The III Degree

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Houdini Dog

Before I left to go out tonight, I locked my dog in her kennel, as I do whenever I leave.  When I came home two hours later, she was walking around the living room.  I presumed that I had forgotten to latch the kennel or something.  When I went to check, I discovered that it was still locked, as I had left it.  The mystery remains.

it’s like i’m trapped in the 90’s or something

notentirely:

i’m actually waiting until next sunday to see season 2 episode 2 of ‘downton abbey’ on pbs’s ‘masterpiece theater’….

maybe i’ll record it on vhs while sporting flannel and drinking zima.

Mmmmm….Zima

If we allow the current trend to continue, we’re going to turn the Department of Defense into a benefits company that occasionally kills a terrorist.  Arnold L. Punaro, a consultant on a Pentagon advisory group, theDefense Business Board.

Dumb Jeopardy Contestants

One of the things that really annoy me about Jeopardy is when contestants make illogical Daily Double bets.  For example, the guy in second place finds the last Daily Double with only two clues left on the board.  He has $12,000 and the four day champion has $22,200.  The guy in second place bet $4,000.  Now, if he gets it right, he is still in second place.  He must hope he gets Final Jeopardy right while the guy in first gets it wrong.  If he misses the question, then he is down to $8,000 and cannot win as he cannot finish with more than half of the guy in first place.

What he should do in that situation is bet either (a) $100 if he doesn’t think he will know the question or (b) $11,900, so that he maximizes his winning when he gets the question right.

I played in a poker tournament today in Belize - I WON!!!!

I played in a poker tournament today in Belize - I WON!!!!

you say ‘heteronormative’ like it’s a bad thing…

notentirely:

<peeve>

on the way to work i heard a cover of eagle-eye cherry’s “save the night” sung by a woman.

when she gets to the line “Girl you know I’ve got to go” she instead sings “Boy you know I’ve got to go”

now, i’m not gonna get all up in this, but since the lyric’s being changed anyway, i really don’t see why the line can’t be “Babe you know I’ve got to go”.

</peeve>

The song is “Save Tonight” not “Save The Night.”  If you are going to complain about a lyric in the song, you should at least get the title right. :)

Why a hiring freeze is bad policy

One of the proposals to pay for payroll tax extension is to freeze federal hiring.  Under this proposal, the government could only fill one out of every three jobs that is vacated.  The main (only?) benefit of reducing the workforce is that no one gets fired.  It always sounds better to just not fill a position than it does to fire someone.  But, if your goal is to get a better government that works more efficiently, then it is a horrible plan.

(1)  It doesn’t technically save any money.  Sure, having fewer employees does actually save money because you are not paying for salary and benefits etc.  But, unless you institute a mechanism to allocate these savings, then it won’t save the government money.  

Let’s say you work for the Department of Education as a project manager on the Race to the Top Initiative which is funded with $1 Billion dollars (all figures made up).  You leave your job to go do something and the Department decides not to fill your position.  They save $60,000 in salary and benefits, which remains in the Race to the Top account.  Unless that money is specifically pulled out of the account, then it will be available on the books in August and September.  And what happens every August and September?  The budget people try to spend every last dollar in the account (otherwise we will get a smaller budget next year).  So, they will still spend that $60,000 and even though there are fewer employees, no money will be saved.  

(BTW, if you don’t think this is exactly how it will happen, then you have never worked for the government.)

(2) What about contractors?  Thirty years ago, everyone who worked for the government worked for the government.  Sure, there were defense contractors making planes and guns and stuff.  But, if you walked into a government building everyday, you were employed by Uncle Sam.  Following the contracting splurges of the 1990s and 2000s, most of the government work force doesn’t work for the government.  (I don’t have actual figures and I am too lazy to search for them).

Simply reducing the number of federal workers is not going to help anything if we just turn around and hire a contractor to do the same work.  In order for a hiring freeze to be effective, you’d also need to look at freezing government contracts, or at least putting them under a stricter review process.  But this will never happen.  So, positions that are eliminated (like the Race to the Top project manager above) will simply be contracted out.

(3)  One-third of the workforce is exempted.  Under the proposed legislation, jobs related to national security may exempted by the President from the one in three rehire rule.  So, approximately 700,000 of the 2 million federal positions are likely to be exempted from the rule anyway.

(4) Government would lose the best employees.  In this economy (I hate this phrase), who is leaving government service?  People who get better jobs elsewhere.  And who is most likely to get a better job elsewhere - the most qualified employees.  So, the government will be losing their best employees and have more difficulty replacing them with qualified applicants.  The average quality of employee will go down.

(5)  The worst employees would not lose their jobs.  The corollary of (4) is that the worst employees will keep their jobs.  They are not going anywhere and now we are relying on them to do their work and more.  The quality of federal employee will go down.

So, what is the solution?  I will be the first to admit that there is waste in government employment.  In my old job at the Coast Guard, our office was overstaffed for ten months out of the year (August and September were busy).  My position was absolutely one that could have been eliminated.  But, under the proposed plan, the only way they’d eliminate my position is if I quit, it is not related to national security (which it was), and it was not the one out of the three positions that got filled.

If you really want to eliminate 10% of the federal work force, you need to have a Reduction In Force (RIF).  No one likes RIFs because it means people get laid off.  It forces supervisors to make difficult decisions and to fire people.  It destroys morale in an office.  But, it also allows supervisors to get rid of the worst employees (or at least the ones they like the least).  Rather than losing the people you can least afford to lose, agencies get to choose who stays and who goes. 

The Tree of Life

I must say that certain elements of this movie don’t suck ass.  The visuals are absolutely stunning.  The movie looks fantastic.  If I didn’t care about things like plot and staying awake, it might be a great movie.  But the movie utterly fails to capture my attention.

In many ways, this reminds me of another Brad Pitt film that I hated - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Again, parts of that film looked fantastic and I loved the idea of Benjamin Button, but I hated that movie.  (My main reason for hating that movie is that it focuses on the middle parts of his life, where his body and mind meet up, rather than the edges of his life, which are where the interesting stuff should happen).

What crap

I want you to think about something.  Think about the number of people who put in how many countless days of work so I could watch The Tree of Life tonight.

  • Writers
  • Director
  • Producers
  • Actors (Sean Penn!  Brad Pitt!)
  • Camera guys
  • Special effects gurus
  • Sound guys (the sound was quite outstanding)
  • Musicians
  • Animal handlers
  • Editors
  • The guys who made the microphones for the innumerable voice overs
  • Marketing people
  • Critics (because if they hadn’t praised this movie, I wouldn’t have watched)
  • The designers and manufacturers of my TV, DVD player, the DVD
  • The founder of Netflix
  • The lady who hand put my DVD in my mailer.
  • The post office
  • The pilots who fly the plane that brings the mail to Belize
  • The cargo guys who offloaded the bag of mail
  • The two guys in the mailroom who make final delivery to my mailbox

All of these people put in a solid days work, just so that I could watch this DVD in my house on this Saturday night.

AND THE MOVIE SUCKED SO BAD, IT JUST DOESN’T SEEM WORTH IT

(to be fair, the first 45 minutes suck a lot worse than the rest of the film, but I never cared about the characters.  Although, that Brad Pitt guy really is an asshole.  I am surprised that they keep letting him adopt kids).