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Disagreeing with Dave Ramsey

Dave Ramsey famously forces all of his employees to sign a morality clause as a part of their employment agreement. One unmarried woman who works for him applied for maternity leave. Since her pregnancy is proof that she engaged in sex before marriage, he fired her. She is suing.

I hope she wins.

Not because I am in favor of extramarital sex, nor am I opposed to Christians. The reason is that I do not feel like an employer should have the ability to fire you for what you do while you are ‘off the clock’ unless it has a direct effect on the business. That goes for all businesses. That means the cop who donates to the Rittenhouse defense fund is safe to speak his mind while not at work. That means a person can go to a Trump rally without being fired. As long as it is on the employee’s own time, the boss should have no say in that employee’s business.

Unless it has a DIRECT tie to the business.

For example, an employee of McDonald’s who stands outside of a store in a company uniform and complains about the food being unhealthy. The employer can discipline him, because it is directly in opposition to the business.

I have spent most of my life working for employers who claim that their employees must he held to a higher standard, whatever that means. What it means in practice is that the employees can be fired for things that are none of the employer’s business. Imagine a workplace firing you for being an NRA member, or for being a Republican and you understand why I am opposed to this.

An employee who has sex outside of work with another employee, especially if there is a subordinate relationship can be fired, but other than that, it should not be any of the employer’s business.

By Divemedic, ago

Dogs Lives Matter (DLM)

A trainer in New Zealand was arrested because a greyhound he had trained for a race was found to have high levels of methamphetamine in its blood. Officials claim that they tested the dog because they were concerned about track safety and cited “far too many incidents” recently where dogs had died or been injured.

The trainer in the case has denied that the drugs caused the dogs’ deaths. He claimed that dogs had done methamphetamine plenty of times without dying, and that the death of the dogs during races were probably caused by pressure placed on the back of the dog’s neck by the racing collars. They lined up several witnesses to show that a ‘blood choke’ caused by neck pressure was the likely cause. He called them out for race-ism and threatened to burn down all of New Zealand if they didn’t rule his way.

It is doubtful that this tactic will be successful, since there aren’t enough dog trainers in New Zealand to make a threat realistic enough to scare a jury into voting his way.

In case you missed it, this entire post is satire.

By Divemedic, ago

Aw, Craps

If you have read this blog for any time at all, you know that one of my vices is that I like to gamble. It all began when I had to take statistics in college, where my professor used casino games to teach us statistics. For that reason, I learned several casino games, and the one that really stuck was Craps.

It is a straightforward game of math, and once the rules are understood, fairly easy to play. The math can be done in your head pretty quickly. I get tired of always talking about the decay of our society, so I thought that I could do a few posts that were more fun (for me) to write to break things up a bit.

The rules for Craps are easy, but since it is a fast moving game and there are lots of bets that can be made, people who watch the game get easily confused and are often scared away from the game. Let me tell you though, that a busy table with a hot shooter is pretty exciting and makes for a fun game.

The rules are simple: The shooter picks up two sixed sided dice and rolls them to the other end of the table. (Most casinos have the rule that the dice must hit the wall at the opposite side of the table.) The first time the shooter rolls is called the “come out roll.” If the dice show a 7 or 11, the shooter wins. If the dice show a 2, 3, or 12, the shooter loses. Any other number becomes the “point” and the shooter continues to roll until they either roll a 7 (which causes the shooter to lose) or again rolls the point (for which the shooter wins). As long as the shooter continues to win, they continue to roll the dice. If the shooter loses on the come out roll, they can try again, but if they lose by rolling a 7 after the point is set, the dealer passes the dice to the player on the losing shooter’s left, and that person becomes the new shooter. That’s it for the rules of the game.

Everything else that happens on the table is betting that the shooter will win or lose, or is a bet on what numbers will appear on upcoming rolls of the dice.

Upcoming posts will deal with the math of the game and what the odds are for different outcomes.

Let me close out this post by pointing out something which many people will try to lie about: The only winner in casino gambling is the owner of the casino. The math is set up so that the longer you play, the more likely you are to lose. It’s math- there is no way around it.

Even games like blackjack, where people try to convince you that they “count cards” and have a system to always win, are set up so the casino comes out ahead. If it weren’t, everyone who plays in the casino would soon adopt this system and the casino would go out of business. I don’t play to make money, I play because it entertains me. I also know that over the long term, I lose money in the casino. I just try to maximize gains and minimize losses. Here are my rules for gambling:

  • 1 I know that I will lose money over the long term. It is mathematically certain. So budget your gambling and stick to it.
  • 2 I gamble because it is fun and entertaining. If I ever find myself gambling while desperate to win because I need the money, it is time to quit.
  • 3 Don’t ever gamble with money you can’t afford to lose. If you are gambling your rent or grocery money, that isn’t entertainment, it’s desperation.

My wife initially didn’t like it, but then she came to realize that I Am responsible with it. Although the first time she came to the table and saw that I was making individual bets of over $100 and had more than $1200 on the table, she was a little nervous. At the time, she didn’t realize that it wasn’t my money I was gambling with. More on that in a future post.

By Divemedic, ago

Sensationalism

The story is that honey is contaminated with nuclear radiation. OMG! Panic. The press loves them a scare story. Radiation is scary because most people don’t understand it, can’t sense it, and know it can kill. Look at the facts, and understand them. Then you can see how ridiculous it is:

The highest level of contamination was detected to be 19.1 becquerels per kilogram. A becquerel is one decaying atom per second. So in this case, there were 19.1 atoms decaying per second in each kilogram of honey. The average American eats half a kilogram of honey per year.

The atom that is responsible for this detected radiation is Radiocesium, or Cesium-137, which has a half life of 30.17 years. Nearly all of it decays by Beta emission (emitting an electron) into Barium-137m, which itself decays 153 seconds later by emitting a fast photon in the form of a gamma ray.

How much Cesium-137 is 19 becquerels? The average human contains 100 Becquerels of radioactive materials per kilogram, mainly due to Potassium 40 and Carbon 14. These are natural, background radiation sources, and are always around. In fact, there are a host of things in your home that are far more radioactive than this honey (source– PDF warning):

  • Coffee 1000 Bq/kg
  • Phosphate fertilizer 5000 Bq/kg
  • Ionization Smoke detector 3000 Bq

Anything that has Potassium and Carbon in it will contain radioactive isotopes of those two elements. Even the air itself. In short, 1 kg of honey is far more likely to present a danger of diabetes than it is a danger of radiation. This is just another example of sensationalist journalism.

But science! In this case, the press is using ignorance to scare people into reading their pseudoscientific nonsense.

By Divemedic, ago

April 19

April 19 is a busy day in US history. I get a sneaky suspicion that there will be an addition to this list for 2021. I hope that this suspicion is unfounded.

1995 Oklahoma City Bombing

1993 The Waco siege ended when the FBI burned the compound to the ground

1989- A gun turret of the USS Iowa explodes. I was nearby on another ship. Had friends on the crew. The Navy tried to make one of the dead sailors into a patsy.

1985 – Two hundred ATF and FBI agents lay siege to the compound of the white supremacist survivalist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in Arkansas; the CSA surrenders two days later.

1865 Abraham Lincoln’s funeral is held

1861 First Union soldier killed by rioters in Baltimore while quelling pro-secession riot

1775 Battle of Lexington and Concord

By Divemedic, ago

Quote of the week

In honor of our loss of one of the greatest speakers of my lifetime, I present to you Rush Limbaugh’s quote of the week:

What about feeling sorry for those who pay the taxes? Those are the people NO ONE ever feels sorry for. They are asked to give and give until they have no more to give. And when they say ‘Enough!’ they are called selfish.

By Divemedic, ago