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Speeding ticket.

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

So yeah, on Saturday night, I got one of those. It kind of sucked. At first I thought it was $148, but I looked at the wrong place. I finally looked at the damn thing last night and it’s $119, but if I take it to court it’ll cost me $148.50. Uh, that seems wrong.

Some funny things from it:

1. I admitted to the cop that I was going to Club Shakers, which is a local strip club. He told me he catches a lot of guys speeding there. To make matters worse, I got there and they were closed. Even though they’re supposed to be open from 7 until 2 Thur-Sat. Assholes closed on a holiday weekend. Also married guys are lucky, they can get sexed up whenever they want.

2. I lied to him about not knowing the speed limit. But it’s a joke, if you go south on Highway 61 right after it divides from Highway 151, it should be 65 MPH right away. Instead they wait a mile keeping it at 55 and then change it to 65 right past the airport driveway. I think they do that just to catch speeders there. Especially since when you head west on 151 it changes to 65 right away.

3. So I looked it up on the Iowa Court records website thing and it says my last speeding ticket was in October of 1999. The cost for it was $28. How does a ticket go up $91 in 10.5 years? I mean that’s insane. If adjusted for inflation, the $28 from 1999 would today be almost $37. $119 in 1999 would be almost $91. When I mentioned the police guy, I mentioned that’s a lot more than my last ticket and he said that they just raised the prices on July 1st. Ha!

4. At that point I said I hadn’t had a ticket in over 10 years. He said “Well, the state has to get it’s money somehow…” I see, the money isn’t mine, it’s their money and they’re just getting it from me, as much as they need. If you’re careful, the state won’t get too much of it’s money from you.

5. “…because the state of Iowa is broke, ya know?” Oh, so the guys I didn’t vote for who are running the state are doing a bad job and therefore the guys who are going a little fast have to pay for it? I mean, shouldn’t those dumb fucks who can’t figure out how to stay within a budget have to pay more? The other funny thing is that the guys who are going a little fast aren’t costing the state anything. I mean, shouldn’t the taxes for people with kids go up unless their kids are going to private schools?  Why should a single person have to pay more taxes for other people’s kids to go to school? It’s bullshit.

6. So the state is going broke and what kind of state vehicle is he driving? A giant, gas guzzling SUV. Are you fucking kidding me? An SUV? I mean SUVs are fucking expensive and they use up lots of gas, which cost money. I mean are you telling me the state is going broke and you’re driving that money wasting vehicle? Nice planning, dumb ass state government. They’re trying to make me feel bad about paying a speeding ticket.

Now for something completely different.

Another thought. I was watching the P&T Bullshit episode where they talked about teen sex and one of the girls they talked to said some guys sent a picture on his cell phone of his area and she thought it was funny because he was proud of it when he shouldn’t have been. I bet the camera cuts off a few inches there.

Ya know, like how camera adds a couple…hundred pounds when you have clothes on.

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Gold buying tips.

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

I don’t own any gold, but recently there’s been a lot of stuff about how Glenn Beck has some company called Goldline as a sponsor. Basically they’re gold sellers. Earlier this week congress man Anthony Weiner, who probably just wants to make a name for himself, held a press conference saying that this Goldline company rips people off. Ok, maybe this Goldline company does, I have no idea. But if you do get ripped off from Goldline, then maybe you didn’t do your fucking homework on buying gold. It’s not like it’s all that hard to do. There’s this thing called the internet and usually you can comparison shop and look at multiple options. Maybe this Goldline company actually has the best prices. Maybe this congressman just doesn’t want people buying gold from this company because he doesn’t like Glenn Beck.

There are other companies beside just Goldline. I looked up and found a company that sells United States Gold Eagle cons for $1,270.34 when the market price for them is $1,276. The funny thing is that at the bottom of the page is a disclaimer that says that gold is subject to devaluation and there can be risk in owning gold.

So what about Goldline, any such disclaimers? Yep they say on their Risk Disclosure page, which they have a link to right at their main page:

Goldline does not guarantee that any client buying for investment purposes will be able to sell for a profit in the future.

Yep, they admit that. Also:

We strongly recommend that you acquire a sound understanding of precious metals, coins, and their markets before you make your first purchase. Be prepared to invest some time and effort into understanding the market and the grading of your coins or currency. Do not commit more than 5% to 20% of your investment funds to rare coins or precious metals

So apparently, Goldline is a bunch of assholes who actually admit that Gold might not be the safest of investments, that the person should be well versed in the gold market and gold buying before they buy from them and that you shouldn’t sink all your money in to gold.

Finally, I went over to Vanguard, a Mutual Fund company to see if they had any sort of Risk Disclosure page. I couldn’t find one. Mutual Funds could also go down in price and present a risk as well, but I suppose that legally, since they probably don’t advertise with Glenn Beck or at the very least don’t advertise with just conservative radio hosts that they don’t need a risk disclosure page. Any bets on this Anthony Weiner dude complaining about Mutual Funds being a rip off or a bad investment? Probably not.

UPDATE 12:45 PM:

Ok, doing a bit more reasearch in to this whole Goldline thing. Apparently, the gold coins that Goldline was charging twice as much as the cost of the gold itself were rare collectible coins, pre-1933. Buying the United States Gold Eagle will cost about the same as an ounce of gold. So essentially, Anthony Weiner seems to be suggesting that antique coins should only be worth the gold they’re made out of.

By that logic, this is just a crummy piece of paper. Selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars is much worse than the antique gold coins, if you melt this down all you’ll have are some ashes. Or if you have an 18th century armoire it’s sell price should be the same as a pile of lumber. Right?

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There’s a difference.

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Tonight Keith Olbermann attacked Sarah Palin for giving a speech at a Wine and Spirit Wholesalers convention and possibly giving a speech to a Marijuana Legalization group. The problem with that? Oh, she’s Pentecostal and her church has some sort of anti-drinking/drug rule. Anyways, I just find it odd that people seem to think that you can’t separate your religious beliefs from your political ideas. Can’t she be okay with the alcohol industry and yet be against drinking in her personal life? In the same way that I think using Ecstasy is a bad idea, but it shouldn’t be illegal.

Meanwhile, it would seem that the FBI had an informant go in to the Hutaree group and tried to push them to becoming more violent. So a lot like the so called terrorist busts back in the Bush years, instead of being Muslims, it’s Survivalist White Guys. None of the “terrorist” they busted were really violent until  the government started edging them on to be more violent. Meanwhile, real violence is never prevented by the government, like the lone guy who crash a plane in to an IRS building or 9/11. And usually the government causes all the violence like at Ruby Ridge and Waco. I find the accusations to be somewhat dubious. Yeah, these guys were probably stupid, but I doubt they were really a threat until the FBI informant came in.

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I’m just pissed off and excited.

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Pissed off: I did my Federal and State Income Taxes. Would it be too much to ask that the Federal Government and the State of Iowa actually make these tax forms understandable to the average person? They keep using vague and ambiguous terms that could mean anything and nothing. State Governments have demanded that cell phone companies make less confusing statements. I ask the government to make a less confusing tax form. Or just dump income taxes across the board. Get rid of all of them. If we did that, we’d be able to fund the same government we had in 1999.

Excited: iPad. Technology is way cool. I mean, sure it’s just a giant iPod Touch with just more features and a bigger screen. But it’s very cool that something so powerful could be made so small and thin and light weight. Remember ten years ago when computer screens weighed a ton and would bend desks because they were so heavy and gigantic. Now my screen on my laptop might weigh 1/2 a pound. I dunno. Everything just keeps getting better and easier to use. Especially if you’re not using Windows. But I’m not buying one. I have a laptop and an iPod Touch and that’s plenty good for now.

Pissed off: State of the Union. Ya know, I’m too busy playing WoW to actually watch it. I heard they moved it to accommodate Lost. Hehehe. It reminds me of those ABC guys who thought it was horrible that Monday Night Football would preempt Bewitched back in the early 70′s. So yeah, if you want a reason to be pissed off at that whole thing, read Anthony Gregory’s take on it. He’s awesome.

UPDATE 11:50 PM: Also props to Judge Andrew Napolitano for pointing out why Samuel Alito was justified in mouthing “That’s not true.” during the State of the Union. At least he didn’t yell out “You Lie!” like an idiot.

Excited: Baseball Prospectus annual PECOTA projections came out today and they have the Pirates projected to win 70 games! Now that’s progress. Of course, PECOTA isn’t a guarantee of anything. I mean the same projections have no team getting above 90 wins outside the AL East and the Nationals winning 82 while the Marlins are in last place. Also last season, they gave the Cubs a 62% chance of making the playoffs while the Cards and Rockies had 18% and 14% respectively.

I just wonder if they win 70 or even 75, would people like Smizik and Chass see the Pirates making progress or would they still write their little bitch-fest columns on how the Pirates aren’t spending money.

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Bush Tax…cuts?

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

It’s amazing to me that during the Bush years and in the year since he left office that the one thing the media blames the recession on is the so-called “Bush Tax Cuts”. And now that Obama is president, we got the tea party people out there finally acting outraged about taxes because Obama and the Democrats might raise taxes. But you see, Bush raised taxes too. There were no “tax cuts” during the Bush years. The fact is that in the final budget submitted by Bush for FY2009, the federal government collected $2.7 trillion in taxes. In 2002, the federal government collected a little under $2 trillion in taxes. Um, doing the math here, it looks to me that Bush increased taxes by $700 billion annually.

So what exactly do the Paul Krugmans of the world mean by tax cuts? They just mean the amount of money that the federal government collected was less than they would have collected had Bush not rearranged the tax code. And we’re talking about a relatively small amount. They use the term tax cut the same way that they use the term budget cuts. You see, the government doesn’t cut the budgets for most programs. What gets cut is the expected increase in the budget. So if in 2004 a government program cost $5 million and they asked for a $6 million budget the next year and only got $5.5 million budget, they’d be the victims of budget cuts.

But it is incredible that on one side are the tea party folks who complain about tax increases when they just saw the federal budget and the amount of money collected by the federal government skyrocket in the last 8 years. And at the same time, the pro-government left complain about the anti-government bias on the right by pointing to Bush’s 2009 $3.1 trillion government.

Paul Krugman and other Keynesians loves blaming the economic downturn on “tax cuts” because they have a vested interest in making cuts in the government look like the bogeyman that caused the recession. The recession was caused by easy credit, excessive spending and low savings, all of which were encouraged and subsidized by the federal government. At the end of the day, the last 8 years just throughly debunked Keynesian economics as a viable economic theory, but it continues on because it empowers the people in the government and that’s why it just won’t get a whole lot better any time soon.

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Monopoly, what?

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I was reading through Farm Futures about monopolies in the Agricultural industry. The first dumb thing in this article is not understanding the word monopoly. Monopolies aren’t several companies running the market. Monopolies are one company running the entire market, in which there’s very few examples of it and none of it in this article. Most of them are government enforced, like electric companies and AT&T. As much as people complained about Microsoft having a monopoly, they didn’t. They had a large percentage of the market share, but there was and still is Apple. Not to mention open source Operating Systems. The fact is that Microsoft has competition, they aren’t alone and probably never will be.

The first so called monopoly they mentioned was Bio-Tech Seed companies, in which there are basically just a few big players like Asgrow and Pioneer. Why would these two have a competitive advantage over other companies? Because of patents. Since nobody else can really keep up with the big guys and because the big guys have a de-facto monopoly on the products in their industry by use of patents, the small guys can’t get ahead. Patents generally restrict competition and create oligopolistic markets instead of free markets.

Then there’s fertilizers. The article states right away that the cause of the so called “monopoly” is the 1918 Webb-Pomerene Act which allows the makers of phosphate and potash to talk about pricing and other issues. The article basically complains about “collusion” among the companies and then goes on to say it’s the law.

The amazing thing is that their solution to this whole problem of “monopolies” is for more government oversight. Oh yeah, the guys who created the problem in the first place are going to tell these companies to stop being the problem that they created. It’s amazing how stupid this article is.

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Invasion 09.

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

So apparently in the last week, the Obama administration has invaded the country of Somalia. It’s amazing to me how many cars had those Obama bumper stickers with the peace sign in the O and now Obama is basically turning his back on that idea. Of course the morons who were protesting the wars during the Bush years don’t give a shit anymore. Those so called anti-war protests were just anti-Bush rallies. In the same way the anti-tax protests are just anti-Obama rallies. If you look at both groups, they were both so fake and so transparent. Hell, they even talked about sending the military to Darfur, as though that wasn’t unconstitutional.

So the people who were supposedly anti-war during the Bush years aren’t saying anything about this unconstitutional invasion of another nation. The fact is that the media has basically done their best work to keep this quiet and not say anything about it. Let the Obama admin attack whatever country it wants, he’s the president we want, he can do whatever he wants. Even worse, he’s increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan and there are still troops in Iraq. He hasn’t been the peace president people said he would be. But those people don’t care, they just wanted a Democrat instead of a Republican.

And now Bill Clinton is doing some saber rattling over Iran. And just as I finished this up, CNN has a breaking story saying that Gitmo wouldn’t be closed by January 2010 which was the Obama deadline.

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Ron Paul: Right in 1998 and 2009.

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

I’ll vote for impeachment….yes, unenthusiastically, because I think the charges are way too mild and not touching the issues I’d like to touch.

So while most of the congress was worried about Bill Clinton having sex, Ron Paul was correctly more worried about the illegal overseas war mongering of the Clinton Administration.

We’re liable to have more attacks on us by terrorist

And just three years later he was proven right. Too bad nobody in the media even notices this kind of stuff.

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What do you know?

Friday, August 21st, 2009

The price for used cars are actually going up. A car salesman says it’ll take 6 to 8 months for the used car market to return to normal.

Oh and it would appear that some dropped out of the Cash for Clunkers because the government was stiffing them on the money. I would bet that it’ll take 6 to 8 months for most of these car dealers to get their money from the government. It sounds like the Cash for Clunkers is turning in to a real depressant for the Auto Dealerships around the country.

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AT&T in 1983…

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

Right after the 1980′s Government break up of AT&T, a sign with this was hanging in many bell offices around the country:

There are two giant entities at work in our country, and they both have an amazing influence on our daily lives. . . one has given us radar, sonar, stereo, teletype, the transistor, hearing aids, artificial larynxes, talking movies, and the telephone. The other has given us the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, the Great Depression, the gasoline crisis, and the Watergate fiasco. Guess which one is now trying to tell the other one how to run its business?

Oooh, owned.

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