10:05 – We’re working on home projects this morning, along with our regular Saturday stuff. That, and building more kits.
Saturday, 31 May 2014
20 Comments and discussion on "Saturday, 31 May 2014"
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10:05 – We’re working on home projects this morning, along with our regular Saturday stuff. That, and building more kits.
Comments are closed.
Is it necessary to say that? Does a day go by that you and/or spouse and/or bowser aren’t building kits?
Hmm. You could use this as some sort of code. Even though a plain reading of the statement conveys no data, its presence alone could indicate that you have not been, say, served with a secret subpoena which you’re not allowed to talk about.
In fact… it’s possible that the statement above already serves such a purpose. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.
“Astronaut Vandalism”
http://xkcd.com/1375/
Instead of dumping billions more into the VA, why not give all Vets “free” Obummercare to cover medical/dental? Could the existing system absorb it? Would it be cost effective? It would definitely give Vets more latitude in where to get care.
Why not dump everyone in the USA into Medicare? And privatize VA hospitals?
My 81 year old father-in-law is a 90% disabled vet now living in rehab (aka a nursing home). I doubt that he will ever walk again. He has abandoned the VA system since they could not / would not address his tachycardia issues. His last three surgeries were in private hospitals due to their emergency status and being paid for by a combination of the VA and Medicare.
When he transitions from rehab to nursing home (after 90? days) then his nursing home care will be paid for by the VA as long as he is in a double occupancy room. Unless he moves back home somehow which even he is starting to accept that he cannot take care of himself anymore.
So long as no one is allowed to opt out of the system — emphatically including government employees, elected politicians, and appointees — that might be almost tolerable. Make sure that drawing a paycheck from the government automatically puts you at the tail end of the queue.
I’m not actually in favor of this, of course. But, given that essentially no members of the ruling class have any desire to un-foist the Obamatax, I want to make sure that they feel the pain more than the rest of us do.
Agreed. If they put us into this gigantic mess, they must not be allowed to exclude themselves from it.
Wait, who am I kidding? They’ll do whatever the fuck they want. And we’ll bend over, grab the soap, and take it with a smile, so long as the tee-vee is still on, the interwebnet thingie still works and there’s a six of classic Murkan rotgut cow-piss beer handy with a few ciggies and some nice meds.
So long as no one is allowed to opt out of the system — emphatically including government employees, elected politicians, and appointees — that might be almost tolerable. Make sure that drawing a paycheck from the government automatically puts you at the tail end of the queue.
Yeah right. Next you will want them to fly commercial in the back cabin with the rest of us instead of a private jet or first class.
Not me; I want them flying in the baggage hold, if at all, and not being transported in boxcars to their waiting guillotines.
I am going to attempt sticking it out with Mint 17. The Asus netbook has been my travel computer for over a year now, as there is no battery or keyboard in the 8 year older Asus laptop. Reinstalling is just too exhausting, so I hope 17 will eventually be the equal of 15. Everything is now working except the radio automation, although the file manager GUI locks up a lot. Easier to tackle the one problem and wait for the file manager to be fixed than a total reinstallation.
Took it with me to the last job. Our days are pretty intense with very few breaks except for lunch. Having that computer allowed me to place an order with a nearby Jimmy John’s online for me and the court reporter, whose hands are busy on her shorthand keyboard anytime someone is talking, so she cannot place the order.
It is scary that a lot of the Linux programs I use have totally abandoned development. That does not seem to be the case with what I use in Windoughz, where all of my programs except Juice, the podcast downloader, are maintained by somebody. Nevertheless, I intend to migrate completely to Linux and abandon the older laptop, and try that for a while. Moving email to totally IMAP4 over this weekend.
It’s also a bit scary that I have still not heard about the only two Linux jobs (both at IBM, my old site from last two years) and the majority of the others I’ve just applied to are all Windoze. One or two with allegedly some Linux on board, though. I gotta take what I can get for the time being.
Never-ending scut and grunge work all weekend here at the house. Then Mrs. OFD will leave Monday for another two weeks.
Gorgeous days today and tomorrow, though. Only fly in the ointment is the plethora of idiot-bastard motorhead douchebags that keep revving their engines, winding them out, scrubbing out, and just driving back and forth on the state road behind the house and around the bend, back and forth to the gas station/mini-mart, dozens of times a night. They must have utterly boring and petty little lives. Standard appearance is Caucasian male, late teens into twenties, short scuffy beards, short bed-hair, baseball hats flipped up in a cartoonish manner, multiple tatts, and they’re in total lust with engine noise and speed.
Remote-control landmines in development here.
Remote-control landmines in development here.
Want a couple of heat seeking hand operated missile launchers? Oh wait, let me rephrase that lest the NSA come knocking. “I am building more kits.”
I heard some interesting commentary on AM talk radio over the weekend.
A guy brought up the fact that we offer educational benefits to vets (e.g. Montgomery GI Bill, et al) but the VA does NOT run or administer a university. They simply take the money to whichever private or public university they choose. So, why if we are offering health benefits to vets does the VA feel the need to administer hospitals? Give them a generous voucher to seek healthcare a private hospital of their choosing. It would cost less than running the nationwide VA health system.
Give them a generous voucher to seek healthcare a private hospital of their choosing.
Basically, that is what my father-in-law is now doing via the ER. The wife told me over the weekend that he is not in a regular rehab / nursing home but in a critical care nursing home due to his constant heart problems. He is totally out of the VA system but they are paying the bills supposedly.
BTW, when my wife had her first cancer surgery nine years ago, the assisting surgeon was an Army Captain learning how do microsurgery at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center so he could bring that skill to the VA hospitals. He was working on a procedure to do neck fracture surgeries using microsurgery since they see a lot of that at the VA.
“They simply take the money to whichever private or public university they choose.”
Well, the amounts paid, depending on marital status and whatever the fund criteria are nowadays, do not lend themselves to veterans attending just any college or university of their choice; that dough won’t get them into the Ivy League or top several tiers of colleges and they’re not wanted there anyway, believe you me. Back in ’75 I got $330 a month and this just barely covered the rent and nothing else, including books and tuition, so I had to work several part-time jobs at once and go to Boston State College, which no longer even exists; whatever was there is now part of the MA public university or state college system, I have no clue anymore. (might find out more soon, though, as one of my nieces will be transferring to a four-year program for her last two years at Framingham State, where her daddy and me grew up).
So I started all in good faith in September of that year and the Feds were very late paying us anything at all, most of us not until well into December. Consequently most of us had to drop out. As I was leaving the bursar’s office one day that month I overhead the old biddies chirping about how it’s a shame these veterans nowadays don’t complete their college programs.
Took me thirteen years of working full-time, going to classes part-time, using CLEP, etc., etc. before I got my BA. BFD; now I’ve forgotten more about English literature than most people will ever know or care about, LOL. So I’m deep into the Greek and Roman classics now; maybe if Mrs. OFD gets on Jeopardy the right questions will come up (she takes the online screening test each year and has qualified but the job always interferes at the last minute).
So I started all in good faith in September of that year and the Feds were very late paying us anything at all, most of us not until well into December.
Yup, the VA still does that. My son had to go stand in line for two days before each semester in order to fill out his GI Bill paperwork. And then they would not pay for three or four months so each semester he had to go get a loan to pay. One semester they did not pay at all since they were “auditing” him so I got to pay that semesters bill and help him pay for his mortgage bills. Nice program if you can take the hit. Most cannot and eventually drop out, especially if they have a wife and kid.
Exactly. I didn’t even have a wife and kids at the time, just turned 21 in SEA. But they make it so hard for us, and it is disheartening now, and I remember when you mentioned your son going through this before here, to learn that they still treat vets like that.
One wonders after a while, and you don’t have to be really paranoid or anything, if it is all deliberate. I mean, clearly we can’t go to Harvard, even if we passed everything with flying colors, like so many WWII vets were able to do when they got back. So it’s state and community colleges and you still have to take out loans, which is hard with no credit and no work history outside Uncle’s plantations, and that latter as a hired killer of foreign peasants and draftees.
It’s all a waste anyway, unless it’s STEM that can be put to use for good money immediately upon graduation. And unless your heart and mind are already committed to studying the forlorn humanities, now long since dominated by communist assholes, much like the ones we blew away overseas, when we should have been blowing them away here.
I used my Montgomery GI Bill from 2000 – 2005 while pursuing my BS at night. Got my check every month like clockwork. Granted, I had it set up where I paid the school and the VA paid me.
I had it set up where I paid the school and the VA paid me.
My son says that the VA will only pay the school directly now. They will not reimburse you. So he would borrow the money from the school and the VA would repay the loan to the school. Crazy!
The Army stiffed me on tuition reimbursement while I was still on active duty. More accurately, the civilian biddies employed by the Department of the Army cheated me. I’d put in the paperwork for reimbursement before the classes, as required, and got approval, then took the classes while doing my day job, which involved lots (lots) of travel. Nevertheless, I pulled off As.
But that wasn’t good enough for the biddies. They’d “determined” that because of my travel schedule I wouldn’t be able to complete the classes, so they denied reimbursement. They didn’t bother to tell me about it beforehand, of course, and they didn’t care that I’d gotten As. They’d made their determination and that’s all there was to it.
I did bitch to my boss, who was having his own issues with the civilian “establishment” at Ft Monmouth. He gave me some suggestions, but none of them panned out. The civilians were big on protecting each other and they were entrenched, not transient like those of us in uniform.