atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#4170: Spring ain't here.

I say this despite the 60° high temperature today because when I took the garbage out last night it was snowing.

...also incidentally keeping this week from being the first week of the year without snow in it. So it has snowed every week this year including this one.

Maybe next week will be the first of the year without snow. We'll see.

* * *

Welders make $100 an hour in North Dakota? Why did I go to school to learn electronics? I could have paid about 1/20th of the tuition to get my welding certificates via the local junior college.

To get annual income from hourly wage, you multiply by 2080...and that means a welder with full certification in the right market can make two hundred thousand dollars per year without working so much as a single minute of overtime.

To be sure, you work outdoors in the heat or the cold, in the rain and the mud and the snow and the ice, night or day--but I think for $100 an hour I could put up with a lot.

The link is to an interview with Mike Rowe which raises a lot of the issues I raised the other day about the value of a collge degree vis-a-vis what it costs to get one.

* * *

I read the Elric saga once. Moorcock's writing never impressed me.

* * *

Bruce Rauner has been the target of a lot of PR in Illinois, and a lot of it has come from Big Labor.

I utterly forgot about the primaries on Tuesday, not that it matters since this is Illinois and we have a choice between left, not-quite-as-left, or sort-of-moderate, which is where Bruce Rauner appears to fall. I couldn't decide who I wanted to vote for. Much of the criticism of Rauner came from the right people to make me vote for him, but the biggest problem I had was figuring out what was true, what was half-true, and what was outright deception.

Whoever the nominees are for the gubernatorial race, I'll vote Republican. Illinois Republicans are scarcely better than their Democrat counterparts in most respects but they act as a brake on the tax-and-borrow-and-spend lunacy of the Democrats, at least at the state level.

* * *

Today I heard that we got a total of sixty inches of snow this winter. That's five feet.

Holy crap.
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