^H

This week has been about trying up loose ends preparing for the next chapter. Am I going to miss the routine of day-to-day doing something that could end in absolute disaster if I’m not there.

Still bouncing things around about what to do. Whether or not I can earn money on them is far less-important; seeing the arrangement I’m going to have is okay. I really can’t find a better word for it, unfortunately; I’m tired of trying to have other people think I’m just like anyone else physically. I’m not. My protestations to the contrary should probably be met with more than a little skepticism.

What I need to learn to do is not try and find things into which I can throw myself to distract me from the mundane that used to consume so much of my time previously.

Fake TwiX account that’d needle some? Hm. Is there someone else who could do this better than I could? Certainly. Am I going to blow the idea off because I don’t have a co-conspirator interested? Almost certainly.

So, in addition to work stuff, I’ve been running numbers, and making some planes. Short-term Disability until the fall. Probably long-term after that. It’s going to be a pretty significant income cut, but the past few years, for me, have been about doing as much as I possibly can to spare huge tax bills. I’m absolutely certain that there’s someone not far from where I live who’d argue that I’m not paying “my fair share.”

Got it.

We can live somewhat-comfortably really about until my expected end-of-life.

Speaking of that, got news that one of my longest employers died.

When i was getting into the media, I’d heard so many things about how awful iit was to work for him. Maybe it was due to the odd hours I worked most of my time there, but I didn’t have very many experiences with him that you could say were negative.

I did have an instance where I thought I was going to be fired. I was working overnights, doing live assist on things like Coast To Coast AM while prepping for the morning shows. I also inherited a big share of the IT work because I knew how to use free-as-in-beer software (yes, most of it was free as-in-speech, but the in-beer part was biggest concern). After one of the first I’d helped prep for Y2K, helped in the cleanup after Melissa, Badtrans, etc.

The promotions staff were trying to send an email announcement about some event to people who’d subscribed to the station mailing list(s).

All of this was tied to a single server on probably about a 40Kbps fractional T1. The message wasn’t huge, but sending thousands of them over a small pipe took a long time.

I’d gotten off the air at 0600 and gone home. The promotions person sent the email probably just before lunchtime.

I got the first call about the fact that it was taking forever about 1p. I came to, checked the queue, and things were moving, but it was taking a long time.

A lot of the pipe was also being used by other staff doing their normal day-to-day tasks. It’d take a while, but it would finish if the server hadn’t crashed so far. (Mind you, this was probably like a 166 MHz Pentium with about 24M of RAM.)

After that disruption, and I did have to work that night, I got another call probably about two hours later.

The sponsor still hasn’t gotten hist email.

Log back in

It’s still running. Sorry. It’ll go when it goes.

Bob is getting really upset that it’s taking so long.

Half asleep, I exclaimed something like “Fuck Bob! It’ll be done when it’s done.”

He was listening on the call to me. Maybe he urged the staff to call me. I don’t know.

Oh shit, I’m gonna get fired.

Probably 36h later, I got word that he was upset, but he understood. And that I needed to mind my manners.

Sir, yessir.

After I left, he was always very hospitable towards me. I wrote about one of those instances here. His analysis of the crappy little company where I went to work will remain with me forever. I’m saddened by the loss, as I was by the loss of Lisa. No, I didn’t get rich, but I learned things I never would have been able to otherwise.

---

So, what else?

Current gig filling holes where I can, preparing for my exit, trying hard not to point and say, “I told you so.” But I did. I’ll be heading off, now, and it’s your. Maybe there would have been a way to keep me, but that train’s probably already gone. Oh well.

What am I going to do with a basically open summer for the first time in who knows how long…

Could have so many meanings. Certainly the French one for “one” doesn’t really fit given my prolificness writing, but it’s what comes to mind as I’m fumbling around this Saturday.

So, what’s up?

Well, a lot of the past week has been spent trying to figure out my future; I’ll soon be Unemployed.

You know, I’ve stuck around in my current gig for a few years longer than I probably should have for myriad reasons. Am I ready to be finished working? Kinda. I’m tired, and my health has worsened with regards to the MS. At the same time, improvements in other aspects have really returned sorta-normal life to me. I’m not seeing the entry I wrote following doing something really mundane, getting my teeth cleaned, on a random weekend morning. and it being kind of unremarkable. I didn’t have to preplan for days ahead to go ahead and do this normal thing.

I should be enjoying this, but I’m not. At the same time, while I should enjoying my newfound normalcy, things were still really disrupted by the pandemic nonsense, reactions to Trump, etc.

So I’ve stayed put, dealt with being Unappreciated, and tried to do the best I could for the company that’s employed me for the past six years.

Late last week, I was informed that my services would not be needed after 9 May.

Hm. Okay.

Do I just go quietly, with my departure largely unnoticed? It’d make a ton of sense, but with some of what I’ve gleaned from my discombobulated employer, I guess I should take a peek.

Maybe what’s happened is unfair, but I thought it was the correct approach to take.

Salaries haven’t kept up with inflation, that’s for sure. I could probably find something that pays roughly what I’m earning now, full-telecommute guaranteed, outside government. My wife out-earns me now, and she’s really only been working professionally for a few years.

I could fret about it, but it seems like an unproductive use of my time. The unanswered question is whether I want to work for a couple more years or not.

I don’t know.

Lots of work, though a bit of a respite from the craziness that was last week.

Once again, though, I really find myself in a position by myself.

Obviously, there’s still been a ton about DOGE. Local news is particularly awful with the reporting. Cuts are happening. Let’s do an interest story about a govvie who’s seeing her gig cut after she’s been in the same job for thirty-five years. Um. Okay. Retire, maybe? Or, embrace freshness. (So says the guy who’s got tons of stuff from way before the start of this blog…) Or, hey even better, let’s get a union thug to tell us how bad any cuts are!

So many things need to be started fresh.

I was disrupted by a call about stringing antiquated stuff along, so I’ve kind of lost the bubble on what I was going to say.

So, other stuff…

Heard a long rant on how what Trump is doing with tariffs makes sense. Naturally, it rolled into the RON PAUL-style despair about Nixon and the gold standard.

You can have currencies that are based on other things. Look, perhaps, at the countries whose currencies are tied in part to things like other non-metallic assets. OPEC isn’t cutting production to keep the price of oil up. Not happening. And both the global energy and currencies were absolutely cripped by the bombing of NordStream.

Okay. The experts at the Libertarian Institute said that would surely happen. And it hasn’t.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that NordStream didn’t carry oil, and Natural Gas isn’t dollar-deliminated.

Yes, there was a minor shock, but people work around it. Just because something was true in 1991 doesn’t mean it’s still true today.

Things changeget better.

I did watch President Trump’s “liberation day” speech, and was struck by that he doesn’t understand that things progress, and you don’t need to do the same things the way they used to be done. The union bosses he had speak don’t understand that. If you needed a pipefitter in 1955, you need one today.

Except maybe you don’t. Maybe there’s a better way to do things. Much as I love the feeling of radiator heat, I wouldn’t build a new building with them on every wall.

Won’t someone think of the pipefitters who are out of work, and the people who would have built those radiators?

Um. Yeah. I have.

And that’s part of the reason I’m not upset to see them go.

I don’t like going to cars or cooking, but it fits here. Is it a problem that gap dwelling is something basically nobody knows how to do anymore?

According to Jesse Singal during the latest “primo” episode of Blocked & Reported. Given my traffic stats, this is absolutely not an issue for me.

I started writing this Friday or Saturday, and came away kind of exhausted by the episode. Lots of focus on Jack Posobiec, and back to the PizzaGate controversy.

But I chose the title because this won’t be a problem I’m having; nobody is reading, and everything gets deleted. Or at least hidden from public view.

This week has been a marked exercise in me showing exactly why I so often find myself alone on almost every issue.

I’m consuming a lot of information that I’d formerly cast aside with a “this is bullshit” dismissal. Oh well.

I do consider everything, and you have to call out when people are just absolutely wrong. About nearly everything.

Professionally, that’s tough. This unwise thing was done, and I just have to work within the frameworks that exist.

It does kind of fit with DOGE/USDS/18F. What the hell are you trying to do? Can it be done better? Go figure out how to do it, and to hell with the legacy cruft.

I’ll make mistakes. I readily admit that. I want you to explain why I’ve made a mistake beyond adherence to some rule from 40 years ago.

“No, you can’t do that.” might as well be restated as, “I’m reporting you to the cops.”

The fundamental engineering has been stripped out in the name of “being agile,” but the sledgehammer that is the regulatory sledgehammer remains, as an unspoken threat.

Okay, then. Do whatever you will, but do it publicly.

In fact, do it on Signal so everybody knows!!1!

I’ve been watching NBC lately after ABC’s debate performance and CVS’s endless string of BS.

They had a report that led in it saying DOGE exists partially to look for waste and that there’s no evidence of.

Excuse me?

Logically, absence of evident is not evidence of absence. With things like fraud in a large program, and government programs tend to be that, there’s some fraud.

There’s been a lot of discontent here in/around home with what’s happening.

There was a good Reason podcast about everything that’s going on with DOGE.

As with so many things, I do find myself in partial agreement. But the strident opposition relies on the assumption that everything is and was okay.

If you truly believe that’s true, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.

Obviously a lot of what’s been the bit issue the big topic of discussion here inside the Beltway Swamp over the past week has been going on with the various things the kids from DOGE have been finding as they investigate the behemoth that is the US Government.

there’s a ton of things that’d make an average person do a triple0take.

some of it has been hyperbolized, but the underlying issues remain. The corporate media focus on the bits that came out early in the week/late last week about Politico missing payroll.

The easy way to deflect this is to focus on the “good” things USAID did/does.

Maybe there’s things that they were doing that are completely justifiable. But it’s up to Congress to actually do the work, and lay those out. In specifics.

As is usually the case, I’m completely on the outside of “the two” camps. I’m a lot closer to Javier Milei‘s abuela approach.

I didn’t bookmark it, but there was someone who was taking about how USAID really just was a p inter-administration parking space for affluent young people who lost jobs when party control changed in the White House.

I’ll spare my more vulgar immediate responses from earlier in the week while readily admitting they were profane, but cry me a river, y’all.

So many of you have never had to worry about anything, ever.

OrangeManBad and the Nazi South African have screwed everything up. The only media outlet that matters said it, so it must be true.

(Forget all the stuff from the first Trump Administration; all of that was true, too…Random Aside: I see that WordPress has taken to counting a double-space after a semicolon as an error. GFY, y’all. Muscle memory guilt up in typing class….)

Returning to the first job I took after I left radio, I went back to the stations probably about six months after I’d left. I was speaking to the receptionist in the lobby, and the General Manager saw me through her office window. She excitedly ushered me in where she was talking to the station do-owner (her ex-husband).

She asked how I was liking my new job. I demurred and said something about liking a lot of the work I was doing, and things like travel. Even if it was to some less-than-wonderful places.

Her husband hadn’t said much, but was listening to my description. After a couple of minutes, he piped in, “they’re missin’ payroll.”

Shit. How do I respond to that? I didn’t want to confirm that it’d happened a couple of times, already, but been fixed within a few days. A bit of discomfort wasn’t really that big a deal with how much more they were paying me, right?

I’d moved back home after my dad had gone to Iraq again to help my mom care for the dogs and house. I’d met this Virginia Beach college student who, for whatever reason, had taken a liking to me, and I was set to rent an apartment near the Oceanfront.

Until they missed payroll again, and I didn’t have the money for the deposit.

On what, then, can I spend this extra money i have? Oh, I’ll pay off the small student loans I had to attend my state school.

Things moved along, and I tried my hardest to make this tiny company succeed. I was doing work both in product development, but also in capturing business. A significant amount of travel, and they’d just take sometimes months to reimburse me for my expenses.

During that time, too, I was having pain in my left eye. I attributed it to something that happened as my new girlfriend and I were trying to squeeze into her childhood twin bed together, but was probably an MS symptom. I went to an ophthalmologist after the incident (accidentally caught her elbow in my eye; as I said, we were trying to share a bed that was probably too small for me, alone…)

I started getting bills from the various providers I’d seen. Why? The company hadn’t paid our health insurance.

Part of the reason I took the job was to get health insurance, and move off the private plan I was paying a not-insignificant amount for.

Things continued to decline with the business. I continued to spend my own money to try to keep things going. They kept missing payroll, and being late with expense checks.

They didn’t pay the lease on the office where I was working in Chesapeake. I had to participate in an emergency move-out one weekend to make sure everything was gone before it was repossessed.

I was driving to and from Ashland (up near Kings Dominion) four days a week.

We started getting paid in paper checks furiously scribed by the company Treasurer on payday.

When I’d get a paycheck, I’d go to the company’s bank, cash it, and rive back to Bad Newz with a pocket full of cash to deposit into my credit union.

The same sort of thing was happening to the writers at Politico late last week/early this week. If you STFW for “Politico USAID,” you’ll see bits about how it was a rumor.

Debunked.

That they missed payroll, for whatever reason, is a story.

How can an organization that’s supposed to be a gold-standard of journalism be given any credit when they’re failing to meet the bare minimums as an employer? That the story got out so quickly says something, too. When I wasn’t getting paid, maybe, my girlfriend, a couple of close friends, and my parents knew about it. I certainly would have been very upset if any of them had shared that information.

I suppose that in the world of social media, there is no shame about loudly proclaiming that to the world.

But that’s true of so many things, I guess.

There’s things that only a few people need to know. And you do your part as an employer to make sure there’s zero chance of the story ever starting in the first place.

Brother, can you spare a dime? has morphed into “zOMG NAXI MUSK is going to mean I miss….”

Cry me a river.

Or maybe understand that the gravy train is over?

I’m not holding my breath on either.

Part of the reason I didn’t vote for Trump is I think things are too far gone to fix gently. I listen to the Republican sympathizers so optimistic about what’s going on. Are they more deluded than the people upset about the DEI cuts?

Good question.

So back to listening to the folks on Just Asking Questions. Not sure if they’ll be as shocked as the Politico people have been when things don’t work out.

I didn’t write this morning because I was busy working out, then actually working. *crosses fingers* Maybe that’ll more than justify my tentative plan to now work Friday headed in to the long weekend.

I am overloaded, but I do what I can to help as long as I can. I did finish up paying my protection racket to the professional certification cabal until 2030. Will I live that long, even?

It’s what I have to do, I suppose. At the same time, I’m just ready to be done with it all.

Other schtuff…

---

Following along with curious it, perhaps morbid, what’s going on with The LP.

I seem to recall part of the NeoHippies’ pitch being an end to embarrassment from the party. How’s that going?

I’m not upset that I’m on the outside. I shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief knowing that my membership dues aren’t going to pay for the supporter of The Pedo.

But those rallies across the river were awesome, amirite?

---

This morning started with this.

Pfft.

Yes, largely on account of faith, I’m opposed to abortion; I don’t government should be involved at all before a certain point.

With that, there abortions shouldn’t be funded with money taken by theft (which is what taxes largely are…).

---

Listened to this. (And apologies for the paywall. I think I still have a freebie subscription if you’re interested email me. But I’m getting strong correlation to the Nixon Administration. Do you remember the assassination attempts on Gerald Ford? I don’t; hadn’t been downloaded yes, but I’m seeing some parallels. It has less to do with the politicians who are in office than it does with just absolutely nuts people in/around California.

---

Musk put this up on TwitterX

I don’t think Defense is the problem, AntiWar folks.

---

Okay, I’m stopping now. Might have more tomorrow.

That doesn’t mean that what it’s working on is at all useful.

Listened to this Monday.

My response to Reason was as follows:

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I absolutely appreciate the mention of USDS and what Musk wants to do with it.

One of my friends from college worked for USDS’s predecessor, 18F, after he’d decided he didn’t want to go back to Google following an extraordinary amount of work on what’d become G+.

One of the movers behind USDS is Jennifer Pahlka. She wrote a pretty good book about what she did there. Her Substack is “Eating Policy.

Consuming that recently has been frustrating. She, and the sort of people who work at USDS, believe government’s inability to deliver services or fix problems is government service delivery problems.

I worry that Elon thinks that that’s the problem, too. (Jennifer also is big on thinking that government can solve the coming climate apocalypse…)

I mentioned my college friend who worked there; I was the awkward guy on campus campaigning for Harry Browne.

Government Doesn’t Work.

Elon’s reinforces that with his space efforts. So, too, has Space Cowboy Jeff (Bezos).

Agree with Vivek’s concerns about debt and spending, but I’m not sure, like SS/Medicare, that anybody has any real idea what to do about it.

---

A significant part of what 18F/USDS was doing was in reaction to the failed rollout of healthcare.gov.

The botched rollout of healthcare.gov was really just a point of mild interest when it was going on.

I’m not going to fully revisit my travails with healthcare from 2013-2017ish, but I will say that the big issues with healthcare.gov was that the Exchange plans I paid for with after-tax dollars were very expensive, and would have to be better to suck.

The private plan I had in 2014 was okay, but couldn’t be sold for 2014. The most-expensive Exchange plant we had for 2015, and it would have had to improve to suck. None of the specialists I’d been seeing accepted it, with a few asking if it was a Medicaid plan. Uh, no, I’m paying something like $750/mo. for this.

I do credit Biogen in helping me find plans for 2015-2017 that covered a lot of my care, but it didn’t change the fact that I was still paying north of $500/mo for myself and my undergrad wife. After about my fourth Tysabri dose of year, I’d met all my deductibles for the year.

But I was still paying something north of $500/mo..

So, while the rollout for healthcare.gov wasn’t done well, the fact that the service it was providing sucked doesn’t change.

I don’t know that there’s a good way to fix any of that.

Part of what they were discussing during the Reason show was that there’s a lot of emphasis on really extending work from USDS, but it doesn’t change the fact that government just doesn’t work. You can do an incredible amount of work expanding service delivery, but if the service isn’t good, does it matter?

Well, it’s above freezing now, so hopefully a lot of the remaining ice will sublimate off, and I can go back to exercising as I’d like.

Going to be a bit odd with my wife the return-to-office of the Federal workforce. I don’t think it’s going to affect me directly, but there’s going to be some changes.

The DEI EO might actually help people like me get back to potentially working on the General Schedule? Possibly.

A lot of discussion about what Musk is doing with DOGE, but I’m really looking at it at this point as one of few ways to actually shrink the Federal workforce.

Someone who’s on the DEI staff — is there anything else he/she can do in Federal service?

Well, work at the TSA, perhaps.

Somehow I think a gender studies major might be able to do this.

But there’s not a lot else.

Yes, there’ll be a segment who’ll finally just retire, but I think there’s still many of them who’ve got debt that makes that impossible. Even with an inflation-adjusted pension, paying a the three mortgages would be tough.

Any sort of self-deprivation is unthinkable. That the buying-power of pretty much every single world currency is dropping is a part of it. Why is the Federal government spending more on interest on the debt today than it spends on the military?

Yes, I know, NeoHippies, it’s all about the Military-Industrial Complex. And President Biden harkened back to that in his farewell admonition.

Okay. Whatever. Let me know who you ware so I can ignore you for the rest of my life.

In 5 minutes, @JMilei provides a comprehensive history and diagnosis of humankind's rise and fall. Thanks to Trump, Milei, Musk, Meloni, Bolsonaro and more, the West turns the ship to avoid the Marxist government iceberg! Freedom, human rights and Truth underpin human… https://t.co/3AWs2P2RQ8

— Carrie Sheffield (@carriesheffield) January 23, 2025

Cannot say enough about how brave saying that sort of stuff is at the WEF.

Dry January ends soon. I did have one drink watching inaugural festivities, but have been good otherwise.

Emphatic “meh.”