New Drivers Licenses for Maine are Ugly

See picture. Enough said.

From http://www.pressherald.com/news/New-Maine-license-unveiled.html

Hipmunk your next Trip

Need to know where to get a hotel that is close to the bars? food? tourism spots?  Go no further than Hipmunk which just unveiled an awesome hotel finder addition to its website.

http://www.hipmunk.com/

It overlays a heat map of food locations (or whatever you choose in the little radio button menu) with hotel prices and a map of the city. 

Congratulations Hipmunk on winning Moogaz’s heralded 5 mustache rating.

Hope and Prediction

My hope is that either the FCC or the Department of Justice deny the pending merger of AT&T and T-mobile (I mean seriously, could we have any less competition in the mobile phone market?), but my prediction is that after “a careful review,” both entities will rubber stamp this thing.  Go corporate interests. 

In case you missed it AT&T has offered to buy T-Mobile  in a deal valued at $39 billion.

http://gigaom.com/2011/03/20/att-to-buy-t-mobile-for-39-billion-here-is-why/

Sprint had this to say:

The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, if approved by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC), would alter dramatically the structure of the communications industry.  AT&T and Verizon are already by far the largest wireless providers.  A combined AT&T and T-Mobile would be almost three times the size of Sprint, the third largest wireless competitor.  If approved, the merger would result in a wireless industry dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically-integrated companies that control almost 80% of the US wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete. The DOJ and the FCC must decide if this transaction is in the best interest of consumers and the US economy overall, and determine if innovation and robust competition would be impacted adversely and by this dramatic change in the structure of the industry.

And PC magazine sums it up in this article:  AT&T Buys T-Mobile: Great For Them, Bad For You

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382279,00.asp

Can we get any more clear-cut that this is a bad corporate play?

There’s More People out there Like Me

A few weeks ago on a Friday like today I belted out an antithesis to our current malaise which is conservative do-nothing capitalism-rules-above-all philosophy.

While it generated some nice hits, I felt a little bit like its message rippled out like throwing a pebble in the ocean.  This morning I was excited to find that someone out there has the exact same feelings as me and sums it up nicely in this post on Thought Catalog. http://goo.gl/oC1RU

I particularly love these paragraphs:

Is it really true that we assess the economic success of our country via the GNP? But if we’re making more money and getting less and less for it — less education, less healthcare — then isn’t that the sign of a failing economy? Isn’t that obvious, even to one such as myself with no economic training?

San Francisco public school teachers are furloughed once a month. I’m not making this up. Thirty miles from here is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech, and Facebook. And teachers are furloughed. Uh, hmn, doesn’t it seem like corporations are getting away with something — like not paying enough taxes?

How about we say: you can form a corporation but once your valuation exceeds a billion dollars, you have to give the schools in your own fucking neighborhood enough money to pay the teachers and provide a lunch other than mad cow meatloaf?

I wonder out loud … where is this middle class rage going?  I feel like I constantly am reading charts about how wages are stagnant and how the top 1% has reaped all of the rewards of the last 30 years of capitalism and yet the only rage manifesting itself is in cutting middle class programs under the disguise of fixing the deficit.  Boxed up and supported by plugged in business lobbyists and messaged to death by Republican TV talking heads.

My guess is that liberal leaning middle class angsters are actually caused-out.  We’re the ones in the community groups fighting for recycling or street improvement programs.  We’re the ones selling cookies to raise funds for school or in the meetings protesting cuts to community pools and parks.  We have to constantly fight business interests and threats to our environment.

Given  all that, we’re exhausted.

Conservatives don’t have this baggage.  If everything is left to the individual, why fight for anything.  They are the proverbial bullies in the back of the classroom, disrupting everyone but adding no value. 

Adding value is hard to do.  Much harder than being a bully.

Wapo Sucks

The Washington Post just released a new web design which bites.

First, it’s visually ugly.  This is subjective although I’m right.  Although it’s hard to see from this snapshot, the font sucks.  And 95% of a newspaper layout is its font.

Second, I have imposed this grid on the new design (23 x 32 squares) and calculated that only 40 squares actually have news in them.  That’s a whopping 5.4% of the page dedicated to actual news, which in this case is just a title: US URGES AMERICANS TO EVACUATE, WARNS OF EXTREMELY HIGH RADIATION.  So basically it’s the most web space ever given to a single tweet. 

Apparently they learned nothing from the research done last time they redesigned their site. 

My guess is someone said they should be like Huffington Post, who pioneered the massive headline approach.  This picture shows actually a small title by HuffPo standards, usually size 360 Font is pretty standard.

At any rate, these days are over.

My view of People from New Jersey

As a New Englander, we’re practically trained from birth to not be nice to people from New Jersey.  But after this commentary by NJ Representative Albio Sires, I’m going to try and be nicer.  He’s almost too nice in advocating for high speed rail.  I’m going to help him out with some charts.

One of his main points:

During the past 50 years, the United States has invested nearly $1.3 trillion in our highways andover $484 billion in our aviation infrastructure. In contrast, rail investment has received only $67 billion over the past 31 years.

needs graphing.

The next time someone says “what a waste of money railroad is” ask them how much they want to cut in highway subsidies next year.  Or ask them if the $100 billion per year China is spending on high speed rail PER YEAR will make them more or less competitive when they’re finished?  Speaking of which, here’s the same graph with China’s investment in high-speed rail alone this year.

And just to put Obama’s federal stimulus expansion of high-speed rail into perspective.

I would put the money that Wisconsin and Florida rejected on this graph, but frankly the amount is laughable.

Nimby

NIMBY

[n(ot) i(n) m(y) b(ack) y(ard) .]

n. Slang, pl., -BYs.
One who objects to the establishment in one's neighborhood of projects, such as incinerators, prisons, or homeless shelters, that are believed to be dangerous, unsightly, or otherwise undesirable.

Green Development? Not in My (Liberal) Backyard

"Test yourself: When a sign in a hotel bathroom exhorts you to reuse your towel for the sake of the planet, do you nonetheless tend to throw it on the floor to get a new one?"

Author: Guilty.

Amicis: Not guilty. In all honesty I do put the towel back to reuse. (More often than not however, they are replaced and washed anyways but that is for another post.)

You:?

Take away message is that wind turbines need to be seen as common so that we no longer “see” them any more than we see phone lines now.