Jobs Bill Alternate Wisdom

Let’s do the numbers.  Obama’s job bill costs $475,000,000,000.00 dollars.  The plan claims to create (or save) 2.5M jobs. First off, notice the “or save” part of the claim.  That’s the same rhetoric used with the first stimulus, however the credibility of such counterfactual claims is well known to have more psychological value than logical merit. Claiming knowledge of a history that didn’t occur or a future that hasn’t yet occurred is particularly offensive to the rational mind.

In fact, Stimulus 1.0 created nothing, regardless of vacuous claims of what it caused to not happen.  Well, let’s be picky.  Yes, it created jobs – just about the same number that were lost.  So, one side gets to say “created jobs” while the other side “didn’t create jobs.”  You figure out who is telling the truth.

Back to the $4.5B.  Using numbers from Bill Spetrino’s recent musings, we can go further.  The $4.5B will be spent now, but paid back over 10 years.  Add in another $120B in interest.  Then do the division.  The cost is $190,000.00 per job.  But remember, about half of those are “saved” jobs, not “created” jobs. That pushes the cost per job up to $380,000.00 per job.

Instead, let’s spend the $380,000 per job differently. Give a $40,000 tax credit to any company that hires someone for 5 years. Suddenly, you get nearly 12M jobs created (not shell-game “jobs saved” or transient seasonal job), and huge tax revenue.  Food stamp and Medicare costs go down. Unemployment down to 4%.

What’s really going on becomes so clear…

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Can Excel 2007 Open an Open Office .ods File ?

DON’T DO IT! Some topics just deserve more coverage. This made me hopping mad today.

Microsoft Excel 2007 will peacefully and silently open and edit an Open Office .ods spreadsheet. Saves without making a single complaint. Problem: All the formulas are deleted and replaced with fixed numbers. ARgghh! This destroys hours or days of productivity, depending on the size of your spreadsheet.

The behavior of Microsoft’s product is so violent against Open Office users, I’m surprised there has not been more of an uproar in the user community.

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False Safety in Cloud Computing

In the WSJ today, an article appeared, titled, “Seeking Safety in Clouds“.  Basically, small and medium businesses are flocking to cloud computing or outsourced IT solutions for data security and integrity.  News for you all: the risks are not better or worse, just different.  Some risks are much worse.  Can you imagine the tempting hack target of aggregated business data as a data center?  Can you imagine all the folks listening to the data streams, culling data as it’s transferred back and forth in the cloud and to/from the end user If you’re sending your company data regularly off-site, you better be locally encrypting it before it leaves your place of business. Do you have any doubt that we’ll read about a data breach within a short amount of time where a bunch of company’s data is taken?

There are solutions to data integrity via synchronization (aka cloud computing) other than paying big bucks for IT outsourcing. Here’s what’s working great for a 1-10 person small business.  Set up your own cloud! This is scalable up to about 50 people.  Buy a big USB hard drive.  Maybe three.  They cost less than $100 each. If you run on a Mac OS computer, pay someone a day’s work to setup the Time Machine backup.  If you run on a Linux computer, pay someone for a day’s work to setup Rsnapshot (on Puppy Linux) for you.  If you’re on Windows, setup Unison (which also runs on Mac and Linux, if you want to universally trade data files back and forth).  A big advantage to these methods is that restoring files is trivial.  Anybody who can browse a file directory structure can do it.

Unison is also particularly suited for transferring files over an encrypted link to an off-site location.  Buy a cheap desktop and put it somewhere else on the internet – maybe at home, if you work at the office.  Or maybe a relative’s house if you work at home.  Use SSH and batch files / scripts to periodically synchronize the data between computers.

Periodically, take a hard drive out of service and replace with a new one – at first each day, then each week, then each month, then each year.  The idea is to have staggered backups that span an increasing length of time, with decreasing granularity. This ensures that if your files get corrupetd or damaged and you don’t find out until later, that you can go back in time to get a good copy.

If this is all too confusing, and you need some guidance, give me a call.

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Open Letter to Fay Vincent – Soak the Needy

Fay Vincent:

You wrote in the September 16th edition of WSJ an editorial titled “Soak the Rich? No, Soak the Needy“.  You describe how Obama’s proposal to remove charitable deductions will motivate the rich to not make donations.  The rich will keep their money.  The benefactors will loose the money — in your case, an up and coming college student.  So, in essence, Obama’s plan to burden the “millionaires ” (actually, folks grossing over 250K), damages the poor recipients.

You are right in your observations. However, consider carrying your thoughts one more step forward.  On average, when charitable giving decreases, now we have one more needy person needing Federal subsidies for schooling.  In the end, the recipient will get scholarships or aid some other way.  The difference is that the government wants to control and funnel the money.  On the average, people at the end of the whip won’t gain or loose.  Instead, the net effect is funneling the dollars through the government.  It’s an issue of control.  They give the money, not you.  It builds dependencies.  It builds constituents. They get to choose how to spend the money rather than you.

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Donald Trump Accepts Gold Instead of US Dollars

Trump is quoted saying, “The economy is bad, and Obama’s not protecting the dollar at all. . . . If I do this, other people are going to start doing it, and maybe we’ll see some changes.” He’s right. Be scared. Continue reading

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