It's why they call it "Labor Day"...

Looking forward to a sort of laid-back Labor Day—rife with the possibility of perhaps breaking bread with the kids later in the day—I put something of a dent yesterday in a job due in my client's inbox by 9 am tomorrow.

This morning's inbox presented me with four new assignments (one of which was a shortie and is gone now), massing around 10,000 source words overall. No due date has been specified, other than the implicitly understood "as soon as reasonably possible."

Any psychic "pressure" I might feel about having that much work outstanding is balanced nicely by the fact that the work is there, and by the fact that I ought to be able to deal with the material in an expeditious and workmanlike manner.

But not necessarily today. Certainly not for the bulk of the work.

Cheers...

Lunacy...

In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman seems to have crossed the line into some other world. I mean, how else can you explain what has to be a candidate for the economic howler of the year.

To wit:

Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. (Emphasis mine.)

According to the Wikipedia article on the US federal budget, the 2010 budget was $3.5 trillion and the 2011 budget, which closes at the end of this month, is $3.8 trillion. I've seen other numbers that pretty much track the numbers in the article (and which are typically higher on both counts), but they uniformly show the 2011 number to be greater than the 2010 number.

I don't know how things work where Krugman hangs his hat, but out here in flyover country, you'd actually have to spend less than you did the previous year before you could talk about a "cut" in spending, and you'd have to spend a lot less to credibly call such cuts a "slash."

I mean, you'd expect Krugman's line of thinking to come out of the mouth of a sleazy, unprincipled salesperson ("We've slashed the price of this year's widget, so now's the time to buy!" when really, this year's widget carries a higher price tag), but even such a sorry creature must know that (a) nobody in their right mind, comparing price tags and spending their own money, would fall for such a load of crap, and (b) they'd probably end up charged with fraudulent and deceptive business practices.

Cheers...