Sunday, 6 October 2013

By on October 6th, 2013 in Uncategorized

18:37 – I pretty much took the day off.


30 Comments and discussion on "Sunday, 6 October 2013"

  1. SteveF says:

    Is… is that allowed? In the US, every employed person has a non-employed dependent, whom he’s supporting either directly, such as offspring, or indirectly, through the munificence of government. The situation is even worse when you consider that a large fraction of “workers” do not contribute to the wealth of the nation. It’s probably safe to say that 1.5 people are depending on every productive worker’s labor, in addition to the worker himself. That means that you are responsible for creating the wealth necessary to feed and house and entertain 1.5 people, and every hour that you could work but don’t, you are effectively denying them food. Furthermore, it’s a good bet that one of those dependents will be a child or handicapped or oppressed and therefore unable to work. Why do you hate the handicapped children of color, Robert? Why are you trying to starve the children? Now get back to work!

  2. OFD says:

    Ol’ Bob is a hahtless bastid, ain’t he? Not only is he screwing over disabled children, he’s also undermining national security. Like that old WWII poster of the stereotypical Imperial Japanese banzai warrior with giant specs, grossly slanted eyes and huge buck teeth: “Go Ahead—Take Day Off!” Aimed at slackers and goldbricks like Mr. Thompson.

  3. Ray Thompson says:

    Nah, he just got furloughed by the government.

    Friend at church has been furloughed, well, sort of. He is in the reserve and is on active status. But he is not getting paid. But he has to show up for work otherwise he will not get paid if the fools on the hill decide to pay retroactive.

    So he shows up for work, hoping he will get paid. If the congressional cretins decide not to allow back pay, then he will have worked for nothing. Or he can not show up and be certain of not getting paid.

    Yet congress still gets paid and they are not putting their butts on the line unless you count tripping over their tongues.

  4. OFD says:

    And the beat goes on….and the beat goes on…

    They are now pretty much shoving a gigantic middle finger into our faces daily now, if not hourly; one horror story after another of the Shutdown Theater schtick. Only people being screwed are us Mundanes, per usual. Heartening to see, though, bikers escorting WWII vets in Mordor; buses crushing orange barricades at national parks; people just hurling barricades out of the way, and an increasingly bitter and angry mood over the population outside Mordor, where they simply just can’t understand why we don’t all roll over immediately for whatever The Prophet Barack Hussein, many blessings be upon his name, wants to do to us.

    Naturally the usual RINO suspects in Congress are champing at the bit for the Stupid Half to cave in, with face-saving or not, they don’t care. The Prophet just sneers his nasty little sneer of commissar contempt and goes off to play golf or get his latest orders from Moscow.

    Rumors abound now of a virtual civil war within the U.S. government; a potential coup d’etat; and a mass march on Mordor. Fun times ahead.

  5. Chuck W says:

    Speaking of non-working workers, I was told by residents of the former East Germany, that EVERYBODY (except those old enough to retire) worked. If you did not go to work where they told you to go, somebody came out and got you. Communism had this figured out ages ago.

  6. OFD says:

    And if you still refused to work they shot you.

    Communism had that figured out ages ago, too.

    Unless you were a middling bureaucrat in the government; then, if you pissed off the right judge, she had you guillotined. And she watched from her window.

  7. Miles_Teg says:

    “I pretty much took the day off.”

    The devil makes work for idle hands to do.

  8. Lynn McGuire says:

    The son of my good friends has been furloughed by the IRS. He is a field agent and a good one that makes about $50K/year. He has been working on a lawyer who has made $32,000,000 in the last ten years and not filed a single tax return. His parents and his wife’s parents have promised him that their grandson will not starve. I asked his parents if they are going to let their son and daughter-in-law starve (plus not pay his mortgage) and got a smile in return. Luckily, he does have enough cash for 30 days. But not 90 days.

  9. Lynn McGuire says:

    BTW, I figure that if Boehner lets a clean CR go to the house floor, he is a dead speaker. I would bet that the Republican caucus would caucus and replace him in a heartbeat.

    And this is just the warmup to the debt ceiling conflagration.

    BTW2, only 17% of the USA government is shutdown.
    http://washingtonexaminer.com/wheres-sense-of-crisis-in-a-17-percent-government-shutdown/article/2536862

  10. Ray Thompson says:

    He has been working on a lawyer who has made $32,000,000 in the last ten years and not filed a single tax return.

    The lawyer must be a politician working for the Obama regime and kingdom.

  11. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I didn’t realize that all you guys also normally worked seven days a week.

  12. brad says:

    Unless I am on vacation and actually away from home, work at least a little almost every day. On a typical weekday, I usually don’t work a full 8 hours at a stretch. Maybe 6 or 7 hours during the day, then in the evenint I will typically answer a few emails over a beer, and on the weekend work a couple of hours both Saturday and Sunday. I figure it comes with liking what you do.

  13. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I’ve cut back a lot. On weekdays, not counting dog walks, I normally work straight through from 0800, when Barbara leaves for work, until 1730. Call it 8+ hours a day of actual work time. On weekends, I normally put in five or six hours a day on work-work, interspersed with doing laundry and other weekend chores. So, I’m actually working maybe 50 to 52 hours in a typical week. That’s down from 60 to 70 hours a week a few years ago.

  14. Chuck W says:

    Heard an interesting way for Boner to extract himself from this mess. Introduce a bill that is ‘clean’ like the Prez wants, but strip off ALL exceptions and exemptions, so everybody in the US of A will be subject to it. No excluding some corps and not others; no exceptions for Congress, etc. I would love to see and hear Reid squirm over that. Not sure Republicans are smart enough to do that, though.

    I do not do any business on weekends anymore—only pleasure. Although the week’s workload is usually only 20 to 35 hours, depending on assignments. Just like teaching English, I am only on duty while actually recording; I did/do no work at all outside the classroom/conference room. Except for the occasional editing job, which usually goes fairly quickly these days.

    Renovations on Tiny House keep me busy for the rest of my ‘idle’ time. Up to now, I have been in no hurry on that job, but hope to increase the speed of that task.

  15. OFD says:

    I am currently doing around six hours a day, seven days a week on the job search thing and another several hours a day, maybe four or five days a week on house and yard tasks, chores, errands, etc. As Mrs. OFD likes to say; nothing works in an old house but YOU. Meaning ME. Because she is gonna be gone again for most of the next two months. The job search thing includes studying up on tech issues; as of today it will be back again to RHEL and Hadoop as I just had an interesting call about a possible remote sys admin gig running those bad boyz.

  16. Lynn McGuire says:

    As Mrs. OFD likes to say; nothing works in an old house but YOU.

    Smart Lady! Sorry to hear that Mrs. OFD is going to be gone for so long so that you can have a roof over your head. And eat!

    I used to work 60 to 80 hours per week but I have really cut back. The two heart attacks really slowed me down. I feel like I do not get anything done nowadays without extreme effort and a team of worker bees.

  17. Chuck W says:

    I am trying my best to get off Windows, and have all my personal productivity on Linux. There is no question Windows is ahead of everything Linux in most important areas. I have made this attempt to switch several times since the first try in 2003. I always end up falling back on Windows, because it is so much simpler than Linux. Just try and look at disk partitions, file system specs, and examine the contents of your disks in Linux. Can’t do it. And the Ubuntu aficionados have been crying for a tool like Windows’ Disk Manager for a half-dozen years, but Canonical refuses to deliver.

    Since I use laptops/notebooks exclusively, I need for the screen to be readable on the laptop itself, even though I plug them into larger monitors at home. In Windows, I can control everything about the display: type size AND the ‘holes’ that type sits in. And I can adjust every bit of type on the screen. Not so in Ubuntu. I can resize the type, but then it runs off the little ‘window’ box the type fits in. Plus, there are many places in various applications where the type size does not increase, but stays super-tiny, in spite of the fact that most of the rest gets bigger. Audacity is simply unreadable because of this.

    Found out yesterday that Gnome is once again officially available for Ubuntu in v13.04—although not supported by Canonical. So I installed it. Machine locked up right away. It will not recover. So it is a re-install and I am back to being limited to Unity if I want to use Ubuntu. We edit using Cinelerra, Ardour and Final Cut on a Mac, but switching my personal computing to Linux is not going to happen if I have to give up the flexibility and ease of set-up that Windows has over Ubuntu.

  18. OFD says:

    Chuck, I’d try the Mint version of Ubuntu and there are several GUI shell options available. But it depends, too; if your work life is less of hassle by using Windows machines, by all means, go for it. I do now; life’s too short; whatever works best for me in whichever scenario. Right now I have three Windows 8 machines and no complaints.

    By way of a laugh here, I just tried twice to download PCBSD to try it out in a vm and then maybe use it one of my machines exclusively and it blew up twice on download or failed in the end without any error mss. On the other hand, I have previously tried to download M$ apps or a Windows o.s. from M$ itself and they either took forever or failed. Of course this could be due to my net connections here. Like right now it’s a hurricane outside my window; rain blowing sideways and trees swaying back and forth. Torrential, and coming off the Bay. This usually can knock out our internet but so fah, so good….

  19. Lynn McGuire says:

    It’s probably safe to say that 1.5 people are depending on every productive worker’s labor, in addition to the worker himself.

    You know, on second thought, this is not funny but very scary. We do seem to be transitioning to multiple people per workers in the USA. This will not work for the long term as the workers feel increasingly unappreciated.

  20. SteveF says:

    I didn’t realize that all you guys also normally worked seven days a week.

    I’m self-employed. (Strictly speaking I’m an employee of the consulting company I’m going through, but it’s just for the duration of this contract, and I’m getting no benefits. It’s just for my convenience for taxes.) I’ve got my butt-in-seat contract, then writing and editing books, scrounging for my next contract, and the occasional small programming job. I have no idea how many hours — productive hours, ’tis — I work per week because I usually work until I pass out in the evening, and the later hours may be productive and may not. Also, I have no idea what productivity scaling factor to use if I’ve taken Peewee to dance class and I’m trying to get something done while camped out in the hallway with two different classes loudly in earshot and people running back and forth. Note that I’m about ten years younger than RBT and OFD, so I may well be working the schedule he did ten years ago. Only a few years younger than Lynn, but I haven’t had two heart attacks. On the other hand, I have a small child. On the other other hand, I’m not running a company with employees and having to do 100 hours per week of unpaid, government-required BS work. On the other other other hand, I still have to do a lot of unpaid BS work even with no employees. Tell me again why we shouldn’t hope for a 100% government shutdown, with no money paid to paper-pushing bureaucratic assholes who contribute nothing to the nation’s productivity but sure manage to drag down the productive?

    Pardon me. I need to put the kibash on my rants lest I catch up to Lynn’s heart attack count ricky-tick.

    You know, on second thought, this is not funny but very scary.

    Yah. I wrote it as a sorta-joke but on reflection it wasn’t funny at all.

  21. OFD says:

    Is it “kibash” or “kibosh?”

    No, the current system is not sustainable, either long-run, or now, increasingly so, the short run. Sir Bob Geldof sez we all have until 2030 and then all of humanity will be dead. I didn’t bother looking into his “reasoning” for that, but by that year we will have seen tremendous changes across the board on this continent alone. I expect to be gone by then or so out of it as to be useless anyway. But we hope to pass on some kind of fucking torch to the coming generations; Robert and Barbara and others here are doing a terrific job of it.

  22. Chuck W says:

    I will try Mint. Somehow it escaped me that several here use it and like it. Unity is definitely not my cup of tea.

    On the wage front, some years ago, there was a discussion here of what life was like before the industrial revolution. People worked only as much as they needed, to get what they could not make or grow by themselves—and the wage work was not all day, everyday—some months not even 1 day. Seems to me, things are getting back to that. People cannot work fulltime, even if they want to. Except for salemen, secretaries, and lawyers, I do not know anybody who works fulltime anymore. Most have part-time work like me, that amounts to about 20 hours a week. And even in lawyer offices, they are locking up the building at 17:00 or 18:00 for security reasons (nobody on the front desk until midnight anymore), so any work past closing is done at home or elsewhere.

    Even those working at Mickey D’s, and the like, are not getting much more than about 25 hours a week. Ran into a woman who was “Production Manager” (whatever that is) at McD the other day, and she only works 25 hours a week, even though she is a manager.

    Really, OFD is right: we are hurtling towards fulfilling the Marxist/Stalinist ideals—and that’s not even our collective goal!

  23. Miles_Teg says:

    I don’t work many hours a week at all, since I retired in May. I had to supervise a whole bunch of tradesmen doing stuff to the house, now I’m trying to sell it.

    I’d like to work at a job I liked, but life’s too short to do stuff you hate. Even when I loved my job I rarely put in more than 45 hours a week.

  24. OFD says:

    “Unity is definitely not my cup of tea.”

    Nor mine, nor a lot of peoples’. Although I don’t drink tea. Or coffee.

    You can pretty easily run the Gnome or KDE shells in almost any Linux distro now. I immediately put it back to Gnome in Ubuntu and Mint previously.

    Gave up on the third attempt just now to download PCBSD9.2. Now going to the latest Fedora (19) and so fah, so good, on the download. If it installs OK I’ll run it as a vm in one of the Windows 8 boxes and then run Tor inside that and then inside THAT an offshore mail client. Second Windows 8 box is the main desktop here for now and runs Mint in a vm with Tor, etc. Third Windows 8 machine will be a dedicated media server running Windows Media Center to the tee-vee, which itself has multiple hard drives attached and the internet connected, plus a tuner card, which I haven’t put in yet; just for laughs to see what we can pull in with an active indoor antenna.

    We’re in a pretty tough reception area for regular tee-vee broadcasts and cell phones. At some point I wanna get a ham radio set up in the attic, which is gonna be my new workshop and radio shack, and antennas up on the roof.

  25. OFD says:

    “…we are hurtling towards fulfilling the Marxist/Stalinist ideals…”

    Since at least 1933; check out Diana West’s new book “American Betrayal,” for how we got to this state of affairs; it ain’t pretty.

  26. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Now going to the latest Fedora (19) and so fah, so good, on the download. If it installs OK I’ll run it as a vm in one of the Windows 8 boxes and then run Tor inside that and then inside THAT an offshore mail client.

    You do realize that each of those layers adds ID information to the nesting envelopes, right?

    For each packet, the outer (Win8) envelope is labeled with your name, address, social security number, etc., along with a note that tells the NSA “it looks like this guy is trying to hide something”. The Linux envelope says, “I’m Linux and I’m not telling you bastards shit”, as does the TOR envelope and the offshore mail client envelope. But with Win8 the damage is already done. I understand that one of the “upgrades” to Win9 or Win10 will allow it to actually issue an arrest warrant with your name, address, and social security number already filled in.

  27. OFD says:

    While they’re spending time squirreling through my layers of envelopes, which reveal nothing much, as I ain’t doing much here, I could be running sneaker-net, snail-mail and other communication methodologies where I have my *real* stuff going on.

    In any case, I’m basically just goofing around with it and seeing how it works, or not, and how much I can learn. I have some other tools to play with here, too, but haven’t gotten into them yet.

  28. brad says:

    For those who really do need security, it’s actually important for there to be lots of innocuous traffic. Otherwise it really would be as RBT says. I use a VPN or a proxy quite s lot, just for the hell of it. Haven’t bothered with Tor yet.

  29. Lynn McGuire says:

    Really, OFD is right: we are hurtling towards fulfilling the Marxist/Stalinist ideals—and that’s not even our collective goal!

    Our collective goal is Utopian Socialist. Failure to reach that goal results in the French revolution. Guillotines for all!

  30. Lynn McGuire says:

    I understand that one of the “upgrades” to Win9 or Win10 will allow it to actually issue an arrest warrant with your name, address, and social security number already filled in.

    There will be an app for that.

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