Divemedic

Automatic Money Generators

Osceola county is installing cameras at schools that will issue speeding tickets to drivers who exceed the speed limit in front of schools. The county claims that a law enforcement officer will verify each infraction before a citation is issued.

We all know how that really works. About a decade ago, 2,000 Baltimore red light camera traffic citations which require a police officer to swear that he or she has reviewed the photos as showing a traffic violation when it was discovered that all the verification signatures on the citations issued were from an officer that had died a year before the citations were issued.

By Divemedic, ago

It’s My Money

No post yesterday because I was arguing with a bank. We decided to eliminate some debts. One of them was a loan with a small regional bank, let’s call them creditor bank, who we had requested a payoff quote from. The quote was for $41,800. We signed an authorization for them to perform an ACH from our checking account for that amount. That transfer cleared on Friday.

This morning, I get a notice from my bank that my checking account is overdrawn by more than $30,000. Of course, I call immediately to see what the problem is. It turns out that the creditor bank performed a second transfer in the amount of $41,300. The transfer was pending, so it hadn’t officially cleared yet. I paid $35 to put an immediate stop payment on that transfer.

Multiple calls to Creditor bank eventually wound up in an account representative, myself, and the manager on a three way call. The story they gave me was too crazy to make up. According to them, the amount of the payoff that I was quoted was incorrect. The payoff was actually $41,300, which was $500 less than what they had originally quoted me. Instead of simply mailing me a check for the overpayment, the bank thought that it would be a good idea to go ahead and take the correct amount out of my bank as a second ACH transfer, then the plan was that they would refund the original ACH payment back to me in 10 business days.

My response was: “And you think that is a good idea?” They thought that it was.

Ok, dummies. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply refund the $500 overpayment, rather than perform an ACH transfer that you weren’t authorized to withdraw, and then have to go back and refund more than $40,000? You do know that what you did was called stealing? Did you think that I wouldn’t miss the money?

No, they responded, because we were not intending to keep the money, we intended to refund the incorrect amount all along.

My answer to that was, “Well, I had to sign an authorization for you to perform the original transfer. Where is the signed authorization for the second transfer?” Crickets.

How can a bank, people whose job it is to handle money be so monumentally obtuse? I am not intimately familiar with banking regulations, but I am betting that what they did was not legal, and if it is, then one has to wonder why.

It took me most of the day playing phone tag to get it straightened out.

By Divemedic, ago

Sunday Morning Musings on Billionaires

Communism and communists get power from the jealousy of others. They convince poor people that the reason that they are poor is because others are rich. It’s a form of scapegoating that enables the would-be dictator to gain power by exploiting the jealousy of the poor by telling them that it isn’t their fault that they are poor- it’s that the rich guy has gamed the system and is somehow cheating. This results in stuff like this:

The reality is that investment entails risk- and this is true whether the investment is your labor, your money, or anything else of value. The riskier the investment, the higher that the reward must be, or else the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze. If you remove the reward by telling a person that he will stop getting paid at a certain point, then that person will stop investing at that point.

If you set that limit at $999 million, then the person will stop investing beyond that point. After all, why risk losing your investment for no prospect of a reward? No more Tesla, Microsoft, or Apple. The person will shelter their wealth and simply retire.

The same goes for limiting income. Tell someone that they can only earn $200k a year, and your doctor simply stops seeing patients some time in October and takes the rest of the year off. Would you work for free?

The facts are simple-

  • there is not one single human endeavor that ensures that everyone has the same outcome. More talented people are more successful that less talented people
  • The more talent, the more the reward
  • people won’t work if they aren’t getting paid.

Much is made of the fact that “Elon didn’t found Tesla, he bought it.” That may be true, but Tesla wasn’t as successful until AFTER he bought it. It was Elon’s talent and skill that made the company what it is. That’s the reason why he is the richest man in the world. It’s no different than Michael Jordan. He played basketball like no one ever has- because of that, he was paid obscene amounts of money to play that game.

This jealousy of his wealth is what leads to communists using that wealth as a wedge issue to gain power, where the communists themselves then gain power and become wealthier than everyone else.

Which has the result of people becoming angry and killing CEOs. Was he doing things that many of us despise? I would argue that using a computer system to deny legitimate insurance claims wholesale, which resulted in needless death and illness is indeed evil. However, that isn’t an indictment of the entire economic system, and certainly doesn’t mean that citizens should begin executing CEOs. That ends in a place that is far, far worse than where we are now. The real fault here lies in government oversight that permits companies to get away with this.

Insurance companies argue that they can’t be held legally responsible for a person’s illness or death because they aren’t the ones who make medical decisions. After all, it’s the doctor who decides on your course of treatment, they argue. The courts and our laws have agreed. Of course, this completely ignores that a medical procedure that can’t be paid for is as good as prohibited. After all, if your doctor wants to order an MRI, but the insurance company won’t pay for the expensive test, it isn’t going to happen.

Now I am not arguing that the government needs to intervene. I am against the retarded intervention of power hungry bureaucrats into affairs of business. When legislatures have the power to dictate what is bought and sold, the first thing that is bought and sold will be the legislature itself.

No, the way to settle this is through the legal system with the use of lawsuits. That doesn’t mean that lawsuits where juries award someone a billion dollars because they called you a crisis actor is a perfect system, and there should be some limits on that sort of thing, but that is a different discussion. However, an insurance company that refuses to pay for someone’s surgery, despite the fact that they were supposed to insure that very person, is clearly involved in medical decisions and shouldn’t be permitted to claim that they aren’t.

It would be easy to blame healthcare and claim that we should have government run healthcare. This doesn’t solve the problem, it simply transfers the power from a CEO to a random government apparatchik that decides who gets medical care based upon his own whims: “Oh, only left handed transwoman lesbians with purple hair get MRIs this month.”

It’s a complicated situation, as most adult problems are. Looking for a simple solution to a complex problem is to believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. It’s a childish dream that just can’t work when we talk about hundreds of millions of people interacting and trying to gain advantage over one another.

By Divemedic, ago

Hating Government

However much you hate the evil government we have, you don’t hate them enough. The latest installment is that time the Broward County Sheriff’s office made a bunch of crack cocaine, then had undercover deputies sell it purposely within 1,000 feet of a school so they could get 3 year sentences on those who bought from them.

The State Supreme Court has since ruled the actions to be unconstitutional entrapment, but thousands of convictions remain on people’s records.

Like the FBI, cops follow Ayn Rand’s theory:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.

By Divemedic, ago

The Cold, Hard Truth

In our recent discussion, many of you say that this financial situation the nation finds itself in is fixable. All we have to do is eliminated this Federal department, that one, and then convince the recipients of all the Fed Bucks that it’s for everyone’s benefit that they stop getting government checks. Do you even hear what you are saying? Comments like this are simply not realistic:

  • Once DOGE is done and we quit using the Federal Reserve Note…
  • Flat Taxes have to come with spending cuts and entitlement program reform…
  • Did you know that snowballs last longer in hell if you put little hats on them?

Ok, that last one is me. Still, there is no way that millions of Federal employees, a hundred million welfare recipients, and 70 million Social Security recipients are going to sit idly by while DOGE and DJT tell them that the money faucet is being shut off. Even the medical field, my own profession, cannot survive without government money.

  • In 2022, 53% of Americans received at least a quarter of their income from government aid, up from 1% in 1970.
  • Government transfers account for 18% of all personal income in the United States
  • One in four Americans received Medicaid in 2022
  • One in five Americans received Medicare in 2022
  • One in five Americans receive Social Security
  • 12% of Americans are on Food Stamps, and 39% of children in school receive free lunches at school
  • In fact, Americans received $3.8 trillion in government transfers in 2022
  • Then there are employees. There are 28.5 million people directly employed by governments in the US.
  • Millions more are employees of businesses that owe their livelihoods to government largesse.

More than half of the residents of this nation are net receivers of government funds, and there is no recovering from that. To illustrate- what would you say if DJT and DOGE announced tomorrow that to save the nation, the entire Social Security and Medicare system was ending on January 21, but the taxes would remain in order to pay off the massive $40 trillion in debt? Would you be OK with that, or would you scream some variation of “That’s my money! You took it from me, and I want it back?” Or would you calmly walk into personal bankruptcy, secure in the knowledge that your personal sacrifice saved the nation?

Call it doomsaying, call it black pill, call it what you want- but saying that we can vote our way out of this is foolishly mistaken. There are no cuts, no magic wand waving, and no solution that the people of this nation will accept until they are forced to accept it. This only ends when the current system collapses.

Whatever your own personal theory on how to save this sinking fiscal ship, there isn’t one that enough people will accept that will be doable. It just isn’t going to happen. Instead of fixing it, we kept kicking the can down the road, and we will continue to do so until it all collapses.

This isn’t a new thing- I have been telling people this for 20 years.

By Divemedic, ago

Taxes

Peter asks for comments about the income tax, the EITC, and reparations over at his blog. A debate over income taxes ensues in the comments, and it perfectly illustrates our problems. Let me explain:

There are those who advocate for a 10-15% flat tax. This won’t work for one simple reason: that is nowhere near enough money. The US GDP is just over $27 trillion. The Federal government spends just under $7 trillion per year. In fact, it works out that the Federal government spends about 23% of GDP. This means that the flat tax would need to be about 24%.

Then came the people who wanted carve outs. The flat tax, they argue, should not be paid by anyone with large medical expenses, the poor, Social Security recipients, or half a dozen other special categories, which means that it wouldn’t be long before the new flat tax code would be just as byzantine as the current one.

There was a guy arguing that a flat or sales tax wouldn’t be fair because poor people would pay a higher proportion of their wages than rich people. Hogwash- flat tax means everyone pays the same flat percentage. Why do so many people want to punish success and reward failure, sloth, and laziness? Not only that, but many on the left say that the rich don’t pay enough taxes under the current system.

Then there are the types who say since the government always runs a deficit, why not eliminate all taxes and just run the government 100% on deficits.

Most people, even those who claim to be conservative, are wholly ignorant of the situation and only want the rules changed to benefit themselves.

Here is the problem:

The US government spends a total of $6.8 trillion a year. Of that amount, $3.7 trillion was mandatory spending, otherwise known as entitlements. In other words, money that has to be paid out by law: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Compensation, Refundable Tax Credits, Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and other mandatory spending. Another $890 billion is interest on the debt that we already owe, bringing the total outlay for mandatory spending to $4.6 trillion. The government only collected $4.5 trillion in taxes. So without spending a dime on the rest of the things that the government must do: defense, courts, prisons, and all of the alphabet agencies, the government is already running a deficit of $100 billion. Add in all of those expenditures, and the deficit rises to $2.2 trillion. 

There is no amount of cutting that is going to fix this. The math is eventually going to sink this fiscal ship. Those who think it will might as well buy a violin and learn how to play Nearer My God to Thee, for all of the good it will do.

By Divemedic, ago

Gangs with Badges

Read this story about cops selling NFA weapons to criminal gangs and then tell me again how only the government can be trusted with guns.

ICE lost $100 million worth of firearms and no one cares. BATFE says that police departments are let off off with warnings. They claim that prosecutors are reluctant to charge these cases, and the bureau stated that “it is our goal to educate, not investigate.”

“We’re not looking to prosecute fellow law enforcement officers,” said Eric Harden, former special agent in charge of the ATF’s Los Angeles field division.

What would BATFE do to a citizen or FFL who did this?

It’s time for Federal law enforcement to be disbanded. All they are is a tool of government tyranny.

By Divemedic, ago

Guns and Tasers

One of the questions we hear all of the time is “Why don’t you just carry a Taser? You don’t need a gun unless you want to kill someone.”

Today’s video is from Blount County, Tennessee. This happened in February of this year, and it is a video of a guy who was pulled over for DUI. You can see from the video that he was swerving all over the road, so a deputy initiated a traffic stop. He refused to get out of the car, claiming that the stop was only because he is black.

Once backup arrived, he continued to refuse to the point that a Taser was deployed several times. In the course of this, the primary deputy was shocked with the Taser. She stepped back, and with her out of the way, the suspect shot and killed the Deputy holding the Taser before getting away.

You can watch the video here, where it is cued up to the last Taser deployment. Because it contains a shooting with a fatality, Youtube will not allow it to be embedded.

Note that the Taser was being actively used and the critter managed to reach a firearm, shoot one deputy in the head and the other in the leg. This is the prime reason why Tasers are useless as self defense weapons. Carry a gun. Don’t bet your life on less lethal tools.

The fine young aspiring rapper who killed the cop was eventually caught after a massive manhunt and is now facing the death penalty. When he was arrested, he told the cop who was taking him to jail, “You black. You allowin’ this?” He is a convicted felon with a long history of committing violent crimes. As a result, he can’t legally possess a firearm or ammunition, but he does anyhow. Why? It’s his culture.

For too many blacks, it isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about race. If you are black, you can do no wrong. If you are white, you are evil. For them, it is a race war.

Look at the Change.org petition for him.

The charge is 1st Degree Murder, premeditated. There is an entire community of citizens that believe this charge is fueled by racism and hate…

It is unclear why Officers Eggers refuses this request of K9 and acts upon the excessive force of multiple taser deployments. Leading up to a firearm being discharged. He acted in self-defense, maybe even a state of shock and cannot be tried for first-degree murder/premeditated murder.

He is on video shooting two cops and killing one of them. It isn’t self defense. He was illegally carrying a firearm because he is a violent criminal.

He isn’t, as the petition claims, an upstanding member of the community. At 42 years old, he had already been in prison multiple times for aggravated assault, domestic violence, and a multitude of other violent crimes.

By Divemedic, ago

Today’s Lesson

Today’s video is of a police involved shooting in Salmon Creek, Washington that occurred in April of this year. I can’t embed the video because it shows someone getting shot, and Youtube won’t allow it. Watch it here.

The guy is a suspect in at least two armed carjackings from the previous 24 hours. He and a female had robbed one man of his vehicle at gunpoint, and were also suspected of having done the same thing a couple of hours before.

I don’t think that they shot him soon enough. When they initially confronted him in the parking lot, they saw that he was armed with a handgun. After that, he ran into a crowded building. I believe that they should have shot him as soon as he brandished his handgun. The chances of a bystander getting hit in that crowded building were unacceptably high, in my opinion.

My second issue with this video is they were chasing a man that they knew to be armed, yet no one showed up with a long gun until the US Marshalls appear at the end of the video, more than 3 minutes after shots were fired.

The dead critter’s accomplice was arrested and is awaiting trial. She was caught after a homeowner found her in his garage. This is why I never investigate odd noises in my house unless I am armed.

By Divemedic, ago

Solar Update

I haven’t done a solar update since September. Our system for November generated 1378 kWh. We used 817 kWh and sent a total of 516 kWh back to the grid. Total for the system since August: we have sent 849 kWh more power back to the grid than we have used, with most of that being in November because of a combination of two things:

  • We are making an average of 46 kWh per day because it’s been pretty sunny. There were only a couple of days where it was cloudy for the month, and we don’t get thunderstorms every afternoon like we do in the summer
  • we just aren’t using much power now that the weather is cool enough for the air conditioning to not be running.

For 15 days in November, we generated more than 50 kWh, despite the fact that hours of daylight are getting shorter.

We only used power than we consumed for 5 days in November. The worst of these was a 48 hour period (November 6-7) where we used 18 kWh more than we generated. During those two days, we generated 20 and 25 kWh, but used 32 and 31 kWh.

So far, it appears as though the solar power system that we installed is working as well as I had hoped. Things do get a bit tight in the heat of the summer, as air conditioning uses so much power that, if the grid were to go down for an extended time, we might not have enough power to run everything without making some conservation moves when it’s a bit cloudy or if it’s unusually hot. Perhaps by turning off the water heater or by not doing laundry on days when it is cloudy or unusually hot.

The problem isn’t generation capacity- it appears to be storage. If I add even one more Powerwall to the system, this will correct the issue.

So for us, twenty four PV panels of 420 watts each gives us more than enough generation capacity. We currently have 27 kWh of Powerwall storage capacity, and could really use about 8 or 10 more, which would mean true independence and the capability of being off grin indefinitely.

By Divemedic, ago