(Not exactly Pit material, but I’m pretty confident that it will end here anyway)
Apparently, a bunch of Republican Congresscritters have come up with a bit of political theater – people send in their gas receipts with tales of how the eeevil Democrats have squeezed their family budgets, and the GOP Tribunes Of The People will present the pile of paper to Pelosi to make her stop whatever it is she’s been doing to make gas so expensive.
Congressman John Boehner has jumped on the bandwagon, and it gave me an idea to help him get more receipts while also advancing his sadly deficient mathematical education. I propose that as many people as possible get a gas receipt for exactly $10, and write a note on the back explaining how they were able to spend less and save enough money to make ends meet by the clever strategem of buying $10 worth four times a week instead of $8 worth five times a week.
Don’t know your posting history well enough to decide if you’re a bad reader, overly partisan, or something else.
What Pelosi has been doing is not allowing an up or down vote on HR 3089, aka the No More Excuses Energy Act. Although that piece of legislation isn’t specifically noted in your provided link, I believe my reference is accurate.
With what mathematical skills do you believe Boehner needs help? He is disagreeing with a four day work week as proposed by Rep. Hoyer. Please, from your linked articles, provide a quotation which illustrates his arithmetical deficiencies.
I thought it was quite clear. Boehner demonstrates that he believes four times ten to be less than five times eight. (I hesitate to accuse him of deliberately and willfully lying when he states that Hoyer’s plan would “let bureaucrats work less”, ergo, I charitably attribute the statement to an error born of basic innumeracy.)
I see Boehner is still pretending to be BMOC while the real powers are out of town.
If it weren’t so pathetic, it might be cute.
If he can’t adjust to minority status, he should quit.
So? Lots of legislation never gets out of committee.
I guess that depends on how you define a “shorter work week”; fewer days, or fewer hours. No member of Congress has any business blithering about a short work week, anyways.
Why would a trip to and from work magically cost $10 when on every other day it costs $8, according to your math? Unless I’m missing something, there is indeed someone who is having trouble with their arithmetic, and it’s not Boehner.
Rep. Steny Hoyer has proposed that certain federal employees switch from a work week of five 8-hour days to one of four 10-hour days; each employee would thus only be on the road 8 times a week instead of 10 times a week, while still being in the office the same number of hours. Rep. John Boehner is under the impression (or at least publicly claims to be under the impression) that this is tantamount to “letting bureaucrats work less”. :rolleyes:
Now that makes sense. The gas thing in the OP does not. One round trip saved every week clearly saves gas. The number of hours worked is a different matter than gas consumption.
I thought it was obvious, but evidently it isn’t. The point of the proposed receipt note is to mock Boehner for 1)being unable to do arithmetic (again, surely he isn’t being intentionally dishonest in his attack on Hoyer’s plan, now is he?) and 2)engaging in a stupid bit of political theater.
Don’t know your posting history well enough to decide if you’re a bad reader, overly partisan, or something else.
With what mathematical skills do you believe Steve MB needs help? He is only suggesting buying $10 worth of gas four times a week instead of buying $8 worth five times a week. Please, from the OP, provide a quotation which illustrates his arithmetical deficiencies.
CMC +fnord!
Great, at least two of our fine dopers are as intelligent as a sitting US Congressmen. :rolleyes:
However, Boehner offered no deceptive math when he spoke out against Hoyer. Cite from one of your linked articles-don’t attribute something to the man which isn’t there.
Political theater is hardly a market cornered by one side of the aisle. Pelosi’s foot dragging in the face of a discharge petition, related to HR 3089, signed by ~ 140 representatives thus far doesn’t constitute political theater?
I don’t think the 4-day plan would let bureaucrats work less, but that might be the result, as a 10 hour day is less productive hour for hour than an 8 hour day IME. Whether that makes up for the gas savings and morale boost of having extra days off I don’t know. Come to think of it, it might increase gas consumption since they might go for extra drives on their days off, but perhaps not.
While I don’t know wether Boehner considered any of this when he made his remark, he is of course right: 4- 10 hours days do result in bureaucrats working less - unless you revamp their whole vacation, sick leave etc schedule as well. In other words, if someone is entitled to 10 days vacation, and you don’t change it to 8 under the new scheme, they just got an effective 20% boost in vacation days. Googling new articles about his remarks get me nothing, so I can’t figure the context of his remarks, which makes making fun of them potentially unfair and stupid.
Sending receipts to Pelosi, on the other hand, that deserves some scorn. While the GOP is right in calling attention to her blocking an up-or-down vote (it nicely illustrates significant differences in policy ideas), the reality is that sending receipts does nothing. It is a dumb gimmick, and like any dumb gimmick, the guy proposing it is calling me an idiot just by suggesting I might go for it. Not to mention the stupidity of the assumed underlying notion that “drilling now” makes for lower pump prices now. I say drill your harts out - but I don’t expect it to affect the price of gaqsoline any time soon, if ever.
I work 4-10s for state government. The only way I work less hours than 5-8s is on holidays I get to take 10 hours of holiday pay rather than 8. Government, in general, gives people hours of leave…not days. I get the same number of hours of leave as anyone else with my level of seniority.
Working 4-10s makes **me *more productive because there are usually times when I have less idiot co-workers around to keep me from doing real work.My productivity will go down if everyone goes to 4-10s.
The cost savings are not supposed to be just in gas that the employees won’t be using. In theory, buildings will be in sleep mode for an extra day, saving those costs. However, when one of our offices went to 4-10s a couple of years ago to save energy costs, they discovered that the savings were minimal because people would still come in on Fridays to do some work and they would wake the entire building. Buildings would have be remain shut down on the weekends to make sure that we were realizing actual energy reductions.
today I am in training out of town so have down time to post…otherwise I would already be working.
When I look at my paycheck, it doesn’t tell me how many sick\vacation days I have left to use, it tells me how many hours I have left to use. And most places let you use vacation time for half days when you just want to leave early.
Saying you have 10 vacation days is just shorthand for saying you have 80 hours of vacation time in the bank.
That’s horseshit. If you’d said in your OP that he claimed it would result in bureaucrats working less, that would be fine. Instead, YOU decided to include some meaningless 8 x 5 vs 10 x 4 comparison, which the man didn’t say or imply.
