inkbluesky

13 ways to live well on less

*Make a budget. “Without exception you have to do a written plan, called a budget,” says Dave Ramsey, author of “The Total Money Makeover.” Listeners to his national call-in radio show tell him once they make a budget, “they feel like they got a raise.” The reason, he says, is “managed money works harder.”

*Pay cash. “When you spend cash, it hurts,” says Ramsey. “And you spend less.”

Ramsey recalls a study several years ago that showed when shoppers spend cash, “you spend 12% to 18% less than when you spend plastic because of the emotional pain.”

Plus, he says, you can get a better deal when you use cash as a negotiating tool.

I was hestitant to post this link because of the crap at the beginning about what his grandmother could buy on her income. We can learn a lot from our grandparents, but those were distinctly different economic times. A single middle income wage earner had the purchasing power to buy a home and take care of a family. That same buying power today takes two incomes. Some good tips in general. The one anecdote about a friend that got a $38,000 Rolex for $18,000 seemed ridiculously out of place too. The median household income in the U.S. is $56,000. Even at the incredible bargain of $18,000 Rolexs hardly fit into the average person’s budget or you certainly don’t need a Rolex to have an accurate time piece.

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An Immoral Philosophy

When a child is enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic. For example, after asthmatic children are enrolled in Schip, the frequency of their attacks declines on average by 60 percent, and their likelihood of being hospitalized for the condition declines more than 70 percent.

Regular care, in other words, makes a big difference. That’s why Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand Schip, which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who would otherwise lack health insurance.

But President Bush says that access to care is no problem - “After all, you just go to an emergency room” - and, with the support of the Republican Congressional leadership, he’s declared that he’ll veto any Schip expansion on “philosophical” grounds.

It must be about philosophy, because it surely isn’t about cost. One of the plans Mr. Bush opposes, the one approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Senate Finance Committee, would cost less over the next five years than we’ll spend in Iraq in the next four months. And it would be fully paid for by an increase in tobacco taxes.

The House plan, which would cover more children, is more expensive, but it offsets Schip costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage - a privatization scheme that pays insurance companies to provide coverage, and costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

Speaking of grandparents most would probably say this was “penny wise and pound foolish”. One comment I heard on this story today was that Bush is afraid that the health plan for children will work and if that works then who knows what that could lead to - better health care and lower costs for everyone?

Review of Mark Nunes, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life -(full review at the link)

In an essay dating back to the mid-1990’s, Jean Baudrillard breathlessly proclaimed the murder of reality at the hands of the unforgiving pace of media “real time.” The essay, The Perfect Crime (1996), laments a “deep seated virtualization of human beings” not marked by the absence of reality, but rather by ultra-reality or hyperreality, which has had the paradoxical effect of “devitalizing” the spaces we occupy in the world.1 Baudrillard’s hyperbolic piece is an apt example of what Mark Nunes might refer to as a “first generation” book on the social, political, and cultural effects of computer-mediated communication that partook in dystopic, nightmarish depictions of the network society.

I wish I could say this was actually settled, that cyberspace is not depersonalizing or that it is THE mechanism that will bring people together, but it isn’t. Like many tools the net and networks can be used constructively, destructively, as a way to be closer to others or a way to retreat from personal interaction. How often have you e-mailed someone because you didn’t want to talk to them.

[  ]…Another apparent paradox established by the Web is the idea that it is both globally expansive and locally situated. I can create “my Web,” but I can still feel as though I am plugged into the wider world. Both of these paradoxes, freedom/control and global/local, assist in our understanding of the Web as a tool that makes the world both graspable and expansive at the same time.

Probably closer to what the net has become then  Baudrillard’s disorienting space. Yet the net as a tool is only as good as the tool user and the programmers that provide those tools. I tend to have idealistic ideas about the net’s potential, but just today I read a forum where the participants identified themselves as patriots yet used web tools and a few thousand words to argue against freedom and for authoritarianism.

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Falling Ice Chunks Hit Iowa Neighborhood 

DUBUQUE, Iowa — Large chunks of ice, one of them reportedly about 50 pounds, fell from the sky in this northeast Iowa city, smashing through a woman’s roof and tearing through nearby trees.

Authorities were unsure of the ice’s origin but have theorized the chunks either fell from an airplane or naturally accumulated high in the atmosphere - both rare occurrences.

“It sounded like a bomb!” 78-year-old Jan Kenkel said. She said she was standing in her kitchen when an ice chunk crashed through her roof at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday. “I jumped about a foot!”

She traced the damage to her television room, where she found a messy pile of insulation, bits of ceiling, splintered wood and about 50 pounds of solid ice.

Karle and Mary Beth Wigginton, who live a block away, heard a loud “whoosh” coming through the trees. They discovered several large chunks of ice in front of their home and some smaller ones in the yard and in the street.

This might be a case of Iowa trying to steal Florida’s title as the state with the weirdest natural phenomenon. Or as a professor explained it could have come from ice that accumulated on a plane’s wings or a megacryometeor - “similar to a hailstone, but without the thunderstorm.”

Nature versus nurture. Free will versus predetermination. Another bump in the road, Resisting Peer Pressure: New Findings Shed Light On Adolescent Decision-making

They found that the brains of all children showed activity in regions important for planning and extracting information about social cues from movement, but the connectivity within these regions was stronger in children who were marked as less vulnerable to peer influence.

Those children were also found to have more activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area important for decision-making and inhibition of unwanted behaviour.

Professor Paus said: “This is important if we are to understand how the adolescent brain attains the right balance between acknowledging the influences of others and maintaining one’s independence.”

Some parents are seem to skip teaching their children about decision making ( how one deals with peer pressure is a decision) and just stick with the don’t do this or that school of thought. The there are the parents that ask questions - do you think its a good idea to drink, to drink and drive, should you study for that test tomorrow - if not what what are the consequences. Regardless of how hard wired this peer pressure influence might be it seems that the parents that nudge their kids toward learning to make better choices also have kids that are better at resisting negative influences from their peers.

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Whatever Happened to Shame and Guilt?

Once again we have been treated to yet more failures of leadership. Last week it was Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles. Instead of testifying in court over his priest-child-abusers, the Cardinal arranged for a $660 million payout to the victims. He then made his apologies and closed the case.

This week we see Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tripping over his own lies as he testifies before Congress about the mismanagement of the Justice Department. Then, of course, as his approval ratings decline, President Bush has again resorted to reminding us that we are a nation under the terrorists’ threat. In Tuesday’s speech he used the words “Al Qeada” 95 times as he tried to connect A.Q. to Iraq and September 11. Good God, how much more of this charade must we take?

There is a positive side to pressure from one’s peers. Maybe someone is a total screw-up and lots of people have tried to set them straight, but they’re arrogant and hard headed and refuse to change course.

grand valley 

Money isn’t evil, but how we get it and use it can be. Google is a frustrating company. They’ve done a few things that while I won’t get into detail here have been less then good, on the other hand they do some things that have the potential to make life just a little better for millions of people, Google’s $4.6 billion plan for an open wireless Internet

Would that all kings were so benevolent. Google announced today it would set aside at least $4.6 billion to purchase a slice of the public airwaves in an upcoming government auction of radio spectrum. The company is imposing one condition on its money: It will only participate, it says, if the Federal Communications Commission requires that all bidders for the radio waves be forced to adhere to principles of Internet “openness.”

4.6 billion dollars tends to get people’s attention even the bureaucrats at the FCC. Companies like AT&T and Verizon are  only willing to go half way -  This is what Google wants 1) let customers download and use any software on the network; 2) let customers use any device on the network; 3) sell wireless space to any third-party wireless provider at commercial rates; 4) allow the wireless network to interconnect with other Internet service providers. 

The old school companies have balked at 3 and 4. They say they’ll might skip the auction if we have all that darn openness. The problem with that is that the government - the repository for your tax dollars will loose Google’s billions if they don’t play the open network game that Google is pushing for. If they’re betting on the outcome of this in Vegas I’d stand behind the 4.6 billion dollar giant in the room.

In The Absence of Anything Remotely Resembling Victory In Iraq, Bush and Cheney Play The Blame Game 

“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” Bush said in his joint address to Congress nine days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And in the weeks that followed he repeated variations of his formula, reducing it to “for or against us in the war on terrorism.” At the Charleston, S.C., Air Force Base on Tuesday, Bush resumed his repudiated habit of conflating threats, suggesting a connection between 9/11 and the Iraq war, and intensified his blaming of domestic critics for the shortcomings of his policy. His story line depends upon omitting his own part in the calamity. “The facts are,” insisted Bush to his captive audience, “that al-Qaida terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they’re fighting us in Iraq and across the world, and they are plotting to kill Americans here at home again.”

But how did it happen that al-Qaida in Iraq, sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein and his secularism, operating in isolation prior to 9/11, though almost certainly with the connivance and protection of Kurdish leader and current Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, has come to thrive under the U.S. occupation? And since AQI represents perhaps 1 percent or less of the insurgent strength, how can it be depicted as the main foe, capable of seizing state power? The other Sunni insurgent groups increasingly view it as an impediment to their own ambitions and have marked it for elimination.

Life is like junior high and in this version the principle is going around telling everyone that they’ll get a  whopping cough if they don’t bury a potato in the back yard. Maybe Bush does read a lot, but its all fairy tales and he actually believes them.