Tag Archive
for Rant
Tagged as: Money, Political, Rant, Seen-Around
Aug
05
Lately I feel like I have been encountering people who are getting paid under the table, which means that they are being paid in a way that attempts to circumvent tax laws. Basically whoever is paying them is not reporting that payment as wages and that means that they are not liable for their share of the tax to the government. The person being paid has the benefit of also not being subject to tax for that payment amount, which effectively means that everyone is keeping more money for themselves.
Unfortunately there is a loser in this transaction. And that loser is everyone else. Everyone who does pay their taxes loses because:
- they could be paying less
- they could receive more benefits if everyone paid their taxes
- the national debt (which at the time of writing stands at over $13 trillion – check it out) could be lower
Instead it is left to the taxpayers to pick up their slack. Yes, even though they (the ones involved in this nefarious transaction) are likely working members of society who do not see themselves as being a burden (they are making their own money after all), their presence on the roads, need for protection (e.g., police, fire), and receipt of other benefits are proof that they have an impact on us.
Integrity? Yeah why don’t we go for that. Or at the absolute very least acknowledge label black as black and white as white. It is not something to be proud of and neither is stealing lunch money from a child.
Tagged as: Political, Rant, The-News
Jul
01
Pork is delicious when it means the consumed meat from a pig. Conversely it is awful when it refers to the appropriations of government money for local projects. While I might be a big supporter of the former, let’s not forget that the late Senator Robert Byrd was a huge proponent of the latter.
When he passed, I heard a radio commentator quote an unnamed source from West Virginia saying that they would not know what to do now that he wasn’t in Washington to send federal funds back to them. It makes sense for them to think this way because he sent back billions to them during his tenure (Citizens Against Government Waste has a tally of Senator Byrd’s pork that will boggle the mind). So it is true, they just lost a major source of income. What’s a person to do?! I have an idea: start making your own way instead of swiping money from the rest of the country.
I am sure that the people of West Virginia are not the only ones. There are recipients of pork everywhere, and they should all be ashamed. This corruption needs to stop. We all know that politicians are self-serving, power-hungry individuals. Do not feed them your vote or willingly eat their pork! Does anyone think about the fact that the politicians are taking money from everyone else just so that they can remain in office? It seems like pork barrel politics could also be called much much worse.
Tagged as: Rant, Relationships, Seen-Around
May
21
Nothing gets my blood brewing like unsolicited advice. Maybe it’s because I like to try things myself. Or perhaps it’s because I just don’t like other people telling me what to do. Perhaps it’s because I get the sense from people giving me advice that they are somehow better than me. It seems to me that oftentimes the advice giver is simply someone who is older who feels like they must direct the uninitiated, and to me age is just a number that does not automatically entitle people to give advice.
I know that mistakes are not pleasant. Sometimes mistakes hurt. They might even hurt a lot. But just because something is unpleasant or hurtful does not necessarily make me want to avoid it. While I do not relish pain, I do appreciate lessons learned. No lesson is as well learned as one through a mistake.
As I go through life I have grown to appreciate silence from others. It’s a good thing to fall off the bike and get up to try again. The problem is that people that have fallen off of the bike before do not want others to fall off, too. They want them to go straight to riding perfectly. Or maybe they want to ban bikes altogether.
While I like trying things out, I can definitively say that I do not know much in this life. I know some things. I will learn other things. And hopefully there will always be people around me that I can turn to for some advice. The thing is, I only want advice if I ask. And likewise I will only try to give advice if asked for it.
Tagged as: Political, Rant, Ridiculous, Seen-Around, The-News
Apr
23
When I think of basic rights, there are certain things that come to mind. There is life, which is the right to not be killed without a just reason. There is liberty, which allows us to have the freedom to do whatever we want to. And there is the pursuit of happiness, which allows us the freedom to find the ever elusive happiness (granted of course that this doesn’t interfere with others’ rights).
In this day and age apparently people’s perceptions of human rights are changing. We are entitled to a good job (even if we do not deserve or cannot do the work), keeping our house (even when we cannot afford it), health care (even though it’s an optional service since our right to life is not an entitlement to a set number of years), and high speed internet. So while all of these things really deserve their own respective thoughts, I just have to say this: really, high speed internet? What an entitled and distorted society we live in.
Tagged as: Rant, Seen-Around, Tip-For-Life
Jan
14
Given enough time, we rather forget about the origin of things. That reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy where the novels are set thousands of years in the future, and the things that we know about now have by then become so far removed so as to be thought myth. They could not fathom the planet that we live on, and they could barely remember that they had originated from Earth.
Even when we are not so far removed from the origin of things we begin to see disagreements about the facts. As time moves on, opinions diverge. Sometimes no opinion even leads to the truth. Sometimes people become fanatical about their opinions. In any case, we can see this phenomenon here and now.
Give a new idea a couple of years, and it will be as if they had always existed. Nicknames just need time before they become the preferred way of referencing things (case in point: not too many people could tell you that “blog” is actually just a chopped up version of “web log”). Games are invented and taught to others with no regards as to why certain things are the way that they are. It is amazing, really, to think of how much information we pass on without even stopping to think about where that information comes from.
It seems to me that the most important aspect would be the origin of information. I know that I want to know if I can trust the source of information before I willingly pass it on.
Oh by the way, Lean On Me is a song by Bill Withers. You cannot use it for worship.