The Procrustean Nature of the Income Tax Regimen
Sometimes your own principles can contradict the way you earn a learning. For example, some government contracts put the risks of down time (say, the offices close under weather conditions, like this past week's Northeast freakish early snowstorm, or government shutdown) on the contractor. So in the cases of a contractor employee, company policies vary on how this is handle. I have not researched how the government responds post-shutdown for contractors (usually furloughed/"unessential" government employees get back pay), but I don't think they get credited for lost billable hours.This reminds me of a San Jose client back in 2000 who got wind of the fact I had to copy a stack of about 25 Oracle CD's onto the server and demanded that I go off the clock while their staff did the copying. (The guy was a particularly stupid first-time PM. As my boss pointed out, there were other tasks I could do, even if their staffers loaded the CD's. But no, he all but had me escorted out of the building. And this was Silicon Valley--it's not like I had a nearby client where I could pick up a couple of billable hours on demand. Just driving in and out of Silicon Valley traffic jams would eat up a couple of hours. But my company wouldn't like the fact that I lost billable hours. This is something that should have been discussed at a higher level before I had to deal with.
In a government contracting situation, it really depends on the terms. In one example from my past, the bi-weekly billing period ended on Fridays. So if we lost a day or more due to relevant factors at the end of the billing week end, there was no way to carry over those 8 hours to the following week. And we had to report 40 billing hours or equivalent per week. Policies differ by contractor, but basically you could apply accrued vacation time and/or borrow a couple of vacation days. After that, you have to eat it, i.e., unpaid leave. So if you lose 10 billable midweek (a snow day and a late start), the best you can hope for is regaining maybe 4 of those hours.
Not to mention Trump threatened to veto the latest budget bill (not because he was worried about the $1.1T he's already added to the deficit but because he didn't get money for his [expletive-deleted] wall that he promised his minions that Mexico was going to pay for). Isn't it bad enough his big mouth has driven the stock market into correction territory this year? It makes no sense. He's got a 40% approval and he's lost two high-profile elections in Trump country backing Republicans. Still, the idea that a politically suicidal threat to veto a budget throwing you into a layoff? Luckily Trump backed off.
So what to do with an unwanted snow day? What else but doing my taxes? I got distracted by a libertarian meme calling the income tax illegal; now I disagree with the idea of an income tax and I do think that the argument that the progressive tax violates equal protection deserved more consideration, but most of the arguments I found less than convincing, e.g., arguments over whether Ohio was a state when it approved it or punctuation deviations.
Oddly enough, I've never filed electronically (it has more to do with my wanting to do due diligence on that option; I'm really concerned about vulnerabilities of PII on government systems). It was more fillable pdf issues that annoyed me. On the federal form for some reason half of my inputs failed to print out although the forms printed out beautifully. I have multiple pdf readers (plus browsers can also handle them). At first I thought maybe it was a reader bug. In the end I basically manually filled out missing values on the printout.
But the Arizona part-time resident form turned out particularly Procrustean. For those who don't know Greek mythology, the bed of Procrustes was a one-size solution: if you were too short, they stretched you out, and if you were too tall, they cut your limbs down to size. In the case of the tax form, it was very bossy that you do the right things or else it warned it would reject my return. "Watcha talking about, Willis?" It basically told me I had made one or more red-lined entry errors in the form. I finally traced it to my entry of the dates of residency. It specifically says, "Enter beginning, ending dates in the form: MMDDYYYY,MMDDYYYY. I did. I'm not sure what the problem was. I ended up downloading the unfillable pdf (straight form printing). I did notice on that form it had printed slashes. i.e., MM/DD/YYYY,MM/DD/YYYY; don't tell me they wanted me to insert the slashes! (Keep in mind most forms don't want to include hyphens in your social security field. I swear to God if the dude responsible for this nonsense was in any one of my classes, I would flunk him to hell. It's bad enough you have to do this nonsense once a year, but imposing rules by and for the convenience of the State is rather outrageous.
What's With Trump's Obsession With Belittling People On Height?
/Officially Trump stands 6'3", a respectful height (although his driver license reportedly puts him at 6'2"). Why fudge the extra inch? Some think it has to do with his girth and height/weight ranges for obesity. I don't doubt a lot of men exaggerate their height, especially biased towards the mythical 6 foot mark (taller women complain about it all the time, with shorter guys claiming to be their height or taller; the guys defensively respond the ladies are taller than they claim). Me, I've never done so, although years back, a very pretty young black department store saleslady, who I think was trying to flirt with me, was writing various PI on the back of my check, listed my height as 3 inches taller than what was stated on my driver's license. I don't recall anyone else who even listed height as PI on the back of a check (I almost never write checks today, given ubiquitous credit card transactions). It did make my day, though.
Since I'm roughly Marco Rubio's height, I'm pretty sure Trump would make the same belittling comment about me (and he notoriously went on beyond Rubio to mock Corker's height as well), although he's also made disparaging comments about 400-lb hackers sitting on their beds. I've never been close to that size, but I don't think that would stop Trump.
I do think I was more sensitive about height when I was younger; both parents were a few inches shorter than average, and I realized I had inherited their genes--maybe I would reach average stature at best, and there is definitely a social bias towards tall stature. Add to that I was younger than most in my grade (I barely made the end of calendar year cutoff) and girls generally start puberty earlier than boys. One day in sixth grade, my being still shy of 5 feet tall, the tallest girl in class was discussing their common height with our 5'9" female science teacher and then caught me eavesdropping on the conversation. The girl angrily stared down at me and snapped, "What are you looking at, shorty?" (Horrified, my teacher quickly reprimanded her.) I was aware that men generally are 5 inches taller than women, but my own Dad would be looking up at these two in their bare feet. I didn't notice the taller guys that much (my best friend in high school was a 6-footer).
I finally hit puberty in eighth grade and quickly passed most of the girls who had begun to tower over me in sixth and seventh grade. But my height leveled off by early high school. Occasionally the old insecurities would flare up. There was a junior high just a few hundred yards down slope from the high school, and the junior high athletes would come up to use the gym with a building entrance next to the boys' locker room. So one day I'm dashing out of the locker room after PE to make my next class when I almost run into 2 junior high girls heading just beyond the stairs to the gym. The nearer, shorter girl looked me in the eye and said, "Hey there, shorty." I was tempted to object that we were the same height, but high school boys are supposed to be taller than junior high girls--besides, the other girl easily had a couple of inches on both of us. Not to mention that the tallest person at my local junior/senior high bus stop was a 6-foot sixth-grade girl--who probably, next to her dad, was the tallest person in the neighborhood. It just feels weird to look up at someone younger, like you used to look up at your parents.
I never really saw many really tall women (6'5" or over) until I went to college, may be up to a dozen over the years, not in athletics, but in other places, e.g., registration, behind me in a queue at UH, coming out of a movie theater, at Sunday mass, etc.. (I consider just above average male height-5'10" as tall for a woman.) /The tallest I've seen was in a Milwaukee supermarket while I was on the UWM faculty. I chose a checkout lane that seemed to have a shorter line. That's when I saw the average-sized cashier who was craning her neck straight back to talk to this huge woman; I think cashier's head topped out around the customer's stomach; not sure; seven-feet plus? She would dwarf Trump and turn the tables on him: "Widdle Donnie"
In college, I taught IT classes; most of the coeds I taught tended to be in the service/required courses (i.e., introduction to MIS, etc.) I couldn't tell you how many taller coeds I had taught over 8 years; maybe up to a dozen. I was perceived by many students as intimidating and no nonsense, although I can't recall every bullying or calling students out. I always came to lecture with typewritten notes, although I'm extraordinarily articulate. I didn't have any qualms of lecturing in front of a group of strangers. I remember in one case at UH one coed came up to me after class and seemed to be unnerved by my looking up a couple of inches; she promptly sat down at a desk so I would be "taller" than her. (It wasn't anything I said or did.) I think when it became clear she was trending to a B versus an A in the course, she was less self-conscious, on one occasion wearing steep heels, putting her over 6 feet and glaring down at me. (I once dated a taller woman, who never referenced my height, except to comment once that she figured I would never be interested in her because she was "freakishly tall". No, the reason I broke up with her (she was also gorgeous and had a model's portfolio) had to deal with her toxic personality. She was passive-aggressive--and one of the ways I knew she wasn't happy with me is she would wear these heels and pretend she couldn't see me.)
I have noticed other people are acutely sensitive about their height. I had a huge crush on this yeoman (secretary/administrative assistant) I met working out of a JAG office in Florida before leaving the Navy. Within 5 minutes of meeting her it was like we had known each other all our lives. Unfortunately she was already in a relationship. One day we were walking down the hall together when she started complaining she was too short. I had never noticed until then that she barely reached my shoulders; I knew that she was shorter than me but that most women are shorter, and one of my little sisters is only 4'10". Her height never bothered me at all; I would have married the girl in a heartbeat. She was unhappy that her elementary school little sister had already outgrown her. (I don't think that's as bad as my freshman friend Mark whose seventh-grade sister was 4 inches taller, almost my height.)
In my adult work years, it's been rare that others ever mention my stature, even though I have at least 4 6-feet nephews. I think the last one I remember was when I was working at an IBM subsidiary. When I worked at Oracle Consulting in the late 1990's, they assigned this new DBA of color without EBS (ERP) experience to work on this Oklahoma project with me (technically I filled in for a departed senior DBA who had been walked off the project). I basically got the failing project back on track and soon thereafter left Oracle. So while I'm at IBM several years later, I stumble across the fact he's working at the business consulting subsidiary. One day he stopped by our Fairfax location for some other reason. I instantly recognized him and asked him if he remembered me. He laughed and said loud enough for my co-workers to hear, "Listen here, the SHORT guy here asks whether I remember him. Of course, I remember him." I later ask him why he called me short; he had never mentioned height when we were in Oklahoma, and besides, I was average, not short. He looks at me and says, "Dude, I'm over 6 feet tall. To me, you're short."
I'm not an important enough blogger for Trump to personally respond with his signature insult to me. I think he would probably call me a fatty with a Napoleon complex. And I would probably respond that as an unscrupulous used car salesman, he would put the dealership in bankruptcy.
Dreams
I have weird dreams I often remember in detail; I suspect Freud would have a field day. During my school years, they were typically of me going into a final exam completely unprepared, having not attended a class or cracked open a book, headed for failure. (This is totally uncharacteristic.)In the new dream, I'm returning, of all things, to the classrooms of UT/Austin as a professor--to teach math, of all things, not MIS (my doctoral field). And it's like I didn't start the class at the beginning of the semester but finally make it to class somewhere in mid-semester, completely unprepared for lecture, only to find a substitute lecturer, teaching calculus not the way your grandfather's professor taught it. I didn't know what the hell was going on, but the lecturer and students continued, totally ignoring my presence.
And you think you have screwed up dreams. To put into context, I had some hellish experiences as a teaching assistant at UT, which I may have briefly described in past posts. After earning my MA with no prospect of getting funding to pursue my doctorate, I found myself unemployed for several month, finally getting a math teaching appointment at the Navy Nuclear School. I had 2 degrees in pure math (with a second undergraduate major in philosophy) and the result was I blamed my choices on my dismal job opportunities. Unlike many or most math majors, I didn't pick up a minor in computer science.
