Paulahmartin

Writes Meg in New Jersey: “We just buried my Mom today. After Mass and luncheon we came home and unpacked cards from the funeral home. This is from my brother’s office.” Can you tell who didn’t bother to read the card before signing it?

related: My condolences on your birthday

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Super Mario kid and dog costume: Bowser and Chain Chomp! This is hilarious.

via[Pinterest]

Minnesota may spend more money performing the drug tests and implementing the program than it saves by denying benefits to drug users:

A new state law designed to prevent drug users from receiving welfare benefits could end up costing taxpayers far more than it saves, while inadvertently denying assistance to poor families simply because they are unable to comply with its complex paperwork.

Like a recent wave of drug-testing laws passed in other states, Minnesota’s legislation was touted as a way to encourage greater responsibility among welfare recipients while saving taxpayers money.

But many county officials and advocacy groups say the reality is quite different: The law contains a bevy of costly local mandates and complicated rules that apply to just a tiny fraction of the 167,000 Minnesotans receiving welfare and other cash benefits.

Critics also say the policy is based on the false perception that large numbers of welfare recipients are using illegal drugs. A new analysis by the state Department of Human Services (DHS) found that participants in Minnesota’s welfare program for low-income families are actually far less likely to have felony drug convictions than the adult population as a whole...

In 2013 alone, at least 30 states proposed bills related to drug screening and testing, with some even extending it to federal benefits such as unemployment insurance, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C...

Just 0.4 percent of participants in the Minnesota Family Investment Program, the state’s main cash welfare program, have felony drug convictions, DHS records show. That compares with 1.2 percent of the state’s adult population as a whole.

“I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that this is about saving taxpayers money,” said Heidi Welsch, director of family support and assistance for Olmsted County. “This is punitive.”

With all the hustle and bustle at this time of year, it's important to remember the real reason for the Christmas season:

Wait. That doesn't seem right...

 

Erm...

 

To be fair, if you sound that out you get "Juices."

So there's that.

 

Now I'm getting confused.

 

Chusl, I don't even know anymore.

 

Thanks to Barbara P., Stacy N., Nicole K., Amanda D., & Amy A. for having the presents of mind to take these pictures.

Lawsuit claims station execs targeted him because of age.

via[Pinterest]

Haven’t you always wanted to buy a bunch of different brands of batteries, test them side by side in the same appliance, and see which one lasts the longest? No? Well, let’s pretend that you have. Everyone uses batteries at some point, and our fully-charged colleagues over at Consumer Reports tested some for all of our benefit.

The winners? Big brand names. Among lithium batteries, Energizer took the top prize. Alkaline batteries are much cheaper, but don’t last as long. The best performance came from a Duracell battery, and the best buy for your money a 48-pack of Kirkland brand batteries at Costco. This presumes that you use a lot of batteries, but between digital cameras and every other gadget in your home, 48 batteries may not last that long.

Which battery is right for you? It depends on what kind of device you want to power. For a relatively low-power device like a flashlight or a toothbrush, the best choice is probably an alkaline battery. If you’re shopping for batteries for a power-slorping device like a digital camera or a handheld gaming device, lithium batteries might be a better choice.

AA batteries that shine [Consumer Reports]

Prickly party animal.
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HILLSBORO • A Jefferson County jury on Wednesday convicted Todd Meine, 47, of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the April 2009 shooting death of Matthew Crumly, 34, outside Club…

by Mike Dang

When Rohr was training as a banker, “before we got out of the training class, they put me with a mortgage person and we went out for a mortgage foreclosure,” Rohr recalled near the beginning of his speech on Monday.

“We went to see a police officer, he called a couple of guys and we went over to a house. He knocked on the fellow’s door [and when] he answered the door, [the officer] grabbed him by the shirt, pulled him out of the house and said, ‘If you ever go back in there again, I’m going to throw you in jail for the rest of your life.” He sent two guys in there – they took everything out of the house and put it on the curb. He locked the door… and said, “The house is now yours.” And then he turned to the fellow sitting on the stoop and he said, “I’m coming back at 4 o’clock with a can of gasoline. If any of that stuff is on the curb, I’m going to light it on fire.”

“That was what foreclosure was,” Rohr concluded, to scattered chuckles. “It took about 15 minutes, or maybe a half hour, and then we were in possession of the house. Today it takes… two years to foreclose on a home.”

Our pal Maria Aspan reports that James Rohr, the executive chairman and former chief executive of PNC, decided to tell the anecdote above during a speech to risk-management executives about “improving banks’ reputations.” Many of the regulatory reforms that have extended the foreclosure process were put into place after the financial crisis to protect struggling homeowners.

Rohr later explained through a PNC spokesperson that his anecdote was “about a time before regulatory reforms when things were done differently, and not better, and this is one example of how risk management as a practice has changed through the years….. He is on the record as supportive of positive regulatory reforms for the mortgage industry.”

Well, then.

Photo: The Fixer

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by Mike Dang

In Hawaii, Tom Brower, a Democratic state representative, is walking around with a sledgehammer and disabling shopping carts used by the homeless. He says he does it because “it’s threatening to steal things,” referring to the homeless taking shopping carts to use as storage for their personal possessions, and yet Brower does not see the irony of how threatening it is to walk around with a sledgehammer to smash carts. And it’s not just the carts—Brower appears to have disdain for the homeless, one of the most vulnerable segments of our society who often suffer from mental health issues.

“If someone is sleeping at night on the bus stop, I don’t do anything, but if they are sleeping during the day, I’ll walk up and say, ‘Get your ass moving,’” he told the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

Instead of spending so much time walking around smashing things, Brower should use his time to talk to the homeless (see here, here, and here), and figure out ways to help. As we learned yesterday, even the most fortunate people can end up sleeping on the streets.

[via ThinkProgress]

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"I actually wasn't trying to create a fight here," Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg told Republican strategist Karl Rove at the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday.

"Yeah, yeah, you weren't trying to create a fight," Rove retorted.

The subject at hand was the rightward shift of the GOP. Greenberg traced the party's transformation back to the 2004 presidential race.

"The role of evangelicals in the church, and the role of the Tea Party, are very much part of a strategy that Karl helped drive," Greenberg said. "That dynamic has carried through, and I think he's now living with the dynamic that he created."

 

 

Made by Dallas-based crafter Clarissa, who made the pattern available on her blog.

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Image cropped and lightened from the original, via Bad Newspaper.

Via [Etsy] $14

by Mike Dang

Just as [the] State [Department] warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the U.S. France, in particular, warns travelers to be careful in a large number of specific cities.

The Washington Post has a list of 16 cities in the U.S. that France warns their citizens about, with reasons or advice to stay vigilant. The advice is generally to keep an eye out on your pocketbooks when in high-tourist areas like Times Square in New York, but it’s also about avoiding areas like Harlem in NYC, Anacostia in Washington D.C., the West Side of Chicago, and Inglewood in Los Angeles (see a trend here?).

The Wash Post story failed to note that the warning to French tourists on the site says that French people shouldn’t use credit cards in the U.S. because of credit card fraud, and that “police violence driven by racial considerations are sometimes reported.” [Thanks to Jon C. for the pointer.]

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Via [imgur]

The New York Knicks got crushed by the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, but just because the game wasn’t very entertaining doesn’t mean there was nothing going on in the stands. Sitting courtside were Nelly, Justin Bartha (National Treasure), and Larry David, the craziest east coast recreation of those times the Entourage guys were jockeying for Lakers tickets. The photo getting tossed around the Internet liberally is the one above, with David giving his best Curb Your Enthusiasm reaction to the events, from the crossed arms, to the frowning expression, to those socks. But For The Win dug up the other Getty photos from the night, of Larry smiling easily, and at least enduring the company of others in his courtside seat. It just goes to show that when the Knicks are playing terribly, the real story is the celebrities watching the game.

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ST. LOUIS • The St. Louis Archdiocese and Catholic Charities sued the federal government Thursday in federal court here, claiming that the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act viol…

by Mike Dang

$JPM VC Jimmy Lee is taking over @JPMorgan on 11/14 at 1pm ET. Tweet Qs using #AskJPM & learn more about him here: http://t.co/eTDT8pJeq8

— J.P. Morgan (@jpmorgan) November 13, 2013

JPMorgan canceled a Twitter Q+A session with vice chairman and veteran investment banker Jimmy Lee yesterday after they realized that people could be mean on the internet.

I have Mortgage Fraud, Market Manipulation, Credit Card Abuse, Libor Rigging and Predatory Lending AM I DIVERSIFIED? #AskJPM

— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) November 13, 2013

Are you involved in a massive corruption scandal in China? #AskJPM http://t.co/iUKLVZNagr

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 14, 2013

How can we harmonize Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical with the Rousseauian social contract? #AskJPM

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 13, 2013

Do you like puppies? If you had a puppy, what would you name him? #AskJPM

— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) November 13, 2013

#AskJPM why did u think this would be a good idea

— alex pareene (@pareene) November 13, 2013

Tomorrow's Q&A is cancelled. Bad Idea. Back to the drawing board.

— J.P. Morgan (@jpmorgan) November 14, 2013

 

It would have been pretty incredible if JPMorgan decided to answer the questions anyway, though Matt Levine’s puppy question seems like it’d be quite difficult to answer.

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This Halloween has seen the usual glut of topical pop-culture costumes—the best Miley/Robin Thicke combination definitely goes to Alex Morgan and Sydney Leroux from the U.S. Women's soccer team. But one man had the ingenuity to engineer a costume that both makes a clever pop culture reference and has an extremely practical use at a bar: recreating the final title card from Cheers with a suit, a bowler hat, a glass of beer, and well-designed way to get the creators' names in frame. We sometimes get easy costumes in the mail, but this guy had an inspired idea. Here's the actual title card from the show for comparison:

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Daylight Saving Time is the greatest continuing fraud ever perpetuated on American people. And this weekend, the effects of this cruel monster will rear its ugly head again. On Sunday morning, Americans across the country will have to set their clocks back one hour, and next week, the sun will begin its ambling lurch to eventually settling at 4:30 in the afternoon. 

Technically-speaking, this sleep cycle-wrecking practice of setting our clocks back is because we will be going back to Standard Time after our flirty summer with DST. And the unsettling shift back to these hours, and the hour "we gain" is the back-end of the time-bargain we have to pay for setting our clocks forward in March to "maximize daylight" — a phrase probably better suited to organisms that rely on photosynthesis — during the spring and summer hours.

Why we try and "maximize daylight" like we're plants is actually an archaic practice first thought up in the late 1700s and often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. As some elementary school teacher may have explained to you, this was a practice to accommodate agricultural workers and farmers (wrong, and we'll get to this in a minute) or lower the nation's electricity usage.  

A lot of that is prime b.s. There is actually no benefit or rhyme or reason we have to endure this weekend's time shift and no reason we should even be playing with the idea of losing and gaining hours. Here's why:

The Energy Savings Are Minimal 

A large push for DST has always been the idea that this time warp saved money and helped conserve energy. In the 1970s the energy crisis helped further this notion along. This is all a myth — the energy saving are tiny. First off, did you notice any change in your energy bills between 2006-2008? I know that recalling electricity bills is asking a lot, but the reason I ask is that we actually extended DST by a month in 2007. The thought was that a month of DST would bring more savings. 

That was wrong. The great energy-sucking state of California actually studied the impact of that extension and found it wanting. "Formally, weather- and lighting-corrected savings from DST were estimated at 0.18%," reported the California Energy Commission. 

There was also another study on the state of Indiana, a state that went full DST in 2006. A team from Yale studied what happened post-DST, and found that the average Indianan was hit in the wallet by DST. National Geographic reported:

In their 2008 National Bureau of Economic Research study, the team found that lighting demand dropped, but the warmer hour of extra daylight tacked onto each evening led to more air-conditioning use, which canceled out the gains from reduced lighting and then some: Hoosiers paid higher electric bills than before DST, the study showed. 

DST Is Bad For Your Health

SAD, a.k.a. seasonal affective disorder, is when people get bummed out when the seasons shift. Sunlight plays a role into that, and you'd think that DST would be something everyone would be looking forward to. Wrong. In order to get more daylight during the day, DST short-changes the early-morning sun hours. Those hours are important for those affected by SAD. And it's also very important for your sleep patterns. 

"Daylight savings time is anti-physiologic, and it’s a little deleterious, at least for several days,"  Dr. Nicholas Rummo, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Northern Westchester Hospital told Health.com, and added, "light earlier in the day is more helpful for them." 

Research has also shown that DST, and shifts and the rupturing of sleep patterns is also linked to myocardial infarctions (a.k.a. heart-attacks), car accidents, and medical equipment malfunctions. 

Time Shifts Are Bad For Your Productivity 

American exceptionalism is a phrase we've heard a lot recently, and it's usually prefixed by words like "dwindling" or "losing faith in...". If we want to continue this path, then we might as well have DST and shifting time patterns every few months. The weird shift in time messes with our sleep patterns and our bodies, and our work. 

"We're encountering data of an increase in extra auto and workplace accidents on Monday or perhaps even carrying through the first week of the Spring time shift," Dr. James Wyatt, at Rush University Medical Center told ABC News in 2012. National Geographic spoke with Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist, and he explained why: 

Light doesn't do the same things to the body in the morning and the evening. More light in the morning would advance the body clock, and that would be good. But more light in the evening would even further delay the body clock.

DST Is Not Financially Responsible

Think about what you could do with $147 million. That's how much the Air Transport Association estimated the 2007, one-month shift cost the airline industry because time schedules with the world (a lot of which does not believe in DST) were messed up. 

DST Is Not Helping Any Farmers

Oh right, we almost forgot about farmers. I remember my second grade teacher told skinny, frail, 7-year-old me, "We do this [time shift] for the farmers." I didn't know any farmers, but I remember feeling noble and helpful. I did not know I was being lied to. 

"That's the complete inverse of what's true," Tufts University professor Michael Downing, told National Geographic. "The farmers were the only organized lobby against daylight saving in the history of the country." The reason, Downing explains, is that DST left them with less sunlight to get crops to market.

DST affects dairy farmers the most, since cows' bodies and the milk they're tasked with producing are affected by the time changes.

You Don't Even Like DST

"God, I love getting up an hour earlier," said no one ever. "Me too. I can't wait to have my schedule messed up in the fall," no one replied.

 A 2011 Rasmussen poll (for what it's worth, Rasmussen can be a bit skewed when it comes to conservative politicians but seems to have no known bias against time zones) found that 47 percent (ha, Romney, ha) of Americans said DST was not worth the hassle. 

So how do we fix all of this? Over at Quartz, there's an idea to just have two timezones. But let's be clear here. The real evil here is change. No one really minds if 4:00 is 4:00. They (and their possible heart attacks) mind if for some reason or another that 4:00 is now 5:00 and will be 3:00 in a few months. And it's time to stop this insanity.