Negative Railroad A Collection of Breaks in the Line

The State of New York is considering relaxing requirements and increasing benefits available to welfare recipients. But maybe the poor in New York are already overpaid:

When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.

Assume a 2000-hour work year. Then, a little math reveals (43,000 ÷ 2000) that NYC welfare pays $21.50 per hour. That’s just the handout, not compensation for adding any value to anything in the form of meaningful work.

Fans of the Garage Logic radio show are familiar with “space management”. That is, keeping all your pavement clear of snow and snow piles. Theo Spark has posted photos of the railroad version:

Stuck.

Here comes the plow!
(It’s being pushed by the blue locomotive, which is running backward.)

H/T: Division of Labour

Some Minneapolis activists held a protest march against a proposed commuter rail project. I imagine they normally love commuter rail, except when it interferes with their NIMBY utopia:

Organizers of the march warned that Hennepin County’s proposal to use a 13-acre parcel in Bryn Mawr for train storage would jeopardize long-term redevelopment plans for Bassett Creek Valley. The largely industrial valley west of Downtown is divided between Bryn Mawr and Harrison, and residents from both neighborhoods have contributed to a decade of redevelopment planning.

In February, the City Council is expected to consider a city staff recommendation to negotiate a sale of the parcel, known as Linden Yards East, to Hennepin County by the end of the year.

Outside the U.S. Coast Guard’s awesome rescue effort, the one organization that truly shined in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was Walmart. It has become a stock example of the power and effectiveness of capitalist enterprise in the humanitarian sphere.

Anheuser-Busch is another example, by its reponse to the Haiti earthquake:

The day after the earthquake, the company’s AmBev business in Latin America immediately shipped nearly 350,000 cans of fresh drinking water from a brewery it operates in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, about 160 miles from Port-au-Prince, to be among the first to provide relief to victims of this tragedy. In addition, the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Cartersville, Ga., is working with the American Red Cross to ship another 600,000 cans of water. In total, the company will donate nearly 1 million cans of water.

Next time you’re tippling, toast to the evil capitalists who save thousands of lives.

H/T: Make the Logo Bigger

Café Hayek has a post where commenters are asked to compose “Hayeku”:

A haiku is a three line poem. The first line has five syllables. The second line has seven. The third line has five.

A hayeku (HT: Ike Pigott for the name and the encouragement) is a haiku from an Hayekian perspective. Here’s one to get you started:

Why do we pretend

That “mandatory” spending

Is mandatory?

The idea (and the pun) tickles me. But people seem to think that any seventeen-syllable sentence qualifies as poetry if broken into three proper chunks. Nope. Like the example offered, it’s just a choppy sentence, not a haiku.

In his State of the Union address last night, the current President repeated his vision for a “clean-energy economy” as a cornerstone to creating jobs. This time, Obama included something that many argue is not clean energy:

But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives, and that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

Neo-neocon didn’t have the stomach to watch last night’s State of the Union address. I endured the whole thing. Setting aside the particulars of the implicitly contradictory wish list Barry set forth, I think the current President is cracking up.

He has lost his slickness, even with the teleprompter. His demeanor struck me as similar to the Seinfeld character George Costanza when caught in his own web of lies. Barry would make a joking jab, then smile a bit too big, as if he was looking for approval. His speaking style, when not in full campaign mode, is full of odd pauses. Last night, what was odd became awkward.

As a service to local sports fans, the NRR offers an excursion analyzing the Minnesota Vikings loss to the New Orleans Saints:

The fumbles were infuriating, but they weren't the reason the Vikes lost. They were the reason the Vikes didn't win by 17.

The Saints played on a short field all game, and the Vikings fumbled away points. Favre played tough, and his last INT was set up by mistakes not made by him:

So much will be said about Scott Brown’s victory, I’ll wait for both the conventional wisdom and the actual truths to become clear before making any grand declarations of my own.

But, I love Rush Limbaugh’s first reaction:

This one's for you, Mary Jo.

Let’s hope the Maine ladies find some integrity and sustain the filibuster against Unicorn Care.

Expect a train on any track at any time from any direction.

Whatever the reports from mainstream media, remember that at best they are telling only part of the truth. My intimate knowledge around Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the I-35W bridge, and countless minor events revealed that reporters get confused, lazy and often just make things up.

This maxim should be applied to the coverage coming out of Haiti: The news is not what is happening, it is just what the media is telling you.

Americans have stopped getting fatter:

The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among men and for closer to 10 years among women and children — long enough for experts to say the percentage of very overweight people has leveled off.

The article points out that, by the national average, we’re still obese. But applying the same rhetoric used for economic conditions, we have “turned the corner” and “stabilized our national caloric imbalance”. There is “still a long way to go”. And although “the road to healthier living may be bumpy”, we must “forge ahead” because our eating habits “will bankrupt the country through increased costs of caring for the fatties”.

If you want to help someone, then just shut up, do it, and spare the press release.

Quoted from: Vox Day

We do not acquit ourselves morally by trying to abstain from a choice of evils.

Quoted from: Rant of the Day

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has authorized $400,000 in earnest money toward the purchase of a swath of Mississippi riverfront just north of downtown. A sale price will be negotiated in secret:

Peter Scherer [the seller] would not discuss specifics of the proposed sale price, but noted that the Minneapolis property has been appraised at more than $8 million.
…
Judd Rietkerk, park board planning director, said the purchase price will be made public once a purchase agreement has been signed, which could happen as soon as the end of this week. Until then, Rietkerk said he is keeping the figure confidential to avoid the prospect of another potential buyer swooping in with a higher bid.

Coyote has a great post about rail transport as an example of government foolishness:

High speed rail is a terrible investment, a black hole for pouring away money, that has little net impact on efficiency or pollution. But rail is a powerful example because it demonstrates exactly how this bias for high-profile triumphal projects causes people to miss the obvious.
…
The US rail system, unlike nearly every other system in the world, was built (mostly) by private individuals with private capital. It is operated privately, and runs without taxpayer subsidies. And, it is by far the greatest rail system in the world. It has by far the cheapest rates in the world (1/2 of China’s, 1/8 of Germany’s). But here is the real key:  it is almost all freight.

In my speculations about breaking the 60-vote Senate majority, I suggested Sarah Palin may offer some stealth support to Republican underdog Scott Brown. If she’s helping, it is so stealthy that nobody has noticed. But even by her absence, Palin is a factor in the Massachusettes Senate race:

We now have a financial system that is completely based on moral hazard.

Quoted from: Simon Johnson

Via: Naked Capitalism

Cobb remarks on fashion:

T Shirts have been making statements since way back to I'm With Stupid. But before that it was a smiley face or a peace sign. I mean after you burned your draft card or your bra, you had to wear something besides your long hair to signify the seriousness of your rebellion from the standards of beauty and propriety of your racist pig parents, right?

I have long thought that shirts with slogans are mild arrogance. Why would you think I care about your opinion of, well, anything? But I respect the argument that holds such fashion—or almost all intentional fashion—is social signaling.

It’s not about the cause so much as about showing that the wearer cares about something. Or that the wearer has bought—and sometimes even earned—a worldview that is branded with alligators or polo players.