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the clinton library is opening right now, as i type. i listened to speeches by various people: average citizens who had been affected by clinton’s policies, former presidents carter and h.w. bush, prez w. bush, and hillary clinton. hearing about clinton’s effect on people made me cry in the car on the way to work. i am truly sappy in my creaking old age. the difference between clinton and bush is so vast that it is heartbreaking. carter’s speech was extremely moving in its respect and obvious affection for clinton. i have to say that the senior bush gave a really gracious speech, really giving clinton his due in a very personal way, even though i’m sure they hate each other. the little bush gave what i thought was a very bland speech with all the required platituded but nothing more. and i’m 100% positive that my views on the speeches are biased, so don’t take my word for it. 😀
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last night, i read more comments in the blogs of ex-EA employees. it makes me truly fear for seppo and his sanity. it also made me grateful for my workplace. the scheduling has been really reasonable, moreso than anywhere else i have ever worked. during crunch time, i put in maybe 1 or 2 extra hours per day for maybe two weeks, with one weekend day and one comped holiday, which was really on a volunteer basis. the rest of the time, i am completely shielded from the pressures of other departments and the manager fight hard to make sure we are protected and not overworked, as well as feel personally appreciated on a daily basis. the managers have lives and focus on their families, which is wonderful. it’s a place i’d like to stay for a while to come.
hello novel
i figure that the novel writing venture that i will embark on will not be the pursuit of the Great American Novel ™; rather, it will be the “Hello World” of novel writing for me: i will learn the technical details of novel writing, including such details as setting up dialogue, character biographies, maintaining consistency of location and position of the characters in a scene, and other such mundane details.
framing it in such terms allows me the freedom to learn these basic things and write for volume without worrying (too much) about the quality of my prose and plot. “Hello World” is not about producing shockingly insightful ways to say “Hello World”. it’s about taking a basic, mundane, uninteresting functionality and implementing it. as such, i have decided to implement a very well known, basic, formulaic plot, which would go a long way to guaranteeing that i will see this task through, as i would not have to worry about what needs to happen next in any given scene. given my reading habits, it is clear that this plot will have to be the very typical historical romance, with no frills.
last month, when i cheated and wrote a few pages for this project, i started writing about me and seppo. the story was fictionalized and the characters had different names, but i figured it would be easiest not to have to come up with characters and their voices by going with knowns. in the first scene, i accidentally injure and hospitalize seppo. heh. i think i might take that somewhere in the future, but for now, i will be working on a very cookie-cutter story which will purposely be built to lack in originality. 😀 way to set the low bar. i’m pretty excited about it though.
but i regress
i am listening to Chicago’s “I Don’t Want To Live Without Your Love”. shortly before that, i listened to New Kids On The Block’s “I’ll Be Loving You”, and Skid Row’s “18 and Life”. i could still pick out Donnie Wahlberg’s lines. bwahahah. needless to say, i just threw some bucks down for a trip down memory lane.
yeah, i know the songs are not good and have no real lasting quality. but listening to them still makes me as giddy as a twelve year old, which is when i first heard all these songs. i don’t know why i enjoyed these songs. probably because they were popular and for no other reason, as my musical tastes had not yet been developed. yet, i still enjoy them, and there is no other music (or anything else, for that matter) that can evoke such a sense of how i was at that age. when i play this music, i can remember when i couldn’t see beyond high school, when i believed in the innate goodness of people, when i drew little hearts all over my notebooks, when little curlicues were a must in my writing, when friends made each other mix tapes, when it was important to get my jeans cuffed just right, when the best thing in the world was seeing that guy at his locker between classes and when the worst thing in the world was not being allowed to stay 5 minutes longer on the phone.
heh, i have a selective memory. that certainly was not the worst thing in the world at the time.
it’s so hard to say i’m sorry
we’ve said, “sorry, everybody” and you guys responded, “apologies accepted“. awww. let’s have a group hug, world.
so f*ing angry!!!!!!
Senate Bill 88 and what it could mean to you. mind you, this was passed and enacted in 2000.
what it means to you, if you are in the computer industry and making less than the equivalent of $41/hour, then you are NOT an exempt employee. see, exempt employees are exempt from being paid overtime anytime they work over 40 hours per week. see, most software engineers i know work more than 40 hours/week. but most software engineers i know make more than $41/hour, which is roughly $81,000-85,000 per year, depending on how much time off you get.
see, until june of 2004, i was not an exempt employee, except i never knew that. i never knew that i was entitled to overtime pay. if i play a really conservative game, i would say that i worked, on average, 1 extra hour a day. like i said, it’s a really conservative game i’m playing. for the year 2000, i believe i am owed $14,625. for the year 2001-2004, i am owed $15,234 PER YEAR. this brings me to wages earned, but not paid, over four years of $60,327, IF i only worked one extra hour a day, on average.
i am so, so, SO mad. it’s not like i didn’t know they were underpaying me. but it’s different to know that i actually legally already worked and earned a certain amount, but was robbed of it.
eta: that “$41/hour” rate is adjusted every october 1st, and goes into effect the following january 1st. the new rate starting on january 1, 2004, was $44.63. my estimates above are based on the lower rate. also, if you work over 12 hours in one day, you are supposed to get paid two times your regular rate. there were at least a few times i worked between 16 hours and 20 hours a day. that means that there were days when my day’s pay should have exceeded $1000. haha. i laugh. i laugh bitterly. when i’m worrying about my mom’s health care and paying for my little brother’s college, i will be even more angry than i am now.
email blogging
it’s easier to disguise blogging when you do it via an email interface, so i am taking advantage of blogger’s email blog setting. let’s see if this works.
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life has been pretty good lately. things are going well with seppo. the dog is calming down, slowly but surely. i am developing a skeleton of an idea for the novel, which i have shamefully put off until december. i do have some worries, of course, mainly having to do with finances. i have to get a repair on my car because the half-shaft boot which keeps it protected and free from rain and road grit has cracked. i have to renew my registration, which involves getting smogged. i have to renew my insurance. i have to renew my AAA membership. i have to send my mom some money because of some wood repair and treatment we are doing on the house. i should send my dad some money before Christmas so he has time and money to buy some stuff. i am somewhat worried about the scope of my project and that i’m not fully on top of every detail yet, with time slipping by oh-so-quickly. still, i’m happy overall.
i sometimes wonder if it’s a blessing or a curse that i appear to have no ambition. mostly, i am happy and thankful for who i am, because it lets me lead a fulfilled life. but i sometimes wonder if i shouldn’t be doing more, being more. and i also wonder if that’s just an ego problem.
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eta: it looks like email blogging adds line breaks, so i had to go back and manually delete them. boo.
the moral disconnect
i know that it’s not that simple for most people, and that many people don’t understand the full repurcussions of what they are voting for, but i thought it captured the idea pretty nicely.
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sometimes, i wonder if people are just naïve… perhaps the average person does not understand what the role of the president is? i don’t mean to excuse people who don’t understand; i just want to first try to figure out what is going on with them. i remember that as a child, i thought of the president as sort of a king that gets to have that position via a popularity contest, like you had the be the “best person” or “most well-liked person” to be prez, then you’d rule over your kingdom. and at a slightly later part of my childhood, i thought the president was the representative of your country to the world, but i didn’t give a thought to the actual practical governing aspects of things. i wonder if there is a significant bulk of people who vote in this country that believes that (1) the president is just your country’s spokesmodel; (2) that bush is a “good person”; and (3) that they want a “good person” to represent us. i have no idea. i mean (1) is sheer ignorance in the literal sense, (2) is due to either reception of purposeful misinformation or perhaps some sort of a cognitive dissonance due to preconceived notions of the man, and (3) is… actually kind of child-like and sweet, except that this isn’t the president of your grade school classroom, and (1) & (2) are so totally wrong!
hrm. i’m going to say that there can’t be that many people that fell under this umbrella. i was just trying to figure out a way to preserve my ideological belief that in general people aren’t inherently evil and aren’t voting to oppress others, but perhaps it is i that is suffering from cognitive dissonance, as there seems to be plenty of evidence to the contrary. that makes me very sad.
taxing interest, waning weight
another book i’m interested in getting from amazon is Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else by David Cay Johnston. i heard him talk on air america radio this morning.
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i think i’m losing some fat! and i think it has to do with seppo’s wonderful, home-cooked meals. mmmmm mmmmm good. man, going home is so great when you have a great guy with tasty food and a crazy cute dog to greet you. 🙂 yay! i love seppo’s vacation more than he loves it, i think. last night, he made fried chicken and sweet potatoes. man oh man was it great. tonight, i think he’s going for ribs. *drool*
tax lies spiraling to random mumblings
ugh. when i contemplate the lies that go behind the perpetuation of the idea that a flat tax rate is the “fair” thing to do, it makes me ill. it assumes that there is no minimum cost of living. it assumes that people aren’t abusing tax shelters. it assumes that the earnings from investments should be taxed the same way as earning from a job. it assumes that people will always be stuck in the same economic bracket, that people are permanently tied to their “class”, with the poor always benefitting and the rich always paying for the poor, which is completely backwards of the real situation.
the other day, i did a quick calculation to see how much i can save in taxes if i put away $13K a year into something legit, like 401(k), and not even some bogus tax shelter. i save almost 14% on the taxes i *should* pay on my full wages, according to a flat tax rate calculation. yet, if a person makes $13K a year, they must pay taxes on all of it, as they clearly won’t have enough to put away into a tax-deductable account, on top of barely making ends meet. that means that if you have money, you can have even more money for no additional work. wow, flat taxes seem really fair, don’t they. $13K a year is what they would make if they earned roughly $6.50 an hour. that’s higher than the national minimum wage. could you pay rent at the crappiest place with that money?
as a person in a pretty damn high tax bracket, i am completely willing and able to pay my full taxes and be happy about the fact and not be an ass about how the government is taking my money. well, maybe not for this administration, as they are clearly masters of squandering the nation’s hard earned money. but the general point is that i feel like i was able to get to where i am and become a highly functional contributing member of society because of the “breaks” given to me. so i’m paying back society for that now. taxes are part and parcel of the bigger picture where we try to move forward as a society. we can’t pay for useful programs without resources.
because my family was poor, even though my parents worked like dogs, i got free school lunches. because my family was poor, i got grants and low-interest school loans. because my family was poor and i worked hard, i got a small scholarship during high school to help pay for bus tokens. growing up, it was deeply and painfully embarrassing to get called up to get my lunch tickets because it branded me as poor. people used to make fun of me and say that i picked my clothes out of the garbage, which stung because a lot of the clothes we wore were in fact donations.
i know how important it is to give people a chance. just because someone is poor and from a bad neighborhood and maybe doesn’t talk quite right, whether it’s a foreign accent with broken english, or ghetto-ized slang, or a red-neck accent, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to make something of themselves. it doesn’t mean they should be dismissed as ignorant and backwards. and it doesn’t mean that they are just sucking on the nation’s wealth with no ability or willingness to pay it back.
there are at least two potential ways they can go: they can be minimum wage earners (or less) all their lives and never make anything of themselves and make a minimal contribution to the nation’s wealth/economy, or they can get some financial breaks to go to school and become a part of the middle or upper economic class, contributing more to the nation in terms of money and a political voice, providing well for the forward progress of the next generation. it’s an extreme oversimplification of the situation, but that is the divide i see between myself and some people i went to grade school with. it is the divide i see between me and some of my family members.
a flat tax rate means that if the total money brought in by taxes is not enough, then taxes have to be raised for everyone, which hurts the poorest the most in an immediate sense. a person of means, or even a person of no means, may think this is fair because they are paying the same relative amounts. again, i assert that this mentality might make sense if you assume that the poor and rich are different people, but not if you think of them as different phases of the same people’s lives, with upward mobility. it’s only when you rule out upward mobility that it could seem fair.
i think it’s fairer for me to have gotten tax (and other) breaks for a few years while i was struggling, so that i can move on to a more stable economic class and more than make up for it with decades of hard-work. does that seem unfair? it is, in essence, a loan i took against my future. and i am giving back with ample interest. and i’m happy about it, because without that, i wouldn’t ever be where i am.
i protest that i am just a thinking person and not an economist, and admit that i’m definitely dealing on a microeconomic scale with no sense of a macro impact. but i see the way america worked for me, and i see how it might be able to work for others, if only given the chance or hope for chance.
eta: the other thing is that if a well-off person says, “i never borrowed from the county, so why should i always be paying for it?” here is some news for you: if you’ve always been wealthy, you didn’t earn it*, so stop grumbling about your “hard work”.
* by “it”, i mean the base wealth difference between you and a truly poor person when you started out in life.
red versus blue
when people show you this map of the states:
refer them to this map instead:
As described in this page:
The cartogram was made using the diffusion method of Gastner and Newman, which is described in detail in this article. Population data were taken from the 2000 US Census. Iowa and New Mexico, which at the time of writing were officially undeclared, we have assumed to have a Republican majority — all indications are that this will be the final declaration once recounts are complete.
[snip]
The answer seems to be that the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are a lot of counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican. One possible way to allow for this, suggested by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University, is to use not just two colors on the map, red and blue, but instead to use red, blue, and shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters.