Taxing the Productive Class

Let me see who is going to bear the tax burden? Why, if we do anything against productive businesses, it will create an incredible burden on the working and middle-class Americans. How could you avoid understanding that? The president and the Democratic Congress have told you that repeatedly. The whole point of the affordable healthcare act was to provide more services of a higher quality at less cost to more people. If you can read that sentence and not see at least four contradictory terms then maybe you need to return to the fourth grade and do a refresher course.

During the Roosevelt years of the depression the slogan was often heard "there is no such thing as a free lunch". You can't get something for nothing in a real-world. Modern healthcare is not simple solutions that were applied in the 1950s and 60s. We have laparoscopic surgery, CT scans, pinpoint radiography, MRIs, PET scans, and modern truly miracle drugs. The days of exploratory surgery in which we open up the chest cavity toss the parts around and declare the body riddled with cancer are over. That sort of therapy is not cheap.

Some of the statements during the Affordable Healthcare Act debate leave you wondering how irrational adult could accept them. Imposing 10 years of taxes for seven years of services and claiming a savings simply does not stand up to scrutiny. To suggest that you can provide health care services for 35 million people previously uninsured simply by cutting excess payments to healthcare providers is ridiculous. Doctors, nurses, lab technicians and healthcare facilities do not come cheap. To demand that they provide services to additional personnel and do so at lower cost is not logical.

Now we are approaching the economic cusp for Obamacare. As we enter 2013 we will begin to see the imposition of taxes, penalties, and regulations. Here is just one of the pending results of government run amok.

Tax to Rise from 45 to 65%

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can be assured that it is going to get much worse before it gets better. And the first-place you encounter this will be in your own doctor's office.

Room-Mate

Saturday Morning Rocker

And who is it that says we won't get fooled again?

Another Gun Tragedy

When will we see the last of these gun tragedies? When will somebody do something to restrict the access of American citizens to firearms? When will a liberal mayor recognize the difference between "automatic" and "semi--automatic"? When will someone make a distinction between gun violence and criminal activity or the act of a madman?

The events in Connecticut yesterday were sheer insanity. It was not at all about guns in America. Had this individual wished to perpetrate his acts without the benefit of a firearm he certainly could have found more than enough means to do so.

A Knife in China

 If we were to deny all of America the right to ownership of an AR style firearm would we really have any impact on this sort of tragedy in an American school? I don't think any logical person can make that argument.

Last Night's Gun Tragedy

That is what I'm talking about when I raised the question of another gun tragedy. You could not imagine another gun law added on the top of the stack of restrictions on gun ownership in the city of Chicago. We find the most extreme progressive politicians in control of both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois. You are not allowed to defend yourself against thugs, vandals, and gang bangers if you live in Cook County. What additional restriction could you impose on the cowering, fearful, barricaded citizenry?

If you want to discuss the impact on gun control in reducing tragedies of multiple murders with gun violence, then don't look to a school in Connecticut. Look to the streets of Chicago. Imagine you are under threat by a street gang member who does not know you, does not care about you, does not respect you and will not leave you uninjured. Now dial 911 on your cell phone, take a deep breath and wait for the police to arrive. You will be long dead by the time you hear the first siren.

Answering Some Mail

" I'd be interested in your thoughts on Win 8 though. We've just gone through a long period of "gotta have an iPad because...." followed by "how come it can't access office documents, my windows shared folders.....". We're hoping a Windows tablet might solve those problems while preserving some of the iPad's mobility."

I upgraded to Windows 8 on my laptop about a month ago. The upgrade on the existing Windows 7 system was fairly quick and with a bit of study of the users guides available online, in very short order I found the Window 8 system effective and usable. As expected there would be some growing pains and some frustration as you looked for things that it previously been readily to hand.

As a longtime toy lover rapidly approaching Christmas it was only a short leap to begin justifying the purchase of a new computer. The old one had been top-end in 2006 when I bought it and I was still very adequate, but what has need ever had to do with buying a new toy?

I've got a 23 inch touchscreen Dell all-in-one with 8 GB of RAM, a 1 TB drive, and wireless everything. I can see portions of my desk and my bookcase that had not been visible to sunlight for a decade. The migration was far from painless, and I wrote an item about that last week. Now that I've got my essential tools in place and have worked with the new system for three or four days I find it very useful and effective.

Now to address your problem. I love my iPad, but I find it less than effective for doing actual work. It is a media consumption device first rather than a productivity tool. The question of accessing Office documents and window shared folders is not insurmountable. You can use the Apple iCloud, Dropbox, or Microsoft Sky Drive or other cloud storage devices. There are numerous apps that allow you to access office documents in the iOS.

All of that being said, if my concern is actual productivity, and portability is a necessity, than an ultra-book or similar with touchscreen running Windows 8 and Microsoft Office would be your best solution. I'm really not sold on the tablet as an effective workplace tool. The difference in size and weight for an ultra-book with an attached real keyboard and the space necessary for RAM and storage is negligible and makes the investment more justified.

The size difference between a 10 inch screen iPad and a 13 inch screen ultra-book is negligible when it comes to the question of workplace efficiency. Windows 8 is going to build an application store in the next few months that may lag behind Apple's library, but will provide everything of significance that you might need for your Windows 8 system and in short order you will never miss your iPad.

Will there be growing pads and gripes? Certainly, but we saw that when Windows 95 came out, with Vista, and who will ever forget Windows ME?

The bottom line question as always as what's the dollar value of your capital investment fund?

Zimbabwe Redux

Is it just me or does it seem unusual that in the interview all of the grand political leaders, with the exception of Eleanor Roosevelt who was not an elected official in the United States government; is it unusual that all of those leaders are black?

It might be that those are the only individuals they can think of on short notice. But it seems very strange that no white or Hispanic or Asian in a position of American political prominence should be noted.

Work like a Third World Dictator

The fallacy in the entire interview is the assumption that taking a poll of the electorate at large is a way to determine beneficial policy for a nation. There is no stretch of the imagination that could lead one to that conclusion. It is not impossible that the will of the majority could be a positive influence. But in most instances the will of the majority will be little more than redistribution of economic benefits from those who are successful to those who are not. Decisions made on emotion, greed, and long past history are not the direction a successful nation will choose to go.

Daylight come and me want to go home.

Maybe a New Project

"I’ve heard the reports. I’ve seen the news photos. Dog-tired, sweaty and suffering the depth of jet lag that only comes from a trip that crosses fourteen time zones and the international date line, I pay the cabbie and turn my bags over to the smiling Sky Cap at the curb. American Airlines to San Antonio. He nods, and tags the scruffy baggage. He grins at the clothesline. I look around for the war protesters, the name-callers, the spitters. There’s no one beyond the normal airport people going about their business. Maybe some of them are against the war, but none approach me with taunts of baby-killing or any semblance of disrespect. Maybe it’s the scowl and the bags under my eyes, maybe it’s the “try me” glare, or maybe the protesting isn’t as rampant as the media would have us believe. Nobody cares. No one bothers me. I get my ticket and head toward the gate to wait for a departure in a couple of hours.

"A call from a nearby phone booth to San Antonio. No answer. I leave a message on the answering machine that I’ll be home almost exactly on the schedule I had sent in a letter a few days earlier. All the connections have been close to on time. I’ll get into San Antonio about eight o’clock in the evening. I nap in a chair near the departure gate.

"The sun is just setting as the flight touches down in San Antonio. I’ve caught glimpses of the white buildings and parallel runways at Randolph AFB and seen the lights on the Hemisfair tower downtown as we maneuver to land. Passengers file out of the airplane and are greeted by family and friends. I look around, but there is no one there. I retrieve my tired belongings from the baggage carousel and get a taxi to take me home.

"The cab pulls up before the small brick rancher in Universal City. The porch light is on and the living room light glows softly through the window. I drag my bags to the door and ring the doorbell. No answer. My dog, Count, barks from the backyard at the sound of the chimes. I ring again, then rummage through my briefcase to retrieve a house key not used in a year. There’s no one home. I open the back door and Count bounds in, jumping to lick my face and greet me. No notes, no explanations. She still lives here, but she hadn’t lied that night so long ago when I’d told here about the assignment. As Santana might sing, “my house is dark and my pots are cold.” Welcome home."

I've had the urge to maybe pick up and start writing the peacetime fighter pilot book from this point. There are a lot of stories to be told about what is often referred to as WW Cold. The story of how I got from San Antonio to Torrejon Spain and then through four years of deployments, travels, involvements, and career politics might make interesting reading.

The real question is how do I emerge truth and fiction so that in the process of writing the book I don't wind up damaging the lives and families of old friends not the least of which might be my own? The first two books were clearly nonfiction and I made every effort to keep them truthful. This book I would have to make every effort to ensure that no one could ever detect what was actually the truth.

Quality of Work or Irrelevance of Wages

When Karl Marx was writing "Das Kapital" he was living at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization had taken individual craftsmen out of the marketplace. Handmade products had been replaced by machine made mass production. The result was that thousands of individual craftsmen were replaced by dozens of machine monitors. The impact on the workplace was that factory owners could control wages and simply say "we won't pay you any more, stand aside someone else wants your job."

In short order, factory owners found that they could demand outrageous work hours and effort at low pay. Organization of workers into unions to protect the lower classes and ensure reasonable working conditions and appropriate wage levels was proper.

Something occurred over the last 120 years. The marketplace developed a middle-class. Society was no longer an us-versus- them environment. Competition among manufacturers resulted in a necessity for providing benefits, retirement and competitive wages. Today we find successful companies recognizing the fact that a trained and experienced worker is more valuable than a low-wage replacement. Keeping quality in your labor force is more important than repeatedly hiring new workers for the lowest possible wage.

It is expected that a quality company will provide healthcare, dental care, educational benefits, retirement, profit sharing, and opportunity to move up in the company hierarchy. These benefits do not have to be demanded by a high cost union, that is generally interested in dues which can contribute to political activity and pressure on the marketplace. Successful companies compete for labor without union pressure.

Strangely enough the private enterprise marketplace with owners versus workers is no longer the main function of unions. Go back and review the fact that unions were established to protect helpless workers against oppressive business owners. Now notice that most unions in America are public-sector unions. Why is that noteworthy? Because the public sector doesn't make profit! There is no motivation or even evidence that government tries to benefit at the bottom line by impression of government workers. Government serves the people. Workers in government do so to serve themselves. There is no reason for government to pay government workers a noncompetitive wage. Workers can choose to work for government at the wages offered or not to work for government. If the wage offered by government is satisfactory, government will provide the services. If the wage offered is below the market, workers will not be available and government will have to adjust their level of compensation.

It doesn't take long to examine public-sector unions to confirm the fact that their wages are irrelevant to market factors, and their dues are used to control elections and legislator doors so as to continually milk the tax base for the benefit of the workers who were not at all motivated to succeed or perform at adequate levels.

Michigan Fights Right to Work

How is Michigan doing with regard to union labor? You may recall it was General Motors and Chrysler that entered bankruptcy and required government bailout to survive. The assertion was that these were "the American car industry" but they were only two unionized companies and arguably well less than the major manufacturers of cars in America. Nonunion companies such as Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Nissan, and dozens of others are American automobile producers paying very adequate wages in a highly competitive marketplace. Along the way they are profitable and very successful on behalf of their workers.

And if we look at the question of unionized teachers, we find literally the majority of states not requiring teacher participation in unions such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Democracy in America is a legislative process conducted by elected representatives. The legislature of the state of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states represents the majority of the people across the state. Screaming union workers in the rotunda of the state capital do not represent the majority, and we have to remember that when the legislature acts, it is reflecting the will of the people.

Now, maybe we should pass that message on to the President of the United States who apparently believes that the unions take precedence over the majority of the people.

Making Things Work

I missed a couple days here at ThunderTales. The problem was trying to get things to work and facing the incredible incompetence of technical support at a range of computer software companies not the least of which was Microsoft.

About three weeks ago I took a look at Windows 8 and was very complementary in terms of the ease of adaptability for the system. Whenever we are faced with a new operating system we always have a reluctance to 1) read the book and 2) actually do what the instructions tell us to do. I found by taking some time to read Windows 8 guides that in a fairly short interval I could operate within Windows 8 very comfortably and actually liked it.

That experience motivated me to think about how old my existing desktop computer was. When a desktop, even a top-end model, reaches nearly 7 years old it isn't quite the great system it was when it first entered your office. I'm a pretty easy sell when it comes to new toys. So in short order I was discussing with SWMBO the real need for a new computer. Within about four days a Dell all-in-one powered by an i7 processor with 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB storage drive showed up at my doorstep. Over several cycles of new computers I had learned that lap link PC mover greatly simplified the transition process, moving applications data and system settings to the new machine.

That was then and this is now. If I could personally deliver a B 61 nuclear weapon upon the devil's spawn at lap link I would do it in a heartbeat.

The initial transfer method left most of my critical applications behind. That was because the interface hid those applications from the selection menu unless one checked two dialogue boxes which were not obviously labeled. So, after about an hour of set up and eight hours of transfer I was left with an unsatisfactory move. Lap link technical support seems to be located in some isolated Third World nation where English is unknown. After some unsatisfactory consultation I restored to the pre-move condition and attempted once again starting from scratch. This time the move took 45 hours of transfer time. The suggestion that PC mover would enhance installation of software on your new computer and do it more efficiently than searching through your old installation disks and doing it all manually was clearly false. After the 45 hours and two full days of being inoperative with neither old computer nor new computer accessible I found that although most of the applications seem to have transferred, none of them were functional.

That led to the decision to abandon PC mover and do the job manually. While it is tedious, it is sort of like cleaning out old closets because you are forced to make decisions about junk that you have collected over the years that you will never look at again. My first transfer was one that I considered the most critical to computer operations after an Internet browser and that was the applications that comprise Office 2010. Over the next 14 hours I dealt with at least a dozen Microsoft technical support personnel trying to install Office 2010 using my license installation key.

Strangely enough the license key was denied because there was an existing trial version of Office on the new computer. Opening the trial version indicates that if you have a existing license key you can enter it and Office will be functional. Unfortunately that did not work for me. That began the saga of a day full of technical support calls to Microsoft. Recounts of the problem, transfers from office to office at Microsoft and dropped calls after frustrating waits didn't solve my problem. The logic of a trial version that would not accept an existing Microsoft Office user escaped most of the technical support people.

To make an agonizing and painful story short, after a full day on the phone I finally encountered a supervisor who recognized the fact that Microsoft Office professional academic version is the maximum horsepower version of the software package and is not acceptable for upgrade from the trial version. The simple solution of deleting the trial files and installing from my original Office 2010 disc finally got me operational.

Now with dropbox, iCloud, iTunes, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and Office all installed I am beginning to approach functionality once again. Let me note that none of this is the fault of Windows 8 nor of Dell computers, but really from substandard software such as PC mover and incompetent technical support such as the Microsoft team dealing with issues regarding Office.

What is probably most surprising, is the general lack of training of Microsoft technical support staff on Windows 8 issues.

Saturday Morning Rocker

Over-Inflated Self Image

We would be naïve if we tried to say that we were unaware that this thinking was rampant in America. Yet it seems as though a very small tail seeks to wag a very large dog in the question of federal support for municipal funding. The video here is from a Detroit Michigan city Council meeting and the council member who is speaking believes sincerely in what she is saying.

But Detroit is a city of less than 1 million people. To be more accurate it is a city of slightly less than 700,000. Although we like to think of Detroit as the motor city and the core of the automotive industry that was a long, long time ago. Today Detroit is largely a ruin. And if you sought the cause for that ruination you would have to conclude it was mismanagement by the city government.

The Constitution of the United States doesn't even mention governments below the state level. Municipal government is local and should be handled within the revenues generated by taxes which the city citizens impose upon themselves. City charters tend to be very specific about taxation limitations and their willingness to absorb debt for the good of the community. There is no obligation under any circumstances for higher levels of government to come in and bailout the municipal government.

Take a look at this woman who sincerely believes that her little town of 700,000 people influenced the election and now the president has an obligation to pay back.

We Delivered, Time to Bring Home the Bacon

In the simplest terms we need to make sure that people like this woman, and elected representative of her community, understand that government money comes from the people. It matters not whether it is a federal tax, state tax or municipal tax, it is still money taken from the people. If the city cannot live within its means then it is not the obligation of others, regardless of how the citizens voted in a presidential election, to rescue that city.

And those of us living in rural Texas, small-town America, sure as hell don't want to pay for her screwed up town.

Shaping the Case

When the events first occurred the photos in all the newspapers showed a sweet innocent young man apparently about 13 years old and a older individual looking somewhat swarthy, dark and even dangerous. It was a few weeks later that we saw pictures of an older Trayvon Martin. Trayvon wasn't 13 he was 17 when the events occurred. He didn't have the innocent look of the 13-year-old. He arguably came across as a dedicated gang banger.

The initial shaping of the events in the media were that a nearly psychotic neighborhood watch vigilante head shot Trayvon in cold blood. Network newscasts of the 911 telephone call were maliciously edited to provide the impression that George Zimmerman was a racist. Although there were many pictures taken from the medical care that George Zimmerman received on the night of the events few were published or publicly available. Support for the statement that his head had been bashed on the sidewalk repeatedly was not made available with photographic evidence.

Prosecutors Finally Release Frontal Photos

A prosecutor is supposed to seek justice. They aren't supposed to have an agenda. If laws were broken their job is to find the evidence to support that assertion. If laws were not broken it is not their job to promote a racist or divisive policy. Creating an inaccurate or erroneous perception of events would be malfeasance in office and certainly illegal.

Was Trayvon looking for trouble that night? Was Zimmerman acting within his authority as a neighborhood watch representative? Had Zimmerman retreated before the shooting? Did Trayvon act aggressively and violently against Zimmerman? Was the shooting justified?

Those are all good questions but the one that really should be of concern is what the prosecution is trying to do in this case

Staff Meeting

Punitive Policy

If the president gets to repeal the Bush era tax cuts and raise the marginal rate from 35 to 39% on those making more than $250,000 per year, how much revenue will that actually generate? We are trying to deal with the deficit of $1.3 trillion per year. Will Obama's tax increase have an impact on that? If we run the numbers we find that the tax increase on those who are most successful in the nation and most likely to reinvest their excess capital into new jobs or business growth would equal about one week' s worth of government spending.

Recently the Republicans in Congress have opened the door for discussion of revenue enhancements. More revenue for government doesn't necessarily mean higher tax rates. It can mean addressing the question of carveouts, deductions, exclusions and favorable treatment that pepper the internal revenue tax code. Have you done your taxes with TurboTax? Then you are familiar with the page after page of questions regarding whether this exclusion or that deduction applies to you. You don't have to look very far to find places where money could be saved and revenue could be enhanced.

Of course any time we start to deal with deductions you will get the paired arguments of not wanting to eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction and a particular deduction or exclusion being too minor to make a difference in total revenue or the assault on the deficit. Recent discussions have raised the issue of a possible total On deductions for every tax payer. Don't worry about whether it is a mortgage interest deduction or some special privilege carveouts. Set a percentage or a dollar value for income adjustment and don't worry about where in particular it will come from. Revenue could be increased drastically the debate on where to cut would not be contentious and most importantly, we would not be doing serious damage to the most successful within our economy.

It Isn't about the Dollars

No, it isn't about the dollars. The president doesn't really care about the deficit. What he cares about is income equity. He is a believer in the concept that all persons should have approximately equal success in life regardless of what their input is to the process. If someone is overly successful it is the task of government to make their success available to those who have failed to achieve as much. This doesn't involve questions of deficit reduction or tax rate structures. It involves social engineering and redistribution of wealth.

The president doesn't care about the budget or the deficit. He cares about giving money from people who have created it to those who have not done anything to deserve it.

Who Cares?

So before the election he repeatedly said we wouldn't go over the fiscal cliff. Now he's been reelected and the lame-duck Congress is posturing with regard to what we will see on 1 January. Treasury Secretary Geithner has proposed a magnificent program of double tax increases a 200+ billion dollar stimulus package and several hundred million dollars in cuts to Medicare and Social Security. If that sounds ridiculous then believe that it is. It is a pure nonstarter for a negotiated settlement.

But let's take a step back. We've been operating here for the last four years on the principle of Obama's reverse speak. Whatever he says is exactly the opposite of what he believes and what he will do. When we remember that, we see that his promise not to go over the fiscal cliff is exactly the opposite of what he intends to have happen. He is currently in a situation in which he can get all that he wants without concern over reelection or who to blame.

He is totally comfortable blaming the Republicans and alluding to Grover Norquist having some sort of magical control over the Republican legislature. Rational people know that is not a possibility, but we've proven repeatedly that the American electorate is not rational.

Sequestration in which the Defense Department pays a huge share of the spending reductions is clearly within the Obama agenda. Restoration of the payroll tax reductions and resumption of the additional 2% of Social Security withholding is going to happen. Capital gains taxes, dividend taxes and restored higher rates for income tax are all coming. If the Bush tax cuts which had been in effect for 12 years now are allowed to expire and more than just the top 2% experience the return to Clinton era rates, Obama will have increased revenue and quite easily turn to Republicans as the cause for that penalty.

He doesn't have to cut any spending and he can clearly return to his policy of redistribution to those who supported him for reelection. "Stimulus" sounds like a means of getting the economy going. It is anything but that. It is a synonym for taking federal money and handing it to people who have been supportive of the administration.

Geithner Offers Ridiculous Proposal

Every day we get closer to the end of the year it becomes readily apparent that Pres. Obama is more than happy to see taxes go up on anybody and limits on spending disappear while he easily can point his finger at the opposition party as the cause for the pain that the country endures.

At the bottom line we should notice that the American electorate is totally unaware and simply doesn't care. It is hard to believe that the founding fathers of 1787 could have imagined such an uninvolved populace. As the song goes "we get the government we deserve"

Taking Care of Iran

Consider this for a moment. Do we have any commonality of interest or foreign-policy goals with Iran? Clearly we don't want to engage in a military confrontation, but we certainly need to employ the most severe economic and policy sanctions that we can short of military force. A nuclear weapon equipped Iran is a frightening concept.

Iran continues to pursue development of nuclear weapons. They continue to publicly announce their goal of total destruction of Israel. They continued to supply weapons of terror to rogue nations and jihadist movements throughout the middle east. The strongest possible action seems to be in order.

The Senate of the United States, controlled by the Democrats, supportive of the president, votes 94-0 in favor of strong sanctions against Iran. Does the president offer his thanks to the Senate? Hardly.

President Seeks Thick Pad of Sanction Waivers

In case you missed them here are some selected excerpts from that news item:

The new sanctions too broadly punish companies that supply materials, such as certain metals, that could be used in Iran's nuclear, military, or ballistic missile programs, the White House worries. 

Or what about reporting to Congress? Can the Intel folks handle this little task?

Finally, the White House doesn't want to implement the part of the new legislation that would require reports to Congress on the thousands of boats that dock at Iranian ports and the dozens of Iranian planes that make stops at airports around the world. Those reporting requirements "will impose serious time burdens on the Intelligence Community and sanctions officers," the White House said in the e-mail. 

One has to wonder how serious the president is regarding the imposition of sanctions to compel Iran to join the community of nations and act like a civilized country.

Saturday Morning Rocker

As the idiots with email jokes always indicate: ....wait for it...

Or simply jump to the 2:00 point:

We're Too Stupid For That

I can go back 25 to 30 years to my time in Europe when various countries still had their own currency, pre--euro. The Swiss had a one, two, and five franc coin. At the five franc level it was worth about three dollars. The Britts had £.50 and a 1 pound coin. The French had a five franc coin. And you could find examples of coins worth more than a US dollar in virtually all of the European nations.

I remember back in the early 1960s going to Las Vegas and seeing one dollar silver coins used rather than gambling chips. Then suddenly they all disappeared. They were taken out of circulation.

People didn't really like walking around with a pocket full of five or six big silver dollars. Nobody complained about the removal. Then of course we had the Susan B Anthony dollar. People said it looked too much like a quarter. Sure, it had octagon corners and was gold colored and slightly larger than a quarter but they just couldn't tell the difference. So, nobody wanted the Susan B Anthony dollar even if given as change. You can't find one anymore.

But that doesn't stop Americans. We have been minting presidential commemorative dollar coins for two decades. We stamp them out, box them up and put them in a warehouse. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars printing and processing consumable paper one dollar bills.

Can I be excused for a feeling of déjà vu when I see this:

Congress Considers New Dollar Coin

We will probably have to make it out of plastic with little spikes on the edges so that the average American can determine what it is. Meanwhile look for the fool standing in front of a vending machine stuffing a limp piece of paper into a slot as it repeatedly spits it back out into his hand.

He has to do that of course because his credit card is maxed out and the machine won't take it.

Measuring Performance

One of the exercises I do in class involves the relevance of statistics. In state and local government classes we often discuss the fact that Texas ranks in the bottom five of student per capita spending for public education. The question to be asked is; do the dollars spent indicate the quality of education received. In other words if Texas spent as much as California per student would we improve our education. Do dollars equate with performance?

The obvious answer should be that it is practically impossible to compare a dollar spent in California to a dollar spent in Texas for any purpose. If we were talking about road repairs we could see that the cost of labor and materials and contractors in Texas would be much lower than the cost in California. When the discussion relates to education then we not only go between costs of living in the two states but we also deal with the very basic question of whether spending more gets better classrooms.

While Texas is among the lowest per capita for public education the District of Columbia is among the highest. How is that working out for you, Mr. Duncan?

DC Wins Worst

It appears you can wallpaper the school room with $20 bills and if the teachers aren't qualified, the parents aren't involved, the students don't participate, and the standards aren't realistic you won't get results. But let's keep trying anyway

The 2010-11 graduation rates are preliminary, state-reported data, according to the federal government and the Education Department says it will release final rates in the coming months. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said this is the first year for which all states used a common measure.

I'm not sure exactly what this means. Are there other ways of measuring whether a student that starts a high school program graduates at the end of four years than simply looking at the performance? I suppose Sec. Duncan will show us shortly when we see the final figures and the District of Columbia performance improves drastically.

Dragons Be Here

One side effect of chemo that many people aren't aware of is peripheral neuropathy. That $.50 pair of words describes the phenomena of reduced sensation to the extremities. Your feet begin to lose their sensitivity and ability to provide feedback from contact with the ground. Your toes may curl slightly, feedback from contact with the floor as you walk is reduced and you may even find that the sensation resembles wearing little Dutch boy wooden shoes.

In the case of your hands it may not be as pronounced as your feet, at least it isn't for me. The significant impact of the neuropathy on my hands is that it makes typing really clumsy. I find I spend more time backspacing and correcting than actually entering text.

Then last week I saw an ad for some software. 10 or 12 years ago when I did software reviews for Ziff Davis publishing I encountered a speech to text software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. In those days of version 1.0 and 2.0 the software bragged of a 96% accuracy rate. That sounds good until you realize that if four letters out of every hundred are wrong you've got a real mess of an editable text. It didn't seem like a practical solution to entering text into a computer.

Now we are up to version 12.0 for Dragon. The quality has gone up and the prices gone down. The home edition which really includes all of the features except for some office collaboration and networking aspects is only 50 bucks at Amazon. I decided to give it a try.

The box arrived yesterday, I installed it on my computer, and spent about an hour going through the tutorials and training of the software to recognize my voice and my vocabulary. It takes about five minutes for the voice recognition training and then the software does a survey of your hard drive to read emails and Word documents to get a feel for your typical vocabulary. Along the way it will notice your correspondence and be able to enter proper names for people that you are familiar with. I did have to go in and coach it on how to spell ThunderTales.I noticed that it is reluctant to allow me to use street language and when I tried to use common defecation as an expletive it prefers to give me ship or shift. I guess I'll just have to clean up my language.

Beside the basic speech to text which goes into a Word document or an email or even into blogger I can also command my computer with voice. I can open programs, I can search files, I can format text, and pretty much do anything I can do with keyboard and mouse strictly by speaking the commands.

I would be lying to you if I said I was fully in control at this point but after only one day I am able to dictate a ThunderTales blog post like this one. That's right this has been all speech to text. I have had to enter with my mouse and keyboard about three times or to correct a fumble mouth. The software takes a little time to follow your speech but in that time it is putting your words into a context. With that time it will learn whether when you say to you mean the number, an excess, or preposition.

So far I've got to say it was 50 bucks well spent. I'm having fun with this.