Monday, June 9, 2008

More Pension Problems

NPR has a propaganda article on Morning Edition about pensions:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91303963

Book Examines Looming Pension Debts in America

Listen Now [7 min 46 sec] add to playlist

Morning Edition, June 9, 2008 · Business journalist Roger Lowenstein's new book, While America Aged, looks at how corporations and governments came to make pension and health care obligations to workers and what is happening as the bills come due. Host Renee Montagne talks about the book with Lowenstein.



Here they talk about how pensions are keeping America back and uncompetitive in a world market. At the very end she quotes from the book that pensions are responsible for a huge long list from seemingly fat people, San Diego's budget, to all American business.

Now lets stop with the stupid American idiocy and look at what pensions really are. Every employee pays into this fund and the company pays you less because they also paid into the pension plan. Unfortunately most companies decided never to pay into a fund. And they certainly did not separate these accounts from their own financial accounts. So if they go bankrupt all the money owed to the employees goes poof. Pension plans in America were just another way of ripping off the workers.

The solution? Use propaganda to make people think pension plans are left over from socialistic unions that have no part in a lean and mean competitive America.

Soon we'll be seeing our schools de-funded even more, most of our highways that are actually useable will become toll roads, all government services will charge, and the propaganda machines working our matrix will keep people distracted with reality shows and sports so people don't think about these sort of things.

And they'll be working our matrix with the help of NPR as seen above.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

The perfect scripting language?

The "Linux Journal" has an article called "How to be a good (and lazy) System Administrator". It's interesting. It assumes you are good at writing bash scripts. It goes along with their heavy emphasis lately of Bash scripts.

Bash is far from being universal though. It's not on real unix boxes. And it's certainly not on windows boxes. There are no universal scripting languages. So which language to use? PHP obviously.

PHP is a clean language. Compare it to say PERL. PERL proudly claims there are more than one way to do anything you want. Problem is that everybody does it in their own goofy hard to follow style. It's a very dirty language that is difficult to understand because of this. Basically PERL has been built up by building scabs upon scabs upon scabs until anything and everything is a mess. PHP, Python, and the newer languages are clean. So if you want maintainability you do not use PERL but you can use PHP.

PHP has a good selection of library routines to cover almost anything you need. Whether you want to handle XML, HTML, CGI, CLI, Genetics, Math, Statistics, Physica, Chemistry, Text processing, etc., PHP has good free libraries for virtually everything. It's not as good as PERL. However the framework is in place if not complete and is actively being improved. Python and the other languages don't even have the framework in place.

Universal acceptance. PHP is available on most all boxes regardless of the OS. This makes the language boring to kiddies. But not to egoless programmers needing results PHP is perfect.

Why the Linux Journal still pushes niche scripting languages like BASH is disconcerting. Attempting to lead programmers down proprietary closed solutions is something I'd expect from M$, not the Linux Journal.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Checkoff list for good songs

There are a few rules I'd follow if I were to ever come out with my own music.

The DONTS:
1) I would not moan after some love. Or pine for some love.
2) Cutsie didies that make your head bob up and down. These vacuous inane tunes have no place.
3) Religion. (Unless it is bashing it.)

The DOs:
1) Good rifts.
2) Lyrics that mean something useful. This could be stories on political times. Struggles. Useful common sense information. Etc..

Perhaps one could start with Isop'sfables and make songs based on them with modern day examples with a good rift to them. Then progress to Socrates and move on from there.

Hilary and her June statements

Hilary keeps talking about how her Husband did not show signs of winning until June. When she's not mentioning that she is talking about how Kennedy was killed in June. That it would be premature to admit defeat a month before June. That the race is far from over as shown in the above two examples.

I have not heard any political pundits talk about how baseless her claims are because of most of the States across the nation have moved up their elections to the first half of the year. It's like comparing the amount of gold $10 could have bought you in 1840 with the gold it could buy you on todays market. You can't compare the 10ozs of gold $10 would buy then to the 1/1000 oz of gold $10 would buy now. So June of yesteryear probably had 1/3 of the delegates still up for grab. Probably the same number of delegates that would have been up for grab in say March of this current election.

Hilary really missed her calling. With all the lies and reality distortions coming out of her campaign and mouth she really should be running on the Republican side. Following Bush's lead. In fact she should have waited until the weak Democrats made fools of themselves for a term or two and then ran as a Republican. Following in the footsteps of the "greats" like Reagan and Bush. She would have fit right in!

Sleazy Ass Democratic Party

Fuck the Democrats. What a pile of shit. Worthless shit at that.

So the Democratic party told Michigan and Florida they were not allowed to move up their elections. Who knows the reason but it's their camp and they can do as they please. They probably told other States the same thing. However Florida and Michigan decided they'd do it anyways despite being told their votes would not count.

So the Democratic Party then warned the candidates not to campaign. Hilary decided to do put her name on the ballot and campaign anyways. Barak did not campaign though somebody put his name on the ballot in Florida but not Michigan. Barak honored the Democratic Patry rules. Obviously Hilary won in those two states and she made a big deal about it holding press conferences. You'd have thought at this point the Democratic party would have punished her.

Now with Hilary way behind she has been making a big stink about how unfair it is not to count these States. So what does the Democratic party do? They decide to count these states and give her half the votes.

Still she'll be far behind Barak. This keeps her in a little longer. Yet it shows just how weak and worthless the Democratic party is. They are spineless.


There are positives though. Several in fact. These immediately come to mind:

1) She will eat up probably 50 million more of her personal fortune. Hopefully leaving her broke.

2) It makes the Democratic party out to be totally spineless.

3) Hilary, basically another Joseph Libermann, will be ruined politically and never again threaten to hold political office.

Asta la vista bitch.