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| The Government Accountability Office is an important information-gathering agency for Congress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Today is a throwaway post so I'll test what I have stated in my introduction. Today I'm filling up blog space so there will be something appearing for my avid fans who can never get enough of my posts. Either that or I will be tossing out another annoying post for those who keep coming for unbeknownst reasons.
Update on Vinyl Liquidation
In a post last November I asked "Should I Keep My Vinyl?" and got a lot of good advice from readers. Finally last month I started boxing up albums in lots of 50 to offer on Craig's List. So far I haven't sold any, but I've gotten a few inquiries. I'm experimenting with this right now. The unsorted mixed genre boxes of 50 albums are being offered for $100 per box--firm. Maybe I'll negotiate for less somewhere down the road. I'm in no huge hurry to see these albums go away. At least now they're out of our bedroom closet and neatly in boxes stacked in my writing office.
I've set aside a couple hundred albums that I especially like and broke out my turntable to start listening to them. I haven't listened to some of these in nearly forty years! The albums are in great condition and I'd forgotten how good some of this music is. Memories have been flooding in and I've enjoyed hearing the old albums again.
After listening to some of them I've been inspired to start putting up reviews on Amazon again. I don't do very many reviews on my blogs, but I enjoy doing short reviews and Amazon is a good place to do it. You can find my Amazon reviews here. Check out the most recent ones and you can see what I've listened to lately. You can make me an offer if any of the albums sound good to you, but now I'm not sure I want to sell any of these albums that I've set aside.
Do you ever put up reviews on Amazon?
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How Affordable is the Affordable Care Act Website?
There's enough debate about the whole Obamacare thing so I don't even want to go there. But how about that glitchy website? I've been hearing reports that this website cost the government (meaning us taxpayers) anywhere from $93 million to $634 million to develop. What? I've considered starting my own website and many you have done so already. From what I've gathered a darn good website might cost several thousand dollars to put together. A million dollars would probably put together a pretty incredible website. But $93 mil or more? Not surprising that our government has spent this much money on the website.
This sounds pretty standard for our government that typically pays prices like $400 for a hammer, $600 for a toilet seat, or $3000 for a coffee maker. All of these exorbitant payouts makes one wonder what the heck is going on with the government folks who are arranging these deals. No wonder we are having financial difficulties if the government is always blowing money in these ways.
What's more, according to the Washington Post the website project was partly built by Canadian consulting firm the CGI Group which was paid at least $88 million. Not to show any disrespect to our dear friends in Canada I ask was there not a U.S. company that was capable of doing this work? Additional millions in funds have been allotted for other aspects of building and maintaining this website. In the end this website could end up costing up to two billion dollars according to some sources. At those prices we should not only have a website with no glitches , but government representatives should appear as 3-D holograms in our living rooms to walk us through the sign up process. The reported cost factors are utterly absurd.
Read the whole article at the Washington Post to see how these costs break down.
Do you have your own website that you have had built and paid for yourself? How much did you spend? Have you had a lot of glitches that you've had to deal with?
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That's enough for me to toss out there to you in one post. I didn't want to think too much putting today's post together and then I ended up doing more thinking than I had planned. Still this is basically a throw away post. On Monday I'll have a question for you that will be more directly related to your blogging activity. It will not be related to the content in this post, but it will be related to what I've done in this post and what all of us do in all of our posts. Please be here on Monday to give me some input.
Do you ever post throwaway bits that get more attention than you had expected? When you don't particularly feel like posting on a specific topic do you ever just put random thoughts on your site? Does randomness on other blogs entertain you, provoke thought, or annoy you?
Do you ever post throwaway bits that get more attention than you had expected? When you don't particularly feel like posting on a specific topic do you ever just put random thoughts on your site? Does randomness on other blogs entertain you, provoke thought, or annoy you?
