Recently in Bidness Category

Sunday, 7 Reckning 2012

Amazingly (cough), the web site organizing the May Day protest seems to be rather difficult to access with my web browser - whichever of NetScrap, IECarumba, FireFox, Opera, or Chrome I try to use.

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Humpday, 8 Shivring 2012

Now that the reich wing Republicants running all that pink ribbon crap you've been seeing all season long have finally exposed themselves to be the religiously insane female controlling farging iceholes that they are, are there three of you willing to donate a quarter of a million dollars each to cover up the shortfall over at Planned Parenthood?

Also, too: can anyone tell me why there's such a huge fuss about $680K of discretionary funding coming from an organization that reported earnings of approximately 400 million dollars in 2010? So much so that you can't even donate the equivalent of some of your executive bonuses for the year to Planned Parenthood due to your religious insanity?

Inquiring minds want to know...

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Update: Big time props to NY Mayor Bloomberg for matching $250K for Planned Parenthood. Are there two more insanely rich people ready to step up to the plate?

Update too: PP has gotten more, with less sanctimonious lip-pursing, than they would have from the Komen Foundation. And even more people see Nancy Brinker and the rest of the conservative corporate welfare queens at Komen for what they are.

Now, if there were only at least one relatively well off liberal who could put half of Brinker's annual salary towards helping out some of the less fortunate liberals out there...

Fryday, 20 Premise 2012

The Funny Farm, along with The Church of the Afternoon Nap, would like to ask you, dear reader, to heed the words of our good friend and internets guru, Marc Perkel. He has been the driving force behind The Church of Reality for a while now, and he would like to talk to us all about the (warning: horking big PDF file) Stop Online Piracy Act and some reality-based solutions to the problem that avoid all that messy treasonous internets-killing Republicant kimchee in the previous link.

I'll let Marc take it from here:

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Friday, 12 Premise 2012

About that blogging thing - it seems to me that the whole writering thing is not going to be feasable within a survival-mode lifestyle. At least that is the way I feel about it these days. Especially with the tremendous amount of feedback (cough) that has gotten through the cone of spammy silence I've put up around the funny Farm.

But, hey - I'm not here to ask you (again) to help me get through the Bush Depression. I might not be here soon at all if we get a Chinese-style internets policy like the one percent are trying to put in place.

I'm here to tout Get Your censor On, the latest effort by David Rees (I hope - I didn't see, during my brief mad scan before posting this, any accreditation for David* - that this is something he's put together). He has a ton of good stuff up already, and you can monitor his newest material through a new entry in the links zone over to the left. For as long as they let any and/or all of us stay on the internets.

A couple of haikus in honor of Get Your censor On:

Go haiku yourself!

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* - then again, I don't do Facebook and the Twitter so I didn't check out the facebook info associated with the Get Your censor On page...

_{Tuesday, 19 Priming 2011}

With all of the propaganda about the nation being broke coming from the Republicants lately, and a surprising (cough) lack of coverage of the how the Republicants bankrupted the country just before they cried poor, I thought I would try and help solve the spending problem with a few suggestions of my own:

- based on data obtained regarding the salaries of the federal and executive branches of the United States, the president is making $400,000 per year, the vice president, chief justice of the supreme court, and the speaker of the house are making $223,500 each, every other member of the supreme court is making $213,900, the house and senate party leaders get $193,400 each, and all the other senators and house members get $174,000 each.

It is costing the american people almost (bites pinky) one hundred million dollars in taxpayer money for the Republicants to shut the government down this year alone. To pay the salaries of 546 of the richest people in the country so that they can screw the poor once more. And shut down the government at the end of this week.

The Funny Farm Instant Deficit Reduction Plan sees this as an opportunity - one that could be replicated at the state level, particularly in places like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and any other Teapublicant/Republicant controlled legislature. There's a lot of big gubmint cheese going on when 546 government employees get almost (bites pinky) one hundred million dollars in taxpayer money. So, here's my proposal: take $100,000 off of everybody's salary, except the president. Take $250,000 off of the president's salary. Voila! You've just saved the american people over fifty million dollars this year!*

The congress could also revoke the automatic salary increases that they get each year, and require that they pass legislature in the future if they want pay raises.

Think of the leadership example this would show the american people, of the shared sacrifice that we could see our policiticans joining in to help us overcome the economic mess that they have gotten us into! Consider how much more seriously we might take the things they say if they would actually come close to approximating the behavior they expect from their fellow human beings.

There are a number of other obvious low hanging fruits of this nature within the government expenditures, if Republicants are actually serious about cutting costs and reducing the deficit - means testing and restructuring for retired governmental pensions, putting retired congresscritters on regular retirement health care instead of their cadillac plans, etc. I'm sure you could find a few of these as well. The new Michigan laws - can these city managers cancel retirement packages for state executives to save costs as well? I'm thinking Hitler Engler doesn't need to have the state paying for his fat a$$ to sit around and eat bonbons all day...

And those four hundred people who have more wealth than half of the american people combined? Here's another instant boost to the coffers: a one million dollar tax on every one of those four hundred would instantly put almost half a billion dollars into the hands of the american people.

Now of course I don't expect to have anyone in any sort of position to do anything about these sorts of things to even notice Your Humble Narrator's attempt to inject some fiscal sanity into government financial planning**. Consider it an interesting thought experiment.

And, as always - Share and Enjoy! It would also be nice to get some non-spam comments one of these days - but that still seems to be at the thought experiment level as well...

* - here's the math I'm basing my claims on:
Current salaries:
House=435 (Spkr + 2 ldrs + 432 reg) = (223,500 + 2x193,400 + 432x174,000) = (223,400 + 386,800 + 75,168,000) = 75,778,300
Senate=100 (2 ldrs + 98 reg) = (2x193,400 + 98x174,000) = (386,800 + 17,052,000) = 17,438,800
Supremes=9 (chf + 8 reg) = (223,500 + 8x213,900) = (223,500 + 1,711,200) = 1,934,700
Veep + pres = (223,500 + 400,000) = 623,500
Total for 546 federal government employees: $95,775,300

Proposed salaries:
House=435 (Spkr + 2 ldrs + 432 reg) = (123,500 + 2x93,400 + 432x74,000) = (123,500 + 186,800 + 31,968,000) = 32,278,300
Senate=100 (2 ldrs + 98 reg) = (2x93,400 + 98x74,000) = (186,800 + 7,252,000) = 7,438,800
Supremes=9 (chf + 8 reg) = (123,500 + 8x113,900) = (123,500 + 911,200) = 1,034,700
Veep + pres = (123,500 + 150,000) = 273,500
Total for 546 federal government employees: $41,025,300

Savings on 546 federal government salaries: $54,750,000

** - largely because I'm relatively certain that the only kind of attention this critique would draw would be of the 'we need to shut this guy up' kind...

_{Fryday, 16 Priming 2011}

Sorry for the lack of bloggy goodness on these pages of late. There have been a number of personal issues that I've had to work through, the bills don't pay themselves (especially when you don't have any sort of consistent, gainful employment in the picture), and of course I'm woefully understaffed as far as putting together business proposals to get Funny Farm Renewables to the point that it can make up for said lack of employment.

But here at the Funny Farm, as long time readers may be aware, the wheels grind slow, but they grind fine. It is with great pleasure that I can report that I have had my first of many alcoholic beverages* at Pizzariffic. Mike hasn't gotten the taps installed yet, but he does have things ready to go once those taps are put in.

I can also report that I am looking into my first mini-hydro renewable energy install, which will hopefully take place later this year. I hesitate to report on any of these sort of events, mainly because things seem to fall apart once I start talking about how they're going to happen sometime in that nebulous near future. My tendency is to wait until things have been accomplished before making the news public, but it was quite happily unexpected to even hear of an opportunity like this and so I thought I'd spread the joy around.

There's been a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of cleanup in the Links Zone. I would welcome suggestions for inclusions, updates on linked zones that are no longer functioning that I haven't caught, or even general critique of any sort - but all I've gotten is spammy spam from a bunch of spammers, as opposed to real comments from real commenters. It's probably not helping that the code on my comments page is frelled and not user-friendly in terms of allowing comments to be posted**. But I will still ask for any and all non-spammy commenters out there to try and let me know how to fix things in Movable Type.

Hopefully this will be a bit more of a regular thing in the future. Until then, take care, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

* - a Heineken, made available to me by the helpful and friendly staff for $2.65 (including Snyder's cut). Imported brews (Only a few so far, including Corona and Heinies) for $2.50 plus tax, and domestics (Miller, Bud and Bud Lite, and a number of others that won't be coming anywhere near my palate any time in the near future) for $2 plus tax. I didn't really look at the wine list and didn't even check to see if there was liquor available.

Bargain basement beer prices plus fantastic italian foods equals you should be getting your a$$ into Pizzariffic and enjoying a fine meal within the next fortnight. Tell 'em the Funny Farm sent you so I can convince Mike his advertising money is being spent productively and maybe even wangle a Funny Farm Frequent Flyer discount for our loyal subscribers...

** - it is possible to post comments, but when the comment gets posted the web page screen does not refresh properly, and it's hard to verify that the comment has been successfully posted.

_{Humpday, 22 Shivring 2011}

I'm quite happy to let you know that my good friend Mike Becker is in the process of getting his beer taps installed, his wait staff trained in the art of serving alcoholic beverages to the public, and his internal systems upgraded to handle the increased complexity of offering alcoholic beverages to the public.

The Funny Farm News Burro has not been able to determine the exact date and time of the first alcoholic beverage to be served at Pizzariffic - however, there is a distinct possibility that they will need to be dispatched in order to provide further information on this important developing story...

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