Afraid of Socialism? You already live with it!

 I have marveled at the recent wave of fear of the radical left "introducing" the threat of socialistic programs into the United States. This has come to a head with talk of the "one payer health initiative" or "Medicare For All" or socialized healthcare.

Whatever you choose to call it, it is the proposal of a government run healthcare system. Leaving aside the fact that Medicare and Medicaid have been around for years and you're paying into them with every paycheck.

I don't understand the new implicit fear surrounding the word socialism.  The United State has utilized socialistic programs for years, perhaps since before the actual beginning of the United States.

Anti-socialistic commenters seem to feel that socialism is automatically tied to communism or Marxism, which I suppose it could be if we chose to do that, but like I said socialism has been at work in the United States happily co-existing with democracy and capitalism since the beginning.

Perhaps the place to start is the actual definition of socialism;

The Google definition reads:

"so·cial·ism

/ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/

noun

1. a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

1.   In a second definition it goes on to describe the Marxist version of socialism. Which everyone appears to be afraid of. But every definition of a word does not apply to every use of that word.

   
   

   Take the word "BOMB" for example.  It is defined as a container filled with explosives constructed to do damage. (The bomb detonated and destroyed the building). But it also means a bad movie or show. (That film bombed at the box office). But it also means an outstanding person or thing. (She is really the bomb).
   

    

   You could not mix or confuse those definitions without completely changing the subject or perhaps causing harm or injury. If she was the BOMB did she see a bad movie and blowup the theater?
   

    

   The idea that social medicine would lead to the end of choice or the end of democracy itself is just as ridiculous. The United States is one of the few modern countries that has not embraced the idea of socialized medicine.  Right now the UK leader Boris Johnson is trying to introduce the United States version of medical treatment such as private heath insurance to replace the National Health Service (NHS) because of issues involving BREXIT, and the British people are up in arms. 

   
   

   If you think that socialism is a concept that should be used "never in America", I have a shock for you:

   
   

   The Public School system; Some 130,930 elementary and secondary schools in the United States, paid for by taxes by all to be affordable and usable by all at little or no cost (the latter because some Charter schools do charge for some services).
   

    

    Public roadways and bridges; Paid for by taxes by all all to serve the uses by all. The alternate would be paid for use otherwise known as privately owned "TOLL" roads.  Imagine if the ownership of roads changed every mile or so. Come to the end of your street and pitch a quarter into the basket. Then do it again every mile or so along your morning commute.

   
   

   Police and fire departments; Again paid for by taxes and not subscriptions.  There was a time that if you did not subscribe to a particular fire service, they would arrive and watch your house burn to the ground and sometimes even interfere with your subscription fire service because they were the competition.  (And yes that actually happened).

   
   

   All public systems and buildings; City Halls, Court Houses, Museums, parks, sports stadiums, theaters, roads, bridges, schools, street lights, sewers, clean water, all the things that you enjoy that receive local, state and federal tax dollars collected from everyone and spent for everyone. 
   

   
   

   That's Socialism. The group providing for the welfare of the group. Sharing the cost, sharing the benefits.
   

   
   

   Lawmakers have started to reverse some of these social costs calling them tax saving measures.  Federal parks and forest areas which used to be free for everyone to enjoy, now carry fees and even memberships to pay the shortfall due to reduced tax support. And those fees are rising. 

    

   And you may not remember, but public and "community" colleges used to be free except for your personal supplies. Now they are only the beginning of your student debt.

   
   Imagine all of these public works projects and systems now pay for use at full cost and your problems if you don't have the cash.

    

   That's capitalism. You use it, I don't, you pay for it. Every private business works that way. The price you pay includes the entire overhead, salaries, and profits of that company.
   

   
   

   I'm not a crazy communistic socialist. There are lots of things that need to be run on capitalism rather than by the state and we pay for the use.

   
   

   But I don't think healthcare is one.  Any system that can charge you over a thousand dollars a month for health insurance that doesn't kick in until you've paid out $4 -5000.00 in deductibles can hardly be called efficient or even functionally sustainable.

   
   

   And that brings me to cost. The popular argument seems to be that everyone's taxes will go up to pay for Medicare for all. That is right. They will. But you will no longer be paying the health insurance company premiums. That's the trade off. 

   
   

   I paid into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the entire 54 years of my working life. I retired from my city job at age 60 to move back to a private sector job and my health insurance ran me $900.00 per month. That's just covering me.

   
   

   When I turned 65 I was eligible for Medicare and my rates are now less than $300.00 a month, and for much better coverage. But that still only covers me. I paid in, but the money was used for someone else. Now someone else is paying in for me. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security all work like this already.
   

   
   

   There are plenty of examples in the world where Socialized Medicine is working, affordably, medically sound, clean, and free for all.  In Canada, you are covered in an emergency even if you are just visiting from another country and never paid a dime into the system.

   
   

   There are a lot of arguments about how the system would or should work, and most of them are outside the scope of my tirade here, but don't let the politicians use the word Socialism to scare you out of the conversation. Remember some of their biggest donors are heath companies that like the rates you are paying now.
   

   
   

   Socialism is just a word, and you are surrounded by it and enjoying the benefits of it already. 

   
   

   And the next time you chip in for that pizza with your pals? Your being a socialist!
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

    

Stamp Out Trump and save the USPS

The USPS is running in a deficit, Trump is holding it hostage to control the election. Perhaps this may help.

Licensed Music better that copyright lawsuits?

Now this may be just my ignorance of how the music industry works showing, but bare with me.

I just watched a video which told me that Tom Waits employs sixty (60) or more people to search YouTube for channels that had uploaded videos using the sound tracks of any of his songs. When found, they immediately file a copyright claim and or a take down notice of the offending video. And he is not alone. For the vast majority of video creators, a copy lawsuit is a waist of time as there is no money there to recover.

Is it me or does this seem counter productive to anybody (everybody) else?

If you have ever looked into licensing a song through BMI, ASCAP, Marmoset, SESAC, SOCAN or any other media licensing company, you will have found the cost can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. There are a confusing medley of different licensees for variable circumstances. And the complex fee schedule varies as well, which obviously puts the music out of the reach of all but a few tip of the top YouTubers, who only want to share their favorite music.

With approximately 86000 new videos added per day and 60 people searching? I would say that your group are trying to stop an army of ants with a magnifying glass on a partly cloudy day. And I'm not suggesting let it all go free. After all, music has value. What I am suggesting is making it cheap and easy for video content makers to get a one time license for a video. It could go as easy as this.

Users create a social media account on, lets say, a special BMI website (this does not exist, its just an example). The account might contain the users personal information and contact info. Click on a new license form and fill it out, click pay and the site would spit out a one-use license in a PDF for print or email. The license contains the license number (an encoded version of the video description provided by the applicant) and the composer credit text that must appear in the video (end credits) and/or in any extended text description section available on the particular platform.

In order to make and keep this non-transferable social media license valid, the following information would be entered for registration: The date of application, the single upload web site (ie YouTube, Vemo, twitter, whatever), the account or channel name, the name of the video, the song you are licensing, if its the original track or a cover performance, your current follower/friend/subscriber count (more on this later), if your video will be monetized, and your expected publishing date. The License would permanently cover THAT one song on THAT video uploaded on THAT site on THAT channel. Additional uploads or songs would require their own license. IE one (1) song on one (1) video uploaded to YouTube and Twitter = 2 uploads = 2 licenses. Or five (5) songs on one (1) video on one (1) upload on YouTube = five (5) licenses.

License costs would be on a sliding scale (below based on one (1) song, one (1) video, one (1) upload);

$5.00 US - all non-monetized videos regardless of subscriber count.

$10.00 US - monetized video with less than 100,000 subscribers/followers

$25.00 US - monetized video with more than 100,000 subscribers/followers

Seems pretty cheap. But is it? YouTube alone gets about 80,000 hours of new uploads a day. According to Quora.com, the average length of a video on YouTube is less than 5 minutes. That comes out to about 86400 videos a day. If you low ball the figure and say only 10 percent of those bought a $5.00 license, that comes to $43,200 a day. That's per DAY and that only includes the $5.00, non-monetized, video license.

How much are your artists making on those uploads now? Oh, that's right your paying 60 people at 40 hours a week to police just YouTube. And I'm sure there are lawyer costs mixed up in there somewhere (there always are).

The cheap price is the key. Affordable by everyone. The license code makes checking against a database easy. The text credits make publicity for the music that is being paid for by the licensee, and its easy to check the video license validity. Now for a few bucks content creators can avoid video take downs, copyright strikes, all the bad stuff. Who wouldn't do that?

With proper announcements the site would be flooded with applicants. At the very least it would pay for its own operation, policing, and royalties. And since take downs don't make money, instead point creators to the licensing site where they could buy a license and get their video creation restored.

This is not an original idea. There are already sites on the internet that license music for uses like YouTube. But at $14-150 dollars a pop for unknown artists, their percentage of uses on videos is limited. To my thinking, the value here is volume. Getting a great rep and building that 10 percent to 40-50-60 percent licensed with a large and happy repeat user base.

So as I said at the start, I'm not a professional musician. I'm not an executive responsible for collecting royalties. I'm not paying 60 people a day to make me no money and spread animosity about my brand by doing take downs on YouTube. But even I would stop using free Creative Commons music in my videos if for five or ten bucks each a I could use popular music.

Be Well.

Making a cheap two stage dust collector!

This just published and "JUST" being the keyword. It took over a year to get all the parts filmed and then refilmed after a stupid brain fart that had me formatting the wrong disk and erasing the second half of the build.

So all grousing aside, here it is. Be Well.

Good-bye to a not-so-old friend

 

Not so very long ago, I was presented with a gift of a computer tablet.  But this was not just any tablet it was a new Microsoft "SURFACE".  More than just a tablet, it ran WINDOWS RT, had a removable keyboard (of sorts), a magnificent screen in a similar aspect ratio as a laptop monitor, and 16 gigabytes of RAM.

Windows RT was a new and experimental version of the Windows operating system. It had the look and "feel" of a Windows platform, it had a touch-me screen, but also a rubber coated keyboard covered with little squares with letters and numbers silk screened on them. Imagine the joy of opening the box and seeing the safety film coated screen. The charger was connected with a magnetic (cant buy one of these anywhere) coupler, that fell off anytime you brushed against it or one of the dogs walked past wagging their tails.

But it was new, experimental, and most important... it was a gift.

I had no idea what to do with it.

You see Windows RT looked like Windows, but it came with a few restrictions.  You needed a Microsoft account to turn it on.  It came with abridged, albeit free, versions of MS Office and Internet Explorer. And your Microsoft account got you into the Microsoft store where you could download approved software. Some for free, some cost money which they made easy by constantly asking you for a credit card to keep safely on file for your convenience.

But there was a hook.  If the software you wanted to run was not not approved or not specifically designed for the new ARM chip-set, you would politely be told that it would not run on this computer.  I'm sure it was Microsoft ecstasy.  NO Firefox, no Google Chrome, Opera, no professional photo editing programs, drawing programs, CAD, no major games, no competition.  Your only bidirectional window to the outside world was Internet Explorer and the store.

Imagine Microsoft's surprise when it didn't sell well. 

Then hope came on the horizon.  Microsoft was going to port Windows 8 to the Surface computers. But it was all dashed as the Windows 8 version was crippled the same as RT had been.  No unauthorized software and no incentive for companies to port their programs to operate with the ARM chip-set. Even the eventual upgrade to Windows 8.1 changed nothing.

Imagine Microsoft's surprise when it still didn't sell well. 

So NOW what do I do with it?

Perhaps it was too slow?  MS came out with a version 2, but it was just the same.  Although thousands of us now owned versions one and two of this experimental device, Microsoft decided to cut and run.  So for the past few years we have gotten just the legally required security updates.

There are a lot of smart people on the internet.  As time went by, some of them found ways to crack or bypass the lock that held our poor Surface tablets in chains. But one by one, update by update the vindictive minds at Microsoft changed the keys to the locks and shut them down.

While all this was going on, I paid little attention.  My personal animosity toward Microsoft goes way, way back.  All the way to Windows with Work Groups. I was not "afraid" that they (Microsoft) were going to screw us... I was sure of it.  (That history is for another blog)

Once the keyboard stopped working, and what few programs I was using loaded its storage with so much crap that I eventually reset the whole machine back to factory once or twice, I just gave up.  But I didn't stop using my little tablet. I found its niche.  I took it into my work shop. Because it had no fans, it was more or less impervious to the sawdust and dirt that woodworking creates and spreads all over regardless of the amount of dust collection you install. I set it up on my workbench and clicked on Internet Explorer (IE) and found my way to YouTube.

At YouTube and searching the internet, the Surface excelled.  Over time the WiFi connection became a little slow. But then they gave us an upgrade from IE 10 to IE 11 and that helped for a bit.

But Surface worked fine to help me find parts I needed, keeping me abreast of my favorite YouTubers, and that marvelous screen gave me a wide angle, full-screen view that I didn't need my glasses to watch.

And then it started.  YouTube and other web sites started warning me that I needed to upgrade my web browser. They would stop supporting it "soon".  For the past six months I scoured the Microsoft web site about possible updates.  For a while there was a rumor of a special version of Windows 10 in the offing to save my little tablet.  But the word officially finally came out:

"Microsoft has officially abandoned any plans for further upgrades for the Surface 1 and 2. "

As I expected. They finally got me.  It took 5 years... I'm Microsoft screwed again.

On July 1st 2020, Internet Explorer 11 finally effectively ceased to function on YouTube and most everywhere else.  If I wanted to wait for 15 to 20 minutes for each video to load, I can still see them.  The "upgrade your browser" warnings are gone. My little tablet is finally a paper weight.

So NOW what do I do with it?

It was a good little computer, betrayed by it's creators. For want of a browser, it could have lived on for years.  I'll pack it up in a box and stuff it in some crevice in the house for my children to find after I'm gone.  They can open the box and look at the little Surface and its wide screen and tape covered power connector and marvel;

"What the hell did he keep this for?"

Life Interrupted

I had it all planned.  My Social Security was two months away, I would work until June or July, build up a little extra money in the bank, and then retire. I had my woodworking workshop nearly finished and would, perhaps even turn a couple of bucks selling stuff I made.

My wife, of just over a year, had her side planned.  Chickens, milking goats, gardening and all the fun that goes with them. Fresh produce, milk, cheeses, and blue egger chickens, and perhaps later, honey bees.

We have been looking for a place in the southern part of Arizona. Phoenix has become too hot and congested. Sierra Vista. Cooler weather (relatively), cheaper (also relatively), and lots of ranchettes.  We've been looking for a place with 4 -10 acres, a workshop, a guest house, preferably on the power grid.

Making our house in Phoenix ready for sale to maximize the market price has been problematic since the arrival of the pandemic. However, the economic impact of "stay at home" does not seem to have affected the estimated value of the property thus far. Our local big and little box store hours of operation and availability of materials has been a crapshoot for a couple of months.

Additionally, the "stay at home" order came post-layoff for myself and my brother and sister stagehands as theatrical, exhibition, concert, television, and film work canceled or otherwise screeched to a halt weeks before.  The one poor advantage was to put me on the unemployment rolls a few days earlier than most other people.  Small dispensation at best.  I don't care how much federally assisted unemployment is, how much stimulus they throw at me,  I'd rather be working.

I used to say "After I retire, I'll be keeping my schedule as much as possible.  Taking care of animals.  Working in my woodshop. Making Youtube videos. Marketing, budgeting, purchasing, and all the ranch work." I would go on to say, "I know exactly when that magic word "retire" is going to engage down to the day."

But now with the shutdown, who knows.

How has the shutdown affected your plans?

Be Well.

Nothing is constant but change

Okay, so its a colloquialism and it's kind of quaint.  But truer words were never said, at least in my life. especially in the last 3 years.

In the past few years I was divorced, my sons grew up and moved out, I retired from one job and was fired from another, I remodeled my house, refound and married my high school sweetheart, worked as a stagehand, rediscovered my love of creating and woodworking, and now I'm planning to retire again - to a farm and workshop in the south of my state.


I don't know how your life has been, but that seems busy even without the details.

This is a kick-restart to this blog and a new chapter in my life. To adventure!

Be Well and take care of those you love in this time of great sacrifice and pandemic trials.