Why US Companies rate a big fat F

You know, if you want free porn, you can get it no problem 7x24x365, pay $500 or more to an American software GIANT such as ohhh Say MICROSOFT and try to get customer service you get put on hold for an hour and then told, "Oh we're sorry the department you want to talk to is closed now."

So now I have this wonderful $500 office productivity package that is completely useless till the next business day because the wonderful electronically downloadable product they spew is only SUPPORTED a few hours each day.....Not pacific hours, not east coast hours or central hours....just whenever they freakin decide to pick up the phone. Yes they SELL it to you any time of day or night....just don't expect to be able to use it when you buy it....that requires some time tomorrow...when they feel like pickin up the phone.

You try to be nice, you try to be patient and yet they still flip you the finger with not so much as even an email to let you know.

My Last Day

For 10 years I worked for Kaiser Permanente, the first 4 years was a wonderful time, the management were people oriented, and cared about you and everyone in the shop was a friend or at least someone you could walk up to and say, hey! lets go grab a beer. Then The West Coast took over and Turned a Regional organization into a National one run out of California.

When California took over, one by one we saw all east coast Managers let go, to be replaced with faceless people on the opposite coast. We saw Management start to ignore the professional advice they were paying us to provide and to follow a strictly California Centric theme, one with lower efficiency and markedly lower Availability of servers. As the numbers and stats declined we saw Re-organization after re-organization as wave after wave of management came and went as things went down the tubes. Never once did the idea that the things that changed were at fault for the flagging statistics, no the problem was the people...the technical experts who were hired for some inexplicable reason could not meet the same numbers they once had. Never once did management consider the fact that they kept increasing the number of servers and continuously reduced the size of the support staff that over work might be the real issue.

But that is all in the past, to "FIX" what was broken the company decided to just outsource most of IT, believeing that the problem lay with the workers and not the management.....we will see how that works for them.

But for now, I am free, no longer is that big carrot of a pension out there encouraging me to endure abuse and over work, no incentive is out there to make me work unpaid over time or 12 hour exhaustive shifts rarely having time for a lunch break. No My new company doesnt have any kind of carrot other than the 401k I contribute to, and thus there is no stick big enough to induce me to work for free anymore.

For some perverse reason I am sad to be leaving Kaiser, it is probably the good memories from before it Nationalized, when we were family and we all worked together and had reasonable expectations of us....and a managementthat actually cared about employee satisfaction. We didnt need a union, we didnt need strong contracts, we just worked together....but that is over probably never to return. Now I take my UNIX Admin skills to whoever makes it worth my wile to work for them. Anyone know of a small company that interested in Quality over Quantity?

I feel free and liberated now....so here is to the future.

Too many people ignornat about the tax sysetem

You now, for years I have realized that if the government had not instituted the practice of
with holding taxes from the employer side, so that tax payers don't really realize just how much of their income gets stolen away, we would have as a nation rioted long ago.

If people had to sit down each month and write a check to the IRS for their share of the tax, a lot of lefty weenies would suddenly find themselves switching sides of the aisle. Alas and alack the following is all too common.

"Because of income tax withholding, many taxpayers have long since begun looking at tax refunds as a “gift” from the state or federal government, which can’t necessarily be counted on but which is a nice surprise when qualified for and received. Few taxpayers indeed recognize tax refunds for what they are: repayments of a debt incurred when the federal or state government took more money from a worker’s paycheck than they were entitled to."


Remember people this is OUR money, not the Governments, it is OUR work, and OUR sweat that earned this money and Government has become increasingly vulgar about stealing it away from us and misusing it....giving it to dead beats and free loaders and setting themselves up in lavish life styles. Our leaders should not be living in luxury far beyond the means of the average citizen. Raging against the wind I guess, because the fact is, each day I grow older and less relevant to the situation, I have already done what I can to try and fix things, and its time for the next generation of sheep to realize they are not sheep. How to get that message out? I don't know but when you have "Octo-Mom" out there maintaining she is "NOT ON WELFARE" and yet has no job and subsists on government handouts and always has since she was a child....It is hard to see any hope.

No Stimulus in the Stimulus Package:

The No Stimulus, Stimulus. What it really is, is a Democrat Christmas wish list.
Note, not a single GOP person voted for this and yet it passed in the House...proof that the DEMS OWN our Government and are not going to worry about Bi-Partisan anything (and why should they?)
The Bill: 647-page, $825 billion

$1 billion for Amtrak (Has not turned a profit in 40 years)
$2 billion for child-care subsidies
$50 million for that economic powerhouse the National Endowment for the Arts
$400 million for global-warming research (economic stimulus?)
$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects (Demo projects to boost the economy?)
$650 million for digital TV conversion coupons
$30 billion, or less than 5% for fixing bridges or other highway projects
$40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects
$20 billion for business tax cuts (Actual stimulus)

That is about 97 billion give or take on the projects that can even remotely argued to be stimulus related. What about the other 728 Billion?

$8 billion renewable energy funding (read that as Ethanol and wind energy which are both cost prohibitive)
$6 billion on mass transit (Fare cover just about 50% of the cost to these systems.)

those two will have a net cost to the economy and are not stimulus.

$600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars (Uncle Sam already spends $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles)

$7 billion for modernizing federal buildings and facilities
$150 million for the Smithsonian

None of the next group can even remotely be considered Economic Stimulus (Not saying they arent worth wile just not related to economic stimulus and do not create new jobs)

$81 billion for Medicaid
$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
$20 billion for food stamps
$83 billion for the earned income credit (giving other peoples money to people who have lower incomes and dont actually pay INTo the income tax system)

The next group of expenditures:
$54 billion will go to federal programs
Economic Development Administration
Small Business Administration
10 federal job training programs

and others. All of which the OMB and GAO have classified as ineffective or unable to pass basic financial audits.

And last but not least:
$66 billion to education, more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago
but this is not to help students get educations the bill states on page 257 that "No recipient . . . shall use such funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools." Can't have money going to nonunion teachers now can we?.

Source Article

Dems are using the economic crisis as a means for throwing money at all their favorite boondogles. *sigh* They Won, they get to do what they want *sigh*

New Job

Learning new stuff...totally different from what I was doing before....brain hurt, skull expanding to try to accomodate more info.....cerebelum liquifying melt down imminent.

I have to write more about this

I had to bring this up because the press is really pushing disinformation on what really is going on and why. This whole Subprime thing started on Bill Clinton's watch and was directly caused by Congress. Congress letting themselves be directed by those of socialist bent and the race baiters. The be all and end all of this market collapse is that it is directly due to congress forcing unsound policy and regulation, in their effort to gain votes with blocks of voters. They went out and messed with the market that they apparently know nothing about. What I want to say to Congress is "listen you jerks, until you manage to balance your own budget and live within your means, stay the hell away from the economy."

Stan Leibowitz does a good job:

How did America wind up in its worst financial crisis in decades? Sen. Barack Obama explained it this way last week: “When sub-prime-mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn, a patchwork of regulators systematically and deliberately eliminated the regulations protecting the American people.”

That’s exactly backward. Mortgage lending took that “reckless and unsustainable turn” because of regulation - regulation driven by liberals and progressives, not free-market “deregulators.”

…The mortgage market was humming along just fine when, in the late 1980s, progressives decided that it needed to be “fixed.” Their complaint: Some ethnic groups got approved for mortgages at lower rates than others.

In reality, mortgage lenders were simply being prudent - taking care to provide mortgages to those who could best afford to make the payments.

The shift began in 1989, when Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants. By 1991, critics were using that data to paint lenders as racist by showing that minority applicants were approved at far lower rates. Banks were “Shamed By Publicity,” as one 1993 New York Times headline put it.

…[In 1993] the Boston Fed announced new requirements for banks - rules that have now turned out to be monumentally catastrophic: Adopt “relaxed lending standards” or risk being labeled as racists, and face serious penalties under the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

Gone (as “arbitrary” and “outdated”) were traditional lending requirements such as requiring a down payment or limiting mortgage payments to 28 percent of income. (Of course, the loosened lending standards weren’t limited to poor and minority applicants - that would be discriminatory.)

…Time after time, Fannie and Freddie trumped criticism by pointing to how they were helping broaden homeownership. Because of the subject’s racial overtones, they beat back calls for reform even after financial irregularities were found.

The Whole article can be found here

State of the Union assessment

Ok it is the state of my Union, aka my assessment of my blog.
First and foremost trying to do this thing has given me a whole other
level of appreciation for those who do it day in and day out with such
quality. I see my own limitations in the writing, and my lack of real
creativity in the writing. I remember when I used to write a lot more
than I do now, when I seemed to have time to allow my imagination to run
free. However in the last few years I find that the struggle to make up at
work for lack of proper staffing levels and suffocating inexperienced leadership from those in that type of role, that I am being sucked dry and that I am being consumed in an impossible race to beat the odds. In the past I did enjoy my job and the challenges it brought and even the long hours, but now the bean counters are in charge and seem to be free to willy-nilly ignore the long term consequences for short term gains. One used to be able to take heart knowing that other places, other companies were smarter and better and you could just hop on over. Now though
it seems to me that the entire national corporate structure has jumped on the band wagon of expedience. To hell with quality, to hell with customer satisfaction (there are always going to be new customers) and to hell with "quality is job 1" now the era of 60-40 engineering is in play get it 60% right and we'll let the understaffed IT department fix the other 40% on the fly.

It is easy to fall into the trap of despair. Guess I need to take some vacation time.
I don't intend to stop posting, and it doesn't matter if I get any more readers than I have now I think it only matters that I have fun trying to learn something new. The readers I do have are awesome beyond compare anyway :) Even if one of them shows me constantly just how poor my composition skills are.

You know, I think I need to rediscover my sense of humor. I know it is in there, I make people laugh all the time...Sense of humor, sense of interest, a sense of proportionality, get my life back on track to something a bit more meaningful than the rut I have slipped into.

Getting old can suck.

Well as a kid and adult I used to be pretty active and pushed the old body pretty hard. From being in the outdoors, hiking, lifting weights, racket ball and a host of pickup football and baseball games. I kept this up till I was about 33 or so then had to back off gradually as things started breaking, ankles, wrists, thumbs. I bounced back fairly quickly from each injury and moved on without a second thought, now however those old injuries seem to want to come out of retirement. Weather changes are a real bitch these days, I feel like a walking barometer. Shoulder, ankle, knee and thumb all indicate bad weather approaching.

When I was in my early 40's I had my last (I hope it is the last) major injury and it came out of nowhere, a tendon in my shoulder just decided it wanted to go walkabout to see the rest of the neighborhood, so it detached from the bone and flapped around a bit visiting all the other bits and pieces in the general vicinity.

I did not know anything was wrong when I went to bed, the shoulder had an odd feeling to it, but not really painful. I woke up and was completely unable to move my shoulder. It was the strangest injury I had ever had. All that I had done the day before was spent 12 hours in the car, driving up to see my kids and taking them to see some relatives from my side of the family, then dropped them off with the ex and drove home.

The wonders of modern medicine meant that I would just need to have two small incisions made, one in the front of my shoulder and one on the back side. The surgeon would use ortho or lapro scopic techniques to work through one (Ortho and lapro...need to look up the proper term) and observe via fiberoptic camera with the other one. They used some titanium screws and some other materials to tie everything back together again. It worked pretty well and my down time was only about a week. One thing though was for several months after the surgery, my shoulder squeeked, it was really weird, I felt the urge to walk around with an oil can and wear a funnel on my head.

Now, that wich brings around this bloggy whine the problem seems to be back. It is hard to type and the shoulder area has that same numb, odd feeling when the injury first happened. so now I have to set up a round of appointments to see a guy about a new shoulder...or at least doing some warrenty work on their first job.

Growing old, it's a hoot!

The coming election

Normally I am energetic and enthused for National Elections. This time around I feel as if I have lost that energy that I normally feel. To anyone who knows me, it is obvious that I could never support Mr. Hopeychange nor any other wannabe socialist in the Democratic party. I think Zel Miller was the last Dem I had any real respect for. McCain an honest to goodness war hero has my gratitude and respect on that account but he is about as conservative as my aunt Shirley who used to be my uncle Bob.

I am not sure if it is just the lack of a candidate that will stand firm on our Constitutional Rights or if it is just that I am getting older and have just seen this play too often. I honestly respected and admired Ronald Reagan as the archetype of what a "True American" ought to be. He was up front about his opinions and he was a real man in a world of girleymen and metro-sexuals but I really don't think that the Republicans will ever get back on track for conservative values. (and Im not talking about pushing religion and right to life issues, I mean Constitutionalists). To vote for the Libertarians is just a waste of time, although on a local and some times even State level it is doable.

I just find it very dificult to be optimistic about the direction the Nation as a whole is moving. It is all too easy for me to just focus on finishing out my professional carreer, and then downsizing and moving out into the open spaces, keeping to myslef and enjoying the shooting range that I will have in the back yard, reading and watching old movies.