comdude

Hello my priend.  Windows Live Spaces just announced to us all that our blogs are being dumped, and the only salvation is to convert immediately to WordPress.  I said, I know WordPress. 

So now I have my old journalspace header flying on comdude.wordpress.com, or some such place.  These “themes” are a little restrictive.  The dashboard is very similar. 

As I write this, the Muslim-in-Chief is campaigning again.  His approval is only above 50% among the voters age 18 to 24.  This should tell you something:  grow up. 

Back before we all had electricity, some guys drafted some founding documents that were supposed to ring true for everybody.  It was the best idea anyone had come up with, so they thought, and they built all kinds of perpetual checks and balances into it, to keep anybody from seizing total control and ruining their experiment.

They were of a mind that government should be a limited thing.

Well?  At the time, about 1/3 of the colonists liked the idea.  About 1/3 of the colonists opposed the idea.  And another 1/3 of the colonists didn’t care either way, they just wanted to be left alone.

A lot of things seem to fly that way.  But when the people who don’t care and just want to be left alone get annoyed, watch out.

I’ve been blogging on Windows Live for a while and it works, but it has its problems.  But so does this.  Over there they have a “code of conduct” that really is kinda censorship.

Here’s one of my favorite pictures lately.  Now where id it go…

This is a free view off the main road going into Bryce Canyon National Park.  Say wow.  The white stuff is snow, and the wind was just amazing up there.  That’s what I say.  America is a beautiful place.  You should go there some time.

I know, people get all caught up in their little stuff.  Swine Flu.  I like to say “swine.”  I believe I’ve had West Nile twice, ya know, it was no big deal.  Anyway you won’t get Swine Flu if you go there.  There’s no people.  You might freeze to death or get your ears blown off by the wind, though. 

Does this thing load pictures OK?  I think I already learned it’s better to hot-link to photobucket.  But these aren’t on photobucket yet.  So you get what you get.  Don’t fall in! 

We also cruised Zion.  Both places they charge you $25 to get in.  It was a long day so we kinda blew off Bryce.  This is one of my favorite Americans I keep telling you about.  Nobody believes me.

Much closer to home, we were out doing something, I can’t tell you what, but it might be obvious, and these good people came by on horseback.  That was cool.  With their dog. 

She just lives right over there.  Quite a view, eh? 

So, Obama says he wants somebody to give him some ideas for how to save money.  I get those in the mail all the time.  Here’s one from a group called Citizens Against Government Waste.  Doesn’t Obama get this in his mail?

Citizens Against Government Waste says “The United States spends a whopping 1.8 BILLION TAX DOLLARS in annual dues payments to the United Nations… There are also the “voluntary payments,” which… amounted to an additional $11 BILLION… we pay an estimated 25% of all UN expenses… This money is used to provide a platform for nations who despise us and oppose our… values of democracy, justice, free enterprise, privacy and private property rights… our tax dollars are paying for a rag-tag collection of dictators and socialists to propagandize and work against our security and economic interests.”

No, I think he’d want to keep paying for that.  Hey, stay tuned.

It’s not because I don’t care.  I”m just up to my neck so much.  I can’t blog from wurk.  The msntv2 doesn’t readily let me get this far (actually writing an entry) very often.  But I am watching.

I used to say, “There is no future!”  I was joking, but I had trouble taking the future seriously.  There’s always so much in the immediate situation.  It’s a good thing they started me on a pension plan 20 years ago, because I would never have thought of it.  The pension plan is pretty good if you play the game long enough.

Social Security was always something Congress dithered with, giving the money to people who claimed to be disabled by virtue of some hilariously fun drug addiction.  I never expected to get any Social Security benefits.  But, retirement is one of those times of life where the money comes from different places.  If Social Security is one of them, OK.

It was only last year that I decided maybe there is a future.  I started a 457 plan and a Roth IRA.  Those things are variously invested by people who manage those accounts in keeping with whatever you decided your risk tolerance was.  Fortunately I did not watch as years and years worth of contributions dwindled away as the market took its nose dive.  November of 2008 was a particularly bad month, as I recall.

I watched, though, as my less-than-a-year-old portfolio turned into a loser.  The 457 was worth maybe 70% of what I put into it, and the Roth IRA was worth maybe 65%.  Then this little voice jumped into my head.  Some conservative pundit said, “Buy gold!”

In February this year, the spot price of gold was actually $1000 for a few minutes.  The Chosen One (gag) has the government printing money like it’s toilet paper, so the value of the dollar is bound to fall.  When it comes time to pay the zillions of dollars worth of bailout and stimulus, what’s going to happen?

If you can think of one thing besides your crotch that people throughout human history have wanted to see, to touch, to possess, what would that one thing be?

So now I’m watching the spot price of gold.  I’m happy to say that those holdings are still worth 95% of what I put into them, not like those other losers.  If it hits $1500 that might be a good time to sell, to make up for the other losses.  But everything is in flux and nobody knows what will happen, really.  There’s blips all over the place.  It’s always been a gamble.  “Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” they always tell you.

But I’m learning a lot about gold.

Really the reason I’m writing tonight is because I have an 18 megabit connection and not much else to do, but eat things.  I guess I drove 350 miles or so today.  I miss my kitty cat.

Recently the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced that this year California would be facing drought again.  This information was probably not observed first-hand by the governor, but most likely trickled into his office by way of the bureaucracy, to wit, possibly, the Department of Water Resources, or some such thing.

Well, right now it’s the rainy season.  It’s been raining like a sonofabitch.  There’s runoff everywhere.  Over at the dam they have been letting water out of the lake, and the downstream water level in the river is above the riverbank.  It’s up into the grass and trees.  There’s a lot of fucking water coming out of the dam.

The new populist perspective is that we do not have a “drought.”  What we have is a “water manaagement problem.”

It would be hard to justify the increase in water rates if there were no drought.  There appears to be a statewide water bureaucracy that benefits from this drought by way of the water bill that comes in through the mailbox.

Historically this kind of “problem” has been solved rather successfully when the responsible parties have been “shot” or “run out of town.”  This is still America. 

I always fall back on the idea that there are just too many fucking people here.  I should qualify that a little better by saying that the vast majority of the excess is too spineless to stand up to this outrage and will happily pay the higher water bill, abide by the insane restrictions imposed by their water districts, and watch helplessly as everything dries up. 

The only benefit I can see is that some of the insane restrictions, further up the scale, include a moratorium on new construction to limit the number of too many fucking people that can occupy the already too crowded space. 

For the rest of us, there’s a “drought,” a manufactured crisis, and it’s bullshit.

Our Tax System Explained: Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he
proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).

The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).

The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).

The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).

The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).

The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’ declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, ‘but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I got!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.

For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.