Thursday, 26 September 2013

By on September 26th, 2013 in politics, science kits

10:37 – CBC posted four short video clips yesterday of Heartland star Amber Marshall’s wedding. Within a few minutes they were also up on YouTube. My impression of Amber’s new husband, Shawn Turner, is that he’s a solid guy. When he’s on camera, I can tell what he’s thinking, “I can’t believe she’s going to/has married me!”

Amber is her usual down-to-earth self. The wedding was held at her/their ranch. On the morning of her wedding, Amber wakes up and mucks out her chicken coop. She then drives into town to buy the flowers for her own wedding. Whatever the opposite of Bridezilla is, Amber’s it. As of a week before the wedding she hadn’t actually planned anything, although she said she “had some ideas.” On the laid-back to stressed-out continuum of brides, Amber definitely anchors the laid-back end. On the morning after her wedding, she’s cleaning out her barn, disposing of the refuse from the wedding and reception. I predict a long and happy marriage for those two. And, yes, she literally did ride in on a horse instead of walking down the aisle.

Work on science kits continues. At this point, things have slowed down, but we’re still shipping 15 or 20 kits a week. That means we have to keep building kits constantly to keep up. I’m not sure what happened in June and July. Ordinarily, those would be heavy months, but this June and July we barely beat the results for June and July of last year. I suspect it had something to do with the expiration of tax cuts and the sequester because we’re by no means the only business that saw volume tail off during those months. The other months have been good, with sales of 1.5 to 10 times as much as the same month in 2012.

All in all, it looks like 2013 will be pretty decent year for us, and 2014 should be considerably better. Which is good, because the morning paper listed the ObamaCare rates for us and the surrounding counties. It looks like a “platinum” policy will cost Barbara and me somewhere around $1,500 per month before the tax rebate. Of course, we won’t get any subsidy because we make too much money. Bastards.

I think it’s interesting how political correctness impacts rates. The single factor that trumps everything in true health insurance is pre-existing conditions, but ObamaCare policies won’t take that into account. A terminally-ill 27-year-old pays the same rate as a healthy person of the same age, which of course means that all the healthy young men are being forced to pay much more than they should to subsidize the ill men. Another major factor in real health insurance premiums is sex. Women cost much, much more to insure, particularly those of child-bearing age. A 27-year-old woman should pay at least two or three times as much as a man of the same age, but that would not be politically-correct, so under ObamaCare she pays the same premium as a man. Then there’s smoking. Cigarette smokers do and should pay much more for life insurance, because they don’t live as long as non-smokers (or, come to that, cigar and pipe smokers). But cigarette smokers should pay lower health insurance premiums than non-smokers, because smokers tend to die younger and of diseases that kill quickly. Non-smokers are the ones that cost the insurance company money, because they live longer and tend to suffer chronic diseases that are very expensive to treat. Of course, smoking is totally non-PC, so smokers get hammered under ObamaCare. The one thing that surprises me is that ObamaCare doesn’t penalize people for being overweight, which is about as non-PC as smoking.


36 Comments and discussion on "Thursday, 26 September 2013"

  1. brad says:

    Yeah, I remember when the Swiss government started regulating health insurance. It’s really a classic case of “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you”. My insurance costs doubled immediately. Gee, thanks for the help.

    What these clueless bastards just do not understand: You have give people an incentive to keep costs down. They must pay some part of their care, at least up to a substantial, painful ceiling. Instead, the government keeps encouraging lower and lower deductibles.

    I was talking to a doctor a while back – he said his office was pretty dead in January and February, because people didn’t want to make that first appointment, where they would have to pay their deductible. In December, he was completely overrun, as people went to the doctor for anything at all, to get the visit in before the new year, with its new deductible.

  2. Marie Z says:

    I moderate a few online support groups in Ohio. I have noticed that a lot more homeschoolers were looking for free or nearly free curriculum this year, and there was not as much chatter about the expensive, out-of-the-box curriculum packages either. This year is the first year in eight that I have not purchased much in the way of curriculum at all. I have been trying to make do with what I can find at the library, what I can find online, and what I can write myself.

  3. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I was talking to a doctor a while back – he said his office was pretty dead in January and February, because people didn’t want to make that first appointment, where they would have to pay their deductible.

    Yep. It’s always been that way. About 35 years ago, I was talking to a radiologist friend who had two offices and a mobile van that went around to nursing homes. His new wife was annoyed with him because his income fell to almost nothing in January and February. All of Dave’s Medicare patients, which was most his patients, hadn’t met their deductibles. He’d send them one bill and if they didn’t pay it he just wrote it off and made no attempt to collect it.

    I was talking to his wife, who’d been a friend long before she and Dave met, and she was complaining about him being too soft-hearted. She said Dave was actually showing significantly negative income for those two months because he wouldn’t try to get people to pay. I told her just to think of it as Dave doing pro bono work about 15% of the time, but it all happened to be concentrated in the first two months of the year. Marilyn was a nice, generous person, and looking at it that way seemed to satisfy her.

  4. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I have noticed that a lot more homeschoolers were looking for free or nearly free curriculum this year, and there was not as much chatter about the expensive, out-of-the-box curriculum packages either.

    Yes, I’ve noticed, too. One of our major goals has always been to keep our kits as affordable as possible consonant with high rigor and broad scope. But I’m fully aware that the financial resources of many home schoolers are quite limited. In many cases they’ve gone from two incomes to one to free up the (usually) mother to homeschool full-time. That’s the main reason we started offering the less expensive CK01B chemistry kit as an alternative to the CK01A, and the LK01 life science kit as an alternative to the BK01 biology kit.

  5. Lynn McGuire says:

    I’m not sure what happened in June and July. Ordinarily, those would be heavy months, but this June and July we barely beat the results for June and July of last year.

    I am beginning to think that Texas and North Dakota are doing well because of all of the drilling activity for the new oil wells. The rest of the USA is going to the dogs due to new governmental regulations on global warming XXXXXX climate change and obamacare. These two single items are causing many businesses to cut back and take a new look at their market conditions. Christmas retail sales are shaping up to be a total downer this year as Wal*Mart is already giving warnings.

    The really sad thing is that Obummer does not have a clue what is going wrong with the USA. He thinks that it is the mean old tea party radicals and Bible thumpers. Sadly, he is dealing with an rapidly aging country that he is trying his utopian ideals upon. People just want to be left alone to do their business and Obummer is worse than a vacuum cleaner salesman on the front porch, hammering on the door.

  6. OFD says:

    “…all the healthy young men are being forced to pay much more than they should to subsidize the ill men.”

    So nothing’s changed there. I will have to see if our local paper/s have listed the data for us; can’t wait.

    “Obummer is worse than a vacuum cleaner salesman on the front porch, hammering on the door.”

    He is far, far worse than that. And he’s far from stupid. They hate what this country used to be and fully intend to drive it down to Third World status and then keep tuning their Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist playbook, probably with a version of “war communism” at some point to weed out the conservatives and Christian believers of whatever denominations. Their problem will be that this is a financial and economic house of cards that cannot and will not stand; the money will just not be there, and again, I say, when they can’t pay their cops and soldiers, game over.

  7. Lynn McGuire says:

    “Intel proves once and for all that PCs are not coming back”
    http://semiaccurate.com/2013/09/18/intel-proves-pcs-coming-back/

    “Lets face it, the modern Windows 8 PC is a miserable experience, it is not a step forward from its predecessors in any measurable way but the steps backward are as numerous as they are obvious. The forthcoming Windows 8.1 is at best window dressing attempting to placate the critics without actually fixing any of their complaints. In short it sucks and it isn’t going to get better because Microsoft feels no need to change their ways.”

    “Then comes the hardware, you know the part Intel does. It sucks too. Why? Because for the last 5 or so generations it doesn’t actually do anything noticeably better for the user. ”

    Wow.

  8. OFD says:

    I have two Windows 8 desktops running and they’ve been OK for the past several months; no complaints, other than my admittedly stupid experiment to mess with the “preview” of the 8.1 “upgrade.” I’ve also got Linux machines here and for me it’s now down to whatever tool works for what I want to do; o.s.-agnostic. My iPhone 4 was upgraded to IOS 7.0 eventually and it works great, no complaints, other than our lousy cell coverage here by the Bay and the presence a couple of hundred yards away, evidently, of a large pile of scrap metal at the town highway department.

    I’m not interested in toting around more tablets, netbooks, e-book readers, and suchlike. I do stuff at home with the machines and when I’m out and about I’ve got the phone; YMMV.

    If I ran a business I’d probably use RHEL servers for the back end and put Ubuntu and Mint boxes out front. Windows where needed and appropriate. Whatever works.

  9. MrAtoz says:

    Here’s a graph the totally supports Obummer’s “increasing the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the national debt” NOT. Scroll down for the chart:

    http://futuretimeline.net/subject/business-politics.htm

  10. Lynn McGuire says:

    Here’s a graph the totally supports Obummer’s “increasing the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the national debt” NOT. Scroll down for the chart:

    http://futuretimeline.net/subject/business-politics.htm

    I noticed that they did not talk about the predicted inflation rate. I read an article this morning on http://www.sovereignman.com/ and cold shivers ran down my back:

    “The reality is that today’s financial markets are controlled and manipulated by central bankers who are destructively expanding their balance sheets to the point of insolvency. Many central banks are already insolvent. Most “rich” countries are bankrupt.”

    “And the “richest” country in the world has entered yet another sad, farcical episode public fiscal humiliation.”

    “The US government is so broke that they fail to collect enough tax revenue to cover mandatory entitlement spending (like Social Security) and interest on the debt. And that’s with interest rates at all-time lows.”

    “The debt is growing by the day. The US government reached its statutory debt limit back in May, and as soon as they raise the debt ceiling, they’ll quickly reach the new limit again. ”

    “The US government cannot even afford the 1.968% average interest that it is currently paying. (This is compared to 6.620% back in January 2001, and 3.665% in September 2008 when Lehman collapsed…) ”

    This is what chaps me about obamacare. We do not have enough money for pay for the programs that we have now. Just wait until obamacare is chugging down a billion dollars per year all by itself.
    That may happen in 2015.

  11. Jack Smith says:

    I say, when they can’t pay their cops and soldiers, game over.

    Any thugocracy knows, you always pay the cops and soldiers even if the rest of the citizenry lives in mud huts and ekes out a living scrounging at the local dump. If there’s no money in the treasury it can always be printed. Or if printed money isn’t accepted because it’s worthless then the cops and soldiers can supplement their pay by extortion and bribes.

    It’s no coincidence that the Washington DC area — I live in Fairfax County VA and see this every day — not only hasn’t experienced a recession in the last years but rather is booming by most every measure. Yes, house prices dropped a little, and unemployment went up by a few tenths of a percent, but that’s about it.

  12. ech says:

    It’s no coincidence that the Washington DC area — I live in Fairfax County VA and see this every day — not only hasn’t experienced a recession in the last years but rather is booming by most every measure.

    Most of the highest income counties in the US are those surrounding DC.

  13. Lynn McGuire says:

    This is what chaps me about obamacare. We do not have enough money for pay for the programs that we have now. Just wait until obamacare is chugging down a billion dollars per year all by itself. That may happen in 2015.

    Sigh. There are so many dollars in play here that I cannot get it correct.

    Here we go again: Just wait until obamacare is chugging down a trillion dollars per year all by itself.

    Is it time to change to “A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.”?

  14. Ray Thompson says:

    Thanks to Obamacare my deductible is now increasing to $5,000 (a $1,000 increase) with a maximum out of pocket of $10,000 (a $2,000 increase) and the premiums are rising 20% to $1400 a month. If I were to participate in one of the exchanges because my employer were to drop insurance (which they are seriously considering) I would have to pay $9,700 a year for the Silver Plan with no subsidies.

    Those with little to no income who refuse to work because they are a bunch of lazy cretins will pay little to nothing. Again, my money is being sucked out of my pocket to support the lazy scum that suck on the public teat and teach their bastard kids (five kids with five different fathers if they even know the father) the same way of life.

  15. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Ray, only a tiny fraction of the poor in this country fit your stereotype. Most of the poor are working poor, often working two or three minimum-wage jobs, and most of the rest are unemployed because they simply can’t get a job.

    My fundamental problem with ObamaCare (other than the fact that I don’t approve of government, period) is that its goal is to get everyone access to first-rate health care. My attitude is that you should have first-rate health care only if you can pay for it. If you’re expecting taxpapers to pay for it, fine. You should get second- or third-rate health care.

    As I’ve said many times, health care for the poor should be clinic-based, with nurses and PA’s providing the front-line care. No expensive tests, no drugs other than cheap generics, and so on. No expensive surgeries or life-prolonging measures. Only emergency care, preventative care, birth control & abortion services, and so on. The goal should be to provide as much as possible at the least possible cost to taxpayers. I’m guessing that the 90:10 rule applies in spades here. Clinics could provide 90% of the care at probably 10% of the cost.

    And anyone who isn’t insured or able to pay who shows up in a hospital emergency room should be penalized severely by having the cost charged against their government benefits.

  16. Ray Thompson says:

    Ray, only a tiny fraction of the poor in this country fit your stereotype.

    I know of several people with two cars, a boat, a motorcycle, and a 4-wheeler. Along with 5 iPhones in the family, $400 a month cell phone bills. The kids get free breakfast and lunch at school. They take multiple trips to the ER each month because no doctor will see them. Biggest complaint is usually a case of the sniffles or a small scratch.

    These people are abusing the system. And I think the numbers are not a small fraction. I am being sucked again to pay for their worthless lifestyle. Why should they be entitled to the same level of ANYTHING as I if they are not working and I am.

    I have no problem with the truly disabled and truly poor and the truly poor should get minimum health care, as in the bronze plan.

    There are just too many abusers and leachers for my taste. These people, with the entitlement mindset, will suck the system dry.

  17. Dave B. says:

    But cigarette smokers should pay lower health insurance premiums than non-smokers, because smokers tend to die younger and of diseases that kill quickly. Non-smokers are the ones that cost the insurance company money, because they live longer and tend to suffer chronic diseases that are very expensive to treat.

    I think Bob is wrong here. Lung cancer is expensive to treat, and heart disease doesn’t just mean one heart attack and then you die. Now we have drugs that make it possible for people to live after a heart attack. Also we have treatment options to treat heart disease before a fatal event. None of which are inexpensive.

  18. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I didn’t say treating the illnesses typical of cigarette smokers was cheap; I said it was cheaper than the costs incurred in treating the diseases common to non-smoking elderly people. For example, statistically a much lower percentage of cigarette smokers will live long enough to develop severe Alzheimers.

    Barbara’s dad is typical. He lived until a month short of his 90th birthday, and he never smoked cigarettes. If he had been a heavy cigarette smoker, he’d probably have died at least 10 years sooner, if not 15 or 20. And in those 15 years, Dutch used medical services heavily, and extremely heavily in the last few years. It’s not the acute care that costs the real money; it’s the chronic care, both direct medical and nursing homes and so on.

  19. Lynn McGuire says:

    Now we have drugs that make it possible for people to live after a heart attack.

    I have had two heart attacks (OK, the second one was an incident but it put me in the hospital for two days before I checked myself out AMA) and am taking $25 of drugs per month. Metaprolol and Warfarin (rat poison).

    At some point, I may need a heart transplant which I think costs about a million dollars and a month to six months in a hospital. There are only 2,500 heart transplants per year in the USA so my odds of getting one are not good though.

    Treating cancer is very expensive. My wife is an eight year survivor of advanced breast cancer and incurred $350K of bills in 18 months.

    The costs really mount up when you have to go somewhere and stay for a long time, more than a month.

  20. Lynn McGuire says:

    Got a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas this morning. They are offering to move our annual date from March 1 to December 1 in exchange for our group health insurance plan going from $5,750/month to $6,400/month.

    That will delay us from going on the equivalent Obamacare Gold PPO mandated plan until next Dec 1, 2014. That plan currently costs $6,900/month for my little group.

    They also included a Obamacare Bronze HMO plan option which would be $3,000/month. I will never do a HMO plan again if I have any choice about it.

    I note that they did not include a Obamacare Silver PPO plan option (if there is such a beast) for us. We will be checking on that but our insurance agent calls are going to voice mail. My office manager thinks that he has run for the hills and is looking for a cave.

  21. Lynn McGuire says:

    But there is hope for Windows! “There’s reason to hope Windows 9 will be better”:
    http://www.infoworld.com/print/227587

    Why are odd numbered versions of Windows good and even numbered versions suck?

  22. OFD says:

    I now have three Windows 8 desktops running, one being set up as a media server in the living room connected to the TV, with a TV tuner cahd and 16GB RAM, all three machines running Windows 8 Pro. Nary a problem thus fah. I have a Linux laptop and a Linux vm in one of them (Mint) to keep doing things in those that I need to do, but for our other stuff, the Winblows machines are working nicely. Maybe I’ll throw a fit in another six months if something blows up, but so fah, so good.

    We haven’t seen our health insurance options yet but I know we’re gonna be screwed; we make too much money, even with me outta work right now. I don’t even qualify for VA treatment anymore. So my guess is that we’ll be paying more than our monthly mortgage until we finally croak, and deductibles will be astronomical and then we won’t be able to find a doctor and if we do, we’ll be on waiting lists for months or years. This is one of the tactics nationwide to get to the objective of driving it down to Third-World status for most of us and a banana republic feudal paradise for the favored few at the top and their socialist minions. Picture Cuba or Romania, only with 330-million people. But we’ll see how that works out, because many tens of millions possess many hundreds of millions firearms.

  23. Lynn McGuire says:

    I think that obummer and his cronies are playing a long game. Soon, within the next five years, most of the health insurance companies in the USA will be bankrupt. With most of the people flooding to the heathcare exchanges, some bright young rising democrat will suggest merging medicare and the exchanges. After all, they do the same thing, right?

    BTW, I cannot figure out if Obummer is a utopian socialist or a socialist utopian. There are differences. He is not a communist, nor a pure socialist, nor a pure utopian. Today, I am leaning towards utopian socialist. Tomorrow, who knows?

  24. OFD says:

    He’s a communist, pure and simple; rips off tuned-up versions of the old Lenin and Stalin playbooks. Missing years of his biography, many unanswered questions about parentage and time out of CONUS; and the twenty years hanging on every word of a racist maniac clergyman in Chicago when not running playbook “community organizing” scams while he and the Mooch raked in hundreds of thousands per year. Don’t forget the wonderful friendship with Bill Ayers and his lovely wife Bernadine Dorhn, although you may not be old enough to remember their fun antics back in the day.

    He is Putin’s station chief in the U.S. Any supposed hassles or fights between them are purely bullshit for the masses.

  25. SteveF says:

    only a tiny fraction of the poor in this country fit [the] stereotype [of the multi-generation welfare queen]

    That may be so, though I’d want to research it myself with a skeptical eye for surveys done by others, but even if only a few percent of dolists are happily and self-righteously gaming the system, they sure stand out. The branch of my credit union that I normally go to often has a cluster of them on Fridays, getting out of their new SUVs (parked in the fire lane in front, often as not) and either sharing tips for getting more benefits or complaining about having to wait so long at the social services office to get “their” money. There are plenty of other examples, just in my experience.

    Perhaps my (and others’) perceptions are biased because I work in the capital of a liberal state, but the important thing is the perception, and it’s damned near overwhelming. I’m losing about 40% of my income to income and payroll taxes (ie, socialist security “premiums”) and about another 10% to property and sales taxes and another, smaller, chunk to various fees and expenses mandated by the governments. I’m feeling very peeved about welfare queens driving cars seven years newer than mine, and the bureaucrats conducting outreach programs to make sure more entitlement money gets disbursed, and the politicians who let it all happen.

  26. SteveF says:

    He is Putin’s station chief in the U.S.

    Ogabe was the Maddrassian Candidate.

    As I keep saying, if Ogabe were a devout Muslim doing everything he could to destroy the United States and to advance the cause of Islam, what would he be doing differently?

  27. Lynn McGuire says:

    BTW, Orson Scott Card agrees with you:
    http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2013-05-09-1.html

    “Michelle Obama will be Obama’s designated “successor,” and any Democrat who seriously opposes her will be destroyed in the media the way everyone who contested Obama’s run for the Democratic nomination in 2008 was destroyed.”

    “But the plan goes deeper than this. Barack Obama, like Hitler and the Iranian dictators, announced his plan, though the media (as with Hitler) has “forgotten” it.”

    “Barack Obama needs to have a source of military power that is under his direct control. Like Hitler, he needs a powerful domestic army to terrify any opposition that might arise. ”

    “Where will he get his “national police”? The NaPo will be recruited from “young out-of-work urban men” and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.”

    “In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.”

    “Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people “trying to escape” — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.”

    “Already the thugs who serve the far left agenda of Obama’s team do systematic character assassination as a means of intimidating their opponents into silence. But physical beatings and “legal” disappearances will be even more effective — as Hitler and Putin and many other dictators have demonstrated over and over. ”

    “Just keep your head down, and you’ll be OK. Unless your children repeat at school things you said in the privacy of your home. Unless an Obama crony wants your house or your job. Unless you tell the wrong joke to the wrong people. Unless you have already written or said dangerous things that will come back to get you shot trying to avoid arrest … “

  28. OFD says:

    Well, Mr. Card probably has a lot of that right; we will see shortly; stay tuned for when and if they begin positioning the Mooch with more serious public utterances than jive about drinking more wottuh and eating more lettuce, say on ObummerCARE, foreign policy, guns, etc. And watch what happens if the Heroine of Tripoli and Benghazi attempts to run.

    On the phony poverty scams in the country I also have anecdotal evidence from decades of observation; back in NJ twenty years ago I could hear these clowns chattering on their cordless phones (with my old scanner) about how to game the system and what tricks to use and who to contact. The local cops busted a whole ring of them once; thirty or forty scammers, mostly driving late-model vehicles, vacation trips, boats, etc. People collecting disability and there are photos and video of them roofing their nice houses and skiing in the Poconos. And these have been just the regular American citizens whose families have been here a while.

    The stuff going on now with immigrants, legal and otherwise, is crazy; probably twenty or thirty million so far and still coming, including hadji types, some of them recently stopped, probably the tip of the iceberg. As soon as they get here they have contacts who supply them with all the tricks, paperwork, scams, and more contacts in gaming the system, which is chock-full of loopholes and very lax oversight.

    This is different than ordinary unemployed people who really want to work and have been desperately searching for it and struggling with bills and taking care of three generations of their families at the same time. And like SteveF, every time they turn around there’s another tax, another fee, another cost to something, and they’re treated like shit by their own government and the media and academia have nothing but utter contempt and loathing for them. While they watch scammers make out like bandits and waves of immigrants skating on in here and making out like fat rats in a cheese factory.

  29. Lynn McGuire says:

    every time they turn around there’s another tax, another fee, another cost to something,

    I forgot to note that BCBS also informed us that there is a new federal tax on health insurance starting Jan 1, 2014. Their projected cost for the tax, assuming we take the Dec 1 option, is $223/month and they will be adding that new tax to our bill. So in Jan, our bill will be $6,386/month + $223/month = $6,609/month. This is for a total of 8 employees plus 5 dependents that I am paying $5,733/month right now.

    Kinda reminds me of that old movie, “Thank you sir, may I have another?”.

  30. OFD says:

    So these bastards will force us at gunpoint to buy exorbitantly priced insurance and then tax us on it, too. Very nice. I don’t remember dropping the soap.

  31. brad says:

    Ms. Obama for president? That’s a conspiracy theory I hadn’t heard. I mean, everyone knew that Hillary Clinton was better qualified than her hubby, but Michelle Obama? If she even announces herself as a candidate, much less get taken seriously…nah, surely not…

    I put my foot in it yesterday evening. Either I’m more of a social klutz than I think I am, or feminism has really poisoned the well. I was having a chat a group of other IT types, some men, a few women. I told a story of something I ran into not too long ago: A middle-aged, male IT department head who has filled his department with cute women who have zero IT skills. There was this sort of pause in the conversation, a collective intake of breath, as though I was criticizing the women in the group.

    Huh? I was talking about a middle-aged, male jerk who is screwing up his department by hiring eye candy instead of talent. I don’t see how this was a criticism of all women; heck, if I had doubts about the women in the group, I’d never had told the tale. For that matter, I wasn’t even really criticizing the women this guy hires; they are probably perfectly good at jobs they are trained for; this just doesn’t happen to be IT.

    Ah, well, quickly explained that this was only meant as a criticism of a guy hitting his mid-life crisis. Managed to get most of the egg off of my face…

  32. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    You mean there actually are competent women in IT?

    I suppose I’ve met a few, although not many. Of course, most of the men I know in IT aren’t what I’d call competent, either.

  33. OFD says:

    On the ObummerCARE situation:

    “As Nancy Pelosi said in 2010, Congress had to pass the bill before they could read it. Now you can read it . . . and weep.”

    http://www.garynorth.com/public/11594.cfm

    On brad’s faux pas: Simply mentioning women, their looks and incompetence in the same conversation guarantees shock and dismay now. The part about lack of IT skillz cemented your gaffe. This is just another area of Things We Can’t Talk About Anymore.

  34. brad says:

    Well, I think that’s it: There’s plenty of demand, but there just aren’t that many really good IT people out there. Fewer women than men in the field, but of those, I think about the same percentage are genuinely talented.

    The problem is exacerbated by bad role models. As an example, theres a guy, about 30, working for the IT department at one of the companies I sometimes work with. He’s has an incredible talent for working with users – he’s never impatient, always willing to explain one more time, just really, really good. He is also technically talented, but…he’s sloppy. You just can’t be sloppy in IT. Writing down most of the user’s requirements for a new system almost correctly, in an unclear specification. Disaster.

    Why does such a talented guy do this? Because it’s the way he was taught by his mediocre, bureaucratic department. I’ve tried to drop a few hints, but it seems to be too late – he probably started as an apprentice, has now spent 15 years doing sloppy work, and isn’t likely to change unless really forced to. So, one of the few really good people, ruined by lousy bosses.

    @OFD: You’re right. It’s idiotic, but you’re right.

    My school just came out with their new, strategic goals. Top of the list: hire more women as professors. This strategic goal was no longer even softened by a phrase like “all qualifications being equal”. Offensive, sexist as hell, but that’s also one of those things we cannot say. What’s wrong with hiring the best people, while disregarding their gender?

  35. OFD says:

    Merit, performance, even seniority, mean nothing anymore; the organizations will hire simply to meet PC goals, whatever they may be, and disregard any consequences. Furthermore, if anyone registers dissent or dismay at this within said organization, they will become anathema and on the shit-list.

    And this doesn’t even get into the off-shoring of jobs for the cheapest possible rate; my former employer laid off hundreds of us and a good chunk of those gigs are now being done by Mexicans and Indians. And whenever they had a corporate security audit at our site, the inspectors/investigators or auditors would roll in and every one of them was a furriner, with ESL.

    So yeah, hire more women in IT regardless; more women professors regardless; and put them in Seals and Green Berets and Marine LRRP units, regardless. Hire “people of color” regardless for whatever and appoint them wherever, regardless. Then here in Vermont bitch about how there aren’t enough “people of color” teaching at the university or in the executive ranks of state government; why is this, you might ask? Racism? In Vermont? Home, with Maffachufetts of radical abolitionists back in the day and an astronomical Civil War per capita KIA? Nope; people of color won’t move here because of the isolation and dare we say it? The fucking cold and the snow. More Things We Can’t Say Anymore.

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