Friday, November 21, 2014

Immigrant song

I watched the president give his talk on legalizing 5 million illegal aliens.
This is a repeat of the 80's, legalize a bunch of people that are here illegally
and that incentivizes another 5 million people to head this way.   The laws in
the 80's were supposed to be the final answer, no more people would come into
country, and Reagan and Bush gave a couple of executive orders that added
a few more million people, but that was supposed to be it.

These current executive orders are wrong for two reasons:  Constitutionally
because it's not expanding on a law previously passed, like Reagan and Bush did
to legalize the families legalized in the law of 1986, It's creating new agencies, employees and workflows.  Operationally it's wrong because we're repeating the same mistake again, legalizing everyone that is here without closing the border first.

It's a done deal at this point, and pretty much irreversible.  if they try and deport
someone in two years the news will be full of reports of boo hoo stories, deporting
children.  Pretty depressing really,  Romney's 47% is inching ever closer to 51%,
and that will be that.

Monday, May 05, 2014

Back in Houston

We finally made it back to living in houston.  Things are fairly different from 8 years ago, more people, more traffic and food is twice as expensive.    In 8 years I've gained about 70% in salary, but we are poorer here than when we left because of inflation.  Crazily enough, the government is claiming little to no inflation because ipads are getting better and cheaper, but once you've bought an ipad (or 2) food really is a lot more expensive.  I'm expecting real measured inflation to kick in once the government makes some program to relieve people's suffering, with mandatory wage hikes or COLA increases, or everything could crash and we'd have another 5 years of deflation and no growth or stagflation.  What has been so tiring about the past 14 years is being trapped in the tides of history.  I'd much prefer just working and saving my money and making 5% on investments, but to make any return I've been throwing the dice and risking a lot, and losing a crapload of money twice since the dot-bomb crash.  So who knows what's going to happen.

I'm only writing this because the building management is constructing offices from an area that used to be a conference room, and it's so noisy that I haven't yet been able to concentrate.  I thought i would try an old trick and start to write something here and hope that it carries over to what I have to write for work, or the carpenters will go smoke a cigarette for a little while.  Luckily  my spanish is good enough that I can follow what their plans are for the morning, and it sounds like they are leaving to go somewhere else.  huzzah.

Anyway, glad to be back home, back on my native heath.  Finally able to unpack all of my books and buy a lawnmower.