09:43 – CNN and the other left-leaning news sources seem to agree that the race is now a dead heat, which tells me that Obama must be lagging badly. On Wednesday, I’ll check the election results with the same enthusiasm I have for checking the results of the Super Bowl or World Series. Which is to say none.
I’m still working on building more of the current kits, but most of my time recently has been devoted to designing and prototyping a couple of new kits and writing the manuals for them. One of those is the LK01 Life Science kit, which we intend to make available in early 2013. The contents of that kit are semi-finalized. There may be minor adds or deletes as I write and do the lab sessions, but no major changes. One change I made from the biology kits is going from a sleeve of 10 sterile plastic Petri dishes in the Biology kit to a pair of glass Petri dishes in the Life Science kit. Two glass Petri dishes actually cost more than a sleeve of 10 plastic ones, but they also occupy a lot less cubic. I’m striving to make the Life Science kit fit the smaller Regional Rate Box A rather than the Regional Rate Box B we use for the Biology kit. The difference in shipping cost is significant, maybe $4 on average, as is the amount of space needed to store finished-goods inventory. So I just ordered a case of the glass Petri dishes. They require extra care in packing, but we can deal with that.
I also ordered some chemicals, both for the new kits and for the current ones. For the first time, I ordered some liquids in 2.5 L bottles rather than 500 mL or 1 L bottles. The cost is much lower in 2.5 L bottles. For example, I ordered one 2.5 L bottle of reagent-grade 28% ammonia for about $22 plus shipping. That amount in smaller bottles would have cost about twice that. In the past, I’ve avoided ordering the larger bottles simply to conserve storage space, but the lower unit costs of the larger bottles are becoming compelling.
I like to tweak my sports fan friends by coming up with complete non-sequiturs. They’ll tell me that Oregon beat USC and I’ll ask how many runs did they score. It drives them up the wall.
I don’t get it.
Ask your nearest sports fan. They’ll get it.
You’re talking about baseball, right? I still don’t get it.
I don’t ask questions like that, I simply stare at sports fanatics as I’d stare at someone with herpes sores covering her entire face, then mock them for putting so much time, money, and attention into sports just as if sports really matter.
Well, of course. That’s the whole reason for commercial sports, celebrities, and so on. People spend all their time thinking about sports and other stuff that doesn’t matter at all and don’t have time to think about things that really matter.
Opiate of the masses.
I like the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin was wondering about the quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. In the last panel, the TV was thinking to itself, “Marx hadn’t seen anything yet.”
As for sports and celebrities being deliberately inflicted on the masses, I don’t think so. The common man seems eager to waste his time and effort on pointless distractions. No encouragement needed. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the ruling class won’t push for taxpayer-funded stadiums and such. With that much money flowing, the graft is just there for the taking.
I never meant to suggest that sports were a government plot. But it’s sure worked out nicely for the government, hasn’t it?
I guess I am a reformed former sports enthusiast; I ran track and played soccer and football in high school many long decades ago, and variously followed the fortunes and disasters of the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots. But in the last few years I’ve lost interest, mostly, although if a football game is on someone’s tee-vee I find it hard to tear my eyes away still.
Now I see it pretty much as you guys do; a bunch of radically commercialized malarkey with pseudo-gladiators and mercenaries being enslaved by mercenary owners as part of the current regime of corporate fascist oligarchy. While rubes, bumpkins and millions of other peasant riff-raff stay glued to the tubes and slugging down shitty American beer and eating greasy, rancid fat/sugar garbage by the ton.
And as Robert says, time spent wasted on this crap is time not spent learning about the things that really matter.
Yet ex-addict that I am, I still keep an ear partially tuned to any forthcoming nooz that the NFL may soon set up a seasonal subscription service for their games. I need to develop a regular habit of going to Mass on Sunday mornings, and then in warm weather going out hiking and canoeing again. And if we have a snowy winter, x-c skiing and snowshoeing. Stay away from any and all possible temptations to watch amazing running backs and spectacular quarterback duels.
By the way, OFD drove down to work today in a series of sideways snow squalls up here with glimpses of blue sky and sun on the horizon.
And I’m seeing the same media polls showing the two bozos running neck-and-neck. Which means, as Bob says, probably that Barack Hussein is running behind a ways right now. And speculation abounds as to whether NY and NJ will postpone their voting; they are clearly states for Barry; this could be interesting.
I’ve got nothing against participating in sports, or even cheering along a team if your family or friends are playing. There’s a huge difference between that and sitting slavishly glued to the television and then screaming “We won! We won!” when “your” team wins. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with chipping in a few bucks to support your kid’s peewees team (though, as discussed on this site a while back, I’d rather just give them money than buy overpriced products that I don’t want anyway), but it’s stupid to support a big-money conglomerate by buying a $10 Steelers coffee mug.
I see Ryan is drawing large crowds in MN compared to Biden’s tiny ones. Same with The Great White Hope, er, Dope. I think I’m getting tingles up my leg! lol
My daughter is currently reading The Galactic Football League series by Scott Sigler. The SF series is about a football league with alien players from all over. They get to use whatever drugs, tech, etc in the game. That’s how the NFL should be. It’s professional isn’t it? Any drug/doping enhancement should be allowed.
I don’t object at all to people *participating in* sports. I used to play tennis seriously myself. What I object to is commercialized “sports”, which aren’t really sports at all.
As I’ve said before, it might be worth watching, say, pro football if the linemen were armed with shields and short swords and if instead of sacking the quarterback they beheaded him. That would bring a touch of reality to the endeavor. Of course, if the courts would toss child rapists, those who swindle the elderly, and similar scum to the lions, literally, that would be worth watching.
I feel the same way about sports as I do about pornography. I enjoying playing, I have no interest in watching.
Rick, I agree completely. I have no interest in watching guys, but the more scantily-clad babes, the better.
RBT, I see where you’re coming from but disagree. I’m utterly opposed to the judicial death penalty. It’s too easy to abuse, with essentially no penalty for government actors who send an innocent man to death.
Ever see the flick “Rollerball,” with James Caan? Came out years ago, but seems like something the folks here would enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZFaPezzM4k
And agreed with SteveF on the judicial death penalty; for the same reasons and also the way it has been enacted in past history. And the wide disparity of practice; a crime that gets people by the dozens whacked in Texas gets them, at most, a few years of prison time here in the ‘enlightened’ Northeast and out on the Left Coast. Also the methods suck; the only one I’ve seen (not in person) that works quickly and cleanly and efficiently is the guillotine, one of a handful of great inventions from France, the others being baguettes and various pastries.
[snip] And speculation abounds as to whether NY and NJ will postpone their voting [snip]
If they try that, there will almost certainly be some ugly litigation. Article I Section 4 says that the States get to run their own elections, but that Congress can override those rules. There is a Federal law which states when the national election shall be held, so NJ & NY risk having their voted annulled for being postponed. Of course, all that depends on SCOTUS having actually read and being loyal to the actual text of the Constitution, rather than just making things up to suit them as they go along. 🙁
Robert,
The fact that CNN and the rest of the media are calling it a close race is a bit disengenuous, given that the ‘closeness’ is actually going to be in the total vote. Almost every legitimate poll currently has an easy victory for Obama in the electoral college, which would take the ‘excitement’ out of the event, and all networks that plan to get your attention for the evening tomorrow don’t want you to think it’s a done deal. Eyeballs count. So, they play up the race (a tactic they’ve all been doing for some time) when the election process has been over for awhile. The fact that Obama succeeded when the October-Come-November Surprise hit (it actually happend this time around, wow!), only increased the lead he had. The idea that he lost votes this past week is ludicrous.
Is it possible that Romney will win. Sure. Nate Silver over at the New York Times has the possibility at 12-14 percent and that is up a fraction of a percent today, after a week of fractionally losing ground. It’s the equivalent of hitting runner-runner in an all-in poker hand (have to keep the non-sequitar sport thing going … IF you think poker is a sport. Me? I’m a Bridge player). What would be the political equivalent? Bad weather in the key states would help the Republican cause because excuses NOT to vote are historically good for them and bad for the Democrats. Would it bring New Jersey into surprise play? Probably not, but a rainstorm or even snow elsewhere, might upset the pollsters mightily.
But I do think you are safe to skip the politics and watch some tennis on ESPN 340 or whatever. I’m sure somebody on the web will report the results the next day 😉
Oh, I fully expect O’Bozo to win tomorrow in the EC, along with some shenanigans with the popular vote in various places. So we’ll have four more years of this person and his retinue, and he will accelerate the program of dismantling what remains of the republic and ensuring the continuation of the present regime. But the house of cards and the system and the coming chain of events are all bigger than him and a lot of chickens are gonna come home to roost between now and 2016 here and in Europe.
The dismantling has been going on under both parties for the last fifty years.
Longer than that. It’s been happening faster since circa 1947 but the big push came in 1861 under The Great Eradicator.
I’m still getting tingles. Maybe it’s a UTI.
David Gergen hit it on the head yesterday on Face the Nation. And basically, he said what nearly everyone here has been saying, but more succinctly: whoever wins will have no mandate. That insures that he cannot accomplish what he wants, and that will make everyone in the US unhappier and more divided. It is a lose-lose regardless of the outsome. Except for the Libertarians, who—with my help—I expect to see continue to advance in numbers.
I’m a big fan of auto racing. The enemies of my enemies are my friends, so I support BIG OIL and all its users!
Lincoln had to get rid of slavery, it was just wrong and the time had come.
I was recently looking a Thomas Jefferson’s bio on Wikipedia. If this is to be beleieved (and I have no reason to doubt it), then Thomas Jefferson owned five slaves that were fathered by his wife’s father. After his wife died, Thomas Jefferson fathered six children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Sally Hamings was half sister to his wife!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#Jefferson-Hemings_controversy
Slavery was and is evil. Period.
Sigh. ^”Sally Hamings was half sister to his wife!”^”Sally Hemings was half sister to his wife!”
Well, of course slavery is evil. But that doesn’t make Lincoln any less evil. He didn’t care about slavery anyway, not really. Note that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Confederate states, i.e., the ones not under his control. Slaves in Union states remained slaves.
No, Lincoln’s only real priority was to “preserve the Union”, despite the fact that he had no Constitutional basis for doing so. The Constitution did not define the United States as Hotel California. Any state was and is free to leave the US any time it decides to do so.
As to the revisionist history about Tom Jefferson, it’s a load of crap. He loved Sally, and she loved him. He no more considered her his property than I consider Barbara mine. She would have been free to leave any time she wanted to, as were their children, but she didn’t want to. Where would she have gone? So the revisionist historians have turned what was really a life-long love affair into a matter of raping a slave.
Bob belongs to Colin, but Bob’s not a slave, just a beta.
Agreed with Bob again, on both Lincoln and Jefferson but I have a harsher opinion of Lincoln’s motives and character. Jefferson got kind of weird and out of character as he got older and he made some bad mistakes, but Sally was not one of them. I thought the actor playing him in the HBO series on the Adams’s did a great job; a genius who was leagues above his fellow founders but who strained as best he could to function with them on their level and try to make the whole endeavor work. I would guess that Franklin was closest to him in intellectual capacity, one of my ancestors, but not bragging; he’s probably the ancestor of hundreds of thousands by now, same as the Mayflower descendants.
And my fellow ‘conservatives’ are applying the pressure on me to vote for Mittens, our last possible best hope for a possible one-percent chance at maybe dreaming about possibly making one or two insignificant changes that won’t last. Or I am told to vote for the libertarian hippie governor dude and over the next thousand years or so, maybe enough libertarians will exist to elect a village dogcatcher out in Podunk.
I am sorely tempted to write in Alfred E. Newman (what, me worry?) or Otto Skorzeny.
Um, in the 1860s, Barbara would have been essentially considered your property. Different times, different norms.
As usual, I left off my point, weak as it was. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings children were slaves even though they were 75% white, 25% black (assuming that Thomas Jefferson was 100% white and that his father in law was 100% white). They were slaves only because they were born to a slave mother. If the father had been black and the mother white, they would have been born free. That is just wrong.
BTW, Jefferson freed most of his children when they reached age 18. The rest were freed at his death along with their half-white aunts and uncles. I suspect that Jefferson loved Sally and their children very much. It would have been nice if he left a document stating such but his actions were very loud.
I applaud Lincoln for having the courage to make that point and force it. I am disappointed that he initially made it for the South only.
Um, there is no State exit strategy lined out in the US Constitution. Therefore, any State that leaves is just asking for it from the rest of the States, up to and including a war of retention. I live in the State most likely to currently leave, Texas, and there are people here actively talking about it. I have been amazed that several of my friends think that we could just leave without repercussions.
Leaving is a power reserved to the States. The Constitution doesn’t explicitly grant the federal government the right to keep a State in the union if it wishes to leave.
As to the black/white mother/father, eh? At the time, a child born to a free woman would be a slave if the father was a slave. More important from her point of view, she would almost certainly have been hanged for miscegenation. Her only defense would have been that the slave had raped her, in which case they’d hang him instead, but the child would still be a slave, the property of the deceased father’s owner.
“I am sorely tempted to write in Alfred E. Newman (what, me worry?) or Otto Skorzeny.”
An equal option with not voting, as a spoiled ballet is also a vote for the incumbent.
I have seen change from left to right in my own country, though we are still far to the left of the leftmost US politician. BUT, we’ve begun the process of firing thousands of bureaucrats. They’ve already scrapped the Long Gun Registry, an entire bureaucracy in it’s own right, and best of all, the party wanting to do all of this stuff is GROWING. Slowly, to be sure, but still growing. It’s gone from being a back bench party, to a lame duck minority government, to a strong majority.
And all done with votes. Huh, who knew people had such power?
Sure there is.
The Constitution doesn’t explicitly give the federal government the authority to keep the states prisoner, ergo the federal government does not have that authority. It would seem to have the power, but that’s a very different thing, and gets us back to my previous statements that we live in a tyranny, not a constitutional republic.
Blast. Day late, dollar short again. In my defense, I was keeping food from burning, which I suppose takes precedence over making a point before RBT.
Dear Texas,
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. (and could y’all please ask all of your former citizens now living out here in California to come home)
((I’m not pretending California is any where near popular))
“And all done with votes. Huh, who knew people had such power?”
Things are a little different down here, as I think you know full well. There are 320 million of us and way radically more diverse in races, ethnicities, religions, etc. With a very long tradition of radical independence from, and disdain for, authority, and a similarly long tradition of violence. Let me assure you that such as myself, or SteveF or a couple of others here are as Caspar Milquetoast or young lambs pure as the driven snow compared with many people out there these days who would do whatever they wanted to anybody they wanted given the opportunity, totally amoral and indifferent; they are Legion, sir.
Voting, election charades, and other foolishness left over from decades ago when it might still have meant something, at least locally, mean zip now here, but I wish our Canadian neighbors all the success in the world in divesting themselves from the parasitic leftist leeches that have fastened upon them.
About the alleged uselessness of sports…
Australian Rules Football and Women’s Beach Volleyball will *always* be worth watching, even if many players of the former are primadonnas.
As to Obama vs Romney, the left is just running a scare campaign. Obama is really in front but he wants to increase his margin and being lots of lunatic left liberal Dems in with him, so he’s running a scare campaign to make sure his people vote.
Hi California, why are so many of your citizens moving here? I have to really be careful in my SUV to keep from running over all the little BMWs with California license plates zipping through traffic. Can we take Louisiana and a few others with us? Maybe even Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast?
I think that you would miss us as Texas is now producing about 2 million barrels of oil per day which is quickly refined into pure sweet gasoline. And it is climbing rapidly as some of the industry wildcatters are predicting 7 million barrels of oil per day by 2020. And we have so many new natural gas wells that half of them are shutin to keep the price from dropping to zero.
BTW, the US Marine Corp is 1/4 Texan according to my son. He thinks that it is 1/4 Californian also. The rest of the USA really needs to start jumping up. Can we keep the 4,000 Abrams tanks stored at Fort Hood even though there are no other Cavalry units in the USA anymore?
BTW, my son was called up last Saturday for 4 hours (and paid $207) from his inactive reserve status. He got a lecture that he needs to answer his phone and letters, 3 hours of powerpoint slides and a man to man talk with a Marine Corps General telling him he needed to join the active reserves for the next 10 to 20 years. Seems that they are really short on O341s that can hit anything. Of course, an 81 mm mortar does not have to be on top of the target, just close. Only 6 more months of inactive reserves for him and he is out forever! He knows that they would ship him to Afghanistan in a heartbeat if he went active reserve.
“Seems that they are really short on O341s…”
O341s?
I think Lincoln should just have let the Southern nutcases go. That way only one or two Deep South states would have left, not the peripherals, and the former would have come crawling back within a few years.
Oh sure, I know that on paper, any State can get hussy and leave at any time. However, the sitting President will immediately set fire to his copy of Constitution and go after them with guns blazing. That “all powers not specifically mentioned here are reserved for the States” went out the door a century ago. The Feddies have got all kinds of powers not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
I had a friend of mine lose her job in a pharmacy a couple of weeks ago and she could not tell me why. Now I know why. They announced that the DEA raided 50 pharmacies and pain management doctors in Houston over the last couple of months and shut these “dangerous” hydrocodone pill mills down. Since when did the Feddies get the right to get between a person and their doctor? Legit, not legit, I do not care. It is not the Feddies business what drugs I take.
“I do not care. It is not the Feddies business what drugs I take.”
Agreed. I think most of the people here, Southern Hemisphere ones excepted, are snorting or injecting some interesting stuff… 🙂
An O341 is a Marine Corps Mortar Gunner. He is the guy who aligns the tube and drops the mortar in the barrel. He only wears hearing protection in one ear so he can hear ranging commands from the platoon sergeant. My son has 60% hearing loss in his right ear from the over pressure event that occurs when the mortar clears the barrel.
Here is a video of my son’s platoon in the Mojave desert (California):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKndW86etjQ
Those are illumination rounds (81 mm) with four propellant packs.
BTW, when they went for their weekly company 5 mile jog, my son carried the barrel (30 pounds). Another guy carried the tripod and another guy carried the base (60 pounds). The other guys carried 3 mortars each.
There is nothing to “fix” in the economy. The number of political ads running on radio and TV around here is numbing. Republicans are all about how the economy has gone awry, and somehow they are going to pull levers and do something to suddenly restore the prosperity we had in 2007 before the housing bubble burst.
It ain’t gonna happen. There are no such levers.
Long ago, while I was still in Berlin, I pointed to Dean Baker, who noted that between the housing bubble bursting and the banking collapse that triggered, through defaults on questionable “subprime” mortgages hidden in a food processor mixture of “derivative” investments that also collapsed. When it was all over, the world had lost $3 trillion in asset wealth, both private and corporate due to US bungling. Baker said at the time that it set the US back to 1992.
A few weeks ago, I quoted some numbers (not from Baker) showing the US economy is pretty much parallel with 1997. We are now 5 years from 2007 and 1997 is 5 years from 1992.
So actually, the economy is going pretty well. It has crawled back at the same rate it took us to grow 2 decades ago. Only 10 more years to get back to 2007.
Lacking capital, there is NO WAY the economy can do better than it is doing. Lynn reports it is a seller’s market again in real estate in Texas. Even Tiny Town housing has firmed up in price. Unemployment is no longer climbing to the stratosphere. There is no way to create that lost capital out of thin air by some Presidential magic. You and I have to let our investments and assets grow in value again to reclaim the 60% that we all lost (national average) between 2007 and 2009. We cannot go out and sell drugs to make it up.
So what is a vote for Romney? It is strictly a vote for keeping his rich-boy taxes lower than us middle-class peons. There is positively nothing he can do differently than Nobama to change things faster than Nobama is. There is no magic Romney can bring to lower unemployment faster, or to grow the economy faster. You cannot ship product faster than you can make it. And you cannot sell it to consumers at a rate that outstrips the growth in their income to buy things. Romney’s ads talk about a past that is over. The worst ended sometime in 2010, and I have commented optimistically about the economy for a couple years now.
I’m voting straight Libertarian tomorrow. I am not throwing away my vote. If you vote for either Nobama or Romney, you are the ones throwing away your vote, because neither of them represents any change at all to the real cause of our problems—which is halting and reversing the growth of government agencies and putting a stop to playing empire. Don’t blame me 4 years from now when the moans will be as loud as they are now, because I will not have voted for either of the bastards. Hopefully, you won’t either.
Rollerball — professional (commercial) sport carries to their logical conclusion.
To be fair, we are just as diverse as you are. We have much the same mixture of ethnic backgrounds and religons. Hell, we’re so diverse that we have two official languages (and too many as well!)
What we don’t do is kill each other with the same enthusiasm that you do. The Canadian murder rate is a third the US. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand this. I grew up watching American television, listening to American radio and reading American authors. Like the people I grew up with, I knew all about “pleading the fifth” but I didn’t really understand how our legal system worked, all I knew was what I saw on television and it wasn’t Canadian. In Ontario, Canadian history wasn’t taught until grade 13. Up to then, it was English, European and American history. The point is that I grew up awash in American influences, but we still sang “God Save the King” (and then God Save the Queen) every morning in school.
A simplistic reason, frequently given, for our lower murder rate is the absence of hand guns. I’m not convinced that that makes a big difference. It certainly reduces then number of accidental shootings but would appear that when we do want to kill each other, we manage quite nicely with knives and rifles. There are a lot of rifles in Canada. On a per capita basis we may have more than you do. We just aren’t as enthusiastic about murder I guess. I don’t know why but I’m good with it. Most other crime rates are about the same.
What we don’t have is the poisonous race relations that you have. With the exception of a very small minority, all the blacks in Canada came here by choice. This may be a significant factor. Occasionally you will hear a moron of colour talking of racism and minority rights. Nobody forced them to come here and nobody is forcing them to stay and if they get too noisy, I can always remind them. Interestingly, the most dangerous city in Canada, with the highest murder rate is Regina, Saskatchewan. This seems to be the result of native gangs.
In spite of what Bill says, on the whole Canadians aren’t really to left of Americans. In fact, it seems that it almost impossible to move Canadians very far from the center in either direction. The Conservative Party (previously the “Progressive Conservatives”) lurched to the right. They were able to form a minority government only because the Liberal party self destructed. They have finally achieved a majority but the also have drifted almost to the centre to the point that their policy and programs are almost identical to the Liberals of ’90s. The US has federal welfare programs that provinces would never allow here. If nothing else, Quebec has kept the federal government from stepping on provincial rights.
The two countries are different but it isn’t exactly clear, at least to me, why they are different. Good luck!
Three more Canadian artists, two you probably know and one that you might not. There’s Leonard Cohen (“prince of bummers”, I love his poetry) and of Joni Michell of whom almost nothing needs to be said. The third is Hugh Dillon. He is probably best know now for his role in “Flashpoint” but he was in a punk/metal group call “The Headstones” but recently (2009) released a solo album. He also appeared in the very interesting “Durham County”.
Rolf wrote:
“…but we still sang “God Save the King” (and then God Save the Queen) every morning in school.”
Geez, who’s an old codger then?
I think it has more to do with demographics and population distribution than anything. As a middle-class resident of the suburbs, my chances of being murdered are probably actually lower than someone demographically similar to me in Canada or the UK. What boosts our overall murder rate is the high murder rate in inner cities, which is mostly black-on-black, or perhaps I should say poor black/hispanic-on-poor black/hispanic. Middle- and upper-class people–white, black, or hispanic–seldom murder anyone and are seldom murdered.
“Geez, who’s an old codger then?”
I confess — I’m old, I’m even older than Trinity (the bomb test). I staggered up to 68 last month. I intend to stagger on.
“I think it has more to do with demographics and population distribution than anything.”
This is certainly part of it. I live in downtown (uptown downtown actually) Toronto. I have lived in the suburbs, a small town (it was small then) and in the city. I am very much a big-city-boy. There is actually more crime in the suburbs than there is in the downtown core. But then there are more immigrants in the suburbs. There was a marked increase in (hand)gun crimes that started in the ’70s. This was a result of Asian gang activity and continues. Most of the shootings do seem to be gang related and for the most part, the gangs are black or Asian. A never reported fact is that almost all home invasions here are Asian gangs targeting Asian families. A quick check shows that there have been 45 homicides in Toronto this year. Of these, 29 were shootings. Not bad in a city of two and a half million. But yes, if you live in mostly middle class neighbourhood either in the States or here, your chances of being murdered are virtually zero.
Hi Chuck, the problem with you theory is my theory, that all the federal, state and local regulations have a stranglehold on doing anything. If you want to build a house on a overgrown weed choked piece of land, the first thing you gotta do is check for wetlands and get the Army Corps of Engineers to give you a permit to clear the land. The next thing you gotta do is get an environmental permit from the EPA. The next thing you gotta do is … Lord forbid you’ve gotta an old building on your property, that might be a historical building and require a destruction permit from the historical society. All of these regulators floating around are killing us.
I agree regulations are a problem, but they are not keeping the economy from performing, growing, and even in Tiny Town, people are in better shape now than when I returned almost 3 years ago. The economy IS moving forward and has been for several years now. It is not going to return to 2007 for a long time, though. But regulations are not strangling it. Every year is proving to be better than the last.