Surprise! The Government Wants to Destroy More Businesses

Last year (late 2007-early 2008) there were a number of product recalls on toys made in China due to the presence of lead. Now, I'm not going to go into the health issues regarding items with lead and pthalates because let's face it, those are well documented.

No, what has me flipping out is the government's response which is of course via a consumer protection act.

What this thing does, is demand that every item (clothes, toys, etc) that is marketed to children 12 years old and younger must be tested for lead and pthalates. Additionally, this is such a widely inclusive law that it applies to thrift stores, donations to thrift stores, new sales, consignment shops and even yard sales.

So consider just what is going to happen here, because truthfully, this things are already happening:

• Thrift Stores will no longer sell children's items, or at least won't for many months--a long enough time that they can, and will, go bankrupt
• eBay, and other auction sites, will stop accepting auctions on children's items as the cost of verifying the legality of an item's sale status would be prohibitive
• Individuals could be fined and/or arrested for holding a yard sale
• Hand-made, and other small, mostly family-owned, children article manufacturers will go out of business
• Charitable organizations will be forced to only accept new toys, as the law covers donations and giveaways

And that's just the things that pop into my head right away. Of those, I'm impacted greatly by at least two, as my church is the Salvation Army and they utilize a thrift store and do a lot of donation work, and there are a number of family friends of my parents who are in the business of creating hand-made objects, some of them aimed at children.

And all this because Clinton-era rules which relaxed trade restrictions with Communist China. Because, one thing we learned is that all the lead-tainted items came from China.

So, how do I think this law needs to be fixed? It's actually simple, and needs to involve these following parts:

• Remove testing requirements on items that cannot actually be tainted with lead
• Make it be based on manufacturing date after 2/10 rather than a sales date of 2/10
• Make items wholly made in America exempt from the testing requirements
• Make the testing rules more stringent on items coming from known sources of contaminants. I.e. stricter testing for Chinese manufactured items as opposed to say Mexican manufactured items, until the Mexican ones start showing up with lead in their more random tests

Of course this implies that the Congress would be interested in not running a number of small businesses out of business, or that they see value in thrift stores and consignment shops. Of course, we all know that Congress, especially a Democratically controlled Congress, has no true concern over small business or anyone that is not on welfare.

But hey, I'd love to be proved wrong.

Eight Reasons...

PC Magazine's website has an article up concerning eight reasons why we should have metered internet.

So, without further ado, here's my personal rebuttal on just why he's wrong on those reasons.

Elimination of bandwidth caps, restrictions, and throttling.
Ultimately, that's what metering is. It's bandwidth caps, restrictions and throttling, except that if you happen to go over, you get slapped with huge fines.

Promotion of higher speeds.
Only if the user is willing to pay for it. A weak argument if you ask me, especially in light of the fact that it fails as a possible model. If a user is being charged for length of time online, then why would the network providers be willing to increase the speed?

Moderate users would pay less than they pay now
And?

Download junkies would pay for their habit
I actually pay for my habit now. I pay more for higher bandwidth speeds than those that don't want that. And the all-you-can-eat buffet fails here as well. The costs associated with a few people who consume extreme amounts, is more than offset by those who consume moderate (or less) amounts.

Spammers pay more for junking up the Web
No. Those people who are not knowledgable enough to not have their machines turned into zombie-bots (or any other type of bot) end up paying more for junking up the web. Additionally, this would curtail such efforts as SETI@Home or the Human Genotype project which used excess bandwidth and CPU cycles for processing large information sets.

Elimination of the net neutrality issues
The author of the article believes that all these issues will go away, and he's right, they will be because all the reasons for having net neutrality will have been implemented. Net Neutrality insists on all network traffic being the same. Once you have metered internet it is a simple jump to having different tiers of which types of bandwidth you can use. You can have 100 Megs of UDP traffic, and 1Gig of HTTP traffic, with it coming from ABC Domain at X speed, and everywhere else and Y speed.

Development of IPTV mechanisms
Yes, I only get 10Megs of Internet a month, so I want to spend it on internet television.

Energy savings (aka "green")
Now, this is just stretching for things. If I don't turn off my PC or Modem now, and I'm considered a moderate user, why would I change that behavior if moderate users would not be affected by going to metered access?

Additionally, one needs to define a moderate user? As an IT professional, my definition of moderate usage may be different than someone who works at a general store, and just uses the Internet to check their email. I need that bandwidth, especially if I work from the house, and have connected to either my office's network, or a client's network via VPN. And would a VPN connection get metered twice? Once on my end, and then again on the other?

No, unlimited connectivity is not an unsustainable concept, nor should it be looked to as an answer to any of the issues raised by the article in question. And in fact makes some of the worse (I'm looking at the SPAM and the Net Neutrality bits right there). Metered Internet is just another effort by the Cable Companies to change what has become the standard way of accessing the internet into something more like their current customer-hostile business model which provides packages of a hundred and fifty channels, of which the customer really only wants a dozen or two of.

Foreclosing Foreclosures

There must be something wrong with me.

I just don't understand something that is apparently a vital aspect of my country.

It boggles my mind; confounds and confuses me.

I don't know why my country men would be willing to do this, yet more and more it seems like I'm in a minority of those people who don't.

What am I talking about? What has me so confused?

Why people take handouts from the government.

What's worse, is why do our elected representatives continue to provide handouts to the people? Though, ultimately I know the reason for that: they want to buy themselves a vote.

What brought this on today was an AP story that I found on MSNBC talking about the Senate's upcoming vote on an anti-foreclosure plan.

Disgusting if you ask me.

No one forced these people to take these exotic mortgages, and as such they should now suffer the consequences of their bad decisions.

I'm not getting bailed out of my mortgage--nor do I want to.

Especially not by the government. I don't want my tax dollars spent bailing people out of their own bad decisions. That's not the purpose of the Federal government. Heck, it's not even the purpose of state or local governments.

That's the purpose of charitable organizations.

Which, despite the Democrat's intentions, is NOT the point of the Federal Government.

At least not the federal government whose Constitution I had studied.

The Air Force wants your machine

In something of a frightening follow up to my last post, I stumbled across a HIGHLY interesting article on WIRED today. One entitled "Air Force Aims for 'Full Control' of 'Any and All Computers.'"

Maybe because I just read Little Brother yesterday, but I'm horrified at the concept of this.

Basically, what they are wanting to do is build a BOTNET, which sits behind the scenes on your PC, until it is called forth to wreck havoc on the online world. For a more detailed description, I direct your attention to the Wikipedia.

While I can see allowing my CPU to be used for distributed processing by such organizations as SETI@Home, I cannot see myself allowing the United States government the same type of access to my machine.

First and foremost, once they do have access, what is to stop them from installing keyloggers, rootkits or other forms of malicious software?

Why do I worry over such things? Am I trying to hide something?

No. But THAT DOES NOT MATTER.

The machine belongs to me. It is mine, to do with as I please. My belongings can be neither searched nor seized without proper authority by a Judge. That's a Constitutional mandate; despite the fact that the so-called Patriot Act allows for sneak-n-peek searches.

The only bright point, if it can be called that, in this whole fiasco is that their goal is unattainable. The Air Force is wanting to spend $11 Million in an two-year study to determine the information necessary to accomplish this. Which is a joke, since within two years of the study being finished, all the findings and information collected will be essentially useless.

Now one can understand why at best, it's a very dim bright point.

I still find it hard to believe that the government of Jefferson, Washington and Franklin has stooped so low.

America Needs a Farm Bill

America needs a farm bill, our constituents need a farm bill.

--Norm Coleman Senator Minnesota (R)

... That's odd. I didn't realize that our country needed the government to subsidize various and sundry industries.

What's odder, is that I still can't find the place in the U.S. Constitution which allows Congress to use my tax dollars to subsidize industries.

What this is, is just another attempt for pork. For Congress to vote their pet ideologies, people and other odds an ends money. One of the many reasons we have such high taxes (unless you're one of the 'poor' making less than $30K annually) and a massive national debt.

It is just another symptom of the 'vote us money' form of government, where the unwashed masses who live at the government's whims (i.e. those on welfare and government employees) are used and abused by the powered elite, tossed tidbits of the state treasury in an effort to keep them ground and voting for the powerful.

How much longer can this idiocy last?

Sometimes, I wonder if even a President such as Ron Paul could stem the tidal flow of destruction which has been building in our Federal government since it forced the States to give up their rights back in 1866.

There is something to always remember:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.

-- Alexander Tyler

Selfishness. Complacency. Apathy. Dependency. I see all those things in our society today. So when comes the bondage?

The joys of Comcast Cable.

I'm moving.

Yup, I've left Pensacola, FL, and have set up house in Madison, MS. Surprising, I now, but it happens. Of course, with the move, means a new cable company has to be utilized for TV and high-speed internet. Much to my unending annoyance, that particular cable company is Comcast.

The first time I stumbled across Comcast was when one of their Santa Rosa county customers managed to transpose a few digits on their bank account when they were paying their bill. It took me a couple of phone calls, the average of which was three hours, plus two visits to their local office (which was about an hour away from Pensacola) before they even seemed to realize that I didn't have an account with them, that I didn't live in their service area, and that they took money from me without proper authorization. At which point, they told me that I had to deal with the bank about it, despite the fact that the bank was pointing me towards Comcast.

So, it was with that bias, and let me tell you, I was quite irate at Comcast for quite a while for that, that I went into setting up cable access with the move.

Well, the first thing I did was I went to their corporate website and ordered digital cable and highspeed internet. I ground my teeth as their website told me that because I was a new customer, I couldn't connect my highspeed internet myself (after all, it's such a confusing process of plugging a cable cord into the cable modem). Yet, I accepted this blatant desire for more of my hard-earned money, and ordered anyways.

At which point, I discovered that they couldn't find the address in their national database of addresses. Apparently, they don't use Google Maps.

Well, after the incredibly unhelpful Customer Service Rep on their little "Online Chat" thing tells me this news, he then proceeds to tell me that I've to either call their local office or go in person to the local office, because they can't look up anything on Google Maps.

So, with my eye twitching, I filled in their survey, restraining myself from telling them exactly what I was feeling at the moment, punctuated as it would be with various and sundry words that I try my best to not say, and would spank my child for saying, and put ordering cable off, because I had to pack.

Well, today, we closed on our house, and found ourself with a few hours in which to go about doing those tasks we had to do in person. Since I despise with a passion talking to people on the phone, we chose to actually visit the local Comcast office.

Let me reiterate a point here: I HATE talking on the telephone.

I despise it with nigh upon every fiber of my being.

I would rather watch a Law and Order marathon.

Heck, I'd rather have toothpicks shoved under my fingernails.

So, now that I've made my feelings regarding phone conversations clear, let's tell you what I was expecting to see.

The Cox cable local office in Pensacola has a nice, wide lobby. To one side are the payment windows. To the other side, there are this little cubicles for folks setting up service, who have problems, etc. I was expecting something like that.

After all, I'm trying to give these people $120 a month for various services and rentals, and that's before the taxes and fees that the government adds in, so I would expect to be able to talk to a real, live person, in the flesh. I mean, that's customer service.

So, we walk into the Comcast office and this is the sight I am greeted with.

• Directly ahead, a bank of televisions set into the wall, and a rent-a-cop dozing off on a stool
• On the wall to the right, a door, next to the rent-a-cop, and a phone, and a table with various papers
• Looking left, I find three tellers, and those corral things creating lines for the tellers.

My entire body tensed, but I had faith that this company was created by reasonable people, and they knew that folks liked working in person.

Sometimes, my hope in humanity comes out at the worst possible moments.

I walked up to the teller, and nicely tell her, "Hi, I'd like to set up service."

In what can only be in the most bored, and disdainful way possible, she whispers (because I sure couldn't hear what she was supposed to be saying through the plate glass window she was hiding behind) something about that phone on the far wall.

A phone.

I wanted a person! Is that so hard? I had questions about the hardware I wanted to ask. I wanted to know about just why I had to pay that outrageous fee to have someone come out and connect a cable line to a cable modem. That's all he should be doing, because there's no way that I'm allowing them to install any software on my machine. Cable internet should not need software on my machine. If it does that's a problem on their end.

But, is it so hard to get a real, live person?

Not that evil device.

So, I walked over to the phone, my wife trailing after me. In my most happiest voice, the one I save for just these types of situations, I muttered (and amusingly enough, the place had great acoustics, so my mutter echoed), "Cox lets you talk to a real person."

At which point my wife hushed me and picked up the infernal device and started punching in numbers supposedly in order to talk to someone.

After a bit, a voice comes on the line (I'm still not convinced it was a real person on the other end), and the wifey tells them we want service, and gives them our address.

At which point, we're once more told that our address doesn't exist in the national database.

At which point, I was beginning to wish that me and the wife both didn't despise satellite television.

So, we have that all settled, at which point, the voice on the phone asks us to give them directions to the house.

...

I thought they had the internet. Isn't that what Google Maps is for?

My wife stuttered a few times, and then handed me the phone, explaining tot he voice that I was her husband and could probably give directions.

I so wanted to ask them why they couldn't use Google, but I bit my tongue, and reminded myself that I want to give these voices on the phone $120 a month for various services and proceeded to describe in vague details how to get to our new home.

At which point she asks me what color it is.

Apparently, "Brick" isn't a good enough answer to that question.

And I'm also supposed to have counted the number of houses from the corner it was, even though I've only been to the place a dozen times or so.

So, now that I've drawn blood, and gave these directions (though it would have been a smarter choice for her to look it up on Google, because though I know how to get to the house, I'm still not sure how good my directions were), I find out what I'm giving directions for.

It's an inspection to see if they can even bother to schedule an install.

And how long pray tell will this visual inspection of the house take (and by visual inspection, I mean they come out, and literally look at the house to see if it has a cable connection), well, the voice on the phone is "hopeful" that we should hear something back by Monday or Tuesday, but it could possibly take up to five or six business days.

Five or six days to come out and look at the house, so that we can actually talk about having cable installed.

I could feel my eye beginning to twitch.

Do these people not realize that I want to give them $120 a month for various services and products a month for a number of years? We're talking thousands of dollars for my and my family's mindless entertainment. I want to give them money, and they're talking about inspections and cable drops.

And she never even gave me an estimated time to schedule the installation after the inspection, but I came out of the conversation thinking it'd be another five or six days after the inspection.

Two weeks before I can start giving them $120 a month for services rendered.

Two weeks before I can pay an obscene amount of money for someone to come out and screw a cable line into my cable modem.

And all of that is if I happen to have whatever it is that the cable company is coming to look at my house for.

Who knows how long it will be if for whatever reason my house doesn't.

Did I mention that I actually WANT to pay them money for services?

...

I think hence forth, whenever someone asks me if I have lost my mind (which amusingly enough, happens with startlingly regularity), I'll have to reply, "Well, I'm using Comcast, ain't I?"

The Real Bus Problem: ECAT survival

ECAT, the Escambia County Area Transit system, is the name used for the buses here where I live. The past year or so, there has been a number of articles in the Pensacola News Journal decrying the fact that ECAT is not making enough money to support its activities.

Basically, they're trying to make those of us who work, own cars, and pay taxes feel bad about the dire straights that public transportation is in, so that we won't complain as loudly when the city/county government tries to up our taxes to give them more money.

Today, there's an editorial in the PNJ saying that due to the upcoming homestead exemption increase, local government is going to be looking for programs to cut (hooray!) and that ECAT is an obvious one.

I say, what's the problem.

Consider, when was the last time that ECAT raised its rates? When was the last time someone could get from one point to the other, in less than two hours? There are a number of other things to do with ECAT before we provide tax money to them. Actually, we should never provide them tax money.

Frankly, it's a hassle no matter how you look at it, one which should be solved by market forces. Raise those rates, and pull my tax money away from ECAT. I don't need to subsidize what should be a business.

Of course, local liberals will complain, and say that with the way all costs are raising, that it's not fair to the low-income folks for ECAT to raise its rates as well.

My response there is: heck, you libs are the ones who voted for this cost of living increase, by voting in a higher minimum wage. So, you really have no one to blame but yourselves for that.

One day, I really hope that everyone will wake up and realize that the government should not be supporting them. That it's not the government's responsibility to take care of your family and provide the basic necessities of life for you. Welfare, and the war on poverty, has done nothing but created a generation of imbeciles who believe they are owed something by the government, that they somehow deserve a portion of my hard-earned money. That somehow it is all right for Uncle Sam to steal it from me to give to them.

What rubbish.

Edwards: Taxing you just because he wants to

Presidential hopeful, John "Little John" Edwards - you know, the joke that was on the other John's ballot a few years back - has stated that he wants to raise the taxes on the wealthy (this is according to an AP story).

Now, I don't consider myself wealthy. I make a decent (okay, I make a great) wage, but that's offset by the outflow of money I have going on. A car note, my own stupidity in regards to credit as a youngster, and that massive blob of student loans I still have hanging over my head. Well, just because I don't consider myself wealthy doesn't mean that I'm not considered that for the purposes of tax hikes.

What these morons who always want to raise taxes never seem to want to tell you is that these tax hikes against the wealthy begin somewhere in the area of $35K per year. Basically, if you're not living off the government coffers, you're considered wealthy.

Which I guess I can see since they've taken such great pains to ensure that people no longer own land and must give the first three or four months worth of their salary to the government.

It's this concept that they need to tax us all into bankruptcy-in order to pay for more entitlement programs (yeah, I want MY money going to the lazy whelp who refuses to get a job and just keeps cranking out more an more kids)-that keeps me from ever voting Democrat. I can honestly admit that a lot of what Mr. Bush is doing/has done in office scares and sickens me. After all, I'm a firm believer in small government.

But back to Little John, let's look at what he has to say in this quote:

"It's just the truth," Edwards said during a news conference following his speech to the California Democratic Party convention. "It's the only way to fund the things that need to be done."

That makes my blood boil.

Rather than raise taxes, let's kill some of the pointless government programs out there. We don't need a Federal level Department of Education. We don't need government grants to those too lazy to work. In my household we have a simple rule, if we can't afford it, we don't need it. For the first few years of my marriage, we were very, very tight on funds. Yes, me and the Mrs. both worked full-time jobs, but we still had a lot of bills (again, that stupidity thing with the credit cards) - and those jobs weren't the best thing in the world.

Now, I would have loved to have been able to eat steak or lobsters every night. Or have gone out to dinner three, four times a week. But we didn't. We couldn't afford such things. So what did we do? We ate a lot of Gwatney brand hot-dogs and macaroni and cheese and Ramen noodles. Then after I got my next raise and the wifey got a better paying job, what did we do? We moved up to Hamburger Helper. Or more accurately, the generic Wal-Mart brand of Hamburger Helper. Even today, I know that we can't afford to have steak every night, so we still cook a lot with ground beef. Yes, the other stuff going into the meat is a lot more and better, but I'm able to feed my family of four for less than $100 a week. Heck, for less than $80 a week.

I mean, one week we had five nights where we ate a dish based on ground meat. I spent $8 on those 5 pounds of meat - the minimum that I would have spent on a roast or a cut of steak. And that's the point - rather than whining about how I can't fund things at the amount of money I'm making now, I modify my buying habits so that what I buy matches how much I make. Amazing how that works, eh?

Sure, I guess I could whine and complain to the government about how I'm not able to provide steak to my kids every night, and the Leftists out there would say, "Well you know, the government owes you that. Why don't you sit back and let Uncle Sam take care of you."

But you know what, I don't think I could live with myself if I did that.

I know I couldn't look my son in the eye and tell him that he needs to work hard at everything he does. I know I couldn't look my son in the eye and tell him that he needs to be a man and support himself and his family, that HE is responsible for such things.

No new taxes (or better yet, the dismantling of the Income Tax and replacement of it by a National Sales Tax). Smaller government. These are the things that I want to see happen in the government. Unfortunately, neither of the two "big" parties seem to want either of those things. It makes me very interested in the Constitution Party:

Maximizing the Minimum Wage

Well Congress is at it again. They are once more deciding that Market Forces are not enough to run things in our capitalistic society. Yes, it is yet again time for a discussion on raising the Minimum Wage.

Oh joy.

Of course the Liberal side of the blog-o-sphere is ecstatic over this. Or at least they were until House Republicans attached a few riders to the bill, such as lowering the Estate tax, and a Federal Pension bill. Personally I don’t think that even a reduction of the Estate tax is not worth a hike in minimum wage to me. So while the leftie blogs are happy at the potential for a decrease in the price of skilled labor, they are unhappy that the families of the skilled laborers who have died don’t have to give away a huge portion of their life’s savings to the federal government.

The reasons I despise the minimum wage are quite simple. They drive my own salary down. Capitalistic of me I know, but I am a Capitalist through and through. The only reason I get up and go to work everyday is because of that nice paycheck I get. And I have told my bosses this in no uncertain terms. They know without a doubt that I am there for the money, and that is fine with both them and me.

But when we get these increases, I view it as an attack by the Federal government against my livelihood. Don’t believe me?

Then let’s look at some skilled labor versus a burger flipper at McDonald’s. And we’ll not even use college-educated skilled labor for this. An electrician makes somewhere on the order of twenty dollars an hour (this is an average, some jobs get more, some less), and we compare that to the simplified cost of a burger flipper of six dollars an hour. That is somewhere on the order of 333% more for the skilled labor. And that makes perfect sense to me. After all the electrician has spent years as an apprentice before becoming a full fledged electrician, and it will probably be a few more years before they get the higher paying jobs. Now, if we increase the pay which unskilled labor gets to 8 dollars an hour, that drops the percentage difference between skilled and unskilled to a mere 250% more.

While that does not appear to be an extreme drop, it really marks a huge decrease in the purchasing power, as well as the worth of the skilled laborer. Because there are factors besides just that differential between the skilled and the unskilled which affects the purchasing power of an individual.

Minimum Wage Increases are like Tax Hikes, the only thing they do is decrease the GNP. After all, while a large company might consider hiring two or three people at five dollars an hour, they’d come up with a technological solution, which means the need to only hire one at eight an hour. We saw this in the farming industry, and it’s slowly appearing in the retail industry as well (don't believe me? Go to Wal-Mart or Winn-Dixie and look for the 'self-checkout' lanes).

Of course, this is one of the few Liberal Ideas which I would support if they would do it my way. A minimum wage increase, effective immediately, to raise the minimum wage to five hundred dollars an hour for everyone. Oh okay, waitresses can get a mere two hundred fifty still.

If we’re going to slash the differential between the skilled laborers and the unskilled then let’s really kill that, and make it a true level playing field while we’re at it.

And yes, I think that’s a stupidly silly idea. I realize that it would decimate our economy, drive inflation out of control, and make the dollar worth a little bit less than the peso. But I find the entire concept of minimum wage a stupidly silly idea. We’re a free market society, and as such should allow market forces to guide such things as wages and prices.

What's more important...

Tell me which is more important police and fire coverage or another lecture on diversity?

Much to my amazement I know which the government of Lansing, Michigan chose. In a fell swoop of laying off 21 police and fire fighters, their proposed budget include $140,000 in diversity programs (Lansing State Journal)

What type of liberal thinking would decide this? What stupidity? Are they thinking that just because they pay $150,000 to a PR firm to send out press releases, or $20,000 on a Harvard law professor, that crime and fires will amazingly handle themselves? That just because they spend a huge amount of money (espeically considering other towns of similiar size spend less or even nothing on programs such as these) that noone will feel the need to commit a crime?

This is an obscene liberal program, and I have to say that I am personally glad that I don't live in Lansing to feel the pain of less police or less firefighters.