Sarcasm | Grumpa Joe's Place

When Do We Run Out of Sunshine?

Posted on 09/06/2023 by Grumpa Joe

It has been ten months since my roof morphed into a solar generator. Today, the electric bill arrived and I am happy to announce that I generated 865 kilowatts and used only 656. Not bad considering that it is only May and the really long days are ahead of us. The downside is that my usage has increased due to running a pond pump and air-conditioning full time. My bill for the month is twenty dollars which comes from taxes and delivery fees for the electricity I buy back. Our supplier announced a 42% increase in power costs and will continue to raise costs until hell freezes over because that is what power companies do. If my plan works out, I will not be spending my fixed income on electricity. Remember also that we will all be competing for electricity when the world turns to electric transportation.

Normally, I pay a fixed fee of $120 per month for power. The cost of the solar system is $75/mo. The bottom line is that I put $30/mo in my pocket and avoid the increases.

Real estate people tell me that homes with solar power are in demand so I shouldn’t have to worry when I am forced to sell my house to move into a long term care facility. If you can swing a deal like I did where I didn’t pay a single nickel out of pocket for the installation and I am saving cash too, then I recommend you cover your roof with solar panels. Turn your roof into a money generating machine. Prepare yourself for the day when your neighbors and their kids are charging cars when you want to watch your favorite soap opera, and the power company is running balls out trying to meet the demand with their windmills and there isn’t a wisp of a breeze anywhere.

My guess is that once the Greenies get past the global warming dilemma they will begin to pick on solar power because it will consume all the sunshine for power, and none will be left for tanning their lily-white asses.

Filed under: Biography, Sarcasm | Tagged: Solar panels | 1 Comment »

Just Thinking

Posted on 10/05/2023 by Grumpa Joe

The current political debate about the debt ceiling got me to thinking about how to cure the problem. As usual, my ideas are extreme, radical, and different from those of the current administration. The only thing our government should be spending money on is our defense, and safety, Instead, over the years we have opted to pass laws that invented numerous bureaucracies and departments which have aged into obsolescence. As they have aged numerous new responsibilities have been tacked onto them to take care of so called problems of the nation. All of these laws need people to write them to proceduralize them process them, and to to enforce them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of workers needed in these bureaucracy’s. Workers cost money, they need space, and computers to do their jobs. Each year as the population grows and more people believe they need governmental help these agency’s grow and grow. The cost of operation grows with it.

My idea is to make each bureaucracy self sustaining. Cut them off from the government’s payroll. If the agency fills a legitimate need then the users would pay for their service. If the agency deals only with indigent people who cannot pay, then the agency must raise the money. Our tax dollars should not be used to pay for anything but the protection of our country.

A much better idea is to eliminate every bureaucracy on the books today, and start from scratch. Fill the Greek and Roman looking buildings with computers that are loaded with Artificial Intelligence. The AI machines would no doubt find solutions to each problem in record time and only cost some electricity. Going one step further, I’d put a solar panel on the roof of each of these places to power the AI computer. No tax dollars needed except for the one time cost of implementation.

If the bureaucracy’s were reduced in size by 90% there would be no need to raise the debt ceiling every four years. Think of all that money going back into the economy, business would boom.

I know you are thinking that I have no heart.What would you do in a recession, like the one coming, to take care of all the people who will lose their jobs? What kind of safety net will you create to take care of these people? Government safety nets are exactly what we don’t need. All a safety net does is to incentivize workers to not work. Look what COVID did to the economy. Uncle felt sorry for all these people and they rewarded Uncle by staying out of the workforce permanently. I know people who enjoy being laid off of a job so they can live on unemployment for two years. Why work when a check comes to take care of me, and I can get food stamps, and many other bennies too?

Well Grumpa Joe, “It easy for you to say eliminate all the safety nets, you have Social Security you don’t have to worry.” My reply would be this: I never asked for Social Security, if I lose it tomorrow I will survive off the nest egg I amassed by working for a living. Granted, my lifestyle would change a lot. I’d not own a computer, I’d drop my internet connection, cell phone, cable TV, and I’d live in a smaller house. I wouldn’t drink as much wine, or eat as much steak, but I would survive, and so would the government.

We have tons of safety nets to protect people, but we still have homelessness, why?

Filed under: Aging, Sarcasm, Satire | Tagged: Bureaucracy, Debt ceiling, Safety net | 2 Comments »

If I Wanted a Job, I’d Apply For One

Posted on 30/04/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Today, I experienced some frustration that annoyed me beyond comprehension. Lovely and I did our best to keep our neighborhood Walmart from closing it’s doors. We had not shopped for groceries for a couple of weeks now, and our cupboards were bare. It was time to give up and shop. The big news during the week was that four Chicagoland Walmart stores closed because they were losing money. It’s my guess that the effect of the relaxation of penalties for shop lifting have been measured, and one of the world’s largest retailers has voted with it’s feet. In other words, “let’s get out of town before they steal the shelves bare, and strip all the copper wire from the building.” Anyway, we did our best to fill a shopping cart with food. We have a habit of guessing how many dollars are in the cart before we check out. Both of us guessed two hundred dollars.

Usually, these stores had as many as twenty lines for check out with humans scanning and bagging. Today, there were only two human staffed checkout lines. In their place were two corrals of fifteen self checkout stations with one human overseer. Walmart has aggressively been working on reducing labor costs since the fifteen dollar minimum wage was introduced. Secondly, since COVID there has been, and still is a huge labor shortage.

Lovey and I parked at one of the computer operated checkout stations and began scanning. We bought a lot of fruits and vegetables and learned that scanning cucumbers, peppers, and onions can be challenging. Each piece of vegetable, and fruit has a label with a bar code. It all sounds great except that the labels are tiny and the bar codes don’t read or scan at all. The computer then asks you to find the item in it’s database by clicking on a photo. Of course this took some time, since it was the very first time I tried scanning a tomato, and a green pepper. Neither was shown as a photo on the screen, so it involved typing in a description of the item, or the four digit unscannable number that was on the tiny label, and then answering how many of the item there was. Okay, I got past that frustration, but then proceeded to try to place the items into a plastic bag that hangs on the station. Plastic material is a great collector of negative and positive ions. The bags stuck together agressively. I found myself fighting magnetically adhering plastic sheet stock to get the bags open, GRRR! This final step of the shopping experience taught me to avoid shopping at places where I must do a self check out. After thinking about this for a few seconds I realized I will not be shopping in too many stores because they are all headed in this direction.

This phenomenon is not new. The first labor intensive vendor switched customers to self checkout many years ago. I recall when my dad drove his car into a service station for gas, he stopped by a pump and waited for the attendant to come to his window. Dad asked him to “fill it up with regular,” or “two dollars worth please.” While Dad sat there, the attendant cleaned his windshield, checked the oil, and filled the tires to a correct pressure. Dad handed him money (credit cards weren’t invented yet) and the attendant would make change and give him a Green stamps. Most gas stations were independently owned and operated businesses. When the oil companies took them over to expand the size of the station by adding more pumps they also reduced the amount of service to zero. Car owners were forced to fill their own cars, and to clean their own windows with station supplied water, brush and paper. Today, I use my phone app to dial in to the station location, the pump number and type of gas. The pump communicates with my phone to charge my card. I still have to open the gas tank, and place the nozzle into the filler tube. Perhaps someday soon an AI robot will do all of this for me.

I don’t know if I saved enough money shopping at Walmart to make the aggravation I suffered to warrant going back there again. If Walmart goes out of business at this location it won’t be because they didn’t have paying customers, it’ll more likely be because they didn’t have customers who wanted to do their work for them.

By the way Lovely and I both guessed wrong, the total was $301.

Filed under: Biography, economy, Sarcasm | Tagged: High food cost, Labor shortage, passing work to customer, Walmart | 1 Comment »

A Highly Paid Pickpocket

Posted on 14/04/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Take a good look at this woman. She has her hands in your pocket, and is lifting your wallet and any loose change you may still have.

“During an interview aired on Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm responded to a question on whether there is a plan to address energy prices that have started to tick up by stating that “the better choice is to move to electrify transportation, because it is so much cheaper for you” and “moving to clean is moving to energy security and moving to affordability.”

I almost fell off my chair. I just Googled Biden’s electrification of transportation plan and learned that he is pouring money into electric charging station infrastructure. Will it be enough? Probably not for a very long time. His desire is to have 500,000 charging stations in place by 2030. The latest stat I found on the number of gas stations in the United States is 115,400. At first the number of charging stations sounds like it will be plenty, but I don’t think so. Most of the 115,400 stations provide up to twelve or more fueling points. It takes me about five minutes to fill my tank while a fast charge will take about 45 minutes. That means the electric charging depot will require nine times as many charging points to equal the fill capacity of a regular fueling station. My arithmetic tells me that the number of charging points is only half of what will be required. Another fact of life is that the current grid that supplies us with our spark is not capable of simultaneously charging more than about five cars per city block before it crashes.

At the same time Biden is planning to increase regulation of gasoline to make it more expensive and harder to get. Remember a few weeks ago when I stated that the current car shortage is a government conspiracy to force us into electric cars. Along with that, the pandemic taught us that we don’t need to drive. Anyway, I have veered from my point which is to state that this lady who has her hands in our pockets is a moron. She actually believes she can convince us that going electric overnight will be cheaper for us.

What Ms Granholm has left out of the discussion is where the electricity needed to spark those 500,000 charging stations will come from. Maybe she has a plan to install a huge windmill on the roof of every fossil fuel and atomic power plant across the country to give us a charge. While we hire the Dutch to design and build those windmills for us we will have to rely on something else. Maybe it will be hydro-electric, but wait, didn’t Lake Meade nearly run out of water this last year? Where will we build new hydro-electric plants. Niagara Falls already has a power plant. Actually, a better idea will be to buy all the old bicycles that the Chinese are no longer using, and we can use them to move around. Not only would that be clean green energy, but we would all lose weight and be healthier. Think of all the reduced health care costs that would accrue. Surplus doctors and nurses would need to be directed to keeping the millions of illegal aliens that have descended upon the USA healthy. The downside of healthy immigrants is that they will be buying up all the beautifully efficient gas powered cars that we had to give up for the electrics.

The bottom line is that we need more power pants

Jennifer Granholm’s stupid answer was completely political talking points. She did it so robotically, and kept repeating the exact same line so many times that I wondered if maybe she is a government robot with limited artificial intelligence.

Here is my tip to Joe Biden, “we are not stupid.”

Filed under: Conservative, economy, Government, Sarcasm | Tagged: Electric Cars, Fossil Fuel, Green New Deal | 2 Comments »

Time For Another Memorial

Posted on 01/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and it is time to set some new goals. Number one on the list is to create a memorial for my second wife Peggy. It is time that the world learns about how beautiful she was. I can’t promise that it will be today, or tomorrow, but it will take place this winter.

Second on my list is to finish the workshop of my dreams.

Third is to design a new Intarsia pattern and to execute the work for display.

Fourth is to fill my garden with Whirligigs all happily spinning away in unison.

Fifth is to retire from retirement from the Frankfort Lions Club

Sixth is to love my family as much as I can.

Seventh is to beat the squirrel

Eighth is to blow up the Apple facility responsible for scrambling the contents of my iMac with their endless need for passwords and updates trying to make my desktop into an iPhone

Lastly, eight goals as lofty as those listed are enough for any man my age.