One year ago today: September 13, 2018, shovel-ready yard.
Five years ago today: September 13, 2014, latitudes are easy.
Nine years ago today: September 13, 2010, another coffee house.
Random years ago today: September 13, 2008, checks made out to cash.
OKAY something is wrong here. Let me look into it.
I don’t know about this polyurethane. Do you have to pour it on like liquid plastic? Six coats and I still don’t have more than a dull matte. I’m not going for the Elvis clock shine, this finish is called “satin” and I’m evaluating it by the sample in the store. Shown here, the layer is applied about as thick as possible with a paint brush. It looks uneven, but I found it dries up pretty smooth. This is the sixth layer and I’m about to say this is how it is. There’s other product in the shed, but I don’t know if it is compatible.
Remind me to go get that Yamaha scooter, best to have it here now that it belongs to me. If I recall the only thing wrong with it is both front signal lights are broken off. That usually happens when it has been transported on a truck bed. I’ll stop there first in case he’s got a socket that can tighten that gasket. Fast forward ten minutes, and I turned onto the street past Agt. R’s place. There was a panel van traveling toward me as I click on my signal light to turn left into the driveway. The bastard slowed up, then stopped and blocked my turn. He just sat there. It was Sunday morning so I did not hit the horn. I rolled down my window and pointed that I needed to get into the driveway.
And I still cannot figure any situation where lock setting six on my Ford would be advantageous. I mention you have to hit the lock button up to five times to lock all the doors. Setting number four makes the noise but sometimes skips, so you land on setting six, the one in question here. It locks the driver’s door, but opens all the other three doors and the tailgate. Could be some millennial joke that I just don’t get. When it happens, you have to cycle complete around again to land on setting five, the one you want. Eleven key presses total. Way to go there, Brandon & Kirsten.
Did you get the report that the Facebook currency scheme, Libra, is being boycotted by all the big players? What, you mean people don’t want to turn over their financial affairs to Zuckerburg like they did their social affairs? Or Google banning the payday advance operations? They are only ten years late recognizing the rip-off and all they accomplish is forcing the losers to seek even worse alternatives. Yep, the whole mess the Hipsters and the XYZ Generations made of computer systems is coming back to haunt them already. Oops, I should not have said haunt, or they’ll think I’m Halloweening.
Ukrainian scissors.
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What do Milissa Labog, Francois Jacquet, Jean-Charles Rosseau, Sebastian Pres, Victor Hugo Ramirez, Nayerli Rosas, and Antonio Bucio have in common? They are stunt doubles in today’s siesta DVD. With all the computerized special effects, I would have thought that was a career on the wane but they needed seven of them for this production. The movie is produced by Europacorp. Five of the names sound French, so maybe it is France that is on the decline. France is an enigma to me. A stable population (proof that it can be done) and an economy based on selling each other wine and cheese. And maybe dippy looking berets and striped t-shirts.
Back to the car, I cannot get the new thermostat seal to stop leaking. I’ve taken it off and carefully fitted it back three times with no luck. There seems to be another leak somewhere, so to hell with this, I’m taking it into the shop tomorrow. I never did trust these plastic radiators. I had a solid aluminum model put in the Cadillac and solved the problem permanently. I put dragged two new joists under the house, painted another coat of urethane, repaired the garden hose, and almost called it a day. But you want the neighborhood news first. Go get a cup of tea and come back here.
Ready? Notice lately there are only two chickens. One of them disappeared. The neighbor came around asking, but I know it was a fox. Because there were no feathers. Actually, I only heard that tale from the trailer court, I’ve never seen a fox get a chicken, but the legend is they leave no feathers. Anyway, the chicken is nowhere to be found. And neither, it seems, is reliable Internet service. On checking with the neighbors, the area is serviced by Frontier. I don’t trust or like any of the providers, they’re all crooks. Frontier, I think, is one of those low-service outfits that takes over rural contracts nobody else wants. They make their money because they lease cable or phone lines at a discount.
It also means they have no incentive to keep the lines in good condition and I’ve heard all the neighbors say they are lucky to get five minutes of good service at a time. Howie thinks it is his modem, but if the service is continually dropping off everywhere, it’s overloaded bandwidth. That’s the provider piggy-backing everybody on one leg. What’s that called? I used to know these things. They also make you pay for the modem, which they will not replace if it works even 10% of the time at low speed. Am I up the creek here? Everybody I ask turns out the same, they have service but really don’t have a clue how or why it operates, using it mainly to watch movies and check their e-mail, and trust the details to a mysterious company.
I found a use for some of the other failed boxes I’ve made. Usually they have some simple defect like not being square or warped lumber. I’m slowly accumulating a box for everything. In this case, my socket set. I never could keep the pieces organized. So now they fit in a box with three sizes, small medium, and large. I still have to fish around but it cuts my time by a third.
ADDENDUM
Let’s talk philosophy. Politics. I’ve never studied it, but what little I’ve read has been pretty slanted. I was looking at the emergence of inheritance taxes because of the way the rich are against them. The poor are at best leery of the slowly lowering limits. At first the law targeted the super-wealthy, then crpt down to the wealthy, and is now affecting the merely rich—but the pattern is established. So much is made off these taxes that the temptation is to keep lowering the bracket and as we’ve seen, there are factions (like Bernie Sanders) who regard me as rich enough to be hit with both taxes and penalties. My crime? Working hard and keeping my nose clean. According to Bernie, others are not so “lucky”.
Now Bernie has his following based less on his philosophy and more on the fact he is sincere in what he thinks and says. The population agrees with inheritance taxes for the rich, but fear the “liberal” and “progressive” pressure to have themselves caught in the tax trap. Mainly, these are people who worked for their “wealth” as opposed to inheriting it. They dislike the tax because one day they might get rich and because the tax trap destroys family businesses where the wealth is primarily non-cash assets, such as a factory or farm. (Many a business has to be liquidated to pay the tax bill and this is counter-productive.)
I’ve always been against income tax on two counts. One, income is unevenly distributed and that makes any such tax unfair. Two, income tax entails a large, faceless government department of non-elects watching over each citizen, which is morally wrong. (It rummages through their private papers without a warrant.) However, I do agree that anybody who receives money for any reason has income and that fact should not be distorted because someone is related to the source. If you receive a million dollars, it should not be treated differently whether you work for it or get it from your uncle. Note, I did not say it should be taxed, only treated equally.
I recognize the outcry that once taxes are paid, what a person does with the remainder should not be taxed a second time. But this rule is traditionally ignored. You are taxed on your income, then assailed with sales taxes, electricity taxes, property taxes, departure taxes, hotel taxes, gas taxes and up-your-ass taxes. If you give cash money to somebody, that is a transaction whether it is your employee or your nephew. Family has always been butt-kissed by tax rules (the English again), yet the type of family favored by tax laws has yet to be shown to exist and is certainly no majority. This flies in the face of the premise that taxation should hurt everybody to the same degree.
My dislike of Bernie’s standpoint is that he way intends to achieve it by enforced participation, while I am the libertarian who says participation should be voluntary. You want to help the lazy, you go right ahead, but leave your neighbor alone. Unfortunately, the opposition to Bernie’s view is mistakenly referred to libertarian, and it isn’t. I’ll explain. It is the far right that call themselves libertarians, but I’ve often pointed out that is an extreme, while true libertarianism is not radical. It is a mild and passive stance that says the role of government should be to protect the individual from his neighbor’s avarice and a few services like paving roads and running the postal office. And the right to bear arms means we don’t need a standing army.
I’m leaving out a lot here, for instance, I believe the Constitution wants the states to be significantly different and to manage their own affairs. So that a person who does not like one state can freely move to another and start over. The shove toward national-wide standard laws and ID cards and databases is nothing but a power grab. Why does Wisconsin need to know if you have a Utah driver’s license? Power, that’s why. Yes, this system allows a small criminal element to emerge, but if the country focused a fraction of the cash wasted on mass surveillance on catching them, criminals would remain a minor thorn. Already, only the rich can afford privacy, and that is where my support for inheritance taxes takes a right turn. Our tax system was based on the faulty British system where the wealthy misuse their riches. And I say, “No representation without taxation.”
Hey, that’s a neat catch-phrase, I have my moments.
Well, they stuck their noses into politics, and now they deserve to be taxed. If not, it creates an oligarchy, a system whereby a rich elite controls the government and remain rich via inherited wealth. I’m not surprised at the way computers are fostering cyber-crime, because the rich have changed. Most new billionaires in our society are from the financial realm, they are not the magnates of old. And thus, they are overly reliant on slanted tax laws that favor tax-free inheritance.
So, to sum it for today, just like George Washington, I am against the country being run by a ruling elite. They live in a disconnected world. They deserve to be taxed for their political interference. I partially blame America itself for the problem because the capitalist system here is based on continual expansion. In old England, you could open a bicycle shop and make a living at it. In America, that’s not possible. One must constantly drive the shop upward toward franchising, expansion, and finally a corporation capable of quashing the other shops. You can drive down the street of any small town in this country and see abandoned mom & pops, but brand new malls lining the bypass. Which reminds me, I should go to Davenport today.
