Wednesday Micro Hits

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

1. I don't blame this father. I might even would do the same thing if I were in his position.

2. I'm not willing to give Comic Sans the benefit of the doubt, but I am a new fan of Bodoni MT. (Note: the article does not spell the name of the font properly).

3. Gas is well on it's way to $4 a gallon. For some states it is already there. But it's not just at the pump where you'll be hit. You'll get hit in the supermarket as well. Despite what some people think, food doesn't come from the grocery store. It's grown. On farms. By farmers. Doing such involves a lot of inputs, a good portion of which is fuel. Tractors, combines, irrigation machinery, and other farm equipment doesn't run on magic. Same for the trucks which haul the produce to the store where you pick it up. This all involves oil. So you can expect a hit at the supermarkets. To make matters worse, as more and more cropland is diverted to growing corn (for ethanol production), prices will also increase because there is less supply. Additionally, meats which use corn as feed (which is almost all of them) will also see an additional hike because the corn is going to be diverted to producing ethanol for fuel, not for feed. Strangely enough, this is why soda has also practically doubled in price lately (high fructose corn syrup). Which leads one to ask ... why is energy independence not a hotter, and more pressing, issue right now? Why would the GOP (and Tea Party) talk to us about saving money in the budget, but not do anything about helping the tax payers save money at home? Yah, this is a rhetorical question.

4. Hopefully this projection though will help ease some of the pain. Unless of course, you've invested in gold.

5. And while we're talking about fuel. Down with ethanol. Up with butanol.

6. Flying anytime soon?

7. An interesting take on education, and exactly who should be teachers. (h/t @DrKlapperich)

8. It's Ash Wednesday.

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Brian Krueger, PhD
Columbia University Medical Center

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Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 9:23 am CST

1. I don't either. How does someone like that not get life or the death penalty?

3. It's because they like the campaign investment and kickbacks from oil co's.

7. There should be an experiment to test this idea :P

Suzy

Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 10:51 am CST

I can't imagine that the man is going to be let back into the public even after time served. He is clearly insane.

However, the father of the boy hopefully will not carry out his plan. Do you think his son would want that? Would you want your father to go to jail for murder for you? No. I would not. It won't bring him peace of mind. And he would spend his last years on earth in a prison cell with other insane people.

For over 35 years the father has carried around the heavy weights of anger and hate. I would not want my dad to let my killer rule his life and thoughts. I would want my dad to think about how much he loved me instead of how much he hates someone else.

Easier said than done, I know.

Thomas Joseph

Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 12:22 pm CST

I hear what you're saying Jade, but I don't know if I would ever recover if a child of mine was murdered ... and then brutalized.

On one hand you have John Walsh, father of Adam Walsh, who channeled his grief into America's Most Wanted. The show has done innumerable good for society (IMO). Then you have the father mentioned in the article I link to on the other hand. It's a shame, but I can't fault him for wanting to see this disgusting POS taken out of life's rotation permanently.

And if I were on a jury, I'd probably buy/accept/understand a plea of insanity by emotional distress.

Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 12:56 pm CST

The problem is, as a juror, you won't be deciding his sentence. You'll only be deciding whether it was a premeditated murder (which it would clearly be). Murder in the first degree is punishable by death in some states.

As for an insanity defense, I don't know how it works, but he may have a hard time proving he was insane if he pre-meditated the murder. Especially announcing it in the local news.

You know, the brutalization thing- that happened after death (we assume). Once the person is gone, the body is nothing. It has as much life as the table. I think, as Catholics, we are taught to honor the body (like it comes back to life, or something), but really, the body is just a vessel. It decays like everything else.

I do not fault him for wanting to kill someone and feeling enraged. Who wouldn't? I think he would serve his son's memory far more meaningfully if he used the energy to make a positive change in the world for others vs. becoming a murderer.

An eye for an eye doesn't work. It just creates a never-ending cycle of revenge that gets played out over and over through generations. No one wins. No one learns anything.

JaySeeDub
Dub C Med School

Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 6:42 pm CST

1. "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. If I remember correctly, the law cannot concern itself with delivering justice, but must concern itself with preventing justice from becoming retribution and vengence. That instead the law must seek to divorce itself from emotion to prevent it from being abused by any one side. Doesn't help victims or their families, but I see what Justice Holmes was pointing at.

3. I already saw higher prices at the green market yesterday. Unfortunate, but it's not as drastic an increase as what I expect supermarket increases will be. I've never quite understood how supermarkets can mark up for fuel costs so much, when buying from a farmer who trucks his own stuff doesn't increase prices nearly as drastically. Unless those farmers are bilking the supermarkets (which I'm kind of for since the suppliers for supermarkets force farmers to bid to sell).

4. I've always said gold was a crappy investment. Yes it has rallied recently, but the rallying has been artificial. It's sustained by gold commodities and options traders/houses selling how "safe" an investment gold is. Kind of like a real estate agent telling people that real estate is an investment that can only rise. And we saw how that bubble went...

Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 8:10 am CST

Jay, in regards to #3. I would imagine that the costs for local would/should be cheaper, especially when compared to vegetables which are not usually grown locally. For example, the bulk of the nations brocolli comes from California. So the east coasters should see a sizeable increase in the cost of brocolli, mostly due to shipping. A recent HuffPo article places those shipping costs at $6000 a tractorload, which can result in $0.25/lb increase. And that's not the only vegetable coming from California to our supermarkets.

I try to support local whenever I can. It helps that I work right next door to a large farmers market, but one should really consider where they buy their produce from. I've noticed though that not a lot of people do that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/22/east-coast-broccoli-investment_n_826446.html

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