They really don’t want anyone in the lower classes to retire. The corporate overlords want to destroy every form of pension available to anyone, and force them to work until they die, so they can loot all of the money people put away for a little peace and quiet at the end of their lives.

They have already looted all of the decent pension systems in the private sector, and now they are going after not only Social Security, but the military retirement system.

They brought in a panel of ‘business leaders’, you know, the people who destroyed the economy, and asked them to recommend changes in the retirement system. These people don’t understand the core place that the retirement system fills in maintaining ‘good order and discipline’ in the military, or the necessity of the system to keeping experienced people in the military after they have received extensive and very expensive training and education.

Suggesting that the military go to a f**king 401K system after the disaster not three years ago, is insulting and demeaning to the members of the military. Do they think that the military doesn’t understand what happened to people when the markets crashed?

Twenty years in the military is not the same as twenty years in a normal business, so normal business practices, even good ones, don’t work. If you are going to convince people to give up many of their civil rights, and face the possibility of being killed as part of their job, you had damn well better be prepared to offer them more than a f**king 401K at whatever advanced age the corporate owners to finally allow them to retire.

I remember why I hate new computers.

OK, I figured out how to turn off the touch pad [extremely simple when you know] and am using a wireless mouse, so that problem is solved. [No, I did not buy the Couch Mouse.] So now I can work in a more normal fashion.

I beat up on the file manager and forced it to do some things my way, so now I have my tried-and-true e-mail client working on the new machine by simply copying the directory to the appropriate spot on the new disc and running the install program again.

In the midst of that I was aware that Firefox 6 has been released and decided to update it on the new machine. That was a mistake, having nothing to do with Firefox. Apparently Toshiba and M$ detected an update in progress and decided to join in. The Firefox update would never have finished at the rate M$ and Toshiba were hogging bandwidth, so I cancelled that and waited.

M$ predicted the Apocalypse if I didn’t immediately update the machine that had just downloaded 78 updates yesterday, and added a further ‘critical update’ before the original updates finished. They lie and tell you, that you can continue working, but you know they are going to re-boot the computer at the end, so you sit there waiting.

So, after that mess was done, I got to deal with Toshiba, which decided for the first upgrade to the machine to do a BIOS burn. It is a multiple step process that requires accessing the BIOS set-up and the use of functions keys at various points along the way. Not too many ways someone could screw-up their new computer [/sarcasm].

So after all that drama, I finally updated Firefox, and it informed me that an Adobe Flash upgrade needed to be installed. M$ and Adobe on the same day really puts a strain on my anger management program.

Hopefully I will be back to some real blogging later tonight.