The Boom Was a Bust For Ordinary People

Barbara Ehrenreich has been studying working people for years now. So, it's not surprising that she knows best what most of us knew already: a "properous economy" does not equal a better life for you and me. And the plight of the poor is sucking wealth from people who thought they had nothing to worry about. Can you say "sub-prime mortgage"? In my own city, some $600,000 houses have gone vacant because their occupants took out loans that made no sense. The line below tees it all of:

"For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans."

See the rest here.

Disaster Capitalism & Disaster Populism

I just got a chance to make a quick read of Naomi Kline's excellent editorial from yesterday. More on this later. In the meantime, be on the lookout for people who will tell you that the best way to solve the sub-prime mortgage crisis is to privatize the air that we breathe.

I have died and been to coffee heaven!

Today, I had my first cup of coffee from a Clover machine. What is it? It's a machine designed to extract a single cup of coffee on demand. What is the difference? It's like a sculptor worked on the complex taste of coffee and removed everything that's even remotely unpleasant and left behind the essence of the coffee. I had a cup of Ethopian Limu. The taste was so rich I wanted to just close my eyes and savor it for the next hour. I've been drinking gourmet coffee since the 80's and I was an early convert to Starbucks. But I've never had anything like this. It was not only easier on the tongue, but easier on the stomach too. No gassy feeling after I finished the cup. I got mine at Dancing Goats in Decatur, GA. If you're in the area, go there! You can find them at the location below:


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You too will become a genuine coffe snob. :p
P.S. Forgot to mention that it does cost more and it is worth it.

What happened to Google Bookmarks?

I had several hundred bookmarks saved in my Google Bookmarks collection. They were easy to access in my Google Bookmarks sidebar on Firefox. Imagine my surprise today, when I fired up my browser and saw exactly two bookmarks. Well, not exactly two. There are still three bookmarks that represent articles I naively starred in Google Reader. There doesn't seem to be any way to ever make those go away. So, what do I do now? I started looking to see what my options are for getting help on this issue from Google. And there don't seem to be any. As you might guess, I am a person who has entrusted a lot of data to Google. This episode scares the hell out of me. If my stuff goes away, is there anybody I can even ask about it? You tell me. The idea of saving everything to my hard drive is starting to look good all over again.

Comments welcome...especially from Google insiders.

Update: My bookmarks reappeared the next day.