Yo Victor-
Long time no talk, figure I'll pass along some CA political news and observations. I wrote a piece or two of this a couple weeks or so back, then started hearing the media pick up on some of it-
About the Toyota unintended acceleration- apparently the fault IS NOT logged in memory. Another big engineering oops. But hey, congress is busy grilling the head of the company, I'm sure our elected officials will get to the bottom of it. NOT. So, we make the "competition" (to Government Motors, anyway) come before us and tell us about their product and bash them and generally embarrass the head of a Japanese company. This was a massive insult to them culturally, and for the equivalent of 2 deaths per year...(the number of fatalities divided by the years in question). Not to downplay the loss of human life but, put it in perspective. The federal CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths; the mandated smaller/lighter cars have resulted in lots more highway fatalities. But, the engineering folks should definitely sort this out. Drive by wire has more/worse failure modes and mitigating these should be job one. I'm sure Ford/GM/etc have had similar failures (even if one in a zillion). I want to see some perspective here.
Here's something that will make you choke on your Wheaties. I heard the other day that there are over 10,000 retired CA state workers that are drawing $100,000 or more in retirement. Yearly income. Not from risk-taking investments, supplemental income, or IRAs but, from their state government retirement. DMV, lotto workers, fish and game, CHP, DOJ, that idiotic CA air resources board, department of who the hell knows what, not sure of the make-up of the statistic, but it is irrelevant. The sheer numbers speak for themselves. That's over a billion yearly just for one partial group of retirees...(numerical aside: But hey, the way BHO and Queen Pelosi keep throwing around these huge numbers at the federal level, perhaps we've become numb to them; proof- within the past couple days, NBC erroneously reported on air the health care bill cost at 900 trillion, and they didn't correct the mistake, they meant 900 billion, off by three orders of magnitude).
As the saying goes, not bad work if you can get it. Problem is, it's a ponzi scheme. Vallejo CA (about 25 miles north of here near the top of the San Francisco bay) already went bankrupt years ago. The police and firefighter union-negotiated contracts had enormous retirement packages that broke the city. A few months back, Swartzenegger, in one of his occasional attempts at reconciling CA's budget problems, mandated state workers take every other Friday off without pay. Personally, I would have fired 50% of them, but what he did was a reasonable measure. I sure as hell didn't notice any loss in service (hint-efficiency goes up if the bureaucrats stay home). Anyways, they sued and the court ruled in their favor, and they are now due back-pay, probably with interest. And I think the housing/financial crisis is a pregnant IED that has yet to come to term. I could keep going with specific examples but, I don't want to get carried away.
My aren't I the cheery guy. But these are just observations of reality. And what happens in CA has substantial effect on the nation. BTW-later I heard on John Bachelor's program the CA numbers are either >$150k x 10k or >$100k x 15k (ie worse). And now the average government job pays 35% more than private sector-used to be government jobs paid less for better security and better pension than private industry. Now private industry has virtually no one offering pensions, WAY less security (layoffs everywhere), and less pay on top of it.
SB
No comments:
Post a Comment