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If you had gone down to the River Lot at Stevens to get your car (or, more likely, went down to the River lot to examine the hole in the pier where your car used to be) you probably noticed train tracks in River Street (now Sinatra Drive). I had always figured these were old streetcar tracks, but they are actually freight tracks.
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Back in July, I posted about an off-duty firefighter who shot a cyclist, because the firefighter thought the cyclist was endangering his child by riding on a road.

The charges were reduced by a grand jury to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and he recently pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 120 days in jail anger management classes, another 12-24 months of a suspended sentence, and ordered to pay $1,200 in restitution. The fire department fired him after he was indicted.

State sentencing guidelines are 20-39 months in prison, but the judge found that mitigating factors included that he served in the military and was a fireman. One would think that a military veteran would understand the lethal power of a firearm, and would have had enough practice with one to not hit someone with a "warning shot" as he claimed.

On the same day, a man was sentenced to 14 years and a $200,000 fine for selling LSD at a concert in Asheville. No one claimed to be injured by the substances he sold. The seller apparently was not a fireman or military veteran.

Back in June, the story of 2 kids in Connecticut killed in a traffic accident made some headlines, because the other car was a police cruiser, and the kids' car was so severely mangled.

After Freedom of Information requests and threats of lawsuits, the video was finally released.

The police officer was driving an estimated 94 MPH on a 40 MPH road without lights or siren (and full throttle up to 0.6sec before impact), and wasn't responding to a call. The victims' lawyer contends that the officer was racing with the probationary officer driving the cruiser that recorded the collision.

The police officer has been charged with two counts of second-degree manslaughter. The host of the party the kids had attended has been charged with serving alcohol to minors. The officer faces a year in prison if convicted; the host of the party faces 18 months.

The Times had a piece today on various services you can buy to avoid getting personal information stolen while shopping online.

A few of them seem like they have some features beyond what you can do yourself, like seeing if your info shows up on sites that criminals use to trade IDs. OTOH, some of them seem to present as much risk as they remove, like Shop Shield that consolidates all of your online accounts in a juicy target.

Instead of a service like Shop Shield, you can avoid keyloggers yourself. Keep your name & shipping address on your address book program or in a text file. When you need to fill out a form, you can cut & paste them into the forms with the right-click menu & avoid using the keyboard at all.

Obviously, you can't do the same with credit card #s, but your bank may offer disposable numbers through a web app.

Be thankful that "they don't make them like they used to"

check out what happens to the passenger compartments in the 1959 and 2009 (0:45 to 1:15 on the video)

Bless you, automotive engineers, for what you've done to protect passengers in lighter and lighter cars. Now get to work on figuring out how to protect people outside of the cars in collisions.

mizerychick's mother wants to give her brother a new bike for Christmas. He lives in Philly, so a shiny new bike will attract more attention than is good for keeping it. I'd rather restore an older bike and make it as nondescript as possible.

Does anyone have an old bike in their garage? Ideally, I'm looking for an 1980s-era mountain bike or older road bike. I really don't know enough about fixing suspension forks or checking aluminum frames to handle anything newer.

We'll use eBay to figure out what it's worth.

So now, were up to 14 people indicted for insider trading related to the Galleon hedge fund.

Meanwhile, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen Friedman, made millions of dollars by buying Goldman Sachs stock after the bailout of AIG was ordered (by Friedman and Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner) but before it was publicly known how much of that bailout would flow through to Goldman Sachs.

So Friedman is going to face trial for insider trading, right? Of course not, prosecutions are for people without connections. He resigned as Chairman of the NY FRB, and that was it.

Matt Taibbi has the sordid story, including how Goldman made a bigger profit by engineering AIG into a government bailout, here.

From the set of Red Dawn

A bubble-blowing "tailpipe" for your bike that spreads seeds, too.

It's just a design experiment, though.

Halloween and its Candy Economy by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Tucker describes the trading floor that spontaneously arises in his house when his kids come back from trick-or-treating. Kids have a natural tendency towards mutually beneficial exchange, and illustrates the fact rarely grasped by critics of freedom that free exchange is not a zero-sum exchange. Once kid's gain is not another's loss, both gain or else a trade doesn't happen. Also, values aren't objective, each kid has his own subjective sense of value for each kind of candy, from Nerds to Hershey bars to Necco wafers.

The exchange gets pretty complex, with 3 and 4-party trades, then some candy becomes a kind of money, in that it's a medium of exchange that can be used to get the things really wanted, not to be consumed itself.

Thankfully, without a Federal Reserve of candy, and absent government bailouts, the kids wound up generally with the best (in their opinion) set of candy they could, given the candy they earned trick-or-treating and their skill in exchanges.

An amusing read and great introduction to exchange economics in easily grasped concepts.

Remember when protesters in Iran were using twitter to organize and avoid Iranian police from mass arrests of protests. The protesters' freedom of speech was so important to the State department that they pressured Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance window to keep the protesters twittering.

Clinton said she considered it important to keep "that line of communication open and enabling people to share information, particularly at a time when there [were] not many other sources of information. . . . It is a fundamental right for people to be able to communicate." Iranians protesting the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been using the medium to organize demonstrations because they do not have access to other communications.

State police arrested two New York men for using Twitter to inform protesters in Pittsburgh about the movements of local officers.

They are accused of hindering apprehension, criminal use of communication facility and possessing instruments of crime.

on any government school shill who claims that schools encourage independent decision making, since they are the place where you find the most mindless "zero tolerance" policies.

A 6 year old was sentenced to 45 days in reform school (a more obvious child prison) for the crime of bringing a Cub Scout fork-knife-spoon to school. I'm sure that kids are really learning critical thinking skills in an environment where they are surrounded by authority figures who can't make a distinction between a butter knife and a machete.

Thankfully, the kid has more sense than the bureaucrats “I just think the other kids may tease me for being in trouble,” he said, pausing before adding, “but I think the rules are what is wrong, not me.” He's being homeshcooled now, he'd probably be better served by staying there.

The Dow and S&P were both up significantly today (1.37%, to 9731 and 1055, respectively) on news that the dollar is weakening against commodities and other currencies, a completely nonsensical explanation. Of course, mainstream financial reporting consists mainly of picking two things that happened today and stating that one caused the other. They may as well claim that the latest development in the Letterman extortion case drove stock prices up.

Gold made a new all time high, on panic that oil producers would stop pricing oil in dollars. That has some plausibility, but there's probably a lot more at work here.

Andrew Marshall has a story at GlobalResearch.ca reporting on some statements issued at the Bank for International Settlements and leaks from the recent Bildeberger Group meeting. I don't know or care if the Bilderbergers run the universe, but I'll easily believe that they have access to the best information available.

To summarize that piece, the recent runups in assets is an effect of the worldwide government stimulus programs and central bank money creation. Banks are reluctant to put money into the real economy (you know, businesses that employ people and actually do useful things) as evidenced by the increasing unemployment rates, commercial real estate vacancies, and so on. Instead, that money has been chasing after investments, driving up the price. Eventually (in the next couple of quarters) people will ake up to the fact that the economy isn't really growing to support those asset prices, and it will fall apart. A financial Wile E. Coyote moment - it will stay levitated until someone looks down.

Needless to say, I'm really nervous. I've had a pretty good run of knowing the momentum shifts just by watching the headlines (you see "end of the world" headlines at the bottoms and "boom ahead - don't miss it" headlines near tops), but I've been totally lost for the past couple of months. I thought we saw the top around Dow 8500-9000. In any case, I think I'll be selling rather than buying stocks. I might miss the top, but I see it going a lot lower in the near future. If I really had an iron stomach, I'd be selling gold. Maybe it's time to look into some put options.

Because the FDIC has made it a better deal for the banks to just foreclose on properties, rather than allow a short sale or modification.

Bob Hertzog has it here:

So, you ask...Why does this program hurt short sales? Because, our brilliant government offers this SAME PROGRAM FOR FORECLOSURES! The only difference is, the government picks up 80% of the tab on all of the extra costs associated with a foreclosure (BPO's, upkeep, utilities/maintenance, legal fees, etc.)

So, If I'm OneWest, why would I want to waste my time negotiating through a Short Sale, when I can make the same amount of money (if not more) by just letting it go to foreclosure? And we wonder why nobody can get a Loan Modification? Why would OneWest approve a loan modification for this guy, when they can foreclose and make over $100k? And, to add injury to insult, they have held this loan for 6 months! Not a bad ROI, huh?

I mean, when I want to get some arugula, I always have a couple of streets shut down and send out teams of security to clear my path.

Much more "green" than just sending out a staffer to walk to the market.

Sep. 16th, 2009 11:34 pm For mizerychick

OK, it's pretty callous to use real footage of victims, but the Hillary Clinton warning siren is beautiful.

In Fredon, the school board and PSE&G have reached an agreement to keep a school from closing due to concerns that kids will be harmed by (wait for it) elevated electromagnetic-fields from nearby power lines. I wonder how many of these people use cell phones.

Also, 3 kids got thrown out of the (taxpayer owned) Newark Bears stadium by team owner Tom Cetnar for not standing during "God Bless America." Apparently, they did not show enough respect for America to satisfy Cetnar, who previously showed his respect for America by stealing money used in drug buys when he worked in the prosecutor's office.

The comment thread is amusing, full of guys with "show some respect or get the hell out of the country" comments. I'm not a close follower of comment threads, but I'll bet that most of those guys are the same ones who were commenting about how great it was to see the guys with rifles and/or Obame with a Hitler mustache posters at the recent town halls.

Sep. 12th, 2009 02:00 pm Investment opportunity for mark_o_rama

Keep your money in a mattress