Yostivanich

“The ris­ing tab has prompted warn­ings from the Trea­sury that the Con­gres­sion­ally man­dated debt ceil­ing of $12.1 tril­lion will most likely be breached in the sec­ond half of this year.” Which was raised to that amount under W. Bush.

“Col­leges have dis­missed ath­letic staff, reduced hours for pools and prac­tice courts, and increased equip­ment and facil­ity fees. Some have also cut the size of their travel squads, elim­i­nated trips requir­ing air travel and done away with hous­ing teams in hotels the night before home games.” Those poor athletes.

An out­stand­ing author.

“Trent Reznor, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails is pretty upset that Apple has rejected the lat­est ver­sion of his iPhone app. And right­fully so, the rea­son for the rejec­tion once again points to Apple’s incon­sis­ten­cies when it comes to the App Store approval process. While we pointed that out yes­ter­day, Reznor pulls no punches in point­ing it out today, in the NIN’s forums.” Rock on NIN and Trent, rock on.

Talk­ing about Face­book and grades, more data shows that more Face­book use equals higher grades.

“Financier War­ren Buf­fett has said the US gov­ern­ment is gen­er­ally tak­ing the right steps to aid eco­nomic recov­ery.” Okay I was right Buf­fet is gen­er­ally in favor of what the gov­ern­ment has been doing.

“One con­clu­sion our data sug­gests is that those jus­tices often con­sid­ered more “lib­eral” — Jus­tices Breyer, Ruth Bader Gins­burg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens — vote least fre­quently to over­turn Con­gres­sional statutes, while those often labeled “con­ser­v­a­tive” vote more fre­quently to do so. At least by this mea­sure (oth­ers are pos­si­ble, of course), the lat­ter group is the most activist.”

“How­ever, as Media Mat­ters for Amer­ica has repeat­edly noted, a 2005 study by Yale Uni­ver­sity law pro­fes­sor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School grad­u­ate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court jus­tices at that time, those most fre­quently labeled “con­ser­v­a­tive” were among the biggest prac­ti­tion­ers of at least one brand of judi­cial activism — the ten­dency to strike down statutes passed by Con­gress.” If judi­cial activism is strik­ing down laws passed by Con­gress then con­ser­v­a­tive judges are the most active.

Some good work to try and clean up space in future mission.

“Despite his defec­tion to the Demo­c­ra­tic Party last week, Sen­a­tor Arlen Specter said on Sun­day that he would not sim­ply rubber-stamp White House poli­cies and would instead vote against his new party on “mat­ters of con­science” like health-care reform. Aside from vot­ing for the eco­nomic stim­u­lus pack­age ear­lier this year, Mr. Specter has sided with Democ­rats on issues of abor­tion rights, gay mar­riage and embry­onic stem cell research. He has been at odds with Democ­rats on such issues as the war in Iraq and school vouch­ers. ” Specter has never been a party line voter.

“The Pen­ta­gon has done lit­tle to col­lect at least $100 mil­lion in over­charges paid in deals arranged by cor­rupt for­mer offi­cials of Kel­logg Brown & Root, the defense con­trac­tor, even though the offi­cials admit­ted much of the wrong­do­ing years ago, two sen­a­tors have com­plained in a let­ter to Defense Sec­re­tary Robert M. Gates.”

“On Sun­day, War­ren E. Buf­fett attacked the government’s stress tests of 19 large banks, say­ing they failed to prop­erly assess the industry’s health, but still said he would expand his company’s stakes in three big banks.” And Buffet’s been pretty sup­port­ive of the gov­ern­ment bailout pro­gram, if my mem­ory is cor­rect (though I could be wrong).

“The admin­is­tra­tion is expected to make the case that the needs of the trou­bled banks can be met with the bailout funds that Con­gress has already approved. That would be a depar­ture from what admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials were say­ing as recently as March and evi­dently reflects the recent improve­ment in banks’ con­di­tions.” Good to hear.

New Kin­dle anyone?

“Yet another exam­ple of the skewed gen­der pol­i­tics in the world of tech­nol­ogy in this sex­u­ally explicit soft­ware pre­sen­ta­tion at the GoG­a­RuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Con­fer­ence) by Matt Aimon­etti.” Really, was it that explicit, the ver­sion that I saw was not really that bad. Taste­less and stu­pid yeah, but not quite as bad as they seem to make it out to be.

“O’Reilly Fac­tor guest host Laura Ingra­ham pre­sented clips of Al Gore’s recent con­gres­sional tes­ti­mony that had been edited to remove his state­ments that he donates the money he makes from his climate-related work to a non-profit organization.”

“It’s prob­a­bly also the case that whether Repub­li­can party iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is in fact con­tin­u­ing to decline or merely flatlin­ing at a low num­ber is some­what imma­te­r­ial from the stand­point of the party’s strat­egy.” The Repub­li­can party has been los­ing peo­ple who iden­tify with the party.

“A few weeks ago I was hav­ing lunch with a friend who is a very suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur. He told me he’d been hav­ing some prob­lems recently with Amer­i­can Express. They’d been deny­ing charges and giv­ing him all sort of grief. Our lunch turned into a sup­port group. Because I’ve been hav­ing the same expe­ri­ences. We shared our hor­ror sto­ries and I felt a bit bet­ter about it.” Wow, con­sid­er­ing the peo­ple that I know who use AmEx and what good feel­ings they have about the com­pany, that’s bad.

“Swine flu in Mex­ico, the epi­cen­tre of the world out­break, has peaked, the Mex­i­can health min­is­ter has said.” That’s pretty good news.

“Ital­ian car­maker Fiat has con­firmed for the first time that it is inter­ested in a takeover of Opel — the Ger­man busi­ness of Gen­eral Motors (GM).” Right after Fiat is in the process of buy­ing out Chrysler. NYT talked about this last week.

Fog­Bugz is appar­ently worse than 37Signals. See here for more info: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hbte/37signals_stores_passwords_in_plaintext/c09afrh