Month: December 2024

When they hauled him out to support Kamala Harris, it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t doing well. May he rest in peace.

I felt really bad for him, he wasn’t the best president, but he was a decent man and he didn’t deserve to be paraded around like it appeared the party was doing. Especially not just to prop up a candidate. I thought it was very unseemly.

I wasn’t likely to vote for Kamala anyway, but I imagine that some folks were wondering if this was another example of the Democrat party simply being too damn old.

That’s not to say the Republican Party is any better. Mitch McConnell is obviously no spring chicken. I’ve written elsewhere in the blog that he should retire and go home to Kentucky.

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As we wind down the year, I’m hoping for some peace and quiet. Maybe a week of just silence, reflection, and everyone taking a breath.

I know I’m pissing into the wind.

With the inauguration coming up, I’m positive there’s going to be massive insanity and after the inauguration there will be newer, stupider, levels of insanity. I hope that Trump can in fact do some good. Who knows? Maybe he will before the machine in Washington, (comprised of scum of the earth Democrats & Republicans,) manages to start thwarting anything and everything that he tries to accomplish. That’s predicated on Trump living up to his ad copy. I’m not sure, and have never been totally sure, about Trump or his reasoning in becoming president. The times I’ve voted for him were, in reality, votes against his opponents.

I’m hopeful of Trump and DOGE.

I have always thought that the United States government should be run like a business. The inefficiency and stupid regulations make everything in the government cost double or triple what it should.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about. I once worked on a project where the government had specified the exact model of CPU and exact type of memory, down to the number of pins each chip was to have.

The problem is, technology advances, new chips are designed yearly, everything gets faster, smaller, and less power hungry. The project itself was supposed to run for 5 years, in reality it had been running for 10, and was likely to run for another 10 years when I joined it.

In the time that passed, the chips used in the project had gone from being leading edge to discontinued. The government, rather than update the specifications and adapt, chose to have the old chips custom manufactured, at 20 times the cost of current commercially available models which did the same thing faster and were 100% backward compatible.

This is one way that toilet seats cost $6000.00

I don’t know if there’s any truth to a story I heard about a government “Quality Inspector” who saved his job and lined his pockets, by “discovering” that the insulation on wire wasn’t the proper thickness.

Electrical insulation, like everything else is constantly improving. As materials science advances we discover new materials that work the same as, or better, than old materials. What supposedly happened is that the wire insulation in this guys project had converted from a rubberized vinyl to a teflon vinyl material. The latter being lighter, tougher, less prone to abrasive damage, and providing superior insulation qualities at higher voltages. It was also thinner.

At some point, 20 years before, when the project was being contemplated, some brilliant jackass had for reasons unknown, measured and then wrote into a specification, the thickness of the rubberized insulation on the wire the project was using at the time.

Our “Quality Inspector” protected his job and the jobs of others on the project by making a stink about the wire being out of specification. He neglected to mention the new wire was superior in every way. His findings were that the wire was out of spec and the project would have to secure wire that met the spec then rework all the machinery that incorporated the “out of spec” wire. This also meant that he & his brother in law could purchase a small abandoned wire manufacturing plant that just so happened to make wire with the right thickness insulation. They charged 3 times market price and their only customer was the United States Government.

This is how government waste is perpetuated, and why it costs $25 thousand dollars for a military radio with shittier specifications and capabilities than a consumer product for $500 dollars.

Trump & his DOGE department have a lot more to do than just slash their way through the bureaucracy in Washington D.C. I think their time limit is unrealistic too.

So much of the waste is literally written into what amounts to law within the congressional budget it will take years of effort to cut. I could see warehouses being filled with custom made, government issue, obsolete rotary dial telephones because of a line item in a budget from 1968 is still in force.

The kicker is, over the years, property might have been purchased, then new warehouses built to house the overflow of rotary dial phones that were no longer in use.

That’s the less obvious kind of waste that needs to be burned out of our government. I don’t think DOGE is up to it. I don’t think they have a clue what they’re up against, just how far the waste goes, or the consequences of severing the snakes head. For all anyone knows, government waste might be a hydra where cutting off one head gets you 2 more.

I may apply to work for them. Just for the hell of it, it might be fun. A man should enjoy his work shouldn’t he?