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September 19, 2011 03:42 PM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 59 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.”

–Albert Einstein  

Comments

59 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread

  1. In keeping with the tradition of initial open posts having nothing to do with Colorado politics, here’s Netflix CEO Reed Hastings describing how the company plans to split its DVD and streaming queues in what looks like a move to sell one or both parts of the company. It begins as a faux corporate “apology” for how the pricing split between the two services was handled recently.

    Read the comments, only a few stooges seem to be happy with this because all the advantages of having a single queue will be lost.

    It’s about innovation, or jobs, or how mind-numbing high tech speak passes for meaningful discussion, or something.

    1. Meanwhile over at PERA, Walker Stapleton has had to sue them (yes he’s a board member but still can’t get the basic fiduciary data points he looking to analyze).

      Apparently PERA hired a Pennsylvania based private attorney to deal with this ‘rogue’ board member. He’s advised PERA to reject the members request because the requested data isn’t a function of his role as a board member.

      Apparently board member Stapleton provided a copy of the lawsuit to The Paper That Shall Not Be Named, leaving COPOLs in the dark!

      Additionally Greg Smith, another Lawyer providing PERAs board council says he’s unaware of the entire situation.

    2. How about a premium ColoradoPols service?  I’d gladly pay a monthly subscription fee for a soapbox upgrade that would allow me to, say, block my viewing of posts from certain selected posters . . .

      Isn’t it about time, Alva?

      1. Then I forget how stupid they are.

        I’m thankful for the ability to read Libby, MarkG, BJ, ArapGOP, and others.

        It keeps the talking points fresh in my mind.

        And reminds me why I’ll never want to be them.

  2. For Congress.

    http://www.politico.com/news/s


    Since 2006, lawmakers on the Hill have tripled their income from private-sector jobs and companies they own, a new analysis of financial disclosure statements says.

    In 2006, 75 members of Congress took in at least $7.8 million of outside income from private sector jobs and companies. In 2010, outside earnings had skyrocketed to $27.5 million by 68 lawmakers, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

    1. Let’s see here.

      Kids exercise less, parents exercise less, there’s less money to pay for physical education in schools, technology has made gaming and watching TV more interesting than the outdoors, parents rely on technology to babysit their kids, corn syrup pervades most children’s’ diets everyday in every way, many children don’t get nutritious breakfasts before they go to school in the morning, toy companies and candy companies have recognized the value of joint marketing, Hollywood recognizes this too, and school administrations can and do allow for healthier lunches even if the federal government doesn’t weigh in with their wisdom.

      But it is the French fries that cause the kids to get fat and Senator Udall’s position on protecting farmers is to blame for fat kids.

      Fucking brilliant, as usual.

        1. You could deep fry most anything and it would lead to obesity. Add some salt and you double down on hypertension.

          I don’t really think that starch is the culprit (as many others have pointed out). Potatoes don’t kill people, deep friers do.

    2. mainly about Udall’s objections, showed a child with a plate including a huge cinnamon roll. Pretty sure it has more empty calories than a potato and the biggest problem seems to be french fries. Seems to me that before limiting potatoes to one cup serving per week, maybe they should worry about pastries the size of a child’s face and consider that potatoes, a great source of potassium  while huge pastries are a great source of nothing we need, don’t have to be served in fatty french fry form.

      You know what else might get kids to be a little less picky?  Besides being served a wide a variety of healthy foods from the time they are introduced to solid food at home (works like a charm.  Kids aren’t born knowing they only like wonder bread, fries and cheese pizza).  Let them have an outdoor play recess midmorning. They’ll be starving and a little more flexible by lunch time.   Most of us boomer kids were.    

      Of course we didn’t get nothing but fast food faves at home either. Fast food was in its infancy as anything more than a once in a blue moon thing for most.  We ate plenty of meat and potatoes, though, ran our butts off, did most of our elementary school work in school with little homework, few supervised after school activities, lots of after school outdoor play and lots of sleep time.  Few were even a little overweight.  Skinny kids were common as dirt even though home dinners, snacks and school lunches bore little resemblance to weight watchers meals.

      The only healthy lifestyle for growing kids is tons of physical activity requiring plenty of fuel. That’s what’s changed and no amount of demonizing particular foods is going to fix the damage. There is no diet that will keep kids healthy and fit while they sit all day, not just in school but afterwards, in front of computers and video games and doing hours of home work, keeping them sedentary for hours longer than grown ups with 40 hour a week office jobs. None. Period. Not gonna happen.

      1. there is absolutely nothing wrong with Wonder Bread. Yummy, nutritios and ohh so fun to roll into little balls.

        Ever heard “best thing since sliced bread”? – that saying is speaking about Wonder Bread.

          1. was a small part of my overall comment and I am against demonizing particular foods though I’m for eating more healthy foods and indulging in the ones that are more problematic in moderation. My Ukrainian born grandmas told us that wonder bread was pretty much the same thing as library paste, actually rolled it into those little balls to demonstrate along with dispensing dire warnings concerning constipation, what with all that library paste sitting like a stone in your stomach. Yummy? If you say so.

            The main thing is, as long as growing kids are even more sedentary than office workers, we’ll see a decline of life expectancy stats due to increases in all kinds of chronic disease and conditions.  On the bright side(?) that could offset some of the cost of treating those chronic diseases and conditions.  People will die sooner, costing less in social security.

            Just like we’re not on Mars and won’t be running around in Jetson style hovercraft any time soon, we won’t be defeating old age and living almost forever either, no matter what the articles in science magazines are telling us about this or that new line of research and discovery. Our descendents are probably going to be fat, plagued by heart disease and diabetes with brittle bones.  Sure, there will be drugs to keep our lifestyle choice diseases in check but they’ll all have unfortunate side effects except for the saving on social security stuff.  

            1. That’s ok. I won’t hold it against you.

              Completely agree, though – our country is getting fatter while the drug and tech companies will continue to benefit through ‘amazing’ new dicoveries that allow us to become even lazier.

                1. letsee … rolls of plastic, duct tape, and a loaf or two of Wonderbread.  I think even the Beckster was hawking it in his mail order End-o-Times buffet kit.

                   

                  1. Wonder Bread and as much gold as you can hoard!

                    Or was it some gold and as much Wonder Bread as you can hoard?

                    Hmmm, to be safe, hoard both! And wrap it in duct tape. Inside plastic. To be eaten later.

                    1. We all have our inexplicable eccentricities.  I allow myself a package of twinkies on my birthday and hope I’m older than they are.

      2. Our kids played competitive sports the whole way through school. But their diets weren’t great (not awful either). And when they hit college that diet had an impact. Improving school lunches is an important part of making kids healthier. It’s not a magic bullet, but it matters.

        It’s also a sad indictment of our system in Washington that the choice is the farmers over the kids because “it’s a small part of the solution” and you can point to other issues that have a larger impact. Yes it is small, but the solution lies in implementing a boatload of small solutions. And if they’re all shot down because some group with political power is harmed, then we never fix things.

        1. lifestyle of constantly running around playing outside except for those gifted few who go on to become dedicated athletes.  It just doesn’t.

          Once again those of us who were little kids back in the day ate all kinds of meat and potatoes and cookies and rice crispy treats  and other kinds of “bad” foods but were almost never fat.  There was no such thing as children with type 2 diabetes. That’s why it was called “old age onset” as opposed to juvenile (type 1) in those days.

          We weren’t in programs where we went to an hour of practice, some of which was waiting around for our turn.  We just ran around through recesses and after school we dumped the books and hit the door to play outside.  All weekend we played outside, not in structured little lesson learning troops but full out doing whatever came to mind.

          You can offer kids all the carrot sticks you want and forbid all the enemy foods you want but it will have a very slight effect in the absence of wholesale rejection of the unhealthy lifestyle today’s kids are living. We just weren’t designed to sit around most the time and those who start living mainly sedentary lifestyles as young children will have shorter less healthy life spans than their  parents and grandparents, especially factoring out those who died young due to now treatable or preventable infectious diseases bringing down the average then. Use it or lose it.

          1. or rode a bike. Now all kids have to be driven around in giant SUVs or their parents are endangering them. To me that seems like a bigger deal.

            The reason for all the team sports is, I think, twofold. First, you have the fear of kids being abducted (which is ridiculously overblown out of proportion to its actual likelihood). Second, you have the colleges who decided some time in the early 90s that they didn’t want kids who got the best grades, but rather kids that were “well-rounded.” Which meant all play and activities had to be structured so you could put them on your resume.

              1. Oh wait, I didn’t like it at all. Sarcasm!

                I don’t know why your kids do anything they do, especially since you didn’t say anything to contradict what I said.

                I think kids today participate much more in structured activities than they used to, like after-school soccer that their parents drive them to rather than just screwing around playing in a park somewhere, or music lessons through school rather than just getting an instrument and figuring it out at home.

                It’s just a theory of mine, and it’s probably easy to contradict, but your dumbass comment fails to do that. Maybe you could construct an anecdote or provide your own motivations for what you or your kids do. It wouldn’t necessarily prove me wrong, but it might start a conversation.

                Or do what you do! It’s really insightful and thought-provoking! </sarcasm>

                1. and the proof is in the pudding.  I was in elementary school and junior high end of the fifties to mid 60s.  We didn’t have the lifestyle health problems kids have today. We weren’t all on super strict diets. It was natural for kids to be a healthy weight, chubby ones being the exception and obese kids very rare.  It didn’t require any particular effort much less legislation and intervention.  That’s all I’m sayin’.

                  And your right.  Our means of transportation was on foot or bike.  We didn’t spend our days being driven around. We put on a lot of miles in a week. And statistically kids are no more likely to be kidnapped or harmed in any way by a stranger now then they were then.  Kids are still most likely to be harmed by close relatives, parents or a parent’s significant other.

                2. This is complete and utter bullshit:

                  Second, you have the colleges who decided some time in the early 90s that they didn’t want kids who got the best grades, but rather kids that were “well-rounded.” Which meant all play and activities had to be structured so you could put them on your resume.

                  My dumbass comment is just my reaction to your incredible cluelessness.

                  My kids play music at least in part because we make them. It’s a life skill that they learn almost effortlessly at their age, but gets really difficult later in life. The number of kids that will voluntarily sit and practice on their own is almost vanishingly small. It’s always been that way.

                  My kids play sports because they want to. From very early on it’s a social activity. And not just for kids. All those little kids playing soccer on Saturday morning have parents on the sidelines. Parents meet other parents through their kids. This is how communities are built and nourished. Kids are likely from the same school, thus there’s a feedback to school involvement.

                  So no, it’s not about stranger abduction, and no, it’s not about building a resume for college applications. I grew up in a leave-it-to-beaver world, too, but it’s just not that way anymore. So get a clue before you start ascribing motivations to others.

                   

      3. I disagree with the notion that too much homework is making our kids fatter. Our kids tend to have a lot less homework than in other countries, yet are more likely to be overweight. Japanese kids don’t do all their homework in their heads while playing kickball, you know.

        1. The long day they put in at school should be enough for most of it. Little kids shouldn’t have a longer work day than their parents.  I don’t know how it is today but when mine was in the 3rd grade he had lots of homework and spent lots of his school day doing things like going to self esteem assemblies.  Then they’d send home helpful notes about how much sleep is recommended for kids that age along with the homework that kept them up.

    3. Check out what was limited to once per week…

      Vitamin A: 22%

      Vitamin C: 97%

      Iron: 12%

      Calcium: 4%

      Green peas are good for you. Lumping all starches together as bad for you, including starches that are whole plant foods, just encourages the addition of more processed foods to kids’ school lunches. What are they going to replace peas and potatoes with? Organic beet greens? In a state that refuses to fund its education system? Not likely.

      If I had a kid and was that worried about him getting peas at school, I’d pack his lunch. But have we really gone so far down the kooky Atkins path that nobody remembers being told to eat their peas as a kid? Mom was right–they’re good for ya.

      1. as ammunition for your milk straw . . . and nothing, absolutley nothing, pissed off the girls more than having mushed peas stuck in their hair.

        Eat em’?  Never thought of that . . .

    1. It might not be too late.  Look how fast Obama’s bump from bumping off Bin Laden disappeared? In attention span years we have plenty of time for dozens of ups and downs between now and election 2012.  

      He also is proposing a minimum tax for millionaires and there is some hope that he and the Dem leadership, after years worth of polls they should have found reassuring, are finally on the verge of getting over their fear of Republicans yelling “class warfare” at them.  Now if they’d just start yelling “class warfare” back at the Republicans since Dems happen to have reality on their side on the whole who’s waging class warfare against whom thing.  

  3. And yet, COGA continues this lie in testimony today before Mr. Tipton’s latest dog and pny show.

    To the north lies the nation’s largest oil deposits contained in shale formations.

    http://smbiz.house.gov/Uploade

    Is this an intentional mistruth, or has COGA hired a staffer that is this unknowledgeable about his own industry?  

  4. Reminds me why I hate government by plebiscite.  

    I support sick leave for employees.  I offer it myself for mine and it is more generous, but this initiative is a turd.

    Why does it gum up the works with all this Domestic Violence stuff?  In addition to sick time, you have to give court time too.  Funny thing, the way it is written you have to give “sick time” to defendants as well.  

    That is ok for me, because I have always given sick time as personal time (I don’t need fake coughing), but I don’t think that is what is being sold.

    I don’t buy any of the doom and gloom being thrown around by chamber types.  I don’t think it will cost much at all.  The biggest knock (to my mind) floating around is that it prevents you from sanctioning an employee who is a no notice-no show for 3 days(not in text).  I was assured by a organizer for the initiative that employees have to give reasonable notice (not in text).

    After reading the actual text, neither is right, but because any sanction is presumed to be retaliatory in nature, I think the restaurant people’s reading of this is closer to accurate.

    I really hate the initiative process because these are concerns that are fixed in the legislative/council hearing process.

    I still don’t know how I am going to vote.

      1. being involved in the debate on 1397 down at the capitol.  Strange.

        And, according to my memory and according to the press,

        http://www.publicnewsservice.o

        the sponsor and the proponents all agreed to pull the bill because it wasn’t ready. The first committee agreed 11-0.

        WitnessProtectionforGeeks is absolutely correct, IMO. This proposal is one group’s attempt to convince people this is a good idea, when ALL the legislators who heard this idea in 2010 thought it a bad idea.

        This is what happens when it is too easy for a minority to impose something on everyone else without a serious vetting process.

        1. that they have been working under for 4 years. The entire state of CT passed this initiative as well, signed into law by Gov Dan Malloy. Seattle within in the last month, has passed the initiative by a city council vote.  

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