today’s rant: a big waste of money, originally 12/12/08

you know what's a big waste of money?  government.  do you know how much richer we would all be if we enacted responsibilities based solely on popular vote, like american idol?  let's take criminal justice for example.  who needs prisons?  why don't we just take the convicts into the forest and chain them to trees?  i don't see that as cruel or unusual.  the tree can give them fruit, shade, leaves to wipe their asses, and if we're lucky, the tree will get struck by lightening and save the time of waiting on death row until the execution date.

my brother told me something quite disturbing last week.  he works for an IT company that gets contracted by the nassau county court system.  last week, he had to go to work early to set up a new nassau court system employee punch-in/out system.  the disturbing part is the cost to set this system up:  $64.5 million.  i'll write it out for everyone so that you appreciate the gravity of the situation, $64,500,000.00, sixty-four point five million dollars.  FUCK!  if you live in nassau county, i don't know about you, but i want a goddamn coupon.  apparently, people got fed up with using a pen and pencil to write when they were in or out of work.  what surprises me the most is that they simply can't settle for a punch clock or some simple computer software.  my workplace has BOTH, and we're 50 employees.  let's put it this way, that is more money than the federal government spent to let us all know that our economic stimulus checks were in the mail.  we're so fucking stupid.

in these tough economic times, you'd think that the money would be put to more practical use.  $64.5 million gives all the nassau court employees a nice x-mas bonus, and then some.  it helps some troubled homeowners in low-income areas.  for my long islanders, it could make hempstead look like garden city.  i'll tell you what i would've done with the money.  i would've bought 645,000 pairs of steel-toed boots, gave a pair to everyone i met, went to the house of the man who drew up this allocation of $64.5 million, and start a line to give that guy a swift steel-toed kick in the gonads.