Patrick's Rants

I’ve just completed my second round turn of SMRT. The first 200 shares @ 8.76 on 1/14/11 sold @ 9.84 3/17/11 for 11%. The second, shorter time frame trade, 100 @ 6.05 10/07/11 sold 7.02 10/27/11 for about 12.5%.

Rick Perry has jumped the shark. He’s apparently on the birther bandwagon as reported by CNN. He also has started touting a flat 20% “optional” tax rate. An “optional” tax rate? That will be a royal mess, bring it on. It means more work for Enrolled Agents representing their clients.

Perry has also suggested that current workers should be able to opt-out of social security. I’m not completely opposed to allowing people to do something with their money other than allow the government to invest it in US bonds. But there are a whole lot of people in this country that expect to receive what was promised to them when they were working and paying the promise to the retirees before them. They cannot be left hanging. This is called a social contract and we have an obligation to uphold our end of the bargain.

Herman Cain’s extreme positions need to be examined closely. First, let’s start with the extremely regressive 999 proposal. According to an LA Times story

According to the analysis, all three of the tax types included in Cain’s plan would disproportionately impact lower-income Americans.

The 9% individual income tax would give the richest Americans — who currently pay a tax rate of about 35% — a break of almost $210,000 a year. But for the poorest 20% of taxpayers, Cain’s proposed income tax change would mean an increase of $418 a year, the analysis found.
Another analysis by Edward D. Kleinbard, a USC law professor, estimated that a family with wage income of $120,000 in 2010 would have paid about $541 less under Cain’s plan, while a family that earned $50,000 would have paid about $4,800 more.

“That’s an extraordinarily large tax increase as a percentage of income,” Kleinbard wrote.

As someone who have done taxes for a living, there is nothing appealing about a tax that causes the poorest of the poor to have to come up with a chunk of money so the wealthiest can pay lower taxes. Nothing.
Cain’s stance on Iraq is like Bush’s. We should have gone, it doesn’t matter that the reason we gave you was a lie,

“MR. CAIN: I don’t think the war in Iraq was a mistake because there were a lot of other reasons we needed to go to Iraq, and there have been a lot of benefits that have come out of Iraq. “¹

Cain goes on to support one man one woman marriage, but allow the states to decide – which currently creates a dichotomy in federal vs state recognition of rights and relationships. He is no-choice on abortion,

“I believe in life from conception, and I do not agree with abortion under any circumstances.”

No exception for rape and incest. No exception for life of the mother. He says the family has to decide in the case where the mother’s life is in danger, but if abortion is illegal. Period. End sentence. What is left for the family to decide?

The extremes are out running this year, make no mistake about that. Cain fits right in.

1. MTP, October 16, 2011

Elizabeth Warren, so scary the Repugnicans refused to approve her to run the new consumer protection agency, the agency charged with protecting everyone who borrows money, who uses a bank ($5.00 monthly fee to use your debit card anyone?) is running for Ted Kennedy’s vacant seat, the one currently occupied by Scott, I had to pose nude for college, Brown.
Brown has raised tons of money from those in the investment industry. With a war chest of nearly $11 million, he may win again.
Of course, politics is a funny animal and just having a giant war chest from financial services donors doesn’t necessarily guarantee a win. Check out Elizabeth Warren’s web site. MSNBC has the catch phrase, “Lean Forward.” It’s time to lean.

Yesterday afternoon, YHOO popped over 15.35, triggering a stock order to sell at 15.40. I wound 50 shares of YHOO out of my holdings.

I realized that I had not posted my YHOO turns, so here is a history on YHOO: bought 100 @ 16.15 (3/23/11) sold same @17.01 (4/7/11). Bought 100 @ 14.98 (6/23/11), bought 50 @13.83 (7/22/11). Original order: sell 150 @15.95. With nothing happening, I sold 100 Oct 11, 16.00c option for $.50 (after commissions net $39.25).

Steve Jobs, dead at 56.

Bumper Stickers for Nurses
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Nurses are IV Leaguers

On a scale of 1-100, Nurses are a 98.6

Yes, Stupid is a Diagnosis

I’ve spent the past few weeks reinstalling this server. What led to this was what should have been a simple upgrade; at least I thought so. I was attempting to go from CentOS 5.6 to 6. Bad news. Red Hat (which CentOS is based upon) recommends against this particular upgrade and I was forcing the install of new packages. The first, biggest thing was breaking RPM. Once that was broken libraries stopped working properly, I couldn’t log into email (although it was still spooling).

No problem, I’ve broken and recovered before. I grabbed the latest burned CD and headed to where the server was hosted. The machine didn’t respond from the console either. To make matters worse, the CD drive was refusing to open so I couldn’t just upgrade in place. I pulled the machine and brought it home. First things first, I had to find a working CD drive in the stack that my wife wishes I had thrown away years ago. I did finally find an operative drive and popped the CD in. It took about a day of messing around before I gave up and decided to do a fresh install with the CentOS netinstall CD.

The “problem” with the netinstall disk is that with the amount of ram on that box it would only do a text based install – and the problem with a text based netinstall (which I learned later) is that it ignores the partitions already on the hard drives and repartitions and formats the drives based upon some internal settings in the scripts. While annoying since I have to restore all of my backups back onto the server, it’s the way the install was set to go – so let’s go.

Here’s a tip. It’s not a new tip or an overly brilliant tip, but here it is: back it all up. Make sure your backups are of everything you need. And test a raw install. I’m not going to follow my own advice, I know that. It’s my failing as an admin, as a human. I lost over five years of mailing list archives and about 20 or so ads that are posted throughout the site. I lost the ads due to my backup procedures not fully rebuilding the databases when I restored them (and not having a good way to rebuild them). I had to rebuild the ad database by reading my own ad code. I made it, they’re alive – sort of – the ads are all new. That’s the only database that I lost, a cheesy MySQL based ad server.
I had good procedures in place for the email system (except no backup MX record ) so no email was lost in the week long transfer.
The web server has slowly been resurrected (after seven days – hmm) the mailing lists are creaking back to life. And some additional procedures are in the planning stages.

One thing that does happen with a major reformatting of the hard drive is that the cruft is gone, hacked away. There is more space on the hard drive. And in a Zen like way, it causes a rethink of one’s life – well, maybe I wouldn’t go that far.

I saw this worm crawling across my driveway. It’s a little hard to see, but it must extend over 18″.

That’s my shoe in the first photo, my hand in the second.

Hank Williams Jr is even too nuts for Fox News:

ESPN yanked his opening music from last night’s Monday Night Football broadcast, and now Hank has apologized.