This Thursday is Veteran's Day -- to all those who have ever served, happy day and thanks for what you've done. Veteran's Day in its most non-veteran sense, however, is a day off. And it's a Thursday off. Which means you've got to go back to work on Friday. So, do you have two Fridays that week ... or two Mondays? Whichever you choose, I vote that we call a Friday at work after a Thursday off FriMday.
Obviously I'm not going to get into the budget thing yet - probably not until the new year - but on the way home tonight I heard a story on NPR that bears thinking about. Recently, the Brazilian government threatened taxing a bunch of American goods because of our policy to provide American cotton farmers subsidies. So at this point, we have a couple options. Under World Trade Organization rules, the subsidies are probably illegal - so we could, I don't know ... stop paying US cotton farmers the subsidies.
But wait! There is another option. Instead, with all the shrewdness of a trailer park lottery winner, we offer to pay Brazillian farmers $175 MILLION dollars a year to let it go. Not being stupid, the Brazillians say, OK. Thanks for the cash.
This is sad in a number of ways. 1. Instead of saving some of our money by getting rid of subsidies, the US government has now taken another $175 Mil of our tax dollars and given them away to a foreign power. and 2. It shows that our negotiators are, let's face it, stupid. The Brazillians thought they'd be getting a token amount of money - and then what did they get the first month? $12.5 million bucks. WHOA! they said (although with a Portuguese inflection). That's a lot of money!
What this tells me is that we didn't really 'bargain' in any meaningful sense. Hell, we probably could have gotten away with paying them $25mil a year, but instead we just gave away the (cotton) farm.
It's irritating beyond words really, how easily bureaucrats throw away our money.
If you know of an easy way for the government to save money, by all means leave a comment. I'm looking for realistic, reasonable ways too - not something silly like "get rid of the Navy". I'm really looking to compile a list of comparatively 'small' savings such as getting rid of the penny ($50Million) and the like - to prove that a few million here and a few million there and pretty soon we're talking about real money. Let's have your ideas.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Time does fly
Obviously the posting 'every week' thing isn't working out as well as I though. But me and BOB (my apartment, BOB, the Box Of Boredom) are doing fine. We know this because I've bothered to name my apartment. As of yet, I haven't started talking to him. And more thankfully, he hasn't started talking to me. If that happens it's definitely time to move.
So the mid-terms went far FAR better than expected with As in each - actually one was a 100 which kind of floored me. But the big surprise, grade wise, this week came from my semi-annual AirForce Fitness Test - which I have never scored higher than about an 83 on. Well, for one of the few times I maxed my push-ups and sit-ups and had to have a run time faster than I figured was likely (although not impossible). Suffice to say that at the end, I had a 90.1 on the test, good enough for an 'excellent' rating, and more importantly, good enough where I don't have to take the test again for a year. So that's nice.
Class wise we have two more meetings before the end of the semester and right now it looks like my first semester will be my last for a while. It seems that while I have only about 15 months left in the service, Uncle Sam wants 6 of those to be over in Iraq or some such place. Soooooo we'll see what happens. It's not a done deal yet, but it's looking that way. Regardless, in my last two classes we are assigned a group and we have to do a 30 minute class on a subject. Remember that Father Guido Sarducci video I linked to in the last blog? Well, I did and if you don't remember, go back and click the link and watch the video. Anyway, if you watch that, you'll have a good idea of what's in store for my class in a couple weeks. This isn't just me, either, this is me and four other adults who have agreed to this. I think it will be fun. Maybe I'll get a clip and put it here but I doubt it.
And one last note - I have successfully lost the 12 pounds I've gained since arriving here. I topped out at a rather stunning 200 pounds at one point here back about a month or so ago. I'm 'back down' to 188ish and I think this is the start of getting me down some more. Ultimately the goal of course is 160 but right now I think getting into the 179 range will be excellent and then we'll worry about lower numbers.
Ok, this was a bit of a 'letter home' kind of post and hopefully next time it will be more along the lines of previous stuff. My project I'm looking at it to take a good look at the federal budget. It's amazing how little people pay attention to what we're spending our money on.
So, stay tuned for that -- Roe's ideas of how we can save federal dollars without doing anything really stupid.
So the mid-terms went far FAR better than expected with As in each - actually one was a 100 which kind of floored me. But the big surprise, grade wise, this week came from my semi-annual AirForce Fitness Test - which I have never scored higher than about an 83 on. Well, for one of the few times I maxed my push-ups and sit-ups and had to have a run time faster than I figured was likely (although not impossible). Suffice to say that at the end, I had a 90.1 on the test, good enough for an 'excellent' rating, and more importantly, good enough where I don't have to take the test again for a year. So that's nice.
Class wise we have two more meetings before the end of the semester and right now it looks like my first semester will be my last for a while. It seems that while I have only about 15 months left in the service, Uncle Sam wants 6 of those to be over in Iraq or some such place. Soooooo we'll see what happens. It's not a done deal yet, but it's looking that way. Regardless, in my last two classes we are assigned a group and we have to do a 30 minute class on a subject. Remember that Father Guido Sarducci video I linked to in the last blog? Well, I did and if you don't remember, go back and click the link and watch the video. Anyway, if you watch that, you'll have a good idea of what's in store for my class in a couple weeks. This isn't just me, either, this is me and four other adults who have agreed to this. I think it will be fun. Maybe I'll get a clip and put it here but I doubt it.
And one last note - I have successfully lost the 12 pounds I've gained since arriving here. I topped out at a rather stunning 200 pounds at one point here back about a month or so ago. I'm 'back down' to 188ish and I think this is the start of getting me down some more. Ultimately the goal of course is 160 but right now I think getting into the 179 range will be excellent and then we'll worry about lower numbers.
Ok, this was a bit of a 'letter home' kind of post and hopefully next time it will be more along the lines of previous stuff. My project I'm looking at it to take a good look at the federal budget. It's amazing how little people pay attention to what we're spending our money on.
So, stay tuned for that -- Roe's ideas of how we can save federal dollars without doing anything really stupid.
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