Denver mandates urban blight and eyesore vacant lots

Recycling is good, I like recycling. HOWEVER, when you charge people extra to get rid of stuff, it invariably backfires. What happens IN REALITY is that the unwanted stuff get chucked in to the nearest vacant lot, pond, or WalMart parking lot in the dead of the night.

My uncle lives in a town that charges $5 for every tire someone wants to get rid of. As a result, the ditches along the roads are littered with tires and he has to clean a half dozen of them out of his pond every spring.

Albany NY tried a similar scheme with disposal of appliances - they wanted to charge people to get rid of a fridge, stove,etc. What happened IN REALITY was every vacant lot in the city became a dumping ground for dead appliances. Amazingly, Albany eventually realized the folly of this approach and now offers free dead appliance pickup as part of normal garbage collection. The vacant lots and back alleys of Albany are no longer dead appliance graveyards.

"do gooders" ignoring basic human nature seem inclined to repeat this failed policy time and time again. None seem to learn a thing from places that tried it.

In related news - Japan's Mount Fuji has become a massive garbage dumping ground for exactly the reasons I've outlined.

Rocky Mountain News

[...]Recycling plays a crucial role in Denver's plan. It would join other Colorado cities that already have moved to aggressively to foster recycling.

Fort Collins, for one, has set an ambitious goal of diverting 50 percent of its waste from landfills. As part of the effort, the city recently banned throwing away old computers, TVs, cell phones and other electrical items, requiring that they be recycled instead.

Fort Collins also has mandated that people who leave extra bags of trash for pickup be charged by the bag. [...]

Ten million gallons of toxic gunk

This is a very long piece, but worth a read. It makes you wonder what's lurking underneath where you live. It also brings up issues of how far back notions of "legal liability" should be allowed to go. Much of the gunk apparently dates back to the 1800's.

Is it reasonable to hold descendant companies, several times removed, and a century+ distant from the original offenders liable? Taken in the extreme, could say the city of Albany NY sue the Netherlands for shoddy sewer construction on State St that happened 350 years ago? (Albany very recently had some sewer lines still in operation that were built hundreds of years ago by the Dutch). As the detritus of progress grows more dangerous and toxic, this is a legal issue that will need addressing.

At what point does punishing people/companies, who had no direct complicity what so ever in some incident, become excessive and patently unfair?

Society loves to identify scapegoats for everything and "make them pay", but what about when the responsible parties have been dead for 100+ years and nobody really knows who they were anyway? Something to think about.

New York Magazine

[...]a thin dribble that betrays the presence of a supertanker’s worth of the stuff submerged in the age-old geology of Greenpoint. It’s actually more than a century’s worth of spills, leaks, and waste dumped by oil companies that has pooled into a vast underground lake, more than 55 acres wide and up to 25 feet thick. First discovered by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1978, the Greenpoint spill has been estimated at anywhere between 17 million and 30 million gallons—three times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spill. That makes it the largest known oil spill in American history[...]

Iran tries to buy weapons grade uranium from Brit company

Given that this is the Guardian reporting it, and it had to PAIN THEM GREATLY to write a story casting a negative light on Iran, one must conclude that its probably quite accurate.

The Guardian

[...]During the 20-month investigation, which also involved MI5 and Customs and Excise, a group of Britons was tracked as they obtained weapons-grade uranium from the black market in Russia. Investigators believe it was intended for export to Sudan and on to Iran[...]

Time magazine reporter spied for north Vietnam

40 years later, not much has changed. The MSM are still treasonous.

OC Register

A black wall in Washington, D.C., bears the names of more than 50,000 Americans killed in Vietnam. Many owe their fate to Pham Xuan An, the communist spy who masqueraded as a reporter for Time magazine.

That cover gave him access to classified information. This he passed to the communist forces, enabling them to win key battles. That is why, in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Pham Xuan An needs no introduction.

There he is subject of two officially sanctioned books and a 10-part documentary produced by Ho Chi Minh Television in 2005. When An died last September, Vietnam proclaimed two days of public tribute before a funeral with full military honors. [...]

eBay seller fined $400,000 for price manipulation

Its been a while since I did anything on eBay, but even a few years ago it was plain that some sellers were shill bidding and complaints were falling on deaf ears at eBay.

There's no real motivation for eBay to crack down on shill bidding -- it drives up their commission revenues.

Apparently pressure from the NY AG's office and the magnitude of this fraud was enough to finally get eBay's attention...it certainly wasn't complaints from ordinary users.

eBay is an evil company with the ethics of a $5 crack whore.

PC World

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A jewelry company on eBay Inc. that allegedly bid on its own auctions to illegally drive up prices by as much as 20 percent agreed to pay $400,000 in restitution and penalties, the New York state attorney general's office said on Saturday[...]

Much more info here at FireMeg.com

Science is one step closer to StarTrek teleportation

When they can teleport me into and out of a bank vault in the middle of the night, I'll be impressed ;->

NZ Herald

[...]A team of physicists have teleported data 143km from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space.

The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than the matter itself is sent from one place to another[...]

Studies Say Death Penalty Deters Crime

I don't suppose it would be too much to trot out the old "if it saves one life argument" eh?

Associated Press

[...]What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument - whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer[...]

Puppy sodomized. WTF?

Heh, I'm told this is a C.S. Lewis quote

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

NY supreme court shows uncommon common sense

Newsday

ALBANY, N.Y. -- New York has the right to deny driver's licenses to immigrants who can't prove they are in the country legally, the state's highest court ruled Thursday[...]

[...]"To state the obvious, undocumented aliens lack documents," wrote Judge Robert Smith in the 5-2 decision, "And the DMV's right to insist on such documents is undisputed." [...]

John Edwards revisionist history

John Edwards is a pathetic piece of shit.

07 JUN 07 John Edwards: "There was no group called al-Qaida in Iraq before this president's war in Iraq."

25 OCT 04 Wall Street Journal: "...The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House staffers. They said the camp, near the town of Khurmal, was known to contain Mr. Zarqawi and his supporters as well as al Qaeda fighters, all of whom had fled from Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits and making poisons for attacks against the West.

Senior Pentagon officials who were involved in planning the attack said that even by spring 2002 Mr. Zarqawi had been identified as a significant terrorist target, based in part on intelligence that the camp he earlier ran in Afghanistan had been attempting to make chemical weapons, and because he was known as the head of a group that was plotting, and training for, attacks against the West. He already was identified as the ringleader in several failed terrorist plots against Israeli and European targets. In addition, by late 2002, while the White House still was deliberating over attacking the camp, Mr. Zarqawi was known to have been behind the October 2002 assassination of a senior American diplomat in Amman, Jordan.

But the raid on Mr. Zarqawi didn't take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House, until word came down just weeks before the March 19, 2003, start of the Iraq war that Mr. Bush had rejected any strike on the camp until after an official outbreak of hostilities with Iraq. Ultimately, the camp was hit just after the invasion of Iraq began..."

Sick auction listings : flowers from Sharon Tate's grave

What can I say? These are sick, sick people.

Murderauction.com

Authentic flowers from the grave of Sharon Tate. Grave was being cleaned by staff asked permission to take as they were throwing them away.

Shoplifting -- You can do it. We can help™

I'm thinking this changes the whole financial equation when it comes to doing "home improvement".

KOKO

An internal memo from Home Depot outlines that associates cannot accuse, detain, chase or call the police on any customer for shoplifting. However, one of the fired employees said the company is selective in enforcing that policy.

"The loss-prevention guy at our Shields (Boulevard) store turned around and told me all we need to do is tell the shoplifter to have a good day as they leave the store.

H/T Digital Brownshirt

What childhood toy from the 80s are you?

What childhood toy from the 80s are you?

You're a Speak & Spell!! You nerd, you. Just because you were disguised as a toy doesn't mean you weren't educational, you sneaky bastard.
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Ordinary 9V battery supplied lethal jolt

This is the lowest voltage electrocution I've come across so far.

1999 Darwin Awards

A US Navy safety publication describes injuries incurred while doing don't's. One page described the fate of a sailor playing with a multimeter in an unauthorized manner. He was curious about the resistance level of the human body. He had a Simpson 260 multimeter, a small unit powered by a 9-volt battery. That may not seem powerful enough to be dangerous… but it can be deadly in the wrong hands.

The sailor took a probe in each hand to measure his bodily resistance from thumb to thumb. But the probes had sharp tips, and in his excitement he pressed his thumbs hard enough against the probes to break the skin. Once the salty conducting fluid known as blood was available, the current from the multimeter travelled right across the sailor's heart, disrupting the electrical regulation of his heartbeat. He died before he could record his Ohms.

The lesson? The Navy issues very few objects which are designed to be stuck into the human body.

Why are the Kiwis so interested in bomb making?

My first thought is that one might check the specific IP's making the requests to see if there are some stable high bandwidth open anonymous proxy servers in those locales that the hits are coming from. I'm sure terrorists and such are aware of anonymous proxy servers and the advantage of using them. If that is not the case, then WTF?

NZ Herald

Internet users in New Plymouth and Auckland are the keenest in the world to find recipes for making bombs, according to a leading counter-terrorism expert.

Nicholas O'Brien, a former Scotland Yard terrorism expert, told a security conference in Sydney yesterday that the popular internet search engine Google had recorded an extraordinary number of NZ-based searches for bomb-making techniques, the West Australian newspaper reported.

Professor O'Brien, from Charles Sturt University in NSW, said data provided by Google's online statistics web page, Google Trends, showed Auckland and New Plymouth recorded the highest volume of per capita hits for the search term "make bombs" of any cities in the world.

New Plymouth was ranked first, then Auckland, and then Perth. Brisbane was the fourth highest ranked city for that search term, followed by Auckland's North Shore, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax (Canada) and Salt Lake City (Utah).

Amnesty Intl honcho: David Hicks should get "reparations"

REPARATIONS. FOR. CONVICTED. TERRORISTS.

Spend a moment and get your head around that one. I guess we know pretty definitively who's side Amnesty International is on now.

The Australian

[...]IRENE Khan, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, was interviewed on ABC radio's AM program by Stephanie Kennedy last week[...]

[...]Khan floated the idea that the convicted terrorist supporter could be "entitled to reparations". Not even members of Australia's David Hicks fan club have raised the notion that he should be compensated, courtesy of the taxpayer[...]

Swiss "death tourism" being questioned

I can see where having an already dead client might make it difficult to do proper evaluations and/or counseling. Thorny matter that.

As a more practical matter, I simply don't see why people would chose this method of suicide to check out. If any life insurance policies exist, many have suicide exemptions on payouts. Wouldn't it be better to concoct an "accident" so the insurance will pay off?

Like maybe chugging a bottle of Jack and take a run at a bridge abutment at 100mph while not wearing a seatbelt. Seriously, that would have to be more thrilling in the last few seconds than any E-ticket ride at Disney.

Telegraph

Prosecutors are calling for tougher regulations on Switzerland's assisted suicide clinics after uncovering evidence that some of the foreign clients they help to die are simply depressed rather than suffering incurable pain.

The clinics, which attract hundreds of foreigners, including Britons, every year, have been accused of failing to carry out proper investigations into whether patients meet the requirements of Switzerland's right-to-die laws.

In some cases, foreign clients are being given drugs to commit suicide within hours of their arrival, which critics say leaves doctors and psychologists unable to conduct a detailed assessment or to provide appropriate counselling[...]

A gun "buy back" scheme that actually works

Not really a buy back per se, rather a scheme to get the bad guys to rat each other out for a grand a throw. Either way, its targeting the guns in the hands of bad guys rather than honest folks.

Brilliant.

Local 10

The Miami-Dade Police Department has made its first arrests in the agency's gun bounty program announced last week.

Police received a call from a tipster referencing the "One Gun, One Arrest, One Grand" campaign who informed them of two men on the streets "in possession of firearms illegally," Miami-Dade police Cmdr. Linda O'Brien said[...]

[...]were all found to be in possession of weapons. Police said there were ammunition, a bulletproof vest, illegal drugs, a safe, an antique gun and two cash register drawers inside the apartment.

The "One Gun, One Arrest, One Grand" campaign offers a $1,000 reward to anyone who calls in a tip that leads to illegal guns being taken off the streets. The program is open to any citizen, but it is being targeted to more than 300 people who are released from Miami-Dade County jails on any given day[...]

Its a joke right? Nope, its not. Measuring titties is patented.

Patent number 5,965,809 awarded October 12, 1999. I don't believe its happenstance this was awarded during the Clinton administration, not for a minute ;->

US Patent Office

This relates to a method of direct measurement to determine cup size of the breast which includes band size measurement by initially measuring the user's chest or torso circumference with a flexible tape measure immediately below the breasts followed by[...]Next, a measurement conversion is made wherein a measurement of seven inches corresponds to an "A" size cup, eight inches a "B" size cup, nine inches a "C" cup, etc. Each one inch increment determines a cup size[...]

James Gleick has graphic from the patent.