greed

Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stones piece gives the best accounting of AIG's role in the economic shit storm I have seen thus far. I love Taibbi's writing, but it seems not even he can make this thing funny, imagery of the Pope going on a meth binge and losing his job notwithstanding. The best tl;dr summary I can copy/paste:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

By the bye, I just acquired a copy of the Get Your War On collection, for which Taibbi wrote the introduction. It's well worth the $11, and I recommend you buy it. Reading the first few pages really brought me back to the "WTF are we doing?" period of '02-'03. Operation Enduring Freedom in the motherfucking house!

Seriously.

I'm sorry he got caught. This is the one red light camera I regularly drive through, because there's just no easy way to bypass it, especially when traffic is heavy and turning left from Old Broadway north onto Broadway is nearly impossible (and fucking dangerous).

Seagate Technology has agreed to reimburse potentially millions of customers and pay up to $1.79 million in plaintiff's attorney fees to settle a lawsuit accusing the world's largest maker of hard drives of overstating the data-storage capacity of those devices, court records show.
...
The plaintiffs, suing on behalf of all affected Seagate customers, allege that Seagate's marketing was deceptive because it used the decimal definition of the capacity term "gigabyte," which indicates 1 billion bytes of capacity, instead of the binary definition used by operating systems, which translates that measurement into 1.07 billion bytes, a difference of 7 percent.

Seagate was technically correct to call 1 billion bytes a gigabyte, but it's also kind of a shady practice. I'm torn, though, between my inner prescriptivist language nazi and my aversion to the totally retarded kibi/mibi/gibi prefixes.

Smokers who cross the state line to buy cheaper cigarettes could see their cars searched or seized as Tennessee tax agents start cracking down on the practice, revenue officials announced Friday.
[...]
Tax agents will stake out nearby stores in other states to find people loading up on cigarettes. Then a second agent will stop and search the vehicle once it crosses into Tennessee, Remke said.
Transporting between three and 24 cartons is a misdemeanor, and 25 or more is a felony, he said.

So depriving the state of $155 is a felony offense that can result in seizure of your car and the loss of your rights to vote or own guns.

Lured by false promises and driven by desperation, thousands of Chinese and Filipina women pay high fees for jobs in garment factories on the Pacific island of Saipan—which despite being a U.S. territory is exempt from federal minimum wage and certain immigration laws. The clothing they sew, bearing the "Made in the USA" label, is shipped duty- and quota-free to the U.S. for sale by The Gap, J. Crew, Polo, and other retailers.

see also

I ran a few errands earlier today and decided out of laziness and hunger to drive rather than bike. (When I got out and realized how effin beautiful the weather was, I promised myself I would go for a couple hours-long ride this evening.) I needed to fill up my gas tank, and damn! gas is back up to ~$3/gal ($2.979 where I stopped). When did that happen, I wondered. I looked at my most recent receipt, and it had been five days short of two months (and $0.32/gal) since I last bought gas. That must be a new record for me. I spent $27 for a tank full, also a new record. Eh, no worries—still less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day, right?

Anyway, I started thinking about the price of gas and gas tax rates and the don't-blame-us-blame-the-dadgum-guvment gas pump stickers that show the state and federal tax rates. So for the last couple of hours I've gotten my geek on and researched the history of gas prices and tax rates over the past few decades.

(Lots of numbers and graphs below...)

NBC said that they debated internally "for hours" over whether to air the VT gunman's multimedia manifesto. That's right, whole hours. Rather than even waiting until the dead had all been buried before posthumously stroking the gunman's narcissistic ego, they decided to forge ahead and lay it all out for us in a tantalizing trickle of photos and video clips. (Speaking of narcissism, how 'bout those NBC NEWS watermarks on all the images. Classy. Neener, neener! The killer chose us and not you!) Their justification for airing the material included something about helping people who wanted to make some sort of sense out of the massacre. Right. Oh, so he was apparently a crazy monotone talking motherfucker. Now it all makes sense. Thanks, NBC, you've taken your cues from FOX NEWS well and have done the public quite a service.

I'm sure the desire to air their big scoop before the other guys had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on their decision. Nor was it that they thought viewers' interest might be waning after seeing the same old greasy head shot for 48 continuous hours.

(More below...)