Buffalo Dave

I turned on the television during supper last night and managed to catch part of the women’s curling competition.  Being from the northern United States I actually know what this sport is.  I wonder how many kids tuning into the Olympics for the first time are going “Huh?  What the heck is curling?  Where are the dumbbells?”

Yep.  There is nothing quite like the seat of the couch action you get when watching an event like this.  It is like watching a giant shuffleboard tournament.  (I bet a lot of people don’t know what shuffleboard is either)  The girl gets on one knee and slides a giant rock down a slippery lane trying to strategically position it for points.  All the while she is yelling things like “Yep,  yep, yes, yes, yes, yep, hold, hooooooold, yep, yes, yes”  Meanwhile two other girls are alternate between furiously sweeping miniscule debris away in front of the rock as it heads toward its target.  Sometimes they sweep like madmen and other times they just fake like they are going to do it.

What a concept is sports.  Who invented this thing anyway?

My wife was watching it with me.  The United States was competing against the Janpanese.  When the Japanese girl went to launch her rock I wondered if she would start yelling “Hai, hai, hai, hai” instead of yes.

The other thing I found very strange was the names of the women on the Japanese team.  They had Americanized first names like Amy and Moe.  Seems like some Europeans have been doing some breeding in that part of Japan.

I felt inspired to throw my own two cents in about the Olympics when I read about Paul Buckley’s post about the Olympics.

I kind of like the extra coverage of Lindsey Vonn.  I guess I am just a pig with raging hormones who likes to see hot looking women on television.

I agree about the rain though.  How disappointing is it to have a rainy winter Olympics?  The rain has already influenced a number of outcomes.  It is a shame that weather plays a factor in some of these competitions like the biathlon.

If you were watching the president’s State of The Union Address last night, you may have caught the part where he said that college loans should only have to be paid back for twenty years and only 10 years if you choose public service.  He insinuated that the government would pick up the tab for the balance of the loan at that point in time.

His reasoning was that no person should go broke because they want a higher education.  Is this guy for real?  I have rarely heard anything more ridiculous in my entire life.  Talk about socialism.

The reason some people aren’t attending college is not because of the costs.  They are not attending college because they don’t realize that it is critical to their future success.  They don’t realize how much easier life will be if they could only put for the effort to get an education.  If a person wants to go to a certain college that they can’t afford, it does not prevent them from going to college at all.  It merely prevents them from going to that college.  Ultimately, they decide to go to a less expensive one even if that means a community college. 

Face it.  These kids who choose not do go to college at all just don’t want to learn.  They don’t want to go to college.  If they did want to go, they could certainly afford it.  Any kid can afford to go to a school like ECC or GCC or MCC.  There is absolutely no reason they can’t.  These colleges will accept anyone with a GED.  All you have to do is graduate high school and you are in.

The problem is that these kids who skip college are not interested in learning.  They don’t have a thirst for the knowledge and skills that these higher learning institutions offer.  If they did want to go badly, there is nothing stopping them, including costs.

I am so sick of this argument about college costs.  Stop subsidizing the expensive schools.  Let the market decide how much a student is willing to pay for their higher education.  The whole idea of subsidizing college tuitions is counterproductive to maintaining a low cost of education.  This is basic economics people.  If the government quits paying for people’s college educations, the colleges are forced to find ways to deliver that education for less money.  This is how it is supposed to work.

The goal should not be to give people enough money to go to college.  The goal should be to let the market force colleges to make themselves affordable to students.  When the economy is booming tuitions could go up.  When the economy is suffering tuitions would go down.

Part of the reason our educations cost so much is because schools get funding from places other than the enrolled students.  This creates the perfect environment for a wasteful bloated bureaucracy.  Let the markets determine school tuitions.

If the government agrees to pick up the tab for educations at the end of 10 or 20 years, you are going to see an absolutely massive increase in tuition costs.  Pumping more money into colleges does not guarantee a better education.  We have proof of this in the public school system that has had funding increases since the beginning of time.  It is counterproductive.

Prestigious universities and community colleges alike are capable of delivering an absolutely outstanding education if and only if the students are there because they actually want to learn about what is being taught.  If they aren’t self motivated to learn what is being taught, then they come out of there with a substandard education.   

If you want to reduce the cost of education, stop sending kids there who don’t want to be there.  Stop handing colleges free money.  The more you give them, the more they will cry that they need even more.

The populist attitude around this country is that every kid should receive a free higher education and the government should see to it that they get one.  How about focusing on getting them to graduate high school first you fricken morons?  A college education is easily and readily attainable to any kid who wants it right now.

I got a good chuckle this morning.  I usually get up pretty early in the mornings.  Sometimes I turn on a national news network like CNBC.  Other times I turn on a local channel like channel 2 or channel 4.  This morning I was watching channel 2 for the weather.

I got a good laugh when they had this little segment about the internet.  Forgive me but I forget the guy’s name.  This channel 2 guy recommended that people check out Fixya.com the next time they needed help fixing something.  That made me chuckle.

If you check that site out, you will see that it is a total spam site.  The site is completely loaded with ads, mostly Google Adsense.  If you read the supposed solutions to the problems on there, you will see that for the most part these so called expert answers are super low quality pieces of crap.  In fact, it appears that the overall business model for this site is to flood the internet with highly optimized posts that provide zero value to the end user so that visitors just click on an ad to leave the page.

Has anyone ever got any good advice from this site?  I have looked at their posts numerous times to try and find solutions to various problems.  I can honestly say that there is not one time that I can recall ever finding a decent solid answer that helped me.  It is pretty much as useless as Ehow.com.  They have thousands of fluff posts about how to supposedly fix something.  But, when you visit and read the material, you realize that this so called expert is in fact a clueless bozo who knows nothing about what they speak of.

For the most part you will be let down by that site.  That is of course assuming you are a reasonably intelligent person.  I hate to bash other websites because it is not like I am providing huge value with my own.  However, this Fixya.com site is, in my opinion, a total Adsense spam site that should be pushed way down in the Google rankings because of its excessive advertising.  Notice I didn’t give them any link love from my site.

I bet they are making a killing with the Adsense though.  Good SEO + Low Value Content + Adsense = very high CTR as the visitors leave the site when they realize how useless it is.  How they ever convinced this channel 2 news guy that their site was worth publicizing as a useful tool is beyond me.  Crap, crap crap.  That site is even BBB accredited. (LOL)

This terrorist attack attempt that we saw happen in Detroit on Christmas Day should reaffirm every American’s commitment to winning the war against terror.  It is evident that these no good terrorist sons of bitches are never going to stop trying to kill people that have done nothing to them in this lifetime.  Tell me.  What exactly did America do to this Nigerian S.O.B. who wanted to blow himself and everyone else on that plane to smithereens?

How is the United States and the rest of the world supposed to prevent these types of things from happening?  It is so damn easy to travel from country to country.  Can you imagine how bad it would be if the United States were on the same land mass as Africa?  Terrorists from the Middle East could ride here on their camels or in the back of their white Chevy pickups with gun turrets on the back.   At least they would be easier to spot.

As far as I see it there are really only three options here.

1)      All people of the world have to come to accept and respect differences in religion, thus becoming tolerant of religious differences. (How the hell is that going to happen?)

2)      Tolerant religions have to eradicate the intolerant ones from the earth (which in turn makes the tolerant ones become non-tolerant). It is a paradox.

3)      One intolerant religion has to take over the world and enslave or kill everyone else.

What other options are there really?  With modern technology it is way too easy for small groups of terrorists to wage war on a massive scale against the rest of the world.  Every year it becomes easier for them.  We have truly entered a new era.  The time has come when peaceful nations like ours are forced to exert brutality, unwillingly, against other intolerant people of the world in order to preserve our own existence for future generations of Americans that we hope will grow up to be tolerant.

Maybe someday mankind will reach a point where it can release this kind of energy by competing with one another for colonizing outer space instead of fighting senselessly over religion.  God help us if we can’t reach that point.