the tindog coffeehouse

According to a new survey, a majority of Americans, including evangelical Christians, believe that other religions besides their own can lead to eternal life:

The findings, released Monday in a survey of 35,000 adults, can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don’t know fundamental teachings of their own faiths.

Among the more startling numbers in the survey, conducted last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: 57 percent of evangelical church attendees said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.

In all, 70 percent of Americans with a religious affiliation shared that view….

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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking Congress to give the Fed more powers to regulate the financial system, in light of the collapse (and bailout) of Bear Stearns.

Paulson said the country had come to rely on the Federal Reserve in times of crisis, citing the Fed’s actions to broker a rescue of giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998 during the Asian currency crisis and the Bear Stearns episode this year.

“Our nation has come to expect the Federal Reserve to step in to avert events that pose unacceptable systemic risk,” Paulson said. “But, as we noted in our blueprint, the Fed has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risk across our entire financial system.”

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There was a lengthy debate a few days ago on USA Today’s PopCandy blog about the all-time worst sitcoms. Most of the shows mentioned (Mr. Belvedere, Small Wonder, My Two Dads, etc.) were shows from the ’80s and early ’90s. Very few readers mentioned shows from the ’60s or ’70s, likely because those were before their time.

As a child of the ’80s, I grew up on shows like Happy Days, Scooby-Doo, The Dukes of Hazzard, and WKRP in Cincinnati, as well as classics such as The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, and The Munsters. (Yes, I watched entirely too much TV growing up.) I played with GI Joe and Star Wars toys but never made it very far in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. I rode my Big Wheel up and down the block without adult supervision and caught horny toads in the vacant lot next door.

Now that I’m a father, I’ve come to the realization that my daughters won’t share many of these same memories. They have no idea who the Fonz is or what New Coke tastes like. They’ve never ridden in the wayback of a station wagon, recorded anything to a cassette tape, or changed channels with a pair of pliers because the knob broke off, and they don’t care.

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TXU is rolling out a new thermostat that can be programmed by the owner over the Internet. Sounds good, right? I mean, say you’re traveling and forgot to raise the AC before you left. Click-click-click, you’re done. Oh, but wait, there’s a catch!  TXU can adjust the thermostat, too, meaning they can arbitrarily decide to turn off your AC to save themselves money.  Um, what?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, your new $3000 Jura F90 coffeemaker, which comes with a handy Internet Connection Kit, can be apparently be hacked to unleash what BoingBoing refers to as a “denial-of-coffee attack”.

As one BoingBoing commenter put it, “For that price you can fly to Paris and sit in an actual cafe and drink 500 cups of coffee served to you by a variety of cute waiters while people-watching and reading a good book.”

Or you could just stay home and soak in the air conditioning.

Like many loyal Firefox users, I couldn’t wait for the launch of Firefox 3, which was released yesterday. After trying several times to get to the site, I was finally able to download it last night and install it on my home computer.

I haven’t had time yet to really play with it, but I would say it does feel a little faster than the previous version. I’m not quite sold on the look of it yet, though. (FF3 is themed a little different for each platform. On Vista it has more of the Vista look and feel, on OS X it has more of the Mac’s look and feel, etc.) But the one thing that seemed to be an issue initially was the compatibility issues with a few of my add-ons.

The All-in-One Sidebar, New Tab Button, and 1-Click Weather add-ons haven’t (yet) been updated to run on the new version. I found a suitable replacement for the weather add-on and can easily work around the loss of the others. It’s just going to take a little getting used to on my part. I also had some issues with the NewTabURL add-on, which may require rolling back to a previous version.

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According to financial disclosure statements filed by the two presumed presidential candidates, Barack Obama earned about $4 million dollars last year (mostly book royalties) while carrying no credit card debt. John McCain, meanwhile, earned about $340,000 but has a joint American Express account with a balance of $10,000-$15,000 with an interest rate of 25.99%.

Of course, you’re asking the obvious question: What would Andrew Jackson think about that?

I’m currently reading An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steele Gordon. He points out Jackson’s quest to eliminate the national debt, which had “soared” to $125 million after the War of 1812.

Jackson had two purposes in ridding the country of debt. The first, of course, was that he thought debt was bad in and of itself. He had called it a “national curse” in his first run for the presidency in 1824. But he thought that the institutions and the people who benefitted from it were a national curse as well. “My vow,” he pledged, “shall be to pay the national debt, to prevent a monied aristocracy from growing up around our administration that must bend to its views, and ultimately destroy the liberty of our country.”

And in fact, Jackson lived up to his pledge, reporting in his 1834 State of the Union address that “the country would be debt-free on January 1, 1835, and have a balance on hand of $440,000.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, now I know who I’m voting for in November! (Even if he has been dead for 163 years.)