Sambal

• Do not use for any other purpose other than for access control or identification.
• Do not leave in direct sun light, for example on the dash of your car.
• Do not expose to extreme heat or open flame. For example, clothes dryers or clothes irons.
• Do not expose to organic solvents, thinners, mineral spirits, etc.
• Do not use as an ice scraper or scraping tool.
• Do not crimp, bend, or twist card.
• Do not re-laminate.
• Do not immerse in alcohol, Isopropyl, ethanol, methyl, etc.
• Do not bite.
• Do not pound with a pen or tool.
• Do not punch a slot or hole in an undesignated area.
• Do not scratch or place any decals on your card.
• Do not wash your card.

(Admonishments to RAH ID card issuees; sadly, most of these must be from experience…)

Michael Moore says the US is not broke: all “we the people” need to do is take the money back from the fat cat billionaires.

What if we took this advice? Let’s imagine expropriating some of the wealth of the richest man in America, William Gates III. Forbes says he’s worth about $54 billion, of which $16 billion is his Microsoft stock. Let’s start by taking that.

OK, so now we’ve seized about 7% of Microsoft’s stock. That’s the largest single block of stock, which should give us some privileges like picking a board member or two. Unfortunately we don’t have actual control of the company because, well, the other 93% could easily outvote us. So we have to sell the stock in order to get cash.

MSFT is trading at $25.91 right now. If we dump shares on the market the price will drop somewhat – say ten percent. So we’ll clear about $14.5 billion dollars during our sellout, driving the MSFT share price to $23.32. (Incidentally, this will reduce the wealth of everyone else who holds MSFT stock by a total of about $22 billion.)

OK! Now we’ve got $14.5 billion in cash for “we the people”. That’s, uh, $50 per person. OK, here you go. Fifty bucks. That really helped a lot.

What were the secondary effects? Well, I’d guess for starters that any publicly-traded company which has substantial ownership by a billionaire will suffer a hit in stock prices: that would be Berkshire Hathaway, Oracle, Microsoft again (Paul Allen), Wal-Mart, Koch Industries (privately held), Bloomberg (privately held), Google, Facebook (limited trading), Apple… After all, if the government (we the people!) demonstrates a willingness to take Bill Gates’s stock and sell it, why would these others be safe?

Ding! What’s that I hear? It’s another delicious running-dog treat from my friends at Koch Industries. Gotta go, I’m already salivating!

Kling: “One point about the Great Substitution of leisure for work is that leisure escapes taxation. That raises all sorts of issues. ”

Non-consumption tax. Video game tax. Sitting around tax. Doing nothing tax. Mental activity tax.

Oh wait, that last one is basically thoughtcrime. What, did the US suddenly get Canada envy?

I didn’t realize I’ve been parsing it wrong all this time.

I thought it was like “No pain, no gain”.

Like “No justice, no peace”.

Like “No bishop, no king”.

Like “No latinos, no tacos“.

But apparently “No woman no cry” actually means “No my dear don’t cry.”

I’ve been posting to Facebook more than I’d like to; so I’m going to try to turn that into more short blog posts with less editing/polish.