Ravenweb Blog

There's only one logical choice, of course .... Photo by Drew Friedman from the New Yorker.

If you're angling for a frightening read this Halloween, instead of picking from the Horror genre, let me recommend Bad Money by Kevin Phillips, a long and hard look at the realities of our economic plight. Phillips examines everything from our mounting public and private debt, the collapsing housing market, the link between oil and our economy, the rise in financial services as a portion of our GDP at the expense of manufacturing, and the hubris and failures in the financial sector. Though written in late 2007, the book might as well have been authored today, as Phillips clearly saw the consequences of the housing bubble on the overall economy. Phillips' predictions for the future are grim, and he argues that the likely end of American domination of world markets parallel the declines of previous leading world economic powers, notable especially the Dutch and British.

I've comes across two interesting websites that project the upcoming presidential election in very different ways: FiveThirtyEight.com - A monster polling tracker and aggregator, FiveThirtyEight.com accumulates and analyzes polling and political data and provides keen assessments of the likely outcomes of upcoming elections. Iowa Electronic Markets - The Iowa Electronic Markets are small-scale, real-money futures markets where contract payoffs depend on economic and political events such as elections. Perhaps the most popular IEM markets are the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election Markets, where contract payoffs will be determined by the popular vote cast in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

Updated on 2009-11-16: It's been over a year since I wrote this, and lot of people continue to find this page from Google, which leads me to believe that people are still having problems with their HP Photosmart C4380s. For the record, over a year later the workaround I detailed here is still working for me. If you have something to add that might help others, please feel free to add to the comments. The original post follows below. ##   So, we bought a wireless printer. After some initial back and forth, we settled on a wireless HP Photosmart C4380. I thought we did a fair bit of research before purchasing the product, but apparently not enough, as there were many issues and surprises that we discovered only after we setup the device. I'm posting this to relate the significant difficulties we encountered setting up the printer and post workarounds I've implemented for the benefits of others who might be considering this product or who may have already purchased it ...