Events

I can't think for a moment what those odd folks at #OWS are protesting. It couldn't be crap like this, could it? Buoyed by one-time gains from accounting changes and the sale of assets, Bank of America reported a $6.23 billion profit for the third-quarter Tuesday, even as weakness on Wall Street hammered underlying results and the firm surrendered its position as the country’s largest bank by assets. The other major commercial banks that have reported earnings in recent days posted profits of around $4...

Paul Krugman once again points out the obvious and straight line between policy choices and the economy today: [T]he financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis. Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry...

The AP has picked up the story about the tzinfo database moving to ICANN: The organization in charge of the Internet's address system is taking over a database widely used by computers and websites to keep track of time zones around the world. The transition to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, comes a week after the database was abruptly removed from a U.S. government server because of a federal lawsuit claiming copyright infringement. Without this database and others...

New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman interviewed Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel recently: I find “Rahmbo’s” Chicago agenda intriguing because it’s a microcosm of what the whole country will have to do for the next decade: find smart ways to invest in education and infrastructure to generate growth while cutting overall spending to balance the budget — all at the same time and with limited new taxes. It’s a progressive agenda on a Tea Party allowance. “I want to be honest about this budget,” the mayor...

In a long-overdue move I completely support, Chicago will raise the annual vehicle tax on SUVs and minivans: [Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel] is pushing in how ... large passenger vehicles are defined. Instead of setting the bar at 4,500 pounds, as it is now, Emanuel wants it set at 4,000 pounds. Such a change means 184,000 more Chicago vehicles would fall under a pricier sticker class. And their owners would pay $60 more for a sticker. Minivans like the Dodge Grand Caravan and Honda Odyssey and midsize...

The Daily Parker uses the mostly-open-source dasBlog engine. The software has always offered two choices for how it creates permanent links (permalinks): titles and GUIDs. As you can see, we use GUIDs, so permalinks look like this: http://www.thedailyparker.com/PermaLink,guid,05976d99-b3cb-4391-9052-509832cbf5cf.aspx instead of like this: http://www.thedailyparker.com/About-This-Blog. I've been thinking that GUIDs, while always unique, are kind of ugly. This morning I tried changing the blog's...

This morning The Daily Parker received a press release from Gary Christen, responding to my analyses of their lawsuit against the guys who maintain the Posix time zone database (here, here, and here). Unfortunately for Christen, Astrolabe's response fails to rebut my central assertions. I said, essentially, they have failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted by a Federal court (or, as one of my colleagues who actually practices law suggested, their complaint is actionable in itself)....

Good idea: Drivers parking in public garages and lots in the central business district would pay an extra $2 on weekdays under Emanuel's plan. It would come on top of the current $3 city parking tax that goes into the general fund, officials said. The money generated by the new tax would be used to rebuild two CTA "L'' stations downtown (the specific stations are still to be determined) and launch a long-planned bus rapid transit system, officials said. For drivers who complain they already are paying...

That's what Fallows says the headline should be: Here is the headline in the online home page of the NYT, about Obama's "pass this jobs bill, pass it now" proposal. Note the word "fails": Obama's Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test The subhead and the rest of the article make clear that more Senators voted for the bill than against it -- 50 to 49. It would have been 51-48 except for a parliamentary ruse by Majority Leader Harry Reid, who switched to a "No" vote so that he would later be...

I'm in San Antonio on business. I brought The Rogue with me, and this week's Economist. Unfortunately, I finished both on the flight down. Worse, I left my Kindle at home. Fortunately, there's a Barnes & Noble just a short distance away. Because what I really need right now is more books.