Recently in Politics & Policy Category

So last Saturday, my wife went to Traffic School. She came home with an amazing story that put this whole Immigration thing Arizona is doing in perspective.

We live in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is about 2 hours north of Phoenix in the mountains.

So we hear about Phoenix, but only obliquely. So we know more about what’s going on PHX then the rest of the country, but not so much that “everyone knows that, so no one talks about it”. So we understand why Phoenicians like Sheriff Joe, and now, we understand why Arizona just passed this seemingly extreme immigration bill. So hopefully, I can use our unique position to explain it to you, as it was explained to my wife, and then me.

What she found out in Traffic School is that murder-in-progress or rape-in-progress is no longer the top priority for police in Phoenix. The number one call that will cause every policeman in miles to scramble is “Truck Full of Drunk Mexicans”. They will leave an active “situation” in order to swarm to stop said truck.

I know, I know, that sounds racist. Bear with me. It’s not what you think.

What’s been happening in Phoenix and Tucson is that the drug cartels have been slowly invading our state. When I say invading, I am not exaggerating. We’ve begged for help from the federal government, and been rebuffed. If you knew anything about Arizona, you’d have to realize that we’d rather ask for help from Satan than the Feds.

On Friday and Saturday nights, the young-dumb-and-full-of-cum members of the drug cartels load up in pickup trucks, stoned, drunk and heavily armed. They then proceed to drive around crazed, purposefully causing accidents. They shoot at schools, schoolchildren, other mortorists, and even police stations. When the cops corner them, they all pile out of the truck and run in a zillion different directions, while laughing hysterically. They do this all over Phoenix in all kinds of neighborhoods, rich or poor, white, black, Hispanic, or Native American.

So the reason Truck Full of Drunk Mexicans will gather every policeman for miles in a swarm in order to stop them is that the people in said truck are about to commit wholesale murder, rape and property damage; the police want to stop them and prevent it. Because its really a Truck Full of Drunk Murdering Cartel Members.

We have lots of people of Hispanic descent in Arizona. We have lots of illegal aliens who are good, hard-working, law-abiding people. They’re not the problem, and everyone knows that. No one really wants to go after them.

But we have to do something, and this law is it. Its unfortunate, and we’re seriously hoping that the police won’t go too far, or be abusive. But the cartels have just gone too far. Basically, this law was written so that we can stop these trucks and send the people in them to jail.

So the way that ObamaCare works, if a single employee files for a government subsidy for health insurance, the government bills the company for all employees at $2,000-$3,000 a head if the company has more than 25 employees. (Part-time workers count as half a person so I guess you could have 50 fully part time employees).

So lets say you’re a company with a lot of part-time employees for whatever reason. If you offer health insurance for your full time employees, and a part-time employee applies for the government plan, well now you’re going to be billed not just $3,000 for that employee, but $3,000 for all employees.

So the logical choice? Don’t offer health insurance at all. I mean, why pay twice?

Now some people think the Democrats are stupid for having stuff like this in ObamaCare.

I disagree. I think its pure genius.

First, the Democrats complain that all corporations care about is making money.

This is, of course, true.

Then, the Democrats promise to protect the populace from the evil corporations, and they do it in such a way that the only practical way for the corporations to proceed is to to screw the populace.

Then the Democrats complain that all corporations care about is making money, and that they will protect the populace from the evil corporations.

It’s genius.

But it pisses me off that my taxes are going to go up down the road because Walmart is going to dump all of their employees, both full and part time onto the government plan.

So basically, I create websites for a living.

Not just any websites though, I build websites that are essentially computer programs behind the scenes. People have to be able to use my websites to get their work done.

So I never, ever use Flash, and I’ve always found websites made with Flash to fall in the following categories.

First, there’s what I call the “Vanity” website. Those are for companies that don’t really need a website. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of website, as long as you realize that’s what you’re building. Pepsi isn’t going to pour colored sugar water into a glass for you over the internet. So building a sexy Flash site makes perfect sense for pepsi.com. Anyone going to pepsi.com is bored. So dazzle ‘em with bullshit. If you’re building a website for a local veterinarian though, that’s not a vanity site. Don’t use Flash, and put the phone number and address on every single page.

Second, there’s what I call the CEO site. Those are sites that you know were bought by a non-technical CEO from a laptop demo. No one in the real world ever goes to their website, because not only is it Flash, but its 20 minutes-to-download Flash. I once had a gig working for a music company and one of their subsidiaries had a flash site and a low-bandwith version of their site. The “low-bandwidth” version of their site had been broken for 4 months and no one at that company had noticed. Their “web guy” who knew nothing about the web always used the “high-bandwidth” version.

Then there are all the poseurs who who don’t know what they’re doing. Making HTML, CSS and all those other lovely acronyms sit up and beg is hard, and Flash ofters what seems like a solution. Some of these poseurs even have thriving companies. Again, at the record label, I went and visited the “web design firm” that was doing Metallica’s new website. They did everything in Flash, and not a single person at their 30-person company could write a basic anchor tag. They created beautiful, but ultimately unusable websites.

All I can say is: Skip Intro.

Anyways, that brings us to today’s topic. The Flagstaff Unified School District.

Currently, we have an election going on in Flagstaff about whether or not to raise property taxes in order to fund our schools. This is the second election on the same issue in the last few months, because the school district has already lost once and didn’t like the answer. They’re threatening to lay off teachers and close schools.

The reason the taxpayers keep voting no, is because our schools are badly mismanaged. We have one of the most top-heavy school districts in Arizona. So for many taxpayers in town, this initiative seems to be a case of the last straw. Even though the average increase in property taxes is going to be $250/household, many people in town are looking at not just this increase, but the other ones being threatened by other local governments and saying NO!

Given that the increase will be $1,000/year on local businesses, some of which are already marginal and failing in Flagstaff, and I suspect this tax increase could actually decrease revenues.

Oh, and did I mention that this whole override thing is pre-emptive? Its based on the theory that the state probably will implement cuts, but it hasn’t yet. So does that mean that our taxes won’t go up if the state doesn’t cut the funding? Do we get our money back, especially if the state raised taxes in order to prevent the funding cut? Nope!

Oh, and this particular election is illegal after losing the first time, but the district got a bye from the attorney general.

Meanwhile, I’m frankly of the opinion that the real solution for our schools is to fire everyone in the administration but the janitors, use the money to buy gift cards for Amazon, and hand those directly to the teachers. I even created a website for this project last year, The Amazon Project.

So with all this going on, I decided to go to the website for the school district at fusd1.org. Supposedly, they have their budget up there, and the challenge is that if you think you can do better, they’re willing to listen. So I went there.

And you know what happened? Flash.

That’s why our school district is in trouble. We’re spending money on a Flash website. I mean seriously. You’ve got to be kidding. Every single teacher in the Flagstaff School District tells me that the textbooks they’re forced to use are universally awful, and what do I see but a Flash website? There’s money flushed down the toilet right there. It’s just typical. Money spent badly by bureaucrats on nonsense, so they don’t have money for the right things.

So instead of decent textbooks, we have Flash. Flash is for rock bands, not school districts.

Oh, and they don’t really have their budget up there. At least not that I could find.

I’ll be voting no.

KARL ROVE, MacHead:

NB: All right, I've got just one more quick question for you. Last time I saw you, you'd just gotten an iPhone. How's that working out for you?

ROVE: I love it. My life has changed. I have a shred of coolness. I've got my 3,500 people in my addressbook on the phone, I can sync my calendar. I keep track of my modest little stock investments. I can check the weather of my house in Washington, my house in Florida, my boy at school, my hunt-lease in south Texas. I can surf the web, I'm just--I get part of my email there.

I mean it is just shocking how much better, how much more productive I am. I no longer carry around a giant address book, if I don't have my calendar close at hand, I can quickly check it out of my-- I don't have to carry, I used to carry several notecards, now it's just as easy to scribble on my little notepad, I can take photographs and forward them on immediately, it's just remarkable.

NB: All right. Well it sounds like Steve Jobs should call you up as a spokesman.

ROVE: There we go, there we go. And not only that, I also have the Mac Book Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.

Perhaps a lucrative spokesperson gig is in his future.

[From KARL ROVE, MacHead: NB: All right, I've got...]

While its true that Americans don't study other languages besides English, we are fascinated by other cultures.

Could he go back to obscurity already? Geesh.

Just felt like a Rant. I’m in California on a business trip, and I’m in the worst part of California, the North Bay in San Francisco, so I’m surrounded by elitist-yuppie-scum who think they are so enlightened and liberal, when really they are the worst sort of snobs, Mercedes-driving-hippies. I got stuck behind this car on the freeway that was belching black smoke as it proudly proclaimed that it ran on “free used vegetable oil”. No doubt that was why it smelled like burnt french fries.

It’s only been 2 days of gritting my teeth while listening to this claptrap about how the US has killed 100,000 Iraqis (27,000, and that’s about 1/12th of what Saddam would have killed in a year), how our soldiers are nazis, how Iraq is Vietnam, how their free speech is being oppressed, all the same tired rhetoric I became a blogger to escape, and already I’m about to explode.

So here goes.

Technorati Tags: 2000 Election, 2004 Election, Bush, Gore, Iraq, Kerry, Vietnam