I’m thoroughly enjoying Lights, a new-to-me artist. The post-apocalyptic look of “Banner” has nothing to do with it.
I’m cranking the tunes this weekend while cleaning the house. Turn your bass to eleven and enjoy!
Obligatory dubstep. But it’s good — really!
I mean, really, what is wrong with me?
When we last left my PoliSci 202 course, I had gotten into it over Affirmative Action and the use of agitprop in the class with the professor and then was popped by the PC police for “attacking the messenger” in the forums when I gently pointed out some hyperbole being used by one of my fellow students when she pulled numbers out of her ass to try and push her side over the top in an argument.
So this week we’re talking about the bureaucracy of the federal government and Budget and Monetary policy, including the Fed. In one of the additional reading handouts for the class, the professor misstated a couple of things. And being a curmudgen-in-good-standing, I could not stop myself from correcting him.
He pulls some quotes out of some collectivist claptrap of a book titled “The Spirit Level”, stating that the Top 10% of Americans earn 70% of all income and the Top 20% earn 80% of all income.
That’s bullshit and everybody here knows that. But the still-in-high-school and those freshly out who are also taking this class don’t. So I call him on it. Very gently. Simply asking if he can double check those figures because all the info I can find says something different. I included this link in my post.
For those too busy to click, the numbers break down like this:
The Top 10% earn 46.44% of all income in the country but pay 70% of the taxes.
The Top 25% earn 67.52%Â and pay almost 86% of all the taxes.
I even suggested that maybe he had accidentally transposed the percentage of taxes paid into the percentage of money earned.
And in order to cover my ass fully, asked my fellow students if, after reading the above numbers (and reminding them that a married couple with college degrees working in Washington State, something they will most likely be someday if they are successful in their collegiate endeavors, would put them squarely into the top 10% of income earners) do they think a Progressive Tax Rate is the most fair.
No takers as of yet, but they have until Sunday to reply.
Why is college level PoliSci feeling more and more like arguing with the bottom feeders at the Daily Kos?
Alternate title: Why Les Schwab is the best.
This is the ongoing saga of upgrading the axles on Buddy the Jeep so that they’ll take more abuse/last longer than the factory items.
A couple weeks ago, while Buddy was having his oil and filter changed, I noticed that that the left real seal was leaking. Again.
After cussing under my breath for a bit, I decide that I’m just going to have “someone else” do this and head on down to the guys at my local Les Schwab. They quoted me $110, for parts and labor and up in the air he went.
The tech gets the cover and guard off the back of the pumpkin and thinks to himself: “Self, there is supposed to be a bolt holding in the axle shaft retaining pin, but I don’t see it. It must be broken.”
He comes and gets me and sure enough, there is no bolt head sticking out where he says there is a supposed to be one. He lets me know that they do not have the equipment to get a broken bolt out at the angle this one resides and tells me of a shop down the street that does. He also zeroes out my invoice, so this new info costs me nothing. Which is nice because the shop down the street tells me it’ll be a couple hours at $87 and hour to work on it.
I OK the work and they put Buddy up in the air again to get the broken bolt out. Except that there is no bolt in there at all. Apparently, Dana-Spicer decided at some point that the axle shaft retaining pin bolts were breaking off too frequently in their 44 Series axles and that a roll pin would be sufficient for the job.
So they put a new roll pin into the the differential, put the cover and guard back on, fill it up with 90W and charge me $98.98 for this new info. I was quite unhappy with Schwab at this point. More miffed than pissed, but still unhappy. So I decide that heading back down to Les Schwab, very calmly, mind you, would not be the worst idea I’ve had this week.
I park, walk in and up to the counter and am asked if I can be helped. I very politely ask to speak to the manager. I am directed down to the end of a hallway to an office with an open door where he is sitting, on the phone, on hold. He recognizes me from being in earlier and asks what he can do for me. I relay the above story, very calmly, stating that I’m not sure why I feel the need to tell him all of this except that maybe his techs need to investigate a little when they’ve got a differential torn open or their manuals need to be updated or something.
His response…..
“Do you have the receipt handy? I’ll cover that.”
Yes. He covered my bill from another shop because his techs were incurious.
If you have wheel/tire or any of your equipment on your vehicles four corners needs inspection/replacement/repair, you’ll never go wrong with these guys.
Customer for life, right here.
David has a Les Schwab story from last year’s Boomershoot that you should hear about that either he hasn’t posted or I can’t find. Feel free to leave your Schwab Tales in the comments.
I’m watching SNL from 1990, & the Weekend Updates sound remarkably like the news today (just with smaller dollar amounts).
Wild boar and elk sausage, grilled over an open fire at Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz last Sunday.
It was my daughter’s birthday celebration, which meant plenty of music.
I had brought a pickup-bed-full of redwood and we just kept burning. It rained off and on as afternoon turned to evening. It ended up a very peaceful and clear night as we outlasted the clouds and partiers and had the beach to ourselves and the thundering surf.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
It’s dying.
I’ve been mostly absent from RNS for the last several months as I worked on a multistate* deal for my employers to purchase a decent-sized package of national-brand fast-food restaurant franchises, a deal that fell through this week because the numbers got so bad so fast. So yes, I’ll be blogging more, but my eyes have been opened, big time.
Get this: these deals are usually priced in multiples of EBITDA, that is, the earnings before interest, taxes, amortization and depreciation. For non-accountants like me, all that matters is that annual EBITDAÂ for this package at the time the sale contract was signed four months ago was roughly $X, so a sale price of 3 times EBITDA (a steal, BTW) would be $3X. Following?
So what happened while we were doing all the due diligence, licensing, and other legal crap to actually complete the sale? Well, in the last three months of 2011, yes food costs rose, but more importantly sales plummeted. I am not going to quote numbers because I can’t, but I can say the combination dropped annual EBITDA to roughly $.6X. That means that sale price of $3X was transformed to more than 5 times EBITDA, taking this from a really good deal to being some of the most overpriced restaurants in the country.
That also means much more than just “oh one year was 40% worse than the other.” It means that just this past quarter alone was SO bad that it caused that kind of drop to the annual figure for this package of stores.
Anybody afraid that Obama’s going to skate to reelection on “improving” economic numbers is deluding themselves. Wake up, folks.
* Not one of these restaurants was in California, either. For one thing, the vast majority of national class-action suits against these chains are always based in Cali, and I wouldn’t allow my employers to ever buy a restaurant in this state because of that alone.
As previously mentioned, the weekly assignments in the PoliSci 202 course I’m currently taking is to pick one editorial and one news story, both from daily newspapers, both on the topic of national politics, and break each of them down. The information is then entered into the forum and each student has to comment on three other student’s choices.
Last week, one of my fellow students chose a story on Obamacare’s stepping on the toes of church groups in regards to contraception, taking the side of the government. One of the “facts” that she used in her description of the editorial was that “millions of American women will be denied their reproductive health care rights” if Obama caved in to the pressure from church groups. This figure was mentioned nowhere in the editorial, so she pulled out of the ether somewhere.
I made an objection. Not a huge one. I made no mention that there are no such thing as “reproductive health care rights” and that no one is denying them reproductive health care. Just like if I wanted to work somewhere that is union but don’t want to join the union, then I have to work somewhere else if my state is not a right-to-work state, if a woman wants to have her health insurance covered by her employer, working for a church may be the wrong choice for her.
No. Instead, I stated that the “millions of American women” phrase was hyperbole, because there are only tens of thousands of women who work for churches, but not “millions”.
I was immediately set up by her for “attacking the messenger”, something explicitly prohibited in the forum rules. She didn’t even attempt to say that maybe she had been misinformed or that she had some sort of evidence to prove her numbers.
Nope, I was the bad guy. I was attempting to bully her.
I have been contacted by the professor and warned to be careful in the future forums.
I explained that she was only offended because she got called out on a lie and that my comment was explicitly directed toward the information and not her. I have not yet heard back, but with my current 94% score in the class, I’ll let him dock me the points.
When I said wish me luck in my previous post on this course I didn’t know I’d need so much of it.
Or nuked the fridge, or whatever term you want to express passing into irrelevance.
Paying for coffee with cash is a sign you are a terrorist.
Forget a Sea Stead, I want off this rock. Â First ship to the Asteroid Belt, please.
