Category: Fail

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Gotta Love California! (NOT)

1894964978-gun-control-cartoon.jpgOkay, so I’m unemployed. I have been since Aug. I’ve also been beating the bushes to find something new.

Covered California – Health Insurance tells me my insurance will be 1400 dollars a month. I was only getting 1800 a month in unemployment. 

Leaving $400.00 to pay mortgage, car, utilities, food, and gas.

So obviously that wasn’t going to work.

I applied for MediCal. That was denied because 1800.00 a month in unemployment was making too much money to qualify.

Let me be clear, I have nothing wrong with me, aside from slightly high blood pressure. Literally no issues. 

Covered California sent me a notice today reminding me that I’d be fined 700.00 in 2021 for not having insurance.

Let me see… $16,800 per year that I don’t have, versus $700 that I also don’t have.

Any moron would like to have health insurance. But only a moron would move into a tent at the side of the road to be able to pay for it. Foregoing transportation (to interview for a new job), food to be strong enough to work the new job, or utilities to power the technology necessary to look for a new job.)

Yeah, California! The STUPID is strong here.

I gotta get out of this place!

Update 3/27/2020

Unbeknownst to me, the other half brought this insanity to the attention of our State Assemblyman.

Within 2 hours, I was speaking with a representative from Covered California.

Turns out that the records were a little messed up, which no-one had told me previously.

Once those screwups were corrected, and because I am no longer receiving unemployment suddenly my cost for insurance is less than $100.

Really?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to pay what I can and is reasonable given the level of care I actually need. I’m also happy to be on track to have health insurance.

I found myself asking this question though… Why did it take a call from an State Assemblyman’s office to get this resolved?

Any hoo now if I get sick, I’ll be able to go to the hospital.

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Used to be a saying, “You can never find a cop when you need one.”

These days I suppose that may still be true. 

Personally, in my misspent youth i never had any trouble locating the police. More properly, they never had trouble zeroing in on where I had been. Usually by the time they got to the location, I was already gone. There was that one time when I took a page from Briar Rabbit. For some reason police don’t like trekking through swamps at 3am…

Go Figure!

Today, Lawyers are much worse than the Police ever were. They’re in everything we do. Funny thing about it is what happens when you’re actually calling a Lawyer and offering to pay them.

Over the past year, I’ve tried to engage no less than six lawyers and None of them have returned my call(s). I guess lawyering means that you don’t have to worry about income and you can afford to blow potential clients off.

Good for them, I guess. 

Bad for those of us stuck in an ever increasing web of rules, regulations, law, and general bullshit.  

Lawyers have a great scam going, they’ve complicated things to the point that they’re indispensable on the government side of the equation and then charge us obscene amounts of cash to provide guidance out of the mess.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but they’re about as specialized as doctors. Now you not only have to engage a lawyer, but you have to know which speciality of the law they practice.

GREAT! just what we all need, more complexity!

To illustrate the point, have you noticed that when you deal with an insurance company, or a utility, or virtually anything else lately, you get read a long assed list of terms & conditions that two sentences in, start sounding like the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon?

“Blah Blah Blah”

Even renting a damn car there’s page after page after page of bullshit.

All of this bullshit is legalese and cannot possibly be comprehended by at least 25% of average people. Hey, read any newspaper in print or online and you’ll see that even ‘educated’ people, you know, the people who insist they’re our betters, can’t write worth a damn. We have people in professional positions that don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re.

Given this, how can you possible expect ‘less educated‘ people to fully understand what the hell they’re signing and agreeing to after a barrage of several pages of legalese?

My Dad used to say that the best thing we could do for this country was put all the lawyers on a cruise ship, sail it out to the middle of the Atlantic and sink it.

I think his comment was based on two factors. 1) Lawyers complicate things. 2) Our government is rife with lawyers. 

Dad was always fond of the “Twofer”, and of doing business with a handshake. His word was his bond and to my knowledge he kept his word. There may be evidence to the contrary but let me keep my childlike illusions.

As a kid, I knew two things. Avoid entanglement with the law, and avoid, as much as possible, drawing the attention of the government:

Pay your taxes, don’t screw around with too many deductions and play it straight enough that the IRS, FBI, or any government agency didn’t come snooping.

Capone was our cautionary tale. Xaviera Hollander added a little color to my minimalist philosophy as I reached adulthood.

With rules, regulations, laws, and all the other complications in our lives it’s made me start to consider the following:

To play it straight, is automatically more expensive. To play the game loose and fast, keeps money in your pocket, and gets you to your goal faster.

Being a stand up guy means you’re going to get screwed. Nice guys don’t get shit except being shat upon, and honest people increasingly are being seen as fools.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves me considering coloring outside the lines. 

A quote from Captain Reynolds in Firefly or Serenity really rang true with me;

“Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all.”

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What? Wait…

IowaCaucus.jpgI was reading about the Iowa Caucus.

The acting DHS secretary Mr. Wolf said that the application issue appeared to be a “Load” issue. By “Load” he means that the servers were unable to keep up with the number of requests.

Okay I’ll buy that is a possibility, if everyone in a state was voting at the same time. But as the number of voters decreased, the server would catch up and post each transaction in turn. If this was the problem then it’s pretty obvious whoever tested the software didn’t do any load testing and quite possibly didn’t do much testing at all.

Lets face it, we’re all familiar with online opinion polls, and I’d imagine the servers handling those are dealing with millions of votes a minute. Seems to me that Shadow (The company that apparently spent 3 years building the software,) would have looked to other examples of voting systems, during their development process.

For god’s sake, there are PORN sites that handle votes for performers without crashing. Given the prevalence of Porn Sites I’d guess they process something on the order of MILLIONS of votes per Second.

Then I read that the application was only for the 170 – 190 precinct captains. So the paper votes were cast, then counted, and the captains were to use an application to input those numbers?

You’re telling me that with 3 YEARS of development no-one ever tested with a measly 200 simultaneous users?

WTF?

As I sit reading more about this, I’m astounded.

I have Apple Time Capsules here in my home that can handle 50 simultaneous users on WiFi.

A low end Dell server purchased from Best Buy could probably handle 250 users from the moment it was plugged in, possibly more if all the server had to do was tally incoming data for ONE Single application.

I have to point out that I’m kinda talking out of my hat here because I don’t have all the facts. So take what I’m saying here with a salt lick.

My point is, that with something as important as votes, if I could put a system together with commercial of the shelf (COTS) equipment for less than 10K in hardware and a little web programming there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for the debacle we saw in Iowa.

Much less so when you factor 3 YEARS of development time.

Hell, with 3 years of development time, I could give you Web and Phone based access, Live updates, and auditing of figures entered by precinct, candidate, and user. Complete with state of the art security. I’d have also taken the DHS up on testing the system too. The DHS has an entire division dedicated to Cybersecurity. 

I’d probably have requested that the FBI and NSA take a look too, if they were willing.

WHY?

Because the product would have to be rock fucking solid and more eyes looking at a system are more likely to find flaws that can be corrected before its debut.

Especially given that over the last four years we’ve heard about nothing but Russian influence in our election process. I’d be wanting to make something that was so secure that there’d never be any question about the veracity of the product or its results.

Make no mistake, this is (or was) a product.

Shadow would have been in a prime position to resell the product to all 50 states and would have been reaping the benefits for decades with maintenance and upgrade contracts.

Now Shadow will fade into the morning light like a bad dream, having made millions (I’m guessing) for its principals and casting everyone below executive level to the unemployment line.

Oh, and they’ll have an added lovely parting gift of FAILED project on their resumes.

As I said, we don’t yet have all the facts and likely, we never will.

Online voting could be a reality. But only if we commit to doing it right. 

Don’t you find it interesting that we have more security in place online and over the phone to deal with our banking needs than we do when dealing with the direction of our country as a whole?

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And we move step by step toward the Orwellian Nightmare…

IMG 0882As I’ve mentioned again and again Job searches are difficult especially if you’re an older worker.

Now as if to increase the difficulty, it’s become commonplace for recruiters to use your social media profile to determine your fitness for a particular position. 

If the recruiter finds something questionable in your social media, you’re not going to get the job. This apparently includes something as simple as a picture.

A news piece out of Texas where a job applicant was shamed over a photo in her instagram and didn’t get the job she was applying for demonstrates just how bad it’s gotten.

Those of us that don’t do a lot on social media or those of us who have no social media accounts are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. 

I found one line in the article particularly telling. 

“Go on with your bad self and do whatever in private. But this is not doing you any favors in finding a professional job.”

Uhh, you social media account is your social media account and it’s not the business of any employer to shame you especially for something as innocuous as a bikini photo.

This isn’t the first instance of social media being used to cause harm. This is simply the latest in a long line of egregious actions on the part of employers, or media.

I personally don’t want to live my life under a microscope. Yet it appears according to Linkedin that I must. 

I ask again where does it stop?

Will we end up with corporate “Social Purity Standards”, How about a GATTACA type society where genetic purity is required to work at all.

These articles about social media accounts all say you must be careful what you post, that makes sense, after all as my grandmother used to say, “You don’t air your dirty laundry in public.” 

But social media is something that you share between you and your friends. It should be something that allows you to keep in touch with a select group of people. That is, if you engage in it at all. My few friends and I typically communicate via text messages, or phone calls not because we have anything to hide but because that’s the way that is most comfortable.

We’re guys, sometimes we say off color things and honestly some comments if taken out of context could be blown way out of proportion.

Back in the stone age when I was in school we used to have object lessons taught to us by our teachers. One of those object lessons was on the nature of gossip. The lesson started by whispering something into the ear of the person sitting next to you. They whispered the same thing to the person next to them, and so on.

By the time the message got to the 15th person it was completely different and 100% wrong.

For example if a buddy of mine were to say, “I’m living in a tent in the back yard for the duration of October,” because he couldn’t stand his wife and daughter’s love of Pumkin Spice EVERYTHING as a joke. He may even have said it in front of his wife on a phone call which all involved would have laughed about.

If that was in a social media post and taken out of context, that same friend would be inundated with questions about how his separation was going and was he okay and what a bitch his wife was. Likewise on his wife’s social media her friends would be rallying around her and talking about what a son of a bitch he was and that she was better off without him.

It could easily be taken out of context.

3nd friend asks 2nd friend about him and short reply is “Well he’s out in the tent in the back yard with the dog”

3rd friend knows based on time of year that it’s a joke about pumpkin spice.

But an acquaintance of #1 and friend of number 3 sees the post and reads into it, “trouble in the marriage with divorce imminent,” before long the whole thing spins out of control and a lot more energy is spent correcting the misunderstanding than was spent creating the original post.

This is why so many older folks just aren’t that interested in social media. It’s not that they don’t know how to use it, they know how wrong things can go, and how quickly. It’s a lesson we all learned back in the early days of telephones when we all had “Party Lines”.

Party Lines were the single greatest source of neighborhood gossip in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s.

If you were filing for divorce, you went to the attorney’s office, you sure didn’t talk about it on the phone. Rumors often got started just because you made an appointment with a doctor, lawyer, or accountant on a party line.

Social media is the “Party Line” of this age. The irony is, back in the day, we all paid handsomely to have private lines as they became available in our neighborhoods.

Now, people flock to social media to post details about their lives that should be private and yet they’re sharing it all with whole world.

This makes me wonder if facebook still lists me as a user, or for that matter myspace. Those accounts have been closed for years, (According to facebook or myspace,) but I have no proof that another facebook or myspace user isn’t able to see what I posted before I decided social media wasn’t for me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for legislation to prevent corporate entities using social media to spy on their employees. God knows the last thing we need is more legislation, but perhaps it’s time to have a very clear division between corporate social media and personal social media and a “Never the twain shall meet” set of laws.

In the case of the young lady who was shamed by a potential employer, because there was a picture of her in a bikini on her instagram…

I hope she sues the shit out of them.

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PG&E Makes Northern California like a third world country

Purge anarchy 0In an effort to curb wildfires, PG&E started shutting down the power due to high winds in Northern California.

It may take them up to 7 days to restore power to the affected areas.

SAY WHAT?

How about PG&E simply fixing or maintaining their equipment? Oh Right… They’ve filed for bankruptcy because of all the law suits from the last major fire that they were apparently responsible for. Uh, what the hell is going on here? They didn’t have to kill the power in the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s so what’s changed?

Could it be that in order to keep profits and executive salaries high they’ve skimped on maintenance? Could it be that zoning and over development have created a situation where too many high tension lines have been run out to places that are inaccessible and therefore not easily maintained?

I’ll admit that I think it’s funny as hell.

Rickandmorty ep210I’d love to see San Francisco and Sacramento plunged into darkness. Both bastions of insanity could do with a nice long dark wake up call.

How would all the electric cars be recharged? OMG it would be a disaster and people’s cell phones have to be recharged. What? no computers, internet, streaming services? You mean we have to, gasp… talk to each other face to face?  After the first night it would probably look like something out of The Purge.

And why would it take up to 7 days to restore power?

All PG&E is doing is shutting down the grid.  Assuming no damage, shouldn’t it be a simple matter of resetting the system and powering it back up?

Of course, while the power is down maybe PG&E should use the time wisely to make routine repairs and improvements. However, doing that would require planning and certainly overtime pay. Since they’re in bankruptcy it’s unlikely that there is a lot of cash for the overtime, but I’ll bet the top executives are still getting their obscene paychecks.

The mental image of Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento residents having to resort to cooking fires while living in their million dollar homes tickles me to no end.

But we all know that isn’t what’s going to happen. In fact here is the outtage map.

It’s mostly the people who can’t afford to live in the cities who are being affected. You know, the workers that have to get up at 4am to get ready for their commute of 2.5 hours to work. Then they’ll have to deal with streetlights being out and signal lights not working, when they finally do get to work the odds are pretty good they’ll have some jerk supervisor that chastises, or outright punishes them for being late.

I guess my point is that instead of PG&E killing the power, they should be working to make sure that the power lines don’t come down in the first place. 

But California is apparently fine with being plunged into the dark ages. So long as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento don’t go dark. 

I could make a killing selling flint knives and stone clubs.