Category Archives: Culture

Someone Fund Me

A 25 year old woman is found busted up on a bike trail and she can’t remember the crash. You can read the story HERE.

It’s a story that caught national attention for some reason. I believe it’s because she’s a pretty blonde gal and there’s some fabricated “mystery” to the incident.  If it bleeds it leads in the “news” world these days.  The story injects that her injuries are “suspicious” and supposedly unnamed “doctors” said her injuries are inconsistent with a crash. It’s sad she crashed, but this story is nuts for a couple of reasons.

First off, her injuries look like the result of a simple get off. Kids back in my day busted out teeth, broke bones, got road rash, crashing bicycles and motorcycles. A couple of kids had their jaws wired shut after crashes.  No one had a broken neck as the “doctors” seem to say would necessarily accompany a crash.

But that’s not the nuttiest part.

Why is it these days that if something, anything, happens a “Go fund me” page pops up? What the heck?

Whatever happened to personal responsibility for your life?

I find it hard to comprehend why two young people who are making a living  want others to cover their expenses. Her hubby was at “Portland International Raceway” according to the story.  I looked up the schedule and the evening event was a cyclocross race.   Cyclocross racing is a recreational activity not a necessity for daily life.  To be fair perhaps he had a paying job working concessions or another track related job.  Portland has a $9.75 minimum wage.  If they both are working at minimum wage jobs, that’s a household income of almost $40,000 a year.

They are also the “healthy young people” that are getting some of the biggest breaks on their health insurance under Obamacare. By law they have health insurance, so what are the expenses that force them to resort to begging other people to pay for their misfortunes?

Again to be fair, perhaps there are some extraordinary circumstances that this young couple needs  help.  BUT…

I think our country is losing or has lost its GRIT. If it’s money, anyone can make more money. Work more hours, Work more years before retirement. Give up buying fast food or coffee. Eat less. Sell some of your stuff.  Wear clothes until they fall apart. Buy used clothing for that matter. Fix stuff when it breaks.  Make do or do without.  Figure it out people.

Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon but my view of the world is that whatever happens I’ll figure out away to, quoting Clint Eastwood as Gunny Highway in ‘Heartbreak Ridge’,  “Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome”.

Darwin To The Rescue!

Yesterday, Governor Moonbeam here in The People’s Republik of Kalifornia signed a bill into law, to limit methane emissions from cow manure. Sounds like a bunch of bovine excrement out of our government, once again. You can read the bill HERE.

The big takeaway is that both methane gas and the solid waste products from cows need to be reduced to prevent further “global warming”.

If you’re a Darwinist, the solution is quite simple. Breed cows that don’t crap!

Some of you may be quite skeptical of this proposal but it WILL work, I’m telling you.  According to the Kalifornia Board of Edukation, Darwinistic evolution is the only “true science” that explains the origin of species.  Let’s run with what the great minds in Kalifornia education profess as TRUTH.

Look at what Darwin said. He theorized by his observations that species “originate and evolve” through environmental or human created (breeding) changes to their living conditions.

This is what we need to do to create crap-less cows. We superglue butt-plugs in every cow and newborn calf to prevent them from excreting manure. Many of them will die off, but according to Darwin some will survive in this new man-made environment and they will be the progenitors of the new species of crap-less cows. If you believe Darwin it should only take a few generations to happen. Just like the pigs that returned to the oceans to feed, which became whales, never mind that fact that there aren’t or never were intermediate pig-fish.

Easy Peasy solution, I’d say. We just need a fecal load of cow butt-plugs and a whole bunch of tubes of superglue!  Maybe a few rubber gloves and some clothes pins for our noses.

All the atheist-evolutionists should be celebrating this government mandated opportunity to disprove the existence of God. Woohoo!

Now if you believe this bovine excrement solution (and all the good atheists should), I have a bridge for sale…

Or perhaps, as my friend mentioned to me after I related to him this proposed solution of breeding crap-less cows, we can superglue the butt-plugs into our politicians and they will evolve to stop making bovine excrement filled laws.

Poor People Choose To Stay Poor

Poor people make poor choices. I suspect most of their poor choices are made because no one was or is there to help them make better choices. I believe that there needs to be help provided to instill common sense into their financial decision making. But as my MBA friend once said, “Common sense is not common”.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

I was watching TV and one of those “Make a low payment and own some piece of crap” commercial was on. The one that I’ll illustrate here was a woman saying “I bought a Playstation for my kids for only $15 a week!”. Let’s examine the STUPIDITY of buying from this lender to the poor.

I looked up on Amazon a Playstation 4 with some games and it’s $347.69. I also looked up the website, Flexshopper.com, that ran the TV ad.  It currently shows the SAME Playstation for $17 per week.

Now $17 dollars a week for a year is 52 payments which makes the total CASH outlay of $884!! That’s well North of double the price of the stupid toy.  If the woman just put aside that $17 every week she could buy the console in 20 weeks, just 5 months.  At the end of the year she’d have $544 extra dollars in her pocketbook.

Just for fun I did the calculations for $347.69 to figure out what interest rate a poor person is paying. It works out to annual rate of 226% !!!!

WTF?  226% is one heck of a return on investment for that predatory lender.  The best CD rate right now is 1.5%. Home loans are about 4%.  Used car loans are around 7%.  And they say used car salesmen are scum!  If we make an assumptions of 40% markup  to the cost of goods, $248.35 is the wholesale price for the $347.69 retail toy.  The actual annual rate of return is closer to 343%.  Not too bad in my book.  Can you say “Loan Shark”?  The “Easy Pay” sleazes are only one group of people that are financially RAPING the poor with predatory lending practices.

I’m a free market kind of guy and I’m not sure I would advocate legislating predatory lenders out of business.  But it does trouble me that there are people who are getting wealthy preying on the ill-informed.  I will say that Flexshopper is better than some other of these bottom feeders in that they do show in small type right below the payment amount, the total cost of the “loan”.  If someone chooses to buy from them, as Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does”.  I looked up some other “easy payment” outfits that advertise heavily on TV, Rentacenter and Fingerhut, and it’s difficult to figure out their terms.  Rentacenter’s website makes you fill out an application before they’ll show the price which is total BS, in my opinion. Fingerhut buries the payment terms in their website.

What’s my solution?  There needs to be an educational focus on how to make wise financial decisions.  Sorry Hillary and Bernie but free college IS NOT the answer to the elimination of poverty,  There needs to be education to stop the financial enslavement of the poor.

Let’s play one more financial game.  Let’s say the young 25 year old mother took the EXTRA $544 a year and put it into an Individual Retirement Account, IRA, each year and worked until she was 70.  If the rate of return was 7% she would end up with $166,329 in her account.   If she didn’t buy the Playstation at all and put the full $884 per year into the IRA, she’d end up with over $270,000!!!  All of that money, well over a QUARTER MILLION DOLLAR$, can be hers for NOT making JUST ONE stupid purchase per year!

Why is there no outcry from EITHER PROGRESSIVES OR CONSERVATIVES to end this ENSLAVEMENT in poverty?