07:47 – The federal government is still “shut down” and trying desperately to make sure people notice. As far as I’m concerned, the ideal outcome would be for the federal government to shut down totally and permananently, leaving everything up to the state and local governments. For that matter, if the federal government is shut down, why should it still be collecting taxes? It seems to me that individuals and businesses should stop sending tax payments to the federal government. Each state could begin collecting those taxes and use them to fund necessary expenditures for things formerly done by the federal government. Congress should refuse to increase the debt limit, forcing the federal government into bankruptcy and liquidation. The last person out of DC could turn off the lights. We’d all be a lot better off.
Thursday, 3 October 2013
17 Comments and discussion on "Thursday, 3 October 2013"
Comments are closed.
A longtime lurker here, Mr Thompson. I have been reading and enjoying your writings , both online and dead-tree, for at least ten years, and today is the first time I’ve seen a typo. You must have been fulminating as you wrote that!
Agreed, 200%.
But “muh roads,” who will build muh roads?
The Shutdown Theater yesterday was with the WWII veterans in Mordor; prior to that was the national parks and the PandaCam being shut down; why do you hate the children?
What will it be today? Oh I see; shutting down Mount Vernon, the D-Day beaches and the Normandy cemeteries. That’ll show those pesky old veterans!
Thanks for the kind words. My wife tells me I should enable real-time spell-checking, but it drives me nuts. I use too many scientific and other uncommon words, so I’d constantly be adding words to the dictionary or having to look at red squiggles.
At any rate, I long ago decided that for stuff I posted on the web I wouldn’t go back and correct typos/errors unless they changed the meaning of what I’d written (e.g., leaving out a “not”).
Lots of people whining on social media that they have to pay $95 fine if they don’t get expensive Obummercare plans. You know, the people who pay no taxes.
My question, if they don’t get a plan and pay or not pay the fine, do they still get a plan for health care for free (other than their usual emergency room trips)? I can’t seem to find the answer. Surely, Obummer won’t let them die of some disease or injury if they don’t buy a plan. That’s what the rest of us are for: to pay for their free health care. Since they don’t pay taxes, will the IRS put liens on their stuff?
I need an answer so I can decide if I will just become a welfare king/queen.
I have another bamacare story. The guy who cuts my hair for the last 10 years told me last week that he got his hours cut from 40 hours per week to 25. Specifically so they did not have buy their cutters insurance. So he had to find another part time job. He is very unhappy now working 7 days per week.
This will all be interesting to see, based, in part, on the questions by MrAtoz. Will the regime take care of people who do not buy insurance, pay premiums or work at all? If not, are they willing to let them die off? If they do, I guess we will continue paying for them anyway. And based on all the exemptions granted, to Congress, the WH, unions, etc., etc., it seems not everyone will be on-board with the plan. Mrs. OFD, a thirty-year public health professional, says that it won’t work unless everyone is on it, i.e., a variant of socialized medicine. But already doctors are bailing and going to sliding-scale and other arrangements with patients.
Meanwhile, as in the tale from Lynn, lots of us will have no choice but to work at multiple part-time jobs on crazy-ass schedules just to pay rent/mortgages, health insurance premiums for ourselves and others, and maybe money left over for food and the gas needed to get to those jobs. Taking care of multiple family generations will take a back seat to these insane work schedules, assuming we can even find any jobs like that. So I guess the plan is to beggar the middle- and working-classes and drive the country down to Third World status under a totalitarian Bolshevik regime. Like the one that Lenin and Stalin ran for all those decades.
Of course. The Madrassian Candidate hates the United States and is working to destroy everything good, unique, or strong about it.
Open challenge for anyone who disagrees: tell me what he’d be doing differently if he did hate the United States.
You mean if he did NOT hate the U.S., right?
If he did not hate the country he would immediately resign, confess all his sins and mistakes, and retire to coach middle-school basketball in Madagascar or Indonesia or Kenya or wherever. This would be in lieu of prison time and/or hanging, and he could consider himself dealt with mercifully.
I’d offer similar options to the other surviving presidents.
No, I meant “if he did hate”. The challenge was for the hopey changey progtards who dispute my assertion that Oblowgoats hates the US and think he’s acting with some goal other than the destruction of the US.
And my calling him the Madrassian Candidate was not happenstance. Even if he wasn’t programmed by his spongeheaded shit of a mother to hate American culture, the Saudi-funded Indonesian madrassa made sure of it.
OK, just clarifying. If he really hates the U.S. he’ll use some excuse to stay for at least a third term and/or get the Mooch in there. He and his AG have so many impeachable offenses between them as to boggle the mind but the gutless Stupid Half won’t do jack about it; they were all hot and bothered over Lewinsky’s dress back in the day. Worthless turncoat pieces of shit for decades.
Then we have this incident in Mordor today; I just looked at some more footage online and my conclusion is that Mordor’s Finest executed a probable mentally ill woman for motor vehicle and traffic violations. She was unarmed with a one-year-old child in the car, who amazingly was uninjured despite all the shots fired exclusively by the cops. At one point that I saw she had just tried to ram the gate and was stopped, with about a dozen cops and security people converging and very close and some with their weapons pointed at the vehicle. She then backed up and took off; now presumably they have her description, the vehicle and its plates, and can catch up with her whenever. Sure, they don’t know if the car is loaded with explosives or whatever, but all the more reason to hold your fire instead of riddling it like a Swiss cheese. Instead they chase it with multiple pursuit vehicles for twelve blocks, endangering everyone else out there, and end with killing her. Who made the calls for all this? Who was in charge? We’ll never know.
How did the other guy get into the Navy building with his bag? Did anyone stop him and look in the bag? Was it empty then? Or did he go up and retrieve that sawed-off shotgun from the fourth floor bathroom? Was there a specific target that he was there to shoot, and the rest just random to make it look random? It’s disappeared right off the national radar, lickety-split.
Oh wow, things are worse than I thought. A former nasa astronaut spoke at our AIChE meeting tonight. She is now an engineering prof at the University of Houston.
She told us that traditionally, 30% of STEM students did not graduate from the Universities. The number has rapidly increased to 70%. All due to lack of math skills from high school. This is a disaster.
I dropped out of graduate engineering school in 1982 partially because of my weak math skills. Once entering college and taking STEM courses, one may never catch up to the kids who did take calculus in high school. Apparently, calculus in high school is very rare now.
This is very bad for the USA. Short term and long term as a huge number of engineers are getting ready to retire. And the foreign kids in our graduate schools now are going home to join their home university staffs.
“She told us that traditionally, 30% of STEM students did not graduate from the Universities. The number has rapidly increased to 70%.”
Well, small blessings anyway. The alternative would have been dumbing down the curricula, so that they could pass anyway. Which, you may be absolutely certain, *is* happening at some schools.
Yes, math and science instruction – heck, instruction in general – in public schools is in a bad, bad way. Long history, but probably the single biggest nail in the coffin was the oh-so-well-intentioned NCLB.
the oh-so-well-intentioned NCLB.
the oh-so-well-intentioned NCGA.
Fixed it for you you. (No Child Gets Ahead).
The two reasons I’ve never gone to grad school in Computer Science are failure to apply myself to my studies and my “weak” math skills. I use the quotes around weak because my math skills are solid to a point. I got a 780 on the math portion of the SAT. My skills in the math after that point aren’t as solid. I don’t know how common high school Calculus is now, but my 1982 graduating class had 400 people, only 9 of whom took Calculus.
That’s one of the reasons that homeschooled kids will come to dominate college and university STEM courses. Not all homeschool students take serious math in high school, of course, but a large number of them do calculus, diff-e, real statistics, and other math courses that nowadays are thought of as “college level”.
The dumbing down of science and maths has been going on for nearly 40 years over here. In 1975 a “D” (the lowest passing grade) in matriculation (Year 12) physics and chemistry was enough to do those subjects at university. Within a couple of years the high school science and maths courses had been neutered to such an extent that the universities strongly recommended that if you didn’t get an “A” or very high “B” in those subjects you forget about doing them at uni.
I never understood why, but science courses didn’t have much prestige in South Australia. To get in to a B.Sc. course at Adelaide Uni in 1976 you needed a matriculation exam score of 225, which was also the minimum to enter the university at all. To get in to a BA required a score of around 350, or a bit more. (I think 500 was the theoretical maximum score.) Kids who really wanted to do arts but didn’t get the required score would enter via science, do all arts subjects, and hope to be able to transfer at the end of the year to the arts degree. I was mystified. I mean, I think arts is interesting, but it didn’t really lead anywhere.
I don’t know how common high school Calculus is now, but my 1982 graduating class had 400 people, only 9 of whom took Calculus.
That is not a bad ratio for very bright children in a class. But “no child left behind” is apparently ruining that since “no child get ahead”.
I got a 780 on the math portion of the SAT.
I got an 1150 total on the SAT but going to TAMU improved me so much that I made a 2200? (cannot find the slip of paper) on the GRE. I remember that the engineering profs were impressed even though my gpa sucked.