I hate wasted days...

its usually been practice for me, while @ ISX, to take 3 days off during the faire season, usually the monday after opening, the tuesday after 3-day, and the monday after closing, because of the recovery times involved.

well, this year, none of those three were planned, but the first got taken anyways.

our cable modem died friday, and the best they could offer in "normal" service was September *9th* (no I am NOT going without highspeed for 10 days straight and still expect to have a 'net at all...this is NOT vacation time).

so they put a rush on it to happen today...only it was "anytime" today...meaning they could have come as early as 8am, or (i was originally told) as late as 5pm...turns out it could have been as late as 9pm, and ended up being 730. All the while i wait in silence (and dial-up), with no chance to get away to get my laptop from my office which had all my work...murphy's laws would have guarenteed that if i ever stepped away from home, that's when they'd show up.

so i got jack done today.

ended up being that my own cable-modem fried, and i gotta make a trek back to circuit city to replace it, but in the meantime i'm renting one from adelphia to cover the time (only $3).

plus i need to go to the local adelphia and bitch a bit to get some credit for all of this.

where's the accountability??

On the subject of how much NYC will lose due to over-expenditures and lost wages during the RNC Convention this week (hint: over $300 Million, all the while promising they'd "pay for it", with a budget of $50 million...

This same "its for your benefit and we'll pay for it" (but it ended up costing millions more than we said it would and we'll just add to the national debt or other taxes for the difference) is the exact same thing they've said about:

1) The recovery effort post 9/11
2) "No Child Left Behind"
3) The Iraq War
4) The Iraq War Recovery Effort
5) The Medicare prescription plan
6) Federal aid for hurricane victims in the last 2 years
7) The cost of the creating, training, and instillation of TSA for our airports
8) The cost of cleaning up ANY natural resource area after EPA deregulations have permitted companies to destroy it for gross profits...

i'd rather not go on.

however, when *I* screwed up my budget and bill paying process that badly, I had the bill collectors come after me within days of that major screw-up.

so where's the bill collector now? where's the accountant who will finally make these bastards accountable for thier flawed processes...

Item By Item

My answers to a section of this post on what Kerry would do that supposedly would suck. (yes, its the Tron guy)

* He'd institute measures to stop sending jobs offshore without a single thought for the industries he'd destroy.

would those industries be destroyed anyways because so many americans were unemployed that they simply stopped buying cars, furnature, reasonable clothes...would the state and local governments be destroyed because by not having any residents with income, they would also therefore be without money to pay for schools so that the next generation might be able to actually get out of the dead-end town and maybe get their own job someday?

before it gets outsourced too?

* He'd abdicate critical decisions on our foreign policy to our putative allies, never caring that their interests are often at odds with our own.

since when are *our* interests the best for the world? Since when is *our* cheap oil (really, the only thing ANYBODY seems to be interested in) more important than anything else? It is a symbol of unbelievable arrogance to continue to feel, 60 years after WW2, that our actions alone define what is best for the world.

There's a REASON the rest of the world hates us, and you just reiterated it.

* He'd jack up taxes on the average American in order to buy votes by giving the money away to those who would not work for it.

So you're also of the belief that those on Hard Time are merely freeloaders, who are just collecting money off the hard working rich people (who, mind you, are rich people getting richer because they just outsourced the jobs of those who are now suddenly on Hard Time)?

People *WANT* to work. They really do. The tiny minority of freeloaders as been thrown incredibly out of proportion by propagandists over the decades. However, factory workers can't switch to jobs in WalMart or McDonalds. They simply can't. Similarly, they can't suddenly become super computer programmers, both because there aren't enough positions there, and because they lack the talent and education for it. And even so, *those* jobs are getting outsourced, too.

So where will they work? And in that (*long* -- my most recent unemployment lasted 5 months) period while looking for a new job that isn't there, how will they eat? How can they look for a job when they have to keep selling their clothes and their furnature just to keep the roof? And what happens when they lose that as well?

where's the "Compassionate Conservatism" in all of this?

Giving tax cuts to the rich.

again.

update: my reply to his reply is posted here in my comments. Best excerpt: In the end, the mounting costs of EVERYTHING the Bush administration has done will have my child indebted to this government FAR more than someone on Hard Time collecting a welfare check for a year.