Category: life

life

Comments on Do Not Call

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I got some good comments from Jason and Denise after my post on the National Do Not Call Registry. I got permission to post some of the comment.

What happens if we follow the personal responsibility road a little further?In the above example, personal responsibility has to be taken in order to get on the do-not-call registry. However, the program is still a government bureaucracy funded at taxpayer expense (unless of course fines for non-compliance fund the program).

To look further even than these avenues – if a large majority of individuals would refuse to do business with companies that engage in telemarketing (and spam, for that matter), their work would become less profitable, and they would find less intrusive ways to advertise. They only call and e-mail now because it’s working. If they stop making money at it, they’ll stop doing it.

I’m not exactly complaining about the do-not-call list – I’m on it myself. I like what it does. However, I do recognize that so much of what we, as Americans complain about (such as unwanted phone solicitation), need not be brought before our local or federal government. We are big kids and can handle these things on our own.

Much, if not most, of what government does these days can be handled by private citizens taking personal responsibility, by private organizations working to improve society, and by private entrepreneurial businesses seeking to make a buck by providing a wanted service for pay.

That sounds like the kind of small government that we really need. Let people take responsibility for themselves and their actions and not make everything an avenue for government involvement.

Tags reactions, thoughts

life

Do Not Call Registry

After receiving yet another phone call from Dish Network, I have begun thinking about the National Do Not Call Registry. I have been on the registry for a year, and the calls definitely seemed to go down after I got on there, except for the calls from Dish Network – at least eight in the last year.

I even confirmed with the registry that my number was listed there. Then I filed a complaint against Dish Network. My wife asked about all the calls we get from companies where we have accounts, like the phone company. They are allowed to call us unless we specifically ask them not to. If we even make an inquiry with a company they can call us for three months after the inquiry.

I called the phone company and they agreed to take me off their call list. I still need to call the one credit card that pesters us with phone calls (the other credit card companies don’t call us) but at least I know I can.

All of this led me to think about what it takes to make this registry work. Obviously it requires that people get themselves on the list. Their website even warns that if someone calls with an offer to get you on the registry for a fee it’s a scam. Registry is free and is the responsibility of anyone who wants their number listed. The second thing that is required to make this work is that people need to report violations. This is easy to do at the donotcall.gov site. Just make sure that you have the name of the company, or the phone number they called from. Also, you must list the date they called. If the call is not within 31 days of your registration with the registry, and it is not from:

a charity
a political organization
a poll (where they don’t offer to sell anything)
or a company where you are doing business

then it is a violation which will be investigated.

I guess it’s like every other aspect of a representative government – how well it works depends entirely upon the participation of the citizens.

UPDATE 1/11/2007: I just got another call from Dish Network. I filed another complaint.

Tags reactions, thoughts

life meta

Holidays

Post author By David
Post date December 29, 2006
1 Comment on Holidays

I’m guessing that it will be normal for me to post less often during the holidays. Hopefully 10 day breaks will not be normal.

Besides the obvious Christmas festivities and work, I have been doing very good with my running until this week. Sometime on Christmas day my right ankle began to hurt. I went running on the 26th and, although running was fine, I noticed that my ankle got worse. My Achilles tendon began to swell some so I have been staying off it for the last few days. I don’t know how it happened, but I have to assume that it is related to the running. Hopefully resting it this week will allow me to get back to training sooner than if I pushed harder. I’m going to give it a try with a short run tomorrow.

I’m still trying to find the balance of what I write about here. I was doing lots of candidate endorsements before the break, but I want a better balance. I have found that there are two new candidates who have filed with the FEC since I last wrote. I guess I had better get caught up again because it looks like we are likely to have even more in the coming weeks.

Last night I got a call from my Grandpa and we got to catch up. I had not talked to him for a few months as he has been busy with his new wife trying to keep up with their combined 48 grandchildren. I don’t know about her grandchildren, but I realized that of his 24 grandchildren half of them were married so we’re all getting spread out a bit.

I can only imagine how busy it would get trying to keep up with 48 grandchildren. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with him, that’s why I decided to do a little catching up here.

Tags candidates, Christmas, endorsements, family, holidays, thoughts, work

culture life

Insurance Racket

I had to deal with changing health insurance today with the business office at the womens clinic that Laura goes to in preparation for our new baby. That gave me the opportunity to review prices for their services. I discovered something very disappointing. In the last year, with insurance through my work, I have paid as much in premiums (not counting what the company was supposedly paying toward the premiums) as the clinic would charge an insurance company. The only money I saved by having insurance, even with the large medical expense of having a baby, is that I am not being charged the higher prices that they charge those who don’t have insurance. I don’t quite understand that policy. Why should they charge more to those people who can’t afford insurance? Isn’t that like kicking a person while they’re down?

Anyway, that’s the insurance racket. My portion of the price of insurance every year is enough to pay for a major medical procedure, like 9 months of prenatal care plus delivery and a hospital stay.If we weren’t having kids I’d be throwing away a new car every year in insurance premiums – and that’s when the company is paying the bulk of the costs. If I were to pay for that insurance myself for three years I would have paid for a major injury – like being seriously hit by a car. If I put that money into my house instead of my insurance I would have the house paid off in 11 years from the time I bought it.

Tags insurance, kids, thoughts, work

life

Party Time

As I left my house this morning I noticed that someone had been to my door (and every door in the neighborhood) and left stuff. When I returned home I went to see what kind of prizes I had won. It took me about 1 second to figure out that it was the Republican Party – here’s what they left:

Orrin Hatch – Senate
- I have just repeated his entire message. Apparently he has nothing to say for himself – I checked both sides just to be sure I was not missing anything.
- STRIKE 1
- I was tempted to go around the neighborhood and remove the “Orrin Hatch” card from my neighbors’ doors.
LaVar Christensen – 2nd Congressional District
- All he has to say about himself is “I won’t just go along to get along in Congress.” Sadly, the rest of his handout is “Democrats might take over Congress and make Nancy Pelosi the Speaker of the House.” As much as I disagree with Rep. Pelosi on many issues, I am not casting my vote against her or anyone else. Too bad I know nothing about LaVar.
- STRIKE 2
Ken Sumsion – district 56 (state congress)
- Ken sounds like a nice guy who might make a good representative. I may vote for him depending on who else is running.
- BALL 1

The moral of this story is Give me a reason to vote for you – otherwise I won’t. The Republican Party almost struck out with me. We’ll see if they get one more strike before November 7th.

Tags parties, reactions, State

culture life

Questions on Class Economics

Post author By David
Post date October 9, 2006
1 Comment on Questions on Class Economics

I have been enjoying a variety of books and movies on late 19th century life lately and it has me thinking a little bit. I was reading one of the books in the Little House on the Prairie series and came across an interesting statement. The school children in a small, isolated town are trying to get home during a blinding blizzard. The first building they encounter is a hotel. All of the children continue to their homes, except one, because they cannot afford to stay in the hotel. The one boy who could afford to stay was able to do so “because his father had a regular job.” A regular job meant regular pay. His father managed a train depot – the 19th century equivalent of a middle class job today. Later I read this statement:

Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves – they’re good things to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.

That got me thinking about how we have so much talk about the importance of our large middle class today. It seems to me that the middle class is dependent on their “regular jobs” and is the most vulnerable to becoming dependent on railroads, telegraph, kerosene, and coal stoves or their modern equivalents (cell phones, cable television, internet etc.). That got me wondering, is society really better off having a sizable middle class rather than being broken mainly into the rich and the working classes?

I theoretically fall into the middle class today (minus cell phones and cable television) and I am not sure that there is much benefit being in the middle class and having a slightly higher standard of living coupled with greater expectations and demands on my wallet. To me that seems to breed greater discontent proportional to the supposed security that the middle class enjoys over the working classes.

Tags reactions

life

Moving On

I’m getting tired of dwelling on being unsatisfied with my life. I’m going to make an effort to move on to other topics. Either they will be happier topics related to my life or else I will write about things that are outside of my life, like the fact that I found an interview discussing torture that aired on on NPR’s Talk of the Nation two days after I had posted on the subject.

After listening to that show today I realized that we must continue to address this issue until we get this administration to change their policy on torture to a policy that condemns torture outright. I hope that more people will take an absolute position similar to the one expressed by Ariel Dorfman (from the interview) and make it publicly known that we do not condone any torture as Americans.

Tags NPR, torture

culture life

What is “America”?

I have been listening to the debate about how we define torture and what we allow in the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. I have heard at least one listener call in to an NPR program on the subject a few days ago and say that how we treat prisoners is a reflection on us as a nation rather than a reflection on them as individuals. That is one of the forgotten keys in the official debate on this subject. As I thought about that sentiment it sent me back to the Declaration of Independence. The second paragraph starts by saying:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Is this the same America that is torturing prisoners, in any degree? If we truly believe that all men are created equal and that all men posses certain inalienable rights including – but not limited to – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness then we should, in all our official conduct, treat all men as if they are equal and as if they posses those inalienable rights. We should, in all our conduct as a nation, do what we can to protect and promote those rights for all people, not just citizens of our nation.

When our nation takes a stand on anything it should be done in a way that upholds the fundamental values of our nation, such as the idea that all men are created equal and posses certain rights. Our soldiers should treat prisoners in a way that acknowledges their equal standing as human beings. Torture is terrorism on an individual scale. Therefore when we practice any degree of torture we become terrorists. If there is one thing we should know about fighting terrorists it should be that we cannot beat them if we join them.

Men of faith (any faith) – as our sitting president claims to be – who recognize a controlling power in the world superior to the United States (I’m not talking about the UN here), should believe that their supreme being will assist the side of righteousness in any conflict between good and evil with the condition that there must be some way to tell the good side from the evil side. So long as we condone any degree of torture – and this may go beyond the Geneva Conventions – we blur the lines between who is good and who is bad in this conflict – no matter how clear the title “War on Terror” sounds.

Update 10/4/2006: I just stumbled upon this discussion from September 25th on NPR: Talk of the Nation. It was very interesting to listen to the perspective of Mr. Dorfman.

Tags NPR, reactions, religion

culture life

Undoing Past Progress

I read two articles today in the New York Times today that got me thinking about how we are undoing the benefits that first made our country the place it was when I was growing up. The first article was about the increase in people in my age group without health insurance. I understand firsthand what they were talking about – not because I do not have health insurance, but because I had to spend more than 10% of my pretax paycheck to pay my portion of the company sponsored health plan. To put that in perspective – I was making something close to the national median income (if I remember correctly what that figure was).

The second article was about why college educations are no longer affordable and what changes have caused that problem. I have long had strong feelings about this problem. I think that the fundamental problem here is that we have lost sight, as a society, of what we were trying to accomplish with tuition assistance and other forms of federal education assistance in the first place. From the article:

By subsidizing public universities to keep tuition low, and providing federal tuition aid to poor and working-class students, this country vaulted tens of millions of people into the middle class while building the best-educated work force in the world.

Another article at CNN elaborated on this by saying the following:

“There’s been a sea change in the last decade-and-a-half over how (colleges) spend their money,” said National Center president Patrick Callan. “It used to be about giving students opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Now it’s about giving them money to go to one college instead of another.”

At first these programs were designed so that there would be money for students to go to college, now the money is being used for students to go to “the right college.” We seem to have lost sight of the fact that the goal was to educate large volumes of people, not to make education one more field for competition in our society.

Some startling statistics to back this up from the CNN article:

The report card finds colleges awarded grants to 36 percent of their students from families earning $20,000 per year or less. Those grants averaged $4,700. But wealthier students received comparable attention.

The colleges gave grant aid to 29 percent from families earning $100,000 or more. And those grants were even higher on average: $6,200.

Let me make that clear – slightly over 1/3 of students from families living in poverty (or very close depending on where the poverty line falls) are getting under $5000 a year to help them go to school. Almost 2/3 of students from those poverty situations are going to school without grant money. At the same time nearly 1/3 of students from families among the top 5% of wage earners are getting over $6000 a year – we can assume this is to lure them to “better” schools.

I do not mean to argue that all schools are equal, but we would probably be better off as a nation if we thought of them that way.

If my experience and the experience of other people I know is any indicator, there is another problem that also plagues our nation with regards to higher education. The degrees that we are paying so dearly to get are often being underused once we graduate and try to use them. Many jobs I have seen require a degree for work that could easily be done without a degree. What is worse, many jobs in which a degree is useful are more interested in experience than in the degree. I have known many people who choose to work and gain experience rather than finish a degree and they end up with better jobs because they have more experience.

If experience is the best teacher – and I believe that it generally is – then our college degrees should be designed to provide marketable experience. If they did, perhaps companies could eliminate the requirement to have a degree as a prerequisite for jobs that do not actually require the training that comes with a degree.

Tags federal aid, learning, reactions, work

life

Anniversary

I should have been able to predict long ago what today would be like. I knew before I started reading the news today that there would be stories of memorial services where they would rehash the events of five years ago. What I failed to expect was how easily my own memories of that day would surface or the need I would feel to capture those memories.

I remember walking into work that morning and wondering why everyone was openly staring at a television set (I came in from behind the set so I didn’t see what was on). As soon as I got to my office and saw the headlines I was no longer surprised. I remember how nervous everyone was. I got jittery when the phone line went dead while talking to my wife that morning.

Nobody with a memory of that day would be surprised at the emotion tied to those events, but I still can’t figure out what is personally different between four years and five years. Socially I understand it. Five years is our second major chronological milestone, after 1 year and before 10, 25, 50 , and 100 years. It is an opportunity to look back and view events from an expanded perspective over the one we had in the heat of the moment. Personally I had expected that each anniversary would be a chance to reflect and that with each passing year the emotions would be a little less intense than they were the year before. Somehow I find that is not the case.

Last year, on September 11th, I was flying across the country on a plane. It was no big deal. I noted the significance of the date and remembered, somewhat mechanically, what had happened. I did not feel the closeness of memory that I have felt today. I find it interesting that five years distance has brought the memories closer to me than four years distance had done.

Tags history, reactions