Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

[FreshFish]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Politicians who come out and say one thing verbally and in writing then change their tune after they are elected.

You might as well just have said "Politicians" and stopped there!

I can remember only one famous prominent politician who said one thing before he was elected and then actually followed through and did it. The funniest part of that is very few people believed he meant it (there was a famous Pfeiffer cartoon that I still have in a box somewhere).

EDIT: actually, I remember three more politicians who also were always consistent between what they said during the campaign and what they did in office. Two of these latter three were legislators though; it's harder for people elected to the executive branch to keep their promises than legislators. The last one in this second list is a local town leader and wouldn't be famous anywhere, not even in town any more since he left office in 2006. He was an engineer and not a career politician, the best local executive I've ever seen anywhere.



that being said, over three states of residence over several decades, only to come up with four who stand out for their integrity is a very sad commentary.

 

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Getting to work for a 6:30AM meeting, only to find out that it was cancelled in the middle of the night.
No, don't worry, I enjoy being at work at 6:30AM.

 

[goldy_331]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Getting to work for a 6:30AM meeting, only to find out that it was cancelled in the middle of the night.
No, don't worry, I enjoy being at work at 6:30AM.

So leave at 3.

 

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

So leave at 3.

I'm already planning on it. I would leave at noon, and work from home again, but I have a 2:00 that I can't miss. Only left the puppy home in the kennel for the morning yesterday, and he didn't poop or pee in his kennel, which I thought was pretty good. Today it will be from 6:00 to about 3:00, that's a long time for the little guy.

 

[JuveGG24]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

My office brought in extra cleaners last night to do a deep clean. They took a cup off my desk and now I'm pretty sure its gone. It wasn't worth much, but it had high sentimental value.

Not happy right now.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Firefox. It's moved from being the best developed web browser available to being run by the biggest asstards (possibly ever).

Exhibit #1:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/963439

I'm now forced to use my search bar default as the address bar search. When I want to google something, I used to just search in the address bar. Now all of them are defaulted to Wikipedia which is my search bar default. All because some dumbasses get a virus and it changes their keyword.url default search provider. Yeah, because this is the best solution to that problem. I mean, it's the laziest and easiest solution to the problem, but it's a poor solution. You can preserve functionality while protecting the keyword.url field.

Exhibit #2:

With every other browser available, when I type in "news.google" and hit ctrl+enter, it goes to "www.news.google.com". When I do it with Firefox, it pukes all over itself and doesn't understand what I'm trying to do. It googles "news". This used to work within Firefox, but it doesn't anymore. When this was brought up to the developers (I read through the bug report for this "feature"), they said, "Whatever. No one uses this feature." SERIOUSLY!? You implement so much bloatware into the source code yet you fail to have a basic feature that EVERY other major browser has? WTF?!?

Exhibit #3:
The line of thinking that releasing a new version means you need to increment the full version number. Changing from say Firefox 4.0.0 to Firefox 5.0.0 used to mean a massive overhaul. Now they jump from 22.0 to 23.0 if they change the spelling in one of the Danish help files.

Exhibit #4:
Auto update.

FUCK THAT.

I'd love to use Chrome, but Chrome has even worse problems than Firefox. It doesn't handle multiple tabs well and uses up a massive chunk of my 8 GB of RAM opening a standard (for me) number of tabs. I've had it actually crash because Windows can't allocate any more memory to it.

Internet Explorer is just a pile of crap and I can't upgrade even if it wasn't. My company uses IE for a good chunk of in-house applications and upgrading breaks many of our applications.

And let's be honest, I'm not going to use Safari because I'm over the age of 10

 

[Twitch Boy]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

tl;dr: Firefox sucks Firefox sucks some more Firefox sucks even more Chrome sucks IE really sucks Safari sucks.

There's always Opera. Or Dolphin if you're on a smartphone.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

I've thought about Opera before. Isn't it ad-supported?

 

[Twitch Boy]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Welp, I'm officially on board the mortgage company screw-up train.

Got my yearly escrow statement today - along with a check for a whopping $1100. Every alarm bell installed in my brain starts going off. Immediately double-checked the escrow payment listings, and they show the second half of my property tax was set aside but not paid. Go find my property tax bill. Ruh roh, it was due August 15. Checked the Municipality of Anchorage property tax database, however, and they show both halves were paid in June and I'm all square.

wat do

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Welp, I'm officially on board the mortgage company screw-up train.

Got my yearly escrow statement today - along with a check for a whopping $1100. Every alarm bell installed in my brain starts going off. Immediately double-checked the escrow payment listings, and they show the second half of my property tax was set aside but not paid. Go find my property tax bill. Ruh roh, it was due August 15. Checked the Municipality of Anchorage property tax database, however, and they show both halves were paid in June and I'm all square.

wat do

Punch your mortgage rep in the face.

 

[Twitch Boy]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Called my mortgage company. Yup, they done fornicated with the canine.

All taxes were indeed paid, but they never listed the second payment on my escrow statement. They're not sure what happened. Facepunches incoming. Spare the CSR, she was really cool.

 

[MarkEagleUSA]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Spare the CSR, she was really cool.

In other words, she sounded hot?

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Small town politics that have escalated into something that could be covered like Watergate except the newspaper and radio are part of the problem. I work as a medical provider in my town so I need to watch what I say (which anyone who has seen me in the political threads before I decided to stay away will know is near impossible) but I want to stand on the top of the tallest roof and ask these people UU T F?!?!?!?!! Problem is that for the not plugged in there is no way to let people know the truth.

There are the subset are completely ignorant can't think past next week, look at the facts and say they aren't facts because that means they would actually have to do something about it (ie spend money to fix and maintain what they want without having to pay for it). Willful ignorance is infuriating. Then there are the leaders and 'influential" folks who lie, call people names, spread libelous info, trash their character in print, on the radio and on the internet all to maintain the status quo which benefits them. These are the people who could literally trash my business, with impunity if I speak out, even if it is the truth (there was a recent court case after they did this- the person won but it hasn't stopped them)

Unfortunately Mr les grew up with this dysfunctional hot mess and thinks it is normal. Kind of like a kid who grows up in a family that kids get beat regularly and their parents are drunken sots. The rest of the world gets it but the kids think it is normal. I won't want my kid to think this is normal!

I need to move out of this toxic waste dump!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Phew, I needed that.

 

[bottomdweller]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

Small town politics that have escalated into something that could be covered like Watergate except the newspaper and radio are part of the problem. I work as a medical provider in my town so I need to watch what I say (which anyone who has seen me in the political threads before I decided to stay away will know is near impossible) but I want to stand on the top of the tallest roof and ask these people UU T F?!?!?!?!! Problem is that for the not plugged in there is no way to let people know the truth.

There are the subset are completely ignorant can't think past next week, look at the facts and say they aren't facts because that means they would actually have to do something about it (ie spend money to fix and maintain what they want without having to pay for it). Willful ignorance is infuriating. Then there are the leaders and 'influential" folks who lie, call people names, spread libelous info, trash their character in print, on the radio and on the internet all to maintain the status quo which benefits them. These are the people who could literally trash my business, with impunity if I speak out, even if it is the truth (there was a recent court case after they did this- the person won but it hasn't stopped them)

Unfortunately Mr les grew up with this dysfunctional hot mess and thinks it is normal. Kind of like a kid who grows up in a family that kids get beat regularly and their parents are drunken sots. The rest of the world gets it but the kids think it is normal. I won't want my kid to think this is normal!

I need to move out of this toxic waste dump!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Phew, I needed that.

So you don't think the override is going to pass I take it...

 

[leswp1]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

So you don't think the override is going to pass I take it...

I really have no idea what will happen. Having the knowledge people can be so evil/unscrupulous/without conscience is unsettling and very scary. The almighty dollar is responsible for a lot. The blatant lying, twisting facts and smearing people who are posting the links to the statistics without even a twinge of guilt is mind boggling . That people are so gullible on a local level is even more frightening. On a macro level you could see not getting how the big gov't works. On the local level the kid next door to you doesn't have books or a seat in class. How do you not know that unless you don't want to? Trying to think of the book we read in HS- Lord of the Flies?- where the main point was to win, at all costs, with no thought to anyone else.

Front page of the paper this weekend- someone sent out flyers in support of override anonymously. One woman's response- the schools are bad, so what. If you are a good parent you send them to private school. Then the argument saying the reason we shouldn't have the override is people are too poor to pay the extra 20$ a month. But we should send the kids to a private school? and people baa like sheep.

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

The abortion protester at my freeway exit this morning, holding up a gigantic poster that may have caused a few people to lose their breakfast.

 

[FreshFish]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

While I am sympathetic to Mrs. Les' frustration, we have the opposite problem here: the Board of Education keeps asking for more funding, yet none of those dollars ever make it to the classroom. Instead, they only go to additional administrators or to expanded benefits packages for existing administrators. Meanwhile, the quality of instruction in the schools seems to be declining at the same time their funding increases. Now, whenever we hear "it's for the children" we are conditioned to expect that is merely a cynical manipulative ploy. This is particularly galling because the student enrollment levels have been flat to declining, so that per capita spending per student has been increasing all along the way, yet what have we seen for that increase but reduced student proficiency? why should any additional dollars lead to any different outcome, given your track record so far??

You want to free up some room in your BoE budget? restore the ratio of administrators to teachers to the level it was 20 years ago and put the money saved into improving the curriculum. Then ask for more after. Don't ask for more until you get your house in order first.

 

[goldy_331]

While I am sympathetic to Mrs. Les' frustration, we have the opposite problem here: the Board of Education keeps asking for more funding, yet none of those dollars ever make it to the classroom. Instead, they only go to additional administrators or to expanded benefits packages for existing administrators. Meanwhile, the quality of instruction in the schools seems to be declining at the same time their funding increases. Now, whenever we hear "it's for the children" we are conditioned to expect that is merely a cynical manipulative ploy. This is particularly galling because the student enrollment levels have been flat to declining, so that per capita spending per student has been increasing all along the way, yet what have we seen for that increase but reduced student proficiency? why should any additional dollars lead to any different outcome, given your track record so far??

You want to free up some room in your BoE budget? restore the ratio of administrators to teachers to the level it was 20 years ago and put the money saved into improving the curriculum. Then ask for more after. Don't ask for more until you get your house in order first.

Why do you hate the children?

 

[St. Clown]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

While I am sympathetic to Mrs. Les' frustration, we have the opposite problem here: the Board of Education keeps asking for more funding, yet none of those dollars ever make it to the classroom. Instead, they only go to additional administrators or to expanded benefits packages for existing administrators. Meanwhile, the quality of instruction in the schools seems to be declining at the same time their funding increases. Now, whenever we hear "it's for the children" we are conditioned to expect that is merely a cynical manipulative ploy. This is particularly galling because the student enrollment levels have been flat to declining, so that per capita spending per student has been increasing all along the way, yet what have we seen for that increase but reduced student proficiency? why should any additional dollars lead to any different outcome, given your track record so far??

You want to free up some room in your BoE budget? restore the ratio of administrators to teachers to the level it was 20 years ago and put the money saved into improving the curriculum. Then ask for more after. Don't ask for more until you get your house in order first.

My school district has added a "Student Advocate" position to each school. Until seeing that sign, I thought that the entire school system was supposed to be made up of student advocates, but that's apparently not the case anymore.

 

[goldy_331]

Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4

My school district has added a "Student Advocate" position to each school. Until seeing that sign, I thought that the entire school system was supposed to be made up of student advocates, but that's apparently not the case anymore.

If it's anything like the school system we took our son out of, it's filled with teacher and administrator advocates.