April Show #1 (part 2 of 2)
Author: oldtestamentguy
27 View
9m 5s Lenght
0 Rating
As a Christian who cares about Gods Creation, the environment, I am one of the 38 thousand people in Texas who will be taking advantage of a government program meant to get consumers to junk their working appliances and buy new ones to help stimulate the lagging economy. As someone who does a good job of tax planning, I havent had any tax liability in years. This means our household is one of the 50% of American households with no tax liability. In other words, odds are that half of my readers are the ones who paid for my (soon to be) new dishwasher. Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment act (aka Obamas stimulus, or pork-ulus to you Rushl listeners) was to provide money for Americans to purchase energy efficient appliances. Still, should the program really stipulate that you must get rid of a working appliance in order to get the rebate? Dont get me wrong. I am glad to get a new dishwasher, and glad that Im gonna get a deal. As a Christian who cares about Gods Creation (environment) Im all about this stuff. But, the programs motive seems to be stimulating corporations instead of lowering energy usage. But thats another story. The real story is the mess that was the TexasPowerfulSmart campaign to get us to trade up in appliances. They announced that the program would start taking applications at 7am this morning (april 7th). So, at 7:01am the site went down I tried with no luck to get through until 10am. Then I found their twitter feed. I found out that the site was getting 1700 hits per SECOND!!! the call center was getting 1000 calls per MINUTE!!! No wonder I wasnt getting through. But, with all of that traffic, they had only given out 2% of the rebates in 3hrs Then their website antics started. They started moving the location of the application to where you couldnt just refresh the page over and over and hope to get through. I found out that you had to start on the home page, and follow the whole set of links (which were updated) to get to the new location of the application. So, at 12 something I got through and got an application filled out. BAZINGA!! Im gonna save some cash. But, I thought I should call my mother-in-law who was trying to do the same deal in order to get a new air conditioner. She was having no luck. She had been trying to refresh a page, which I told her no longer existed. When I followed my method again, I got right through and filled out an application for her. So, I was able to get through the process 2 times in about 15min. I would NEVER have known to do that if I hadnt read a blog post chronicling the problems of the site. It also turns out that the website may have experienced some sort of internet attack (DDos for you techies). That may have been the reason that only 2-3% of the rebates were given out before the site shut down at 11am. When it came back online at 12:15am, the remaining money went out pretty fast, as seen below (from their twitter account): The spiritual guru evidently tweeted that he had caused the earthquake of 7.2 magnitude by meditating. Do I think he really did it? No. If you thought I might, then you dont read my blog. The God of the OT and NT is the sole being with power to do that. Of course, Im not saying it was a judgment against anyone, Im just saying God has the power like Scripture speaks of in Zech 14:4