You Too Can Have Your Own Desolate Wasteland

In the Fallout game series the premise was nuclear war has rendered most urban zones a total wasteland.  Well, there’s another simpler method to create those urban wastelands.  There’s already one wasteland that exists right here in the US in fact.

Don’t believe me that Detroit is like a waste land, lets look at a picture from Detroit and Chernobyl:

And now for another picture:

Now which one is which folks?  Which picture was taken where?  One was taken in a disaster zone caused by failed socialist policies, the other was taken in a nuclear disaster zone.

Ready?  The first is from Detroit  the second is from Chernobyl.

This is what socialism brings to the people, a wasteland devoid of prosperity and growth.  Remember it the next time someone tells you government is the solution to the problem.

H/T to Kevin on the video.

Been There, Done That

I recognize this silence and mood, both from growing up and the recent unemployment in this house.

Found via Kevin

Fearless leader came out yesterday and said that unemployment drastically dropped.  Except that also included some new ways of calculating the numbers.  Except every way I’ve heard of them calculating the numbers is cooking the books.  My wife was "unemployed” for a year and a half, though she didn’t qualify to be counted amongst the unemployed even while trying to find a job.  It’s all done to provide political leverage.  But if we use the same method they’ve been using it provides us a decent window to see what the trend is like.

Shamelessly stolen from Joe, who took it from Tyler Durden,  tell me, can you spot the statistical outlier?

SeptemberChangeNSA20-24_2

Or how about seasonally adjusted:

SeptHistorical20-24_2

If you can’t make sense of the Seasonally Adjusted chart, let me give you a clue.  Which one of these has a swing month to month well beyond any other?  Can you spot it?  I knew you could!  The fact is, employment sucks and here’s a big clue for everyone, government cannot make it better.  Despite the smoke politicians blow up your ass about creating jobs, they can’t create jobs.  There are only two things that government regulations can do, make it more difficult to hire someone or remove money from the pocket of someone who would give you a job.  If anything when they throw money at something it actually tends to have the opposite effect since people want the free money.  More on that bit later.

Everyone keeps looking at the state as being the solution to their problem.  They keep asking what can my government do for me!?  Well if government had its way, it would make you their slave by making you dependent upon them.  From the looks of this lady, they’re succeeding. 

Darwin Needs No Further Restraint

Yet another falling incident:

Police said 22-year-old Jonathan Meyer had been drinking with a friend Friday night when he tried to drop to a second-story balcony and missed.

To give you an idea of the current record for this year already:

This is the third alcohol-related fall at WSU and the University of Idaho in the past month. A 19-year-old WSU student was injured in a three-story fall Sept. 14 at a fraternity. A 21-year-old University of Idaho student was injured in a two-story fall Sept. 12 at his fraternity.

Not to mention the August incidents that they didn’t bother reporting.  Remember these are the “best and brightest” that we send to college.  No, I don’t think so anymore.   A good majority of those who go to college I think go because they’re too dumb to do anything else.

They go to college racking up debt to get degrees in things that will never earn them enough money to pay it back.  Again, remember what I was saying about them not really being the best and brightest.  Then you have other incidents where someone claims that College is a right and that everyone should go.

Everyone has the right to attempt to obtain a college education.  However just because you can attempt it, doesn’t mean you can afford it or that you will be admitted.  It is up to the person to perform well enough to be admitted as well as find a way to finance their schooling.  You do not have a right to force someone else to pay for your education.  You do not have a right to be automatically admitted.  You merely have a right to seek education, you do not have a right to have it handed to you.

Besides, you know what’s great about the internet, which you can use at your local library, and it’s also cheaper than going to college, you can self educate.  There are piles upon piles of information out there if you’re willing to go find it and read it.  The MIT Open Courseware is the best example of available information.  I have gone through many of the courses trying to improve my knowledge on different subjects as well as supplementing what I already know.

The point of college at this point is to provide a little sheet of paper and certification that you are educated about “X”.  The thing is, that certification is an investment and you had better invest wisely.  My wife got two degrees, both in the sciences, however it was an actual certification that finally got her a job.  All you get out of college now days is a piece of paper, most of them are worthless, a few are gold.  If you’re paying for that piece of paper, I suggest making sure it’s gold and not pyrite.

I Encountered A Member of Occupy Last Week

So evidently last week when I went to visit Joe and Ry I should have just used cash to pay for dinner at the Kirkland Red Robin.  It was at least positive I used my credit card instead of my debit card.

You see some piss ant that is too lazy to work decided to make a complete copy of my card and go on a shopping spree today.  They started in North Bend evidently at a gas station and drove to Ephrata where they proceeded to hit up Wal-Mart and Rite-Aid racking up a 500 dollar bill at which point Bank of America’s fraud division suspended the card and called me.

You see I rarely use that card and usually only for one off purchases who’s costs are immediately paid off by the next bill.  So I talk to the fraud department they fully closed the card, asked me if I knew anyone who could be using it.  I informed them I’m staring at my card right now, it’s been in my wallet and I’ve used it only once recently, last Tuesday to be exact, at the Kirkland Red Robin.  They back charged all the fraudulent charges, closed the card, and I should have a replacement next week.

So I get the inconvenience of being out of my card for a week, which is no big deal, I have an emergency fund for a reason.  It is still annoying though.  It is annoying because some ass-hat felt that I needed to redistribute my wealth to him.  Except in the end he didn’t end up stealing from me, he ended up stealing from those companies.  I’m sure this little piss-ant feels that he was just robbing from the rich to give to himself, never mind that the costs of his theft actually gets distributed into higher costs for everyone else.

So yeah, I’m in need of some recoil therapy.  Luckily I can blow some stuff up this weekend with Joe and Sunday I’ll be able to shoot the stages I’ve designed.  It should be fun, but damn I’m still since I’ve got to redo many of my online recurring transactions now.  At least I have a list of which placed I need to go fix.

At least I got my money back, because this would definitely be me if I got a bead on the parties responsible if I didn’t.

Quote of the Day – Munchkin Wrangler (07/19/2012)

Nobody builds a business alone, that’s true. But Bob didn’t make all those people work for free, and he didn’t make use of public resources without writing hefty tax checks for the privilege. Bob paid everyone, including his local, state, and federal government, before he even got to make his first dollar of profits. And Bob carries all the risk here. If his business tanks, his contractors aren’t going to return the money he gave them for their work, his employees aren’t going to give back their wages, and the government isn’t going to return the taxes and fees he paid. So why is it OK that when he’s successful enough to make a profit, some populist asshole politicians can stand up and say that “he hasn’t paid his fair share to society yet”?

Munchkin Wrangleryou didn’t build that
July 16th, 2012


[I do love the comments about what it took to build a business coming from a man who’s never built or run a business in his life. Businesses take work, period. There is risk and there is one person who takes that risk and the reward for the risk is the potential for profit. But profit is the result of greed and corruption right?  That person who has poured blood sweat and tears working their ass off so they don’t fail shouldn’t get any reward.

Why should they get no reward, you see someone else actually built their business. The business owner didn’t spend late nights with no bonus pay keeping the ship afloat.  They haven’t spent hours working on a website with zero income coming from it at the beginning.  Who cares that the business operator has paid anyone who works for them a fair wage in exchange for their goods and services?

That’s the crux, people who are paid by the business owner didn’t build the business.  People who build a business invest considerable time and effort without the guarantee of a reward.  That in and of itself is the very nature of business and is known as your Return on Investment.

Building a business means you invest a lot of time and your own money that in the future you may end up with more than you had.  Evidently our fearless leader has some other shining example of what building a business looks like.

*Most annoyingly is some places charge you a fee merely for permission to conduct business.  You see you need a business license to sell things to people who would like your goods and services.  You pay for the privilege but if for one reason or another you take a year off, you get to pay the tax man for the privilege again.  See how that works?  The government has to get theirs or you can’t get yours. -B]

Since when is it our job to take care of everyone else?

What happened to self reliance and why in Zeus’s butthole does the current administration want to take care of everyone else and ignore the issues in our own country?

The U.S. must shape a world order relying as much on the persuasiveness of its diplomacy as the might of its military, he said. All hands are required to solve the world’s newest threats: terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons, climate change and feeding and caring for a growing world population, he added.

As I continue reading Atlas Shrugged I frequently see similarities between the book and present day America.

From each according to his ability to each according to his need. – Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Apparently other countries, who could IMO take care of themselves, are higher on the list of priorities than people right here at home.

The government also seems to think that throwing money at problems will be the solution. For example, programs such as Social Security, food stamps, unemployment, etc. are having money taken from tax payers for funding. This creates a decline for private wages.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.

The Obama administration is pushing the country towards communism:

Economist David Henderson of the conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. “People are paid for being rather than for producing,” he says.

(Emphasis mine). In this case, the way to make more money would be to have more kids, because then your need is greater.

We don’t have any kids and we are working our butts off to make ends meet, yet we are punished for our hard work just because someone else doesn’t work but needs more because they couldn’t keep it in their pants or their legs closed. Oh yeah, they also need a new big screen TV and an expensive ‘green’ vehicle to cart the kids around in.

Why should my husband and I not shrug?

TMW

Quote of the Day – 06/01/2008

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
— Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993
———————————–
It seems to me that there’s been a push to believe that theory, which often sounds good, always works, and disregard the fact that theory is created in “a perfect world.” Case in point, many feel safer in gun free zones, I on the other hand feel defenseless because it only affects the law abiding. -B