Thoughts from the Year 2007Thoughts from the Year 2007You know me -- it is my belief that the best thing that ever happened to automobiles sold in the United States is Japan. Until Toyota and Honda arrived, Detroit believed that if they made it and advertised it, people would buy it. I grew up with my father working for General Motors. My first job was a Chrysler Corporate Engineering in Detroit (Highland Park). But every car my father owned had my mother or myself living at the dealership waiting for repairs. Every American car I bought was worse and eventually my wife lived at the Dodge dealer. Then I bought a Datsun, another Datsun, and then a Toyota and then a Dodge Minivan. The Dodge minivan is the most mis-engineered car in the history of Detroit -- but that is a different matter. They are all different matters but give background for the current opinion: America is still building motorhomes to the same lack of quality and respect for their buyers as the Detroit automobile makers. Detroit is going broke and, after 30 years of good foreign cars, has still not figured out its problems. Motor homes on the other hand have not had to deal with quality issues. They still do the take it or leave it approach and tell you to buy a new one every three years. Maybe Toyota will buy Winnebago. That would be a good start. Here is an example of RV mis-engineering. I will not write volumes on lack of quality. My door step has a bright orange light on it. This is great. But the light only goes on at indeterminate times. I have seen it on but it does not go on when I need it on. The electric door step also behaves in a non-sensical manner. But I can usually predict it. I would like the step to go down (and maybe stay down) when I open the door. There are times when the step should stay up when the door is opened but when this occurs either a positive action by the door person or an alarm should occur. Something. One night I opened the door and the step did not go down and I fell the 3 feet on my head. If I had had a 5th wheel, the distance would have been 6 feet. I skinned my arms. I hurt my neck, head, and back. And I just said: more Detroit mis-engineering. I have solved this problem in the easiest way. I added a wire from my batteries to a switch that I added to the screen door and then to the light. I cut the other wire to the light. Now when I open the door, the light goes on. When I close the door, the light goes off. It will always go on regardless of the step position. This means that I open the door and look down. If I see steps, great. If I do not see steps then I flick the switch to lower the steps. But I shall not fall on my head again because of not seeing absent or invisible steps. The step came with a light. The light came with a wire. The door came with a switch to operate the steps. The RV manufacturer has everything he needs to make the light and steps work responsibly. But a Detroit engineer along with some marketing guy have decided that facility presence is sufficient. Working in a logical manner is not necessary Requiring a thought process from an industry that has been dealing with mismanagement and bankruptcies for 50 years can only be corrected by the addition of some intelligence and responsibility. Qualities not found in American industry.
If Americans were not so lazy, maybe they would not be so angry. In 1979, my family looped around the USA and Canada in an RV -- I talk about this elsewhere. Typically we would pull into a park, leave my 4-year-old daughter Bree off and then find a camp site. Once settled, I would locate Bree who would have found someone to talk to or play with. This particular day we pulled into the campground at the top of Glacier National Park in Montana. As I arrived, Bree got herself into trouble. She was standing patiently waiting for an opportunity to speak in a circle of adults -- each bragging about how far that they had had to drive that day to arrive at the campground. Bree had an opening: a woman had said how far she had driven in miles. Bree politely asked: "How many kilometers is that?" I really do not know if Bree knew a kilometer from a watermelon but it was was a good chance for her to place herself into the conversation. She did not expect the reaction that she got. Everyone in the circle angrily glowered down at her and I really thought that she might be hurt. I picked her up and carried her back to camp. The American hostility to anything that even sounds like it came from a foreign country amazes me. Oh. We buy Japanese cars and stereos -- but we badmouth the people who invented quality merchandise. It is OK to buy the Toyota, just do not let those foreigners into the country along with their cars.
I live in Mexico. I can use American dollars to buy almost anything. The Mexicans love dollars. They are stable and the merchant will not give you the full exchange rate.. But a Dallas (and you know I hate to say anything nice about anything from Texas and especially hate to say anything nice about Dallas) restaurant chain has advertised that it accepts Pesos. Because I ping pong across the border, I carry Mexican money in one pocket and American money in the other. But on the American side I can never ever use Pesos. I think maybe the border Wal-marts might take them. The border grocery stores do. Some of the border fast food places do. But in general Mexicans know that if they cross the border, they better change their money first. On the Mexican side near the border are many little change houses. There are a few on the American side. But other than these, if you carry Pesos you are out of luck.
This is really stupid. I hear about hate letters and death threats because a pizza chain finds it profitable to sell pizzas in the same currency that many of its customers understand and prefer. What do these letter-writing perverts think they are going to accomplish with their hate and anger? I wonder if these same people have Mexican maids or handymen. Whenever I invite Mexican friends over to my RV, the very first thing they do is start cleaning. Now I am not a good housekeeper. We know that. But Mexicans are very interested in working hard, keeping their homes neat and clean, and in general being good friends and neighbors. They will share their last tortilla -- with a stranger. Gringos? If it looks like you were not born in Denmark you can expect the door to be slammed in your face. What arrogance. What stupidity.
Yesterday I went into a Yuma Wal-Mart. I like Wal-Mart. Basically if it is not in Costco, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart, or www.buy.com. I do not buy it. I pulled out a handful of money. It was mixed dollars and pesos. I gave the woman a $20 and she asked if I had a nickel. I said 'tal vez'. She thought I said 'pesos' and said they did not take pesos. I told her that I thought they should but continued to search for a nickel. When she returned my change she said "No, they shouldn't:". Now I am in Arizona. I have lived there I know that the only people that people in Arizona respect have a bible in one hand, a gun in the other, and a flag draped over their shoulder. Common beliefs include less government money for students and more money for schools (primarily private). More money for insurance companies and less money for medicine. But we have been through that. I thought maybe we had miscommunicated and repeated that I thought that Wal-Mart should take pesos. She repeated her reply as I walked away.
I thought about this. I have been disappointed that Wal-Mart has too little regional products. I mean that in some tourist areas there is a section of curios and tourist items. I think that each store should have such a section. I have been disappointed that in the border stores (such as Yuma), there are not more Mexican items. This would include books in Spanish, especially children's book. Why children's? They always make good gifts and if someone wants to learn Spanish, children's reading books are a good place to start. I find some Spanish-English coloring books and a couple of Spanish books in the main section but not enough for a city where half the people (other than snowbirds) walking into the store are primarily Spanish speakers. If there were no Wal-Marts in the Canadian border cities, I am sure that the northern American stores would have a similar interest.
At least Wal-Mart could support a booth or little store in the front for a money exchange.
But hostility? Come on people, life is too short to be worried about the other guy. Wal-mart should be interested in making profits. People should be interested in being happy. Wal-mart assists the people by supplying products of highest interest to it customers.
On the other side, last week I went to the El Centro Wal-Mart.. Typical of a Mexican, I needed some exact change and dumped my total change on the counter. I quickly counted out everything minus a dime. My coins were mixed Mexican and American. I started searching the pile for a dime when the cashier extracted a Peso. I said that it was not American and she said: "Close enough". Maybe the hostility I notice is just in Republican or Bible Belt strongholds.
I was reading in the news about people working 70 hours per week becoming the norm. I think that this included commute time. There are 7 times 24 or 168 hours in a week. If you sleep 8 hours per day, you have 168 - 70 - 56 or 42 hours remaining. This is about 6 hours per day to spend with your family and doing house chores. I know from experience that this is not a possible combination for a single parent.
When I got divorced, I promised my kids that I would be home every night and we would have a home-cooked dinner. I informed my manager that I would work 8 hours per day, no weekends, no holidays, and find a way to get my work done. When I changed jobs, this was a condition of my employment. I learned to improve my productivity at work. My kids would never come second.
I took a job with Siemens in Boca Raton. The management at all levels above me did not understand. They had forced overtime of 60-hour weeks. I went home at 5 and stayed home on weekends. I watched managers with their clipboards walk away in anger many times. My kids got their meals and these were never from a can or a tin-foil box.
If I can do this, anyone can do this. I was a professional engineer. I learned to manage my time and schedules. Any pressure for increased time was due to the inability of my management to do the same. I never make a secretary or now that I am retired, other people, make up for my inability to schedule. No typing for me ever got done after 5 pm.
I still accepted the stress that came with the job. I had additional stress for the pressure of my hours. I designed telephone systems and interfaces. Telephony is the leading edge of the leading edge of technology. You must be absolutely accurate (when you push the '9' key, a '9' sound should happen). You have product windows defined by marketing which must be met. You have creeping excellence. I took all of these seriously. Then I met an NICU nurse. NICU? Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Babies lived or died depending upon her care. They would die in her arms. She would deal with the bereaved parents. She would deal with emergency helicopter transfers. She would assist doctors in surgery of body parts you could not see without magnifying glasses. She would come home stressed to the point of being marginally functional. But she came home. After knowing Amy, not only did I keep my hours but I rolled off the stress. Nobody died of telephone fatigue in my watch.
Management counts on you accepting their stress. This does little to improve your job performance and does much to destroy your home life. I was a engineer. It was my job to produce product. It was my management's job to schedule the work and provide the tools. At Siemens, tools were always a problem. Meeting schedule for state of the art telephones with tools that belonged in a museum was difficult -- but I learned.
I saw a book: "If you do not want to raise them, do not have them" or something like that. If you are going to have children, then accept them as your primary responsibility. Be enough of a person to stand up to the stress and impossible schedules. Stand up and be the parent that you have committed to be by having the child.
To quote a Harry Potter movie: "he is a human being and not a piece of meat." It is time that we all stood up and counted ourselves as human beings and not pieces of meat. There is nothing in this world more rewarding than the smile of your daughters and sons when you walk in that door on time at 5:30 every evening.
Lifted from another website:
At a nursing home in Miami, Florida, a group of seniors were sitting around talking about all their ailments.:
"My arms have gotten so weak I can hardly lift this cup of coffee," said one.
"Yes, I know," said another. "My cataracts are so bad I can't even see my coffee."
"I couldn't even punch out the chad at election time, my hands are so crippled," volunteered a third.
"I can't turn my head because of the arthritis in my neck," said a fourth, to which several nodded weakly in agreement.
"My blood pressure pills make me so dizzy!" exclaimed another.
"I guess that's the price we pay for getting old," winced an old man as he slowly shook his head. The others nodded in agreement.
"Well, count your blessings," said one woman cheerfully, "and thank God we can all still drive."
My opinions:
The above would be funny if it were a joke but it is not. I have people coming into my computer workshop every week with computers that they have no business owning. Talk about the improvements in artificial intelligence -- computers now know to turn on and off when you lift or close the cover or you ignore them for too long. I thought this was great until these people walked in with computers that they could not figure out how to turn on and off. There is an increasing number of these people and they are still driving 40-foot trucks (often towing anything from a boat to a truck with another vehicle inside) down your local streets and highways. There is no special license for doing so. They may not have had a driver test in 40 years. Do you have any idea how many laws and conventions have changed in 40 years?
My daughter says that I have antagonisms against old people. She may be correct but she does not drive in Yuma. She does not see the attitudes that seems to come with accumulated age and wealth. Although I seriously wonder daily about how these people accumulated such wealth. I mean I shall always remember my father yelling at me: "If you are so damn smart, why aren't you rich?" Maybe that is where I get my attitude towards dumb, rich, old people. Maybe it is sour grapes that my savings never broke $1M (and never will) and I type on a laptop with missing keys. Maybe it is because when you are 12 you remember every word your parents yell at you even if you try to ignore them at the time.
Maybe it is because I do not like laws in general. A law is a rule enforceable by the government administration (police) created by one group of people to control another group of people. People do not pass laws to control themselves. Therefore, I am against most laws. The primary example of law creation today is the group of people who do not like abortions trying to stop others that equally do not like it but see it as an alternative.
But... There should (I hate that word) be at least a special driver license for anyone driving a vehicle of non-standard (what ever that means) length or behavior. Old or young. There should (that word again) be a requirement to renew ones license periodically. And that means a physical testing and not just an eye test or a couple of questions off of a computer screen. If a 60-year-old had to drive as well to keep his license as a 16-year-old must drive to obtain his license, many 60-year-olds would be walking.
Today I stood in line at Pep Boys. The woman in front of me was so old that I hope I never get to where she is. She needed a walker and she looked like death on tennis balls. She also needed a serious attitude adjustment that the service advisor was smart enough to not attempt. She was very upset when told she would have to wait for a couple of hours for them to change the tail light bulb in her car. The advisor suggested other stores: Sears maybe. How long was the wait at Sears? No matter, she did not like Sears. There was something wrong with a system if it took a couple of hours to change a light bulb. He was patient and explained that there were a lot of others ahead of her and that she had arrived a lunch time.
To me there were several items here. She is too old to be able to change a tail lamp bulb? Anyone can change a tail lamp bulb. Or almost anyone. It is lunch time. And she says she is passing through. In two hours she could get to Tucson. Maybe she could get help there. Is a tail lamp so critical that it must be fixed across lunch? If she cannot walk without her walker and does not have the intelligence and dexterity to change her own light bulb, who thinks that the man behind the bar is there to service her every whim when she has a whim (or a hair up her whatever) -- who lets this relic drive a car down the Interstate? I know the rules of the road, service rules, laws, have all changed in the almost 50 years I have been driving. I can remember the Texaco drill team when you pulled up to the pump. The world has changed a lot for those who knew the name of their horse and now have to figure out the little pictures on the dash board. And my daughter thinks that I have Alzheimer's. Dinosaurs died because they could not adjust.
Yes, I am prejudiced, but get anyone who fits this description off of our highways. And I suspect that she would refuse to pay for the time it took to identify and to change the bulb. I know I am a dinosaur -- but I try hard to keep up and I try to not take my adjustment problems out on others.
But then maybe I should start dating women over 30. I am sure I could learn a lot. Do you know how hard it is to find a 28-year-old woman interested in a 62-year-old (Oops -- 63 year-old) man who cannot dance, nor speak the language, nor is rich? When I arrived at Mary's house today, I was greeted with a warm hug and a smile, a good lunch and a language lesson. It took my mind off of people who need tennis balls to get to the service counter. I just wish that the pretty young women would stop opening the doors for me. I get embarrassed.
Yeah. I know. Here I go again. Maybe this section belongs under Politics. People are missing vacations, weddings, et al because they did not get a passport soon enough. If you waited until the last minute, put on your stupid badge. But I really feel for those who gave themselves ample time and their passport did not arrive. This is another anti-Bush thing from me. It is stupid but acceptable that individuals did not get their application in on time. It is incompetence to have the government unprepared for the deluge. It is theft to accept a $60 additional fee just to get a passport returned within a month. For an extra $60 over the almost $100 original fee I should be able to walk out the door with my new passport.
But for passport applications to take months is gross incompetence by the Bush Administration. The Feds know how many people travel every year. They know it better than the travel agencies do. If they have any doubts, I guess they could ask Interpol. They also know how many people have passports. I cross the border every week or two. I show my passport. I am no longer the exception. I am still curious like this week when I hand the guy my passport and he asks if I am an American citizen. This week I ignored the question. He figured it out and asked something else. These guys know every time I cross the border, which crossing, time of day, ID used, how good is my Spanish. They know a lot more than that. I must be on their highest level of the "wouldn't hurt a fly" scale as sometimes they just look at the screen and hand my passport back. But this is beside the point. The point is that we again see the Bush Administration hurting its own people (at least it is not killing them with this error) because it did not have a plan.
The Bush people get a law passed saying we all need passports to travel. This is long overdue so I do not give him credit for this. Anyone who travels knows this. The implementation dates are posted and are years in advance. The number of people who will need passports could have been very accurately predicted. The dates come and people wait many months because the administration did not add staff to handle the deluge? When people are stupid enough to ignore news casts, even from the governor, to get out of the way of Hurricane Andrew, they are just stupid and need stupid signs. When I pay lots of good money to people in the same situation, people who have the ability to deal with the storm and are on the public payroll, I know that my money is being wasted at the general cost of loss of quality of life when I hear that months go by with nothing. This is what taxes are for?
Do not get me wrong. It is the buck stops here thing. When I worked, I did not put my lack of ability to schedule work on the shoulders of team mates or the secretary. I do not blame the people behind the desks sorting papers and trying to make sure that everything that came in goes out in the same condition along with the additions. I am sure that these people are working their hearts out to serve their customers, the American public. The problem is their boss, i.e. the President, who refused to allocate enough resources to handle the deluge. You can help. Make sure the next president is competent. And you know my opinions on that.
And I hear that some people are not getting their original documents (e.g. birth certificate) returned, When I applied for a Social Security card for my daughter several years ago, the envelope was returned with an advertisement for windshield repair but her birth certificate was gone. When I complained, they (the Social Security Office) refused to even accept responsibility saying that I was lying and that it could not have possibly happened. I got her a new birth certificate and reapplied for the card in person. When you are up to your ass in alligators, you are lucky if all you got wrong was a misplaced document.
When I got divorced my smaller family had hard times with happiness and self-concept. Other places on this site have been loaded with blame for this -- but I set up for my kids some rules. For rules, fewer is better. Rule #1: Be happy. Rule #2: Like yourself. There was no Rule #3 but I ran into another Rule #2 that I also like: Always make the best move. So I accept that as my Rule #3. The problem is that these rules must be self-imposed.
Do not lead someone else's life. If you are married and compromising yourself (and your children), something must change.
People tell me that I trust other people too much. They are correct. I do. I trusted my wife when I heard that she had male friends. We got divorced. I trusted my daughter when she accepted help from me after she got divorced. It cost me my lifestyle. Etc. But I am happy (thanks to a woman named Amy). I have some modicum of self-respect and am respected by others. I could use a little more. But to lose my trusting of people would change who I am and I like who I am. To my friends who would like me to offer advice, you just read it. It is the best I can do. I have a few friends that I would like to advise on their choices but I will not since they are perfectly able to make their own choices. All I can do is be at their sides when the choices are made. If you are one of my friends reading this, thanks for being my friend.
I was talking about some of my high school escapades to a friend the other day and she referred to me as a troublemaker. I brought the conversation up with my daughter as I never thought of myself as a troublemaker. We have too many rules. That is the problem. If everyone followed all of the rules all of the time there would be no creativity. There would be no invention. There would be no progress. There would be only people looking over their shoulder to make sure that someone did not catch them forgetting about one rule or another.
I am not stating that we should all go out and rob banks. That is not about following rules, that is just plain anti-social. I can think of a short list:
Nothing criminal. When I went to work for Chrysler, my father warned me to not make waves in the automobile industry. I made waves. I computerized the manufacturing schedule process. I put personnel and payroll online. I helped automate the online warrantee system. I and a lot of IBM friends, helped put Chrysler on the leading edge of computer data processing in 1967. I did this because I did not like the rules and wanted the world, my company, and myself better. I hurt some feelings. I had managers who hated me. I was not perfect. I did some things that were not all good and I had problems in the hallways with my girlfriend. But Chrysler was on the map. I learned more about IBM operating systems than anyone I knew. In 18 months. Troublemaker? Some thought so. Others rode the train and we did great things.
So, when I hear about the ACLU did this or did that, I like to read what they did. I do not always agree with what they do but I am always glad they do it. If we did not have the ACLU, conformists of the world would herd us all into little groups of sheep and corral us into lives making about as must progress and creativity as the banana slugs you see oozing in the hills near Santa Cruz.
When I came down with the cardiac condition called Atrial Fibrillation, the doctor prescribed Coumadin to prevent my blood from clotting. When you have a weak heart and an irregular heart beat, you need something to prevent blood from collecting in various corners of your system. Coumadin does this without doing some other bad things that blood thinners do. But there is a side to this that makes this medication interesting. Vitamin K (found in some green foods) counteracts Coumadin such that how much Coumadin I need depends upon my metabolism and my diet. Once on this medicine, my blood is tested for Coumadin level every couple of weeks.
I initially refused to take this medicine because I knew what Coumadin is: WARFarin. The WARF stands for: Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. This stuff was invented by my Alma Mater while I was going there. It became the basis of the rat poison known as D-Con. D-Con was so popular became the Kleenex of rat poisons. But Warfarin is a cruel chemical. It thins the blood. The more Warfarin, the thinner. This is the primary side effect of the medication: thin blood. It kills rats by having them bleed to death internally. If I seriously bump my head, I have to get an immediate x-ray or I may have the same problem as the rat. If I cut myself, I shall bleed profusely. If I enter the hospital for surgery, my necklace tells the doctors to wait a week before cutting. And anyone on this medicine had better have a bracelet or a necklace warning doctors.
Remember Israel's Sharon having to wait a week for surgery? Those of us with the necklace know. But there is a zinger here. Zinger is one of my favorite words. It is sort of like finding a chocolate chip in your vanilla ice cream. If you love chocolate, this surprise is not all bad. But if you do not like chocolate, you are sort of pissed off. The Warfarin zinger is the Vitamin K effect. They have now added Vitamin K to many pet foods. Vitamin K has no nutritional value for the pet. None at all. So why put it there? To safeguard your pet in the event it eats rat poison. It costs money to add vitamins to pet food. But they figure that enough pets will eat rat poison that the investment is worth it.
I do not know about you but the concept that there is enough rat poison out there that anyone's pet cat, dog, or gerbil may be eating it is frightening to me. They are finding anti-freeze in Chinese toothpaste. Where do I look to find nascent rat poison?
This is a little lesson in Chuck Kelly Economics. I have been complaining to my stock broker since the first of the year that milk and soda prices are escalating rapidly. To heck with gas prices, staple food items are far more critical. My daughter tells me that after months of my bitching, the national and local news casters are finally getting the point. If the price of gas goes up, you drive less or buy a more economical car and blame either the Iranians or GWB depending upon your politics.
If the price of houses goes up you get a bigger mortgage or a smaller house or live longer in an apartment. If the price of motorboats goes up, you buy it anyway because for those Republicans that buy motorboats, price is not the issue. For those of us not rich enough to buy a motorboat, the price of food items becomes a serious problem.
The banks invented credit cards (stay with me here) to get Americans to accept the concept of perpetual debt. The banks love debt as they charge interest and credit card debt pays the highest interest. I mean houses and cars get loans at competitive rates but very few people look at the fine print on their bank statements.
So what does this have to do with the price of food? 10 years ago they finally changed the banking laws to permit buying food on credit. So now you can increase your debt by buying dinner. This is insidious. Insidious? Another favorite word. It means that there is a negative effect which is continuous and increasingly dangerous to your health. Sort of like arsenic in the water supply. You may not notice it but sooner or later you will get very sick and the cure is as slow as the ingestion.
Food debt is the same way. One day you wake up with a whole lot of debt and you did not change your life style. Now you will have to change. Vacation will be a visit to the Grand Canyon rather than the Grand Cayman. Etc.
So when I notice that the price of milk has gone up a dollar per gallon at Wal-mart in a period of 6 months and when I notice that during the same period, soda and ice have also risen by 25%, I start screaming to anyone that will listen: you may not notice that inflation is rampant -- but your wife knows. My stock broker turned a deaf ear to my complaints. Now the Fed (Federal Banking System) is guarding the national interest rates because of the price of milk. No one else noticed that in two weeks the staple food prices at Sam's Club went up 20%?
Where has this taken us? Inflation of expensive items cause effects on the sale of those items. Inflation of food, drug, and clothing nudges and keeps nudging us into a poorer life style. Why are these prices going up? I (no surprise here) blame GWB. More people in the USA have lost their high-paying jobs for lower paying jobs but the production costs of food have not gone down. Therefore, a poorer worker pays proportionally more for his food. There is always the guns versus butter problem that you learn about in the real Econ 101. We have higher priced butter because we have been making too many guns. Food must be transported and the higher cost of fuel is added to the price of food items as they must get to market rapidly. Many little problems that add to each other.
You want to solve the problem? Elect a president who got good grades in Econ 101. Elect a president who gets his advice from qualified advisors and not from the owner of his baseball team.
There is always a tendency to confuse fact with fiction. One day when lost in New York City, I had deja vu: I had been here before. Where I was was someplace I could have never been nor wanted to be. I was in the courtyard where the knife fight scene from West Side Story was filmed. West Side Story was a copy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet brought into the 20th Century. In fact, there was no Romeo. There was no Juliet. There were no romantic dances to be held in this courtyard. The courtyard was real (cleaner in the movie) but nothing else was. It is easy to fantacise that the values to be learned from fiction include the players. But it is not true. So when there is so much to be learned about what is happening in the real world, I get really angry when the "news" stations spend half their space and much of their headline space on TV shows.
I bookmark the news web sites: msnbc, cnn, yahoo (remember: Fox is not a news anything at all), etc. I like that I can configure the Yahoo site but it is sort of drab. I like the MSNBC news slant better than that of CNN. The CNN site keeps downloading empty HTML files that clutter up my screen. But what really frosts my cake is the amount of TV show clutter that takes the place of news. I mean, do people who want to see what is happening in their city, state, country, and world really care about who in Hollywood said what about whom or which person is likely to not be on a TV show this week? It is bad enough that the news sites have sections for these, I can live (read that as 'ignore') with them. But when the main item with the big picture at the top is a TV show person who will not be there this week, I really believe that someone (or a whole lot of someone's) has their head (s) screwed on wrong. Please news sites, just give me the news.
I read today that Disney Studios will ban smoking (cigarettes, etc.) in its movies and discourage smoking in its affiliate studios. Really? Two comments: 1. It's about time. 2. I don't believe it for one minute.
Walt Disney died of lung cancer from smoking. That should tell us two things: 1. There is a history of smoking in the company. 2. The company does not really care about who does or does not smoke. It should tell us that the precedent set by their founder should be enough to discourage his successors but from my own experiences I know it did not.
I always liked Disneyland. In 1973 my family (wife only at that time) moved to Phoenix. We quickly made visits to my sisters in Los Angeles and San Diego and visited Disneyland several times. We visited there shortly after our baby was born (August, 1975). She fell in love with Disneyland as had we. For many years she remembered that trip -- unusual for a baby. What did we like about it? It was clean. The people were well-behaved: no line skipping, no abusive language. Straight out of the Nelsons (Oh -- I forgot: you forgot about the Nelsons. Look it up: start with Ozzie and Harriet). AND No Smoking. No Smoking in any building. No Smoking in any line waiting for a building. You could smoke outside where you, in general, did not bother anyone.
I would have like smoking banned from the entire park but then I lived with a father who smoked and I was sick to my stomach most of the time he was home or we were traveling. My older daughter has the same condition. It is NOT psychosomatic: we really get sick.
With me so far? In 1989 my two daughters and I moved to Boca Raton, Florida. One of our first trips was north to Orlando to visit Disney World. My older daughter had been there when she was a baby when our family took a camping trip to Florida. But those memories had faded. We skipped Disney World in 1979 when we were in Florida as too many other things were on our mind at the time and we were going broke financing the local K-MArt with the things we needed to furnish our new motor home.
But in 1990 when we got our first break, we three took off for Disney World. This was a really rude awakening. I had learned from experience that most Asians smoke. A good portion of the California tourist population is Asian. But somehow they managed to keep their need to pollute their lungs and my air to a minimum while visiting Disneyland. Now I found that most Floridians and most Europeans smoke -- and they are not as considerate as the Asians. At Disney World there was smoke every where. Smoke in waiting lines. Smoke in theatres. Smoke in bathrooms. Smoke in restaurants. Smoke on the amusements. People smoked in front of the No Smoking signs. Before we left, we went to the front office and complained about the smoke. This was where I learned that the Disney Corporation might as well have owned the cigarette companies.
The man behind the counter told us that smoking was encouraged in the park as most of their customers smoked and they did not want to hurt anyone's feelings -- they might not return to the park (as if my feelings did not count and it did not mater that I would never return to his park?) He refused to consider our complaint. I asked for his supervisor. With some reluctance, she gave us a complaint form and I filled it out. I gave specific examples of people, places, and times of people smoking in places where they should not have been and the individual park employee that I had asked to restrain the smokers. These employees had informed me that enforcement of the No Smoking policy was not part of their jobs or even a part of any policy. The signs were just there.
The complaint form was accepted by the very rude supervisor. The first employee just smirked. About two months later I received a letter from the Disney Corporation apologizing for any inconvenience that I had encountered in their park and they hoped I would return again soon. No comment on their rude employees (I had included their names on the complaint form). No comment on the No Smoking policy. Just a statement that the park was there for everyone's convenience, not just a few.
We never went back to Disney World. In my lifetime I shall never return there. I have since been to Disneyland and find it as enjoyable as ever albeit much more expensive. My older daughter had originally planned to have her wedding there. If I am in the neighborhood, I shall go there. Disney World? Not a chance.
Do I believe that the announced No Smoking policy in their movies will actually be followed? What do you think? I think the executives are just blowing more smoke in our faces to make more dollars by pretending to one-up Pollyanna. Disney Execs: I dare you to have the guts prove me wrong.
I just read that people are shirking their responsibility of jury duty. I think this is stupid as it is the easiest way any person can make sure that our democracy continues to be free. But some places make jury duty difficult at best. When I lived in California, I got a jury summons. I was to be available for service for 1 week. On Sunday of the appointed week I was to a special number and was informed of whether I needed to appear on Monday. My jury notification assigned me a number. During the week I called each night to see if my number were needed the next day. By Wednesday the message read that no more numbers would be called. I received a letter stating that I had fulfilled my jury service requirement for the next 5 years. This is easy and really how it should be.
On the other hand, I am now a legal resident of Texas. We all now that the South is as far behind the rest of the country as California is ahead. In any case, I ge my mail a month at a time. So I receive a jury summons for a week two weeks before I get the card itself. It states that if I have not shown up at the courthouse on the designated dates that I am in contempt and a sheriff warrant may be issued for me. The card includes a list of exemptions hat can be checked off and returned -- as long as the return is made prior to the court date.
The Texas mechanism is so archaic that I wonder if Texas has left the 19th century, let alone, the 20th century. Relying on the US postal service for things resulting in criminal offenses is at least barbaric or criminal in itself. Requiring a retired, traveling person to return to Texas or be arrested the next time they enter the state is equally absurd. Being out of state or out of the country is listed as an exemption only if in the military service. I am to return to Livingston whenever they say from wherever I am to maybe be needed in the county courthouse? I should join the reserve and ask to be sent to Iraq at the age of 63? Don't laugh -- this has been done -- but not by me.
In other words, forcing legal actions against potential jurors is a good thing only if the court system has a responsible method of selecting and notifying people of their responsibility. Texas has shown itself to not be in this category. If I were in Livingston or anywhere nearby I would be proud to accept jury duty. When I am on the beach in Mexico and get a letter saying the Polk County Sheriff is looking for me because I did not show up at the Livingston courthouse last week, is not in this category.
I just read an article in the news that Wal-Mart is taking advantage of teenagers because these children 'volunteer' to bag people's groceries and other items. Some government official says the kids should be paid. The tone of the article is definitely anti-Wal-Mart. At least Wal-Mart has signs indicating that these kids live on the tips of the customers. Other stores do not. But the Mexicans know. I am a poor tipper. Waitresses, yes. Others, no. But the news item has it all wrong. Somebody is playing the "it's not fair game" with Wal-Mart as the target. In almost every tienda, mercado, whatever in Mexico there is a box or a dish at the end of the counter. Frequently there is a child there. Mostly the child will bag your groceries. A few centavos in the dish is the best he can expect. Why? In Mexico the Peso is the primary unit of currency. It is worth about 9 1/2 cents. But, like the USA still dealing with pennies, the Mexicans still deal with centavos. 100 centavos make a peso. When was the last time you could buy anything for .095 cents? The same is true in Mexico but the store prices will round to the nearest 10 centavos (worth less than a penny) leaving you with coins you cannot use. You dump them in your pocket if you like to hear coins rattling (aluminum coins do not rattle well) or you dump them in the little box for the kid who did you the favor of bagging your groceries. I have never liked the practice as I also think it exploits children. But after this article, I shall make a point of leaving my change in the box and hope that the boy (or girl) has something to eat tonight.
Remember that poverty to the level of hunger is common in Mexico -- and the government's idea of food supplements for the poor amounts to less than one meal per month. Oh! Tipping is not generally done in Mexico -- except for these centavos. Waitresses do not get tips from Mexicans, only gringos. And gringos think that following local custom and not tipping is beneficial to the Mexican culture. No lie. I have heard that argument too many times.. In the major restaurant in this town, the manager keeps the tips, the waitresses the abuse. In the nicer restaurant, the lead waitress gets 100 pesos for a 10-hour day -- and the gringo's tips. But food and clothing and diapers cost more in Mexico than they do in the USA. You are not going to change Wal-Mart except to have them expel the kids but you can help feed him dinner by tossing your centavos in the box.
I am not a writer. I am not a recognized critic. My opinion does not count. But I do have an opinion as a reader of all 7 books. I have watched all of the movies. I have read the first 6 books multiple times. My only serious critique of the first 6 is that they were written by a woman and I do not like women writers. These books were so good that I put this bias aside.
But book 7 is different and is a great disappointment. I can buy the storyline as a whole. I think that the storyline is as good as the others. But her actual story writing jeopardizes the entire series. No, not jeopardizes -- ruins.
She wrote like Steven Spielberg was going to direct the movie. She jumped from one frying pan into the next frying pan. Character development is necessary in a novel -- we do not see it here except in jumps of insight that are more out of character than development. What little growth there is was imposed upon them and not learned and formed by their existing personalities and new experiences. Oh. They grew older in the last two chapters. And the second was 19 years older.
The jumping outside of the story for book excerpts, Snape's memory, and other tricks to juxtapose history are excuses for not writing good text. and the entire end of the book is about his dying. Again we get the ghosts anticipating that he will join them. Are we to believe that we are getting ready to see him die? I think not. First off, the TV news has told us that he survives. Second off, the entire book expects him to live. The hopes and works of hundreds of people are waiting for him to make two touchdowns in the last two minutes of play. Rowling should listen to the Ice Bowl -- Bart Starr in against Dallas. Then she would understand both how we know Bart/Harry must win the game and how he must feel about doing it. A little of walking into doom goes a long way. The last segment of the book with Harry walking in doom is not the act of a hero or a winner. In this book Harry wins over Voldemort solely by means of the mechanical invention of the author. This is not creative writing it is more like the science fiction story where the hero wakes up after a bad dream.
The real loss on Voldemort was that this greatest evil wizard of all time accidentally created a 7th horcrux when he killed the parents and this has made him defective and unstable. This is OK in the first books as she claims that the books have developed in complexity along with her intended audience. I might have even bought it in the 7th book if it were the first time that a curse caused a serious deviation -- but it is not. I dislike when an author runs out of tricks for their hero and reuses old tricks. I mean if it is a trick that the hero has learned from experience that is something else but here it is the author's trick and not a trick of one of her characters. I do hate the idea that for 7 books he has been defective to the degree that the entire series changes from dealing with an evil genius to dealing with a defective mental midget.
The most serious plot (?) let down is that there is this evolution of ownership of the Elder Wand that Harry has figured out on his way to die that Voldemort has not figured out. Harry has been portrayed as an analytical genius nowhere in the 7 books up to this point. Hermione may have been able to figure this out with a discussion among the three of them but Harry? Come on now, give us a break. And if Harry could have, how come Voldemort did not? The evil genius of the wizard world seems to have become stupid in his search for the wand and the requirements of ownership. That the book ending should come down to a matter of evil genius being evil stupidity just does not cut it. Even the bible gives the devil credit for intelligence.
The ploy of the 19 years later is a cheap trick that accomplishes many things. None of which are good. People who read the last page first do not get any idea of the story line. You do not write to these people. These people will always exist. People will cheat on their taxes and cheat at cards and cheat on their wives. These are no reason to compromise tax laws, card rules, or marriage vows. Here Rowling cheapens the concept of literature.
Than again maybe she wants to make sure that the wizardry book world will continue. She leaves the 19 years available for future stories: she has guaranteed it. This to me is sad and seems to contradict her claim that the 7th book provides some closure. During the 19 years, Harry can have some new adventures with or without his other musketeers. During these 19 years, his children can have some adventures with or without a father to guide them. This is not closure. It is certainly not the grieving process that we would expect an author to have when a book is competed.. She says she is finished with Harry but she has done the contrary. Or maybe by writing such an abortion she knows she cannot recover by further abortions.
I enjoyed re-reading the first 6 books because I wanted to see nuances that I missed and to see how the author moved from scene to scene in the development of the story line. I reread book 7 not for these reasons but because when I finished book 7 the first time, I was still pasting the pieces together.
I can buy the story line. I just cannot buy her writing a consortium attempting to tie every knot and thereby leaving her critics to have no story to criticize -- just the poor execution. It seems that she has walked around her timeline, storyline, character maps, and made sure that every possible reference anywhere in any of the books has been regurgitated. She has bent to the lowest class of critic to do this. Lower than me. She has seriously insulted her loyal readers.
One line: her insulting the intelligence of her audience by this childish collection of anecdotes on the first six books will cause the entire series to be removed from the annals of literature. It could have been great. What is the line: "Not with a bang but a whimper?" But then the guy who wrote that WAS a great English author.
I had a psychologist tell me one time that my evaluation of people was faulty. I do not give credit to what a person does. I give credit for the attempt -- credit for the analysis and credit for the endurance. Rowling gets no credit here for anything. Maybe her next books will have lots of pictures and print in big letters.
The book 5 movie reviews are so bad that I doubt I will even buy the DVD until its second release. I understand that book 6 was filmed concurrently -- this gives the actors, insulted by movie 5, no chance to leave a bad product line. If the same actors do the book 7 movie, they are adding their names to the list of those who will do anything for money -- and by book 7 I do not think they need more money. It takes a great total effort for a movie to be better than the book. Neither the great screen writing of movies 1 through 4 nor the familiar faces of Watson and Radcliff will save movie 7.
I am a bit slow on the uptake. You know this from other stories. But a few months ago I started looking for a funnel. You know, a standard funnel. You buy them in grocery stores, hardware stores, Smithy's, Wal-mart, etc. They are round with a large end tapering to a smaller tube, open at both ends. Tiny ones help you pour spices from the big box the the small box. Bigger ones permit you to do the same with flour. Medium sized ones allow you to pour gasoline into your gas tank. Maybe you can still buy the tine ones for spice but the others are gone. The one I was looking for has a long curved tube that permitted fitting into the gas tank slot and keeping the large end vertical so you do not spill the gas.
And they are all gone. I presume precisely for the reason that I need one. I carry two bottles of gasoline in my trunk. Each fitted with one of those strange filler tubes that guarantee spilling gasoline everywhere when you use them. That is, unless you have a funnel or can spend a half-hour watching a dribble. These are the Wal-Mart, California-approved tops. The spout is too big to fit into a gas filler tube. It has a neck that pushed back (with difficulty) when you insert it into a larger tube. I do this for my Honda generator. ANd it has a tricky little air tube that stops the gas flow when the tank is full. Cute. But when I withdraw the tube, gas goes everywhere until I right the tank. I then slide the slide back up to seal the tank. I really do not like spilling gasoline all over my generator since the next thing I am going to do is start the generator and the exhaust pipe might be very hot.
I can buy a funnel with a very short, fat, tube. I can buy a funnel made of plastic with cute little wrinkle thing to permit it to flex with a very small exit pipe. This is useless for gasoline transfer (or any other transfer) since the tricky extension screws onto the funnel part (rectangular) loosely. You will get as much outside as down the little tube.
You can now buy at Wal-Mart a similar contraption with a tube and a clothespin at the end. Without the clothespin, it might be useful even though the plastic tube is so thin it collapses under its own weight.
But today I found one that almost works. It is like the old standard, curved tube, black plastic funnel except that it is straight and has avery short tube reduction at the end. But that smaller tube exactly fits the tank entry hole while pushing the little flap out of the way and when the tube expands, it catches and holds the funnel. It is at an awkward angle and may not hold a rush of gasoline but it will hold a small stream and that is all I need.
So for you nitwits who have changed our lives with you stupid contraptions, I now have a working funnel. Why do I think I need one when gas stations populate every corner? Where I go, there are no corners. I have a ten-gallon tank on my Tercel. Maybe 11. And I drive 200 miles at a time with few gas stations and they may be closed. I should buy a car with a bigger gas tank? No. I like the economy of my little car and even a better reason: I have no money.
Sometimes when I am reading a book and it is raining outside, I forget that it is not raining on the book characters. So I think I sort of understand. But... Around the world, around the country, around my neighborhood, around anywhere there are lots of people. Each with his/her own idea on how the world should work. Should -- I hate that word.
Remember the Cuban boy whose mother died trying to get him to freedom, the US of A? He was deported back to Cuba after the Attorney General sent a SWAT team into his home and stole him from his American family? Everyone in the USA knew the proper course of action and knew that any other course was wrong. I have lived down there. I would lunch in Little Havana. I think my opinion counts at least as much as someone living there or someone who has never been there. But I understand both sides of the argument. I would have liked him to stay. I really would have liked him to stay. But the law said, and we claim to be a nation of laws, that he had to go back. He went back.
Here is the problem. I email a merchant. I state the I have no access to phone service but I do have email. I ask for information on the merchant's latest promotion as displayed on his web page. I get an email back: please call customer service at 800-123-4567. Now. Don't you think I might have done this if I could?. Would I go through the trouble of emailing if I could have resolve my problem by simply driving 100 miles, verifying the little bars on my cell phone, and then calling?
We all have our ways of living. The problem is that we either believe everyone else lives the same way or that there is something wrong with them for not doing so. My cardiologist admires me for carrying around a little USB chip with my medical information on it. Hi-tech. But then I live outside the 800 calling area. I have email access but no cell phone access,
Another day, I email to protest the operation of my brand new cell phone. I must return the phone to the exact store from which I bought it. I am over 1000 miles from Atlanta, Georgia today. Oh, a local dealer will loan me a phone until mine is repaired. This will take a month. I will be 500 miles away in a month. What is the purpose of having a mobile telephone service if the service is not prepared for me to be mobile?
I hear some people say that "People are the same everywhere!" When I here that I know I am talking to someone who has been no where. I have lived in 20 different places. Some I liked some I did not like -- depending upon the personalities of the people living there. I have been held at gunpoint in 3 locations: South Bend, Orlando, and Phoenix. In Phoenix by a squad of police officers swarming my driveway with the claimed sole purpose of wanting to know my name. My house. My driveway. Who do they think is driving up at the end of the work day? The other 2 places I was was held up by thieves (They left with what they came with). No. People are not the same. I am not the same. My lifestyle is not the same.
My Samsung Microwave in my RV is recalled -- this model catches fire. Drive the RV to the designated Samsung repair center for a replacement. The cost to drive the RV to Phoenix and return is $300. The cost of a new microwave in Yuma is $45. The cost of a new Samsung microwave in Yuma is $60. Could I have a $60 credit? No. $45? No. Pay $300 or we will not honor the recall.
I find comfort in seeing the sandy hillside in front of my home. I find comfort in knowing that if I do not show my face in the next couple of hours, someone will come looking for me. I find comfort in knowing there are people out there who consider me family and love me as such -- people that I did not know a year ago. I take comfort in knowing that if anything happens to me, that I shall be taken care of. These things mean a lot to me. I searched all of my life for this kind of caring.
I will not give this up because someone thinks that I should live where I can make 800-number telephone calls. They could send a courteous reply to my inquiry to their advertised (by email) promotion. I will not pay $300 to replace a $60 microwave. I will not live in a bottle like it seems so many other people do.
How can I ever convince anyone that to be truly free, you must understand that freedom includes knowing that freedom to you is not the same as freedom to me? How do I convince the world that lifestyle choices involve choices -- and that we do not all make the same choices? We really do not.
Many years ago, 1979 in fact, I , that is, we, my wife and I, had a daughter, Bree, who behaved in a very confusing manner. In many ways she was hyperactive. But she could watch TV in the same awkward position for hours and not move. My wife was reasonably concerned and we (she) decided we must all l go on the Feingold diet. Dr. Feingold claimed that food colors and additives caused such erratic behavior. This is a very difficult diet. Remove ALL artificial colors and artificial preservatives from your diet for a month. If the undesired behavior goes away, you have identified the problem. You may then go back to your regular diet, one item at a time. When the undesired behavior returns, that is a food that you should not eat. There may be many such foods but you can figure out how they group and what to avoid. My daughter was allergic to a couple yellow and red dyes. We were happy.
This diet process is harder than it sounds. This not only means eating nothing artificial, it means nothing out of a plastic bad or other container containing preservatives Yes they do). Basically if you did not pick it yourself out of your own garden or kill your own pig who ate only from your garden, the food is off limits. You need a month to stop the craving. Caffeine is a biggy here.
That was 30 years ago. Dr. Feingold has been laughed out of many scientific circles. Lucky for all of us he has not thrown in the towel. I notice in today's news there is another survey which show similar results. You know how they invalidated this survey? Oh, you know , of course, that the food companies have a vested interest in invalidating people such as Dr. Feingold. They used the same argument that they always have. Just because it works, does not make it a fact. Their argument is that the studies show interesting statistics but do not prove and cause and effect.
Statistics? They can show a direct correlation between certain foods and additives and behavior changes. This is claimed only to be a statistical correlation with no basis in fact? I do not need a scientist to evaluate my daughter's nervous system and its responses to these colors to know that I do not want my daughter eating them. If 100 people all swallow a cup of arsenic and they all die, do I need a scientist to tell me that I do not want to swallow cups of arsenic? I don't think so. Hooray for people like Dr Feingold. And where is the FDA when you need them? Oh, the FDA is too busy trying to figure out how the food companies can further hide the junk they are adding to our food by further obfuscating the nutrition label. One of Parkinson's laws applies here.
I am sorely disappointed in the U. S. Treasury Department. But then again the real man in charge is not my favorite President. They have come up with a new $5. We are supposed to applaud because it has a big number 5 on the back side for the "visually impaired". That is just shit. I am sorry but the United States is the only country printing currency that makes ALL of its bills the same size, shape, and texture. Even if you are not blind, when you go to another country you are immediately impressed with the fact that you can tell the denominations apart by size. Color too but that is beside the point. The US money is all the same size and shape. The new colored money looks the same as the old except the new looks like it was dropped in the mud. But this is enough. I have hit on our stupid paper money before. And the fact that a court has sided with me but the President referred the case to a favorite appellate court which sided with him. Remember Presidents appoint appellate judges based upon their likelihood of deciding the way the President wants them to.
The other problem is that they have come up with another dollar coin. Same size, weight, composition, etc. as the other dollar coins. This sort of makes sense as you do not want the same denomination changing shapes every year. But, common guys, the reason the other coins did not survive is that they are the same size as a quarter dollar coin. Oh, yeah. They do not have knurled edges. But the news ones will according the news page. Oh, they are heavier? Not so I would notice. Why do I want heavier coins in my pocket? Someone ought to rethink this. I know non-round coins have trouble in vending machines. I know coins wear at the edges the fastest. But could we not find some way to make them different? The Mexicans (and other countries) have bimetal coins. They are two colors. We should be able to do at least this. We really need to address this problem as the paper dollar is worth so little and last for such a short time that it does not even get put into a wallet any more. It is just shoved into a pocket with the coins. This increases the wear and seriously decreases the lifetime of the bill. A useful dollar coin would be appreciated and not scorned. It just goes to show the absolute disconnect of the Federal Government that they cannot improve upon the worst idea in the century for producing money. People really want a dollar coin. They just do not want this one.
When I was a kid, the story about Goldilocks and the three bears made Goldilocks out to be this cute little girl who ransacked a house and ran away when the owners came home. My revised story to my children was about the vandal that she really was. Today I watched an MSNBC news clip of a vandal and thief intimidate a Mexican merchant .at his own store. The thief (who even identified himself for the camera) walked away with the merchant's property, a US Flag.
This was a travesty of justice in itself. We have assault, vandalism, and robbery shown on a national network and it is the merchant who is made to look bad. This action is just wrong and the police should arrest the man. The merchant was a Mexican who probably had not read the Code any more than had MSNBC. This should be listed as a hate crime since the thief made it a point to attack a minority merchant.
But there is a second thing very wrong here. MSNBC.com states that flying a flag above the US flag is illegal ("against the law"). It is NOT. The United States Code elucidates proper protocol for displaying, using, and destroying the flag. Protocol is NOT law. There is no jail sentence for not following protocol. It may be rude. It may be upsetting but it is not illegal. Making any display or use of the flag illegal would violate the first amendment to the United States Constitution. The last several Republican Congresses have attempted this abridgment of the Constitution. The First Amendment rights are paramount to our lives in the United States.
if we permit television shows and web sites to transform prejudices into established law then we return to the days prior to the Civil and Equal rights movements and we need to start the fight all over again. Or maybe we are calling Myanmar news black and our newscasts are blacker.
I am reading in the news that a copy of boys were found by their father a couple of hours after a car accident -- after the police had made no attempt to locate them. I am exaggerating? I do not think so. In 1970, Easter weekend (described better somewhere in this history) I was traveling early morning on Good Friday from South Bend to Madison using US 12 and US 20. During the night near Michigan City (not too far from East Gary) a train had plowed snow and ice across the highway. The locals had called the Indiana Highway Patrol multiple times. I hit the 3-ft wall of ice, spun around and collided with a semi. By all rights the accident should have killed me. It almost did. Rather than accepting ANY responsibility for not clearing the highway, the Indiana Highway Patrol tickets me (dead) for falling asleep at the wheel.
But they did worse. The Indiana Highway Patrol did not even bother to see if I were alive. A couple hours later, the tow truck driver noticed I was breathing and had me transported to the hospital. A couple of hours? I do not know -- I was in a coma for three days. But the time of day that I was admitted to the hospital was 3 hours after the accident.
So I am alive because of an observant tow truck driver. If the Police had taken the warnings of the ice seriously, the accident would not have happened. If the police had made any examination of me at all -- lust looked at me -- I would have been in the hospital very quickly. But they did neither. I found out about the ticket almost a year later. I was never presented with the ticket. I never paid a fine for the ticket I did not receive. If the cop had just stuck the ticket in my pocket, he might have seen me breathing. I was much luckier than the kids who were met by the same police, just 35 years later. I am luckier: I am alive and they are dead. Maybe someone will notice now that this is a police department in serious need of attention.
I have been watching a movie: "The Last Boy Scout" where Bruce Willis yells at his movie daughter that she lives in his house and is his daughter and she must show him respect. I am not sure he is correct but the names she calls him and her language are indeed out of place.
I live in Mexico where respect is part of every life from the day it arrives. Respect is built into the language. I have covered that elsewhere. But the movie reminds me of a part of my life a long time ago. It reminds me of incidents with my father. An incident related to me by my younger sister is of a conversation she had with my father . She had told him that respect cannot be demanded nor can it even be earned. It can only be given -- freely. Further that a person resorting to violence had lost the discussion/argument/respect. She told me that he said that this was very astute coming from someone so young and asked her where she had learned it. She told him that she had learned it from her brother. This was a shot to the head -- he suddenly realized why I had all those years survived his attempts to ruin my life.
My father's lack of respect for me as a person deprived me of understanding when respect should be given. In Mexico, the children learn the concept from the structure of their language and their families. Not being able to respect my family resulted in even to this day me having difficulty calling others by formal titles and names. In Spanish I have to work to use the formal verb forms and am upset when they are used to me by my friends.
I learned about respect
in one day. I hope others learn about respect in a more positive
manner. I have found in my Mexican friends the love and respect
of family. My family is here now -- except for my beloved
daughter, Megan who is still in Berkeley.
I just watched 4 videos of the incident n Florida where a
student was arrested for inciting a riot and was tased for asking an
extended question. I also read that the police were absolved of
any responsibility. You know my opinion of violence in
Florida. Maybe not. Florida is a violent and perverted
place. They have the strangest crimes hitting the national
news. If you notice mailing addresses, most of the scams, phony
vacations, etc., originate in Florida. If you get a rude person
on an 800 number, there is a good chance that the call center is in
Jacksonville or Ft. Lauderdale. If you hear about a cop pimping
his wife, it is in Florida. Enough.
First off, the police had no business using a taser on this
kid. Period. The 4 published videos show 5 police officers
sitting on this kid at the back of the room. They dragged him
here. They could have dragged him 20 more feet -- out the double
doors and not made a public display of their abuse. They stopped
where they did to demonstrate their violence to the entire
audience.
This paints a very vivid picture of how the police want citizens to
behave. Police and the the Constitution have different
objectives. The Constitution guarantees rights of free
expression. Police want everybody to be quiet, conform, and stay
in their houses so that they have nothing better to do than go to the
coffee shop. The balance point varies from place to place.
Florida comes closer to the coffee shop.
Yes, I know the kid apologized once on his way to the police
station. If it would reduce my chances of more violence and
Florida jails, I would apologize for killing Hitler. Do you have
any idea what that kind of voltage does to your mental processes.
I do. Mental clarity is not a survivor. Thinking of
avoiding another taser shot becomes a very high priority.
Continuing my education also comes to mind.
How many trained police officers does it take to remove one student from an audience without resorting to the violence we saw? We saw the number grow from two to five as they approached the door. Five trained police officers cannot take one student 20 more feet? Oh, he was on the floor? Who put him there? Could not someone drag him 20 feet? None of the videos show the student acting violently against the officers. None of the videos portray the student as a threat to the officers. The only thing the videos show is a student trying to ask a protracted question and physically trying to stay in range of being able to voice his abridgment. He had no weapon. He was not striking the officers. He did not demonstrate any martial arts. He voiced no violence against either Kerry no his attackers. He just fought to stay in the room. Even the few clips of Kerry speaking showed him trying to address both the question and the violence against an American citizen.
This is why I no longer live in Florida. This is exactly
why. And letting the country see what the police can do and get
away with there only encourages more violence and more conformity in
other locations.
I used to ask my kids when they were small: "What do you fear the
most of anything?" More than being robbed or held up or attacked
in the United States, I fear the police. I have had a Phoenix
police officer threaten to beat me up on the side of the road for
refusing to divulge my Social Security number -- as he added charges to
the ticket he was writing. We compromised: I gave him the number
and he removed the excessive charges. I would have fought the
excessive charges in court and I told him so. I could not have
survived a beating by a person with his training, weapons, and
disposition. And I did not want my two-year-old daughter to view
her father beaten. But Florida police do not have my
reservations: the more who see the better the lesson: if you do
not conform we will hurt you.
A Nebraska woman runs away with her boy student, drives her car across the Mexican border at Mexicali where the Border Patrol cameras catch her license plate and Mexican officials are notified. Wow. I guess if you do not live near the border you do not know the level of technology involved. The news says that the police "guessed" who was in the car when the computer recognized the license plate. With the myriad of Border Patrol cameras, I suspect this was better than a "guess". The license plate would be a giveaway but those other cameras looking into your windshield are not for decoration. And do not think for a minute that the Mexican police are just fat men grabbing gringo money in their spare time. I have seen the database available to their police officers. You would be better off in Nebraska.
A hint though. They could have walked across the border
separately, met a ways into town and proceeded from there. As
long as they stayed within the frontier (for the rest of their lives)
and never got stopped for a violation, they do not even need
papers. To make sure that they did not get lost, before they crossed,
they could have bought cell phones that work on both
sides. If they crossed at
high traffic times, even the pedestrian cameras would have had trouble
recognizing them. She, being a teacher, could educate him and
thereby eliminate the need for Mexican papers to enter school.
They could buy a little house on the outskirts of town, set up a
tienda, and live happily ever after. That is, of course, if the
Border Patrol never told the Mexicans that the two were suspected of
being in Mexico. This means they got to Mexicali having never
charged anything along the way. No gas in Yuma. No Denny's
breakfast in Tucson. And certainly no abandoned car in El Centro.
And remember: the US
has agents on BOTH sides of the border.
It would be best if they cross at different crossings and use
crossings a long distance from where they abandoned the
car. Different Greyhounds / Am track trains: a minor traveling
alone may be recognized before one traveling with a pretty young woman
obviously not his mother. And call home for money? The man
waiting at the local Telegrafos office is not your friend.
Of course, also from Mexicali, you could hop the freight train and
go down the coast, even to Guatemala. On that train, they would
be lucky to not be attacked
by other criminals of a more violent persuasion. And they would
need
pesos: you remember people with dollars. You would need to know at
least a little Spanish or even
the street people would figure out that you were fugitives. All
it would take is a picture of the two on the wall of a toll booth and
it is all over. On the buses (that go everywhere) the soldados
check papers.
I love Mexico but I would not want to be a fugitive with
police on both sides looking for me.
In 1969 I was beat up by the police for just walking down the street
to work (Mifflin Street).
In 1981 in Phoenix I as I drove my motorcycle into my driveway at my
home, multiple cars converged on my drive with their inhabitants
all running at me with their guns drawn. The leaders comments:
"Don't
worry, we are the police!" Guns have always frightened me.
After Mifflin Street, police with guns frighten me more. American
police with guns frighten me the most. It is one of the things I
like about Mexico: when the local policeman waves at me he is
armed with a smile and when he waves at me, there is no gun in his
hand. Oh. The Phoenix police? They simply wanted to
ask me if I were the person who called asking about the sudden rash of
old cars parked on the neighborhood streets. I got my answer: the
old cars were now parked at my drive. I guess returning from the
dentist is deemed a violent act. My tooth thought so. The
crazy woman who simultaneously tried to run over a twelve year old girl
was not deemed the threat that I was: the crazy lady missed the girl by
10 feet. These police officers stated to me at the time that
although the car had driven two blocks in pursuit of the girl, this was
not considered an attempt on her life as the car missed her by 10 feet
when the girl ran onto the neighbor's lawn and the array of police cars
at my drive prevented the crazy woman from further pursuit of her
victim. To the police, I was was the real threat: I had
questioned their motives. I should have been thankful: if the
police had not been threatening me with their guns, the neighbor girl
might have been dead.
Every time I see an American policeman with an American flag on his arm I want to rip it off. The violence that the policeman represents is an insult to our forefathers who died trying to free us this same kind of oppression. This little flag sewn onto the sleeve of each policeman (and every other government uniform) has come to represent armed force against the citizens of America.
In Madison (WI) the governor called the National Guard on campus. He armed them with bayonets. He chose farm area units so that the soldiers would not identify with the students. This was purely a political action since the students had shown no evidence of violence: students simply boycotted class to support the legislature's elimination of teacher pay for graduate student teachers while at the same time placing a suspected racist into the state office of inter-racial affairs. The students dropped flowers at the soldiers feet. What did the soldiers do? Some seriously injured the citizens they were sworn to protect. The more rational soldiers just dropped their bayonets and joined the students.
What's my point? The time to use physical and violent force and life-threatening weapons on a citizen of the United States is when they have shown physical and violent force and a propensity to use weapons against against the police or other persons. Tasers kill people. Bullets kill people. Every time a taser or a gun is pulled out, there is the chance that someone will die. The United States police take university courses in violence and control. We have Kent State happening almost every day now. Remember Kent State? 4 innocent persons were killed by soldiers with guns who just turned and fired into a crowd with no provocation, just fear and arrogance. The concept that a policeman must use a weapon on a person who does not also have a weapon is absolutely insane. That a police force condones such actions is indicative of what we hear about dictatorships and evil places. Recently the police shot and killed a man who had shown no violence and had only a hairbrush in his hand. He was presumed to have a gun in his hand. So what? He had shown no action to use the hairbrush as a weapon. Sort of the the old cowboy and indian movie narrative: "Shoot first and ask questions later."
They recently showed
5 police officers tackling the boy who asked Senator Kerry a question
-- and then they tasered the boy on the
floor. If 5 trained police officers cannot reasonably and quietly
remove an unarmed, non-violent person from a gallery without the use of
deadly weapons, there is something wrong with their training. He
used violence? No. He simply resisted being killed. That is
not violence. That is self-defense. And he had no weapon.
Yesterday on the news we saw a pregnant woman, unarmed, non-violent,
tasered because she wanted to leave. The video clip do not show
her informed she was
under arrest. It did not show here being read Miranda rights. She
showed no violence other than trying to leave. Pregnant.
And the department says that the cop used reasonable force and they do
not even claim that she was properly informed of here rights.
With my heart condition, that same action would have left me
dead. I do not wear a big sign saying: "I have a heart
condition, do not tase me." Maybe having a large belly is not
sufficient in a hospital to warn the officer that the woman might be
pregnant. Maybe the hospital should issue warning signs to its
visitors. Maybe we all need to carry signs saying we are
citizens. Maybe wear the national ID card on a chain around
our necks. Two of them, large, one for the front and one for the
back crying out that I am a citizen and you need to protect me -- do
not try to kill me.
If the police administrations support these assaults on its
citizens, and the citizens will not stand up and fight this oppression,
it is time to move to a country with real freedom and not
just a mockery of the word. It reminds me of the movie where Mel
Gibson screams "Freedom" as his last word as he is dying. In the
United States it is freedom that is dying. Maybe the last
citizen just decided that freedom is not worth dying for and just
redefined freedom to be the acceptance of police control. To
paraphrase and extend Mr. Eliot: Freedom is not lost
with a bang but with a whimper.
When I was a kid, we always asked our teachers why did people follow HItler? We were told that he lied about parts of his own population. We were told he lied about others wanting to war against his country. We were told that he was the master of the "Big Lie". He was elected president but usurped imperial powers. Why would anyone follow Hitler? Ask GWB.
Today I read about a woman who is fighting Bank Of America because of an identity thief who keeps removing money that she deposits to cover what he stole. She should have immediately closed the account, reported the theft to the bank and to the police. But the bank refused this by requiring forms to be filled out that would take over a week to reconcile. The woman should have just shut it down, told B of A that it was their problem, and then sued them. B of A has never shown any interest in its customers. Last week, for the first time in my lifetime I walked out of a B of A branch with no problem: I got a cash advance on my credit card. When I had an identity theft problem, Bank of the West (Not B of A) immediately opened a new account at a different branch. It took two phone calls to Netbank but when the person on the phone understood that the ball was in her court, I got the new account . Auto-deposits: no problem the first month. Auto-withdrawels same thing but each was verified by phone call. You want protection from identity theft? Use a bank that cares for you (Hint: B of A is not on the short list).
The U.S. Postal Service has announced a new stamp: "The Forever Stamp". When you buy one, you can use it for first class no matter where the rates go. They are hoping that you will go out and buy plenty of them so that they can hold your money until you use the stamp or lose it and need to buy another. I guess this is good business on their part. It does make me curious though. Maybe it is just more of the GWB arrogance showing through in a different department. It is my understanding that the lettered, interim stamps historically have not been usable for international mail because international mail requires the paid postage amount be visibly imprinted on the stamps. But then maybe the new stamp can only be used for domestic mail. Maybe people will be smart enough to not buy them.
I am sort of a legalistic type so I see the Pope's visit to South America as the ultimate legal problem for the Church. The Pope has the problem of defining how far abortion-voting lawmakers separate themselves from God. This gets to the very core of the declining membership of the Church. Current society takes the more popular Christian view that one's relationship with God is assisted by community in the church as opposed to the Catholic view that ones relationship to God is defined by the Church. The Catholic Church cannot argue against the Christian thesis but it cannot support it as it invalidates the Church. To excommunicate the politicians would be to drive away the very Church members who have public support. This would be a public lose-lose situation. Instead the Pope says no communion. This makes the transaction private and personal between the politician and his confessor: he must confess his sin and promise God (or at least the confessor) to never vote for abortion again. For this politician to take communion again publicly means that the politician has done this and made this promise. I don't think so. The Pope cannot win this one.
The transcript of the interview was edited by the Vatican to soften his comments -- the Vatican admitted this. We live in a strange world.
I bought gas today at $2.38. The Sam's Club price was $2.98.
The other day I went to Sam's Club to for my weekly shopping trip. Prices have risen steeply at the Club for the last several months. Milk was now $5.16 for two gallons. California pricing in Arizona. But then I find two gallons at the Wal-Mart up the street for $4.08. I pay for club memberships so that I do not have to price-shop for all my food. Sam's Club has lost my confidence.
Today I went to Sam's Club to buy some shampoo and conditioner. $9.00 plus tax. I again followed up the visit by a stop at Wal-Mart. Same shampoo and conditioner, same bottles, same everything except the price: $7.90. I have always thought that Sam's Club had a problem because it did not whether to compete with Costco or to compete with Wal-Mart, its parent. At this point, it has conspicuously lost to both. Maybe it is time for Wal-Mart to let its pigeon go free.
In biology class 45 years ago, I learned that eyebrows protect our eyes from dust, dirt, and sand. I thought that this was just a bunch of hoke because eyelashes were better at this and eyebrows were too far away. I grew up in Wisconsin and Michigan (no dust). I concluded that eyebrows were a cosmetic legacy. I resented the women who plucked out the real hair and wrote in lines that they thought were better,
I have lived in the desert for 30 years now. I was wrong (not about the women plucking their hair). Eyebrows are for keeping sand out of your eyes. I know this because I have developed a habit of rubbing my eyebrows when they itch. I have to remember to close my eyes when I do this because if I do not I will get sand in them.
I tend to be against pirating because of my software development background. The operative word here is 'tend'. When I have to pay a minimum of ten dollars for the third reprint of a DVD, and the copy-protected, encrypted, movie disk comes with a second disk, similarly encoded, in a package that includes extra pages to hide the DVD and an extra cover that must be ripped apart just to discover what I have purchased, I know the media business is taking me for whatever it can take me for. I want to see the movie. The reason for all of the other junk is to try to make me feel like I got a bargain. No bargain: just cheated. Therefore, for my friends who, like me, are concerned with viewing the movie, I make copies and pass them out to my friends. No profit here. It takes me about 4 hours to decrypt, decode, and copy the movie DVD to another DVD that can be viewed on any normal DVD player -- even those with different region codes. My copies are as good as the originals -- none of this black magic copy stuff for me. That is why the f4 hours minimum and the use of at least 4 writable DVDs.
Yes, you got my money -- but you only got it once.
I think we take the massive efforts of scientists and engineers very much for granted. I spent 40 years in telecommunications, impacted by the Carterphone (look it up) decision and the migration to data-oriented transmissions from analog; from mechanical relay switching to speed of light switching at glass junctions; and the migration to personal phones from house phones. This is my technology. My father was in the space program designing guidance systems. The latest shuttle launch gauged the shuttle. From pictures taken during lift-off they see that the gauge was caused by a piece of tank foam and not ice. They will analyze the damage with a remote laser camera. Do you have any idea the amount of technology involved in obtaining and evaluating this information?
Here is a hint. In 1960 all missile tests flew at night. Each missile had a blinking red light at the top. It blinked at a constant rate. From the cameras (film), they could determine (later) the acceleration of the missile by counting film frames between blinks. Missile tests failed because the time it took for the direction sensor to determine that the missile was off balance/course to inform the servo to correct the off balance caused severe directional oscillations. My father blamed the slow speed of light traversing the long wires from the sensor to the servo and claimed the problem could be improved but never resolved. He never lived to see microprocessors. Those problems are legacy today. How many technology changes were made while you ate your breakfast this morning?
Here are a couple short items on Leopards. I am not sure why leopards are picked on.
You go for a walk. You encounter a hungry leopard. You have three choices: ignore the leopard, flee the leopard, attack the leopard. The first two choices will solve the leopard's hunger problem. The third gives you a chance to live.
You and your friend are out for a walk. You encounter a hungry leopard. It eats your friend. You leave before it looks for seconds. Cheaters, liars, and thieves behave just like the leopard. Why do you not show them the same respect as you do the leopard?
I just read in the news about the border crossing problems in El Paso, Texas. I have just returned from a trip where in San Jose I encountered a woman adamantly opposed to Spanish-speaking in the USA. This isolationist-segregationist attitude of the USA must stop. The USA has two borders. People cross both borders. I do not hear about a French backlash (although there might be one in Buffalo). I resent everything I buy at Costco being labeled in two languages. Either one language or three but labeling products with the other most notable isolationist-segregationist language only helps people to identify the USA as such. Making it increasingly difficult to cross the border does not stop the illegals but it does hamper the legals. With all of the new technology in place, crossing the border has become slower -- not faster.
Ah. They have mostly stopped the dog searches. The yellow scanners and dope sniffers are mostly in place. The additional concrete barriers are in place. The prioritizing makes me go through pretty fast, My Mexican friends with the visas go through fast. But the wait in line for the same length line is longer. I wonder when I present my passport, my USA passport, why I get asked if I am an American citizen.
I wonder why I have to tell the man that I have a Texas license plate and not Arizona. His computer says it is Arizona. My plate is the ONLY thing on his TV screen and it is obviously not Arizona. Texas plates are black and white (like police cars). Arizona plates are colored with a big cactus picture. But then maybe the guy who wrote the recognition software writes color-blind programs.
If the USA were serious about the border crossing, it would find a
way to stop the tons of drugs that cross that border every day. I
sincerely doubt that school kid pockets or farm workers shoes are
drug-lined. There is no question that the
drugs are crossing by the truck load. No. I do not know
where and I do not
see them.
I hate companies whose primary business is dealing with money as a
commodity. Why is a bank rich? It is making profits on the
money you have given it while it gives you nothing or peanuts in
return. Why is an insurance company rich? It collects 33%
more in premiums than it pays in claims. Why is a casino
rich? Because a lot of people think they can improve upon gaming
statistics (odds). Why are statistics called 'odds'?
Because the 'odds' are against you. For example: When do
you draw to an inside straight? Never.
It is not the millionaire who pays for all of those lights in Las
Vegas. It is the average Joe who spends just a couple of hundred
and then moves on. There are hundreds of thousands of Joes.
They lose some money, spend a lot of money on meals, rooms, room
service, and dinner shows, and then go home happy. Believe ti or
not, I always won enough at blackjack to pay for my trip. That is
history as the Indian casinos changed the odds in their favor and the
Nevada casinos followed suit. A good card counter could get a 2%
or 3% edge on the dealer. Bet the right amounts at the right
times and you can walk off with a pile. The other games are just
gambling and the house wins. There are thousands of people who
think they can beat the odds. They cannot as any mathematician
can tell you. Counting cards is not easy and requires much
practice and memory games.
So these same people think they can beat the odds in the housing
market. The casinos are honest. They lay it out in front of
you: you are there for two reasons: to enjoy yourself and to inhale a
lot of cigarette smoke. The cost of enjoying yourself is up to
you.
The insurance companies require all sorts of government assistance
which is obtained, more or less by blackmail, to keep their strangle
hold on its customers. And you do need insurance. Life insurance
if you have a family. Health insurance unless you want to
die. Property insurance unless you want to go broke when your
house burns or the neighbor kid breaks his leg. Automobile
insurance for similar reasons.
But you do not have to be stupid here. In all of these places
you are going to lose money. This is a fact. Live with
it. There are some simple rules on dealing with banks. My
general principle is to reduce risk. I took a course in this in
college. Reducing risk should be paramount in all of our
lives. You do not have to stay home and in bed. You can
jump from airplanes. But you should always know the odds when you
make your decisions.
Reducing risk on a mortgage? Easy: buy the cheapest 30-year,
fixed rate mortgage you can find. If the rates are too high, buy
a 7-year balloon mortgage and then refinance when the rates go
down. A variable rate mortgage? Are you crazy? You
can only lose money on one of these -- and you can lose your house
too. Buying one of these is like the mouse walking into the mouse
trap because he likes the taste of peanut butter. He will
die but he may die after he has eaten.
First off, the real estate agent or whomever, gets a commission from
the bank on you getting the loan from that bank. This is true of
car loans too. In these cases, the agent is not your
friend. You might get a better rate if you went to the bank
itself but then again you might have a good agent and he will give you
a lower rate. You pay this commission however it goes: negotiate
the commission.
Second off, the commission is only paid if the loan is made.
There are wonderful sales promotions to get you to buy loans.
There is nothing sexy about a 30-year, fixed-rate loan. You can
compare apples and apples between any banks for the best deal.
But the myriad of variable rate plans will dazzle even a serious
financier. Low initial, changes with the prime, changes
with the duration, changes with the moon cycles. Whatever, the
key word is 'changes'. These changes will never ever be in your
favor. Oh. If the prime rate goes down, your payment may go
down. But then again, it may not. The rules are
intentionally confusing and verbose. People will not read all of
their contract because of the obfuscation of the real bottom line: the
bank will make more money from this loan than the 30-year-fixed.
Period.
You are planning to earn more money next year? You are willing
to bet your house on that? You are more stupid than I thought.
Your mother will die and leave you her inheritance? You are
willing to bet your house on that? My mother will probably
outlive me.
Your wife will go back to work and you can make higher payments?
What about the baby? Absentee parents or abusive childcare or
overloaded grandmother moving into the house?
If you cannot afford the payments now, gambling that you can afford
the payments next year is risking your home. Gambling that the
teaser
rate is temporary is not gambling, it is not reading the
contract. Any variable rate is a gamble and gambling against a
bank has worse odds than gambling at the roulette table. Much
worse.
So. Now the banks are trying to collect on these thousands of
variable rate mortgages and people are crying. I have no sympathy
at all for the banks. Capitalizing on greed and stupidity is what
they do. The problem is that they expect a certain percentage of
defaults. They do not expect them to all, or almost all,
default. Mostly they can resell the house and make a slight
profit. The FHA and VA will pay for those loans. But
banks are not good real estate agents and will not make the profit that
they might otherwise make. They just deal in money and the sooner
it is paid the better. I will never cry for a bank. And who
pays the FHA/VA costs? Come on now. You are not that stupid or you
would not be reading this.
Cry for the people losing their homes? No. I have tried to feel for
them. I cannot. I mean, should someone pay
for such a large quantity of people being stupid? That is the
bottom line. Bailing these people out bails out the banks.
I hate the banks. Again, I repeat, the reason I hate the banks is
because they take advantage of people being stupid. They count on
people not being smart enough to read the contract. That is how
they make their excessive profits. It is how they pay to become
one of the very largest influences on Congress. It is that
influence that will make me pay for bailing out the stupids rather than
the banks giving up their excessive profits.
No. Bailing out the people is bailing out the banks and
encouraging stupidity. Oh. The people have learned to not
do it again? Right. Our country is on its third round of
masochistic wars in my lifetime. One every 25 years. The
government does not learn. Why would its citizens learn? In the
war, people die and we do not learn? What is the loss of a home
to these same same people?
Our entire society seems determined to reward stupidity. It is
really disheartening. You want to straighten this out? Have
the banks refinance all of these loans to standard 30-year-fixed with
some bank profits going into the mix to reduce the rates but retain the
loan. Then, if the people cannot keep these payments, throw them
to the wolves. Sour grapes because I cannot afford to own a
house? No. I live in a paradise in my motorhome far beyond the
boring life of bricks and mortar.
Maybe as part of the contract for bailing the people out we
could
add a clause that says that we get to shoot them if they do it again or
have children. Maybe the bankers should have to always wear
placard front and back with a big red letter 'B' on it to warn people
that they are in front of a professional thief.
The banks have already rewritten the bankruptcy laws to
reduce
their losses. Can we add a credit score line that prevents more
of the same stupidity? I do not think so. The banks are in
the middle of this. They will win regardless of where this
goes. Oh. One bank. Two banks may go under but what happens
then? Another bank buys their assets and the government pays the
losses. A net gain for the banking industry. Sort of like
killing the runt of the litter.
Back in 1988, one man owned: some land, an appraisal company, a savings and loan, a construction company, an a real estate office. The land was one street over from my house in north Phoenix. The area is called Paradise Valley but not part of the town with that name. The mail address is Scottsdale but that is because the US Post Office incorrectly presumed that when the area was incorporated it would be part of Scottsdale whereas Phoenix did the honors. In other words, a nice neighborhood with nice schools, nice churches, and friendly (for Arizona) neighbors. The man on one side of me was a well-known attorney. The man on the other side was a professional tennis player.
Then the man with all of the companies moved in. On the land
to the north of me and south of the main street he built zero-lot-line
houses. Oh, just one street. But for several blocks and with the
associated culdesacs, many houses. The concept of zero-lot-line
is simple. Look at the neighborhood, build a house 10% smaller on
a 20% smaller lot. This makes the house too big for the lot so
you build the house against one lot line. This gives you enough
room on the other side to walk around or build a peace garden (look it
up).
These are new homes so the man's appraisal company can only compare
to the remainder of the neighborhood. This over appraises the
house by 10 to 15%. At least. But they now sell for the
local price of $90,000. As an incentive to hesitant buyers, the
man's loan company will defer payments (but not interest) for a
year. With a government-guaranteed loan, FHA or VA, you walk into
a new home for $500.
For the next year you spend all of your money with landscaping,
drapes, furniture, and household belongings. You are lucky if
this comes to less than $20,000. Let's summarize and compare.
On the price of $90,000, you bought a house whose real value is
$76,500. You have closing costs of about 4% bringing your loan
amount to about $93,600 plus or minus the $500 for the FHA/VA
loan. This is a 30-year standard mortgage but you make no
payments the first year. With a 10% (average for that year)
mortgage, after the first year you owe $103,400 on a home worth
$76,500. You will pay $910 per month for the following 29 years.
Let's say instead you had bought one of the neighborhood, normal
homes for $90,000. You pay 10% down and a 30-year mortgage bank
mortgage. You start paying immediately with payments of
$710. You did have to cough up the $9,000 down payment.
Let us also presume that you want to sell the house after one
year. To make it easy, let us also say that the housing market is
flat (unlikely, it usually goes up a little in a year). Your loan
payoff balance is $80,600. With closing costs of 8%
(minimal), you owe the bank $87,000 leaving you with
$3,000. Not much but then you should have lived there for at
least 3 years to see the house market go up and amortize your purchase
and selling costs. You lost $9,000 but got to live in a nice
house for a year. Rent would have cost you more.
Let's look at the dummy who bought the zero-lot-line house.
His buyer gets an honest appraisal for the $76,500.. He will not
pay more than that. You bite the bullet and sell the
house. Your closing costs at 8% are $3,800. You owe
the bank the closing costs and the payoff balance of $103,400 or a
total of $107,300. You received $76,500 from the buyer -- so you
OWE the bank $30,700.
Don't get me wrong. If you can afford the $912 house payments
for 29 years and work hard to maintain the value of your home, you will
have lived pretty well off. The schools in our neighborhood were
among the very best in the state. If you are a good talker and
want to fight the Maricopa County assessor, your property taxes will go
down as the other houses are sold off at the reduced prices. You
might survive.
But the cost! The cost of the free house for a year is 29
years of payments $200 more than if you had bought the nicer home, put
minimal down, and paid $710 a month. Let alone the fact you got
cheated on the price in the first place. WIth the bank loan, you
paid over 30 years, $256,000. With the Zero-lot-line home, you
paid $317,000 total.
There is a worse price. Many of your neighbors after the first
year discover that they cannot make the $912 house payments. If
they try to sell the house, they will owe the bank $31,000. If
they did not have the $9,000 down payment a year ago, it is unlikely
that they have a spare $30,000 now. So they default.
Suddenly your neighborhood (and mine) have rows of houses with the
windows boarded up as the FHA and VA try to unload these
foreclosures. If you default, you have credit problems for a long
time and the banks might pursue you if they were out the money.
But they are not. The FHA and VA pay off the loans and the bank
has all of its money plus interest plus costs. Who paid?
Who do you think pays for government expenses? Hint: government
expenses are why the government collects taxes.
So what happens? A couple of hundred homeowners can now never
get another government loan or any other loan for that matter for
a long, long, long time. The value of the neighborhood as a whole
went down. The appraisal company collapses. The loan
company collapses. The land is sold. The houses are
sold. The man with the original title walks away very wealthy.
The man? They finally arrested him for a giant fraud thing
south of Phoenix and he spent a few years in the penitentiary.
When he got out after a couple of years, he was still filthy
rich. The two United States Senators who tried to help him got
got their hands dirtied a little. A little soap and John McCain
and the other guy are all clean again.
Me? I sold my house in the middle of this. The local
prices were down and I took a loss of the house. Made me mad.
Once upon a time my daughter injured her leg on a neighbor swing
set. The dummy had not cut off or covered the bolt ends and she
tore her leg on one. The insurance settlement was $7,500.
At the time this was good. My health insurance would, and did,
cover the medical costs. It would have covered scar recision when
she was older but she declined. But what happened in the middle
was a banking thing. The Arizona law for settlements to minors
was that the money had to be prudently invested and the judge declared
'prudent' meant a bank savings account, U. S. Savings Bonds, or a bank
CD. I have a different adjective than 'prudent' but those were
the choices. The lawyer and I went to the bank to check out
CDs. It was not a bank. It was a savings and loan named
First Federal. The largest in Phoenix. You know CDs.
They come in brackets: short, medium, and long term. The longer
the term, generally, the higher the interest. The 10-year CD can
be bought for a maximum of 10 years (smart naming!) or for as little as
2 1/2 years. But you set the period when you buy it. If you
sell it off too soon, you pay a premium penalty. If you do not
cash it, they might renew it for another term and them you pay the
premium when you complain.
In any case I told the man I wanted their 10-year CD for 10
years. He said I was crazy. I should invest the money in
multiple CDs of varying length so that I could maximize the amounts on
rising interest rates. The 10-year CD at the time was paying
11.8% or a 'yield' or almost 13%. The rates had been going
up every couple of weeks for a year. I told him that the rates
might go up and I would take my chances but this was the highest that
they had been in my lifetime and I would settle for what I had.
He repeated his claim that I should do better. I pointed out
that if his bank could last for 10 years paying those or higher rates I
would have lost but I was betting that the rates were not sustainable
and told him that rates that high would eventually bankrupt his
bank. I told him that. 10 years later my daughter cashed
her CD for just short of $30,000. First Federal? They
went bankrupt and were bought by Bank of America.
I grew up in the Northeast: Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo,
Boston, South Bend, Bloomington (IL). If you have not lived there
you have no idea what mountains of snow can fall almost
overnight. Many places have major snowfalls and deal with them
well. Some do not. This section is not intended to be
political or too malicious. In Wisconsin, I hate the restricted
parking laws but they are effective: if you do not move your car every
two days you are in trouble and will have at least a ticket.
There is alternate side of the street parking by date. In two
days any snow and ice should be removed. The plows go out as soon
as any snow starts making sure that the streets stay clear ahead of the
problem. There is no guarantee as the snow can come faster than
the number of plows can clear. But they try and they try
hard. I have not seen better anywhere.
Eastern New York works much the same way except they do not
plow. They blow the snow over the top with their humungous snow
blowers. Driving after a storm is sort of treacherous as the
corners may be six feet high and absolutely square. YOu have to
stop at the corner an peek around it before proceedings. Like a
giant maze. Cute but not really fun. Efficient for the
amount of snow that they get.
Boston area is sort of dependent upon where you live. More wet
than I like. Illinois and Indiana are write-offs. Mostly
they get snow and ice at night and it melts in the daytime causing all
sorts of damage to your car and clothing. But a little plowing
and they are happy.
Michigan is a different matter. Somewhat protected from the
major falls by Lake Michigan and Superior, Detroit will not see the
snow that is seen directly west of the lake. But there is
substantial snow although the freezing temperatures are missing.
OK, you Michiganders: watch the weather map if you do not believe
me. And maybe things have changed but moving from Milwaukee to
Detroit was a real eye-opener. When Milwaukee plows, Detroit
salts. I mean salt pellets everywhere. Salt only works when
it is warm (20 degrees or warmer).. Colder than that you need
sand. But mostly you need a plow. And Detroit uses them so
sparingly that you wonder if they have any.
Among the places in Detroit that I lived, I lived on Tracey just
south of 8 Mile near Schaefer.. They never, ever plowed our
street. After a few days we might get salted. To get to
work, I not only had to shovel around my car, I had to shovel all the
way down Tracey to the corner and then around the corner to
Schaefer. Schaefer was salted. Clearing a car's width for a
city block and a half is a lot of work. It might take a couple of
hours. By the time the road was cleared and I sank into the front
seat of my car, I was ready to take a nap buit instead I had to slog
down 8-mile to Woodward and then down Woodward to Highland Park:
Chrysler Headquarters. Maybe I would have had help clearing the
road if I got up later but I was always an early riser. But help
from the city? Not a chance. And the drive down 8 Mile in the
salt and slop was no picnic either. Windshield wipers were meant
for rain -- not slop. And your car needed a good heater. I
always like the heater.
So when I see Michigan hit with serious weather, I feel for the
people there more than other places. They are out clearing places
that most cities would clear for them. And if you have not lived
up there: snow is pretty and fluffy and nice. But a shovel full of snow
gets heavy after the first 40 or 50 of them. Good luck guys.