Bibi-tibobbity boo!

I've been largely ignoring this situation, but yesterday, Israel's prime minister, Netanyahu, was given a chance to speak before a joint session of Congress.

This was Boehner's attempt at a direct slap in the face to Obama, and Bibi wants to discontinue talks with Iran on nuclear enrichment and sanctions.  It is also an unprecedented move, to undercut the President in purely international matters.

The rule has always previously been "politics stops at the water's edge", meaning that a unified governmental face is always presented to outsiders.  But the GOP's insistance on politicizing everything having to do with Obama continues, and no social pressure is sufficient to cut back their attempts to keep him from accomplishing anything (witness the continuous use of the filibuster over the last six years, for instance).

But I think this move might have backfired, on a couple of levels.  One, the GOP seems generally fine with giving the President more power (witness their actions on trade negotiations, for instance, as well as their continued inaction on immigration and spending), so knee-capping the office of the President doesn't seem to have gone over well with the base.

Plus, Bibi's speech wasn't terribly coherent.  He said that the Iranian government is composed of genocidal maniacs, and that talks are useless, but that Iranians will nevertheless become desperate for talks if the sanctions are given more time to run their course.  Left unanswered were why economic coercion would work on those "maniacs" and why Israeli polling shows Iran as the fourth-most important issue in the upcoming election if Iran is an "existential threat".

Similarly unexplored was the question of how well Iran's government would possibly function if, as Bibi seems to want, he were allowed to install it (preferably after a war, it seems).

Although I will say that I took a brief look at RedState last night (for the first time ever), and Bibi was being called the "Churchill of our time" there (an insane assertion, on a number of levels).  I think the person writing that particular article didn't much pay attention to what was said, based on his comments.

All of this leads me to wondering about where politics is headed, over the next couple of years.  Thus far, the GOP majority in the House has shown itself completely incapable of governing; hopefully that will turn around, somehow.  I suspect it will require the ouster of Boehner for that to happen (at a minimum).

Heading to the right at a Cantor

Color me amused by House Majority leader, Eric Cantor, losing his GOP primary.  Good riddance, as far as Cantor is concerned, but it's scary to imagine him as being too left-wing (which some Virginia voters apparently think).  It'd be nice if that allowed someone who could reasonably be called a moderate to win, but it seems unlikely.

We can be sure, though, that Mr Brat (an economics professor at Randolph-Macon college) will not be bucking for House Majority leader if he wins the general.  You'd think him feeling insufficiently informed to have an opinion on the minimum wage would be a catastrophic failure, but I wouldn't bet on it.

This sort of ideological shift generally stops dead when it runs into a wall of going too far.  I'd've thought the GOP was already there, but apparently not.

Dysfunction competition?

The interactions between the House and Senate have had an interesting reversal of late. It used to be that the Senate would say, in conference, "You've got to take our version of this bill, because this is all we can pass".

It was, more or less, a tacit admission that the Senate was fundamentally broken.

But now, the House can say the same thing. In fact, I think the House is a bit more broken than the Senate, right now. Just no interest in governing from the majority there. Seriously, how many times do we need to have Obamacare symbolically revoked?

Is it really any wonder that there hasn't been a budget passed in several years?

So where does that leave us, as a country?  Heading downhill towards third-world status, unfortunately.

Back on the Air

We started out the week, this week, by having a macroburst which took out the power for over two days. Ick. And we were very lucky in the storm. Many trees were broken off well above the ground. One of them dropped 100' or so of trunk across our yard, but it only hit one of our (much smaller) trees. When I first started cleaning, I was thinking that the whole thing was a disaster, but I quickly put my over-the-top rhetoric on hold when I thought about the people who've had their homes completely destroyed in storms. As I said, we were very lucky; and very thankful for that luck. Now if we'd only had a generator to take care of the two days without power.

We were lucky there, too, though, insofar as that my dad had dropped a small freezer off with us with some food a few months ago when my son was born. So we were able to take that over to a friend's house to preserve the irreplaceable perishables (I mentioned having an infant son, right?) by plugging it in. Hooray.

We had some friends over for the Fourth (already planned), which actually went well, despite the lack of power.

We've mostly just been catching up since then. It did give me an excuse to check a couple of things that have been wrong for a while on my home server, so I'm happy to have that resolved. I also got the computer equipment in my utility room moved over to the rack I bought for it a while ago (yes, extreme overkill, but it was destroying the shelves I was previously keeping it on).

And I finally got a new cell phone today. I'd had my Treo for many years (the 700p was new when I bought it), and had waited a long time for AT&T's exclusivity with the iPhone to expire. But after Verizon got it, I still kept kvetching, waiting for... well, I'm not really sure what. The prospect of Verizon setting download caps on their data plans was finally enough to get me to switch over, though (helped by my wife being happy about the idea of replacing her Palm Centro; a happy surprise, that), so I broke down on Wednesday and got one for each of us. They arrived today, and life is good. And now, perhaps, we'll have an internet connection even if our power goes down for a couple of days. Happy days.

Save Early, Save Often

One thing all get-wealthy and financial-intelligence books will tell you is to save early and save often. I wonder if they understate the save early part.

To demonstrate, consider this example. If you save $1k/yr every year between age 20 and 30, earning 8% interest, you'll end up with $157k by age 60. On the other hand, if you save $1k/yr every year from 30-60, earning the same interest, you'll only end up with $122k.

Let me repeat that, just to emphasize how important it is. Starting ten years earlier, but only saving one-third the amount of money, you will still end up with 29% more money at age sixty. And remember that that gap will grow the farther out you want to take it.

To push this home even harder, if you up the rate of return merely to 10%, the numbers increase to $306k and $181k. This is almost a 40% gap.

It's also worth noting that a mere 2% increase in annual growth comes close to doubling the final amount, in the 10-year savings plan. This is the miracle of compound interest. Make it work for you, rather than against you (which is what happens with excessive borrowing).

One way that I've done so is that I've always put 10% of my salary away in my 401(k), even back when I had just graduated, and it seemed silly. This actually served a double (or triple) purpose. It got me started saving, and it got me used to having less cash on hand. As a side bonus, it saved me a little bit on taxes.

Some years later, I did a similar thing when I was planning on buying my first house. To get used to having less cash on hand, I split my direct deposit so a couple hundred (of every paycheck) went into an index fund while the rest went into my bank account. As a nice side effect, it helped me efficiently build up that down payment.

They weevil and they wovel, but...

When we moved, we ended up with a much longer driveway than our old one. This one is 60-70' long, with a rounded area at the end (where the garage is). Back in May, I thought about getting a snow blower, figuring that was the only way to handle a driveway that long, but, while searching, ran across this nifty device (also to be found here).

I think I'd actually heard of it before (maybe a TV commercial a year or two ago?), but had forgotten. It was significantly cheaper than any of the snow blowers, took less storage space (a couple of feet of wall space, but no floor space), and didn't need any maintainance. And maybe it was about as fast (it was suggested in the reviews).

Well, it isn't as fast, at least not for our size of driveway. But the rest of it is true.

I've had mixed results with scraping the surface clean, but it does a fantastic job with dry snow. It's very fast (I can get my driveway done in an hour or so), doesn't kill my back (this is a major plus), and is environmentally friendly. If you're going downhill, it does an even better job of pushing snow along. The scoop is large, and you can really fill it, since you aren't lifting the whole mass.

You can get an wear strip for the front edge; I highly recommend it (cheaper directly from wovel.com than from amazon). Aside from the wear factor, it might help it deal with ice (with which I've had mixed results).

This thing is so good, I ended up clearing a good chunk of my street (100 yards or so) so that I can get to the top of the small (but fairly steep) hill to get out the quick way.

So, yes, I would definitely buy it again, if I had the chance to go back and do it again.

Dance to the Beat!

When my wife and I got our old house ready to sell, I had to pack away DDR. In particular, the pads were too big and heavy to keep handy (I got metal pads from this place, which are fantastic if you play on the higher levels of difficulty, and especially if you play a lot). I also packed the game discs away quite early (well, most of them), which made the pads issue pretty much immaterial.

Being unable to play most times of the day also limited options (between work and my daughter's sleep schedule), and the game being set up on the top floor of our old house meant it was nearly impossible to play for six or so months.

Well, I finally got everything set up last night. Actually, that was kind of interesting also; previously, I'd had the game hooked up to an old 32" CRT. Well, here I had it hooked up to a 1080p LCD. I didn't really expect that to cause any issues (I'd only seen issues with that sort of thing once at a friend's house (he had a DLP rear projector that caused about 7/10ths second delay; boy, was it fun playing DDR with that. I had to re-teach myself how to play, practically)), but was surprised to see that there was a noticeable delay (probably two to three tenths of a second). After monkeying around for a bit, I found a game mode which got rid of the delay.

But the new house got rid of most of the difficulties. It's a) single family, so I don't need to worry about the neighbor; b) can set up in the basement, where the sound doesn't carry; and c) because of those first two, I can play after my daughter goes to bed. I knew there was a good reason we moved. :)

Well, after not playing for over half a year, I was surprised that I didn't have too much trouble playing at the Hard difficulty level. I wasn't in any danger of getting any AAs, but only one or two might have tossed me (I had it in exercise mode, so it's difficult to be certain).

I played for 27 or 28 minutes, and burned about 450kcal, according to the game. My only recent exercise being chasing my daughter around, I was surprised that I wasn't wiped out by that at all. In fact, the calories are close to twice what I was planning to do; this was supposed to be very light exercise (ok, compared to some of my workouts when I was serious (either trying to get in particularly good shape, or to lose a little weight), that is very light, but I wasn't comparing against that standard in my mind). It made for a very pleasant surprise.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens when my daughter gets old enough to play. I could see that going in several different directions; although the thought of her possibly being able to beat me when she's like seven or eight is a bit scary. Well, a bridge for when we come to it.