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.
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
The Supreme Court ruled today that churches have the right to hire and fire their religious leaders without regard to discrimination laws. In many ways, I agree with the concept of this - churches have the right to decide who leads their churches.
BUT, the facts of the case that the Supreme Court ruled on are pretty bogus. A teacher at a Lutheran school in Michigan was diagnosed with narcolepsy and was fired. She threatened to sue the school for firing her and they argued that this violates their religious beliefs.
So, a church is allowed to make not suing it a tenet of the religion and then cannot be held liable if they fire you for threatening to sue it. Brilliant.
See how I did on my goals for 2011.
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!!!!
<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. :)
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.
I leave Belize in 6 months - here is what I still have to do.
I majored in history in college and one of the concepts I remember vividly is that in many years, very little happens. Sure, they write things in the history book for every year, but if I were to ask you what major events occurred in 1983, you’d probably have to look to Google to find out. (My quick search shows the most significant world event in 1983 to be the bombing of the Embassy in Lebanon).
But some years are chock so full of events that important events are given no historical coverage. I’m not talking about years like 2001. 9/11 remains the single most important event of the 21st Century. Moreover, the US invaded Afghanistan following the attacks, but not much else happened of huge historical import. I’m talking about years with so much going on that the years become linked with the events.
In the past 200 years, there have been quite a few of these years. Any of the years for WWI and WWI would qualify. But outside the war, there are three years - 1848, 1968, and 1989 - that most historians agree are defined by the revolutions that spread across the globe during these years. After what has happened during the first two months of 2011, I would not be surprised to see the current year join these historically significant years.
1848 - The year was characterized by a series of revolutions throughout Europe. Often called the Springtime revolutions, popular uprisings occurred in Italy, France, Denmark, Habsburg Empire (Austria), Hungary, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Wallachia, and even Brazil. Though there was very little immediate change from these revolutions, the unification of both Germany and Italy can be directly attributed to these revolutions.
1968 - The year of the student protests and socialist revolutions were in a large part a response to the US war against Vietnam. Millions of students around the world protested against the war and for civil rights for women and minorities. Protests in Czecheslovakia and Poland were ended by violent responses from the Soviet Union. Assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, along with the violent protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago were just some of the major events that occurred in 1968.
1989 - This was the year of the anti-communist revolutions. Protests in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czecheslovakia, and Romania led to the fall of their Communist regimes. In Berlin, the divisive wall came down in November. The Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in April of that year. Over the following years, the USSR fell apart and democracy took over Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
2011? - I will be the first to admit that 2011 is not quite there yet. But the events of the first 50 days this year have sown the seeds of revolution in the Middle East. We have already seen mass protests lead to the fall of long-time dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. Protests in the Sudan (as well as the Southern Sudan independence vote), Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, and Iran all have the potential to add 2011 to the short list of monumental years.
I wrote this back in February and I would say the year has born out the hypothesis.
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).
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.
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).
One of the several pieces of ‘must pass’ legislation before the end of the year is the ongoing ‘doc fix.’ Essentially it is an increase in the appropriations for Medicare because the formula for the entitlement program sucks and does not accurately cover rising Medicare costs. But, maybe it actually does.
So much of what I see in government work has the private sector basing its costs on what the government is willing to pay. When I am on temporary duty for work (such as training), the government gives me a maximum dollar amount that I can spend on lodging (and a separate amount for food and other expenses). Amazingly, most of the hotels in the DC area charge that exact rate for rooms. In fact, on my last trip to DC, the government rates changed during my trip there and the rate for my hotel changed to go with it.
So, maybe one of the (many) reasons that health care costs are going up is because the government is willing to pay that amount. Perhaps, if we cut the amount we pay, but require the same services for doctors to collect this new, lower amount, then health care costs for everyone will go down.
There is, of course, a line at which the doctors will choose to stop taking Medicare patients because they aren’t covering their costs, but that line is pretty far down there. The government pays for too large of a chunk of the work for doctors to turn away so many patients. (A few probably would and we’d hear all about these stories of doctors refusing patients, but it would be a significant minority).
So, I think we should take a page out of the Republicans handbook and starve the beast. DON’T pass the doc fix and voila, we just saved millions, if not billions of dollars.
