10:14 – Barbara visited her dad twice yesterday, morning and afternoon. Then she came home to make dinner and we passed a relatively ordinary evening and night. Frances just called to give us an update. At the nurses suggestion, no one stayed overnight with Dutch, who’s refusing to talk to anyone. Barbara plans to head over to Hospice this afternoon to visit Dutch, although it may be pointless if he continues to refuse to talk.
Work on science kits continues. Barbara is downstairs now building 120 solids bags for chemistry kits. I’ve already built 60 of the small parts bags that are used in both chemistry kits, so the next step will be to build 30 sets of chemicals bags for each of the two chemistry kits and assemble 30 each of the final kits. With what’s already in stock, that’ll give us sufficient finished-goods inventory of both chemistry kits, the biology kit, and the life science kit.
I’m concentrating on filling bottles. Barbara had already labeled 60 sets of each for the chemistry, biology, and forensics kits, but I decided to do batches of 120+. The reservoir on our automated dispensers holds two liters. We slightly overfill bottles, which means one reservoir filling is sufficient for 120+ 15 mL bottles, usually 125 or so. So I’ve been filling the 60 labeled bottles and then filling 60+ more unlabeled bottles. That much more efficient than filling batches of 60, because it halves the time needed for setup and teardown/cleanup between batches.
We’d originally planned to introduce an AP Chemistry kit next year, but we may do it sooner than that. I was just contacted by a state department of distance education that wants us to produce kits for their students who are taking AP Chemistry at home. They actually want two types of kits, an equipment kit and a consumables kit. The state organization will purchase equipment kits, which they’ll lend to students’ families for the duration of the course, after which the families will return those kits. The families will purchase the consumables kits. The problem is, the course starts in mid-August, which doesn’t leave much time to get components ordered and in stock, build the kits, and ship them to the students. This time of year particularly, components are often back-ordered, so it’s possible we won’t be able to meet their schedule.
I was just contacted by a state department of distance education that wants us to produce kits for their students who are taking AP Chemistry at home.
Congrats! You are getting stature in the industry. I love it when people contact us for our product saying that someone had referred us to them. I still believe that word of mouth is the best sales tool.
Word of mouth is crucial for some things, less important for others. I was dismayed when I rang a house painter recommended by a friend of 30 years and his partner only to find out that he’s booked out for the next eight weeks. I may have to go with someone else. But I don’t greatly care about recommendations for a plumber to replace washers or someone to work in the garden.
Did the department mention how many of each kit they may require?
I think it’s interesting how much the online virtual schools are growing. A woman my wife used to teach with (at public school) has moved out of state and will be sending one daughter to private school, and the other daughter will be entrolling in an online virtual school.
Yes, alternatives to public school are booming. There are about as many types of homeschooling as there are homeschoolers, and there’s a very broad menu of choices for parents to choose from for their children, from on-line virtual schools to co-ops to intense summer-long science and math camps.
I see the trend, and it isn’t good for public schools. Increasingly, public schools are losing their best students to homeschooling. Just as bad, they’re losing the parents who are smart and motivated enough to homeschool. Without those parents pushing public school systems to improve, what we’re going to end up with is public schools having only students whose parents don’t care.
Right now, less than 5% of students are being homeschooled, but that’s increasing every year. Liberals see this coming, and have actually started to try to guilt-trip parents of good students into keep them in public schools to help poor students. That’s not going to happen. Liberals will do a lot of very stupid things, but sacrificing the interests of their own children isn’t one of them. And for those few who actually decide to do that, I have only contempt.
Right now, the only thing preventing homeschooling from skyrocketing in popularity is the requirement, often legal, to have a parent at home teaching the students. But good students age 12 or 13 and up–those old enough to be on their own at home during the day–don’t really need that. Tell them what you expect them to do, sit them down with a book or in front of a PC, and go to work. Test them frequently to make sure they’re buckling down, and you won’t have any problems.
Without those parents pushing public school systems to improve, what we’re going to end up with is public schools having only students whose parents don’t care.
We are already there in the inner cities and slowing spreading to the suburbs. Unfortunately, this seems to be income related and I do not understand that. I expect all parents to push their kids to do well in school so that they can do better in life.
The Peeping Tom’s are excluding Mosques:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061213-659753-all-intrusive-obama-terror-dragnet-excludes-mosques.htm
Why am I not surprised?
I think it’s cultural. Many cultures–including those of Northwestern Europe, Scandinavia, Judaism, China, Japan, India, etc.–place a high value on education and push their children to do well in school. Others, not so much.
I expect all parents to push their kids to do well in school so that they can do better in life.
Why? Welfare and living on other people’s money has served their parents well. Food, housing, clothing, utilities, cable TV, cell phone and free medical. Why pay when you can have it for free? Drop out of school and sit on you butt every day and watch soap operas.
Drop out of school and sit on you butt every day and watch soap operas.
Not many soap operas left besides GH. Unless you mean reality shows?
“Why am I not surprised?”
That’s right; and you can be sure they’re snooping and peeping at the Christian churches, see if they can find anything at all to attack them with, but the sites where actual terrorist activities are being encouraged and plotted? Nah. Too sensitive; don’t wanna piss off the 1/10 of 1 percent people here who are “peaceful” muslims. And the people who decide all this do it in total secrecy. Amazing; we’re just gonna roll over for this like our Brit cousins did, I guess.
“…public schools having only students whose parents don’t care.”
That’s been true since I was a kid in the publik skool system; it’s a baby-sitting service for most parents, in households where both are forced to work in this system. So the kids are warehoused and much of the time is spent on political indoctrination; a combination of corporate fascism and hard-Left ideology. Can’t read or write their own language or do basic arithmetic, but by Jeezum they feel good about themselves and buy the whole neo-Marxist stew of bullshit, hook, line and sinker. White patriarchs ruined the world; Islam and Wicca are just as valid as Christianity; Western civilization is the font of evil in human history; and speech and thought must be sharply curtailed and monitored at all times to avoid disrespecting some Official Grievance Whore group or other. And science is cool if it is exclusively devoted to environmental causes that have been thoroughly politicized. Ecology=Good. Nuclear Physics=Bad.
“…Drop out of school and sit on your butt every day and watch soap operas.”
We see this up here with white people, of course; not fah from here are “low-income” housing structures and nobody seems to have very much to do; home most of the day, up late into the wee hours, and most meals appear to be takeouts or pizza deliveries. Everybody smokes ciggies constantly, except the hippo-sized females.; they just eat, apparently. I suppose we can be thankful that there isn’t a “Breaking Bad” meth lab in the vicinity and violent gang activity. A twelve-pack of shitty American lager, a carton of ciggies, some smut on the tee-vee or Internet, and Bob’s yer uncle!
OK, now I understand why I am seeing a nasty little rumor about Medicare, “75 and you are out”:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350983/ron-johnsons-transformative-proposal-jonathan-strong
“White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough, congressional liaison Rob Nabors, and other Obama officials came into the initial meetings on the Hill reiterating the president’s position that $4 trillion in deficit reduction would basically solve the problem for now.”
“But according to GOP deficit projections subsequently prepared by Johnson and obtained by National Review Online, the true size of the problem is staggering, and surprised even many of the seasoned budget negotiators involved.”
“$4 trillion? Try $106 trillion, the medium estimate. That’s $106,954,000,000,000. Even the lowest, extremely conservative estimate comes in at $72 trillion; the highest is over $120 trillion. ”
Of course, snopes says the 75 and out for Medicare is bogus:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/over75.asp
Just wait until all the illegals XXXXXX undocumented future citizens jump on Medicaid. The billion dollar digit will be spinning then.
Are we going to have to have a civil war to fix all this? Really?
I just got a brochure in the mail selling me life insurance; I can make monthly payments and the insurance will remain in effect until I’m 80. Swell. Lotta folks live way past 80 now, let alone 75.
“Are we going to have to have a civil war to fix all this? Really?”
Bob’s earlier prediction about what the State will do with all the retirement pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., is probably what will happen, eventually; the question will be if they can even start to get it underway (and make no mistake, it will be a total gigantic mess, rife with corruption) before the whole house of cards collapses. I don’t think they can, and I still think, especially considering the figures in the tens of trillions being bruited about now, that we’ll have a great Default and the State will just write everything off. Unprecedented in history with a country this size and this populous and armed to the teeth.
Among them, around 20-million or more illegals. And the tens of millions already here that we can’t do a thing about. The current system can in no way sustain this level of costs, just no way in hell. Plus run multiple-front wars all over the globe. Not sustainable. And the class that is paying for it all is being RUTHLESSLY punished and bled white by it all and themselves dwindling in numbers and aging out.
Throw in a badly decaying national infrastructure and wide-open borders (how many hadji sleeper cells have crossed the Rio Grande in the last twenty years?) and vulnerability of this country to a wide range of attacks (with an intel capability that has proved itself laughable many times thus far) and most of the population concentrated on the coasts and in the big cities and we have:
A recipe for disaster.
Will that mean another civil war? Quite possibly. And right now half the country is outraged by what this and previous regimes have done, and the other half is outraged that we are outraged.
I just got a brochure in the mail selling me life insurance; I can make monthly payments and the insurance will remain in effect until I’m 80. Swell. Lotta folks live way past 80 now, let alone 75.
Life insurance is to pay off your debts so your wife can live on without having to worry about finances. Hopefully you are solvent and have a few savings by age 80 with your social security income, hah!
Me, I have more debt than life insurance at the moment but I should have that rectified in a couple of years.
Bob’s earlier prediction about what the State will do with all the retirement pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., is probably what will happen
Please refresh my memory here as I do not recall what Bob’s prediction is (other than we will muddle through it). My prediction is that the Feddies will start seizing everything in sight (maybe I got that from Bob and Argentina)? I can hardly wait until they seize my IRA, most of it is invested in five acres of land here in Fort Bend County.
Throw in a badly decaying national infrastructure and wide-open borders (how many hadji sleeper cells have crossed the Rio Grande in the last twenty years?) and vulnerability of this country to a wide range of attacks
I doubt that these sleeper cells can do very much in the way of killing much of the population. Unless they get nukes or some sort of disease. Otherwise, when they pop out, some redneck is going to shoot them.
Bob can correct me if I’m wrong but I believe the gist of it was that the State will simply consolidate all the retirement and pension plans, and 401’s and Roths, etc., along with the funds in Medicare and Medicaid, etc. into one huge megafund from which they will distribute support to approximately the 95% of the population that won’t be working anymore here. I tend to think it won’t get off the ground before it all blows up and that the State itself is headed toward eventual collapse under all the weight of its obligations, corruption and incompetence.
As for my wife surviving me, it is just as likely to be the other way round here; we’re thinking about doing it in case one of us goes and the other has to pay for the coffin, etc, (in my case easily done: no embalming and a plain pine box and burial out in some abandoned or semi-abandoned boneyard in the woods) and take care of living expenses for the duration and have something left over for the kids.
Sleeper cells can hide in plain sight for a very long time and eventually be set off to create all kinds of mayhem in a country like this; the water supply, the food distribution networks, the power grid. Hell, strap on some suicide vests and blow themselves up in a major shopping district or mall on Black Thursday. Do that in a dozen cities and watch the shit fly; the State will go ballistic and we will have martial law and the hadjis will have won, temporarily. Sure, local rednecks and huckleberry cops may get some of them, but as the IRA informed the late Margaret Thatcher after a bombing they’d done which just missed her; “We only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky all the time.” Funny blokes, those guys.
I’m in progress writing a novella on this topic. It’s set in the PRC, which is not as computerized as the US but lives closer to the edge because their population is so much higher. Even a single knowledgeable and resourceful man can cause all kinds of havoc. It’s not necessary to kill the entire population; killing a few thousand, inconveniencing a bunch more, and getting the attention of the rest will do the trick.
True to some extent, but a long-term sleeper has to be extremely dedicated or he’ll lose focus and dedication. (And the kind of person who can maintain that kind of dedication for years or decades usually has other mental oddities which make him stand out.) The usual way to deal with them is to have handlers and political officers/morale officers, but doing that greatly increases the risk of something going wrong or someone opening his mouth. It also increases the need for external support, mainly money from Arabia or Iran.
And that, by the way, points to the real way to stop terrorists. It’s not by winning over the hearts and minds of the people who make up the sea in which the terrorist swims, as the metaphor goes. It’s by cutting off the money. This has been known for at least my entire adult life. Why the geniuses who fancy themselves as running this nation aren’t acting on that bit of wisdom is an interesting question.
A very interesting question; but didn’t our lords temporal seize or freeze Iranian or Iraqi assets in this country one or more times over the years? And in the case of Saudi-origin terrorists, how do they cut off that money when it comes from the Saudi princes that our president walks hand-in-hand with in Texas and our current president bows to and practically grovels before?
The sleepers I’m thinking of that more than likely have been getting into the country over the past couple of decades are probably very low-level; they don’t need to maintain middle-class facades; they’re probably workers and laborers who get a stipend on top of what they can earn here in those kinds of jobs and they just coast along, maybe even mostly forgetting what they’re here for. But they have family members back in the Sandbox and the Suck and at some point they can be activated and told to get with the program or somebody at home gets hurt bad. And maybe there a few higher-level controllers who do in fact maintain middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyles and we certainly know that a bunch of the actual terrorists over the years came from those economic and academic backgrounds.
Here comes your sleepers:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/06/11/Obama-Admin-Considers-Resettling-Thousands-of-Syrian-Refugees-in-U-S
“A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families.”
“The State Department is “ready to consider the idea,” an official from the department said, if the administration receives a formal request from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the usual procedure.”
“The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement. California has historically taken the largest share, but Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia are also popular destinations.”
Why not? That is sarcasm by the way.
Jesus wept.
Just what we need, a few hundred-thousand Syrian refugees, almost all muslims. And meanwhile hadji mobs are stoning Christians in Dearborn, MI:
http://www.infowars.com/american-muslims-stone-christians-in-dearborn-michigan/
Let’s all just roll over now and let them have the entire country, I guess is the prevailing wisdom among our lords temporal. We have justices and law school professors telling us sharia is the next greatest thing.
Tell ya what; I didn’t survive three U.S. wars and years of street cop gigs to eat this.
Nothing much is said about the perp in this case but I wish he could be deported back to whatever hellhole he came from:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-14/men-sentenced-over-sharia-whipping/4755638
“As for my wife surviving me, it is just as likely to be the other way round here”
You can get a joint policy, that pays once for whoever dies first. This is cheaper than having two policies. For the second person, it’s only important to have enough assets and/or insurance to cover the costs of burial and cleaning up the estate. More is nice, but not necessary.
Why is the West is paying any attention to Syria? It is simply none of our business. Europe deals with European troubles, let the Arab league take care of its own members. The USA is an ocean away, it is even more irrelevant for you guys – and Obama has apparently just approved the first weapons shipments…
Why is the West is paying any attention to Syria?
Because we have Obama. The idiot who thinks he is the anointed king of the world.
I agree about Syria, let them sort it out themselves. Both sides will hate us if we take sides. Same goes for any other African or Middle Eastern hell hole. If the locals want democracy let them fight for it. Oh, and carry a big stick for when they start messing with us.
It’s not just Obama, there are plenty of red and blue clones of him in your recent history. Just can’t leave well enough alone.
brad, Ray and greg; all correct, right on the money.
We are once again gonna support the wrong side, with our taxes collected from us at virtual and sometimes real gunpoint, and various weapons that we sell them or give them are likely at some point to be used against our own troops.
But the only people this affects are families of those troops so the vast majority, Mr. and Mrs. Boobus Americanus, don’t really give a shit. They’re in for a very rude awakening at some point.
Why is the West is paying any attention to Syria?
Because we have Obama. The idiot who thinks he is the anointed king of the world.
It is Obama’s “Muslim Spring”. He thinks that this is his legacy. Moron.
Friday is not up yet on the calendar so here is the latest nooz on the IBM Roadkill Project:
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-increases-us-layoffs-1790-jobs-cut-in-2012-so-far-group-says-2012-3
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-begins-layoffs-2013-6
It is Obama’s “Muslim Spring”. He thinks that this is his legacy. Moron.
You calling me a moron? Or the self-anointed one?
You calling me a moron? Or the self-anointed one?
Dude, sorry that I was not clear. Barrack Obama is a moron. He is also a Utopian. Utopians cause a lot of the world’s problems because they have this deluded sense of self that says that they can fix any problem. They tend to rob Peter of his stuff and give it to Paul, thinking that Paul will worship them.
In a way, Barrack Obama thinks that he is God. But he is the type of God who does not believe in free will for his subjects. Beware him, he will rain down destruction on all of us.
I remember when IBM was very selective but when you got in you had a job for life, like a Japanese salaryman. I heard of someone who was working full time but doing a BSc so they could get a job with IBM. S/he cut back her study program because the grades s/he was getting were good, but not the straight distinctions s/he felt s/he needed. Apparently, when you got to work in the old days IBMers would sing the company song before getting down to work.
There came a time in, I think, the Nineties when they simply had to get rid of the dead wood. When voluntary redundancy packages were offered the good people took them, the duds (at whom they were aimed) didn’t. So they decided that the company wouldn’t survive if the duds stayed, so they fired them.
I hated them in the Eighties when I found out how much they’d done to screw Control Data, and how much they were manipulating buyers, but have calmed down a bit now.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-14/weiners-second-coming/4756088
Does anyone think Weiner can, ah, get it up again?
We have a saying in Australia, “A soufflé doesn’t rise twice.”
Dude, sorry that I was not clear.
Dude, no worries. I have been called a moron more than once. I just wanted to make sure that the term was directed where it really belonged and landed where it should.
I remember when IBM was very selective but when you got in you had a job for life
That is indeed true. I worked with a fellow in the USAF in the late ’60s that was in danger of being drafted. He was employed by IBM but his birthday was at the front of the lottery for the draft. He enlisted in the USAF instead. IBM continued to pay him $500.00 a month while in the USAF so he would return to them when his tour was up. If you were good, IBM kept you whatever it took within reason.
When I was leaving the USAF I interviewed with Burroughs for a position working on the operating system (MCP). The interview was odd. They treated me like I worked there already and even asked my opinion in a staff meeting on some OS issues. I turned down their offer because I did not want to move to Pasadena California. Three days later the offer was doubled, I still said no. Three days after that, on a Saturday, some VP calls and tells me the offer still stands, they will buy my old house, pay for my relocation expenses 100%, and provide temporary housing for six months at no cost to me. I still turned them down as California, especially Pasadena was still California. And it was too close to my family.
About a year later my brother, who drives a tow truck as a side job, had to tow one of the fellas that was part of the decision process. They talked and the guy finally realized that he was talking with my brother. Told my brother they really wanted to hire me and that they were willing to offer much more. Never said how much. But I still would have been in California, close to my family.
We don’t and won’t see job offers like that anytime again soon; Big Blue dumped a bunch of people, some of them with twenty years there, like yesterday’s newspapers, and not for the first time. And they played nifty games with numbers each month, too.
And on a sort of related note, a story in the local paper today mentions that the site where I had my interview a couple of weeks ago and where they kicked off the 4-6-week background checks, got infested with bugs. I did a double-take, figuring, oh, did their IT infrastructure get hit with some kinda virus or malware or something? Silly me; no, literal bugs; bedbugs. And they didn’t bother notifying their employees. Could this be a sign?
You didn’t want to go to Southern California? The home of California Girls