Uncategorized

Republicans in Tennessee have just declared to the entire state that they want to lose the next election. Jesus, leave it to the Stupid Party to make Joe Biden look smart. They are trying to pass a law that would make it illegal to serve cold or chilled beer. (Hat tip to wirecutter)

I have said it before, and it bears repeating- “Just because the Democrats are your enemy does not mean that the Republicans are your friend.”

This is why Trump is so popular- he isn’t like all of the other politicians. Was he perfect? No, but remember that he isn’t an expert on everything, because no one person can be an expert in everything. The largest complaint that I have heard about him was the banning of bump stocks. He isn’t, and never was, a gun guy. Not a part of gun culture at all. So he did what any outsider would do- he went to the people who he believed to be experts in gun rights. He consulted the NRA. Everyone in the country who isn’t part of the gun culture assumes that they are the progun experts. Those asshole Fudds over at the NRA told him that bump stocks were useless, and therefore throwaways in gun culture. Not knowing any better, he went with that.

The enemy here wasn’t Trump, it was the NRA.

To me, Trump’s biggest problem was taking people at their word. Being an outsider, he didn’t understand that members of the swamp and of the Uniparty only care about two things: money, and power. They use one to get the other interchangeably. Being a babe in the woods when it came to politics, he frequently made bad choices in adding people to his inner circle, and that naivety cost him possibly everything, including his life.

Big Country is asking for your help with costs associated with his wife’s recent cancer diagnosis. See if you can lend him a hand…

Just heard what sounded like a loud, double sonic boom. Went online, and it turns out to be a reentering spacecraft.

From the posts about plumbers charging $1500 for small jobs. I am NOT saying that the plumber doesn’t have the right to ask for that price. It’s his business, after all. It’s just that all businesses are in competition. Plumber A is in competition with Plumber B, etc. The other half of that is that all businesses that offer some sort of labor are in competition with people who would do it themselves. Restaurants, plumbers, even gunsmiths. There is a limit to what you can charge for services before people say that it isn’t worth paying someone to do it. The customer then either does without, or they do it themselves.

For me, it’s math. I look at what it would cost me to do the job, then how long it will cost. Then I compare what the service business is asking for the job. Take lawn maintenance. I could mow my own lawn, but here in Florida that means about three hours per week to mow, edge, weed eat, and blow down the sidewalks in the summer, plus another three hours a month in winter. Then there is the cost of supplies, maintenance and fuel. So call it an average of two hours per week plus about $15 a month in supplies. My lawn guy charges me $85 a month. That means the guy is doing 8 hours of work for $60, so it costs me $7.50 an hour to get my lawn mowed. I don’t mow my lawn, even though I could.

I look at it as a pure financial transaction. Let’s say (to make the math easy) that you make $50 an hour at your job. It actually would be more beneficial to pay someone to do a job than it would to do it yourself, if the job was costing you less money than you would make in the time it took to do it yourself.

Now suppose that he increased his rate to $200 a month. I might start mowing my own lawn at that point. The plumbing job is the same. The plumber was charging me $1500 parts and labor to do a job that I could do myself for a total cost of $300 in parts and tools and four hours of my time. After materials and tools, I could do it myself and save $300 an hour. That’s far more than I make, so if it’s within my capabilities, it’s worth it to simply do it myself.

There is some risk that I will not do as good a job as the pro, but at what point does the juice become not worth the squeeze? We all need to develop these skills. When TSHTF, they will be worthwhile skills to have, and now is a good time to learn.

How police use thousands of camera feeds and AI to track you. There is no hiding from the police state.

it took the DOJ nearly two years and how many millions of dollars to figure out that the Uvalde cops screwed the pooch.

The report builds on a scathing investigation by state lawmakers that found “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision-making” among the almost 400 law enforcement officers who responded.

Yet not a single one of the 400 cowards who stood there, holding back parents trying to rescue their children while listening to them being slaughtered by a madman will face any real repercussions from their cowardice and failure to act.

This is what happens when people from the big city move out to the country. Do you hear how scared this woman is?

This lady finds mountain lion on her patio
pic.twitter.com/Calo6qeJm5

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) December 23, 2023

I thought the process was obvious, but I guess I didn’t explain it well. Let me try from the other side.

Let’s say that your name is John. Your wife Christine just died and left no will. Being that she was a widow, you were her second husband, and she had bank accounts in solely her name from a previous marriage, (including the retirement funds from her previous late husband).

The bank just told you that all you need is identification, a death certificate, and your marriage license, and they will cut you a check from the retirement account that Christine once shared with her husband.

The problem is that Christine’s adult children produce a will from before you married her, and this will says that THEY are the ones who will receive her remaining property. In this case, Florida law says that the surviving spouse gets 1/3 of Christine’s estate before the will is taken into account. Since it is assumed that the surviving spouse gets everything, the surviving children will have to hire a lawyer and go to court in order to enforce this will. In order to fight it, you will have to hire a lawyer as well. By the time all is said and done, the lawyers in the case will cost between 1/3 and 1/2 of the total inheritance. Everyone except the lawyers loses.

The children come to you with an offer: If you agree to take half of the estate, that is still more than what you would get after the court battle. Win for you.

That’s the idea, anyhow.

So we were helping Mom’s husband clean out the mess in his house. When we were in the detached garage, we found a safe inside of it. Inside of it was $4,000 in cash, the phone number to her stockbroker, and a will that was written in 2006. That will dictated that my mother’s assets be split between the three of Mom and Dad’s children. The three of us have wills that were written earlier, but they were all from before Dad passed away.

She married her husband in 2021. Since getting married, my mother and her husband have maintained separate bank accounts at the insistence of the husband’s daughter, who always accused my mother of being a gold digger, but was also collecting $4,000 a month in support payments from her father. Those payments are scheduled to continue until the daughter turns 25 years old. (She is 23 now)

According to my brother’s estate attorney, the will from 2006 is the controlling one, but since they were married after that will was written, her husband (we will call him John) is entitled to a third of the assets, then the remainder will be split according to the will. John, however has dementia and isn’t in good health. That means that John’s daughter Susan will get whatever money he gets from my Mother’s estate as soon as he passes.

This is important, because the stockbroker tells us that he closed Mom’s account back in June, at her request. The money was sent to a bank by wire transfer, and that is where the trail grows cold. The balance that was transferred was over $150,000. That amount represents the remainder of my father’s retirement savings.

This bothers us, because Susan was absolutely ugly to my Mother. She opposed the wedding, and when she and her father went out to dinner, Susan would never let my mother go with them. Letting this woman that none of us know inherit the money that my Mom and Dad spend a lifetime putting away isn’t sitting right with us. We have discussed it- all three of us siblings have grandchildren, and we want to fight for that money and use it to set up a trust for Mom and Dad’s great-grandchildren, our grandkids.

This would possibly entail a protracted and expensive legal battle. Lawyers would likely eat up half of the money that is there. So instead, we are going to request that the state place Mom’s estate in probate, and then offer to settle it by giving John half of the estate, with the remaining half being used to setup a trust for the benefit of Mom’s great-grandchildren.

If Mom intended things to go any other way, then why didn’t she write a new will? If the 2006 will was no longer her wishes because of her wedding, then why didn’t she rewrite it? Why keep it in the safe?

Still a mess, and getting messier every day.