Hi, everybody! Here’s a picture of me taking a nap on my porch.
I know what you’re thinking: “Lightning, did you refinance to take advantage of the low interest rates?”
HAHA . . . I OWN THIS PLACE FREE AND CLEAR! IT’S PAID OFF!
— Lightning 
Stop one heart from breaking. Ease one life the aching or cool one pain. Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again.
What’s the billing code for that?
I never actually noticed it before, but the gas station where I buy sodas every morning has a sign out front showing the current jackpots for Powerball and Mega Millions.
Both of the jackpots were three digits this morning (nine digits if you add six zeros for the millions) — one a little more than 200 and one a little less. Maybe that’s why I noticed them today, because there were so many digits. Or maybe it’s my destiny to win the lottery and the hand of fate turned my eyeballs to the jackpots.
“I noticed the numbers out front,” I said to the clerk. “Give me a ticket for Powerball and Mega Millions.”
“That’s a lot of millions,” he said.
“It sure is. I’ll still stop by in the morning for sodas though.”
Without money, you’re one day old and one inch tall. And you’re nude, too. But the beauty of it is, there’s no point in doing anything to you if you haven’t got any money. They could do things to you. But if you haven’t got the money, they can’t be fucked.
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
That headline should not read “DESPITE new health law,” it should read “BECAUSE OF new health law.”
But we were going to get things for free! We were promised better things at a lower cost!
In my day, most of the citizens were farmers or merchants or tradesmen. They lived by their hands and their wits. They had horse sense and they knew when they were being sold a bill of goods.
Of course, that was before television.
Americans today are unfortunately rather stupid. Most of them don’t know anything about economics, science, history, government . . . as George Carlin says, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” George is here in heaven now. He breaks me up, he really does.
Your president and Congress have decreed that every American will have health insurance whether they want it or not. They have further decreed that a lot of Americans will not have to pay for their own health insurance, which means that the cost of their health insurance has to be paid by the rest of you. That’s one reason why your health insurance premium is going up.
Another reason your premium is going up is the “guaranteed issue” provision. “Guaranteed issue” means that no one can be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.
Funny story: My friend Paul Epps, his wife has an insurance agency in Southern California. It’s an area that’s susceptible to wildfires in the summer months. When a fire breaks out, people who live near the fire actually call this woman wanting to buy a homeowners policy.
Of course, she doesn’t sell it to them. Insurance companies are a little bit smarter than that.
Buying a homeowners policy when your house is already on fire is analogous to “guaranteed issue” health insurance: Hello, I’d like to buy some health insurance. Oh by the way, I have cancer, but the doctors think that with lengthy and expensive treatment, I have a chance to pull through.
This is not even insurance anymore. Insurance is something you pay for now to protect against the risk of having to pay a lot more later. In these cases, there IS no risk. The bad news has already happened. It’s a dead loss for the insurance company and they have to spread the cost of that loss to other policyholders. That’s another reason your premium is going up.
This isn’t even economics, folks, it’s just common sense.
Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later — NYTimes.com
Profits shmofits . . . if you’re not using Coursera.org, you are missing a life-changing opportunity.
According to this White House press release, the federal government is ringing in the new year by simultaneously raising tax rates (i.e., penalizing people for working) and extending payments to two million people who do not work (i.e., rewarding people for playing Xbox). Has this ever happened before at any time in the history of the U.S. (or anywhere else in the world for that matter)?
Warren Buffett
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Warren Buffett argues that higher taxes won’t keep the super-rich from trying to make money:
Suppose that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.”
Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.
Really, Warren? It’s an investment, right? It’s not a sure thing. It’s not a giveaway. I’m being asked to put money at risk. That’s the difference between an investment and a savings account.
So the number one thing that I want to understand before making the investment is what kind of a net return can I expect — worst case, best case, most likely case. Then I can decide if I’m being adequately compensated for the risk that I’m taking on.
And by net return, I mean after taxes, after commissions, after everything. How much money will I actually get to keep? And if I don’t think I’m being adequately compensated for the risk, then yeah, I’ll leave the money in my savings account.
Assuming a tax rate of, say, 35 percent, why does it not make sense to say, “I would take that risk for an expected return of $X, but not for an expected return of 35 percent less than $X?”
America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.
I hardly know where to begin with this . . .
First of all, what is the relevance of the 1950s as opposed to any other period of American history? America prior to 1913 had no permanent income tax and contrary to left-wing propaganda, it prospered. Why can’t we do that again?
Of course we’re all in favor of fairness — right? — but why is it only important that “the rich” pay their “fair share”? I don’t remember ever hearing anyone, certainly not Krugman, use the phrase “pay their fair share” in reference to any group except “the rich.”
If you’re concerned about fairness, isn’t it also important that the middle class “pay their fair share”? Isn’t it important that the poor “pay their fair share”? Shouldn’t we all have some skin in the game?
Why not say that everyone should “pay their fair share” instead of making a class warfare issue out of it?
As George Harrison used to say:
Should five percent appear too small
Be thankful I don’t take it all
America in the 1950s had a top tax bracket of 91 percent for incomes greater than $200,000. For every dollar you made in excess of $200,000, the federal government took 91 cents as its “fair share.” You got to keep nine cents as your “fair share.”
Out of those nine cents, you also had to pay Social Security taxes, state taxes, local taxes, sales taxes, property taxes and excise taxes. Am I forgetting anything? It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that nine cents on the dollar wouldn’t be enough to cover all those taxes, in which case you’d actually lose money on every dollar.
If I’d been a business owner in the 1950s, with the knowledge that once I made 200 grand, I’d be operating at a loss, I would have just shut the place down at that point and sent everyone home till the next year. I don’t care if it was November or August or January.
Finally, when Krugman talks about workers having “the power to bargain,” he’s talking about unions, as though the two things are inseparable. I’ve never been in a union but I’ve bargained for wages and benefits at every job I’ve ever had. Anyone with marketable skills can bargain for wages and benefits.
P.S. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but “workers” is a telling choice of words, isn’t it? Why not “employees” or just “people”? “Workers” calls to mind communist rallying cries and the Wobblies.
I found this table from Ballotpedia rather interesting. It shows how much money has been donated to each side of the California ballot propositions.
| Proposition | Donations in favor | Donations against |
|---|---|---|
| Proposition 30 | $67,100,000 | $53,400,000 |
| Proposition 31 | $4,400,000 | $573,700 |
| Proposition 32 | $60,500,000 | $73,300,000 |
| Proposition 33 | $17,100,000 | $275,700 |
| Proposition 34 | $7,400,000 | $391,900 |
| Proposition 35 | $3,700,000 | $0 |
| Proposition 36 | $2,700,000 | $119,900 |
| Proposition 37 | $8,700,000 | $45,600,000 |
| Proposition 38 | $47,800,000 | $42,300 |
| Proposition 39 | $31,400,000 | $45,000 |
| Proposition 40 | $601,100 | $2,300,000 |
My boy and I are buying sodas at the Chevron station . . .
I notice they’ve got the place plastered with breast cancer donation stickers . . . donate a buck to breast cancer research and you can put your name on a 3×5 sticker with a pink car and a Chevron logo and they’ll stick it up on the wall.
I object to that. Let Chevron donate their own damn money instead of shaking down the customers.
“Would you like to donate a dollar to breast cancer research?” the attendant asks.
“No,” I reply. “Shouldn’t Chevron make their own donations? They’ve got more money than I do.”
It takes the guy a few moments to pick up on my theme, but as we’re wrapping up the transaction, he grabs the ball and runs with it.
“Yeah,” he says, “and the price of gas keeps going up.”
“It does, although I have to admit it’s down a little bit in the past week.”
“They bounce it,” he says, “but in the long run, it always goes up. It’ll be five dollars, then seven dollars. And they control everything so there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“You’re exactly right,” I say to him.
When we get outside, I say to the boy, “Chevron should fire that guy. Not a good company man.”
David Henderson says — accurately, I think — that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks can be paraphrased as “People who are dependent on government will vote for the candidate who credibly (to them, at least) promises to keep the programs that have created that dependence.”
Do you think President Obama disagrees with that? He doesn’t.
If you think he does, please see The Life of Julia on the president’s web site. It lays out a “typical” woman’s cradle-to-grave dependence on government assistance and describes how Obama will keep those programs going while Mitt Romney won’t.
The most insulting thing about it is that as you read about Obama funding this and Obama funding that, it sounds like he’s doing it all out of his own goddamn pocket. What a prince!
There’s no acknowledgement that Obama is taking from some and giving to others, and that all of Julia’s “free” stuff is paid for by me and people like me out of money earned by our own labor.
And we are struggling. We’re putting a kid through college, my wife has had an expensive medical condition, our home equity has plummeted, the roof leaks, my car is long overdue for new tires . . . there are unplanned expenses . . . next month, something else will break. That’s life.
As part of our middle-class existence, we pay a five-figure annual federal income tax bill. We pay for Julia’s babysitters, education, health care, etc., and Obama takes the credit. Not even a “thank you.” If we could keep even a fraction of that money, maybe we could afford to pay our own education and health care costs.
How about acknowledging that for every Life of Julia there’s a Life of Paul and presenting their stories in juxtaposition to show how, as with any policy, some people are better off and some people worse.
| Life of Julia | Life of Paul |
| As she prepares for her first semester of college, Julia and her family qualify for President Obama’s American Opportunity Tax Credit—worth up to $10,000 over four years. Julia is also one of millions of students who receive a Pell Grant to help put a college education within reach. | As they go into debt to pay for their own child’s college education, Paul and his wife are required to pay for Julia’s college tuition as well. |
You see the idea? Let’s try another one . . .
| Life of Julia | Life of Paul |
| Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform. | Paul’s wife is diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition. Although they have health insurance, which they pay for themselves, there are deductibles, co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as the financial implications of his wife’s inability to work. They receive no government assistance, which is fine, but their financial woes are compounded by the fact that they are also required to pay for Julia’s “free” medical care. |
The money being used to buy the votes of millions of Julias out there is not coming exclusively or even primarily from unnamed “millionaires” on “Wall Street” . . . it’s coming from “middle class” “hard-working Americans” on “Main Street” who are struggling.
Because of the huge productivity differences between good programmers and bad programmers — 10x? 28x? More? — my biggest leverage point as a development manager is my ability to hire people.
At my last job, we had an HR Director named Lucy. In every one of our annual Employee Satisfaction Surveys, Lucy’s group had the lowest scores in the entire organization. Nobody liked or respected her.
She was, however, close with the CEO, which made that irrelevant.
Lucy’s friend Kathy Slauson runs the Slauson and Slauson recruiting agency, so that’s where we got our programming candidates, who were mostly terrible.
The Slauson agency doesn’t specialize in IT candidates, although they do have a “technical recruiter,” who unfortunately knows nothing about technology.
They don’t bring candidates in for in-person interviews. They take whatever candidates give them in the form of a résumé and they pass the résumés along to clients like me in hopes of being paid a fee.
What value does this add over candidates sending résumés directly to me? None.
Slauson doesn’t qualify candidates. They don’t map abilities and skills against the requirements of a position. They add no value to the process, and I had to screen all the résumés myself, the same as if I’d just bought them from a job board.
When I saw that Slauson was just going to throw résumés at me, I asked them to please add a short write-up, indicating why they thought each candidate was a good fit for the job.
What I got was write-ups like “Candidate is good with Technology X,” where Technology X is something I indicated as a job requirement.
When I asked “How did you assess that the candidate is good with Technology X?” they would tell me “We asked him.” Or “It’s on his résumé.”
In other words, “Candidate is good with Technology X” meant “Candidate states that he’s good with Technology X. Unverified.”
(If you’re wondering at this point why an HR department would funnel good money to a recruiting agency for doing nothing, go back and reread the part where I mention that Kathy Slauson is a personal friend of Lucy the HR Director.)
I said earlier that Slauson has a “technical recruiter.” She was in the office one afternoon and handed me a résumé.
“He doesn’t look like an ASP.NET programmer,” I said after looking it over, “which is what we’re looking for. For example, I don’t see any C# experience.”
“It’s right here,” she said, pointing at the résumé where it said this: C++.
If you’re not a programmer, you might say, well, easy mistake to make. C# (pronounced C-sharp, like a musical note) and C++ (pronounced C-plus-plus) are both programming languages containing the letter C followed by one or more symbols.
But whereas C# is the primary programming language for web development on the Microsoft platform, C++ is a lower-level language used for system development. Nobody does web development in C++.
Not surprisingly, a high percentage of Slauson’s candidates bit the dust in the initial phone screen with me, because the phone screen was their first encounter with someone whose programming knowledge was non-zero and could possibly tell a good programmer from a bad programmer.
According to Kathy Slauson, that was totally unacceptable. She thought that because she had an in with the HR department, we should be hiring every candidate she sent over, qualified or not, and paying her for the privilege, which is the way it worked before I arrived on the scene and screwed up the process.
She was always very polite to me in person, assuring me that she was doing her best to improve the quality of candidates, but behind the scenes, she was telling Lucy the HR Director that I shouldn’t be allowed to interview candidates anymore.
(That information was never supposed to reach me but it did.)
Think about that: we had a recruiter telling our HR Director that a manager shouldn’t be allowed to interview their candidates. (The fact that I no longer work there tells you which side of the issue Lucy came down on.)
Kathy also told Lucy that the candidates I was rejecting were perfectly good candidates because after I turned them down, they were being hired at other companies.
Imagine that!
Of course they were being hired at other companies. They were being hired by companies with lower hiring standards for programmers. The best thing that could happen with some of those candidates is for them to be hired by competing organizations.
Do you think Amazon or Google worry that candidates they turn down get hired somewhere else?
(No, I wasn’t trying to match hiring standards with Amazon or Google. I’m just saying that it wasn’t my goal to be the employer of last resort, or to be able to say, “If we don’t hire ‘em, nobody’s gonna hire ‘em!”)
Everyone I hired was an order of magnitude improvement over the people they replaced.
I like to work with talented people. I’m not trying to get rich and I don’t have a career path. I’m trying to learn and get better and contribute to my profession.
If you give me a job where I’m responsible for hiring people, I’m going to hire the best people available, and decline to be force-fed unqualified candidates by a friend of the HR Director.
To be continued . . .
If we spend enough money on home decorations, maybe we’ll finally have a chance to be happy . . .
Satan
6 Walmart Heirs Hold More Wealth Than 42% of Americans Combined
Everyone gets what they deserve, that’s my motto.
Of course the Walmart heirs have a lot of money. They’re fortunate enough to be the descendants of a man who got a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law, plus five grand he’d saved up in the army, bought a store, turned it via a lifetime of hard work into a retailing empire and left his estate to his family.
It’s a great American, Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches story. Meanwhile, 42 percent of Americans don’t work, don’t pay taxes and collect entitlement checks, and Mother Jones gives us the absolutely priceless information that they don’t have as much money as the Walmart heirs.
Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in 1962. By 1980, Walmart had 276 stores, 21,000 employees and $1.248 billion in annual sales.
If, over the course of those 18 years — 1962-1980 — you or someone in your family had recognized a good thing when you saw it and bought some Walmart stock in 1980, every dollar you invested would now be worth . . . hang on, let me pull up Google Finance on my iPad . . . over $500! So $1,000 would get you $500,000 . . . $2,000 and you’d be a millionaire without working a day in your life.
Sam Walton is in heaven now. I’ll see the rest of you whiners in Hell . . .
America is the land of opportunity.
While some Americans sit around whining about 1 Percenters, rising young innovator Matthew Creed of Kansas has figured out how to turn publically available data into a money maker: post the names, mug shots and addresses of arrestees on a web site and offer to remove the information for a $200 fee.
And by the way, he’s only operating in Johnson County, Kansas, so the market is wide open for other budding entrpreneurs who want to apply the same business model in their own area.
“Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children,” said a statement from Cruise’s rep on Friday. “Please allow them their privacy.”
Again the press release asking for privacy. ATTENTION EVERYONE! A LITTLE PRIVACY PLEASE!
If not for the press release, who would know or care about this? I’ve got my own problems, thank you.
And it’s another blow to the theory, believed by many, that having a lot of money, free time and famous friends is a guaranteed ticket to happiness. No one’s life is a fairy tale, no matter what it looks like . . .
“Where are you folks from?” the border agent asks.
“Irvine, California.”
“How long were you in Canada?”
“About half a day.”
“Why such a short stay?”
“We’re staying in Seattle for a few days and just came up for a visit.”
“How do you like this cold weather?”
“No big deal. I grew up in cold weather.”
My son makes a sputtering noise in the back seat.
“Is he okay?” the agent asks.
“Well, unfortunately he’s got irreversible brain damage to his frontal lobes. We still love him though.”
“Is anyone in the car carrying $10,000 or more in cash?”
“American dollars or Canadian?”
“American.”
“I wish.”
“Is that a yes or a no, sir?”
“Sorry. No.”
After we pass through the border check, the boy says in a mocking tone, “‘I grew up in cold weather.’ In La Mirada.”
“La Mirada is subject to extreme temperature fluctations,” I reply. “Much more so than Irvine.”
