Anti Nuclear Manifesto

Let me give you my anti nuclear manifesto. The problem with nuclear power is two fold. First, no one has EVER given a reasonable answer as to what to do with the waste that lasts forever, and no, burying it in rusty steel barrels is NOT acceptable. The other problem is people. Nuclear power will always be inherently unsafe because people have an unerring propensity to fuck up. When designing a nuke plant, there is not a lot of room for design mistakes. I have worked with engineers, they make mistakes all the time. Lets assume that the engineers come up with the perfect design(unlikely). That is just the first phase of the atomic circus. Now it is time to actually build it. Of course the engineers have specified the very best quality grade A+ concrete and steel. Who is going to build this, Haliburton? Look at the big dig, can you picture those assholes building a nuke plant? No matter how much legit profit is being made you can guarantee the construction douche bags will cheat on materials to fatten the profit margin, where grade A+ cement is called for they will use grade D, the same with the steel and other materials. You will wind up with a plant that is safe on paper, and would have been OK if built the way it was supposed to be that is a time bomb. Wait, last but not least, now it is built and it is time to actually run it.
So now you have the possibility of design defects, the absolute surety of shoddy construction and Homer Simpson shows up for work. Of course Homer isn't scared, didn't they show him how safe the plant was? I have never seen a situation where people failed to fuck up whenever the opportunity presented itself, what makes matters much worse is that Homer Simpson thinks the safety margin is much higher than it actually is, as grade A+ steel and cement can take a lot more abuse than the shitty grade D materials the construction assholes used. So there you have it, the three stooges, the Engineers, the construction company, and the people running the plant.

Fire Alarms

 Fire alarm, whaaaat? You must think I'm fucking insane to do a rant about fire alarms. Fire alarms are good, right? They save lives, right? Who wouldn't want the friendly firemen to show up when their house is burning? For the most part fire alarms ARE a good thing, but sometimes there are exceptions. The exception is when the fire alarm is either designed and/or installed by complete fucking idiots.

Let's take, say, the fire alarm where I work. Some new sensors were installed,
and they must be VERY sensitive indeed, as the alarm now goes off every day. This isn't your daddy's fire alarm either, it's ear piercing, rock concert loud, guaranteed by it's maker to give hearing damage every time it goes off, which recently, did I mention this already, is every fucking day. This is not just useless, it is actually harmful. Ever hear the story of the little boy who cried wolf? Just in case you were born under a rock and haven't heard this one it goes like this. There was a little boy who LOVED attention, which he would get by yelling "WOLF, WOLF, WOLF" at which all the villagers would run out looking for the wolf, who was not there as the boy was lying. Well one day, who shows up but the big, bad wolf himself, and he has little boy on his dinner menu. Apon seeing him the little boy cries out "WOLF, WOLF, WOLF", but by this time the villagers have had more than enough of his bullshit and ignore him. At the end of this sad but cautionary tale, the only thing left of the little boy who cried wolf is a giant, stinking turd, left by the big bad wolf as a good bye memento for the villagers.
 What has all this to do with a defective fire alarm you say? Think about it, if that alarm continues to go off when there is no fire, the firemen may have to show up, but their enthusiasm, and rush to get to the office is going to diminish. Lets just say that if this keeps up, and there is ever a real fire, response time may be on the slow side.

Guitar Techs

 Ever have to deal with repair people? You know, like the auto mechanic, or maybe computer techs? Was it good for you? It hasn't always been fun for me. Especially regarding guitar techs. It's always the same thing. Me: "my guitar has fret buzz, can you get rid of it?" Guitar tech: "Sure, no problem." A week to over a month later the guitar comes back and still has fret buzz. If I'm lucky it's been reduced somewhat, I've had guys make it worse. What the fuck is it with those guys anyway; I didn't ask to have fret buzz reduced, I asked to have it GONE!! Sure, I can hand it back, and have my guitar gone for another week to month, but if they couldn't get it right the first time, I just don't have any confidence a second try will give me better results. I've played guitars with no fret buzz, my Schecter C1 Classic doesn't have it so I KNOW it's possible to set up a guitar to eliminate it. I have a theory on this. There are essentially two types of guitar techs. Mediocre, and highly competent but busy. The mediocre guys just don't have the skills to get rid of fret buzz, at least on some guitars. The highly skilled guys can, but they tend to be backed up with work, so if your name isn't Joe Perry from Aerosmith or Eddie Van Halen, they are not going to take the time to do it right. With these guys the fret buzz will be reduced, but not eliminated. I suppose if you hound them you can get the job done right, but these are the guys that typically have a month turn around, so good luck there. I've heard of people who have had good experiences with guitar techs, but I never have and I'm sick of them.

Immigration

It seems to me this is not the single issue it's often presented as, but a multi-faceted one. I'm going to attempt to break it up a bit.

• Illegal vs Legal immigration
  
  An argument I hear a lot is "we have to pass amnesty, because we need more people for low pay, menial jobs". This country already has a green card system allowing legal immigrant residency. If we truly need to have more people here to pick fruit or do other manual labor it seems to me it would make a lot more sense to issue out more green cards to people who are obeying the law and waiting to enter the U.S., than giving amnesty to people who have broken U.S. immigration law to get here. Those people should NOT be getting work preference over people waiting for green cards, and amnesty allowing them to stay here would do just that.
  


• Illegal Alien Felons
  
  I don't understand why there is even a debate about this. Illegal aliens convicted of a felony need to be GONE the second their jail sentence is served. Their feet should not even hit the pavement outside of the jail, they should be placed on a bus and deported back to their home country, or taken to the airport and flown out if they come from overseas. Even if we instituted an amnesty program, illegal alien felons should not be eligible for it. The same goes for any so called "sanctuary cities", if they are found to be harboring illegal alien felons federal funding should be cut off until the policy of sheltering them is halted. It needs to be made clear to them they are banned from re entry in the U.S., and any attempts to return will be rewarded by a mandatory prison sentence. The U.S. has more than it's fair share of native crooks, it doesn't need to import any.
  

Port Forwarding Sucks

Nothing pisses me off faster when trying to get something to work online than to read "you have to configure your router's port forwarding". This has to be done with bittorrent clients, and some games if you want to run a game server. Note I said SOME games as every Valve game I've ever played has NOT required this! To all the douche bag game programmers who code games that require this - NOT EVERYONE HAS ROUTER ACCESS!!!!! That's right you fucking nerds, people living in apartments and college dorms don't have router access, and the admins there aren't going to custom configure the router for one persons game play. If you program games that require port forwarding for net play please do me and everyone else who doesn't have router access a favor and get a job bagging groceries.