Matt's Blog

Unions….yuck

woody — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 22:57:29 +0000

So this post comes from my growing belief that Unions are worthless, hurtful, and costly to everyone. I continue to monitor the progressive trend that accompanies Chicago of budget deficits, in the government and citizens. Katie and I first vision of this craziness was trying to build a bathroom in our basement. So we had a few people come over to our house to give us quotes. Every company that came over was giving us quotes that were WAY beyond our expectations. Every time it was stated “Well we have to find someway to pay the plumbers, painters, electrician, and construction union workers”. Yes that’s right every single one of them are apart of a different union. So what this means is that each of them have a minimum wage they can work for by order of the respective union. Even when they are completely out of work. We went through a number of general contractors before we finally said yes. So here I am paying a lump sum to a general contractor and he has to work with each of the unions to try and get someone in to accomplish each piece of the work, in turn, causing the project to get a bathroom to extend over a month. Meanwhile the each union still receives their pay via union dues. And these union dues pay for some extravagant 3 story office complexes around the Chicagoland area. Can’t even tell you how nice these buildings are, and just to house the Union leaders. Leaders that are paid purely by union dues. So when the painters are hurting for work and nothing on the books these union leaders still have a nice 3 story building over their heads.

Get this each county in Chicagoland has these office complexes. So I will probably post pictures of these later, but you can imagine a nice 2 to 3 story office building for each trade: contractor, painter, plumber, electrician, concrete & brick, and other trades I don’t know of, in each county.

So to further wrap my head around it, and in turn hopefully yours. The unions delegates the standardized pricing for the services of their respective trades. So when you usually get a painter to paint a room for $100, the union states that instead in this county you will have to pay $450 for the same room. That’s because when you pay for a unionized worker, you pay for their future pension, union office space, some form of quality assurance, and filthy “piece of mind”. The other point I have to make is that there is not one union in this area that is not in debt because of the pension. Each of them have grossly miscalculated how much it would cost to retire each of these workers.

My example is the chicago public teacher’s union. Many estimations have the teacher’s union to be in the hole about $450 million next year alone. Yea who is going to pay for that? Well all I know is that my income taxes and property taxes will increase next year. And the state of IL bailed them out last year…

I just don’t think that unions are functional. They increase the price of salaries and services to the point that no one can actually pay for them. Then in turn they truly don’t offer anything back to the workers they were sworn to be servicing because they can’t properly manage their retirement or the politics.

Or maybe the politics in IL and Chicago are just that bad and corrupt.

So this is my rant from my personal review.. thanks for reading

Weeplaces

woody — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:14:36 +0000

I have found a great website that maps out your Foursquare places!!! Check out mine: weeplaces.com

Great God

woody — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:37:43 +0000

Well its a Tuesday and possibly the only day this week that I’m going to be in my home office. We have a busy schedule lined up for installations and training events.

We came back from TN on Sunday night for attending my cousin’s wedding. It was absolutely gorgeous wedding and the boys were incredible during the pictures, but my poor sick Mason couldn’t make it down the aisle. Awh yes they were going down the aisle because they were both ring bearers, therefore they were wearing adorable tuxedos.

I think we all miss TN a lot and for one main reason, weather. The weather was amazing the first and last day. Unfortunately the wedding day was a little dreary with rain and 50°. But when we first got there it was around 82° and the last day was 72°. Then we fly back to Chicago to find 50° and cool breezy that made it feel like freezing.

Needless to say we miss the warm weather of the South, and the fact all of our family is down there!

I am going to make a recommendation now that everyone go purchase the following book:

Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Our community group is doing a study over this book and it truly has the potential to change so many Christians lives. It is a really hard read because it convicts you on so many fronts.

This blog entry is title Great God because my brother-in-law Andrew and his wife Kat have had their baby girl, Elliot, in the past two weeks. God has given them a strong and healthy daughter and I can’t wait to meet my new niece. Our friends Brian and Heather have also had their baby girl, Allison, which is also healthy and doing well. Our TN friends were finally able to bring home their baby girl, Eva, from Uganda. Tremendous praise all around for God’s great love for us.

Oh yea love me some iPad

TV Series – Kings

woody — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:05:43 +0000

I am thankful so much for Christmas and the receiving of iTunes Gift Cards because it allows me to purchase everything that I’ve put on my Wish List within iTunes Music Store. Well the one thing that I’ve been wanting to watch was a TV Series that came on NBC back in 2009 called “Kings”. This series has quite a few biblical references but I don’t think they intended it to be completely dedicated to the re-telling of the story of King David. And I think that’s what I enjoyed the most was the nice subtle references to keep me interested in watching. But yet the acting and directing blew me away. It was quite an incredible series. I enjoyed watching every episode and then going back and reading more about David to see if it correlated at all to the real King David.

I highly recommend everyone watch this series. It has received more recommendations then all over TV shows that exist on iTunes. It beat out House, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, Entourage, Fringe, Jersey Shore, Modern Family in ratings and reviews. I know it would be weird for it to be off the air for two years then come back, but I do hope that NBC will try.

Interesting piece regarding Chicago Public Schools

woody — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:20:56 +0000

http://substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1592&section=Article

Guild Wars 2

woody — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:29:44 +0000

Don’t know if I’ve posted about this before, and I’m not a huge gamer by any means, but some things I get excited about and this game is one of them:
Guild Wars 2

Bye Bye DirecTV

woody — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 02:28:53 +0000

So DirecTV has just gotten too expensive for us while we are reviewing our budget over all, so in response we are headed to strictly antenna. Monthly Bill = $0 which is a nice change for us. We are signing up for Netflix though, so we can get the streaming movies feature and have it stream to my iPad, Wii, and PS3. So this whole transition has happened today. So I have spend a few hours today re-wiring the house so that the antenna that is in our upstairs master bedroom can feed the rest of our TV on the 1st floor and the basement. Its been quite the process, but I’ve come to a stopping point, I’ve found that even through the indoor antenna that I got off Craigslist has a pre-amp in it, I still need to purchase a bigger amplifier. I’ve found an excellent site to inform you of what you may need to purchase in your area based upon signal strength.:

http://www.antennaweb.org/

I’ve already email two people from Craigslist to review purchasing their amplifiers. I really hope to get all this behind us soon, we are spend quite a bit in making this transition. But its to get our monthly bill down from $90.53/month to $8.99/month. So I think its going to be worth it.

We are quite happy with the steaming features of Netflix just not the variety available to stream. There is a difference between what you can receive on DVD and what’s available for streaming. Streaming contains much smaller selection. I just figured for kids it would offer more of a selection to be chosen since streaming is such a great feature for moms.

ok going to bed, eyes are closing while i type this

AT&T crappy service

woody — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:57:13 +0000

Well once again I am without DSL. This would be the 3rd time I have had my DSL modem replaced by AT&T. This time though it is going to take them 4 work days in order to ship me a new one. Thankfully my work has given me a Sprint MiFi card and it works pretty good in my house. Just really frustrated that I can’t take advantage of my employee discount for Comcast at home, because AT&T service isn’t worth it. I unfortunately have not other option here, AT&T has exclusive rights to this community. I don’t like that exclusive rights stuff, isn’t there a law against monopolization? (Ok so there is one cable provider in the area, but all of there lines are underwater and they still don’t have it fixed after a year…..)

Contractors

woody — Wed, 05 May 2010 01:18:19 +0000

This is ridiculous, contractors. So this post is a rant. I’m fed up with hearing about contractors taking over a business because they won the bid, then tanking the business. So I just heard from a good friend of mine that works a very very large computer company and he is praying and hoping he can get out soon. This is based on my limited knowledge of the situation, but contractors have come in to the consumer sales division of this company and have really ticked off the consumers. Ticked off in the sense that they hang up on the consumer if the customer doesn’t want to add any additional features or accessories. You ask why do they hang up if the customer knows what he/she wants? Well that’s because if they end up agreeing with the customer then that would hurt their sales margin so much that they would rather just tick them off and hang up on them, hoping they call back in and get another contractor that would sell them that product. Well its caused the computer company as a whole to drop drastically in sales. But hey they won the bid to come in and assign temporary workers to do consumer sales, so the contractors must be doing something right? I’m just positive that they have caused the company to go under and hurt the company’s image. So my friend that I referred to at the beginning is not one of the contractors, instead he is one of the last remaining true employees of the company and is wanting to get out, because they have cut his pay down drastically after the new contract went through.

Well this actually correlates with contractors that win government contracts too. I am working with another school district in our nation that has outsourced all of the IT staff to contractors. Guess what that means? The school district doesn’t have to show the salary figures for any of the IT staff for they are all under one contract, therefore separate company. So for the line item it just states, IT Budget $4 million = Outsourced to Company XYZ. This allows for two things, one the school district doesn’t have a clue how much the Contracted IT Director is actually making, in turn they don’t have to tell the public that he is making more then the Superintendent. Guess what the School district is now in debt millions of dollars because they have no control over the IT staff, curriculum staff, teaching staff, or janitorial staff because they are all contracted out…. See the issue. No accountability to the upper-management or the public in this scenario. This happens all over our country and these figures are purely fictitious, so it doesn’t point to any one school district. And by the way with previous job, I know of one city government that was doing the same with their IT staff, it was all contracted out so the tax payers didn’t know how much they were getting paid. Yea the IT Staff is getting paid well for a city job, but on the same case the city is going broke and causing taxes to go up, therefore causing people to move out. Vicious cycle that I am seeing now.

Have you run into this?

Example of how Microsoft mucks things up

woody — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:45:22 +0000

So this is for my technically minded people. This is an example of how I wanted to find a MS Windows 2003 Server evaluation. So I took two ways of approaching it. First I went to Google and search for two different phrases: “microsoft windows 2003 download” then “microsoft windows 2003 evaluation”. The first search returned a website that was just another search site within Microsoft. So I had to go and enter again the criteria I was looking for via drop-down menus. Selected “Windows Server” then “2003″ then “Evaluation”. One would assume that this would give you one very easy response back because that provides enough detail to Microsoft to understand what I want today. Instead I receive a response that pertained to downloading the Part II of an Evaluation Technical Report document. What in the world???? Second response was for seeing how the innovations in Windows 7 and Exchange Server 2010 can help you…. again what in the world?? What do either of these pertain to my very detailed drop-down selection?
So back to my Google search, I was trying to search for “Microsoft Windows 2003 Server evaluation” and it responded with the appropriate page within Microsoft’s website, but I’m still waiting on that page to load…..
Yes I’m needed 2003 b/c that is what my client has, not 2008….