Letter Never Sent

Apartment rents expected to rise 5% Inflation alert. More than anything else, fixed geographic costs like this will hit the middle and lower middle class consumers hard.

In a huge nod to Wall Street, Bush nominates Goldman Sachs’ Henry “Hank” Paulson for Secretary of the Treasury. This is about as high profile a cabinet pick as you can get as Paulson is one of the most well known and respected captains of finance. This follows on the heels of the high profile selection of Fox talking head, Tony Snow, for White House spokesman. It looks like Bush is signalling the business world (rather obviously) that he may need their help to keep the wheels on.

I found this quote, which in this context is rather interesting:

“The thing I learned in Washington is that just as important, or more so, as what you do is who you do it with.” -Hank Paulson, CEO Goldman Sachs

After I logged in to discover 152 friendly (”Great site! Ci@lis!”) spam comments from Cialis and online poker sites, I had to move to a new solution for fighting comment spam. It seems the spammers circumvented my previous solution and implemented it into whatever scripts and tools they use to troll the vast blog geography. Luckily, due to the open source nature of Wordpress there were several available solutions for preventing automated comment spam through the use of ‘captcha‘ images. There was one Wordpress plugin, SecureImage, that stood out due to its simple drop-in functionality. You just throw the plugin into your Wordpress plugin directory and activate it. You must also have the ImageMagick module installed on your server, which is usually the case. If not, it’s an easy install. I had to make one change to the plugin script since it was not detecting the presence of ImageMagick’s convert utility. If you have the same problem, simply comment out the section where the script checks for the location of convert. To see the captcha script in action, try to leave a comment.

LARPer Stone Golem made from foam rubber. Video

Live interpreters over Skype for $2.99 a minute. “Be on the phone with an interpreter within seconds. Now all Skype subscribers can have immediate access to live, high-quality professional interpreters, who speak over 150 languages.”

One of the auditors at work who often inhabits the cube next to me recommended a book he had been reading, “Into the Wild” by John Krakaurer. I picked it up while on lunch and read it over the next two days. It’s the tragic tale of 24 year old Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, an intelligent and educated young man with existential angst and wanderlust, who lived off the land of rural Alaska for one summer before succumbing to starvation and injury from mysterious causes and dying alone inside an abandoned school bus where he had been camped. You know going into the book that he dies. The book is really about trying to unravel his motivations and reasons for living such a perilous life on the fringe. Why did he feel so uncomfortable in his world and with himself? Why did he feel so strongly about proving himself against nature and reality? What experience did he hope to achieve?

It’s also about growing up and searching for meaning, the relationships between fathers and sons, the individual and society, the siren song of idealism against the inhumanity of reality. It’s about life and ultimately failure.

On the Father Factor:

In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters.

Children of the “time-bomb” father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes.

But those same children may have trouble feeling safe and developing trust, said Poulter, a clinical psychologist who also works with adolescents in Los Angeles area schools.

“I’ve seen more people hit their heads on what they call a glass ceiling or a cement wall in their careers, and it’s what I call the father factor,” Poulter said in an interview. “What role did your father have in your life? It’s this unknown variable which has this huge impact because we’re all sons and daughters.”

Styles of fathering can affect whether their children get along with others at work, have an entrepreneurial spirit, worry too much about their career, burn out or become the boss, Poulter writes.

Even absent fathers affect how their children work, he writes, by instilling feelings of rejection and abandonment.

YouTube: the original 13-minute short film of Bottle Rocket, directed by Wes Anderson

Pickled corpse tumbles out of rum barrel “Thirsty Hungarians find surprising cause for drink’s ‘special taste’”

Regardless of your personal feelings on the issues, there is an argument to be made that illegal immigration amounts to importing poverty, mostly by creating a foreign, low-wage underclass. Despite the political divide, business will be the major beneficiary of any immigration reform or lack thereof. We now live in a world where low-skill jobs need not be outsourced to take advantage of third-world coolie labor. Third-world labor now comes to our doorstep, at great risk, eager for exploitation. Ultimately, illegal immigration has the effect of keeping wages lower (largely a negative for the average American), but also of acting against inflation (positive). So, it’s really a mixed bag economically. Whatever the outcome of the current debate, the loser will be working class Americans and especially those who work for minimum wage. If there is no change in policy, poor Americans will continue competing against low-wage Mexicans who arrive in ever greater numbers. If illegal immigrants gain amnesty, 12 million immigrants will be thrust into the minimum wage realm and into the welcoming embrace of big business who needs cheap labor, but is too risk-averse to use illegal workers. The addition of 12 million minimum wage workers will drop wages for the bottom 25% of this country saving big business billions in payroll. From the business perspective, this is the perfect argument for a guest worker program, which would legalize illegal labor under the auspices of transitioning immigrants to citizenship while still allowing businesses to pay below minimum wages. The only real solution is to control immigration and to control how business uses immigrant labor. It is disheartening to see the political manipulation of otherwise well-meaning Americans who want their fellows to have the same opportunities they have, but this sentiment of brotherhood will come at no small expense to those who can least afford it. This is well understood by the non-hispanic poor (the african-american community seems solidly anti-illegal immigration) and not so well understood by middle class whites who have less to fear.