Assorted Links 8/15/09 Archives

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Assorted Links 8/15/09

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, September 9, 2009
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, September 11, 2009
• How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, September 15, 2009
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, September 16, 2009
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, September 17, 2009
• Capitol Hill Workshop, September 23-25, 2009
• US Consumer Credit Shows Steepest Contraction in Over 5 Decades - "Thanks to Dave Rosenberg for the above series of 5 stunning charts that highlight the inflation/deflation debate. The key take away is those charts all show deflation. Indeed, in a credit based economy a better title for chart 3 might be 'Credit IS Inflation'."
• Deflation Hits Porn Industry, Canadian Grocery Stores, Newspapers, Firefighters, Lawyers, High Tech - "While nearly everyone is worried about inflation, deflation is hitting a wide gamut of white collar, blue collar, and no collar industries. Let's take a look.
  . . .
  Some voluntarily embrace frugality, others have frugality embrace them. The amazing thing to me is that people are harping about inflation with this hugely deflationary backdrop across a wide array of industries."
• Good Enough For You, Not Good Enough For Me - "President Obama just revealed at the New Hampshire "town hall" that he rejected Federal government supplied insurance for himself and his family when he was in the U.S. Senate, and instead of the government regulated stuff he took advantage of his wife's private insurance supplied via her $317,000 per year political fixer/politician's wife job with the University of Chicago Hospital."
• Anti-consumerist tracts: so many to choose from! - "Neal Lawson’s All Consuming -- yet another book that bashes the consumerist society -- sums up the flimsy intellectualism and elitist disdain for the masses that courses through the veins of today’s anti-shopping lobby."
• Calling the Police as Negligence - "Yesterday, I blogged about the silent alarm case: A store was being robbed. The safe was set up to trigger a silent alarm to the police station when it was opened (supposedly contrary to company policy). The police came. There was a shootout with the criminals, in which a patron died. The patron's family sued the store for negligence, on the theory that the store shouldn't have risked patrons' lives by triggering the silent alarm. The trial court granted the store summary judgment. The appellate court reversed the grant of summary judgment, holding that it was for the jury to decide whether silently calling the police was negligent."
• First-time Home Buyer Frenzy - "Expect a surge in existing home sales (and some new home sales) over the next few months. Expect prices at the low end to rise (simple supply and demand). Expect all kinds of reports that the bottom has been reached.
  
  Expect the frenzy to end ... "
• Diet Advice For Diabetics Falling On Deaf Ears - "Type II diabetes do produce insulin. In fact, they tend to produce lots of insulin-- but it’s not enough to keep their blood sugar under control. Why not? Simple: they’ve become resistant to the stuff. When the body’s insulin receptors are constantly flooded with insulin, they become damaged and stop working … just like the cilia in your ears can become damaged by too much noise. Worse, the beta cells in the pancreas can become overworked from constantly cranking out the insulin and burn out.
  . . .
  There is, of course, a natural alternative: stop forcing your body to smack down your blood sugar several times per day. Then you won’t need so much insulin. Many Type II diabetics have been able to stop taking insulin and any other blood-sugar medications simply by eliminating sugar and starch. That’s how it worked for Dr. Jay Wortman, the medical expert behind the wonderful documentary My Big Fat Diet."
• Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice - "Human nutrition research and practice is plagued by pseudoscience and unsupported opinions." ht ALD
• Misguided Worries About Inflation - "Indeed every week I have someone email me that 'We have inflation and deflation at the same time.'
  
  No we don't. It is not possible. The reason is falling prices are a symptom of deflation not a definition of it. Falling prices frequently accompany deflation, but they are not a necessary ingredient.
  . . .
  In Austrian economic terms inflation is a net increase of money supply and credit and deflation is the opposite, a net decrease in money supply and credit. In those terms we either have inflation or we don't. Prices simply do not fit into the equation.
  . . .
  The notion of inflation and deflation at the same time is a widely held belief based on brainwashing by the Fed about what inflation is. If everyone realized inflation involved money supply, the Fed and Central Bankers would not be able to lie through their teeth about being 'inflation fighters'.
  
  Once you realize that inflation involves money supply, you must come to the realization that the only source of inflation in the world comes from Central Bankers. Unfortunately, the media has bought the Fed's 'inflation fighting' mantra hook line and sinker by talking about inflation as if it was prices."

• A Short Walk Goes a Long Way - "'Those who increased their physical activity by even a small amount-- 60 to 119 minutes per week--showed similar reductions in liver enzymes compared to those who increased physical activity by about four hours,' the study says. In other words, they found no dose-response effective for an increase in exercise of more than 60 minutes per week.
  
  'I like the fact that 60 minutes a week is enough for NASH,' my favorite Certified Diabetes Educator wrote me. 'This should help get the depressed or skeptical NASH-afflicted couch potatoes to start moving around! That’s just 10 minutes six days a week!'"
• DesignYourDorm Takes The Guessing Out Of Moving In - "Just supply your school, residence hall, and room number during registration, and if you're lucky you'll get a 3D model of your room. The site doesn't have replicas of every room in every university in their database, but they allow users to add floor plans, meaning that in time it'll only get better. (If you don't want to add your floor plan, you can also just select a generic floor plan.)"
• Getting Things Done Explained for Students - "GTD is basically a 'workflow for life,' so if all you want to do is get papers in by their deadlines, it's overkill. Luckily, some of the GTD precepts work for the student workflow--so that's what I'll share here."
• Storage of your photos: Some ideas - "Well, here’s what I would recommend after thinking about this quite a bit myself (side note: I have over 60,000 digital images, most of them RAW photos, but at least several hundred digital abstract art pieces that I have created as well that total approx. 400 Gigabytes):
  
  Get a network attached storage device (NAS Array) that accommodates 4-5 hard drives and offers RAID levels 5, 6 or 10. Backup all of your photos, videos, etc. on a regular basis to this NAS Array. Plug into this NAS Array a single external 1.5TB hard drive and backup the array to that. Keep the external hard drive either in your car or your office or at your friend’s house. Use online backup as well if you want an extra layer of protection.
  
  Networked Attached Storage plugs directly into your network router and is/should be accessible from every computer in your house and from your network-enabled PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 (real men use Xbox 360s :) ).
  
  If you buy a Drobo, Thecus, Qnap or Buffalo NAS (all of which I have researched and can recommend, though I lean towards the Thecus and Qnap because of speed of data transfers and the fact that the Drobo, strictly speaking, doesn’t offer network connectivity [even with its optional 'Droboshare' add-on, it transfers data from the network through an RJ45 connection to the Drobo via a USB 2.0 connector]), and set them to RAID 5, you have pretty good protection."

• The economics of the secret Chinese menu - "Especially for immigrants, restaurant life is often about ambience, social contacts, and feeling you have a space to call your own. A restaurant cannot be all things to all people and the #1 best way of judging a restaurant is to look at its customers."

August 15, 2009 10:27 AM    Caught Our Eye