Christmas Budget Form: Fill & Download for Free

So... It’s complicated. For ease of readership, I’m going to mind trick away a lot of that complexity and focus on four essential components of the budget making process:The President proposes a budget, and his budget proposal is about as consequential to the actual, final budget as a child’s Christmas wishlist is on their parents’ spending decisions (or, uh, Santa’s workshop’s manufacturing priorities, if you’re so inclined). Sure, the child might get some of the low hanging fruit, but rarely will find their much-wanted pony in the backyard on Christmas morning.Congress establishes the desired budget – the imaginatively named “Budget Resolution” – that maybe includes some of the President’s desired spending priorities but usually just includes whatever Congress wants. Or not, because Congress. This is not the final budget. Its only purpose is to set the benchmark for all subsequent appropriation and authorization bills to follow. House and Senate each pass their own Budget Resolutions that then have to be reconciled into a single, Joint Budget Resolution. These are not subject to filibuster, and so do not need any Democratic support. They may, however, run into problems getting passed if the House and Senate disagree on the benchmarks (such as happens when the House and Senate are controlled by different parties).Congress gets to work on the appropriation and authorization bills for the individual government agencies to put the Budget Resolution into force. These are the actual budgets that get presented to the President to become law. These bills may be subject to filibuster in the Senate, and so would require Democratic support, and they may be vetoed if they don’t include authorization and adequate spending for the President’s “Every American Gets a Pony!” program.If Congress fucks up all of the above and fails to pass any appropriation or authorizing bills, it then has to pass a “Continuing Resolution” to allow the government to stay open at its existing spending levels or shut down due to lack of funds. Shutdowns are unpopular with the electorate and are usually a giant red flag that shit’s not getting done in Washington. They’re particularly embarrassing for a party that controls the White House and Capitol and so should, in theory, be on the same page and getting shit done. Continuing Resolutions may also be filibustered, but the risk is that the party of the senator(s) filibustering the Continuing Resolution cops the blame for the ongoing shutdown.It should be noted that Continuing Resolutions have been the typical method of funding the government for most of the last 20 years, because our modern, hyper-partisan Congress is woefully inept at making the kinds of compromises necessary to pass regular spending bills.But getting back to the point of the question: Yes, eventually the Republicans are going to need some form of Democratic support if they want to get anything more than Continuing Resolutions passed, which will likely mean walking back or abandoning a number of President Trump’s desired budget proposals (eg, a 10% hike in defense spending, The Wall, annihilating the EPA and other national science entities, a unicorn, etc.).

At first I thought this was a goofy question but then I realized it wasn’t. The goofy answer would be “My first home computer!”But it wasn’t. I’m dating myself but here goes:My birthday falls fairly close to Christmas and my parents would allow me to combine their budget for my birthday with their budget for Christmas. I did this in 1982 when I was in 7th grade. I had recently become enamored with computers (through video games) and regularly read Byte magazine. In the back of Byte magazine, I saw ads for the Sinclair ZX/81 computer:Photo By Evan-Amos - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, File:Sinclair-ZX81.png - Wikimedia CommonsMore than one article in Byte raved about this computer claiming it was faster than an IBM-PC. It was also CHEAP! In kit form, it was $79 and I could order a 16KB RAM module for another $30 expanding the built-in 1KB RAM to 16KB. I convinced my parents to order it for me. My birthday came around and we found out that Sinclair was backordered. But it just so happened that Sinclair formed a partnership with Timex to produce the Timex/Sinclair 1000:By Marco-Tangerino - Own work, Public Domain, File:Timex_Sinclair_1000_FL.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsPhoto by Marco Tangerino (Public Domain)The Timex Sinclair 1000 came with 2KB of internal RAM. But the exciting part of the Timex Sinclair 1000 was that the local grocery store was selling them for $99! I convinced my parents to cancel the order for the Sinclair ZX81 and buy me the Timex Sinclair 1000. I also got to have the programming guides on my birthday but had to wait for Christmas for the computer. That gave me a few weeks to pour over the guides. I was ready to rock and roll on Christmas morning. I dug out an old cassette player for storage and a black and white 13″ TV for a monitor. Ordered a chess game for $9.99.Christmas morning came and I immediately hooked up my new computer. It was tiny and very light. The cords I used to connect the cassette player threatened to drag the entire computer across the table I was using as a desk.I could load the chess game but I could not successfully save anything to a blank cassette and reload it. Programming was annoying. If you zoom in on the picture, you may be able to see that above each key is a BASIC command. You program not by typing out the commands but by holding down a combination of keys (it turned out that the Sinclair was faster than the IBM only because the BASIC interpreter didn’t have to decompose text into symbols, the key combinations embedded a symbol in the “code”). To make matters worse, the 16KB module connector was fragile and the computer would lock up if I pressed the keys too hard (or just breathed too hard).My parents, recognizing that I was despondent, helped me return the Timex Sinclair 1000 and very generously allowed me to “upgrade” my gift to a Commodore VIC-20 which was $149 at the mall:By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, File:Commodore-VIC-20-FL.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsThis was the first computer I fell in love with. The VIC-20 was so much better for a 7th grader. The keyboard was substantial. The screen, although only 22x23 characters, was much easier to read on my 13″ B&W TV. And it had sound! I didn’t realize how much I was missing with the lack of sound on the Timex Sinclair. I didn’t have enough gift budget to get the dedicated cassette player, so every program I tried to write was erased when the computer was turned off. But that didn’t stop me. The first program I wrote was an alarm clock that played simulated bird sounds. Then I wrote a program that used print statements to make TRON Recognizers scroll across the screen. I was allowed to get the cassette player soon after. It actually worked! I could save programs.That Summer I taught myself how to program in Commodore BASIC primarily by typing game programs in from Compute! magazine. I would invariably make mistakes which I was too lazy to fix by comparing the lines of code to the lines in the magazine. Instead, I would debug the programs. I also wrote my first full games. The first was a Centipede variant using the graphics characters build into the VIC-20. The second was a side-scrolling space shooter using a full set of programmed graphics characters (I had to map out the 8x8 characters on graph paper, convert the lines of the character into binary, and POKE that value into a special place in memory). I learned the limitations of 3.5KB of usable RAM as my variable space overwrote my custom characters! I tried (unsuccessfully) to make my own RAM expansion module.The following Christmas I manage to sell the VIC-20 for almost what we paid for it and piled that cash on top of my birthday and Christmas budget to order a Coleco Adam which turned out to be more like the Timex Sinclair. So, once again, I returned my big gift and headed to the mall to buy a Commodore product. This time a Commodore 64 with a 1541 Disc Drive which held a whopping 170KB of stuff in fast (compared to the tape drive) random access.By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, File:Commodore-64-Computer-FL.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsI never loved the Commodore 64 the same as the VIC-20. Partly because, by that time, Compute! was publishing the Compute Gazette (specific to the Commodore platform) and added a checksum in their listings that would check your code as you transposed from the magazine. I did get a 300 baud modem (300 bits per second or 0.0003 Mbps) and explore the world of BBSes.

I was let go as an IT director by a company during an economic decline since they thought they could get a cheaper deal via outsourcing. What they failed to notice, is what I actually did there!I had built the company VOIP phone system from scratch with Linux and Asterisk and made all changes. The mail and file server was also linux, which the new outsource firm had no experience with, they were a typical low end Windows only shop with a bunch of entry level techs.I had installed the financial system on which I was an expert, and since they had laid off the payroll admin, I was they only one who understood the project and job cost tracking and the payroll and taxes. I had been running payroll for the last month by myself.I (as a former principal project manager) was helping all the construction sites do their schedules. Most of them had no formal scheduling experience and could barely use a computer, much less produce a schedule for a fifty million dollar project.I was the person resolving all the audit questions for the brand new accounting director (who came up with the outsourcing idea) He had no idea how to do any of it (I had designed the financial statements and even the tax withholding math).I knew it was coming for two months since I had to debug next years budgets, so I had formed a consulting practice, and when the owner wanted to speak to me just before Christmas (when he always did his layoffs…real classy!) I went to my office and brought in my consulting contract, left him a copy and nicely told them to call me if they had any issues, but I would be charging for my time.A week later, I got the most hilarious email from accounting telling me I would have to work night and weekend (unpaid, I was salaried) overtime to resolve all their audit issues in time for my official layoff date (they really said that!). I thanked them for a great laugh!The new tech support company wound up putting me on speed dial.I then moved to my beach house 100 miles away, and made a six figure consulting income for the next 5 years semi - retired at the beach.