George Will thinks we need to stop extending unemployment benefits because it just subsidizes unemployment: clearly, those who have been unemployed for 99 weeks are choosing to live off their unemployment checks instead of filling all those empty jobs that are available. Alan Greenspan is warning us that the bond markets are going to put a halt to U.S. borrowing, and the fact that treasury yields have gone down lately is a sign that the problem is even more real than we think. No wonder Paul Krugman thinks that we could be on the precipice of a third Depression.

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• Current Mood: Cybered
• Currently Listening To: "Crosseyed and Painless", Talking Heads

Representative Tom Emmer, running for governor, has a lot of ideas about “redesigning government”. One of those ideas, apparently, is ending benefits for legislators. Emmer thinks that legislators and other elected officials should not get health insurance, pension contributions, or per diem payments. If Emmer wants a legislature that does not reflect Minnesota, then this is a great idea.

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• Current Mood: Friday

Hey, is this blog still on? It appears that I haven’t updated it in quite a while. The end of session got in the way, then the MSST program started and then we moved to a new place. During the move, I had yet another example of how important it is to back everything up on your computer.

I moved my computer over, plugged everything back in, and turned it on. Windows 7 refused to boot, halting at a blue screen. When I tried to boot into safe mode, I could see that the problem was with a file called CLASSPNP.SYS. I found this thread with a similar problem, but unfortunately replacing the file didn’t help. All the other searches I did turned up people with the same problem, and no solution. Eventually, I had to reinstall Windows to get it working.

Fortunately, though, I had backups of all of my data, and so I didn’t lose anything, most importantly the paper I was working on for class. It did take several hours to reinstall all of my programs and get everything looking right again, but I didn’t have to spend many more hours recreating documents. Remember: always back up your files, and back them up to more than one place!