Rant

Just a short follow up. In one day the portfolio I am following recovered about 530%.

That is to say, the reported loss over the last 6 days has gone from 3.58% yesterday to 0.19% today.

Just stay the course and things will get better.

If you are invested in the market, don’t panic. As CBMTTek pointed out, February 2024 the S&P 500 was doing just fine, at the same level. The media wasn’t screaming about the economy tanking.

He’s correct. The amount of panic the media projects is tempered by which party is in control.

A 0.001% drop in the market when Trump does something is cause to panic, which causes the sheep to sell, causing the market to drop. A 1.000% drop in the market when a Dem is in office creates a cricket like ambiance. And saying anything makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Trump has put multiple tariffs into place. These tariffs cause changes in supply chains and in the costs to produce certain goods.

Every product produced requires raw goods, tooling, work space, and skills to create.

Consider a simple BLT. The raw goods are bacon, bacon, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bread, mayo. Having all of those raw goods does not a BLT make.

You have to have the correct tooling. The tooling here is a way of cooking the bacon, such as a grill top, cutting tomatoes, cutting bread, spreading the mayo.

Once the sandwich is produced, it has to be packaged for delivery. That requires still more raw goods.

When you sell that sandwich, you include the cost of the raw materials that go into it, you include the cost of the packaging, you include the cost of the tools, the building you used, and you include the cost of labor. You then need to include the cost the government imposes on you.

The cost of your raw goods includes the price you pay for the goods, the cost the government imposes on those goods, such as tariffs and VAT, and the cost of transporting the raw goods to your location.

Once you have all those costs, you add profit to come up with the price you will charge your customers.

Now, let’s change the product, instead of creating a sandwich, you are creating a gear. Your raw goods are iron and pattern making materials. You will use your tools to convert pattern making materials into patterns. You will then use those patterns to cast gear blanks. You will then turn those gear blanks into finished gears by applying different tools.

You have converted raw materials, with knowledge, skill and labor, into a finished product, a gear.

That gear is sold at a price which is profitable to you. That gear is likely a raw material for some other business.

Tariffs add to the cost of anything imported into a country that imposes imports. Imports are decided on the origin country or the country of manufacture.

Consider a car that is manufactured in Detroit. If that car includes raw materials that are imported from other countries, those materials that have tariffs applied will cost more.

There are no “complexities” to this. The “PANIC!” people want you to think there are, that’s not true. Every business keeps track of the cost of raw materials. If they don’t know the costs, they can’t set prices. It doesn’t matter if Ford, Canada produces the part or Ford, Flynt creates the part. There is a cost that is paid to have that part in the Ford, Detroit plant to put into a new car.

In a well-functioning business, they are always looking at the cost of raw materials. The cost of raw materials includes the cost of taxes (tariffs) and transportation.

It also includes the cost of bad materials. If you are paying a $1.00 for a widget and there is a 10% failure rate, that means you are paying $1.10 for each working part. If somebody else has the same widget with a cost (price + extra costs) of $1.05 and a failure rate of 0.1% that means they are only scrapping 1 in 1000 widgets.

In this case, it is actually cheaper to buy the “more expensive” widget.

Included in the cost calculations are longer-term issues. If the ball bearings you purchase are not properly heat treated, and you assemble them into a high-precision roller bearing which then fails in a million dollar engine, there is a heck of a lot more costs involved.

We know that people will change their purchasing habits when the cost of needed goods goes up. We saw this when Americans switched from steak to ground beef as their primary meat. Look at the CPI for food, you’ll see that in the past it had steak on it, today it has ground beef.

Because the cost of goods goes up, people will look for better prices. If that search leads to a local business, so much the better.

Unfortunately, local business might not be set up to cope with a large influx of new business. This leads to shortages.

In a market-driven economy, this leads to people consumers offering more or producers charging more. This is called a “signal”.

Because this signal exists, asking for more of that product, producers will attempt to create more product. This could be as simple as turning on an extra machine or as complex as standing up an entirely new production plant.

When this is going on, “the market” will respond. The market responds by buying or selling ownership in different companies. If a company that used to clear $2,000,000 per year is now projected to clear $4,000,000 per year is likely to attract buyers. A company that is seeing their income drop is likely to attract sellers.

This causes market fluctuations.

Over the course of yesterday, the portfolio that I follow was up as much as 1% yet closed down 0.82% Since Trump announced the tariffs, the portfolio has lost 3.53%

On $100,000 that’s a $3,530 loss.

And it is meaningless. That portfolio will go up again.

The people who are screaming the loudest are the people with millions in the stock market. If that are looking at a $10,000,000 portfolio, a 3.53% drop is $353,000 “loss”. That is more than a 1/4 million dollars in just a few days.

But it only becomes a loss if they sell now. If they hold on to those securities and the price recovers or goes up, then they will “make money”. But again, that is only true if they actually sell the security to realize the profits they made.

There is no reason to panic. The sky is not falling. If anything, this might be a good time to look at putting money into the market. The trick is to buy when near the bottom of the sell-off.

The only reason I know this, is I did some research this last week. I am NOT the person you want to take financial advise from.

Immigration law in the United States is garbage. For many years, we did accept immigrants. Americans to be.

We were the melting pot. You came to the United States, proud of your original country, or hating it, then you work to become an American.

The stories of parents demanding that their children only speak English, to become even more American.

If you want to see a group of very proud people, just watch a group of immigrants become citizens. They work hard for that privilege.

But the Democrats had to ruin it. First, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. This is the act that closed mental institutions.

Yes, there were things wrong with mental health institutions. On the other hand, there are so many mentally ill people living on the streets.

But Teddy did worse. He pushed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.

In other words, he made a person from a third world shithole in Africa just as eligible as an Engineer from Germany. In addition, it pushed family-based immigrant visas.

The fallout from this could be anticipated, and was. Since immigration law favors family connections over what is best for the United States, family connections became much more valuable.

Before the Immigration and Nationality Act, if a couple wanted to come to the United States, both applied for visas and both worked towards becoming Citizens. Both were vetted and the needs of the United States were taken into account.

Afterward, we saw the concept of anchor immigrants. These were people who were admitted to the United States. Once established, they then sponsored other members of their family for visas.

Having a single immigrant become a citizen often leads to their spouse, their children, their parents all being granted visas. If any of those became citizens, they could sponsor even more relatives.

As more and more people applied to become citizens, the wait times started to go up. But there was a shortcut.

There are two methods of creating a family-connection. By birth, or by marriage.

Under current law, marrying a US Citizen will get you a visa, a green card, and a good start towards citizenship.

It became so common that laws were put in place to stop “sham-marriages”.

A sham-marriage is a marriage that exists only for the purpose of becoming a citizen.

How common are these sham-marriage? Common enough, that I knew of a woman who was taken advantage of by a middle eastern man.

But what are the odds of knowing two such women?

Yeah, it turns out that I know another woman that was taken in by a Muslim, once he had his citizenship, he divorced her, tried to take her kid, failed at taking the kids but was now an American Citizen.

Please leave a comment if you know anybody who was taken advantage of or who participated in a sham-marriage. I’m curious.

This is an interesting and challenging case, for me.

This is a Constitutional challenge to Mahmoud being detained and then deported. His claim is that this is a violation of his First and Fifth Amendment protected rights. Because it is a violation of his rights, the court should grant him relief.

Mahmoud is an Arab that claims to be a Palestinian. He entered the United States in December 2022 on a student visa to study for a Master’s degree at Columbia University in New York. He completed that degree in December 2024 and is going to graduate in May 2025. He married in November 2024 and got a green card.

He was granted a green card because he was married to a US citizen. He is still an alien, just not illegal. He has not overstayed his visa, nor is he required to leave when his visa expires.

His lawyer describes his actions in this way:

This describes his actions as speech. Regardless of how reprehensible that speech might be, it is still protected. The First Amendment protects reprehensible speech, not just the words we want to hear. It is easy to believe in “free speech” if the only allowed speech is that which we agree with.

This case is seeking the following relief:

1. Assume jurisdiction over this matter
2. Declare that the state violated Mahmoud’s First amendment and Fifth Amendment protected rights
3. To keep Mahmoud in New York
4. Release Mahmoud
5. Pay Mahmoud’s legal fees

Item 3 is mooted because Mahmoud was out of New York before the case was filed. In a later filing they requested that he be returned to New York.

So we look at the Constitutional challenge. One of the things to note is that not all the Constitution applies to everyone. Some apply to Citizens and some apply to “the people”. The rights limited to citizens are called out by the term “citizen”. The rest of the time the founders use the terms “the people”, “person”, and “the accused.”

The Supreme Court has issued many opinions that restrict “The People” to those with a strong connection to the community politic.

With these in mind, it seems clear that Mahmoud is a member of the people. His rights are protected by most of the Constitution.

Is he challenging a federal law prohibiting the free exercise of or abridgment of his speech? Not directly.

Instead, he challenges the law as applied to him, His claim is that he can’t speak while detained and that the threat of detention has a chilling effect on his ability to speak freely.

The state has not justified his detention in court documents — yet. Instead, they are fighting the most relevant parts first. Bluntly, I don’t care if this asshole is deported or rotting in a jail cell. He’s not out there intimidating the people of the United States.

What the state did was they revoked his visa and his green card.

When can a green card be revoked?

What this means is that the state need only prove that Mahmoud was part of or assisting a terrorist group. Hamas is a designated terrorist group.

Conclusion

The left loves to talk about hate speech. They love it because it allows them to justify their violence. Hate speech is always in the eye of the offended.

“Violent” speech is violence, according to the left.

Violence can be countered with violence.

Therefore, you saying something that they disagree with is hate speech, which in turn is violence, which means they can punch you.

In the other direction, any real, physical violence they engage in is “just protests” and is “speech” protected by the Constitution.

They are going to lose this one. I’ve seen to many good filings from this administration to believe they aren’t going to win. Maybe not at the district level with all the rogue inferior judges, but they will win higher up.

I’m going through some personal stuff right now, and it’s been rough. Some of the responses I’ve gotten to my last few posts have left me feeling raw and frustrated, and unsure of what to do and say going forward. After some long talks with Chris and others, I’m writing this to try and get some general thoughts out that I hope will help you guys and me.

First and foremost, if something is labeled “From Behind Enemy Lines,” then I am doing just that – talking about the Left, FROM the Left. That is what I’ve been asked to do, when I’m posting under that banner. I’ve been asked to give a Left perspective, or at least a “more Left” perspective, so that you guys can learn and to be sure that Vine isn’t an “echo chamber.” I am going to be more obvious in it, adding FBEL at the top of posts that are “representative Left” or “explaining Left” so that they stand out.

So my last post was about the memes I’d seen floating around, and in particular, about the Trump 2028 one. From where I’m standing, there are three groups of people. First, we have the far Left. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and nothing you or I say is going to change it. I ignore them. Second is the group of “normal Left” or what I tend to call “thinking Left.” These are people who have chosen willfully to be Left of center, but are self-consistent, thinking, and reasoning. I might not LIKE their reasoning, and I may think it’s false in the grand scheme of things or missing important points, but they’ve shown me that they give actual thought and consideration to their position. I have many friends in this group.

The third group consists of people like me. We were a little Left of Center, if you asked us. People on the Right just lumped us in with “The Left,” and the Left considered us oddities and “too far Right for comfort” but generally tolerated us. We are no longer “a little Left of Center.” We are deep state Right, at this point, because the Left has shifted so far Left that we’re not even close anymore. Some, like myself, have chosen to take the couple of steps Right to join the rest of you under the Conservative tent, albeit in our own little corner while we acclimate. Others are dithering out there on the sandbar, wondering where the hell the tide went and why it’s so fucking cold these days.

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One of the great things about following people on X is that you get news faster and from different points of view.

One of the worst things about X is that you get idiot NPC talking points dumped into your feed constantly.

For the last three weeks, every weekend, there is a spat of NPCs telling me that Trump has gone golfing. That he has gone golfing every weekend since he took office. That his golfing has cost some number of millions of dollars. The number is the same across every post.

This week, the talking points included that Trump was golfing while there were fires on Long Island. How can he be so cruel. And he went golfing last weekend during the fires in North and South Carolina.

Last weekend it was about how the fires in the Carolina’s were happening despite the claims of good forest management. Claims that there wasn’t water to fight the fires. While showing the same video of firefighters using water to fight the fires.

The biggest NPC talking point has been on “Tax cuts for Billionaires.” The claim is that Trump is taking money away from veterans, the sick, and the elderly to give to his “billionaire friends”.

If you open the curtain and peek behind it, you find that they are lying.

So let’s do a little numbering.

We are going to look at somebody making $12000/year, $50,000/year, $100,000/year, $500,000/year, and a million dollars per year.

We use a progressive tax rate, so as your income goes up, so does your tax rate.

Somebody with an income of $1,000,000 pays 328 thousand dollars in taxes. If everybody got a 1% tax cut, he would get to keep $3,281 of his money. The person making $50k per year would get to keep $500 of his money. Oh my goodness.

So what are these huge tax cuts that “Trump gave his billionaire friends?” The Trump tax cuts apply to everybody. The NPCs claim that everybody getting tax cuts is not fair because a millionaire gets $3k back, but regular folk only get $500 back. This is so horrible, that they proposed an amendment that would have increased the tax rate of people making more than $999,999.

This would have added another tax bracket. They are literally saying that if we don’t raise the taxes on those making more than $999,999 we are giving a tax cut.

It doesn’t make sense to anybody except NPCs.

This entire talking point also avoids the question of how billionaires make their money.

If I was working a full-time job and pulling in a billion dollars per year, I would be charging $480,769.23/hour.

It isn’t happening. A million dollars per year income is only $480/hour.

Yes, there are some professions that charge at the $500 to $1000 per hour rate, but they are generally not taking it all home. Instead, that hourly rate goes into paying for many people.

What a millionaire does is they make money by investing. Pretend you made $174,000 in 2024. After paying all your bills, you might take home $50 to $75 thousand for fun stuff.

Now, supposed you took that $50k and invested it in a stock, like $TEM in January 2025 at $32/share. If you sold it at the end of February 2025 at $89.44 you would have made a profit of $89k. Not a bad return over the course of a month.

This is a short-term capital gain which gets taxed at your as above, according to your tax bracket. On the other hand, if you hold that stock for a full 12 months and then sell it, you would only get taxed at 15%, not 24%. That is a 9% savings in taxes.

If you were to have a taxable income of over $533k/year, then your rate would be 20% on that $89k, not 37%. That translates to savings of $15,140.

Trump is not talking about cutting the capital gains taxes. He is talking about income tax changes.

This is the same language game that congress critters make every year. “We made cuts to the budget!” translation, “We aren’t going to spend as much as we wanted to. We are only spending $500,000 more, not the $3.3 million more we wanted”

A cut is when the amount spent this year is less than the amount spent last year.

I believe that I managed to lose some of my article. Still, it is just a rant.

Years ago, I was in conversations with a lady, we agreed to meet for coffee and then a movie. When I arrived, she was busy with other people. I waited. When she was finally done with the others, I asked her which movie she was interested in seeing.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to go to a movie with you.”

My reply was, “I’m disappointed with you.”

I walked away. Later, I heard through the grapevine that my sentence had nearly broken her. “I’m disappointed” carries great weight, emotionally.

For years, I’ve felt like I’m in a political battle where the other side gets to decide what rules I fight by and what rules they fight by, but their rules are not the same as mine.

I remember every time somebody called me a murder for wanting to keep my guns. Every time I was blamed because some asshole killed children. I was to blame for the blood spilled in the cities.

If only I would consent to common-sense, reasonable gun laws. It is all about safety.

After Sandhook, I was hearing the same things again. One of the people doing it showed up on my Facebook page.

I proceeded to call her a heartless subhuman for wanting children to die. Why wouldn’t she agree that it was just common sense to have teachers armed to kill assholes that would harm our children? How could she be so selfish?

Every attack that had ever been leveled at me, I threw back at this lady.

Turns out that his lady was a friend’s aunt. They came to me and asked me to tone it down. To back off because I was being hurtful. She was a teacher and had spent her entire career helping children.

I did. I took the highroad, again.

This is where we always went.

When Trump v0.1 came on the scene, the Democrats loved him. They loved him because they knew he was a Democrat at heart. They wanted him to win the primary because he would be easier to beat than Hillary.

Trump v0.9 showed up when he became the Republican candidate for President. The Democrats turned on him like a pack of hyenas.

Trump v1.0 started when he took office the first time.

One of the reasons he won that time was because he was fighting back. He was calling the left out for their lies. But he used belittling terms for them. He fought from the gutter where the left lives.

Ally was so upset about his words that she couldn’t accept his deeds. Almost every interaction regarding Trump was her telling me about something he said that was mean.

She was still part of that leftist mindset. That mindset that looks for a reason to throw a person out of the tent. If a person is in perfect lockstep with the sheep of the left, then they are kicked out.

Every conservative was unacceptable to her because they had done something that disqualified them.

She has come around. But some of those old habits die hard.

We got into a big argument after a Republican representative introduced the mentally ill representative as “The representative of ??? Mr. ???” sorry, I don’t recall the names.

When I was talking at dinner, I mentioned this and mentioned that I got a chuckle over this.

She was very upset with me. “I expect better of you.”

From her perspective, I was being mean to that ill person. It would have been easy for the Republican to introduce the other member as “Representative X”. No Mr. No Mrs. No Miss. Just “Representative”.

Yeah, she could have. But I was pleased to have her punch back.

But everything she observes from her new group gets that same, “I expect better of my team” treatment.

I read Alito’s dissent. It didn’t pull any punches. Thomas joined him in his dissent. When those two are in agreement, then the right thing to do is what they are saying.

Barrette didn’t agree with them. She voted with the majority to deny a stay pending appeal.

Having mulled over it for a few days, I have to agree with Amy. And it is one of the reasons why she is a good choice for the Court.

I do not want somebody who votes the “right” way on my issues. I want somebody who respects the law and follows the constitution, regardless of where it leads.

I am sure that it was hard for her to withstand the powerhouse that is the Thomas-Alito team.

The short of it was that Roberts made the issue moot. This saved everybody time. It kept the status quo for a bit longer. And it put the case on the correct footing for an appeal of the preliminary injunction. In addition, even the denial was a win because it slapped the inferior courts square in the face with their rogue behavior.

I expect more of my justices. Amy gave me more. It hurt, to be sure, but she did the right thing.

When I see Trump 2028 I know it is not going to happen. The push for allowing a president to have three terms happened near the end of the Obama presidency. The left wanted their chosen one to have another term.

I didn’t like the idea then, I don’t like the idea now.

Because I don’t see any real push to get Trump a third term, I know that Trump 2028 is a troll. It is a good troll because the left can’t treat it as a joke. They can’t because they were serious when they were trying to get Obama a third term.

When I see “Trump 2028” posted on the idiot signs held by Democrats during the address to the joint session of Congress, it makes me smile even more.

It trolls on so many levels, and it makes me chuckle. It isn’t being pushed by anybody seriously. J.D. 2028 is what I’m actually hearing. The serious faces of the people holding idiot signs makes it work more. The fact that if it happened, the Democrats would have an even bigger meltdown. There would be accusations all over the place.

And not a single Democrat would admit that they had seriously looked into it for their guy, for Obama.

As a practical matter, getting a third term for a president requires a Constitutional amendment. If somebody were to propose one, I would be on the phone to my Senators and Representative to tell them to vote against the amendment.

Until that happens, this is a great troll. I’m not going to let realities get in the way of good humor.

As many have said, the left can’t meme.

When I started writing, regularly, for Miguel, I took it upon myself to cover legal cases. Since that time, I’ve learned more than I really wanted to about our justice system.

As my mentor used to say, “The justice system is just a system.” As a systems’ person, that allowed me to look at cases through the lens of my experience analyzing large systems.

One of the first things I noticed was that most people reporting on cases didn’t provide enough information for us to look up what was actually written or said.

CourtListener.com has come to my rescue for most legal filings in the federal system. If you know the court and the docket number you can find that case on CourtListener.

Once you have the docket located, you can start reading the filings. These are stored as PDFs. Most of my PDF tools allow me to copy and paste directly from the PDF.

What isn’t available on CourtListener is Supreme Court dockets. I’ve talked to Mike and others, the issue seems to be something about scrapping the Supreme Court website as well as other stuff. I’m not sure exactly what.

I want to be able to keep up on all the current cases in the Supreme Court, what their status currently is, what has been filed. They entirety of the case. I’m not concerned about most of the cases, but often it is easier to get all than a selected portion.

To this end, I have code that uses patterns to pull cases from the Supreme Court docket without have a listing of cases.

This tool will have search capabilities and other tools shortly, for now, it works well enough.

I am using the PySide6, which is a python implementation of the Qt framework. For the most part, I’m happy with this framework. There are parts I don’t like, which I work around.

My most recent success was figuring out how to allow me to click on hyperlinks in text to bring up my PDF viewer. This was not as simple as I wanted it to be, but it is working.

The other night, I wanted to write about a current case. I had the case docket in my tool. I pulled up the docket, clicked on the link, and John Roberts’ order popped up in my viewer, exactly as it should.

I started writing. Went to pull the quote and nothing.

Copy and paste does not seem to be functional in my tool.

Which takes me to the rant, which @#$)*&@$) coordinate system should I be using to get the right text!

Qt is built around widgets. Every widget has its coordinate system. In addition, there is the global coordinate system.

Each widget also has a paintEvent() which is when it paints itself.

To start the process, I capture mousePress, mouseMove, and mouseRelease events. While the mouse button is down, I draw a rectangle from the place clicked to the current location of the mouse.

I attempt to draw the rectangle and nothing shows up on the screen.

Through debugging code, I finally figured out that I am not updating the right widget.

The QPdfView widget properly renders the PDF document in a scrollable window. I have made a subclass of QPdfView so I am catching all paint events. But even though I’m telling the system that I have to redraw (update) my widget, there are no paint events being sent to my widget.

Turns out that my widget only cares about update signals that require the framing content be redrawn. I.e. if the scroll bar changes, then I get a paint event. Once I figured this out, I was able to tell the viewport that it should update and things started working.

So now I can draw a frame on the screen. But what I want is to get the text from within that frame.

I asked the QPdfDocument for a new selection from point_start to point_end. It tells me nothing is selected.

Where do I currently sit? I have my frame in my PDFViewer coordinate system. I have the PDF document in a different coordinate system. The PDF coordinate system is modified by the scroll bars or viewport. The scroll bars and scroll area modify the actual coordinate system of the viewport contents.

Somehow, I need to figure out which of these coordinate systems is the right coordinate system to use to get the text highlighted by my mouse.

I’m tired of this fight.

My mentor was a federal employee. He, and his team, worked odd hours. I would put in my 8 hours as a contractor and then go to his lab and work with him and his team until midnight or later.

Somewhere along the way, people noticed that his team didn’t have set hours and raised a fuss. They complained to the IG that he and his team were mis-reporting their hours.

This led to the IG sending people to investigate.

Now, this was in a secured area. During normal hours, you could just walk in after you should your badge. After hours, you had to sign in and out.

What this meant was that his team had security logs showing when they left for the night. And with a bit of work, they also had the time when people got to work.

After a thorough investigation, they found that yes, the team was misreporting their hours.

They were underreporting by 10 to 15 hours per week.

For me, it didn’t make any difference. I was on salary to the contractor. The time I spent with my mentor, working on projects for the government, were not billable hours. I didn’t care. I learned astonishing things.

Our system administrators were a pair of very sharp ladies. They arrived on time and they left on time. During their 8 hours, they worked constantly. I never felt like they gave less than 100%. When they needed to work late, they did.

Others I worked with were the same way. They gave their 8 hours and left. We got what we were paying for.

Some scientists over worked too.

Then there were the “slackers”. They arrived at work exactly on time. They went to their desks, were seen, then went to the restroom for their morning dump. This lasted anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.

Subsequently, they went and did a bit of work before it was time for morning break. After the morning break, they had a pee smoke break. Then lunch, then a bit of work, then home, exactly on time.

Total time working, maybe an hour and a half.

A former friend worked for the state government. He was proud of the fact that he got paid for 8 hours of work per day, but on a normal day, he only spent about 2 hours working. The rest of the time he was doing own time projects/stuff.

Now, sometimes people look like they are cheating, but they aren’t really.

We had a group of scientists that looked lazy. They would get to work and sit around talking, reading the paper, for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two. Then they would get busy pouring over results for a couple of hours. Then they would have another long gab session.

After that, they would spend a bit of time putzing with their program before telling the program to “run”.

They would twiddle their thumbs doing nothing until quitting time.

They were incredibly productive. They submitted a run before they left for the day. That would run overnight. If they had the parameters right, the run would complete shortly after they got to work. They would then analyze the results and submit the next run.

On Fridays, they would submit jobs that would run all weekend long. That made Mondays look like they were goofing off for an extended time as they waited for the runs to complete.

Their work was so important that it justified a major computer upgrade. The new computer was 4 times as fast. What used to take them 16 hours of run time now only took 4 hours. They should now be able to get two or three runs per day done.

Nope. With the faster computer, they were able to get more detailed results in the same 16-hour run time. They adjusted to the increased speed by answering more of the question more accurately.

All of this is to say, when I see former federal employees screaming about being fired, my heart gives a little thump of happiness. If they are good or needed, they will be rehired. In the meantime, learn to code. I hear COBOL is a good choice.

People have a difficult time making hard choices.

The Trolley Problem brings is one of the ways that we explore ethical choices. The general premises are that there are five people that will die if you do nothing. There is one person, who is currently safe, who can be sacrificed to save the five.

Do you do nothing and let five people die, or do you throw the switch and kill the one?

What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?

Now take that same list of changes and insert it into the five. What if one of the five was a child, a woman, a person of color, your wife?

Ok. How about if your daughter was the one and your son was one of the five?

The problem hasn’t changed, but the emotional stress is greatly increased.

Politicians know this. They use it to their advantage.

The term is “Emotional Blackmail.”

Consider the following dilemma, you can choose to pay more in taxes or the school system’s proposed budget is capped at a half million increase rather than the 3.5 million increase they were asking for.

For me, that’s an easy choice. Cap at a 0.5 million increase. At which point the emotional blackmail begins.

“If you don’t give use the extra three million dollars, we will have to fire teachers.”

Is that really the only choice?

That is the question I posed a teacher. What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.

Now, I’ve been told that I’m against teachers. That I oppose her. Why? Because I don’t want to cut teachers?

For her, there are only two choices, pay or cut teachers. If I don’t want to pay more in taxes, I must hate teachers and want them fired.

So I asked her about programs in the budget that could be cut instead. In our first iteration, there were no programs she was willing to cut.

The problem she has is that every cut is equally bad. Every choice is equally bad. Since all the choices are bad, the only option is to get the 3 million dollars out of the stone of taxpayers.

We had a similar issue at a family level years ago. We had a 16k windfall. We all agreed we would put that money into the homestead. The problem was that nobody could agree on what we should do.

Should we get new siding for the house? Should we replace one of the vehicles? Should we pay off a loan?

It wasn’t even that simple, there were about a dozen different projects or expenses we were considering.

By default, humans will spiral rather than make a hard decision.

I had to listen to people tell me that project A was more important than project B, but B was more important than C. And C was more important than A.

It was a circle. Everything was more important than everything else.

The first process was having everybody create an ordered list of by importance.

They couldn’t do it. They all had situations where they had multiple things with equal importance. Or worse still, some couldn’t do it because they couldn’t choose.

The method that did work was creating binary choices.

We lay out a grid, in that grid we compare every item to every other item, asking if item row was more important than the item in the column.

Once that grid is filled out, we can create an ordered list. Once we had ordered lists, we could present and come to an agreement as to what our priorities were.

From this table, we can create an ordered list

1. Roof
2. Foundation
3. Gutters
4. Siding
5. Paint
6. Truck
7. Car
8. Computer

The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.