Whew!
I really thought that big post from yesterday had been eaten. Imagine my relief when I learned the SOB of the Week hadn’t been lost.
All I have to share with you today is my fortune from tonight’s fortune cookie. Interpret it for me:
An exciting opportunity lies ahead if you are not timid.
Trust me, it’s not called slacking…
Unfortunately, it’s not called having a life either. I haven’t got a good excuse so I won’t offer it. Instead, without further ado, I offer this week’s S.O.B. of the week.
This week’s son of a bitch(es) award goes to a diverse group representing a wide range of people performing a wide range of services. These folks share nothing but a common goal to line their pockets while avoiding actual delivery as promised. Were they not government contractors, they would not be in business.
Example number 1: The house we live in was built by the lowest bidder. Our housing is known as 801 housing because it was built by a contractor and the government leases it from the actual owner – probably the builder. So they get to use flawed design and sub-par materials to build houses and then collect rent on them for the next 20 years with the certainty that the leases will always be renewed until the houses can no longer be maintained in an inferior manner and the same damn contractor builds another set of shitty houses.
Am I being ungrateful? Maybe. I mean my house isn’t roach infested like my quarters in Germany were. It’s a house and not an apartment. It could be a great concept. Here are some reasons why it is not:
1. The kitchens in each and every one of these kinds of houses are not sized proportionally to the house. A four bedroom house has approximately 8 linear feet of counter space in four two-foot sections. There is no work space and even less cupboard space in these kitchens.
2. The bathroom in the master bedroom is designed in such a way that I don’t think anyone would ever buy the house if it were for sale. There is a sink in the master bedroom itself with a medicine cabinet above it. This means when your WLC-working husband gets up at four and starts to shave, the entire master bedroom is lit up like a rock concert. The part of the bathroom where the toilet and tub/shower are is literally the size of two bathtubs. A wastebasket barely fits in that room and most adults need to step in and around the toilet in order to shut the door. Who signed off on this? A federal government employee that just doesn’t care.
3. In order to go upstairs from the front door, you must shut the door because, if open, the door completely blocks access to the upstairs. Imagine how much fun this makes it when you’re moving in and out and trying to carry furniture upstairs?
Example 2: This company. How can anyone believe that any of their actions were undertaken in good faith. They planned on taking the money and running. That’s what government contractors do. Fuck the people.
Examples 3 and 4: Halliburton and Blackwater. Bend over taxpayers! Here we come! Let’s get filthy rich while satisfying our Rambo fantasies and over billing for it. No-bid schmo-bid. We all know competition is for suckers, right?
Example 5: Outsourcing Passports. I am still appalled that some financial wizard was convinced this is a good idea. The problem is that most of the decision-makers when it comes to awarding contracts possess no analytical skill whatsoever. Case in point: I know of a Financial Analyst for the government that possesses only a high school diploma. In other words, this person has no financial or analytical skills. A career bureaucrat focused on only getting to retirement age decides what is best for the taxpayer, sweet huh? It’s bullshit. They are just putting time in and taking money out so of course they don’t give a flying rat’s ass if a contractor does too. As long as their job doesn’t go away, they could give a shit who elses does. This is how contracting works. The work gets contracted out and the contractor hires the former government employees who couldn’t snag another government gig for a job with similar benefits and better pay. Oh, and they don’t work about the same too. I’ve said before and will say again that our government is run by a bunch of “C” students who couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a map. And, because it is easier to sit down and shut up, the taxpayer allows this condition to worsen. At what point do we say enough?
Wouldn’t it be great to have some real analysts and fiscally responsible people on the job for a change. And ethics! Who wants our government to get some?
Reading and Writing…
Today I want to talk about education. I don’t know if this qualifies so much as a rant but I just want to know how we get our kids back on the right track for a global marketplace. Thanks to No Child Left Behind I am 100% sure that my son isn’t learning anything. In fact, I would say we have turned very few marketable products out of our education system in the past decade and that is depressing. How do I know? Trust me. I just do and I don’t feel like being Dooced today.
So what options do we have? I’d homeschool, but I question my ability (albeit less every day) to provide a high-quality education. Plus, I have to work! Tell me how I can work full-time and homeschool and I’ll be all over it. We can’t afford private schools and I don’t think they’re any better. I especially question the true wisdom of the tech-adverse Waldorf approach. Some of it I like. Integrating applications like knitting into the math curriculum make a lot of sense. But I fear that abstinence from technology on other levels puts kids at a distinct disadvantage in secondary and post-secondary education. Show me some evidence to the contrary and I’ll be quite happy.
I am just bummed because I know The Senator does not get homework because the parents of other students don’t see that it gets done. Yes, that’s a sad excuse, but I understand the teacher’s position. The teachers all teach to the WKCE and that’s it. My kid learns nothing.
How do we fix this? How do we help kids to understand that they should study math and science and not fitness and history in college? No one is hiring history majors, I am sorry. The demand is for technical fields and it is so strong that we import supply for them while other workers see their jobs moved offshore to lower costs without affecting quality. It’s common sense but we seem to be lacking it.
I’m just…frustrated. How would you solve?
You know you’ve missed it…
Moving over from the good old days of Sharp Around The Edges, here comes S.O.B. of the week.
This week the title goes to a very, very special guy. You know him as current Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke. Ben’s had a busy week! First he bails out Bear Stearns and drops rates on a Sunday without regard to the impact of those actions on the markets or the economy in general. Then, yesterday, he gets the Fed to drop rates another .75% to a nice, inflation-triggering 2.25%. Ben, I don’t know how the hell you got a PhD from MIT but you should be forever grateful because now you’re exhibiting quite a disarming disconnect from sound economic policy.
I hold with my original position that rate cuts aren’t going to solve the current economic mess one bit. Your actions simply appease the sheep in the short-run and do not address fundamental economic challenges such as the cost of production inputs, including oil, and rising unemployment. I understand the concepts of lowering rates as a short-term stimulus, but companies are not going to jump at the chance to invest based on the other economic factors in play. I believe you know that but lack the balls to actually say it lest your boss get pissed and replace you with another “Yes” man. It might be hard to pick up tenure somewhere else, but really… Isn’t your dignity worth something?
I’d also like to know how this rate cut is going to offset the inflationary pressure that will inevitably come about when you have to increase money supply to cover your bailout commitments. Your economic stimulus, my friend, is anything but. Congratulations Ben on being the first SOB of the week for 2008 from this awesome blog.
It’s Not Just The Economy Stupid!
Am I the only one fed up with the Fed? The Reserve bank dropped the discount rate a quarter point to try and stimulate the economy because, you know, it is completely oblivious to the fact that oil prices are topping $112 a barrel.
It is frustrating to see the Federal Reserve Bank resort to doing what they have always done to try to stimulate the economy even though it is clearly not working. When one of the largest investment banks in the country sees its share prices drop 93% from its Friday close to a buy out offer of $2.00 per share last night, dropping interest rates isn’t going to do a damn thing. It isn’t going to resolve the mortgage crisis, it isn’t going to stimulate employment because it does not address the fundamental issues of rising production costs, transportation costs and increased consumer fears bringing down the economy. All of these issues because of the rising price of oil. Disagree? Tell me why!
Bush needs to stop the double-talk. If there is no recession, why are his monkeys at the Fed doing the recession dance and why do we have major investment banks collapsing because of the subprime mortgage fiasco? Frankly, I will take the word of Warren Buffett over the hedging comments of our President, the frat boy.
The worst part is the snow ball effect that both rising fuel prices and the mortgage disaster are having on the economy. Use Michigan as an example. First in the nation in unemployment, fourth in the nation in foreclosures (that’s an old figure, I wonder if it still sticks). 51% of closed real estate transactions last month were short sales. I wonder how many were foreclosure auctions? Our house has been on the market for one year as of March 1. There’s been no traffic through it in several months. Why? Well, our price is too high. We’ve dropped it from $209K to $172K and it’s still too high because of the steals you can get with short sales and foreclosures. What do you do? Well, you know what we do. We get ourselves a ticket on the short-sale train and prepare to lose our ass. Why? Because this string of dominoes falling isn’t stopping anytime soon because we as a nation are not doing the right things to stop it. And rather than bitch about fuel prices, why don’t we do something about it. Do you suppose that OPEC keep limiting production and driving prices up because our foreign policy geniuses have pissd them off? I do too. It is also because we’re unwilling to actually change anything about our usage patterns for fossil fuels. I don’t drive any less. Do you? Would you if you could? (I would most definitely. I find the idea of an hour on a train or bus with a book or some knitting infinitely more satisfactory than an hour drive alone in my car.)
We are looking for quick fixes rather than long-term solutions. We’re lazy. What we need to do is invest in alternative energy research and public transportation infrastructure so that those of us objecting to gas prices really do have choices. Investing in alternative energy research not only creates jobs, it creates long-term solutions for the rising costs of energy. The problem is that we’ll need to import workers to fill those jobs and the stereotypical hard-working American will still not have a job. Why? Because you majored in History, dumbass. Or maybe it was Fitness or Sports Management because, you know, there is so much demand for those kinds of skills. It’s also possible that you didn’t go to college at all. If that is the case, my friend, you brought this on yourself. You’re not marketable. You do not supply the skills that the new economy demands. This leaves you two choices: Acquire them or shut the hell up.
Re-Launch
I probably should call this “My opinion on damn near everything”. I’m re-launching this blog to enlighten you as to my thoughts on national affairs and other things that seem to jump from the web and piss me off nearly every day.
