Highway 20 (which runs latitudinally between Highways 73 in the west and 65 in the east), you’d have to drive 145 miles to get your Big Mac (if you could fly, however, it’d be only 107 miles). This map is the brainchild of Stephen Von Worley, who got to thinking about the strip malls sprawling out along I-5 in California’s ever less rural Central Valley: “Just h...

This is just ridiculously amazing. A friend sent me the link to this... My plan is to lowball them, put together a good financing package, invade Panama, and then threaten to blow up the Panama Canal unless I am given 1 trillion dollars. After I get the trillion dollars, I will pay down the rest of the debt on my Russian assault hovercraft, and probably retire at that point. Alternately, this could be a wonderful plaything for Roman Abramovich. It even comes with a full armament. Amazing to me this thing is being sold by a US brokerage... http://www.iboats.com/sites/portlandyacht/site_page_9432/item_443366.html?listing_page=listing_sum_index_1.html LOCATED IN RUSSIA � MILITARY CLASS HOVERCRAFT LANDING CRAFT 90% COMPLETE AND READY FOR DELIVERY IN 4-5 MONTHS..........An outstanding opportunity for the right government agency to obtain a vessel which normally takes 4-5 years to complete. These vessels are proven in service with the Russian and Greek navies and their square-shaped pontoon ...

Found this guy hanging out in a parking lot in Woburn - a hotel right next to the movie theater there. Pretty hilarious to see in person actually, it is a ridiculous looking vehicle. Some guy drove up and asked me "what the fuck is that?" He had one of those Jeep Liberty's with the light bars on the top, so between that and hi-beams from the Expy, managed to get some decent lighting =)

Some people (those being really into gadgets and tech) will remember the Palm Foleo, which was a total disaster of a product which nonetheless is credited with helping start the netbook craze along with the OLPC XO. It was a mini laptop that worked off of your palm device instead of being a computer of its own. It cost as much as a computer of your own, and so was a really dumb product, but it did help lead to all the $250 10' netbooks roaming the wilds of international airports and Starbucks these days. Blackberry has decided to go the other direction, and I kind of like it in an amusing, progress of technology kind of way, but I will never get one and it will fail as a product. It brings back the wristwatch (largely killed off in my generation by the ubiquity of the cellphone in your pocket - though honestly the golden era of that was when flip phones first had external screens that were small, greyscale, and always on. Its kind of a pain to check the time on the Pre honestly, a...

The President and his staff are very careful that almost none of these pictures exist. As they should be. As was referenced in Thank You for Smoking, the only people you see smoking these days in pop-culture are Bad Guys and Europeans (the two have a tendency of being the same character). Definitely affects his image, hard to call that look anything but dumb at this point in our knowledge about smoking, cancer, etc.

Great article sent to me by my older bro James, of http://thefourpartland.wordpress.com/ We're All Felons, Now Perpetual public fear of crime has turned us all into criminals. Radley Balko | October 19, 2009 "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." — Ayn Rand Violent crime is down America, across the board, spanning two decades. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that the incidence of reported rape had hit a 20-year low. Homicides are down, as are juvenile violence and crimes committed against children. Crime rates have been plummeting since the early 1990s to such an extent that explaining the drop has become something of an obsession among criminologists and sociolog...

Came across this one this morning doing some research on CAFE Standards. Check at the bottom of the search page... I wonder how much adult content the EIA regularly serves up?

I believe in God. But thats about as far as I get. By the oft bandied about and frequently abused to the point its point is likely warped, rusted and dull these days, Occam's razor tells me that for all of the many times events exist well beyond the realm of science, there is likely a non-scientific explanation. That does not mean however I believe in religion. Quite the opposite. I think religion is, by an large, a crock. It was made up by men, its rules were created by men, its organization by men, of men, for the control of hearts and minds. Funnily enough, I just watched the Invention of Lying, you would see how that fits in if you have seen it - entertaining movie by the way. But, what actually triggered this was a new move by the Catholic Church to attract Anglicans. They set up some rules that will allow entire congregations of Anglicans to make the move. As a bit of a backstory, the Anglican Church (started by Henry VIII's split with Rome) has had a bit of schism itself...

Usually, I have this to say about Apple "their products look great, but they are ridiculously overpriced." Then, if you pushed me, I would say that their arrogant snobbishness really gets to me. The iPhone is a great phone, but the price you pay? Absolutely ridiculous (however - I will grant that until just as good or better alternatives came along such as the Pre and the latest Android phones, the price was a little more justifiable as the only game in town.) My bigger problem with that phone and most things Apple is that you are forced to play by their rules and in their ecosystem. Fine, if you want all Apple and you want to be nickled and dimed for everything that should be free. What gets to me most though were the desktops and laptops. They are now just IBM x86 machines with a different OS. Thats it. They come all in white, or aluminum, and they come with some nice software. Which is a good thing, because only about 10% of all software is actually available on a Mac. Yes...

The BoN is not a window into my life. My name is not even Norm, though it is a name of mine. However, I have not been on my best game recently for the BoN. I have been lagging behind in getting ideas of mine up here, and to be perfectly honest, I have not even followed world news, cars, gadgets, technology and the unusual that closely the last few weeks. I went through a breakup which thankfully was more a drain of time than energy, but still, has been a long process. This is related to the fact that my ex decided a good time to cheat on me was two weeks after we moved in together (and use an unwitting friend of mine as cover, and lie to me about it etc etc). I hope she is having a wonderful time with her equally clingy, socially awkward, and tattooed on the outside but weaker than Poland on the inside co-worker (sorry for the Polish joke Frankie). Of course, he's practically married and living with his g/f, and I have been out at bars with him when he was looking for women (thoug...

I was looking for bindings to go on my new skis... and came across this.. which was pretty funny, well at least it was funny late on a Sunday night when you are looking for reasons not to face the work week yet. http://www.rei.com/product/790676 I'm going to go ahead and say... you probably don't want to mount the heelpiece that direction... black zoom Rossignol Freeski 110 XL Bindings - '09/'10 Item # 790676 $139.95 1. black din 3.5-11 $139.95 2. Qty 3. Free shipping with REI Store Pickup. Shipping timeline, rates and more . if (back_to_table) { document.write(back_to_table); } if (preferredSku!=null) { preferredCatentryID = parseHashforPreferredSku(skuarray); for (si = 0 ; si P

So you thought $3/gl was bad? Try this on - its costs the US military $400 on average for every gallon of gas consumed in Afghanistan. The staggering thing is in some regions of Afghanistan it costs the military over $1,000 per gallon, while the US marines alone consume 800,000 gallons of fuel per day in the country. So yeah - it means that the US govt is spending billions just to fuel up. One of the ironies is of course that Afghanistan is in-between Saudi Arabia/Middle East, Asia, Russia, India and China. So the fuel supply should or could look like this: But because of the way the US military runs its wars - it instead looks like this: The thing is, I am sure most of those costs are not long-distance transportation. They vast majority of those costs I am sure are coming in-country. But what this means is that the logistics department of the US military sucks. If you really think that the US could have won WWII if gasoline cost 150 times more at the in Germany than it did from pumps ...

In my searchings of the odd, unusual, weird and wonderful of the automotive world, I had come across the 1988/1989 Dodge Dakota Convertible. Yes, its a pickup truck. Yes, its a convertible. Yes, if you want to store anything valuable in your car, you need to buy something else. Yes, it seems like a really dumb idea. But think of it as a more practical Jeep Wrangler and all of a sudden... I want one. Specifically, I want this one, which I found on eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250512642710&viewitem=&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWAX%3AIT 1989 Dodge Dakota Convertible Rare & Redone 1989 Dodge Dakota Convertible Research 1989 Dodge Dakota Please wait Image not available Enlarge Time left: 3 days 10 hours (Oct 18, 2009 17:42:53 PDT) Bid history: 5 bids [ Refresh ] Current bid: US $1,125.00 Reserve not met Enter maximum bid: US $ Place bid Place bid (Enter US $1,150.00 or more) You can also: Watch this item Now watching in My eBay Now watchin...