I have been visiting with a young lady, Micaela Vallejo, from Ecuador every two weeks for over three years for conversational practice using Spanish. She is a little north of 30. How far I do not remember. She is unmarried, a fact I find remarkable given all she has going for her, but she seems quite content with her status. Micaela lives in Coca, a small town of around 45,000 souls in the northeast corner of Ecuador, close to the border with Colombia. It is located in the Amazonian rain forest at the confluence of two large rivers and a smaller third. According to the web and Micaela Continue reading “Cultural Differences, the US Dollar, Ecuador”
Rev. Joe’s Random Thoughts # 3,020
…yeah I know you did not ask!
We are born, we live, we die, and then folks pick through our “stuff” buying it for pennies on the dollar.
Rick Perry’s Giant Sump Pump
I usually do not excerpt the whole article but this is too rich. Do you think we could get Reich, Krugman and Kristoff to run the government?
Robert Reich
Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, ‘Aftershock’
8/31/11
Of all the nonsense Texas Governor Rick Perry spews about states’ rights and the tenth amendment, his dumbest is the notion that states should go it alone. “We’ve got a great Union,” he said at a Tea Party rally in Austin in April 2009. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”
The core of his message isn’t outright secession, though. It’s that the locus of governmental action ought to be at the state rather than the federal level. “It is essential to our liberty,” he writes in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, “that we be allowed to live as we see fit through the democratic process at the local and state level.” Continue reading “Rick Perry’s Giant Sump Pump”
Dollars are essentially votes
Folks who know me realize that I like to get good value for my dollar. Some folks have called me cheap. I don’t think that is really the case. I just remember a concept I learned back in high school economics. Whenever you make a purchase, you are effectively casting a dollar vote for that product. More to the point you are voting on the pricing of that product. I just like to be careful with my voting.
I was in Walgreens to buy a bag ice. Yes it is a little high in there, but the combined cost of gas to the grocery store and Continue reading “Dollars are essentially votes”