City of dude's shoulders

I ride the train to Los Angeles once a week now. It's a good deal in a number of ways. It costs $17 round trip in pre-tax dollars. It's less stressful and less wasteful than driving, and safer.

The train goes backstage in Southern California. The path goes through infrastructure, industry, and poverty. Huge warehouses stretch blocks in each direction. Hundreds of trucks fill acres of parking lots. Freight trains take a solid minute to go by at blurry speeds, dragging steel girders and tanks of plastic granules and stacked bulldozers and mysterious bumpy tarped plinths.

In one yard a crane holds up a locomotive while workers wrench on it from below. In another, a gigantic wooden beam three feet on a side stretches to the horizon. Huge junkyards hold crushed cubes of metal.

People live right up against the tracks and keep their style. One tiny house shows off a backyard entirely full of cactus. A pudgy Mexican dad floats in his pool as we roar by. Gang members argue next to an old Monte Carlo with a flat.

If you drive the freeway you see a million Dennys and gas stations and malls and orderly little suburban box homes.

Ride the rails and you'll remember: Los Angeles isn't tinseltown, it's the biggest port on the West Coast and a Chicago's worth of trains and trucks and warehouses and factories spewing steel and oil and toxic tanks and aircraft parts all over the world.

So this one's for Commerce, California. Keep the hard hats on and pay your union dues, L.A. The people on the train see you, anyway.

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-29-2008

• Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith
  
  
  Palin's Churches and the Third Wave. The most unpleasant of the unpleasant dominionist ideas in the unpleasant pentecostal wing of unpleasantly stupid American christianity.
  
  
  (tags: via:kellyramsey religion pentecostal fundamentalism evangelical powerreligion charismatic dominionist)
  
  
• PETER HITCHENS: How China has created a new slave empire in Africa | Mail Online
  
  
  What's Mandarin for "King Leopold of Belgium"?
  
  
  (tags: slavery race politics news africa china colonialism congo imperialism)
  
  
• How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
  
  
  how many more complicated ways are there to say "it was a bubble again like always"?
  
  
  (tags: finance commerce failure villainy software quants)
  
  
• Midnight Muncheez - Bringin Our Store To Your Door
  
  
  Everything stoners need, delivered 8 pm to 3 am
  
  
  (tags: newportbeach local delivery food stoners 420 snacks commerce orangecounty california)
  
  
• Light Switch Complicator on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  
  
  The Society for the Presentation of Inefficient Mechanical Devices Presents The Totally Unnecessary Overly Redundant & Mechanically Superfluous Light Switch Complicator
  
  
  (tags: flickr ha toys art)
  
  
• Code: Flickr Developer Blog " Flickr Engineers Do It Offline
  
  
  queueing as used by flickr
  
  
  (tags: via:deusx flickr queuing queues web programming webdev scaling scalability)
  
  

Halloween Dreams

Halloween Dreams, originally uploaded by grickily.

Yeah, I know I keep posting Dan's stuff, but his art makes me feel happy inside.

RESEARCHERS FIND LARGEST YET SUBPRIME NUMBER

RESEARCHERS FIND LARGEST YET SUBPRIME NUMBER

WASHINGTON, DC (AP) — Economists working at the United States Department of Treasury and top Wall Street banks announced the historic discovery of a very large subprime number, the biggest yet seen.

The group, working in secrecy for years and using banks and real estate holdings worldwide as a laboratory, found the gigantic number some time in the last year and is only now releasing the information to the public.

"This is a win-win," said Gary Leukotomakis, the Treasury's Chief New Economist. "We've shown that subprime numbers far beyond anything previously imagined are now possible, and even likely." Subprime numbers, which may seem esoteric to the typical American, are used in complicated financial transactions such as derivatives, credit swaps, REITs, "Jumbo loans," nonconforming loans, and spectacular, heart-stopping international financial crises.

Thad Labbé, a senior economician at Goldman Sachs, credited new financial technologies for the breakthrough. "We had always theorized about the power of a regulatory vacuum, but when we were able to produce one in the field everything took a quantum leap," he enthused. "Everything else we needed — weightless real estate, risk-free quantum risk, low-viscosity greed-through liquidity, and unpoppable Hyper-Bubbles — all of that stemmed from this revolutionary new postregulatory paradigm."

"In layman's terms," said Labbé, "it was like free money. But forever, because it's government science."

Tiara Hampton, a professor of Freedom Science at the Guthy-Renker Institute for Postscientific Study, agrees. "This proves what we've been saying all along, what naysayers have pooh-poohed. There actually is no hard limit to a subprime number, and the actual risk to researchers is nil." "In fact," she remarked, "risk in this quantum environment is entirely reversed, so that it's not possible to suffer consequences from so-called financial risk unless you're unrelated to the experiment completely."

Sources close to the team estimated the subprime number as nearly 700 billion, but cautioned that this number was not exact. "You have to understand," said one source with first-hand knowledge, "that the actual number will be the product of rectal extraction for some time. The important thing is that it's big, and bigger by a big number than the last big number."

Spokesmen for the research group said they did not yet know what would produce the next large subprime number, but that they were confident it would be discovered in much the same way.

The research group, which until now had been working behind a veil of secrecy, was funded by the Freedom Science Foundation, the Goldman-Sachs/Treasury Revolving Door Society, and subscribers like you.

(tip o'the hat to mcbrennan for the inspiration)