To the rescue, my [morning] callout [mentioned y’day] was as easy as could be. An executive needed some computer basics without having the entire company guffawing. They had previously sent him to group classes at the library where he learned nothing.
Now, he’s up and running and I’m happy I made the decision to help—teaching adults is a field I got out of years ago. Within moments I determined that the company people who were berating him were themselves doing it wrong, so I showed him the right way. You’ll rarely hear a “power user” shut up faster than when he encounters one of my students.
In music, I met a talented teen who doesn’t know what she’s got. I no longer teach music, either, but this might be an exception. She’s bright as a button, but her mother plainly doesn’t know it or is not prepared to follow it up. Trust me, I know all about parents who will try to quash any field of work their child chooses that isn’t the same dead-end route they took. I met the mother, and she’d probably say fine as long as the lessons were free. Sad, isn’t it? What a pitiful lot these working class parents. Yep, I am familiar with parents who can’t do jack shit and be damned if they are going to their own child show them up.
Bingo wasn’t anything great, either. I made enough (to be happy), but it is the same effort to call a small crowd that never tips as a huge crowd that fills the jar. I’ve learned to like the game but it hasn’t been worth the candle for a year now. So it’s not like I’m a quitter. I admit, the new band is not playing out, so I’ve little else to do on Saturday evenings. But I’m well past the age where a quiet evening at home can be worth more than earning a few bucks. Actually, I hit that crossroads at age 33, but never found a non-boring woman to stay home with. I heard that! If I'm the boring one, let me ask this. Who is reading who's blog?
Related to bingo is the finances. I make less now than in 2009. However, by the time I notice [the pinch], others must be bleeding or at least in deep pain. Things here have been below average for 17 of the previous 18 months. But I’m no longer dependent on the word of others to help, which is precisely what I said would happen once I recovered from medical expenses. I just don’t like it when I have to keep huge buffers in place to ensure something short term doesn’t have a domino effect.
So you’ll know, my survival planning has nothing to do with stockpiling food in some underground bunker. It is to survive the first 45 days while all the non-self-reliant porridge brains of the world duke it out. That’s the stretch when the food, water, and gas run out. That’s when the majority of the casualties will occur. I figure after that amount of time, those who are still alive will have learned to leave each other be.
The daytime heat gets mention, it is really out of sorts. You cannot have lived here the last ten years without spotting that something has changed. Put another way, a single degree of increased temperature causes the summertime humidity to soar. One reason I left the cold up north was I didn’t like being cooped up in the house all winter. Did I trade it for the opposite? (If I had to choose again, I would still opt for the warm weather. Cold weather is a waste of intellectual life. Eskimos don’t win scholarships.)
Russia has taken to threatening Internet service providers quoting Yankee-style copyright laws. I’m curious how a population that is not as complacent as Americans will react. The Internet is not responsible for what people do with it, so these laws are a form of prohibition, or more specifically, law that can only be enforced by removing the presumption of innocence. Russians have considerable experience dealing with authorities who try that. We shall see.
As a matter of fact, there is something I’d like to point out. I never studied accounting to get a job. Arithmetic isn’t my strong point. I studied accounting for the knowledge, because it was challenging, and I enjoy the subject matter. I never set out to be an accountant any more than my partner, RofR, set out to be a lawyer. We got the degrees to further our interests in other areas. Now you know. This kind of behavior is very common in my circles.
Should the feds bail out Detroit? My interest in politics is pretty much zero, explained by the type of people that get into it. All talk and very little action except the kind that seems to offend the taxpayer. Boston would need billions to completely overhaul the way they do business. I say no. Why? Because a money-making infrastructure cannot be conjured out of thin air. If you want to understand the process, look at other countries, most of whom have no idea what a billion-dollar industry even looks like. They don’t have what it takes and neither does Detroit.
Rather, I view Detroit as an example of what happens when you let Liberals and the welfare state have their own way. Those who rob Peter should not whine when Peter packs up and leaves. Many others view the Detroit mess as what happens to every city when the minorities take over, an argument with fairly substantial merit around the world. There is a slim chance a new industrial base could emerge on its own, but no chance whatsoever that politicians will ever learn to let matters take their own course. The first signs of prosperity would be taxed out of existence, if not the company, then the workers. So why bother?
On that note, I’d like you to look at something. There are very few billion-dollar companies outside the USA except intergenerational factories and banks protected from competition via institutionalized bribery. Europe, you know what I’m talking about--name me one completely new business that's come out of Europe in the past 200 years. That’s what happens when politicians get involved in finances. They look at the entire process the wrong way and the investment climate shows it. In the USA you spend 30 years running a business, in other countries you spend 30 years trying to get it off the ground. (I believe I told about how I once saw a Canadian town council turn down a license application solely because it emerged that none of the members knew enough about the business to maximize how they would tax it.)
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