Here is a nice photo of the windy beach this morning. I was trying to find a scan of the audio book you'll read about in a minute, but this blog will not upload some sources. I'm learning
Did you know I also keep track of the books I read? Does that surprise anyone? Anyway, I just finished “Jackdaws”. Extremely well done and blows “Theory of Relativity” right out of the water. More vivid characters and great German, French and English accents by the orators. Is that what you call people who do audio books? It is easy to forget all the parts are done by just one man and one woman. The author, Follett is, I believe, the same as wrote “Eye of the Needle”.
A group of women agents pose as cleaning ladies to commit sabotage. The only downside to the plot is the (usually misguided) concessions to making two of the women lesbians and another a transvestite. Like we need to know any of that in a war story. It is a six hour listen with a half hour wasted on homosexuality which contributes nothing to the plot, as if it was injected there to make somebody happy.I’d say my new students, the Ravens, are happy. They joked about flying their children here from New York to take my lessons. It seems they were able to help out one of their “whiz kids” over the last week with some material I showed them. Of course, I told them not to do that because it was better to fly me to New York. I’ve really latched onto a good process with my method of teaching word processing as it applies to other computer actions, such as the Internet.
It was such a blistering hot day, I took the afternoon off and lounged. I like that, "lounged". I also sat around drinking coffee. This is unusual as this is normally a cooler and very pleasant part of the year. I made some bread following an old Hopi recipe, it was like eating hard-tack. In equally exciting news, I got that tune stuck in my head, “Judy in Disguise”. So if any of you are expecting anything momentous, maybe check back in later in the day. (It turns out later I had to leave the house because my air conditioning could not keep up. When that happens, I go to the library, which is always freezing cold, ah, government A/C.)
Next, it was to the shop for a bit to keep up on research. The main item discovered is a firm price for wiring money overseas. It costs $30 per transaction. I have no problem with that, although it adds $4.50 to each item I was contemplating, because one thing I hate is percentage fees. You know, the outfits that charge you more for writing a larger check, like there was any difference in their effort. I dislike any fee based on ability to pay because it is based on a stranger’s estimation.
Of course, this means I will love customs duties. I may have the terms wrong, but after two hours at the library researching importing, I suddenly don’t think the gambling games up the street are so crooked any more. It’s hard to believe such a corrupt system could exist in a democracy, but then, except for disaster news and sports, democracies tend to be very inward-looking. The rule book is around the size of eight large phone books and categorizes every conceivable item into tax categories. They are assigned an “HS” number.
This has something to do with a Harmonized Tariff, an attempt to keep duties equal between agreeing countries. Two of those countries are the US and China. The "harmony" ends there. Non-knitted cotton shirts are taxed differently than knitted cotton shirts. I thought cotton shirts were woven. The best news I have is that the highest tax I found was 17% on quite a large number of items. The bad news is that tax may be based on a cost that “may include packing costs, drawing, selling commissions, royalty or licensing fees and any future fees you may pay the exporter at a later time”.
While I understand that the purpose of these fees is to discourage certain items from being imported, the whole thing stinks to high heaven of a massive con-job. Why is China allowed to restrict US imports? And why, on orders above $2,000 (a trivial amount) are you compelled to hire a broker? The whole [trade] regulation seems designed to trip up the unwary. Sounds like the legal system, you could probably do just as good a job on your own if they would commit to a fixed set of rules, but instead they squirm and crack down on you for even trying.
Still, the greater the barrier to entry, the happier I’ll be over time. Later, I went over to Jack’s to fix the computer. It was a loose power cable on the hard drive. I stuck around for two hours and got the printers working and generally showed him how to get the systems working right. He has excellent equipment and basically had been sold the idea that the more expensive equipment would work by itself. Talk about déjà vu, you absolutely swear you’ve seen this guy before. He was a jockey for 30 years.
He still has a network problem, something I’ll have to look up. There is a way you can program wireless routers to have their own network name or something like that. His notebook works with the wireless router, but the workgroup name is not the same as the one required on the computer to share the printer.
It was a great day, I made good money and I called JZ to remind him that the weekend is reserved to visit the dog track and, if possible, take in a bike ride along the beach to scout for women. Paula called, she’s not for me but she’d keep a tight rein on JZ. She found the elusive figure of the minimum you get from Social Security. It is $445 but you must have less than $3,000 in assets. Ah, but I can work with that figure, for now I have a basis for comparison. I must now find the figure if you have 40 points at minimum wage. If it is over $800, I’m going back to work for 28 months. (In the end, it was not over $800, it was $712, and I did not endanger myself by returning to work.)
A final weird item. A got a $35 parking ticket a year ago, they are now offering me to pay it off at $10 or send it to collections. However, they got my name wrong from the Motor Vehicle registration. This is very important to me – the name is close, but it is wrong. (Through no action on my part, there are now two different versions of my name in the Florida system. Guess which one I'm promoting?)
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