Random Ramblings

This is by far the coolest picture I have ever taken in my life!!

It was a few years ago, I was walking down to the Eno River through some back trails when I heard a "WHAP!" on the water, like someone slapping their hand on it. I knew some beavers had built a dam nearby, so I ran down to the water's edge with my camera in hand, expecting to see some cute little furry critter coming downstream towards me.

Errrr, not so much.

In fact, it took me a few minutes to tell what exactly it was. Apparently, snakes are smart enough to know that fish need water to survive -- as it swam, the snake was actually HOLDING THE FISH OUT OF WATER to asphyxiate it! Eventually, it swam over to the bank of the stream and I could finally sort it all out in my brain ... and snap the photo. The "whap" that I heard was a water snake striking from the shore at a sunfish. FYI: it is a "Midland water snake", probably 5 feet long, maybe an inch and half in diameter; for comparison, the sunny is about the size of your hand.

Talk about some BAD Advertising

I got a flyer in my recent Duke Power bill that was a really bad attempt at telling me how great and wonderful Duke Power is and how I should be happy with their exceptional efficiency. They showed how every $1 I send them is broken out:

$0.24 pays for power and fuel
$0.15 pays for monthly payroll
$0.11 pays for operating costs and maintenance
$0.14 is retained as earnings or used to pay dividends to stockholders
$0.17 pays for depreciation
$0.13 pays for taxes
$0.06 pays for interest and preferred stock options

First off, there is a figure of a dollar bill which is broken into pieces -- each item above has a line to a representative piece of the dollar bill. Except that it is not actually "to scale" and thus is extraordinarily misleading. The piece that represents the $0.11 for maintenance is nearly twice as large as the piece for $0.17 for depreciation! Of course, they did make the $0.24 part (that pays for actual fuel costs) the largest piece of the drawing -- just so I know how much they put out for little old me. Of course it is closer to 33% of the drawing, but who's really counting.

All of which also obscures the fact that for every dollar I send to Duke Power, nearly $0.20 is sent to stockholders! This is a LARGER percentage than they pay their actual workers.

The wonders of bureaucracy!

I just saw this in a tech-y magazine the other day (infoworld.com, Ephraim Schwartz) ... talk about your government dollars being wasted. The gov't allows companies to hire foreign workers through various visa programs. In the tech fields, it tends to be the H1-B visas which are supposed to be somewhat specialized -- the company can't hire a US citizen because they couldn't find any US citizens with the proper technical skills. So the Dept Of Labor has a database of all these open positions so that they can consider whether to grant the visa application.

Hmmm, database of open job positions. You don't think anyone else would want to take a look at that, do you? Turns out the DOL will **NOT** allow any US citizens to search this database ... you know, 'cause why would any US citizen want a job? especially a high-paying job in the tech sector??

With all the uproar about overseas outsourcing, you'd think they'd reconsider this. But then, this is the US gov't. They have a database of jobs, they have people who want those jobs, but they cannot connect A with B.