W-day again

[altivo]

Y'know, I was born on a Wednesday, for all the good it did me.

Farrier was here this morning, vet late in the afternoon. Worked late shift as usual for Wednesday, boss called a meeting at 4:30 to tell us that due to a budget shortfall of 25K (decline in tax revenue due to the recession, increase in insurance costs) there will be no raises this year and staffing will continue to be paper thin. Not that the usual raises are that good. The last two years mine hasn't even covered the increases in state income tax and health care insurance. My check shrinks even when I get a raise.

The Fed once again demonstrates its incompetence and lack of vision, so the stock markets rise and so does inflation. Savings and CDs are earning rock bottom rates, but the wealthy Republicans want to take away retirement benefits and medicare as well. Then they'll tell us we aren't saving enough for retirement, since they've made it all but impossible to save anything anyway.

Obama talks Hawaii into handing over his full birth record, but of course the "Birthers" aren't satisfied and just consider it a fraud. Peabrain Trump demands that the President turn over his college transcripts as well. Is he willing to hand out copies of his own, I wonder?

Hummingbirds were still hanging around today, maybe they'll stick around and nest here.

Forecast: more rain, rain, and rain possible. There might be a moment of sunshine on Friday, if you don't blink and miss it.

Enough. I'm going to bed.

Comments

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Do the rules say you have to have attended a US college?

Or a college at all?

Is there anything in ones college papers that would hint at original citizenship in any way?

Captcha: investors thfli. These are getting crazier every time I reply to one of your posts.

[altivo]

No, the rules say nothing at all about education. The President has to be at least 35 years old and a natural born citizen (not an immigrant.) The latter, by the way, only requires that one of his parents be a citizen, and has nothing to do with religion or birthplace, but these nut cases haven't even read the real Constitution to understand that. Obama's mother was a citizen, and he was born on US soil, in Hawaii, a year after it became a full-fledged state even. There is no question whatsoever about his citizenship. The "Birthers" are people who will clutch at any straw to try to deny the legitimacy of Obama's election win, basically because he's black.

The first half dozen or so Presidents were born as English subjects, and only became US citizens by the accident of being inside the boundaries of the original 13 colonies when they became self-governing, so the technicality is really a remote one.

As for education, some early Presidents and at least one fairly recent one (Harry Truman) never completed college degrees. It's a democracy. Whoever gets elected is elected. But people who are used to running the show however they like it for so long just can't believe they've lost power even temporarily.

[schnee]

Obama talks Hawaii into handing over his full birth record, but of course the "Birthers" aren't satisfied and just consider it a fraud. Peabrain Trump demands that the President turn over his college transcripts as well. Is he willing to hand out copies of his own, I wonder?

This really was expected, wasn't it? You don't get anywhere by feeding trolls, not even in real life.

The whole thing's actually quite reminiscent of creationist tactics. If there's two species, say A and C, creationists will wail about how the huge gaping hole in the fossil record that evolution couldn't possibly explain; so when archaelogists later on manage to find the "missing link", so that there's now species A, B and C, creationists, far from satisfied, will now wail about how there's TWO huge gaping holes in the fossil record.

There's a similar mechanism at work here, and attempting to debate with these people makes just as much sense as debating creationists. You can't make someone see if his job/income/political power/... depends on his being blind.

[altivo]

I think he finally responded to this because some polls were showing that as many as 40% of US voters now believe that he is not a "legitimate" President. There's nothing rational about this behavior. Something like half of US residents seem not to believe in science or evolution. It's willful denial, not rational thought. And in Obama's case, the real issue is race. Racism is deeply entrenched in US culture. Creationism is also a form of racism. I can remember when I was in high school how I realized that when a fellow student and her father (who was a Southern Baptist minister) stood up at a meeting to declare that "No matter what anyone says, we didn't come from no monkey."

Such people make monkeys of themselves, when you come down to it.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

"We didn't come from no monkey."

I just love this butchering of the language, since if I'm not too mistaken they're actually using a double negative to say that they did from a monkey.

Now if only I understood why it is so important for religious people to set themselves aside from the rest of, oh, the entire planet ecosystem.

[altivo]

Yes, well... You're technically correct about the double negative. However, in practice, English speakers have never followed the rules imposed on them by academics who tried to make us use Latin grammar. Split infinitives, double negatives, "ain't" and other examples have been around for centuries and won't be going away.

However, in a formal setting such as a school board meeting, that sort of colloquial speech is certainly out of place. Particularly in a northern state, it did sound just the way you imagine it did.

Religious believers, at least the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, have at the core of their belief the notion that humans were made explicitly by god, in the image of god (whatever that means,) to dominate and rule all other life forms. Anything that calls this into question is damaging to their inflated notion of self-importance, and therefore must be challenged vigorously.

Ironically, in the US there is an incredible surge of racist intolerance now against all of Islam as a result of 9/11. This movement is so ignorant and ill-informed that they have no idea what they are expounding. However, one of their big criticisms of Islam is that it leads to the practice of theocracy, and the imposition of religious law on the entire population. Then they turn around and try to impose Christian theocracy and religious law on the entire population of the US. Yes, the same people, in almost the same breath.

[avon_deer]

Someone where I work (who has just taken early retirement himself) joked that the only retirement gift the youth of today will get is a bullet with which they can feel free to shoot themselves. :/

Not a nice guy; but somehow I worry quite visionary.

[altivo]

If the present trend continues, the US and many other nations will descend back into the laissez-faire capitalism of the eighteenth century, reducing the majority of their populations into nothing more than serfs.

I still have not figured out just why this is happening. I'm convinced it is somehow a result of World War II and the impact it had on economies and social attitudes, but the whole chain of causality is horribly twisted. Up until the 1920s, rational thought and science were on the increase, but somewhere in the miasma of the 30s and 40s, the trend reversed itself and the polarization began.

The development of mass media and its ability to sway the emotions and suppress the logical thought of so many at once enters into the picture. So do several mismanaged and misrepresented economic collapses, including the most recent one. The willingness of so many people to be led about like sheep (or lemmings) makes the whole disaster possible.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Trump is very smart. He's pandering to the same demographic that made his "reality" show a hit, and they're people who don't do much thinkin'.

It probably won't get him terribly far, if it does, we're a step closer to a true idiocracy. But it will get him more media attention, and publicity is good for the other things he does.

Inflation isn't a huge concern yet. Low interest rates make it more attractive for banks and investors to take risks making loans, bot to individuals and businesses. The knee-jerk reaction would be to jack the Prime Rate up to make-up for all the damage Greenspan's incompetence caused, but that would really just make things worse. We're in minimal danger of inflation at this time because money is not flowing as much because everyone is still scared. How it all basically works is that low interest benefits higher-risk investments and tends to get maximum money in circulation, which causes inflation if it goes on too long. High interest only benefits those with exceptional credit and well-established businesses, and stifles competition, because it makes it much more difficult for little guys to get loans at all.

I don't get the obsession everyone seems to have with going on the dole at 65. "Retirement", to me, is "too fucking old to work anymore", not going on an indefinite vacation funded by the generations currently in the workforce. Social Security was to be only a net that allowed people who could no longer work to not die penniless and homeless, or having to resort to begging, Medicare is to keep them from dying of easily treatable diseases. That's what's really wrong with the system. Without raising the SS taxes, you can't really expect it to keep working as a retirement hammock when it was designed solely to help-out those who were either financially irresponsible and didn't save during their working years, or simply just getting by and couldn't afford to save anything for the eventuality that they could no longer work.

[altivo]

Trump is a wooden headed autistic. But so are many of the ultra-conservatives, and they continue to have a following because they use the media so cleverly.

I disagree about inflation. It is creeping upward and already approaching 3% while unemployment is still high and pay rates are static. The price of gasoline alone could send us into another collapse before the year is over. Food prices are rising faster than the general inflation rate, and prescription drugs are unspeakably high. Those who don't feel the pinch, which of course includes most politicians and all bankers and financiers, simply have no idea what they are doing. Getting more money into circulation just increases the inflation rate. At some point, you have to say no. The actual inflation curve lags the money supply by many months, so even if the Fed put some brakes on now, inflation would continue to rise through 2011.

SS is not and never has been a "retirement hammock." It doesn't provide enough to live on as a sole source of income, and less now than ever before. However, because SS exists, other retirement income options have been reduced or eliminated, especially by smaller employers. More and more, retirement savings options through any kind of payroll deduction or employer contribution have been limited to stock market investment plans, too, which I consider unacceptably risky and inappropriate for those with modest incomes to begin with.

As the economic situation progresses, we are finding that fewer people have more and more of the money, which makes plans like SS and Medicare even more important. To abandon or castrate them is like returning to the Medieval era when people who did all the dirty work were treated like animals and left to die when their usefulness ran out. I'm really surprised to hear you take this angle on the subject.

Also, both employers and the government have been pushing people to retire in order to provide job opportunities and a chance for advancement for younger workers. You can't have it both ways.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a good idea to make cuts to entitlement funding, but I do think it's necessary to increase the retirement age just 5 or 10 years. For those who are unable to work to the retirement age, there's always SSDI, but 65 isn't really all that "old" anymore, when more and more people are living into their 80s and 90s thanks to advancements in medicine. My dad has already outlived his dad by about a decade. It's clear we have to change our perception of old age and retirement a bit. Older folks vacating jobs to make room for young people entering the workforce is nice, but the economy really has to grow and create more jobs too. As Baby Boomers continue to retire, we'll have a lot of vacancies.

But I do think that it's silly to give everyone retirement dole just because they paid in. People who can easily afford to live without it really shouldn't be collecting SS. everyone seems to view it kind of as a retirement account, and that's probably the wrong approach. Maybe it should be treated more like welfare or unemployment insurance, where those who need it can claim it, and others just consider themselves fortunate not to need it.

This is also one of those areas where I'm not sure privatization is an entirely bad idea, either. The problem with any sort of viable retirement accounts is that they have to grow along with inflation, otherwise there's no point in paying in at all. If your retirement investment loses one or more percent each year as it's outstripped by inflation, it's not going to amount to much. Saving money is kind of stupid if it's just saved to a bank account. If it's not working somehow, it's just decaying. I'm not terribly happy about that fact of life, and the only way to avoid that decay would be to lock the economy back to a standard baseline (such as a valuable metal commodity, gold or platinum), but that tends to be disastrous for other reason. Basically, it hamstrings the economy a little because there's less need to invest, and it keeps the currency far too strong, making for trade imbalances. A weak currency is great for exports, which is why China is holding its Yuan down. They risk runaway inflation, but until that happens, they're extremely competitive when it comes to exports.

Also, don't confuse fuel and commodity prices spiking with inflation. It's most likely speculation again. I've already seen the prices at the pump drop nearly $0.30 in the past week or so. I'm taking that as a sign that the unsustainable climb in prices has started heading back down, more of that bubble economics thing. Hopefully a bunch more late-to-the-game (or rather, late-out-of-the-game) speculators get burned badly for their troubles in driving prices up. I have a feeling food prices, at least for certain types, will stay high due to the weird weather lately, which is probably affecting planting, and fuel prices impact those prices pretty heavily too.

[altivo]

Privatizing SS would become a giant scam, a big money suck up for the financiers and a total loss for the people who need it most. The stock markets are too speculation prone and erratic to form a basis for a stable, even limited income for most people.

The idea of privatization comes from those who would most stand to benefit, the corporate execs and bankers who are just drooling at the idea of controlling that much more cash and being able to waste it or steal it as they choose.

No way will I support that. It would create more bubbles in the markets and more crashes we don't need.