USA: The Highest...

The highest what?  The highest corporate income tax rate.  In the world.  Starting on April 1st.  From an opinion piece in today's WSJ:

April 1 is a date that every politician and business executive in America should circle on the calendar. That's when Japan cuts its corporate tax rate to 36.8% from 39.5%. The United States will then hold the title of highest corporate tax rate, with average combined federal and state profit levies of 39.2%.

Yes, that's higher than Sweden. Higher than Russia. And China, Mexico, Denmark and even France. Doesn't it make you want to break out in a chant: U-S-A, U-S-A? 

I can almost hear the progressives cheering.  “Yes!”, they'll say.  We're leading the world, as we should be.

Me?  I just cry for my country's future.

And, as always, remain amazed at how little attention issues like this get from everyday people.  As though they don't matter...

Table, Rising...

This is an impressive piece of design, and woodworking: a folding table made from a single sheet of wood.  Lots of details, and photos of the actual table, at the designer's site...

Awesome Customer Service Stories...

Here's a very nice collection of great customer service stories.  I'd seen about half of these before...

ServiceNow IPO News: on Fox News!

There's no new news about a potential ServiceNow IPO in this story.  But the venue is new: Fox News!  I got to this page through a link on the Fox News home page.

The search term “servicenow ipo” is still the number one driver of traffic to my blog...

Rainageddon...

Last night on my drive home, I heard a radio announcer talking about the rain storm expected to hit us tonight as “rainageddon”.  It earned this moniker because of the amount of rain expected: up to 2 inches (5 cm).  Anyone from a place like, say, Hawai'i would be greatly amused by this.  We consider 2" of rain to be “rainageddon”, but there that would barely qualify as a morning shower...

This morning the dogs and I took our morning walk through a thick cloud.  Visibility was about 100 feet.  When we walked down to the end of our driveway, our house was gone; just a vague fuzz of light in its direction. 

As usual, Race was all about the pine cone.  I kicked; he was happy.  The three field spaniels, though, were in a frenzy of smelling, just as they always are in wet air.  The three of them would run around, seemingly at random, until one of them found something enticing.  Then upon some signal not apparent to me, all three would congregate at that spot – noses together, bodies angled precisely 120° apart, forming a perfect three-pointed star.  After sufficient sniffing of the exquisite spot, in concert they'd break off and commence the random searching, separately, again.  This pattern repeated ad nauseum for our entire walk.  The usual peeing and pooping occurred, mind you; it was just incidental to the real mission of smelling...

Just another morning in Jamul!