Tuesday, October 18, 2011
ParkMobile
Hmm ... pay for parking downtown by using your smartphone??
From InnerLooped
Well it has only been a couple of days, but InnerLooped’s recent dinner Downtown (and subsequent post about the Terms and Conditions of ParkMobile’s ability to send you advertisements for using a city service) turned out to be one of those ground-breaking “oops” moments for the City that helped them avoid a bigger “oops” down the road.
After our post last week about section 5.3 of the ParkMobile Terms and Conditions… our post was picked up on Swamplot.com. Eventually, the CEO of ParkMobile posted in their comments section about the mix up, that ParkMobile does not send advertisements to users, and that they are changing their Terms and Conditions. Then yesterday, Swamplot got in touch with the City:
While we are glad to see this issue being cleared up… the more troubling thing is that it took me only five minutes to determine the contract could have left a loophole for taxpayers to be spammed (it might never have happened… but the loophole was there)… but the City overlooked it. While this seems like an honest misunderstanding and small oversight, you would think that the City would be a little more careful when approving contracts that could later upset taxpayers ([cough cough] the red-light camera fiasco).
InnerLooped will eventually be reviewing the ParkMobile service. It seems like a great idea, but we need to try it out first to see if it really is more convenient than slipping a couple bills into the machine. The Mayor will be announcing the new program Thursday at Discovery Green.
From InnerLooped
Well it has only been a couple of days, but InnerLooped’s recent dinner Downtown (and subsequent post about the Terms and Conditions of ParkMobile’s ability to send you advertisements for using a city service) turned out to be one of those ground-breaking “oops” moments for the City that helped them avoid a bigger “oops” down the road.
After our post last week about section 5.3 of the ParkMobile Terms and Conditions… our post was picked up on Swamplot.com. Eventually, the CEO of ParkMobile posted in their comments section about the mix up, that ParkMobile does not send advertisements to users, and that they are changing their Terms and Conditions. Then yesterday, Swamplot got in touch with the City:
“The City’s agreement with ParkMobile does not allow for promotional emails
or texts to be sent to registered users,” Admin & Regulatory Affairs
spokesperson Christopher Newport tells Swamplot”.…
“Good catch,” Newport says: “This is something that should have been
excluded from ParkMobile’s Houston users terms and conditions. ParkMobile is
updating their terms/conditions today to remove any reference to promotion or
marketing materials that pay by cell customers may receive either by text or
email. Pay by phone users will not be spammed, and neither ParkMobile nor the
City will sell information to marketers.”
While we are glad to see this issue being cleared up… the more troubling thing is that it took me only five minutes to determine the contract could have left a loophole for taxpayers to be spammed (it might never have happened… but the loophole was there)… but the City overlooked it. While this seems like an honest misunderstanding and small oversight, you would think that the City would be a little more careful when approving contracts that could later upset taxpayers ([cough cough] the red-light camera fiasco).
InnerLooped will eventually be reviewing the ParkMobile service. It seems like a great idea, but we need to try it out first to see if it really is more convenient than slipping a couple bills into the machine. The Mayor will be announcing the new program Thursday at Discovery Green.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Egan: Cold Pizza
Have you ever seen such a collection of clowns and losers as the current crop of Republican Presidential wannabes? I mean, without going to the circus? This does NOT speak well to the health of this nation, much less to the health of the Republican Party.
Cold Pizza from Herm Cain
By TIMOTHY EGAN
By almost any measure — social, political, economic, logical — Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is nuts, nuts, nuts. Go ahead and jack up the price of nearly everything that moves in the United States with a 9 percent national sales tax on all new purchases and services. Talk about instant branding: every time you buy something, you’ll be hit with the Herm Cain tax at the checkout line.
And this is just the start. The nearly 50 million filers whose main federal tax is now a payroll deduction and not an income tax would see their overall bill from the government increase by nearly 100 percent. This conclusion comes from the economists and fact-checkers who have actually looked at the napkin sketch of a plan Cain got from some accountant friend of his in Cleveland.
In essence, Cain is proposing the largest shift in tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle class in the nation’s history. Oh, and he apparently would scrap the two great government programs that keep millions clinging to fragile middle-class status — Social Security and Medicare — because he wants to eliminate the payroll taxes that now pay for those insurers of dignity.We are forced to seriously consider this bizarro-world, reverse-Robin-Hood scheme, one that would junk the entire federal tax code for a 9 percent flat rate on corporate earnings, personal income and retail sales, because of the astonishing news that Republicans have elevated Cain to the top of their field in three polls released over the last 48 hours.
Not to worry: fruit flies on a bad apple have a longer life than does a front-runner among Republican presidential candidates. Cain’s reign will be short because his central plan is pure craziness, even for Republicans.
Let’s say you buy a new car or a week’s worth of groceries, or pay $2,000 for your kid’s dental work. Cain would add 9 percent to the price of those transactions — on top of the 9 percent in sales taxes people already pay in some states, like Washington, where I live. And if you’re lower middle class, there would be no income tax offset — but an increase!
That’s the Cain platform: raise the price of everything in the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression.
So how did Cain float to the top, at least for a week? He’s a motivational speaker, and a good one. He’s glib, optimistic, likeable, and has a great personal story. But he has zero governing experience. And his business forte was running a national food chain, Godfather’s, when they made truly awful-tasting pizzas. (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on their post-Cain pizzas.)
Cain tops the polls because almost three-quarters of Republican primary voters cannot come around to their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. And the rest of the field lose voters every time they open their mouths.
In Tuesday’s debate, Newt Gingrich showed why he is a prevaricator with preternatural talent, finding new and creative ways to revive old and discredited lies. He trotted out the 2009 “lie of the year” winner by Politifact.com — that death panels would decide who gets to live under the new health care law.
He also called for jailing the congressional architects of a new law to curb the kind of uncontrolled manipulations by bankers and Wall Street traders that brought down the global economy. You heard that right: he doesn’t want the people who dreamed up all those explosive credit default swaps and derivative trades to go to jail; he wants to incarcerate the reformers.
Cain’s ideas are actually worse: he would give Wall Street speculators more money. Under his plan, a billionaire now paying only 15 percent federal taxes on investment income — a lower rate, as Warren Buffett notes, than his secretary pays — would get a 40 percent reduction.
Last month’s frontrunner, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, offered up fresh material for the all-hat-no-cattle label he seems determined to wear. To his prior proclamations that evolution is “a theory that’s out there,” and global warming is a hoax, this dream candidate of Rush Limbaugh put the American Revolution in the 16th century. Amazing, the things Thomas Jefferson could do in his 235th year.
Oh, but there were some critics of Cain-o-nomics. Michele Bachmann noted that the 9-9-9 design, turned upside down, was a Satanic 6-6-6.
The power of his plan, Cain replies to all criticism, is its simplicity. “I can explain it in a minute!” he says. But someone who has taken more than a minute with 9-9-9 — Bruce Bartlett, the former economic adviser to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush — has called it “insane.” Read his examination in his Times blog here.
Cain is unelectable, and his plan is toxic. This gets Republicans back to the one person they cannot yet get their arms around: Willard Mitt Romney, an unflappable technocrat with a Harvard M.B.A. who passed a bold socialist health care plan that is a model for the nation, and once professed that he would be stronger on gay rights than Teddy Kennedy. Bring on the general election.
Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, and most recently, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America.”
Original.
Cold Pizza from Herm Cain
By TIMOTHY EGAN
By almost any measure — social, political, economic, logical — Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is nuts, nuts, nuts. Go ahead and jack up the price of nearly everything that moves in the United States with a 9 percent national sales tax on all new purchases and services. Talk about instant branding: every time you buy something, you’ll be hit with the Herm Cain tax at the checkout line.
And this is just the start. The nearly 50 million filers whose main federal tax is now a payroll deduction and not an income tax would see their overall bill from the government increase by nearly 100 percent. This conclusion comes from the economists and fact-checkers who have actually looked at the napkin sketch of a plan Cain got from some accountant friend of his in Cleveland.
In essence, Cain is proposing the largest shift in tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle class in the nation’s history. Oh, and he apparently would scrap the two great government programs that keep millions clinging to fragile middle-class status — Social Security and Medicare — because he wants to eliminate the payroll taxes that now pay for those insurers of dignity.We are forced to seriously consider this bizarro-world, reverse-Robin-Hood scheme, one that would junk the entire federal tax code for a 9 percent flat rate on corporate earnings, personal income and retail sales, because of the astonishing news that Republicans have elevated Cain to the top of their field in three polls released over the last 48 hours.
Not to worry: fruit flies on a bad apple have a longer life than does a front-runner among Republican presidential candidates. Cain’s reign will be short because his central plan is pure craziness, even for Republicans.
Let’s say you buy a new car or a week’s worth of groceries, or pay $2,000 for your kid’s dental work. Cain would add 9 percent to the price of those transactions — on top of the 9 percent in sales taxes people already pay in some states, like Washington, where I live. And if you’re lower middle class, there would be no income tax offset — but an increase!
That’s the Cain platform: raise the price of everything in the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression.
So how did Cain float to the top, at least for a week? He’s a motivational speaker, and a good one. He’s glib, optimistic, likeable, and has a great personal story. But he has zero governing experience. And his business forte was running a national food chain, Godfather’s, when they made truly awful-tasting pizzas. (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on their post-Cain pizzas.)
Cain tops the polls because almost three-quarters of Republican primary voters cannot come around to their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. And the rest of the field lose voters every time they open their mouths.
In Tuesday’s debate, Newt Gingrich showed why he is a prevaricator with preternatural talent, finding new and creative ways to revive old and discredited lies. He trotted out the 2009 “lie of the year” winner by Politifact.com — that death panels would decide who gets to live under the new health care law.
He also called for jailing the congressional architects of a new law to curb the kind of uncontrolled manipulations by bankers and Wall Street traders that brought down the global economy. You heard that right: he doesn’t want the people who dreamed up all those explosive credit default swaps and derivative trades to go to jail; he wants to incarcerate the reformers.
Cain’s ideas are actually worse: he would give Wall Street speculators more money. Under his plan, a billionaire now paying only 15 percent federal taxes on investment income — a lower rate, as Warren Buffett notes, than his secretary pays — would get a 40 percent reduction.
Last month’s frontrunner, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, offered up fresh material for the all-hat-no-cattle label he seems determined to wear. To his prior proclamations that evolution is “a theory that’s out there,” and global warming is a hoax, this dream candidate of Rush Limbaugh put the American Revolution in the 16th century. Amazing, the things Thomas Jefferson could do in his 235th year.
Oh, but there were some critics of Cain-o-nomics. Michele Bachmann noted that the 9-9-9 design, turned upside down, was a Satanic 6-6-6.
The power of his plan, Cain replies to all criticism, is its simplicity. “I can explain it in a minute!” he says. But someone who has taken more than a minute with 9-9-9 — Bruce Bartlett, the former economic adviser to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush — has called it “insane.” Read his examination in his Times blog here.
Cain is unelectable, and his plan is toxic. This gets Republicans back to the one person they cannot yet get their arms around: Willard Mitt Romney, an unflappable technocrat with a Harvard M.B.A. who passed a bold socialist health care plan that is a model for the nation, and once professed that he would be stronger on gay rights than Teddy Kennedy. Bring on the general election.
Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, and most recently, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America.”
Original.
Occupy Everything
It's heartening to see that people are "waking up." Of course, we've been awake all along, but have been sitting on our hands most of the time.
Hey, where are the fucking jobs?!
Are you wondering what the "Occupy" protestors are demanding? Here's a list:
You can find some of the best signs at various "Occupy" events by clicking here.
Below are some of my favorites:
Naturally, FOX News is not taking the protests seriously...
Hey, where are the fucking jobs?!
Are you wondering what the "Occupy" protestors are demanding? Here's a list:
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Posts (Atom)
remember
deja vu
indeed
Probably
Delete Fox "News"
Smells really bad
Applies to Trump
Trump is the enemy
2024 Election
$132 billion
Remember
too true
Didn't realize the GOP hated America so much.
