If A = B

and A = C,

Then B = C

Instead of ranting and raving illogically at various town hall meetings, let’s try using a little good old-fashioned logic (that we were all bored-to-death with in high school, but, let’s face it, can come in handy now and then).

Now consider the following statistics:

When asked in a new Harris Poll how strongly those polled support 14 different government services, five services receive strong, or a fair amount of support, from about three-fourths of all adults or more. The five most popular services are The National Parks Service (85% support), Crime-fighting and prevention services (77%) Medicare (76%), Social Security (76%), and Unemployment benefits (74%).

Medicare came in with a strong 76%, over 3 out of 4 people polled by Harris.  (REMINDER: Medicare is a “single payer” system, with the government as the payee).  I think it is safe to say that overall, Medicare is a success, and, if we can say that success is “good”,  it logically follows that:

Medicare (A) = Single-payer System (B)

Medicare (A) = “good” (C)

then, Single-Payer System (B) = “good” (C)

Now, that wasn’t so painful was it?

Silicon Valley's unemployment rate -- which was below California's average and largely tracked the national average last year -- has soared, surpassing the state average in May. By June, the area's unadjusted unemployment rate was 11.8%, worse than California's 11.6% and the national rate of 9.7%, according to the latest figures from California's Employment Development Department. The rate of job losses was particularly steep in sectors such as semiconductor manufacturing, where employment dropped more than 13% in June from a year earlier.

in teaching or financial consulting. People are leaving tech as “more tech companies are offshoring and some are shrinking, plus people are burned out and tired from having been there and done that,” says Ms. Brock.

Community colleges and job centers in the area are reporting a increase in enrollment of out-of-work techies, and many are looking to move into other industries.

Others are happier to leave tech. Minda Cutcher, 53, was laid off as a finance manager at telecommunications company Covad Communications Co. last year after a decade at the San Jose, Calif., firm. In May, Ms. Cutcher launched her own financial-consultancy business for the elderly.

Ms. Cutcher says she doesn’t regret leaving tech after working in the industry for 30 years. “I did a real re-examination of my priorities,” she says. “I’m done with high tech and fancy titles. Now I’m going from high tech to high touch.”

With the recent rash of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia, hi-tech entrepreneurs are coming to the rescue.  Most people figure pirates probably don’t bathe often, at least often enough, so here’s one solution that kills two birds with one stone:  The instant wash, but with no rinse cycle: This solution (no pun intended) allows crews of ships under attack to coat the side of the ship, ropes, ladders, etc. with a slimy liquid that makes it almost impossible to walk/climb/hold-on-to.

Ron Mathis, senior program manager of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, says the foam was developed for the Marine Corps to control unruly crowds. But, he says, he’s optimistic about selling some for “the pirate application.”

The idea would be to spray the pirate’s vessel as it approached, or to coat ropes, ladders, steps and the hull of the ship that’s under attack.  Mathis says walking on a surface that has been sprayed is like walking on ice. Climbing steps becomes nearly impossible. And ladders are out of the question.

Next, we have the super-sized “sound blaster”.  Think that pirates won’t take orders?  Think again, but this time the order to “get the H__ off of my ship” command can be heard loud and clear.  It’s a high-powered directional loudspeaker that allows a ship to hail an approaching vessel more than a mile away. And it comes with recordings of useful phrases, like “You must leave the area immediately,” in Somali and dozens of other languages.

For pirates who keep coming anyway, the LRAD has another feature. It’s a piercing “deterrent tone” that sounds a bit like a smoke detector alarm.

The tone can be transmitted with enough intensity to cause extreme pain and even permanent hearing loss for anyone directly in the beam of sound that comes from the device.
And finally, we have the high-powered squirt gun (at last, the “rinse cycle” after being slimed per the goo they got sprayed with earlier).  “The Force 80 Water Cannon is a stainless steel, remote-controlled squirt gun,” says Roger Barrett James, director of international sales and marketing for the Swedish company Unifire.

The Force 80 is no ordinary squirt gun, he says. It has a 3-inch nozzle that can send1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction. It is a tremendous force of water that will knock over anything in its path and will also flood a pirate’s ship very quickly,” James says.

And since the Force 80 can be controlled from inside the ship, using video cameras and a joystick, pirates can’t easily shoot the person operating it.

Yar, armed with these beauties, acommercial ship can kick some serious pirate booty!

Officials decided they had to act lest the nation’s largest insurer file bankruptcy. Such a move would roil world markets since AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) has $1.1 trillion in assets and 74 million clients in 130 countries.

An eventual liquidation of the company is most likely, senior Fed officials said. But with the government loan, the company won’t have to go through a tumultuous fire sale.

“[A] disorderly failure of AIG could add to already significant levels of financial market fragility and lead to substantially higher borrowing costs, reduced household wealth and materially weaker economic performance,” the Fed said in a statement.

The bailout marks the most dramatic turn yet in an expanding crisis that started more than a year ago with the mortgage meltdown. The resulting credit crunch is now toppling not only mainstay Wall Street players, but others in the wider financial industry.

So we have nothing short of the socialization (yes, theirs that dirty word) of financial risk, and the subsidization of big boys who play in that world.  Now these are “for profit” organizations, so I would assume, after these companies are turned-around, that we will all see some sort of distribution of profits each year, yes?   A dividend?  A tax break maybe? 

Hmmm, I wonder if the Feds would bail out the New York Philharmonic, or The Met, should THEY go under??

“There’s a real dilemma facing operators of coal powered plants,” said John O’Donnell, Ausra’s Executive Vice President. “The price of coal has exploded recently and it continues to rise rapidly. Long-term coal contracts are coming in at 4 times the price of the last iteration of the contract.”

Australia recently ratified the Kyoto Protocol and will begin trading carbon in about a year. Carbon is likely to trade for $30-$60 per ton, according to John O’Donnell. Ausra’s solar thermal retrofits are cost effective around $30 a ton.

“$30 a ton is $.03 a kilowatt hour [for electricity generated from coal],” said John O’Donnell. “For some of the older coal power plants, you are looking at a 30, 40, or 50% increase in the electricity price [due to coal's carbon output] all at once and an ongoing uncertain future.”

To their credit, Bank of America, Chase, and Citigroup are now considering climate change and carbon emissions among the risks in lending to money for electric power plant projects, so borrowing money for such projects may cost more for power generation options that result in a large carbon footprint.  This provides added incentive for local and federal governments to look towards clean and renewable energy sources.

But so far, no major energy bills have been passed. Is it possible all this money has been spent to maintain the status quo?

Meanwhile, the renewable energy folks haven’t seen a big increase in funding.  Looking at the dollars spent lobbying Congress, that may not be surprising. The renewable industry and their allies in the environmental movement have spent a combined $19 million lobbying Congress this year – half what the oil industry has spent.

If cash equals friendship, then John McCain and the oil industry are best friends.  The Arizona Republican has taken $1.4 million from oil industry employees in the 2007-2008 election cycle, more than any other politician, according to CRP.  That’s over three times as much as Barack Obama, who ranks just below Hillary Clinton as the highest Democrat recipient.

The sad part of this discussion is that people know about, and even EXPECT their to be a corrolation between how much a special interest spends on lobbying and/or making campaign contributions.  You can ID this expectation in the rhetoric behind the report from CNN.  If the trend of “whoever has the most money wins”, then our democracy is doomed.  Progress in the interest of the majority will be slowed to a crawl, if it moves at all.  If our elected officials don’t have the moral strength to resist the implied extortion and “bribes” from these large companies (some do and some don’t, but I believe the majority do not), then we need to remove the temptation by making lobbying illegal, and campaign funds should be funded by, drawn from and distributed equally from our tax dollars.  That way, maybe the real voice of the people can be heard over the thundering din and deep pockets of special interests.

Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili announces Friday he signed a cease-fire agreement with Russia.

In Washington, President Bush chided Russia on Friday for Cold War-style behavior, saying, “bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”

Bush said the United States stands “with the people of Georgia and their democratically elected government.” He said the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity “must be respected.”

“We will not cast them aside,” he said.

Bush said Russia’s invasion of Georgia has “damaged its credibility.”

I’m reminded of an old saying, something about “the pot calling the kettle black”.  Excuse me, but if my memory serves me right, didn’t we recently do a preemptive attack on Iraq?  So Russia, in this case, is a “bully”, but we’re not?   Hmmmm.  I think we should at least consider the possibility that Russia was actually emboldened by the fact that we are over there raiding one country or another.  So, Mr. Bush, what gives us the sovereign right to invade a country, but other countries cannot?

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Most corporations, including the vast majority of foreign companies doing business in the United States, pay no income taxes, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.

    During the eight-year period covered by the report, 72 percent of foreign-owned corporations went at least one year without owing taxes, and the same was true for 55 percent of domestic corporations.

    Small companies were much more likely to pay no taxes than larger companies. Still, more than 3,500 large domestic corporations – with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts – did not pay taxes in 2005.

    The report said about 80 percent of the companies studied paid no taxes because they didn’t generate any profit after expenses. Money-losing companies can legitimately owe no tax, and others can use provisions of the tax code to lower or eliminate their liability.

    But the lawmakers who sought the data seized on the report as proof of corporate gamesmanship.

    ”It’s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country,” said Byron L. Dorgan , D-N.D., who requested the report along with Carl Levin , D-Mich. “The tax system that allows this wholesale tax avoidance is an embarrassment and unfair to hardworking Americans who pay their fair share of taxes. We need to plug these tax loopholes and put these corporations back on the tax rolls.”

    The report covered the period from 1998 through 2005. During that time, corporate income taxes as a share of gross domestic product dipped, from 2.2 percent in 1998 to 1.2 percent in 2003, the lowest share since 1983. But receipts jumped after that, hitting 2.7 percent in 2006 and 2007, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That was the highest share since the late 1970s.

    The GAO report also found that foreign-owned corporations were somewhat more likely to report no income than domestic corporations. There are several possible reasons for that. Foreign corporations may be younger, and startups are more likely to have no net income after expenses. They may also be in industries with lower profit margins.

    Another possibility could be the use of transfer pricing, which companies use to account for transactions between subsidiaries in different countries. Creative, rule-stretching use of transfer pricing can allow companies to push their profits into lower-taxed jurisdictions. The report does not attempt to examine whether illegal transfer-pricing caused the difference between foreign and domestic companies.

    But companies looking for lower-taxed jurisdictions often take profits out of the United States. The country’s 35 percent top rate on corporate income is among the highest in the industrialized world.

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So, evidently our government, in conjunction with it’s Suger Daddy corporations, has found a perfect way to make us “feel sorry” for corporations, while behind the scenes they are getting away with murder.  They have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, yet the majority of them pay no taxes.   Hmmmmmm.  I guess it’s easy to show little or no profit on your tax returns when  you are making huge “campaign contributions” (read “bribes”) to your local congressional rep. while also paying your top executives astronomical salaries for coming up with innovative tax dodges.

In a recent Techimoto article, written on July 29 of this year, entitled Just Remember Us When You’re in Office (wink, wink), I stated that the majority of congress had to be on the take, and under the influence of Lobbyists. Why? Because issues about to be voted on, issues that are so obvious as to what makes sense and what doesn’t, issues that have, via polls, the support of the majority of Americans, get voted in the opposite direction!

So what can we conclude? That some phenomenal forces are at work behind the scenes, and these forces are what are driving congressional votes, not what makes sense, and is in the best interest of the American people. These forces most likely translate into dollars in one form or another, either in “promises made” to congressional members for their “retirement”, or in promise of current or future campaign funds for that particular elected official (of course some congress members are less subtle, and openly and unabashedly take direct bribes, like tickets to the Super Bowl, junkets to exotic vacation spots, etc.).

So, Paris for President, but my reasons are probably different from most: She’s already so rich that bribes from companies like Big Oil would look like fodder for a day at the Mall. When offered a large “campaign contribution” from Exxon, I can see her rolling her eyes, and saying “get real bitch”. Whatever.