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Do not expect your pension to be there when you retire. I regard my 401k as an emergency savings fund, because I do not expect it to be there in thirty or forty years. It's going to get eaten by a hungry government long before I can expect to retire, because there's no way in hell the government won't seize the huge pool of money represented by peoples' IRAs, 401ks, and other savings instruments. As soon as it becomes necessary, it'll happen, and it won't matter which party is nominally in charge. Our Greece moment is still ahead of us, and we can still avoid it, but we simply will not try, because that would be hard, and no one has the self-discipline to do the hard things any longer.
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Because I saw that "Games People Play" video the other day, I decided to listen to other Alan Parsons' Project favorites. I ended up digging out my "Very Best" CDs (self-compiled) but they're too scratched up to play reliably, so I re-ripped them.
...this is the part I don't get: a computer's CD-ROM drive can easily read, without error, an audio CD which is so scratched up that it won't play without skipping. I don't get that. Is the CD audio spec that error-intolerant? Really?
Anyway I was able to rip the audio from the scratched-up CDs without any trouble whatsoever, and then made new versions, removing some songs and including some songs which have come out since I made the first set of disks. The result is two CDs of pure APP goodness.
What I really want to do is to get the un-verfuckled version of Tales of Mystery And Imagination, then make a compilation MP3 disk with all the best stuff on it from all the Alan Parsons ouerve, including Ladyhawke. The "Best Of Alan Parsons, Ultimate Master Version", I'll call it. Yeah.
Also, dump it to a SD card so I can play it in my MP3 player.
...just as soon as the 105,000 other things I have to do are completed. *whimper*
I'd be very hard-pressed to explain to people why APP is my ultimate all-time favorite band, bar none, but it is, and that's how things are.
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I hope I can cut the grass tomorrow.