This is hilarious.

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.

Pictures and everything at the BBC.

I know most other people who read this couldn’t care less about the Phillies, so I’ll try not to belabor anything here, but I just think they ought to ring the liberty bell in honor of the victory. What’s the worst that can happen – it’s already cracked.

HELL YEAH!

The NY Times’ Ethicist had a very interesting query from last year which I stumbled upon today. It’s an interesting question so I’m curious to see what other people say.

A doctor revealed to a patient that she was pregnant and the patient burst into tears. Her husband had had a vasectomy; her pregnancy was a result of a brief affair; she would not consider abortion. She begged the doctor to keep her secret for the sake of her children and marriage. Later, the doctor is unexpectedly confronted by her husband.

Now pretend you’re the doctor – what do you do? Think quickly because the husband is standing right there and this is no time for a long awkward pause.

If you want to see what the doctor did do, and what the ethicist responded, you can read the whole article.

Andrew Gelman (who has significantly more PhDs than I do), has done the math so I don’t have to. The odds that my vote, in Washington DC, will matter in the presidential election are less than 1 in 100 billion.

Some of these signs I saw last night, some I made up myself.

Size does matter!

I drove up to Philly with Aliza on Saturday night (Rebecca had to work). I got in late Saturday night and watched the end of game 3 with my dad on TV. The Phils made it more dramatic than they had to, but in the world series a win is a win. Sunday we watched the Eagles and Falcons on TV, and my grandparents came over to see Aliza. Honestly it was hard to focus on the Eagles beating up a second rate team with the WS game only a few hours away. I also found the time to make a quick trip to Rosenberg’s to buy a case of wine. (It’s so nice to be able to shop at a place with good selection and low alcohol tax again). We headed downtown for the game around 5:30, picked up our tickets, and made it to our seats in time for me to wander around taking pictures. One thing I did not see any of was Rays fans. I have gone to hundreds of sporting events in my life, and no matter what the event and what the city there are always a small (yet often vocal) contingent of fans of the visiting team present. This was the only exception to that rule. I walked around half the stadium, on the inside, scouted the stands, and checked the parking lots. Not a single Rays fan was to be found anywhere. I guess when the team has only been around for a decade or so and most of the “fans” have only called themselves that since August, there ins’t much time to build up a fan base that then travels to other cities.

The game was awesome. I screamed myself hoarse, drank some water to recover, and did it again. I even gave myself a headache from screaming. The only disappointing thing was that the crowd was a lot more subdued than I thought they’d be. This is the worls series – we should be at maximum intensity the whole time! Just because it’s between innings is no excuse for not making noise. Also the new open style stadiums are much quieter than the old cereal bowl style stadiums like the vet. Too much open space doesn’t reflect the sound as well. I took a lot of pictures which will all have to make their way to my flickr stream later.

The game ended after midnight, we didn’t get home till 1, and I didn’t get to sleep till 2. I then had to wake up at 5:30 to drive back down to DC. Aliza  of course had a diaper malfunction overnight so I had to change her clothes before I left. I was making great time until I got close to Baltimore – there was an accident on I-95 that backed up traffic for miles. By the time I cleared it I was hitting rush hour traffic, and then there was another accident on the DC beltway. I finally go to work around 10:30, having slept only 3 hours the night before and having already spent 4 hours in a car. Between the emotional rush of last night, the lack of sleep, and doing all the driving, I don’t think tired can even begin to describe how I feel today. Much like Obama, I transcend tired. I am in a post-exhaustion state. Somehow I have managed to avoid falling asleep with s steady regimen of eating junk food and drinking caffeine.

The only negative for me is that the Phils sloppy hitting in game 2 means that they didn’t clinch last night.  Since they didn’t I’m going to be in DC when they clinch tonight, and won’t be able to go to the massive party on broad street. There are some Phillies bars in DC but I don’t know if I’ll be awake enough to still be out at midnight.

I traded my 401K for tickets to game 4 of the world series. Look for me on TV, I’ll be the one in the Phillies hat.

PS – no, I didn’t really trade in my 401K, it’s not worth enough to get world series tickets for anymore.

Bad News:

I’ve complained before about the national debt before, but out current “fiscally conservative” Republican leadership has brought us to new levels of debt making my previous rants based on obsolete data. I would just like to correct that by pointing out that our debt has now crossed $10,000,000,000,000.00 (1×10¹³) and the debt clock is having a rollover issue.

Good News:

The TED spread is down below 2.5% and the commercial paper rates are also falling back to reasonable rates. You may now all exhale. (At least until the next round of bank earnings reports).

Shame on you Obama…. shame.

In 2004 Bin Laden released a taped message calling for the usual impossible wars against everything that is good about the world. It apparently had an effect on an election in which many ideologues attacked their opponents as being “the candidate of choice for terrorists”. While Bin-Laden is not on the radar this year, he can always reassert himself. If I were him I would release a video supporting one of the US presidential candidates – it doesn’t even matter which one because as many people will switch their votes away from that candidate will also switch to that candidate assuming they’re being lied to. It would simply be for the purpose of causing chaos, commotion, hysteria, and making the American people a little more nervous.

Also, a week after the election, I would “leak” a video where I congratulated my underlings on their operation as we managed to get “our” candidate elected president of the great satan. Again, it doesn’t matter who wins, but it scares the heck out of the American people if they think that the terrorists are happy with the result.

This makes a lot more sense than a $700 billion bailout with $150 billion of pork attached to it, but let me start at the beginning.

Commercial paper is the term for low interest short term business loans (usually provided by financial institutions), that businesses need for day to day operations. By their very nature they’re considered to be very safe loans, so the rates are usually around 2%, and they are often bought by people looking for safe investments, like money market funds. When Lehman went bankrupt anyone who owned Lehman assets probably had to write them off (meaning they had to assume those assets had lost a lot of value). One of the money market funds that was forced to do this ended up writing down enough assets that it “broke the buck” – it lost investor’s money. This sent the market into a panic, and for a brief period of time, the commercial paper market ground to a halt. As commercial paper is necesarry for many business to function, this has disastrous effects on our economy. (As the politicians like to say, this is now where wall street is affecting main street). Currently commercial paper rates have quadrupled to around 8%, and most investors (like money market funds), are very wary of investing or holding onto longer term loans. (For the record, commercial paper is usually considered to be a loan of less than 1 year, and some countries have legislated that).

The initial proposal of buying 700 billion in bad assets from beleaguered banks was intended to have the effect of allowing the banks to unload their worthless assets (onto the taxpayers) so that they would all start trusting each other again. (Right now no one wants to trust anyone and therefore won’t lend out money). This would have had the ultimate effect of allowing lending to happen again, including the commercial paper market. However, it also would also have created an even larger federal bureaucracy, had taxpayers assuming all the risk, and had taxpayers subsidizing outlandish salaries by banking executives who have bankrupted their companies. (What’s with capping their salaries at 500K? If you want the taxpayers to save your incompetent rear you should have your income capped at the federal minimum wage – isn’t that supposedly enough to live on?)

The current treasury plan would be much more targeted – it would be directly helping the commercial paper market only. (Although indirectly everything affects everything of course). It wouldn’t be throwing hundreds of billions at large financial companies that made stupid decisions, and it would be helping main street directly rather than only helping them indirectly as a function of helping wall street. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). The large financial companies got themselves into this mess, and they should reap what they sow. They understand risk (or at least they should), and if they handled it incorrectly that’s their problem. In a capitalist economy bad ideas must fail. It will create a vacuum which other entities (perhaps new entities) can fill which ultimately drives innovation and creates a more robust financial system. If we can find a way to keep the rest of the economy afloat while they sink, so much the better.