The Hayseeds blog, No. 93 for the week starting December 11, 2004.
November 27, 2004
Hayseeds No. 92
December 11, 2004
Hayseeds No. 93
December 18, 2004
Hayseeds No. 93
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I'm starting to feel a lot better, thanks to the miracle of modern antibotics targeted to certain skin problems and many overpaid scientists and doctors who believe they are god. At least, it didn't kill me unlike what might have happened 40 or 50 years ago.
Walking around the back field this morning I noted how the dog's ears pick up when the church bell was ringing. Removed my mat from my truck bed to keep the rain from piling up in it. Sat in my truck and got that feeling back once again. 4x4 Low is really low, and great for hauling wood from the backyard (driving in first gear in that range is like driving a tractor in low gear).
How about the Texas Death Penality Show? People nationwide are able to vote on who should be executed today, based on their special crime, and then you get to watch the execution take place. Gory yes, but probably not much of a step for the reality shows we see today. Hey, it would bring in the ratings and help pay for the ever-so-wasteful penalities that us taxpayers get stuck with paying.
Well, obviously!—It would be a big step down from governor to one of President's henchman. Moreover, the governor says he loves New York and doesn't want to leave it, despite the fact that he's rarely in Albany. Maybe he just doesn't like cities per se, and being in Washington would mean he could never get away from DC, unlike himself with Albany right now.
While it seems that being mispopular served Clinton good in 2000 for the US Senate Election in New York, running for President is much more difficult. I can't see her as President, and I know I certainly know I don't want her as President (although she'd be better then most Republican idiots like the one we currently have).
And his fate is still unlearned. He will ride forever 'neth the streets of NYC. Yes, the city is thinking about hiking some local taxes to pay for the subway in the big city. Having never been in a subway before (except in Phillidelphia in 1995 or so), I don't understand what the big deal is, except that subways provide a lot of transit for a lot of people in the city without big (or small) polluting pickup trucks like myself.
It seems like people on both sides of the isle, who come from areas where the legislative pay is more then adequate to pay for living expenses and a good life, are opposed to further pay hikes, particularly those which would benifit city slickers more (such as proposals to replace lulus with cost of living benifits). In other words, Sayward, Parment and the alike not only hate the high property taxes in their districts, they fear they will get a pay cut in the legislature, while people like DiNapolli and Sanders will get a big raise.
Yet another exciting freak story about how Medicaid is sucking all the life out of local budgets, and paying a large part of people's salaries for nice people like me. Not to mention our fine State Employement Agency, in other words state agencies and local government, that hire about 25% of the locals in every portion of the state and that the other 70% who live off of state contracts, state and federal subsidies (farmers and the alike), and those who get paid to lobby the state.
Maybe he's right, but it looks like it's rather inevitable at this point in form or another, most likely bundled with a big bow and called reform. It's nice to have a little bigger check to come home for the holidays, right? Note how there is no planned hike for monies for legislative staffers.
I think Yancey Roy is right on the mark on the inevitably of a raise and that it will come with a big bow tied to the top, suggesting reform compounded with another popular bill like the minimum wage veto override. At least some people will make out good besides legislators, should a payhike happen through the minimum wage hike. But for those poor suckers who depend on low minimum wage to keep their struggling businesses going, it appears that all this legislative sausage making will hit them twice in the face.
See, I wouldn't read Alan's Legislative Gazette except for these kind of cheesy stories from NYPIRG and EANY. At any rate, some of those gimky toys you see around Christmas are really bad for both you and your child (to say nothing of the environment). We have heard about this for years and years, but still parents blindly buy those hip-hop shrink wrapped garbage (in the most literal sense of the word), and children choke and die. Nothing like Christmas to make me a cynic.
Some people in the Assembly Republican Minority and Senate Democratic Minority are threatening to take the leaders to court to explain why they can't have more of the power. The reason is obvious: they are not in the majority party, and the people of New York didn't vote them there. I guess you could argue that power isn't very well distributed in the New York system, but that's how the bums (voters like me) want it, and that's how they've voted in the polls in the past. It is a dangerous thing when the judicary to be messing with the legislature.
Well if you look at these numbers from the Daily KOs Blog (hey, I'm bored and surfing the web for a while), you will see that red states typically have a lot more teenage pregancy then blue states. I guess that says something about so-called moral values, or at least where poor minorities are most likely to be large part of the state populations. The other obvious question is what are these teenage pregencies like? Are they from supporting families who live on large pieces of land and can afford such pregancies, or are they getto horrors?
We have known this was going to happen for a quite a while now, but it all was just a matter of timing. Right on schedule, minimum wage workers will be getting $6/hr starting on Jan 1, $6.75/hr in 2006, and $7/hr in 2007. I'm sure many people on the lowest rungs of the society (and those a few up like myself) will be benifiting from this hike. It will inevitably push up wages for all, but at the same time might cause a slight inflationary pressure or decrease the number of new jobs in New York versus the few other states with lower minimum wages.
It's a big loss for the governor, and those who opposed the miniumum wage hike like small business owners and farmers who employeed lots of low wage workers. Minimum wage is in real dollars a lot higher upstate then down, as purchasing power is a lot less in downstate. Still, they say to live a basically sufficent life in the Albany area, you need to make at least $13/hr. That number might be off-set though by other assets that an individual would own like land, a good reliable car or truck, a house, and so forth. Paying for those things takes a lot out of people's wages.
So what does this all mean to governor Pataki? The fallout is hard to know for sure, but it seems like the governor dropped his strong opposition to the hike, in fear of being a branded a cold-hearted mean-spirited person. At the same time, he wants to appear tough and fisically responsible not only to fill his ego and protect his own assets, but to give policymakers in Washington a nice resume to hang his hat on. He claims he doesn't want that job in DC (it would mean more time away from his cows), but we all know that deep down a good position in the Republican party would do him good. It might just be that a crappy cabinet position is not what he's in the market for, especially the way the Bush administration is chewing through cabinet members in recent years.
Those who get slightly more then minimum wage in the Capitol (roughly $78,000/yr base salary for legislators), can't look for a pay hike attached to minimum wage hike, according to the words of Brady Bunch: Joe, Shelly, and George. Joe and Shelly say they haven't talked about it all, and George says he would veto any increase. It's too bad for some legislators downstate who get barely enough money to survive (well, it's not that bad) and have to get second and third jobs in high-paying law firms in their field of expertice (nothing like Assemblyman Wright's Election Law pratice—write the laws and litigate 'em) and overpaid banking positions (after writing favoritable laws to the big banks). I will believe that there will be no so-called reform to legislative pay, when Jan '05 rolls around and it's impossible for a sitting legislature to hike their own pay.
The Big Sky state, known for it's big western rural landscape and it's rugged individualism is electing many Democrats to top posts. Democrats now control the Montana Senate and Governorship, and are regularly winning 4 out of 5 state elections, despite their luck in the recent elections. The Washington Monthly gives some ideas on how the Democrats have won back that state.
To summarize, Democrats have emphasized the environment in pratical terms of hunting and fishing. People like doing those activities to a large degree in that state, and protecting areas and opening new areas up are big things. People are starting to see what the aggressive energy policies of Republicans have had on that state, and how there is an alternative. Democrats have learned to rethink their gun control attitudes, from being totally anti-gun, to being reasonable supporters of gun rights, and at the same time curbing the excesses of some that use guns to cross the line. That's not easy to do, especially for a party known for it's phophia of things that go bang.
Genuine populalism has helped the Democrats to a large degree. People can pick up when Republicans and Democrats are being fakers, and some of the Republican rhetoric is just plain mean-spirited and unfair to people of the lower classes. Democrats are no better with their fake emphasis to lower classes (we love our blue collars, but don't you pull me in the mud from my Beemer). There are too many rich Democrats who aren't afraid to show it, or have a liberal attitude to show for it. Maybe someday these Democrats will realize values are important, even when they aren't forcing it on others like the Republicans do. It is one thing to condemn gay marriage, it's another thing for a state to prohibit it.
And also means some really bad drug dealer people will back on the street sooner. See the Newsday Highlights of the Law. At least it seems that they are raising the penalities for some violent offenders, but not for those who use guns in act of selling or getting drugs (which is really unfortunate).
These modified drug laws also fail to give more judical discresion or make penalities more reasonable for the amount of damage that certain drugs do. Cocaine and methaphamine users still get off relatively easy, and crack users get punished severely. The lack of stronger penalities for methaphamines in the new drug laws is extremely disappointing, as meth production usually involves the stealing of dangerous farm fertilizer materials, and produces hazardous byproducts that are carelessly discarded along roads sides, only to cause problems for regular rural citizens.
All hard drugs are bad for their psychoactive properties, that distort reality, bring out hidden mental illness, and make people dependent. We must consider the ramifications of a drug from production to communities destroyed by it's use. We should punish or help those who do drugs, once we figure out whether or not they are culipable. This brings up the old question: is it mental illness or individual defiance? The later denies the autonomy of an individual, while the second suggests that all action is purposeful and that addictions are largely social constructs and not medically based.
I'm not particularly happy about this, but he will make a good candidate for the Democrats to run against the Republicans' increasingly stale George Pataki. He's a man of the party, and it looks like he has a good chance against Pataki (assuming he doesn't bow out and Gulianti replaces him), so we must celebrate him.
Will I campaign for Spitzer for Governor? Maybe. He's a harder sell for me (too liberal), but he's fought a good fight for individual investors and the alike, and I think he would make a good governor. A lot depends on how he will define himself in the campaign. I was just hoping for Assemblyman Brodsky or the alike to run, but I will live with Spitzer. He's not Pataki, and that's good enough of a reason to vote for him, even if I endorsed and voted for Pataki in 2002. We can all make mistakes in the past.
The Supreme Court of Mannhattan says that when the planes hit on 9/11 it was two seperate disasters. Who besides a lawyer would say the NYC attacks where two seperate attacks? At any rate, this means that Larry Silverstein is entitled to double the insurance money that he would have otherwise gotten. That means we will all be paying more for commerical insurance, and Silverstien will get his money, abit on dubious ground assuming there is not the inevitable appeal.
There is a lot of opinion in the papers today on this topic. The TU eds call those who oppose the hike to be sore losers for claiming their will be catclymic damage, citing another article that suggests the wage hike will be good for most people, even while it forces upward pressure on businesses to hike salaries and ultimately prices. The inflationary pressure of the hike should be interesting, as for what it does to businesses and to our own wallets.
It is one my little pet peaves when people say hi, particularly with mentioning my name, and don't identify themselves. I probably know who you are, but I forget—if your not constantly in my face, my memory sometimes fails me. You don't know how many silly lobbyists, classmaters, professors, and other people I've met over the years. It's just so unconfortable for me when such a situtation arises. Please be nice, and if you don't think I know who you are, identify yourself.
It's seems that the legislature has let itself off the hook once again when it comes to reforming the Rocky Drug Laws. I'm not surpised that legislators wanted to defuse the tension on this situtation, and move on with things, but the lack of reform is indictative of a system that rarely reforms itself.
At any rate, as Joe said, these changes to the drug laws will change lives, but not nearly enough. Yet, that's normal with politics—we'd like to do ten times as much, but were stuck with only a fraction of what we might otherwise desire. Hopefully in next year's budget that the Westchester DA's dream will come true, and local government will recieve the effective resources for fighting drugs and giving those who are dependent help. While that won't fix the broken laws, it will go a long way to improving the system, as did these changes.
Then any other US Senate candidate in New York history according to final numbers which show him winning by 71% of the vote. Not big news, but it shows to what a great extent the Republicans are in the dog house in New York, and how partisan politics have become so polarizing with the extend of red-blue states.
Assuming that Pataki runs for a forth term he is going to face a strong uphill battle from Spitzer in the '06 governor race. This is not surpising, as there has been only one man elected for four 4-year terms of governor in New York and that was no less then the man who drove around in a Cadillac with number '1' license plates—Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Yes, there was Dewitt Clinton who had something like 5 or six terms, but his terms where only two years long, and that was in the 1700s. I think getting a Democrat in charge of things could bring some promising reforms, but it might have some downsides too. Pataki's veto has proven to be an important check on a sometimes overreaching Senate and Assembly. Who knows if a Democrat would veto nearly as many bills, although a Democrat might protect our formal civil liberties better from laws like the Terrorism bills.
While you might have thought I was thinking about the continuning rumbles about terrorists in that county, I actually am going to discuss the County's banning of Alchohol Mist machines, that can't make you drunk, despite what some say. The amount of alchohol in most beverages is too low when in inhaled to have any effect, except to make you poorer by buying the $2000 machine, and as such to make you feel like a sucker. But the beat goes on. And some claim it's a way to get drunk, without looking drunk or being drunk as per breathlizer tests. Only problem is that if your not measured as drunk, then you must not be drunk.
No kids, we aren't talking about Clifton Park either despite what Capital News 9 says, but areas like AuSable Forks and Plattsburgh. Many Democrats love Spitzer and others not so much, but most are happy to see good competition to the somewhat outmoded George E. Pataki.
There is a bill that's been on the governor's desk for a while that would continue the ban of vinyl piping in commerical buildings, a good commonsense environmental measure. He must act on it during the next week or it wil automatically become law. See bill AB 11660 and SB 7577. As we all know, we don't need any more vinyl in our society, where it poses a grave threat. As many of you know, vinyl contains cancer causing chemicals, and when you burn it, it's even worst. Not only will we be giving more death sentences to firefighters and those who work in those buildings.
Some (rather greedy) general contractors want vinyl piping to be in buildings, as it would save them maybe $3000 of a multi-million dollar contract to build commmerical and government buildings in Upstate. They cite the fact that it is an additional expense to building owners, and vinyl piping has some environmental benifits such as reduced material consumption in manufacture. PVC plastics are just made up of 57% salt used for chlorine, and the least amount of oil of any other type of plastic. It's cheap to make, but when that chlorine burns or leaches itself away it produces that horror known as dioxin.
So us environmentalists and those pipe fitter people want to keep the old copper and stainless steel pipe. Fitting stainless steel or copper takes a little bit more skill, and isn't as easy as PVC pipe, but is far better. Stainless lasts forever, and can be easily recycled, unlike PVC which goes to the dump on demolition or is incinerated and we all get to enjoy more cancer. That says nothing about some construction sites where people save a little bit of money by burning piles of debris (these places exist in some places of the state unfortunately).
New York State is going in the direction of getting nasty materials out of out buildings. The worst asbestos offenders are all but gone, although some new products do contain abestos like chaulks and floor mastics. Creocete is gone from picnic tables in state parks and many docks and telephone polls, being replaced with out materials. Lead solders are being replaced with safer metals. Playground materials are less likely then before to use arsenic to preserve them. And so forth: we are making materials safer.
We have a long ways to go. We got to get rid of vinyl siding in one way or another, and stop making our trucks and cars little palaces of that toxic vinyl. But we need to go in the right way.
Standard Disclamer: I know a pipe-fitter, and I certainly think it's important to give people who devoted their life to this trade a good life. We don't want to be killing such people by forcing them to handle toxic pipe to save a few bucks, and the costs of stainless/copper pipe is pretty reasonable. It also keeps more of these contractors employed.
You just know this has to be good, even if his predictions are as artifically pestimistic. His observations are pretty asute: that we are playing a game with interest rates and deficit spending to make a very weak economy go far more then it should be going. It's like the old trick of holding the choke open on your truck until it chokes out with a big cloud of white smoke from all the gas it's getting and none of the air it needs.
If Kunstler's right, we inevitably are leading ourselves to another period of stagflation and lack of confidence like we saw in the 1970s. However, we might be able to avoid it by doing what we are currently doing, but only slightly more restrained. Remember, half the battle of feeling good is pretending and not actually doing. We were depressed as a nation in 1970s, believing that 1960s exuberance took us too far and damaged us as a society. Yes, we did spend too much in the 1960s and we went too far with some new programs and technologies, but that alone did not cause the stagflation of the 1970s.
Kunstler would like to see us become a reality-based society, grounded in agriculture and small towns, and not this modernist ugliness that we currently see in our cities. Certainly rotting concerete structures can be depressing—but we need to fix and build upon our strong base. I think we need to fully look at ramifications of our actions on all things, and how to integrate the human need into our big cities. We have to find ways to better use materials, and create better sources of energy and resources. The solution to modernity is not to turn it back like people like Kunster would do, but to celebrate it and use technology to cure its ills through careful consideration.
In some ways Kunstler believes very deeply in this notion of using technology to take our society in new directions, but his cyncism sometimes gets the best of him. Maybe the radical reforms he proposes are best, but they are impratical and must be tempered with the neccessity of contemporary society.
Yes, you sure can. Take a look at this construction debris dealer that actively recycles old material including wood from old houses. Very neat. We really should aggressively pursue the recycling of construction debris, figuring what a truly big part of solid waste it really is (and how much of it with minimal reprocessing can be resold and reused).
A lot of accidents occur in mall parking lots, especially as cars try to navigate through often confusing intersections controlled only by signs, with way too many lanes of traffic. Mall try to accomidate lots of traffic at low costs to them, and often with really bad results. As the TU shows there are some suspects for really high traffic collisions, and they aren't what you suspect—Northway Mall, Latham Farms, and Mohawk Mall.
It's not as much a matter of traffic as you might expect, as Crossgates and Colonie Center get far more, but how the parking lots where engineered, and how much traffic is in the hot spots at any one time. It seems as though there is a compelling public interest argument in having traffic professionals such as the DOT survey and design, or at least certify designs to make sure they are safe.
At least when it comes to funding under-preforming schools, something that most of them support. The devil is in the details with this poll: namely how was it worded and where exactly is the money coming from and where is it going? Most New Yorkers agreed that they'd be willing to take some state funds from wealthy schools and give it to poorer, except that such a proposition won't fly in pratice. NY has a strong pratice of following hold-harmless, which requires that we only give schools more funds and not less. So we have to raise revenue another way.
Interestingly enough, there was no option in the poll to raise income taxes as a way to pay for increases to poor school taxes. The business community may be steadfastly against that, along with richer New Yorkers, but it seems like a good option to make the state tax code more progressive. The second choice of people polled was to hike sales tax, but that may prove impratical with some counties already having a 9.25% sales tax—any further hike might encourage tax evasion and hurt the poor more then it would help.
The third choice in the poll was to raise property taxes to pay for the hikes, but that's wildly unpopular, and in poor districts where schools are underfunded the tax rate is almost up to the maximum of about $21-23 per $100 accessed on residential property. Raise it any more and your going to be going against the Laftner curve. Higher taxes will hurt property values more then help them (leading to lost revenue), and will erode the already poor communities any father. And nobody is going to pay higher property taxes just for paying for schools far away (property tax only goes to counties and local government).
As a side note, it dealing with the Medicaid crisis in New York would likely help poor communities in a number of ways. For one, it would mean reduced property accessments, which could be money poured into schools or back into the community for individuals to spend. It also would mean that if we found more cost effective ways to deliver services, we could give better quality health care to the poor in those schools.
Probably not it looks like when it comes to the half million dollar compliance fine doled out from city court in city hall along with the other half million the city spent on keeping the building from falling on people. Fred LeBrun probably is right that nothing will ever come of the Wellington, and if anything is saved, it will be just a little part of the fascade. The rest of the historic building that once housed people like Mario Cuomo is now just a part of downtown history and the Rapp Road Landfill. It's too bad we can't make foreign nationals comply with city laws, but it also makes a powerful argument for mandating local ownership of buildings.
The rather indepedent Democrat who was mayor of NYC for a while and then endorsed President Bush and others is now celebrating his 80th birthday. Who would have ever thought he'd get so old so quickly? I guess the late 1970s are rapidly fading into the past.
They want to reform committees so that they get more power, but nobody really thinks all this talk of a power grab is going to get them anywhere.
Some lakes right near highways are being studied to find out what supersalty water is doing to the environment. We all know what evil salt does to our cars and trucks, but we also much remember how much damage that car accidents do.
All I can say amazing! This one man knows more about regulating pollution and the reality of bureaucratic environment policies, and while you might not totally agree with him politically, he seems pretty candid and truthful in this interview. He discusses:
His observations on social movements are particularly asute:
I have a theory about movements in America, whether it is the women's movement, the civil rights movement, or the environmental movement. When they first start, they tend to point up imperfections in the society which are almost universally accepted as problems. They serve a useful function in highlighting past wrongs that every fair-minded person agrees should be righted.
It's only in the subsequent phases of the movement that they begin to get into more controversial questions, after the initial agenda of the movement has been quite uniformly accepted as a correct one which ought to be redressed. Congress then enacts the fundamentals of the movement, whether related to civil rights, women's rights, or environmental protection. You know, there are two ways of killing movements: either give them nothing, or give them everything. Some get everything they asked for, what do they do next? When the original agenda is enacted, then what? The movement doesn't break up, but holds together by finding a new agenda. The women's movement started with issues involving equal pay for equal work, something almost no one could deny. While it hasn't yet been fully achieved, everybody agrees it is the right thing. But once the original agenda is achieved, then what? Questions are raised about abortion rights, for example, which is more controversial, and not uniformly or universally accepted like equal pay for equal work. Civil rights experienced the same thing, as did environmentalism.
