Where Are My Keys?

Punch back, twice as hard..

Mayor Bloomberg has an informal lunch in a NYC pizza joint, tries to order a second slice, and is refused*:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was denied a second slice of pizza today at an Italian eatery in Brooklyn.

The owners of Collegno's Pizzeria say they refused to serve him more than one piece to protest Bloomberg's proposed soda ban,which would limit the portions of soda sold in the city.

Bloomberg was having an informal working lunch with city comptroller John Liu at the time and was enraged by the embarrassing prohibition. The owners would not relent, however, and the pair were forced to decamp to another restaurant to finish their meal.

Witnesses say the situation unfolded when as the two were looking over budget documents, they realized they needed more food than originally ordered.

"Hey, could I get another pepperoni over here?" Bloomberg asked owner Antonio Benito.

"I'm sorry sir," he replied, "we can't do that. You've reached your personal slice limit."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Of course, this is satire.  I do hope that this does embolden a restaurant in NYC to actually have the balls to step up and do this, the next time Bloomberg dines there.

City Workers finally having to contribute like the rest of Us..

Cities around the Country are waking up to financial reality, and *gasp* asking new hires to pay their portion of retirement expenses.  You know, like we do:

Pension costs have caused several recent high-profile municipal bankruptcies recently, so other cities are trying to avoid suffering similar disasters by asking employees to begin paying part of their pension costs.

In Sacramento, Calif., City Manager John Shirey said today he will hire 58 new police officers only if current officers agree to pay the employee share of their pension payments. The police union is one of few groups of employees in the city who don’t pay any of their own pension costs,  according to the Sacramento Bee.

Most public pension plans are set up with a set contribution for employers and employees, but employee unions often negotiate for employers to pay both the employer share and some or all of the employee share, which makes pension payments a large chunk of many cities’ budgets. Bankrupt Stockton, Calif., for instance, owes the California Public Employees Retirement System $900 million.

It's not just Sacramento seeing the light:

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake introduced a bill today that would require city employees to pay part of their share to address $681 million in unfunded pension liabilities, according to the Baltimore Sun. The bill would require employees to put 5 percent of their salaries into the pension fund by 2018. Rawlings-Blake’s office estimates it would save $53 million over nine years, according to the Sun. “The costs of outdated benefits have crippled our ability to pay workers what they truly deserve in their paychecks,” the mayor said in a statement. “We must make tough choices to rebalance the way we compensate our hard-working employees by reforming unsustainable benefits and instead invest in better wages up-front.”

Look for more and more this to happen in cities near you.

Remember, something that can't go on forever, won't.

This should help make long-distance relationships easier..

Pretty cool use of technology:

 

Pretty cool..

All this, and only $12:

 

GWK responds to JDJ..

 

Everywhere but where he needs to be..

 

An epidemic sweeping the Country?

NSFW, thanks to JDJ for the link!

 

I have the solution..

Saw today via Instapundit that veterinarians are being hit with crazy student loan debt at the same time demand for their services is shrinking:

At the age of 30, she still has the sign, which is framed on her desk at the Caring Hearts Animal Clinic in Gilbert, Ariz., where she works as a vet. She also has $312,000 in student loans, courtesy of Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Or rather, $312,000 was what she owed the last time she could bring herself to log into the Sallie Mae account that tracks the ever-growing balance.

“It makes me sick, watching it increase,” she says. “There’s also the stress of how am I going to save for retirement when I have this bear to pay off.”

They don’t teach much at veterinary school about bears, particularly the figurative kind, although debt as large and scary as any grizzly shadows most vet school grads, usually for decades. Nor is there much in the curriculum about the prospects for graduates or the current state of the profession. Neither, say many professors and doctors, looks very promising. The problem is a boom in supply (that is, vets) and a decline in demand (namely, veterinary services). Class sizes have been rising at nearly every school, in some cases by as much as 20 percent in recent years. And the cost of vet school has far outpaced the rate of inflation. It has risen to a median of $63,000 a year for out-of-state tuition, fees and living expenses, according to the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, up 35 percent in the last decade.

This would seem less alarming if vets made more money. But starting salaries have sunk by about 13 percent during the same 10-year period, in inflation-adjusted terms, to $45,575 a year, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. America may be pet-crazed and filled with people eager to buy expensive fetch toys and heated cat beds. But the total population of pets is going down, along with the sums that owners are willing to spend on the health care of their animals, one of the lesser-known casualties of the recession.

I have the answer: train them to work as medical doctors under Obamacare.  Makes sense, as there aren't enough doctors to go around for humans, and we'll all be treated like cattle soon enough when we need treatment.

Hiring Vets to handle Medicare patients is a no brainer!

Before you think about doing a body slam to a cactus..

You may want to watch this first:

 

Finally, an upgrade for airline seats!

Seating in airline cabins hasn't changed too much since the Sixties-I'm not talking about the addition of TV sets and Wi-Fi, but the actual seats themselves.  Sure, a few carriers have removed a row or two of seats, creating "stretch" seating, allowing additional legroom for frequent fliers or for a fee.  I'm not talking about that, but improvements to the seat.  Check out this design:

Pretty slick, using the real estate above the seating area for TV and tray, and redesigning the chair and materials it is made of.  I do wonder what the "pain in the ass factor" is, when the guy sitting in the window seat needs to use the restroom.  How long does it take to fold up the tray and TV to allow an exit?  I also wonder about the emergency oxygen masks-could they get caught in the TV/tray?

Pretty cool to see someone come up with a better mousetrap.  Which airline will be the first to try it out?