Category: General

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Today is “Stinkys” spa day

Pretty much the whole day will be shot. It’s just as well, I won’t be tempted to look at the news.

I also won’t have to see Elizabeth Warren, Jasmine Crockett, AOC, or some government worker whining on X about their horrible mistreatment.

Lieawatha (Warren) has pissed me off so much I can’t see straight. She is posting about every 15 minutes on X and usually whatever she’s posting is easily disproven with a 1.5 second news search. But we all know there are people that will not spend the 1.5 seconds to cross check the lying bag of feces. I’m tired of being lied to, I’m more tired of having to check every damn thing this woman says.

Crockett is an absolute moron. Does she hear herself saying 5K won’t do anybody good? She was on her knees licking Biden’s ass over a 700 or 1000 dollar check to “help” out the American public who the Democratic Party had screwed.

Actually I’m sick & tired of Democrats in Washington altogether.

That being said, I’m getting impatient for arrests. If the government is corrupt, then I’m for calling it treason and hanging the perpetrators on the Capitol lawn.

When we start hearing things like trillions of dollars being wasted, that’s gonna fire us up. There was a headline today claiming that trillions of dollars in medicaid payments were made to ineligible people overseas. WTF?

Then I look at the Goddamn tax brackets and find that the small sum I get in social security is still high enough that the motherfucking IRS / Government is going to tax me on it. What the actual fuck is that about?

As I was looking at my taxes, I was thinking that I didn’t want the IRS to have my bank account number. Why? Because I don’t want to make it easy for those fuckers to put money in my account, more importantly I don’t want to make it easy for those fuckers to lay hands on what little money I have. 

I’d rather deal with handing a check to a bank teller.

That’s how little trust I have in these government fucks.

While lying scumbags in Congress allow and profit from breathtaking corruption and waste, they’re taxing Social Security recipients who barely have enough per month to keep up with their medications, food, and rent/mortgage.

Really?

This is why so many people are ready to show those fuckers in Washington D.C. what an insurrection actually looks like. I pray to God it doesn’t come to it, but if it does, I’m betting that there aren’t going to be trials, just firing squads.

I thought the Democrats were supposed to be looking out for the poor, the low income, and the disadvantaged people. Another lie!

The only time any politician is concerned about the people, is when they’re glad handing for votes. They’ll all bend the people over and fuck us to get what they want. 

This stuff running on the TV and through my head is exactly why I need a break.

I suppose the funny thing is that Democrats in Washington, and across the country still haven’t gotten the message. We voted for Trump, we voted for his cabinet, his administration, and the people that he told us he was going to have installed in various department that needed a good scrubbing.

Elon Musk can access my shit. Kash Patel can access my shit, Tulsi Gabbert can access my shit, Dan Bongino can access my shit. 

I trust these people so much more than I trust the old entrenched establishment.

What’s funny is that the whining Democrats seem shocked that the very people Donald Trump told everyone he was going to put in these positions, Are actually in the positions as specified.

We knew these folks were going to be doing exactly what they’re doing before the election. Guess What? 

WE’RE HAPPY they’re ripping through the bullshit. 

We’ll be happier when corrupt politicians are being marched out of their offices and down the Capitol steps.

If the new DOJ in concert with the FBI starts arresting people in D.C. My cock will be raw from rubbing one out every time a new arrest is made. I may even get chafed.

That’s what we’re all waiting for. We’re waiting for arrests just like children wait for Santa on Christmas Eve.

We don’t even care if some of those arrests are vengeance. Because some people really deserve it, and have brought it on themselves.

I need a break! Jesse will enjoy being “handsome” and having his fur all fluffy. I’ll enjoy him being happy about it too.

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But it’s only 1%

Waste of money.I keep seeing people talking about USAID being only 1% of the budget. As if somehow that justifies the waste.

Waste is waste. That 1% is still more money than I’ll ever see. It might be more money than most of the people in the United States will ever see.

That it’s only 1% isn’t the point. The point is what that 1% is being spent on. An alternate point is, “If we see this here, what will we find elsewhere in the miasma we call our government?”

The best thing we could have happening to our government right now, in my opinion, is to have successful businessmen looking at government, not as a black hole of poor investment, but instead looking at it like a failing business that they’re trying to save.

I say that as a preamble to the point I want to try to make.

I don’t understand the logic of trivializing money spent, or money earned.

Let me provide a couple of anecdotes from the opposite perspective. A perspective of companies trying to make a profit.

I once worked for a company that sold software. The software, drove process controls in devices and could easily be integrated into a company’s machines via a pretty clever API. 

The company’s software was in a ton of other manufactures machines. It saved the manufactures time having to write basic control software and allowed them to concentrate on feature differentiation.

The company I worked for sold licenses to use their software. Part of the licensing structure was for updates, modifications, and integration assistance.

One of my friends worked in the Sales department. One day he came to my cubicle really despondent.

He’d been working for weeks on several deals only to have those deals rejected by the ‘powers that be’ because they weren’t big enough. Meaning the individual deals weren’t in the millions of dollars range.

I can understand that philosophy if the smaller deals were going to require a lot of hand holding or customization. But that wasn’t the case. The other companies were looking for just the base software and they were going to handle the integration into their product on their own. They were looking for a jumpstart to get their products to market.

The powers that be, rejected 6, trouble free 1/2 million to 3/4 million dollar sales because they wanted nothing less than million dollar sales.

Neither of us understood the logic. Money is money.

The Company, like so many other I’ve worked for, no longer exists. 

Turns out bad management destroys even the best company. In this particular company’s case their refusal to do smaller contracts opened a door for their competitors to bring their products to market and capitalize on the perception that my company was “Too Elitist”. My colleague and I were long gone by the time everything imploded.

I’ve watched more than my fair share of companies and their dynamite products go down the tubes through bad management, arrogance, and greed.

I worked for another startup company whose CEO said in a meeting, “If smaller investors don’t understand our name change then we don’t need their money. Larger investors will understand and support us.” 

A couple of colleagues & I walked out of that meeting, looked at each other, chuckled, then polished up our resumes. The company was gone 8 months later.

The point of these anecdotes is:

When people trivialize even small amounts of money, (Or waste,) it seems to open the door to foolish decisions, or more waste.

In the case of companies, they lose access to operating capital and sometimes that’s enough to starve a company to death. With companies, they may get a reputation for being difficult to deal with, or slow, and that drives away potential future customers.

In the case of the government, trivializing amounts makes it more likely that smaller amounts of waste will be overlooked as “the cost of doing business”.

For example: If I’d known USAID was so wasteful, I’d have applied for an 80K grant renewing yearly to study frogs in drought affected areas of the mountains where I live. (There aren’t any frogs here.)

It’s a little bit of money, less than .000000000001% of the national budget. Regardless, it would still be a waste, and I’d be living pretty well on the government dime.

If NBC or CNN reported on me doing research on non-existent frogs swindling the government out of 80K a year, most people would be outraged.

Yet this is exactly what a lot of government apologists appear to want to sweep under the carpet and ignore. 1%, 5%, 10% of the national budget?

It’s just a little waste…

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A guy walks into a bar…

London cozy bar.Yesterday, I was bored. Not really bored but I had an appointment in Palm Springs. 

I could have done the appointment via teleconference. As I was thinking about it, I realized I hadn’t been anywhere except the grocery store, pet store, or postoffice for months.

I’ve grown tired of people and tired of the stupid stuff people do. Without interacting with the world, you start to loose touch. 

Depending on your inputs about the world and the people in it, you might even take on very negative views and start to insulate yourself because that is safe and comfortable, versus having to have your guard up all the time. Probably continuing to insulate like that isn’t healthy.

So I saddled up and drove out to Palm Springs. Yes, I know gas is $5 in California. But the tank of gas in the car was from October, so I needed to burn through some of it and give the car a run.

Traffic was lighter than expected. I chuckled when I had the thought, “I guess the deportations are working.“

I got to my appointment early and spent the extra time walking around, watching tourists, and wondering why the drive out hadn’t been “Fun”.

The road was open, under normal circumstances that would have put a smile on my face because I’d have been opening up the beast, flushing all the accumulated debris from short drives and stop & go traffic out the tailpipe.

But oddly there was no joy in the exercise. That was confusing.

Appointment done, I found something to eat, ran a couple of errands, got my hair cut, looked at the heavy congestion on the traffic maps heading back up to my place, and found myself a bar.

The bar is owned by a bar tender who used to introduce me to a different bourbon each time I went to the bar he worked at. I met him in 2016 maybe 2017. Super nice guy, funny, and made you feel welcome even if the place was packed. 

At some point he & I had chatted about careers, and other stuff, & I’d learned that his goal was to own his own bar.

Sometime between the onset of the COVID lockdowns and now, he’d achieved his goal.

The bar is cozy, eclectic, and old school. There’s no “Soda Gun”, all the drinks are made old style with a flourish and each one is a work of art. It was neat seeing a drink crafted before my eyes that looked just like the pictures in books. 

While I was there a group of 4 guys came in. After they’d gotten their drinks they started talking about the Democrat Party “rising again” they didn’t put it that way but that was how it sounded.

They were still in love with Kamala, they felt that Newsom was too slick and came across as untrustworthy.  

They were also betting that Kamala would be a shoo in for the presidential nomination in 2028. They were talking about how she could easily take Trump down in a debate and were talking mostly as if Trump would be running in 2028.

Later they posited that Trump could put Eric or Don Jr into the Whitehouse then be their puppet master.

I’m not sure where this kind of derangement comes from.

Trump is done! This is his last term. I don’t know if Eric or Don Jr. have any political aspirations and wouldn’t be at all surprised to find they didn’t. After what’s been done to their father, them, and their families why the fuck would they want to go into politics?

I’m betting that after Donald Trump Sr. is done, the Trump family will return to media. Don Jr. has a pretty going concern in his podcasting. Eric seems pretty content running the family business. I expect that Eric will sell all the properties in New York as it’s possible to do so, then move the Trump empire out of that state.

The long term damage that would cause to New York would be a fitting punishment for the law fare the state of New York engaged in.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I was overhearing the political conversation, that these Democrats to my right were missing the target. The one to watch is JD Vance.

He’s young, he’s wicked smart, he’s sarcastic, and witty. He’s the perfect candidate to keep the young people who voted Trump into office this time, voting for the Republican Party. Age wise, he’s perfectly positioned to attract Gen X, millennials, boomers, the other age brackets, and keep them. Because he’s experienced their issues, insecurities, and lived through their concerns.

Kamala Harris would be out classed, out gunned, and out performed in a debate with JD. 

That being said I hope Democrats do run Kamala again. Because if that’s the best they’ve got, their party is dead meat.

I didn’t interject myself in the conversation but I haven’t got any kind of poker face. I’m sure my facial expressions were a dead give away that I was overhearing their conversation and that I was probably “The Enemy”.

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He’s been right about a lot, wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right about this.

President Trump.Trump said he’s going to be weeding out illegal immigrants from the Social Security system.

Since then, X has been alive with people telling us very seriously that Illegals can’t get Social Security benefits. Then acting like Trump is dumb or crazy or whatever.

Hmmm. Really? So if one of these folks is using a stolen SSN to work, you think that somehow they’re not going to use that SSN to do other things? Apply for credit cards perhaps? Mortgage loans? Bank Accounts?

Really? Nobody is that naive.

The other half had his identity stolen on a couple of occasions. Once, it was just a couple of debit card numbers, but the other time it was his whole credit history. He wasn’t aware there was a problem until he tried to get a loan for an instrument, then he found out that there was someone else running around using his social security number.

How ever did this bad person get the other half’s SSN? Oh that was due either to a medical insurance company breach, or a doctor’s office closing. We later found out that all the medical records had simply been dumped in the dumpster out behind the office.

It didn’t matter. It cost us a lot of time and money to get everything sorted out. 

If someone has your SSN, name, and date of birth, they could possibly start collecting on Social Security too.

That’s called stealing you know. Not that any of the liberals care about little things like stealing, or crime in general.

Unless it disturbs them.

When drugs come to the rentals in their neighborhoods, or an HOA socialite is mugged for her earrings in a common area.

Then liberals who previously wanted to defund the fascist police, while being kind to the poor immigrants seeking a better life, will hire a mercenary goon squad to patrol and harass everyone walking through a neighborhood.

We know that a lot of those liberals manage to look the other way, & pay under the table dirt cheap wages to illegals too. Liberals don’t seem to understand that paying someone 10 cents an hour is essentially slavery. Say that out loud to a liberal and they’ll lose their shit.

I’ve long been annoyed that everything is tied to a SSN. Credit applications, Tax filing, Mortgages, Car Loans, Medical records, Insurance, and God knows what else. 

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

Back at the dawn of time when I got my SS card, the accompanying paperwork said specifically that this number wasn’t to be used as ID.

Yet that’s exactly what it’s been used for. Lots of people forget that SSN is an account number, to your forced contributions to a retirement savings account, that doesn’t pay a particularly good interest rate.

At this point we might as well use the number as our phone number, drivers license, and car plate number. Everyone knows our account numbers.

I’d bet we’ve all received at least 10 notices of security breaches where our name, address, SSN, and phone number has been dumped out on the internet for sale.

I’ve been informed that my personal data was leaked by the Office of Personnel Management of the United States government. You know what they said? Too bad, so sad, perhaps you should invest in a credit counseling service.

At least corporations provided credit monitoring services for a few years!

Given all of this.

Is it that far a stretch to entertain that some number of illegal immigrants might be getting social security payments they’re not entitled to?

Illegal Immigrants, as Tom Homan said, are all criminals. He’s right, and I fell out of my chair when he said it directly to someone questioning him about deportations.

Until I heard him say it, I thought I was some kind of idiot that just didn’t understand the issue.

The moment a person crosses our border without permission, or overstays their Visa, they are, by definition, a criminal because they committed a criminal act. If they’re willing to start out committing a crime, what’s to stop them from stealing someone’s identity?

Liberals would justify even that, as okay (as long as it wasn’t their identity,) because the poor illegal is just trying to work and feed their family and they needed a SSN to work. Or retire.

Here’s something few people ever find out.

If you claim unemployment benefits, or assistance for medical costs, or disability payments, all of which are tired to your SSN. The state sends you a 1099 form. 

YES! Boys and Girls, you have to pay Federal taxes on that “Income” If you’re in a state with income tax, you get to pay them too.

So some illegal running around with your SSN can do a whole lot of damage, before they even begin to fuck you out of your tiny assed social security check.

All of this is to say, it’s very possible that some 87 year old grannie, or someone who’s contacting the Social Security office on Monday morning ready to retire, may find out they’ve got nothing because someone else got there before they did.

Trump saying that he’s ordering it to be looked into is a good thing. Even if they find nothing, at least the American People can have faith in the Social Security Administration. 

If an audit does find fraud, then booting the fraudsters out of the system means people who deserve the funds will likely get them, and perhaps Social Security will last a bit longer.

I question the Democrats screaming about Doge looking into Social Security.

We know over the years, both the Democrats and Republicans have raided SS funds. We the People assume that the money has been paid back. What if it hasn’t? Worse yet, would be finding that money is still being siphoned off for stupid projects like those at USAID.

I’ll tell you what. If all the retirees eating tuna, cutting their medications in half, and paying taxes on their SS income were to find out they’d been spending a billion a year for something like “Condoms for Convents”, or half a billion on “Feed a Jihadi for Jesus”…

The old folks (myself included) would tear down the Capitol and smash every stone to dust with their walkers & canes.

I envision exchanges like this between the Capitol police and the old folks;

“Yeah sonny, that’s a pretty badge, so what? I’m on my last legs here, I’ll be dead in 6 months from cancer. I can’t feel anything on my left side… This here is a kamikaze run for me! Tear gas? That’s all ya got? I’ve been smoking Lucky’s for 65 years! I could huff that canister & chase it with straight bourbon! So bring it, ya pussy!”

(Thanks to Grok for generating the image.)

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I admit it, I hate looking for a job, and have come to hate editing my resume.

Employment signs.I miss the days of simply having a resume that represented my work history.

Back in the day, because of my industry a resume could be cut & dried. We didn’t need to jazz it up or modify it for each application. We chiseled our history into a document that didn’t change.

We’d write a cover letter explaining that we’re appreciate the opportunity to interview and we’d interview with the hiring manager, not a committee of people from unrelated departments.

I’ve never understood the philosophy of Edna from accounting participating in an interview for a dude who was going to be slinging solder in the board repair department.

Unfortunately, the hiring process, over time, became more like a sorority rush, or the election of prom king & queen. Or perhaps more like the example provided recently by congressional confirmation hearings.

I’ve been in interviews where the hiring manager didn’t actually get to ask relevant questions or the answers “Timed-out” because the other unrelated departments needed to ask their irrelevant questions.

Point of interest… the troubleshooting procedure for a $50,000 high speed dye sublimation printer is radically different from changing toner in your desktop laser printer.

That troubleshooting procedure is not something that can be described in 5 minutes. However, to a hiring manager, the description of that process can tell him if the candidate has done the work and is qualified to do the job.

As a hiring manager, I’ve been overruled when requesting a small number of interviewers. HR’s explanation is, “Larger, more dynamic interview processes allow for determination of the candidates ‘team player’ abilities.” Trouble is, most of the people in my field are introverts. Many are just one step shy of being hermits. The really qualified, super smart, radically capable folks in my field are great in one on one, or one on three interviews. But put them in front of a crowd of 6 or 8 people asking them irrelevant questions and they freeze completely.

Not that HR departments ever listened to a hiring manager’s reason for keeping the interview small.

I digress. 

Several years ago, I’d been laid off, I was struggling with my resume, not because it didn’t represent me and my work. But because it wasn’t “Hip & Modern”. It wasn’t getting the attention it used to get because the HR departments dumped it into a database. The hiring manager didn’t see my resume unless someone in HR thought it was worthy.

It used to be, you mailed your resume directly to the hiring manager & they handed their selections to HR to schedule an interview. Way back in time, the hiring manager was on your phone themselves asking when you could come in for an interview.

Anyway, my resume was tailored to answer a hiring manager’s initial curiosity and provided enough technical data to peek interest.

That wasn’t working anymore. HR saw information that they couldn’t make heads or tails out of, and didn’t have the ability to do anything but robotic searches for keywords.

I’ve related the state of HR pre-screens.

HR: Do you know networking?
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know IP?
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know Ethernet
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know MAC address?
ME: Yes
HR: Do you know packet?
ME: Yes

All of those questions are encompassed by the answer, “Yes” to the first networking question.

A full and complete answer which doesn’t allow them to fill in check boxes is this, “I’ve been in the industry since RS-232 terminal connections were MUXed at 9600 baud to Super Mini computers like the Nova 1200 series.

I’ve worked with both token ring and the common star networking topology in use today. I’m certified in the operation of several network sniffing tools and therefore am familiar with the OSI networking model.

Now can we please move the fuck on?

That doesn’t work if you want an interview. Just so you know.

After talking with several people about my resume, I decided to get “Professional” help with a rewrite.

I was not pleased and didn’t get my money’s worth. This professional made my resume a word salad of meaningless drivel worthy of Kamala Harris.

I hated it, and guess what? As an experiment I submitted it to a couple of job application requests and got LESS response than using my old monolithic resume.

However, seeing what this professional had done, I tried to hybridize, incorporating some elements from the so called “professional”. It hasn’t helped.

I’ve also noticed that the resume rewriting services aren’t being pushed on LinkedIn as they were in 2019 – 2021. I’m guessing that enough people expressed their dis-satisfaction that LinkedIn decided it was a bad business model.

Since I’m actively looking for a job again I’ve been re-evaluating my resume. I’m not even pleased with the hybridization. There are too many strained sentences that fail to make the point. It looks like hyperbole and oversell. It feels like I’m telling lies.

I guess that’s the bottom line. It feels like the only way to get ahead, or in this case, just to get a freaking job is to dishonor myself by being what I am not.

It comes down to how much am I willing to give up in order to retain my honor?

Why can’t I just be who I am? Why can’t I apply for a job, without having to retool my resume again and again to highlight skills for each particular position? What does this do to my resumes already floating around out there? Are those the lies, or is this new one I’m sending, the lie?

I left management instead of continuing to slug my way up the corporate ladder. Apparently that was a no no. It always creates questions and my truthful answer many people take as a lie. 

I didn’t like what management at my level was becoming, and I didn’t want the whole corporate thing. I just wanted to do my job, then go home at the end of the day. I didn’t want to be on call 24/7 or deal with employees calling out sick then giving me excuses and having to sit in judgement. I just wanted to sit at my desk, produce good results, and be at peace.

To HR, this appears to have been a demotion, a failure in my ability. For them, the mad scramble to ascend to the heights of corporate infrastructure is the only measure of success.

For me, success was sleeping in my own bed at night, next to the person I loved, having enough money to pay the bills, and to not remember or care about the political machinations going on at work.

I truly wanted all the Machiavellian shit to be well above my pay grade.

HR and in some cases hiring managers don’t get it.

I’m no threat to anyone’s career because I’m not interested in politics. A lot of older hiring managers get it. But the gatekeepers in HR who, to be honest, are mostly female can’t process that way of thinking. 

They view everything as a means to an end. They’re always processing through the lens of breaking the glass ceiling. In that mode of thinking there is never an equilibrium between satisfaction and income.

The other thing that is really weird about job searching these days is that some recruiters only want the last 10 years, others want your full job history. The former say 10 years is good enough and demonstrative of your most recent experience. They’ll also say that no-one is going to read a long resume.

The latter say, having your whole job history is valuable and that interested hiring managers will read it all.

I’m not sure which is the right answer. Honestly I’m not sure that anyone really has the “Right” answer. I have come to realize that most people have zero respect for experience. 

I used to resent that. Now I look at it as a function of their education. The 20 to 30 year olds (myself included when I was that age,) always think they know best. When I was in school I was taught the value of history and on my first jobs I learned that experience often trumped book knowledge.

The elder mentors I was so fortunate to have in my career would say things like, “You can do it that way, which is by the book, and it’s gonna take 4 hours to assemble and disassemble. OR we can unbolt the unit, turn it on its side and access the broken part through an assembly access panel on the bottom. We’ll be done in an hour and can go have lunch. Your choice sport.”

I think a lot of the 20 & 30 year olds these days don’t have plain spoken mentors. They might not be getting the benefit of a mentor because there’s a lot of fear about thinking outside the box, so to speak. Someone is always going to raise a stink if you don’t do everything by the book. These days, the stink raisers can really fuck up a situation, and they manage to drag everyone down to their very limited view of any situation.

I guess that’s why I’m reworking my resume yet again. It’s why we have committee interviews that only muddy the waters about every candidate. It’s possibly why interviews these days feel like “The Dating Game” or Prom elections.

Oh well, back to the resume…

P.S.

If you’re looking for a worker that’s happy to do his job, show up for work every day, be trouble free, non political, and no threat to your position. Send me a message. If you’ve got a remote position available, let’s talk because if I don’t have to drive anywhere or deal with people, I’d work pretty damn cheap.