Month: January 2006

your tax dollars at work

Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects – New York Times:

Agents from the inspector general’s office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general’s office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
[…]
No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.
That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official’s stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official “had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash,” the report says.
Outside the vault, money seemed to be stuffed into every nook and cranny in the compound. “One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office,” the report says.
The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein’s government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.

This is the party of conservatism and fiscal discipline? Could Bill Clinton, flawed as he is, have asked for a successor more likely to burnish his reputation?

doesn’t everyone do this?

Request for Mac OS X developers: put an alias for Applications in your install image:

In the meantime, something that can make application installing a little faster is to drag the Applications folder into the documents section of the OS X “dock,” so that you end up like this:
Images Appdock

Now installing apps is as simple as draging them from the install image onto this icon on the dock.

As I noted on Ruk’s site, this is something I’ve done for so long, I can’t imagine not doing it.

fortune cookie, or an idea that seems to have gone out of fashion

I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

— Thomas Jefferson

If you look at politics as economics applied — every political school of thought has an economic agenda at its core — what to make of a political ideology that scoffs at debt?

ideas

Anne Herbert:

The idea is you have some great ideas.

The idea is sometimes you don’t notice your great ideas because
they are very different than what already exists.

That difference, which makes you shy off your ideas, is part
of what makes your ideas great, and needed.

The idea is that the rest of us could use your great ideas
if you get them out among us. The idea is your different ideas
could help make a different world that would be a better place
for us all to live.

The idea is that some of the words here will remind you of
your ideas.

A guy I used to work for, Stewart Brand, said that once you
have an idea you have about five minutes to do something about
it. You don’t have to do everything the idea calls for within
five minutes, but you’ve got to do something right away to make
it real.

That’s a good idea, too.

I haven’t finished this yet. It moves at a very deliberate pace and I have resisted the urge to power-scroll down and get to the conclusion: from what I read so far, that’s the kind of thinking this piece is gently but unyieldingly opposed to.

My initial reaction was a mixture of relief at hearing/reading some things I had always wanted to hear and pain at having heard instead all the other less helpful responses:

When I was a kid, the things that really mattered, the things took me to being alive and feeling alive at the same time, when I noticed them out loud, it wasn’t so much that people said, “That’s wrong.”

What they said was, “That doesn’t matter.” Or — things that mattered to me, the whole chorus of the way the people around me lived said, “That doesn’t exist.’

[tip]

5 star music« Mondays: better than Friday Random Ten

5 &#10029 &#9835« Mondays

The idea came from JWZ in late 2005: why not rate all the music in your jukebox? If your jukebox is iTunes, you create an “unrated” smart-playlist containing all the tunes with no stars, then you set up the Party Shuffle to draw from it, then you rate them as they go by except when you’re not listening, and after a few months, you have them all rated. I haven’t got them all rated, but I have quite a few labeled &#10029&#10029&#10029&#10029&#10029, which means “a tune that in some way gives me as much pleasure as music can.” I care a lot about (and am reasonably literate about) music, so I decided I to share some of this five-star stuff with the world. I’ll try to post something most Mondays.

Yeah, why not? But not this Monday.

A side benefit to this is that as you listen and perhaps find tracks that <*koff*> arrived in your collection through means other than retail, you will be moved to buy them from the artist.

Now playing: Caring Is Creepy by The Shins from the album “Oh, Inverted World”

buyer’s remorse?

Secure File Storage and Sharing – Strongspace.com:

Strongspace is a secure place to gather, store, back-up and share any type of file with your co-workers, friends and family. You can upload, download and manage your files over SFTP (Secure FTP) or with any modern web browser.

I just signed up for StrongSpace, this offsite storage repository, and after tinkering with it, I’m starting to wonder what I’m getting. The offsite aspect of things makes a lot of sense, and I think that will be the selling/tipping point. But even at $8/month [$96/year] one could buy a biggish disk — 30 times the size at today’s prices — and just use it.

Hmm. They make 4Gb USB flash drives now, too.

Now playing: Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street? by Bruce Springsteen from the album “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” | Get it

Brad Delong reads the NYTimes TimesSelect so you don’t have to

The Late David Rosenbaum on Jack Abramoff:

The late David Rosenbaum, the very well-regarded New York Times reporter who was murdered early this month near his home in Upper Northwest, wrote an excellent page A1 story about Jack Abramoff almost four years ago: back on April 3, 2002.

A ripping read. At the time it may have read like a simple profile of a power-broker, principled but ambitious. Now it tells a story of greed and hubris while it unmasks the lies about who knew and played along with Abramoff.

I’d pick a key graf or two but I can’t: it’s worth reading in full.

Now playing: The Oncoming Day by The Chills from the album “Submarine Bells”

it’s not a game

Some people think this whole Presidentin’ business is fun and games at best , and at worst a job with regular hours, a nice house, and a lot of speeches and such. The war is just a big game of “capture the flag”, ya know, especially for Doughy Pantload, the Krispy Kreme Kommando.

But for more serious-minded people, it’s not much fun at all. It will be interesting to see how un-fun it becomes over the next few months to 2 years.

Continue reading “it’s not a game”

the last coffee maker I’ll buy?

gizmag Article: The AeroPress Coffee Machine: a new concept in an ancient art :
Productinfo Webimages Aeropress Aero Press Box 01

There’s always a better way – ALWAYS! Humans have been consuming coffee for 1200 years, the first coffee shops opened 500 years ago and coffee is the world’s second largest traded commodity, behind only oil. More than 1.5 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day with the US market for coffee machines at 20 million a year and growing. You’d think we would have already perfected the best way to produce a cup of coffee from coffee beans, but several years of research by Stanford University mechanical engineering lecturer Alan Adler (the inventor of the Aerobie flying disk which holds the world throwing record of more than a quarter mile) appear to have found a better coffee machine. Independent reviews suggest the new Aerobie AeroPress delivers the smoothest, richest, purest and fastest cup of coffee (under 30 seconds) you’re likely to find and the bonus is that the AeroPress costs just US$30. And while it might look like a French Press because both use immersion and pressure, it works quite differently.

[tip]