Rather be ashes than dust » rant

Senator Bernie Sanders Speech against Bush Tax cuts

ryguy — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:07:00 +0000

As much as I would love to closely follow politics in America, I just seem to be unable too because of so much misdirection; lack of good, accurate, and succinct news reporting; and as someone of the working class I frankly just don’t have enough time to keep up with all the necessary research to stay fully informed. As they say, money never sleeps, but I do. So I don’t know this Senator Bernie Sanders guy very well nor his policies, but this speech seems to be on the mark, or at least inline with questions I have about the current policies running through the American Gov’t.

Here are some things that seemed to stick out to me:

…the United States now has by far the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth.

and

the top 1% earn more than the bottom 50%

Like I said, most of the time I can’t keep up with the political spheres, so anything thoughts would be most welcome.

P.S. Obama did extend Bush’s Tax Cuts for the rich. Obama your compromise represents a failure to me.

It’s not perfect, but this compromise is an essential step on the road to recovery

President Obama

PPS: Senator Sanders said he would do anything he could to stop this bill

Subway Beatdown and the Confucian way

ryguy — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 13:53:02 +0000

Most of the time I absolutely love Korea, but one of the things I usually have trouble swallowing is how people can passively watch as things get out of hand around them. For instance, this happened again this weekend when I was at show in Seoul…but I’ll describe this later. First, video is of some crazy ajumma thrashing a young girl around a subway car. I haven’t figured out exactly what set the old lady off, but it seems the final straw was that the young girl didn’t use the proper level of speech for an elder. Whatever it was, it’s annoying to see how everyone just watches without even reacting.

Here is another one of people just standing by as this guy slams his handicap cart into an elevator door several times causing it to break and him to fall down the elevator shaft. Although, I’m not sure what the people could have done in this case, but you can clearly see in the reflection of the door people standing by and watching. Even after the guy falls through the door it just seems they keep looking at the door with curiosity. I know there was probably nothing they could do though…poor dude. Makes you wonder why he would want to go that way.

As I said, I love Korea and this is just one of the things that I have trouble ignoring. In all fairness, this is not typical of Korea, but I do hear or in this case sometimes see these things happening. When I do ask around about events such as these I am usually told it something about shyness or deeply root confucian beliefs. I know I don’t understand it, which means I can’t fairly comment about things such as this, but I do know that it does bother me.

EDIT: Seems that the subway video link died…I got another one, but then that one died too.

Pist about money, banks, and universities

ryguy — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:01:20 +0000

So today I went into the bank to setup up automatic bill pay for a credit card. While I was in there I asked about increasing my credit line to consolidate debt. They began to process this but I was denied because of a paid collections agency bill. This bill that I got was utter bullshit! The bill was from UCSC because I printed some documents and they did not post the bill for these documents until after I was no longer a student at the school. I have asked on several occasions if I owed anything and the schools response was that there were no holds on my accounts to prevent me from receiving my Diploma, I took this as them meaning I do not owe them money.

Fast forward a year and some months and I discover when attempting to order transcripts that I have a past due that has been sent to collections. What began as a $10 dollar charge cost me $160 dollars because it has been assessed late fees for over a year. Did they tell me this…NO! So I paid this because I needed my transcripts and thought “Fuck it, it is not worth arguing with them because it will take to long.” Now this credit agency has fucked my credit so I cannot, increase my credit to consolidate.

Bullshit.