Rumble Strips|You have been warned!

The government is out of control:

He built a fence, a retaining wall, a patio and a few concrete columns to decorate his driveway, and now Francisco Linares is going to jail for it.

Linares had been given six months to get final permits for the offending structures or remove them as part of a plea agreement reached in January, when he pleaded no contest to five misdemeanor counts of violating the Rolling Hills Estates building code.

It gets even better:

The 51-year-old bought the nearly 1-acre property in the 4600 block of Palos Verdes Drive North in 1998. After tearing down an adobe house on the site and building a 3,000-square-foot French-style home, he began landscaping.

When Linares asked the city to repair the white three-railed fence behind his house, he was told it was on his property and his responsibility. So he replaced the termite-infested planks. Then the city reversed itself and said Linares had illegally built the fence on city property.

What a bunch of sorry mo-fo’s. If this is how they treat someone who built a 3,000 sq foot house in their community imagine how they treat the peons. The house was probably too small or maybe bigger than the home owner’s association president’s house, or something.

This is so overdue it’s not even funny.

“We don’t care where and how you get your work done,” said Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM’s global health care and life sciences business. “We care that you get your work done.”

IBM says it saves $100 million a year in real estate costs because it doesn’t need the offices.

Of course most of the people who enjoy being free from the traditional corporate workplace don’t get to work at home either. When the jobs that are not mobile begin the inevitable transition away from the corporate monoliths of dense urban areas then we will see economic and social benefits that are several orders of magnitude beyond what IBM saves every year.

This is a Reuters article about French President Sarkozy’s first major foreign policy speech so I don’t know how accurate it is. I hope it is damn accurate

French president says diplomatic push by world’s powers to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program is only alternative to ‘Iranian bomb or bombing of Iran’

Bush should have said that as soon as he was reelected. Everyone with a lick of sense knows it, might as well say it. It’s pretty bad when the French make the administration look like a wus on the GWOT.

Then, further down in the article:

Sarkozy proposed setting up a “committee of wise men” to consider the future of Europe, including the Turkish question.

The “Turkish Question”? Again, this is Reuters so who knows what was really said in the bits around the little quoted snippit used in that sentence. Ok, everyone raise their hands if they want the future decided by a “committee of wise men”?

Anyone?

Does anyone remember the popular career guides from a couple of decades ago titled “What Color is Your Parachute?” How many of you out there have a golden parachute? Or any parachute at all?

At a family occasion many years ago–Thanksgiving probably–a cousin unwisely opened the cabinets over the stove while looking for a serving dish of some type.

“Oh, this is where y’all keep the dead cockroaches,” she deadpans.

“No,” I reply, “that is just where the old cockroaches go to die.”

Not a single cockroach had a parachute. Not one.

* * * *

Cruise on over to TheGarage to read my comments on Mark Cuban’s comments re: the Internet and for the latest on my quest for high speed Internet

I got the cable company coming over sometime before noon today, hopefully first thing, to put in some high speed cable internet. No TV, just internet. It’s going to cost me just under $50 and probably a bit more once the bills actually start to come in which is the same as SWBATTCingular’s DSL price.

I’ve had SWBATTCingular’s DSL since back when it was just SWB and high speed cable wasn’t even on the horizon. When they hooked it up I was damn glad to have it. I’m just almost outside the distance limit which is supposedly about 15,000 feet from the CO. But today there are more options.

I talk about the cable guy coming over at my tech blog which isn’t really a tech blog yet because I haven’t been blogging in it. I copied the articles from certain categories here in EI over to TheGarageBlog but haven’t added anything new, until now that is.

So hop on over to TheGarageBlog and read my first article.

Okay I finally got this thing set up right. I had my entire account really hosed for about twenty-four hours. Not a single site that I have moved to the hosted environment would work from the browser. Something about an internal server error, or something.

I made some DNS changes and the regular URL, www.enormousincongruities.com, will now work just like nothing ever happened. It took me a little while and I had to sleep on it to finally figure out how to correct the mess I made but it’s all sorted out now.

I guess we can blame this fiasco on Bill Clinton for putting all those new cops on the streets.

“There were warehouses full of it. Now, that isn’t the case,” said Al Aden, police chief in Pierre, S.D.

Departments in all parts of the country reported delays or reductions in training and, in at least one case, a proposal to use paint-ball guns in firing drills as a way to conserve real ammo.

Seems like one of the big arguments against the “more cops” bill Clinton passed, which included the silly midnight basketball, was that the cost to pay for all those new cops beyond the initial years would be prohibitive. Dang, I guess the opposition were right and it wasn’t actually a vast right-wing conspiracy out to discredit the Clintons after all.

A solution of course is to disarm a significant portion of the police force. But we can’t do that because most of the people who want to be a cop wouldn’t be interested if they didn’t get to wear a gun with their shiny badges.

UPDATE:  Surprise, surprise! The media is a liar. “According to two spokesmen for the world’s largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military’s ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war.”  (link)

There is plenty of water, but Las Vegas is getting in a bind:

The news coming from the Southern Nevada Water Authority Thursday about the valley’s future water supply is worrisome. Unless we act quickly, there will be no water for hundreds of thousands of Las Vegas Valley residents in just three years.

And what if they don’t act at all? How many thousands of residents will go without water? You want to know how many, I’ll tell you how many–none, that’s how many. We got plenty of water over here in Southeast Texas and we will be glad to sell you all out there in Las Vegas all you can afford to store. Using the municipal water rates I would estimate several hundred thousand bucks worth of water falls at my house and runs off into a ditch and into the ocean every year. Same for my neighbors.

Though I am sure there are periodic shortages of water out in the middle of the freakin’ desert, in the case of this story it turns out that inept bureaucracy is the culprit and suddenly they need some money to keep the water flowing.

SNWA data shows drought conditions getting worse, not better forcing the general manager of the water authority to ask the board to spend more than $45 million to upgrade water pumps at Lake Mead.

How can such an emergency situation be reached where “hundreds of thousands” of people, American citizens no less, will be without water in less than three years? Where has the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money contributed to the local and state governments gone to?

I suppose there are some rickety-assed bridges in Nevada as well. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, $45 million isn’t a lot of money, especially when it comes such a basic necessity as water. So how come these pump upgrades were not put in over the course of the last five years?

I guess it doesn’t matter, some people will still have to leave Las Vegas if the government is left in charge:

Even if all of the water projects are finished and everything starts working on time, the Southern Nevada Water Authority still predicts a shortage.

That means by 2010, the valley will be short 64-million gallons of water a day.

The free market would solve all the water problems in the desert if the government would just get out of the way.

UPDATE: U.S. Foreclosures Rise Sharply in July — Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate: one filing for every 199 households, or more than three times the national average. It reported 5,116 filings during the month, an increase of 8 percent from June. (link)

I watched a documentary on one of the edu-channels the other night about the siege upon the Branch Davidians at Waco. A gruesome tragedy by any measure.

I think it would be appropriate for someone to ask a front-running presidential candidate who was the former co-president of the United States during the Waco tragedy what she thinks of the final outcome. Was the situation handled appropriately? Did we need to go in with para-military force? Did Hillary Clinton play any role in the decision to gas and burn of all those innocent women and children?

What did Hillary know about Waco and when did she know it? I guess we now know why her White House records are sealed until after the election.

So here it is. This is the new home of enormous incongruities. It’s a fixer upper for sure. I think I can move the archive over here and leave the internal links as is so they point back to the archive which can live back in the garage. Moving the posts would be for the sole purpose of Google bait. Heh.

I still have to point the DNS from the garage to this hosted account but after that the old www.enormousincongruities.com link will still work.