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New 9/11 photos from above
Heartbreaking. Still. Always. From CNN.com.
Greenbie’s vitals
Google sure comes in handy! I was wondering when (or if) Greenbie had died. Here are her vitals:
Born: August 4, 1891
Died: January, 1976 in Penobscot, Maine.
It isn’t clear from the citation whether she’s buried here but the “nearest” cemetery is listed as:
Alton Cemetery, Penobscot, Maine
Do You Know What Keeps Glenn Beck up at night?
Just read this Freakonomics article in the NY Times and listened to a short Freakonomics Radio clip of Stephen Dubner interviewing Glenn Beck. I don’t know if Beck and I see eye to eye on the subject of this blog. I imagine we would. I’d like to find out for sure.
America is not yet lost
Paul Krugman echoes a lot of my thoughts about the dysfunctional Congress.
We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.
It seems Sen. Shelby of Alabama:
has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.
One wonders what it will take to get the Congress functioning, and I mean really working again. As Krugman notes, ” America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.”
Experiencing furloughs
In California many state workers have been put on “furlough”. These forced days “off” are accompanied by a reduction in pay. Though temporary, they are particularly difficult for those with lots of obligations. It’s a relative, right? Someone pulling down $600,000 a year with multiple mortgages, loans, and college tuition for several kids might find it hard to deal with a 10 or 20 percent cut. Although it is difficult to imagine that such a scenario trumps the lower wage worker who also suffers a 10 percent cut. Continue reading “Experiencing furloughs”
The Great Depression analogy
Over at The Atlantic, Megan McArdle had this to say about the analogy between the current recession and the Great Depression.
I don’t want to push the Great Depression analogy too far, but what’s surprising when you go back to primary sources from 1930 is the optimism. I don’t mean to imply that everyone thinks things are just swell. But while you know that they are facing the worst economic decade of the twentieth century, they don’t. They’re expecting something more like the recession that followed World War I. People are cutting back, but they’re still spending, particularly because companies are slashing prices to move inventory. It was the long grind of the years that followed, and the catastrophe of the second banking crisis, that scarred them permanently. And this shows up in the economics stats and the stock market, which did not, as we like to imagine, simply decline in a straight line.
Score one for frugality
No inaugural bash as usual for University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Lessons of the Great Depression
Harvard Economic professor Robert Barro on lessons from the Great Depression. He’s interviewed by the website, The Browser.
B: I thought that the Great Depression was the ultimate cautionary tale on the dangers of protectionism. That’s not the case?
RB: No I think what is much clearer is the role of the financial system and the credit implosion, both in the 1930s and today. The rest of the stuff may just be a sideshow, it may not be that important. There’s a strong tendency for the economy to recover on its own, as long as it’s not subject to further new shocks, so a likely scenario is that that is what will happen today as well. And then the Obama administration will say that it’s because of our policy that things recovered, and there won’t be any way to prove whether that’s right or wrong.
Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.
-- George S. Patton