Idiots

Jesus, you're a heartless prick.

 

Just telling it like it is.

I should say new homes for new residents. If you build a new home but stay a member of your county, you are not growth. You are just moving within the borders.

I could also say 15 mom and pop shops spring up, but Wal Mart is more likely. Lowe's, Home Depot and Best Buy do just as well.

 

Well, we have our Super-Walmart. It opened in the fall, I believe.

But we don't have a police department. How can anyone justify that? I worked in a city of 2,700 people, and it had a police department. This is a city of 90,000.

As for the construction of new schools, districts in my native state generally receive state grants to pay a portion of the costs. I don't know how they do it here in Redneckville, but it appears the thing to do is to go as long as possible without spending money. That's why 80 percent of the students are holding class in oversized tool sheds that they refer to as portables. The land here is outrageously expensive, but I've yet to see a school with more than one story.

 

Here's the thing with our fair state: School districts aren't allowed to plan big enough facilities for anticipated future growth --- they can only build or expand a school to carry the number of students that exist at the time the plans are drawn up.

Our state capital: Full of idiots.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I don't mean to be casting stones at Southerners, but it sure seems like some of these truck-drivin' good ol' boys are a few eggs short of a full dozen. They nearly drive over my bumper to get past me, and they sit at the next red light for about 10 seconds. It boggles the mind.

I'm not much for redneck Republicans who don't have a college education but seem to think that they know better than those edumacaded fools. I also don't care much for hearing more people speaking Spanish than English in the grocery store. I deal with it, but it's pretty annoying when most of the neighborhood boys who are my son's age can't communicate verbally with him. It also annoys me when my Little Brother's mom can't even understand it when I tell her that he needs to see a doctor.

It's not tough to see why I have such contempt for the people of this state. But my annual pass to Disney World doesn't end for another six months, so vacation can't be over just yet. And perhaps it never will be over. The thing is that I like this state enough to want to change it.

 

You forgot to mention that they still have not stopped fighting the Civil War.

Educated Mother Fuckers is a term I have heard. That, and Yankee or Damn Yankee if you stayed.

Too many Jethros and not enough Shelby Footes down here.

 

I can't find the stupid caller thread but didn't want to create a new one, and I felt I'd revived the Open Letters thread enough, so I'm sticking this here.

Was duty officer through the holiday, and scams are a big thing. We get a lot of those -- Americans calling from the States on behalf of an American citizen, or so they say, in Istanbul for X reason who's now being told by employer/police/doctor that they need $$. Usually, the callers are female, but not always, but almost 100 percent of the time, the in-distress person is described as a fiance. Questioning usually unearths an online relationship and the two have never met. Standard MO is that the in-distress person can only communicate by text but won't contact the consulate directly. People get fleeced for thousands.

So a call comes in; it's some woman saying her fiance is in Istanbul in distress. RED FLAG. Has been in Turkey since November working as a consultant. RED FLAG! RED FLAG! Now, said American citizen is in a hospital, close to death, and the doctor won't treat him without money up front. Has texted a photo of fiance to woman and sent an address to which caller is to send money. Fiance cannot speak for himself, as he has malaria. (CORPS OF RED FLAGS!)

I try to politely explain this is the MO for scams and warn the woman not to send money, but she assures me this is "a real relationship," though she hasn't seen fiance for almost a year. I asked when she last spoke to him and she says she texted him Friday. I said no, spoke, and she stammers and sticks by the Friday thing.

The texting doctor won't give her a hospital name, just demands for money. Since the last thing I need on my watch is a real dead American citizen, I ask for fiance's passport number and name of hospital, and I figure I can make calls.

Caller sends me a photo of the passport, name of hospital and of the "boarding pass." I immediately email back that the passport is fake, just look at the expiration date. She replies, what, passports aren't good for five years? I've never had one, I don't know. I said, well, as a matter of fact, no, they're good for 10, but the bigger issue is the abbreviation for January is "Jan," not "Jen."

Dear Lord, she had it the whole time and never bothered to look. She maintained the guy was real. Counting on a wedding.

As if there was any doubt then, I took a look at the boarding pass and replied to ask if if she put him on the flight herself, because she'd said he left from Houston, but the flight given was an American Airlines flight from Tuscon to Chicago and on to London, plus the airport listed was West Houston, not Houston Hobby, and it was allegedly a direct flight. Riiiight. A direct flight from a small private airport to a huge international one.

Oh, and there's no such hospital in Istanbul.

Her final reply was "I hope you find and prosecute him."

Didn't have the heart to tell her I'm not law enforcement.

 

Do people that stupid sometimes deserve to be fleeced?

 

People give thousands. One person handed over her kids' disability checks. I had one caller who'd sent over $500k.

What I can't figure out is how these people find their marks. And we only get a percentage of them, I suppose. I figure many people just send money without calling us.

I had another idiot -- an in-the-flesh one from Arkansas -- who lost his money in a city all the way across the country, and then, with the very last cash he had, bought a ticket for a 12-hour bus ride to Istanbul to show up at the consulate so we could buy him a plane ticket so he could continue to travel. Even expected us to pay for his cab. His thought was, "Uncle Sam will bail me out."

It's like hey bub, we do emergency loans, but, um, we're closed. For a week. He had no credit card and no cell phone. He'd been traveling for a month. WTF?

I got his mom and aunt, but they refused to send him money. His mom said she'd even call her congressman and have him contact the State Department to act on his behalf. I was like, m'am, I am the State Department, and we're closed until Tuesday.

I finally physically went to the consulate, handed him the phone and said to call his mom or whoever else would send him money because we absolutely could not do anything. Mom caved and I used my own bus pass to put him on a bus to the airport.

 

In my community, not having a police dept. is actually a smart move. Now our town is labeled our own police dept. but aside from the Chief, we subcontract out the officers from our county at an hourly rate. That way, we avoid the pension bomb that is killing our govt. agencies. We pay only what we can afford, so we pay our fair share of the pension costs, but immediately, not later.

The problem is not new homes, new homes feed the economy, however, in permitting/green-lighting those homes, you need to make sure they pay for the infrastructure needed to service those homes, gas, water, sewer lines, schools, parks, etc. In California, you can complain about the high cost of living, but the local govts. make sure the housing tracts pay for themselves (at least most of the time, as I've seen.) At times, I've seen them require the developers pay for the new schools needed.

 

This thread is long lost gold.