Month: January 2013

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As much as I’ve bashed EDD it’s only fair …

That I report when EDD actually does something correctly.

I spoke with an EDD representative yesterday who actually asked reasonable questions.

This was a first!

This lady asked what I’d done as a career.

I told her that I’d been a software Quality Assurance person for about 30 years.

She asked me why I’d taken a Bartending class. 

I told her because I couldn’t get the time of day in my previous career and that It seemed a way to get immediate employment. After all good times and bad… people drink!

She noted that this was quite a departure but she saw my point.

She didn’t comment on  my statement that High technology businesses were offshoring or leaving California at an alarming rate.

She did that pause thing that you hear when people are censoring themselves. I don’t know if that was agreement or not but it was interesting.

This lady was a real person. She wasn’t one of those creepy automatons who barely speak English and strain my universal translator to the breaking point.

She was actually a nice person.

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It was kind of funny, because she told me that this class didnt’ qualify for California Training reimbursement. 

I told her I wasn’t trying for any reimbursement, I was simply reporting that since I was sitting in class 10 hours a day I obviously wasn’t out interviewing. I’d answered the question on the EDD forms honestly.

She paused again… Then chuckled and said, “I see.”

She asked, “If you’d been offered a job during that week would you have dropped the class?”

I said I’d have accepted the job as a priority. But, I’d have gone to the folks running the school and asked if I could attend nights and finished the class.

She chuckles again and says “I’m clearing this, we’re going to get you caught up.”

I was shocked. I thought there were no EDD benefits left so now I’m curious about what the they’re doing. We’ll see when the next batch of paperwork comes through. Heck if all I have to do is fill out paper work and they’ll keep me in the system I’ll fill out the paperwork.

It was nice to deal with a real person at the EDD at least once. 

#EDDNOTFAIL

 

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Sandy Hook was a tragedy but lets think shall we?

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Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner has proposed that California impose a waiting period on bullet sales.

Her sound bite on TV last night was so insane I thought my head would explode.

Most gun owners always keep a supply of ammunition around. Oh and for your information… 200, 250, 500, even 2000 rounds of ammunition isn’t that much, despite the mock breathless shocked reporting of the talking heads on CNN.

At a shooting match, you go through 250 rounds. On the shooting range you can easily fire 300 rounds. Why? because you’re practicing!

How many golf balls do you hit at the driving range? How many baseballs do you hit in a batting cage?

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If you’re practicing to hit a target, you use a lot of bullets, just like any other situation where practice improves skill.

This “Lawmaker” obviously doesn’t know what the term “Pre-Meditated” means.

NO, It doesn’t mean that you meditate seeking karmic balance before you get your gun and go shoot up a school. 

It means that you plan well in advance your actions. 

That being said a waiting or cool down period before you can purchase ammunition is pointless.

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Do you think that James Holmes wasn’t planning?

Lets see, allegedly he had guns and ammunition in his car along with body armor. He didn’t stop at the army surplus store and buy that stuff on the way to the theater.

Holmes also took the time to boobytrap his apartment and was probably not intending to come back but was trying to take out additional fire and law enforcement officers that he knew would come to investigate his residence.

So Ms. Skinner what kind of waiting period do you think you’d like to impose? A month? 6 months? A year? 

No it’s pretty obvious that you’re trying to impose and eternal ban on bullets followed by an eternal ban on guns.

The last time a bullet ban was proposed environmental protection was the vehicle. After all we don’t want lead in the environment do we?

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Adam Lanza didn’t stop at “bullets r us” on the way to the Sandy Hook school. He had all the ammo he needed because it was in the gun cabinet.

The problem is that people are trying to assign meaning and rationality to the insane actions of people that are… pardon my technical terms here, crazy as fucking hell.

There is no logic, no sense, no reason behind these events. These individuals were / are out of their minds.

I for one am sick and tired of everything being tied back to the Sandy Hook tragedy and the way that tragedy is being used to forward the agenda of the gun control lobby.

I personally find it obscene that the gun control lobby, our liberal politicians, and the media are using the murders of children to push their agenda forward.

Let’s stop engaging in knee jerk reactions. Let’s look at these tragedies in the harsh light of reality.

Crazy people, do crazy shit. There’s nothing more complicated about it than that. If we want to live in a free society we accept that there will be a certain element of risk.

A question I’d like to see answered is this.

Why is it that when I was growing up no-one would even have thought about shooting up a theater or even more unthinkable a school. What has changed in the fundamental fabric of our society that allows what was once unthinkable, to be manifested in reality?

That’s what we need to identify and fix.