Thursday, December 18, 2008

Wet Drought


If your monitor is correctly adjusted, you
should be able to see 33 shades from pure
white to deep black
. Squinting isn't allowed,
so you may as well click on it to enlarge.

Enough already! When the drought breaks; it sure breaks big time. "I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when ..." is the way Johnny Cash said it about being in Folsom Prison, and several days without sunshine and no car to drive is much like a prison for me.
----
Our largest local employer—Eastman Chemicals—is planning on trimming its 2009 budget by $100M, and most of it will come through labor cutbacks, of course. One of the local plant's main products is material (cellulose acetate) for cigarette filters, and as they trim the payroll here, they are investing in a new plant in South Korea to manufacture the product. All this is for the long term benefit of local area employees. Oh, yeah!
----
It seems like no one is alarmed about bad economic news anymore. So much has gone down that I fear we are becoming numb to the consequences. If this major recession should slide into a "minor" depression, it will be many years before we are recovered instead of the many months that a recession will take. Meanwhile, Dubya and company—along with the fat-cats on the Hill that were defeated—are grabbing as much "loot" as possible before getting out of town. Think tanks and lobbying firms will be up to their asses with high profile employees and "consultants". What the hell is a "consultant" good for anyway? If ever there was a job title manufactured for a plain old adviser, it has to be that of "consultant". I believe it goes like this: "If you want my advice, it is free, but if you desire to consult with me, my fee is $20 each minute of my knowledgeable time you use; minimum is ten hours worth of my precious minutes. My free advice is for you to consult with me."

I don't even want to know what a "think tank" is!
----
Locally, eleven people are being charged for probing prostitutes, or something of that nature.

4 comments:

Mark said...

Its so nice that they are going to South Korea. That kind of crap has to stop. Will be a country making nothing one of these days.

Maggie said...

I can see all 33. Amazing how many shades of gray! Just like politics. Shades of the truth.

Yeah, that down sizing and moving to another country makes no sense. Can't they imagine the end of this story? They want to live in Korea, maybe?

Anonymous said...

I suppose this has been an ongoing thing since Nixon was in office. I see no recourse except for tariffs on job exports and goods imports. We are in a Catch-22 ...

Anonymous said...

I have to use one of these charts at least weekly to test my cheapo monitor

S. Korea is a particular problem in that they have quotas on foreign goods sold to their citizens. N. America needs to deal some paybacks.

Blog Archive