Rag Hand

The Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) has gone ahead and spent more of the taxpayer’s money on “oooh, shiny”.

(These are the same people who told us how wonderful the strip monorail was going to be. –I can’t remember if they said that before of after the wheels fell off.)

This time it’s new buses.

The Ace bus is supposed to look like a train, which, somehow, by means of black magic or perhaps through the power of prayer, will make people want to ride the bus.

At almost $1,000,000 each these things ought to pick you up at your front door and guarantee that you will arrive at your destination on time.

Unfortunately these shiny new machines are buses, not a panacea for what ails transportation in the Las Vegas valley.

Which is to say, they will break down, run late, force their passengers to sit out in the weather, and take at least four times as long to get anywhere as a private automobile.

As an example of what is wrong with the basic system: people disembark from the south bound Boulder hwy bus only to have to run through traffic to get across Boulder Hwy to catch the north bound Nellis bus without having to endure an additional hour or so wait. –Since I do not recall ever seeing anyone running the other direction I assume a small adjustment in the timing would resolve the issue.

But even such a small change as tweaking the schedule would require many months of meetings and fact finding reports. More to the point, it would require the RTC do something besides feed their own egos by buying new toys instead of fixing the problems.

This “make it shiny and they will come” attitude has brought us, Neonopolis, the Strip Monorail and the soon to be built Neon Museum.

Now the powers that be are telling us that these Ace buses will make people want to ride the bus because they look like trains…. Yeah. Riiiiiight.

The author of Political Nevada questioned the competency of teachers in Nevada. Saying that there needs to be a proficiency test.

Here is his opening paragraph:

Everytime the results come back in a comparison study concerning the quality of education in Nevada, someone will defend the poor quality of education by saying that the lack of money for reducing the amount of students by hiring more teachers is the reason. That is not the reason, that is an excuse.

I agree that there needs to be some sort of criteria by which teachers are judged. Like the tests that were applied as part of the no child left behind project. Of course those tests are now being thrown out because of the high failure rate, and you can rest assured that the teacher’s union would find a way to strong arm our elected officials into throwing out any tests that reflected badly on their members.

Perhaps suggesting some sort of proficiency testing is just shouting into the wind, but something needs to be done.

We have classes that are being taught primarily in Spanish with just a few English speaking students and we have classes being taught primarily in English with just a few Spanish speaking students.

Can you imagine the frustration of the teacher who has a room full of students and must now make an extra effort to redo every lesson for a few English/Spanish speakers. This situation is unfair to all parties involved, but is addressed by a principle who says “there’s nothing I can do,” or worse, a school district that says “there’s nothing we can do” because “our numbers say…”

To top it off the rules make it all but impossible for a student to transfer to another school, even if they can provide their own transportation, because the district is divided along lines on a map that are apparently chiseled in stone.

The problem isn’t that we must educate the children of people who are here illegally, any more than the solution to improved education in primarily minority schools was to bus students across town based on skin color. The problem is a system that is driven by numbers, with no room for common sense or caring in the slightest for an individual child’s welfare.

This situation exists because numbers are easy to manipulate, and most so called educators in upper management are not educators but political creatures who got where they are based on a college degree and a better than average line of bullshit, who are hired by politicians to shuffle things around, making certain not to disturb the underlying policies, touting whatever minor changes they make as great improvements. Then when the situation becomes untenable, they take the fall, so that the politicians never need to take the blame for their own failures.

Once again we are back to the politicians. they are the ones who have the final authority, but would rather spend money on beautifying a school or building a new building, than facing up to their responsibilities and fixing the problem. –Which is a lack of basic education across the board.

A final thought: Why is it that the European and Japanese education systems consistently turn out students who’s test scores surpass those of the US?

These photos are from Hostility.

This is the line outside the Sahara Ave office of the Nevada DMV on Thursday morning.

After a two hour wait outside, this is the line to get a number, to get in line, inside the DMV

I know the valley is growing, but the DMV isn’t keeping up.

In fact most of the Government agencies a civilian must deal with, ranging from the DMV to the Nevada Division of Welfare to UMC are overloaded past the breaking point.

Some, but not all, of this would be eliminated if we would reserve all services for legal residents only, but we all know that as long as illegals provide cheap labor, that’s just not going to happen.

Besides, the cold hard facts in the matter are that we simply have more people than the system can handle. And rather than give up the sweetheart deals with various industries -gaming and mining come to mind- and raise their taxes, our elected officials sit on their butts doing nothing, while the state’s infrastructure crumbles.

As the saying goes: Money talks, and nowhere does it talk louder than in Carson City.

Read this story in the New York Times then see if you can find anybody in a position of power willing to talk about it.

NYT – The Swaps That Swallowed Your Town:

Like the credit default swaps that hid Greece’s obligations, the instruments weighing on our municipalities were brought to us by the creative minds of Wall Street. The rocket scientists crafting the products got backup from swap advisers, a group of conflicted promoters who consulted municipalities and other issuers. Both of these camps peddled swaps as a way for tax-exempt debt issuers to reduce their financing costs.

Now, however, the promised benefits of these swaps have mutated into enormous, and sometimes smothering, expenses. Making matters worse, issuers who want out of the arrangements — swap contracts typically run for 30 years — must pay up in order to escape.

That’s right. Issuers are essentially paying twice for flawed deals that bestowed great riches on the bankers and advisers who sold them. Taxpayers should be outraged, but to be angry you have to be informed — and few taxpayers may even know that the complicated arrangements exist.

There you have it in a nutshell. Your school district uses swaps, courtesy of our good friends on Wall Street, to reduce debt, but what the “swap advisers” didn’t tell them was that they all worked on commission and the only way they got paid was if there was a transaction and the bigger the transaction the bigger their commission.

Now our cities are drowning in debt and the people who conned them into the deal are making nothing but money, because of early termination fees in the millions of dollars. -Makes Verizon look kindly, generous and honorable doesn’t it?

The part of this whole fiasco that rankles is, as pointed out in the article, nobody has bothered to inform the people who invariably get stuck with the bill -the taxpayers- exactly what arraignments exist and why their counties, school districts, and cities are suddenly facing bankruptcy.

Oh no. Under no circumstances should the common man be allowed to know about the deals that were made. To make this public would risk our elected officials and their cronies being held accountable and we can’t have that.

In the mean time the robber barons of Wall Street get fatter and richer, with nothing to show for destroying our economy and in fact the economy of entire countries, except huge bonuses.

Do you still delude yourself into thinking that we are a sovereign nation? Read this explanation of the ACTA treaty(Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

In it you will find that they are trying to standardize copyright laws. On the surface the idea sounds good, but when you read it you find that the Draconian ideals of the RIAA and MPAA are to be enforced with an iron fist, with special treatment given to the music industry.

Our president and his cohorts have placed staunch supporters of the RIAA in the justice department and issued public statements that the absurd penalties for downloading or uploading a few songs demanded by the recording industry are perfectly legitimate. Now they are working to make it an international offense. –Complete with a different rules concerning due-process.

The people we elected are selling our constitution and bill of rights to the highest bidder. In this case the music industry.

Since when did the United States of America allow other countries to write our laws?