Stuff@kibblesnbits.net

Representative Melvin Watt (D-NC) has proposed an amendment to the Federal Reserve Transparency Act (HR1207). Watt’s amendment makes it more difficult to audit the Federal Reserve, which is in direct contrast to the goal of HR1207. Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) very thoroughly explains his reason for opposing the amendment. Watt’s responses to the criticism leveled at his amendment are absurd.

Watt: [The arguments] talk about handing out money to foreign central banks. Uh… give me a break. Does anybody in here think we are handing out money to foreign central banks?

Are you serious? Let me refresh your memory with an exchange between Grayson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke from July:

Bernanke: [...] Meanwhile, we’re not lending to those banks, we’re lending to the central bank. The central bank is responsible for repaying us.
Grayson: So, who got the money?
Bernanke: Financial institutions in Europe and other countries.
Grayson: Which ones?
Bernanke: I don’t know.

Watt does make one good observation: that an elected body (such as the Senate) should be doing the audit, not an appointed body (the GAO). However, that’s not exactly how the GAO works.

The only appointed position at the GAO is that of the leader, the Comptroller General of the United States. The appointment is made by the President and carries a 15 year term. After Senate approval, the appointee does not report to the President, only to Congress. The GAO is intended to be their investigative arm, handling investigations and fact-finding. The President has no control over investigations or actions taken by the GAO. The 1500 or so positions within the GAO are filled by civil servants. Those jobs are usually taken by federal employees who began elsewhere within the government and made a “lateral transfer” into the GAO.

I wash myself in the shower with Comet and steel wool. I scrape the stubble off my face with a Ka-Bar and use gasoline for aftershave. Then I comb my hair with a live wolverine. I put crystal meth in my coffee. When I go to work, I chase down cars on foot, drag the drivers out, kill them, and then take their cars to work. When I take a smoke break, I burn styrofoam and inhale the fumes. When I go hunting, I just stare at the deer. They follow me home and climb into my freezer. Because they know. They know.

RegularDaddy
SomethingAwful Forums User

Two things, France does not have the most days off (only the most mandated vacation days), and the United States is pretty sad unless you’re a member of the armed forces – then you get 30 days annually.

The first graph is a comparison of (most) of the countries in the world and their government-mandated vacation time, with actual paid vacation separated from the paid holidays. The second graph is only the OECD nations. The table is the numerical data that the graphs were generated from (OECD nations are in orange).

Based on a sample of 31 streets, all (nearly) straight. Number of buildable lots was determined by choosing to build a “Green House” (the smallest structure in the game), and counting the number of visible cones on the street. The number of lots and the price are very strongly correlated with the relative length of the street. The cost per buildable lot appears to approach around $14 once you get up into the $3m+ streets.

The moral of the story is go way out into the midwest of the United States and buy the longest, straightest road you can afford and cram that thing full of Nova Tower Blocks. Why? They have a great ratio for rental income versus number of lots (about 1.65 times larger than the basic Green House). Early in the game, you can buy a ton of them and have a great early income.

The following table should be pretty self-explanatory. It is simply a breakdown of the number of days, per building, it takes to recoup the construction cost.

The Break-Even column is simply the cost of the building, divided by the daily rent, rounded up to the nearest day. The Break-Even w/ Sale column is the break-even day, assuming you sell the building once you’ve collected enough rent to offset the difference between the purchase price and the sale price (50% of the purchase price, basically).

The cost data is accurate as of October 5th, 2009.

Go to Vimeo to watch it in HD!

Electric stoves only – gas stoves lack the thermal mass of a heating element, so step 2 doesn’t work too well.

1. Place up to six eggs into a saucepan, in a single layer
2. Fill the saucepan with enough water to cover the eggs
3. Add 1 tsp salt
4. Place the saucepan on the stove and set the temperature to “high”
5. When the water boils, turn off the stove, but leave the saucepan on the burner.
6. Let the eggs sit in the water for 12 minutes.
7. Place the eggs in a bowl of icewater and move them into the fridge.

The result is easy-to-peel eggs with perfect white and yolk firmness without the over-cooked sulfur taste or discolored yolk. The yolks should have a creamy consistency.

The eggs, if left in the bowl with water, should be eaten within 3 days. If stored in air, you’ll find that the yolks oxidize and become tinged with green and that sulfuric off-taste will become more noticeable over time.

Recently, I began testing various image resolutions for display purposes. I wanted to be sure that standard 3:2 and 4:3 image dimensions would de displayed in a balanced, pleasing way on this site. The blank image templates were created and labelled. In labelling them, I chose to use a clean, fixed-width font. The candidates were Lekton and Mono Spatial.

At first glance, Lekton, created by students at ISAI Urbino was a strong candidate, with its pleasing geometries and slab serifs. Closer inspection reveals some interesting, but less than idea, stylistic characteristics. The asymmetrical serifs, for instance. And the lowercase c and lowercase r.

Diacritics are well represented by the font lacks important characters. Currency symbols are absent, as is percent, pound, the at symbol, braces, and guillemets. Okay, so no one really uses guillemets.

For this little project, those missing symbols don’t matter – but what happens when you commit yourself to a font like Lekton and then down the road you need to use one of those absent characters? I guess you could simply substitute in the character from another font family that is similar in appearance, but I am a purist. There is also an updated version of Lekton, but the increased lineweights just seem hamfisted. I’ll have none of that. Lekton, you’ve been voted off the island.

So, on to Mono Spatial. It’s got diacritics for damn near everything and wipes the floor with Lekton when it comes to symbols. It’s missing a mu and a reference mark symbol, but everything else is there. And it looks great. The unilateral serifs look pretty good. My only complaint would be the uppercase Q. The tail is just barely hanging on there! I guess I can overlook that.