Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

Hello? America?

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Are you paying attention?

Great. We’ve just managed to vote in a bunch of Tea Party-backed talking heads. They keep talking tax cuts and reduced deficit spending, like they think that’s going to solve all of America’s financial woes.

I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. The guys who got voted out were completely ineffective. The government has been trying to run up the slope of a mudslide for the past two years — after the warmonger who was in office for eight years before that started the flow of “defense” spending that caused the mudslide in the first place.

Yes, I blame Bush and his government. They got us involved in two fucking wars. Wars we can’t win. Wars that cost a fortune — every single day. Wars that are killing and maiming our young people, warping their minds, and making us look like brutal colonialists to everyone else in the world.

It’s Viet Nam all over again — but worse.

When Bush took over (from Bill Clinton, in case you forgot), the U.S. had a record budget surplus. When he handed the reins to Obama, we had a record budget deficit. Looks like Junior Bush ran up the credit cards, huh? And who’s paying for it now? Taxpayers.

You want to know where the money is going? Take a look at the budget. The top six expenditures are going to:

  • $738 billion – Defense spending
  • $738 billion – Social Security
  • $567 billion – Income Security (including unemployment, federal employee disability, and military retirement)
  • $498 billion – Medicare
  • $381 billion – Health
  • $251 billion – Interest

Look at the numbers. Our total budget is $3.69 trillion dollars. 20% of that goes to defense spending. Another 33% goes to social welfare for the elderly. (Yes, I did say social welfare — isn’t that what social security and medicare are?) But what really kills me is that nearly 7% of our national budget goes to paying interest on accumulated debt. It’s the sixth highest expenditure! Remember those credit cards Junior Bush ran up?

Yet all the Republican Party and Tea Party people can chant is “lower taxes, lower taxes.” They somehow think that lowering taxes will create jobs and generate more income for the Federal government. My question: When you lower a rate, how does that bring in more money?

The Bush administration experimented with this years ago. They gave us all $300. I’m not sure what we were supposed to do with it, but I donated mine to the 9/11 Fund. Today, with 10% of Americans out of work and about the same percentage of Americans about to lose their homes, another $300 (or $600 or $1000) would likely go toward the mortgage or put food on the table. How is that going to create jobs?

Also, how is a tax cut going to help people who don’t have any income?

Worse yet, these supposed tax cutters are completely opposed to higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans — people with multiple homes and cars, people who send their kids to the best colleges, people who can afford health care, people who don’t need social security or medicare or unemployment. Somehow, the GOP and Tea Partiers equate these people with small business owners. Give them tax cuts and they’ll create more jobs. I call bullshit. The wealthiest Americans are not “small” business owners. They’re corporate executives and the upper management of investment firms, insurance companies, and banks. The same people the Bush administration bailed out before leaving Obama with the big credit card bills and expensive wars.

What the GOP and Tea Partiers fail to acknowledge is that the United States population has one of the lowest tax burdens in the world. Yes, we pay less taxes than most civilized nations.

When you pay less taxes, you have to accept less services. So what are we going to cut? Social Security and Medicare? It’s mostly that age bracket that voted in the supposed tax cutters, so I seriously doubt their services will be cut. We can’t cut defense spending with two wars on. We can’t cut interest spending because we don’t want the Chinese calling our debts due immediately. That leaves income security, health, education, veteran’s benefits, national parks, transportation. Do you really want to cut any of that?

For the record, I don’t mind paying more taxes if it means I get the services I need for a healthy and secure lifestyle. But I’ll be damned if I pay more taxes so big business can get tax breaks for sending jobs to China. Or so corporate executives earning $1 million + a year can buy another home or plane or boat.

Personally, I’m fed up with the whole thing. It’s all too clear to me that all parties want the same thing: to be in power so they can help their special interests. They say whatever they want to get in power. This year’s attack ads were completely out of control. The lies were outrageous.

And what do they want? The GOP want to help big business and the wealthy. The Dems want to help the poor and ecology. The Tea Partiers want to help themselves and their ultra-conservative, religious backers. No one seems to want to help all Americans. It’s us vs. them.

In the meantime, the taxpayers — who are paying the salaries and health care benefits for the morons we vote into office — are getting treated to an ineffective government unable to do the right thing for anyone.

The next two years should be interesting.

Yes, Wilderness IS Special

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And we don’t need your signs ruining it.

Wilderness is Special?I took a short hike yesterday in the Secret Mountain Wilderness area of Sedona. Wilderness areas are “protected” by the government, open only to foot traffic. Hell, they even suggest air traffic minimum altitudes.

Yet apparently the government has no problem erecting ugly signs like this one and the equally unattractive one just down the trail from it just to remind us how special this area is.

Apparently, it’s not special enough to remain sign-free.

Act Like an American

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Stop being close-minded, fearful bigots.

Act Like an AmericanOne of my Facebook friends shared this wonderful image the other day. It’s apparently a reproduction by Al Haug of an image that’s been floating around the Web for a while. He found a smaller version of the image on Salon.com but even the author of that post didn’t know where it originated.

I think it says a lot about what’s going on these days in America. We used to be a strong, proud country, tolerant of different races and religions. Now we’re the victims of fear-mongering radio show hosts and failed governors who feed us hate until we’re afraid of everything different from what we are.

And don’t even get me started on the war against science.

It makes me sick to see what this country is becoming.

Read this sign. Share it with your friends. Remember the message. Stop fearing. Stop hating.

Act like an American.

There IS Such a Thing as Too Much Business

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When that business is being conducted at a loss.

I’ve been deeply involved in the Groupon debate for the past few days.

Earlier in the summer, I’d bought a Groupon from a Twitter friend and had used it to buy some jewelry at half price. Later, in August, I was approached by a Groupon clone company and got the details on what they really cost a small business. I did some math, realized it would never work for my business, and blogged about it .

Only a week or two later, I heard a story on NPR about Groupon in which a friend of mine with a business similar to mine was interviewed. He seemed to say positive things in the interview. When I called him, he gave more concrete information that didn’t seem too positive. I spent half a day crunching the numbers again and still couldn’t see how Groupon could benefit me.

I put that aside and got on with my life.

Back into the Debate

Yesterday, my attention was captured by a story on Plagiarism Today about a photographer who had been caught apparently passing off professional photographers’ images as hers on her Web site. The whole thing blew up in her face when she offered a 1-hour portrait sitting with print and CD of images for $65 through Groupon. She’d sold over 1,000 of these — far more than any photographer could complete in a year — when someone pointed out that photos on her Web site belonged to other photographers. She attempted to say that her site was hacked, but it was pointed out that the same photos also appeared on her Facebook page. Then her site and Facebook page went down; when her site reappeared it had a collection of crap photos that my mother could have taken with a Kodak 110 camera. (My mother is a horrible photographer.)

If you’re interested in seeing how the situation developed, read the comments from the Groupon thread, which were preserved by Petapixel after Groupon cancelled the offer, refunded the money, and deleted the thread. (A little too late to put out that fire.)

This story was picked up by many other sites, including TechCrunch. Their focus was on the ability of a business to effectively service Groupon customers, Groupon’s apparent failure to properly vet the services it features, and the hardship incurred by at least one Groupon merchant, Posie’s Diner. Since I’ve always thought that the Groupon model could be potentially harmful to a small business merchant using their service to advertise, I went to the Posie’s Diner blog post and read the story. It’s an honest and rather sad account by the restaurant owner who wound up having difficulties meeting payroll expenses while accepting the Groupons she’d sold. Each one had a face value of $13 but she’d received only $3 for each one. That meant she’d have to sell $13,000 of product for only $3,000 in revenue. The blog post explains the other related problems, which are mostly customer related.

Some Commenters Are Jerks

To make it clear, Posie’s Diner does not blame Groupon. She admits she made a mistake and takes full responsibility for it. But that didn’t stop the usual bunch of jerks from making nasty comments on her blog post. This one really pissed me off:

Businesses that complain about too much business should not be in business.

Wow. This guy needs to get a clue. If every sale you make comes at a loss, then even one sale is “too much business.”

That’s the situation I would have faced if I went with the Groupon clone — or Groupon. My margins are so low that I’d lose money on every single sale. I didn’t need that kind of business. No business does.

Is Groupon a Problem?

I admit that I resent the idea of a company making money off my hard work while I lose money on deeply discounted sales. Posie’s might have made a mistake going with Groupon, but it’s a mistake they won’t make again. I just won’t make that mistake at all.

To be fair, I read both good and bad comments all over the Web about Groupon from both merchants and customers. Clearly, there are possibilities for using the service with success. I just can’t figure out what they could be for my business. But there’s also a lot of pain in the Groupon model: the financial hardship of businesses with too many Groupon sales, the difficulty for customers being able to redeem Groupon goods and services due to crowds and overbookings.

Back to the “Photographer”

The idiot “photographer” who unknowingly pulled me back into the Groupon debate is truly a fool. Not only did she commit fraud when attempting to use other photographers’ work as examples of her own to sell her services, but she sold far more Groupons than she could ever expect to accept. If she hadn’t been revealed as a scammer in time to cancel the sale, she likely would have been out of business before long. After all, she was making less than $35 on each hour-long session at a client’s home. Between transportation costs and materials costs, she would have been in the red from day one. Would 1,700 sales at only $35 each have been “too much business” for her? I think so.

Then, when customers starting seeing the dismal quality of her work, would Groupon have refunded their money? And what would they have done when the fraud claims starting coming in and Groupon was called out for not properly vetting the offer?

Or maybe she was a true scammer who never planned to do any Groupon work. Perhaps she planned to just take the money and run.

Clearly, there’s some kind of problem with Groupon that needs attention. I’ll continue to watch from the sidelines. But I certainly won’t be giving Groupon any business in any form.