07:23 – We got quite a bit done on science kits yesterday, with more to do today and tomorrow. Barbara is taking a week of vacation time later this month to attend a crafts workshop up in the mountains, so I need to have a good backlog of kits ready to ship before she leaves.
Our real-estate agent up in West Jefferson sent us a new batch of listings, so we need to go through those, figure out which ones we want to take a look at, and schedule visits to them. I hope that we’ll find something suitable on our next trip up and be able to put in an offer. As of today, Barbara officially has two months left at work, with September 30th her last day. By that time, we hope to have a house bought and ready to move into.
Best of luck on the house search; be very careful and don’t jump at the first likely candidate. Make sure you have a THOROUGH inspection done and try to walk through with the guy (usually a guy).
For those youngsters who wonder what old farts like me are yammering about in regard to the origins of our immigration disasters, here’s the basic background:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/howie_carr/2015/07/howie_carr_trace_terrorists_to_ted_kennedy
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/howie_carr/2015/07/howie_carr_trace_terrorists_to_ted_kennedy
That is way past micro-aggression.
I’ve got five Latino guys working on the new roof and breaking out the old bricks today. Noisy as all get out. The brick breaker is using a 20 lb sledge hammer. Only one of them speaks English halfway well.
The electricians are a pair of Serbian bothers. They came here in 2001 to get away from the politics. The older one blames everything in Serbia on the politicians, says they are all bad people. The younger brother ran the new wires about 100 ft in the back attic on Wednesday. He got so hot that he had to call his brother to help him get out. He sat on back patio for 30 minutes soaking wet and pale. I was afraid that he was going to have a heat stroke. I told him to jump in the pool to cool off. But, he got better after a while.
Do Americans work anymore?
Lynn, you sound like the CEO or spokesman of a big IT company. “We need more H1-Bs because there aren’t any competent Americans we can hire!” Right. What they mean is there aren’t any Americans willing to take the position for 60% of the prevailing wage and willing to work a lot of unpaid OT in order to keep their job.
“What they mean is there aren’t any Americans willing to take the position for 60% of the prevailing wage and willing to work a lot of unpaid OT in order to keep their job.”
There it is. The dark clouds were on the horizon when these corporate nabobs stopped paying us bonuses and for training; last time I had either of those was when I world for EDS in 1998. Now we’re expected to train our furrin replacements or be fired immediately with no benefits and no hope of collecting unemployment benefits. There are PLENTY of competent and trained and experienced Murkan IT workers; the corporate ass-hats simply won’t pay us or pay for benefits anymore when it’s cheaper to hire incompetent and inexperienced furrin workers from various furrin shit-holes. It’s a big security hole, too, but the nabobs don’t care; they’ll take their chances and hope insurance covers it, plus denial, lying, and thieving on a grand scale. The H1-B scam has been shown repeatedly to be just that, a giant scam.
And the attitude is, Murkans don’t wanna work and won’t take low-paying jobs, etc., etc.
Let them eat cake!
Legal and illegal immigration drives down wages.
The export of knowledge worker jobs was predicted, and has happened. ALL things become commodities eventually.
Why SHOULD programming jobs pay more than teaching or management? They used to when there was a small labor pool. Now that pool is enormous. I’m sure at the top of the heap they still do pay well and there are open positions.
At a certain level (and I’m not qualified to set that level) I’m certain that programming and network management are further in the “art” than “craft” area, and that is where individuals begin to be valued. We’ve all worked with or for ‘rock stars’ in their fields, who usually get paid rock star money. Below that level, anyone with some aptitude can be taught the ‘craft’ of it. Not saying they will be GOOD at it, but they can check in code that works. If not, like any unproductive employee in any field, management needs to remove them. If management is unable or unwilling, that is a different issue.
I’m willing to assign blame for the attitude that programmers are interchangeable widgets to several factors- use of lines of code as a metric for ‘good’ programming, creeping Leftism that devalues individuality and insists all people are the same, and HR practices brought about by discrimination lawsuits and the EOE act insisting that ALL employees be treated absolutely equally.
The same thing has happened in all the skilled trades.
In the 80’s in Chicago a wave of Polish immigrants swept in and basically took over bricklaying. It’s a hard, back breaking job, done out in the weather, and yeah, Americans weren’t willing to do it. Certainly not at the entry level. Now, everywhere in the west and south, hispanics, mostly illegals, have taken over all the concrete, mason, and tile jobs. Their work is generally poor when compared to someone who came up thru the traditional trades, but that is all people are willing to pay for.
Now there are SOME people who are willing to pay more, and those people hire ‘artisans’ to do the work in their homes. It is USUALLY confined to very visible items though. In the artisan market, you find a lot of traditional american workers. Many have downsized from running a company in a commodity market, to selling themselves as INDIVIDUALS, with a valuable unique skill set.
Another component of this discussion is the “reshoring” movement. Many companies who sent work off to distant low bidders have begun to move that work back home. The promised savings didn’t occur, or the costs to get quality were too high, or the risks of losing control of your IP became too great. I saw this first hand with one of the companies I worked for. The “cheaper” chinese manufacturer needed CONSTANT supervision and correction, ultimately leading to stationing western staff onsite in china, in order to get an acceptable product. I’m reasonably sure they could have spent a lot less money, with fewer risks and hassles in the western world. It seems that almost no one takes the intangibles into account or is so constrained by PC mindset that they can’t. For example, some cultures have NO history of mechanical aptitude. Some have no individual excellence or support for the independent thinker. Some place higher value on social components than they do competence. Some will steal you blind without a second thought. But you can’t bring up any of these issues in a meeting that has minutes.
Eventually, there will be recognition that having foreign nationals work on your security infrastructure is a bad idea. Eventually this damnable PC nonsense will pass. Eventually, I think there will be a ‘reshoring’ within the IT business too.
We just have to live long enough to see the equivalent of 70’s Japan. Made in Japan was a sign of cheap nasty crap. Now, it’s the sign of quality, as they pulled themselves up the manufacturing ladder. The low cost labor, and cheap goods have moved on to Korea, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and others. Mexico can’t compete anymore on labor cost either. The same thing will eventually happen in IT.
Or at least that’s what it looks like from where I’m sitting…..
nick
For me, links in the first two comments today did not wrap and overlapped the “Recent Comments” column (this is on Chrome v43). Anyone else seeing this?
“Fortunately, neither of us has ever wanted the big-spending lifestyle.”
“Best financial advice I ever got, get rid of consumer credit debt.
Follow that with saving 10% of every dollar made. Transfer the 10% when you make the deposit. When getting started, try to go one week without cashing your paycheck, then deposit it on your new savings account.”
“I do not worry about debt on real estate though…”
Been busy, but still lurking. Some recent thoughts above resonated with me, especially that one about saving, or what I call “paying yourself first.” Never did the big-spending lifestyle, nor had any consumer credit debt, but have occasionally used debt to advantage.
These are good old fashioned ideas that have served us well for a long time, and it is hard to knock them. BUT, if we (and I include myself in this illustrious group) really believe that society is in for some catastrophic hard times, then using debt to accelerate the accumulation of hard assets seems a good strategy. If society and the financial system collapses, then this debt will be effectively erased, but the hard assets will remain. Takes guts to do this, but might worth some serious thought. Living conservatively, especially having assets invested in cash, is betting on the continuation of life the way it is, or normalcy bias.
Well, we had a major boo boo this morning. Mr. sledge hammer dude hit five of the six new electrical wires pulled the other day. With a 20 lb sledge. Both 30 amp wires were hit and exposed (for the new A/C and clothes drier). So, there will need to be five new electrical wires pulled because I do not believe in splicing wires that cause electrical fires in the middle of the night. I am not paying for this work twice.
@JimB,
you raise a good point. If you truly believe the whole thing is coming apart, leveraging yourself to maximum and then saying “sue me” is a valid (if distasteful) option.
Unfortunately, as most financial guys will admit, “timing” the market is a b!tch. And that applies to the doomsday market as well.
Anyone who took that approach as a survivalist in the 60s/70s got spanked hard. Anyone following RBTs logical conclusions (including me) and betting on the dissolution of the Euro in 2010 would have been spanked.
We believe it’s coming, but history has shown it is d@mn hard to get the timing right.
If extreme claims require extraordinary proof, then extreme actions require extraordinary conviction and knowledge.
In the book Alas Babylon, the protagonist uses his secret foreknowledge to do just this. He cashes a rubber check and is much better set up when the attack comes. In John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, the protagonist buys a sailboat with a rubber check, after walking away from job, home, friends, due to his advance knowledge of the coming disaster. Without that surety, making the ‘all in’ bet that it is coming apart RIGHT NOW, looks kind of crazy.
I actually have a friend that took a similar approach with the housing bubble. He has not made payments on his upside-down mortgage in years, and has only kept the sheriffs away thru maneuvering and the fecklessness of his lender. He encouraged me to do what he was doing, refinancing and pulling cash out of his house thru the whole run up. He said I was stupid not to take advantage of the situation. I declined. He’s lost his business, had the stress and strain of the sheriffs at the door, had his wife return to work, and is $1 MILLION dollars upside-down on his house. I am within 10% of my assessed value of paying off my primary residence, less than $30k, after only 8 years. I know he regrets the choices he made, and I love the choices I made. But objectively, he’s spent a million dollars he didn’t make, lived in a nice house for years without paying, and that could be argued to be the ‘smarter’ choice.
It all goes back to the tension between preparing for disaster and yet hoping it never comes. I think that is one area where some preppers go astray. My philosophy is that the choices I make for prepping have to work equally well if NO disaster strikes or at least have minimal negative impact on our ongoing life. It’s why we live where we do instead of out in the sticks. It’s why I go to great lengths to do my prepping on a budget. It’s why I try to avoid any IRREVOCABLE decisions. In fact, a large part of being prepared is so that you CAN avoid irrevocable decisions. (Antibiotics vs amputation, eating bulk vs eating pets, escaping to the woods vs having you daughter suck United Nations soldier c*ck in a refugee camp….)
And I’m leaving aside the morality of any of those actions. I think many of the problems and conditions that are leading us toward the brink are the result of widespread disregard for the morally correct action, and personally don’t want to contribute to that. AFTER the fall, I may not have that luxury, and I’ve given that thought too.
nick
“We need more H1-Bs because there aren’t any competent Americans we can hire!” Right. What they mean is there aren’t any Americans willing to take the position for 60% of the prevailing wage and willing to work a lot of unpaid OT in order to keep their job.
Where did I use the work competent? I basically said that everyone working on our addition except the GC is an immigrant (based on their English skills). You hear about this and seeing it freaks one out.
The market place says that the cheapest people for a job will win the job. All of these construction projects are bid to the lowest bidders. Just so happens, the lowest bidder does work like a dog, 12 hour days and six days a week.
I do not know how to fix this problem without excessive government regulation. And I am against excessive government regulations. We cannot afford them.
We believe it’s coming, but history has shown it is d@mn hard to get the timing right.
If extreme claims require extraordinary proof, then extreme actions require extraordinary conviction and knowledge.
Take a go at “Replay” by Ken Grimwood:
http://www.amazon.com/Replay-Ken-Grimwood/dp/068816112X/
He takes the prior knowledge subject to the extreme.
Not ONE word about the race of the attackers, not even to describe them physically despite the plea to the public to identify them.
Of course the video is clear.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3182354/Horrific-injuries-suffered-girl-attacked-gang-catcalling-men-wearing-bikini-way-beach.html
nick
no they are NOT like us.
Bonus question, what if the boyfriend were armed? At what point is he able to shoot, at what point not, what changes from one to the other.
Super bonus, what if the girl was armed from inside the car? When could SHE shoot? When not?
Super super bonus, what about if you are armed and it’s happening while you pump YOUR gas? Same questions….
Figure it out ahead of time, so you don’t f it up when it happens.
I’d have to watch the damn thing multiple times to make much sense of it; looks like words were exchanged and a minor fracas erupted; also looks like the young woman kept trying to go back to the store or whatever with the bf trying to stop her or something.
‘
So: bonus question 1: I guess the bf can shoot if his life or gf’s life is in imminent danger; I don’t see that here. If he or she is on the ground being stomped, then that’s a good time to shoot. How about just getting back in the car and bailing outta there?
Super bonus: GF armed inside the car can shoot likewise, when her life or bf’s life is in imminent danger; again, I don’t see that from the blurry and jumpy surveillance tape.
Super super bonus: OFD is armed, pumping gas and I see the whole deal go down; I call the cops with the relevant info and stay clear until such time as it appears someone’s life is in imminent lethal danger.
The perp evidently didn’t throw the pipe until gf and bf were both inside the car and it was a “lucky” throw on the part of the perp that caused the injuries. I doubt that LE will do much about this caper, unless there’s a lotta media howling.
And while not ‘blaming the vic” here, I’d say that swanning around in one’s swimming togs at a multi-culti, shall we say, commercial establishment in the nighttime is asking for shit.
@ OFD ,
That’s pretty much the way I see it too. Boyfriend engaged in fighting (disorderly conduct) or mutual combat. He couldn’t shoot unless he disengaged, and the homeboy continued to attack. Ditto for the girlfriend.
As the impartial witness, unless you’ve seen it from the beginning, you don’t know if it was mutual combat, which would preclude you shooting in most states, or an assault where you are justified to act.
I’ll blame the victim here too. Coverups are cheap, as is driving away. It used to be politeness and a sense of propriety would have prodded the coverup. Younger people today (and many others) think they are free to act however they want, without consequences. While in a perfect world, a woman should be able to wear whatever she likes, wherever she likes, it is the height of folly to believe that in the world we actually live in.
Maybe this girl was never taught that it was unwise to be half naked in public after dark. Maybe this guy was never taught that retreat is sometimes the better part of valor. Maybe neither was taught that groups of black males are dangerous.
Let’s not give the the attackers the free pass though. Were they never taught politeness? Were they never taught to respect women? Without the verbal assault by the pack, the couple would have gotten into their car and driven away, unmolested. And luck shot or not, throwing the pipe was aggravated assault. AT THAT POINT, shooting would have been justified most places, (with the caveat that most jurisdictions assume that you can drive your huge weapon -car- away, and SHOULD.) The defense would have been muddled by the prior conduct of both parties.
Best case, avoid the location. Second best, ignore the provocation and leave. Third best, get in the car and only counter attack if they attempt entry or break a window (in TX that is the tipping point for a valid shoot).
nick
presented as food for thought, not legal advice.
“Do Americans work anymore?”
My Mexican gardener, lawnmower guys just left.
OTOH, 90% of the pharmacy workers here are Vietnamese, and I have no issue with that whatsoever. Last posting I shared an office with three other engineers; it was two red faces in a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.
Well, the neighboring town is Westminster, with one of the largest Viet communities in the USA.
If the pipe is thrown through the window as they’re driving away and they keep driving, preferably to the hospital ER in this case, then no shoot. If the driver was hit in the face on the other hand, and they came to a stop, and the perps continued the attack with or without pipes, bricks or whatever, then hell yeah, light ’em up. Maybe by that time someone would have been calling 911.
The long URL in the first comments looks fine on my updated FireFox (on Windows 10). Bleeding over the edge on Chrome and Edge.
With regards to the ‘name’ field problem, I’ve got a ticket into the Theme support site since last week, but they have not responded yet. (It’s a free theme, so not surprised, although their lack of response is not typical. It’s an ‘older’ theme of theirs, so maybe they don’t care anymore…)
I keep thinking I should make my own theme, but it’s a lot of work. Maybe a switch to the theme that I am using on the re-reboot of http://www.ChaosManorReviews.com is in order … but that’s up to Robert.
“Eventually, there will be recognition that having foreign nationals work on your security infrastructure is a bad idea.”
Hah. The last six months I was at IBM up here they ran an internal security audit which involved a team of peeps coming through our areas and, well, auditing us. None of them were native English speakers; about half seemed to come from the Balkans and the other half from the Middle East. I found this astonishing at the time; then I saw two of my colleagues having to train Mexican IT workers to do their jobs before one them retired and the other left for another job elsewhere. Right after that, the layoffs commenced. I’ve discovered since that Murkans aren’t doing the RHEL sys admin stuff anymore and not touching any of the clusters we built and/or maintained back then; it’s done remotely from Slovakia, India and Mexico. Only jobs for us now down there are apparently low-level scut work stuff horsing hardware around or plugging in routers and switches.
Ima gon try to nail some of that spiffy remote sys admin work when and where I can while working on my other stuff here.
“If extreme claims require extraordinary proof, then extreme actions require extraordinary conviction and knowledge.”
Good one. I will admit that timing is challenging. Also will admit that I don’t have the guts to borrow excessively, and never have. Tempting, though, with mortgage rates at recent lows, although not very low by historical standards. My crystal ball needs alignment.
I really have no solution for outsourcing jobs outside the USA. And if a contractor is willing to work 12 hours per day at 6 days per week and call that a 40 hour week, who am I to complain? In most cases, they are independent contractors and no rules apply. The framers working on my addition are just a guy and his dad. They have been working like crazy so they can get to the next job. They are going to set my windows and doors on Monday and then put up the outer layer and wrap.
For our home addition, I am paying the GC and he is selecting the subcontractors. He does have his favorites because they have done so much work for him over the years. The only stuff that I select and pay for direct is the HVAC contractor and the bathroom items like the sink, shower enclosure, and toilet.
The real long term worry for jobs in the USA is automation. I can see automation of driving jobs fairly soon in the next 5 to 10 years. I just wonder who will unload the trucks when they get to their destination. Or load the trucks. Automation of programmers has been a wished for item for a while but I doubt this will ever happen.
“I just wonder who will unload the trucks when they get to their destination. Or load the trucks.”
Robots. Easily.
I’m beginning to come around to RBT’s prediction that the State will end up paying a basic income to most derps for the basic necessities of life, bread and circuses, and said derps will then just lie around like the fat slugs most of them are nowadays, watching tee-vee or fiddling around on the net or some of them might find wonderfully enabling and stimulating work of some other kind, allegedly, freeing them up completely to ‘do what they love.’
This assumes, of course, that we don’t all just spin down fairly quickly into ruinous dystopian nightmare and civil war and that the State will somehow keep the whole mess going a while longer.
If so, and we have the bread-and-circuses model, the State will also have the means to withhold bread and circuses from those elements who are inadequately grateful or obedient. The more rebellious actors will either be put down immediately or become “outlaws” and exiles. And as it is, we are now fast approaching, if not completely there yet, the total surveillance state. Coming up soon enough, with encouragement from the State already, will be our very own wunnerful Stasi network, too. “If you see something, say something.”
That big old guy down the street getting all kinds of UPS deliveries every week and messing around with chemicals and talking radical right-wing stuff on the net every day? Pull his ration cards for a couple of weeks.
The prepper guy in Texas stirring up discontent and spreading FUD about prepping nonsense? Send a couple of guys by to have a little chat early some morning and pull his ration cards, too.
And the right-wing Catholic gun nut in northern Vermont? Veteran and ex-cop who knows too much nasty stuff? Zip a drone past his office window with a cute little rocket mounted on it.
Right now I reckon it will be a race to the wire, between Nanny State taking complete control as in “1984” and the old Soviet Union and East Germany, and spreading disintegration, collapse and dystopia, where the State loses control and we end up in the late Thomas Hobbes’s ‘state of nature.’
I’m beginning to come around to RBT’s prediction that the State will end up paying a basic income to most derps for the basic necessities of life, bread and circuses, and said derps will then just lie around like the fat slugs most of them are nowadays, watching tee-vee or fiddling around on the net or some of them might find wonderfully enabling and stimulating work of some other kind, allegedly, freeing them up completely to ‘do what they love.’
So we are going to put everyone on Social Security? And put everyone on Medicare? Wow, that is an enormous amount of money. 300 million times ($1,500/month Social Security + $500/month Medicare) = $600 billion/month = $7.2 trillion/year.
That dog don’t hunt.
Friday was Milton Friedman’s 103rrd birthday. Here are some of his quotes:
http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2015/08/01/in-honor-of-his-103rd-birthday-here-are-the-20-best-quotes-from-the-late-great-milton-friedman-n2033298/page/full
Times and writing styles sure have changed, but I’ll bet most of us could find something to like in his ideas.
That big old guy down the street getting all kinds of UPS deliveries every week and messing around with chemicals and talking radical right-wing stuff on the net every day? Pull his ration cards for a couple of weeks.
Whew, no visits to Kneevada.
“That dog don’t hunt.”
Sure it will. Just keep printing fiat currency while also having seized everyone’s accumulated retirement, pensions, Medicare/Medicaid, SS, SSI, VA, etc. One huge superfund to loot at will until it’s gone. Eventually the bread and circuses run out and the mobs with pitchforks show up.
“Whew, no visits to Kneevada.”
Visits everywhere, no doubt. Some Army vet/pilot out there with many microaggressions committed daily on the internet and stirring up rayciss stuff, sedition, discontent and negativity. Clearly a threat to pubic order and duckorum.
And of course we’ll have to bring back certain expats to face the music, too; nail them for U.S. taxes galore and assign them and/or their children to military units as compensation for the time they spent not supporting Mother State, i.e., the Homeland.
I did forget about looting all pensions, 401Ks, and IRAs. That will keep that funding going for a few years.
I can see the advantage of remote sysadmins, in theory. I do this stuff for my wife’s little company, but I find myself re-learning every time, because things need worked only every few months, or even every few years. Our in-house Linux server has just sat there since 2010, quietly doing its job. Someday it will die, and I will cry, because it will probably take me weeks to get a replacement running all the same services, in the way we want them to work. Someone who did this stuff for a living would be a lot faster, and probably make fewer mistakes.
OTOH, remote administration doesn’t buy you an understanding of the company, or the needs of the users. When I’ve visited large companies here, I see incredibly rigid policies that lock everything down to the point the users can barely use their machines. In the end, the users spend lots of time find ways to work around the official policies, which is hardly a productive use of their time. When some external IT type comes in (like me), I get bombarded with help requests for stuff that they just can’t get sorted out with the remote support. Not least because of the language issues – we may be able to understand a Pakistani tech speaking English, but someone who doesn’t have English as their native language just has no chance.
Which doesn’t even get into the issue of trust. Big company with lots of trade secrets – and all their servers being administers from 2nd world countries with rampant corruption. Riiiight… For governments, this is even dumber.
And of course we’ll have to bring back certain expats to face the music, too; nail them for U.S. taxes galore and assign them and/or their children to military units as compensation for the time they spent not supporting Mother State, i.e., the Homeland.
Oh, fun times ahead for my kids. They both still have the US passports (the wife and I handed them in some years ago). Since then, the US has massively increased the fee to free yourself of your US citizenship, to more than $2 grand.
The older son had to file his first US tax return this year; as of next year, he’ll have to file the whole enchilada, including the FBAR. It’s a nightmare of paperwork, more than you have to deal with if you actually live in the US. The kids banks haven’t yet realized that the kids are US citizens (even though they theoretically have the information), or FATCA would make it even worse. The sheer idiocy of it all gets me to frothing at the mouth.