Aaron’s Blog

According to Real Clear Politics, Obama is still in the lead in the general election.

According to individual state polls, he needs to step up the fight in some of the southern states.

So why is McCain losing? I think some of it has to do with age. He’s pretty old and while his health records say he is healthy, I think it worries people. He also has that nagging flip flopping problem much like John Kerry did.

I’ve been watching and reading a lot of the web sites for these PUMA groups. People need to be pretty careful because there are a lot of different PUMA groups sprouting up, most of which are frauds. I don’t even think there is one legitimate group that is registered as a PAC.

Most of the keep repeating the same thing. “It’s not over.” and “Hillary can still win the nomination!” I don’t know what kind of drugs they have been taking, but it certainly must be illegal and mind altering. No matter how you count it or try to spin it, Hillary has lost and she will not be nominated under any circumstances. Even looking at the current numbers, if Michigan and Florida were restored to full strength, the amount of super delegates that have pledged to Obama still puts him up over the top. The chances of them swinging to another side at this stage is slim to none, leading heavily toward none.

I know people are still really mad about the whole Michigan and Florida thing, but you know, rules are rules. They need to take that up with their state governments. McCain is losing in the polls. Obama is winning, even without Hillary’s supporters. He has some better policies on some things where McCain has quite a bit of flip flopping going on. Obama looks like he will be the more stable person in the long term. I think it’s time for these PUMAs to really grow up and realize that while some votes were not counted, there is a reason for it. That reason goes above and beyond anything that Hillary brings to the table.

An article from Phoenix, AZ said that a home invasion suspect was confronted by police. He resisted when given an order to drop everything and cooperate with police. So they tasered him. He pulled the taser probes out and started fighting with police. He was able to wrestle the taser from one of the officers and start using it on them. A third officer showed up and fatally shot the intruder.

Can we stop with the forcing of police officers to stop using deadly force now? Please? That could have been much worse. Children could have been killed by this nut case.

A lot of people are saying she won the popular vote… That is not true.

According to the numbers by Real Clear Politics, which is who everyone quotes when saying Hillary won the popular vote, Obama won the popular vote. He won by a VERY small margin, but he won it none the less.

The problem is, that margin gets even wider when you remove the Florida vote, which needs to be done in order to be fair. Since the Michigan and Florida voting process was invalid from the start, they cannot be counted at all, delegates or voting numbers. Rules are rules, and while there are a lot of people that will state rules were meant to be broken and a lot of good national things have happened by breaking rules, this is not one of them. There is a process with rules for a reason and that reason is to stop fiasco’s like we had in this primary season with the democrates. We also cannot use the numbers from IA, NV, ME, or WA. Those states do not publish any of the actual popular vote figures, so even a guess-timate would be highly inaccurate and illogical to use in this context.

So, let’s look at the numbers. Just using popular vote without MI, IA, NV, ME, or WA, Obama gets 17,535,458 while Hillary gets 17,493,836. A very small margin indeed. That’s only 41,622. For a total of 35,029,294 votes, 41,622 is a pretty small number. But let’s get serious for a minute. The Florida outcome was 576,214 for Obama to 870,986 for Hillary. That is a margin of difference of 294,772. Since we need to remove the Florida vote because it was an invalid election, that will make the real numbers this:
Obama - 16,959,244
Hillary - 16,622,850
New Spread - 336,394

We went from a spread of .12% to a spread of 1%. So instead of Obama actually winning by only .1%, in reality, he won by 1% which is still close, but not as close as people believe it was.

Before I get a ton of hate mail from die-hard Hillary supporters saying I’m just a Obama-robot, I’m actually not a supporter of any of the lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that all politicians, including Hillary, Obama, and McCain, are liars, cheaters, and do not look out for the best interest of the country or the party they support.

I only look at the facts of the situation and with this, you cannot count invalid elections. Dean knew it even before super Tuesday happened. Michigan (where I live, by the way) and Florida both were not even on the roadmap (except to show how incompetant the elected officals were by breaking the rules) until Hillary lost super Tuesday. That’s when she immediately started preaching to all of us how important it was for our votes to count. Shady isn’t it? She rallied everyone to make our voices heard, so she could win invalid elections. I think that was the biggest turning point in the primary. That is when super delegates started changing their minds and supporting Obama. There was no conspiracy or selection process by super delegates. They simply saw their previously chosen candidate playing dirty politics. She turned her back on her co-workers, the people she needed to work with, and supported illegal elections and even took it one step further: recommended that people fight for their “voices” to be heard. By telling people that what they did was right, was not only immoral, but dangerous. She set the precident that every primary could be frought with bickering and arguing over who should be first, and who is more important. This is why she lost, not only the popular vote, but also the support of her fellow politicians.

It’s quite possible that her chances of a future presidential nomination could be jeoparized greatly, as well. With the split in the party she has caused it could be quite unlikely that she will garner future support from the high ranking democrates that help bring a person to nomination. It’s a shame, because her stance on how to fix health care was a good one. She was going to try to do something no one else has ever been able to do, including herself, and that was to make health care a national program. I was hoping that as a president she might be able to push it through unlike in the past times she has tried, but now we may never see such a bold move.

It is time for the Democrates to move on, however. There are a lot of pros and cons of both Obama and McCain. People need to be making decisions on who has better policies, not fighting amongst themselves over who did what and who was “selected” not elected. He was elected, by popular vote.

This country has undergone many changes to manufacturing industries, big business, and small business alike. With past news of layoffs by the major automotive manufacturers, cities like Detroit, Flint, and surrounding suburbs have suffered greatly. The situation, nationwide, was made even worse by headlines of AT&T, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch cutting back 16,000+ jobs.

The fact of the situations is that we are now in a global marketplace, more-so that we ever have been. Our businesses have to compete with countries like China, Taiwan, and India who can provide very cheap labor rates which can always offset (and more) the costs of doing business in a foreign country. It’s cheaper to employ 500 people in China than even 100 people in the United States. Health benefits, retirement benefits, and general average pay is much greater than other developing countries. The people in these countries, like China and India, live very cheaply and do not live up to the American lifestyle of spend more, play harder.

It’s a known fact that the problem our country faces today with our failing economy is that for the past decade; consumer spending is, on average, higher than income. That means that most people are spending more on disposable goods than they have spendable income. As this trend continues, so does consumer debt on revolving credit. As this debt goes up, so does the possibility that the spending will have to stop eventually. Once the spending stops, the profits for the retailers and manufacturers stop. Once the profit stops, the employment cutbacks need to be made. The trouble starts there and ends with consumer bankruptcy. As people lose their jobs and cannot find a replacement right away, the interest and late fees on revolving credit build up and soon payments are not being made.

Now that bankruptcy laws are more strict so that credit providers will not totally lose out, people are forced into selling cars, homes, and anything they have just to pay back some of the debt and new payment plans are made for a percentage of the rest. Once this happened, a flood of new homes were hitting the market. This is where the housing market took a major turn for the worse. It wasn’t long before banks were advertising new loan programs to get people into houses they could have never afforded in the first place. People with income that would only allow a $150,000 house were taking out interest only loans on $250,000 houses and just making payments on the interest. This was a great idea because houses always go up in value. The problem with that theory is that a house is only valued by how much someone will pay for that house. Realtors and property brokers continuously drove up the prices of houses by taking into account what the seller needed to get out of the property and then adding a percentage for themselves. Sometimes, this was much more than what the property was really worth. It was common for “house flippers” to buy houses for what they were really worth, spending 20% more to do upgrades, and then expecting a 50% or more profit. Naturally, realtors would agree and list houses for that amount, especially if other realtors in the area were doing the same thing. If there is no choice, people are forced to pay that amount if they want to live in that area or “fall in love” with that house.

For years, this price jumping and incredible inflation of home prices continued. When those very low payments, interest only, loans started to expire and people needed to refinance, the homes went back up on the market to make a “quick profit”. Unfortunately, because so many homes went up on the market, the bubble burst. Homes stopped selling, loan payments doubled and tripled, and people could no longer afford to make the payments. Tie that into a slowing economy where large businesses were cutting back on employees and the recipe for disaster was baking in the oven. The amount of foreclosures today is incredible. Banks are dumping off properties for anything they can get. Since these house prices are sliding down hill fast, so are the surrounding property values. Even if a property could still be reasonable priced at $200,000, the 3 houses down the street that can’t even sell for $100,000 bring that $200,000 house down to their level of $100,000. Remember that the price of a property is relative to the prices of similar property surrounding it.

This situation is made worse by the fact that most of the manufacturing personnel that is unable to find a job will be unable to find a job in the future. This isn’t a temporary situation, but more of a permanent situation caused by the migration away from manufacturing into technology, education, science, and health care. Since manufacturers are forced to send jobs overseas, employees with no or outdated skills will be permanently unemployed unless they go for re-education or update skills for newer more efficient manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, even these newer manufacturing processes require less general laborers, so even fewer people will be required.

Now that the unemployed will need re-education or updated skills, the educational industry will add more teachers and administrators to their payroll. More people will seek out professions that are current, which means more engineers, medical professionals, and information technology personnel. It is estimated that by the year 2012, the United States will have a deficiency of 800,000 registered nurses. In Michigan alone, there are 84,000 jobs that go unfilled due to no qualified candidates, even in an economy that is the worst in the nation. These jobs are not skilled or non-skilled laborer positions. These positions are for medical, information technology, and scientific companies. The majority of the unemployed in Michigan are general laborers from automotive companies that have drastically cut back on their operations.

Big businesses are scaling back while small businesses are cropping up. Currently, small businesses account for 70% of the new jobs created today. Unfortunately, these jobs are for less pay and benefits that are found in larger corporations. This trend is going to lead to considerable less consumer spending and add to the rising costs of products and services. This double edged sword is here to stay.

In the future, it is hoped that credit providers become more aware of the financial needs of their customers and better financial planning is taught to young people so that consumer debt is avoided.

I have one word for this piece of software: Crap.

Once installed, it changes your Windows Login sound in such a way that it cannot be changed back. I have dug as deep as I could and never did find out where or how this got changed. I’ve contacted support many, many times only to have my support requests answered by a canned “Go to add/remove programs…” message and then the ticket is closed immediately. There is no way to contact support, at all.

It also serves up a TON of advertising. It’s actually hard to view the weather information through the ad related crap ware it installs on your PC.

Stay away from this application. It WILL damage your computer.

So on Monday, Michigan will officially implode on itself and chaos and anarchy and will ensue. The Michigan State Police boys will be on at 15% strength. Just enough to keep some riots at bay (except in Detroit, and maybe Flint). I even heard that the bridges in my wonder hellhole of a town would all be stuck in their upright position… We won’t have the secretary of state, nor will we have any other non-essential services. Since the government will effectively be cancelled until indefinitely, I am hereby setting my chronograph and counting the time that the government will be shut down… During this time, I will refuse to pay any taxes to the State of Michigan. Since they cannot provide me with any of the services that I am paying taxes for, they will not get any of my tax money. I expect to see options on my tax forms at the end of this year so that I can write in the appropriate times that I will not pay taxes for.

That sounds pretty dumb doesn’t it? I will still have to pay my taxes…. So why is Jenny around the block shutting down all the other income generating sources for Michigan? She is shutting down the casinos. She is shutting off the lottery. I think it’s official. Jennifer Granholm is smoking crack. Oh hell. She has always been a dope head. Just look at her policies. She’s on crack. She has to be. No other person in their right mind would do the things she has done to kill this state. She has to blame everything on the previous administration… Bull. Cut the crap Jenny. You suck and you know it. Do the right thing and step down.

I just spent the last 4 hours writing a 500-word essay on Economic Feasibility. Feasibility of what, you ask? I have no clue. That’s just what it was supposed to be titled. It normally doesn’t take me 4 hours to write such a small paper. I’m used to writing 300 page papers in just a few days. So why did this take so long? Because colleges for adults are dumb, that’s why. You see, we are not allowed to reference ourselves in the sense that we would actually have experience to base opinions on. You see, nothing you write about is every fact. You can never prove that the sky is blue. You can however, quote other people that say the sky is blue. This gives you a reference point to say that other people also confirm the sky is blue. However, what happens when you have a topic that you know inside and out? It puts that shoe on the other foot. You are no longer just the student, you are the researcher that already has done the experiments and now wants to report the findings. Colleges don’t allow that. They tell you that you must research and reference other people…

Why? I don’t know. I think it’s just because they are arrogant and useless for people who actually have real world experience. You see, with regards to economic feasibility, I know what it is, what it does, and what it means. I do it for a living. As a software engineer, I design systems that save companies money, and usually at a cheaper cost than what they would have paid in a few weeks without the system I designed in place. I don’t need some financial analyst to tell me how to do this… Nor do I want to waste the time finding someone to “back me up” on this topic, because quite frankly, I don’t need it, because I am good at it.

So what did I do? I got my ass handed to me. I submitted a paper that has no references… Only a reference to my 10+ years of experience working as the system analyst to implement cost effective systems that saves companies millions of dollars a year. Do you think I will get a good grade? No. I didn’t submit a paper that worked in the confines of the establishment, so I will get my ass handed to me on a nice silver platter. That’s ok. I can just throw that out; I needed to lose some fat off my ass anyway.

When trying to do repairs on your own motorcycle (or car), it’s very important to remember that it’s just a machine. It’s not some living and breathing organism that is out to make your life hell, even though that is what it may seem like sometimes.

In trying to get my 1980 KZ1000 back on the road, I encountered many trials and tribulations. The problem is, half of those problems were probably my fault. Frustration sets in and I started to give up. Some common grumblings were “This thing will never get fixed.” “This is just a pile of junk and will never work right, I need to just sell it and take the loss.”

Not once did I ever stop and think, “You know, this is just a machine… It can be fixed. It just may not get fixed right this second.”

I finally finished the book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While this book was more than just something to help me realize that it was JUST a machine, I took a lot of that type of advice to heart. Once I finally gave up on the notion that it was out to get me, things went a lot smoother.

Read the book.. It’s pretty good.

Don’t mistake the title. I actually really hate the look.

The Victory Vision is the latest model from Victory motorcycles (a Polaris company, now).

While it has a hot-rod engine, the styling is something to be desired. To me, it looks like a cross between a land speed record rocket, and a Harley Davidson Road King. Is this what the new generation of rich urban bikers want? It used to be a traditional looking Harley with all the bells and whistles of brand new cars…