Author: wwducat

About: Writer, Technology guy, Photographer, Possibly EX-Software QA Engineer, Worker Bee. Interests: SCUBA, Working out, Friends, New Views, New Vistas, Photography
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500 Billion needed to maintain the Roads?

So California is talking about raising the gas tax to fix the roads?

Because the state is projecting a 500 billion shortfall by 2020.

WTF?

Maybe they shouldn’t have been raiding the DMV fees, and reallocating other highway maintenance funds to purposes that WERE NOT highway related.

Of course we will never find out what happened to all the funds “Borrowed” to fix other shortfalls.

Oh yeah… We’re not supposed to remember that… And we’re not supposed to mind paying some of the HIGHEST license fees in the country.

I’ve got a salvage title on my 13 year old truck and have an annual 120.00 bill, same on my 10 year old bike. But the real killer is the 600 dollar bill on my passenger car.

Add it all up and the state of California gets 840.00 a year just for me to license my vehicles.

Add to that the 50.5 cents per gallon of gas and long commutes and I end up paying… and I’m estimating here, about an additional 480 to 600 dollars in added taxes per year.

That’s a grand total of  around 1300.00 per year to the state. Don’t even think about the additional costs of repairs CAUSED by the bad roads, or the cost of vehicle insurance.

You’re telling me that’s not enough!?! How do other states have great roads?

Why is it that when you cross the Nevada or Arizona boarder magically the potholes are gone and the roads are smooth? Why is I-75 on the East coast clean and well maintained?

If you factor in fuel wasted sitting in traffic, sitting behind morons that drive like they’re driving pace cars at Indy, and the idiots that slam on their brakes when a bird flies overhead, it’s probably a safe bet that most folks are filling their tanks at least twice a week.

So multiply just half of what I’ve been paying, by the number of drivers in the LA area alone and that’s an OBSCENE amount of money.

Then do the same for all the cities in the state and you’ve got a crazy obscene amount. So Sacramento… tell us again how we don’t have enough cash to maintain the roads?

Here we are;

Rock… Us ….Hard Place.

Our roads are for shit and decaying more every day, that hurts the economy. On the OTHER side of the coin Sacramento RAISING the taxes on a critical item like gas screws the economy.

This is especially true of most cities in California because WE DON’T HAVE MASS TRANSIT.

With the exception of the San Francisco Bay area, cities in California opted for commuting instead of trains / buses that run on time. 

Yeah,  Yeah, The talking heads and politicians speak breathlessly about the success of the light rail in Los Angeles.  

I’ve ridden it folks… yep you can get from one point that’s 40 miles away from your home to another point that 10 miles away from your place of work as long as you’re in the LA basin.   

Oh and by the way it can take you an hour to go the same distance you can go in 15 minutes driving your car during rush hour. If you want to bicycle that last 10 miles to work…. TOO BAD, you’ll have to wait for a train that has one of 4 bicycle slots open.  

Since the trains run more or less  every 10 minutes well you could be on that platform for a while. So you put your bike back on your car and drive to work. So much for being green, getting some exercise, and saving some money. 

The Folks in the Valley and Orange County??? Uhhh well you’re screwed… have a nice day!

Again with one exception, there is no mass transit in California.

Which leads us back to the decaying infrastructure, and what to do about it.

As one article pointed out, construction costs have risen considerably since the last time the gas tax was raised. Really? I guess we in the middle class hadn’t noticed that or the rising cost of living and our more or less static wages!

I’ve mentioned it before, I’m going to repeat it again.

It’s a given that he largest cost of major projects isn’t the material… it’s the labor.

We have a standing labor force in prisons throughout the state.

Instead of feeding, clothing, housing, and providing HBO, & Gym facilities to
these folks, how about we feed & clothe them and let them pay their debt to society with real work?

Prisons wouldn’t be as crowded…

At least not during the day while the work crews were out, and at night… well folks are sleeping and then all they’re worried about is having a bunk.

I’d even be for incentivizing. For each year you work on a road crew without incident, it’s a year subtracted from the sentence. You have to admit it’s a very real way to teach someone that WORK is rewarding.

I personally think that’s a lesson worth teaching.

I also think that little Johnny or Susie riding with Mommy & Daddy in their Prius would see a prison work detail as a cautionary tale of the consequences of right vs wrong.

That might have a beneficial effect in the future, reducing prison overcrowding and the costs associated with our penal system.

After Sacramento implements my suggestion… then lets talk about raising taxes.

Until then…

Keep YOUR wasteful greedy hands out of my pocket!

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Is Social Media Bad?

Several weeks ago, After reading of  another suicide by an all too young man who had been bullied incessantly I found myself thinking about Social Media.

Social Media inherently is neither good or bad on it’s own.

It’s the WAY that people use it for that cause the problems.

The young man who recently killed himself over being bullied brought home to me a major difference between when I was in school and now.

While I was bullied a bit when I was AT school, When I got home I didn’t have to think about being bullied at all. I was on my own turf. I had a break, and the bullies were far too lazy to walk the three blocks over to my house to bully me in person.

There was a built-in system of checks & balances. I only had to put up with those assholes while I was at school and I could use the afternoon and evening while I was pretending to do my homework to figure out the best way to avoid the bullies for a couple of days.

Bullies being what they are, if you’re out of their sight for a day or so you’re typically forgotten for several weeks. Oh don’t worry, the bullies would always come back around to you again.

I was a redhead when I was younger, I got to deal with taunts about my hair color, “I’d rather be dead than red”, taunts about my sports inability, “You (run, throw, catch) like a girl”, and later “the ever present “Faggot!”.

In my defense, once my legs and arms slowed down in their growth I suddenly became a lot more co-ordinated, and no longer ran, threw, or caught like a girl.

With Social media and the 24 /7 connectedness each of us deals with, we find it harder to retreat.

As an Adult I know I can turn off my cell phone, and I don’t feel compelled to be on Facebook, or Twitter, Tumblr, or any other system that invades my privacy except on my terms.

Our children don’t seem to understand that connectedness is something that they control.

It may be more proper to say our children, being social animals and craving approval simply don’t have the maturity to exercise their right to to retreat by turning off the electronics.

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

We know that parental controls probably won’t work, and we really shouldn’t expect the schools to stop all bullying. I’m firmly against so called “Zero Tolerance” policies.

These policies are unenforceable and in fact often punish the wrong persons. Saying Zero Tolerance to most teenagers is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Perhaps we should instead teach that technology, while essentially a good thing does have a down side and that each of us needs to remember ultimately we have control over what we see, hear, and participate in.

Social media isn’t bad, but it is certainly prone to abuse. Dealing with that abuse is as simple as blocking people that are abusive and forbidding anonymous posts.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s simply exercising your right to limit what you have to put up with.

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Penn State Molestation

I have been reading about the disturbing events in a variety of news sources. Today there was an article on one of the CNN sites that caught my attention.

Apparently, new laws are being called for in Pennsylvania that would deal with how and when sexual abuse is reported.

This raises a couple of questions for me.

Do we really need another law that says abuse should be reported?
We already have laws on the books that deal with this kind of thing, the failure here was that the police didn’t get called immediately.

Why aren’t the rules of common sense enough? Screw telling your boss you saw another boss fucking a boy in the locker room showers, walk to the nearest phone and dial 911 tell the operator you need the cops and at least two ambulances. (One for the child, and then other for the remains of the molester) then leave the phone off the hook so that 911 can record the soundtrack as a cautionary tale for other molesters.

No matter how strongly a law is written if it’s not enforced or enforceable then you’re wasting your time. In fact, you may be giving a scumbag lawyer yet another opportunity to 1) Get a perpetrator off on a technicality because an overly complex law wasn’t followed to the letter. 2) Allow someone with a grudge, or who was overly zealous to destroy some poor schmuck because they were seen naked where a child might have seen them. (There was a case like that in Huntington Beach, CA)

Odious and complicated laws seem to get us in more trouble than they prevent. I think we should let common sense prevail.

A section of the article really caught my attention.

Outside of the legal concerns, many question why McQueary did not stop what he allegedly saw happening in the showers in 2002.

“How does McQueary, a 28-year-old grad student, look in the showers of a facility and see a grown man raping a 10-year-old child and not instinctively grab a baseball bat and not protect this child? How does he live with himself?” asked Richard Hermann, legal analyst and criminal defense attorney.

Why didn’t McQueary instinctively grab a baseball bat?

REALLY?

Ok Let me explain it to you.

This is what comes from telling Men over and over again that they’re too violent, and testosterone poisoned.

This is what happens when you create law after law that protect, and allow criminals to sue and WIN cases against their victims.

This is what happens when you tell a Man he can’t defend himself, his family, or others because he’s supposed to be like a little schoolboy and go tell the authorities.

This is what happens when you create a culture where it is preferable to abdicate the responsibilities associated with being a Man because getting involved and taking a stand is simply too expensive financially, emotionally, and professionally.

I’d wager, that if McQueary had stepped into that shower, and said “Remove your dick from that boys ass” carrying a baseball bat, that the fine Attorney Richard Hermann would have been demanding McQuearys’ prosecution for threatening a superior with bodily harm in front of a child!

SO people… which do you want?

Pussy men who don’t take action?

OR

Men who take action, even though they might sometimes get it wrong? Are you willing to accept and PROTECT Men that take action, even though they might screw up?

You can’t have it both ways!

I’ll take the Men that take action ANY TIME, how about you?

Here’s another chilling fact. Even IF we as a society decide that we really want Men again it’s going to be 20 years at minimum. Because there are too few Men who remember the old rules, the old ways, and fewer still that are in any kind of position to teach those ways.

McQueary may have been a coward, he may have been in deep shock, he may have been simply confused about what to do, mixed signals from the society at large can do that. He will live with his conscience and the vile image of a 10 year old being raped while he did nothing for the rest of his life, and that may be punishment enough.

However, according to the Grand Jury findings McQueary wasn’t the ONLY man to witness improper events happening in that shower. Other maintenance / cleaning staff were aware of other events and they also did nothing.

To me the inaction of these men speaks volumes about how Men in general have been villainized and castrated in our society.

I’m proud to be one of the old fucks, I’ve still got a set of low hanging hairy ones.

I’d have been in that shower in two long strides and when I was done… well the man who was fucking the 10 year old wouldn’t be using his dick for anything except pissing ever again.

Sometimes you do what you know in your heart is RIGHT and you accept the consequences even when you’re punished for doing the right thing.

It’s thin comfort but you can sleep at night… As a Man.

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Will Kim Kardashian go down in flames? We can only hope…

Another train wreck.

On the plus side at least she’s not a train wreck because of drugs, alcohol, grand theft, or petty theft. She’s managed to demonstrate why the “Sanctity of Marriage” crowd has been sniffing a little too much incense in their weekly prayer meetings.

72 days in a “Committed” relationship is almost but not quite as long as some gay friends long term relationships.

I suppose that I should say thanks. You know, under that old line “The Enemy of my Enemy is my friend”. She has done a great job of weakening the “Marriage is Sacred” argument across the nation.

Clearly marriage is about material things. Goods, land, money, fame, and of course being able to legally & morally play with someone else’s genitalia, if only for a short time.

On the Down side, every fucking place you look there is Kim Kardashian!

She’s right up there with Brittney, Lindsay, Charlie, Michael, Chris & well you know the list….

Time for all of them to take their wrecks and exit the public stage.

I’m tossing my cookies right along with Christopher Titus in his comedy show “Neverlution”

Please make it stop, raaallllfffff!

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The Rules….

Recently while my brother was visiting we started comparing notes about “Rules”.

We were both raised with rules and consequences. You know… you violate the rules and there are consequences.

Both of us at one point or another jumped off the roof of the family home. And for just a few seconds we did in fact defy the law (rule) of gravity! For a few milliseconds we enjoyed the thrill of being weightless, then came the consequences as we crashed down arms and legs flailing to the neatly manicured St. Augustine lawn.

As children, human body design allows for a certain amount of ill chosen activities. Most parents know that kids bounce surprisingly well. Jumping off a roof is in fact quite survivable when you’re 8 to 12.

It’s all about the landing… I could probably survive a similar leap today but I don’t think it would have the same thrill, (I’m Flying!) Today it would be more about (I’m Falling, now what is that terminal velocity equation… Splat!)

We won’t even get into my experimentation with gunpowder and certain chemicals from my chemistry set… Suffice it to say… my eyebrows eventually grew back.

I mention these ill chosen activities because they taught me a lot about rules / laws. These lessons formed the basis for a large part of my life philosophy. Well, these, and other lessons taught by the unique sound of my fathers belt as at arced toward my miscreant bottom. The lesson, simply put was “Obey the rules and bad shit doesn’t happen to you”.

Flash forward 35 years or so and I’m sitting with my brother in a restaurant. We’re witnessing some altercation happening out on the street and both of us reach the same conclusion about who was wrong and who was right. We turned back to our beers and pretty much said at the same time;

Why does it feel like we’re the only people still following the rules?

This lead to a discussion about the rules in general since apparently most rules have changed, and we missed the  memo.

Both of us will follow the rules.  This is particularly relevant in our workplaces.

For example.

In his workplace there was a rule that said no magazines or reading material was to be at various posts within the workplace (Think security). So he accepts this policy (rule) and then goes to his post. Lo and behold there is a substantial collection of reading material. As he cycles through other posts during the day he notes that reading material is abundant.

For folk like us, This creates a conflict.

Either all the rules are valid or none of the rules are valid.

We shouldn’t have to guess which of the rules our employer is going to enforce and which they’re going to let slide. If you’re not going to enforce a rule then remove it from the rule book and lets all move on.

When he questioned his superiors about the reading material he was labeled a Troublemaker. It set him up for all kinds of petty harassment and punishment by his peers. He wasn’t trying to make trouble, he simply wanted to know if the rule was actually enforced (apparently not), selectively enforced (low seniority couldn’t read, high seniority could), or enforced only when someone was watching.

Rather than actually answering his question, his supervisors just created a miserable work environment.

The creation of shitty work environments is all too common these days, especially among small minded, insecure, weak willed bosses. It’s less risky to their petty empire than an actual discussion and has no consequences other than to make the person they don’t like seek other employment.

When did the “Rules apply to others… not me” mindset become the norm?

All of us as children have that mindset. We are supposed to grow out of it.

Yet with each passing year evidence that we are in fact not growing out of it becomes more and more abundant. 
Recently there was the wonderful example of humanity at it’s worst in a McDonalds on the East Coast. A woman goes off and slaps a cashier because he needs to follow procedure and verify her $50 dollar bill. 
There are a number of things wrong with this scenario. First of all what kind of moron pays for a happy meal with a $50 bill? Given that you are in a position where you are the moron paying for your happy meal with a fifty, what part of the vendor is going to verify the bill escapes you? 
Then when an employee is obviously following procedure… where the hell do you get the idea that it’s OK for you to slap that employee?

But this bitch goes one further she climbs across the counter to pursue the employee who HAS retreated from her onslaught.
This is where things get really strange. The male employee being human grabs a pipe and starts beating the shit out of this crazed bitch.

I could have seen him punching her lights out but the pipe is over the top. The fact that he keeps smacking her after she’s down looks kinda bad too. On balance we can’t really see what’s happening behind the counter for all we know she’s trying to hit him with something she’s found.
Oh how proud the parents of these people must be! 21st Century homo sapiens to fresh out of the caves in less than 60 seconds!
All of them should have been taken to jail or better yet, a manners re-education camp complete with electroshock.
These people followed the rule of the jungle, not the rules of polite society and that’s the point!
Rules exist and are enforced by peer pressure within a society so that we don’t go back to the caves. But rules ONLY work when there is a homogenous society. 


We no longer have a homogenous society
I’m not talking about skin color here, or religion, or class. I’m talking about the fracturing of our society at a fundamental level. Ask any two people on the street about any set of rules and you’ll get different answers about which rules they’re going to obey.That’s a very different picture from 35 years ago.
We’ve become a society where people obsess over the tiniest of slights. You’d expect polite behavior, but in fact our society has focused so intensely on the minutiae that we have simply lost sight of the bigger issues. 
It’s no longer about if something is racist or sexist, we’ve broken it down to, “is something more racist or sexist against one group over another?” completely losing sight of the fact that racist or sexist behavior is in general bad.
We all need to step back think about the big picture concepts.
Don’t lie
Don’t steal
Don’t mistreat people regardless of their sex, color, sexuality, or whatever
Obey laws
Don’t cut in line
Be polite to each other
Treat everyone with respect and acknowledge their right to their opinion even if it differs from yours.
Apply all rules equally to everyone no exceptions


Why can’t we do this?
I think it goes back to a simple change in our thinking.
We used to all be Americans.
Now we’re Asian Americans, African, Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, [Insert Ethnicity Here] Americans. We’ve even broken it down to sexual preference, now you can be an [Alphabet Soup] American.
What point does this serve except to draw distinctions based on our differences instead of our commonalities? 
We are all here in America because we were either born here OR because we CHOSE to come here.

Regardless of how we came to be here OR WHEN, at some point, someone in our family decided that being an American was better than being what they were. (Even African Americans have a choice about where they live. If they feel that they can’t get past the injustice in America they have a choice to leave. That, by the way is a choice we all have.) 

It’s well past time for us to put aside where our families came from and embrace being American again.
That doesn’t mean that we have to forget our traditions, it does mean that we need to find a way forward. It means that we all have to hammer out a new set of rules that we as a society agree to, and will follow. It means that we accept responsibility for ourselves and our fellow Americans and once again take pride in our unique ability to be a melting pot where the best of Humanity, not the worst is on display.