Although there are still 30,000 families (over 90,000 people) living in temporary FEMA trailers in southern Mississippi, the driving force in the new home market and rental market for the next 10 years will be providing housing for casino workers. The State of Mississippi has decided that they want to become the second largest gambling destination resort to Las Vegas. The State has awarded 15 new gambling licenses for new casinos. The first two announced in southern Mississippi were both over $1 billion and one of those has already started clearing the land. Casino revenues are currently exceeding pre-Katrina revenues. The casinos pay very well and are employee intensive. Recent studies suggest that for every new casino employee hired by a casino an additional person will be added to the local workforce.

Ben Koshkin

As sure as life takes unexpected turns; my life has taken a curious turn towards the weird. I’ve been asked by an associate to fight against a spambot who has commandeered their name and posts a defamatory remark across the internet. What’s amazing is how incredibly unlucky one would have to be that a spam bot would have been feed your name out of a dictionary and sent out to spew random text to build relevance for a bottom feeder mortgage, pharmacy, porn or software company. This whole story is a mind blower, so make sure you keep reading the updates.

After a fairly long silence, I have returned. I made a rather severe career change and the associate wave of aftershocks have kept me particularly busy. In addition, I notice keen changes in my own mindset, of which I will try to write what I can when I can.

I have been asked to join a team of developers on a large project in Mississippi. I’ll post more on it later.

For now I present to you, my new business card:

It’s been a while since the last post. This one will be only to upload my resume. It will be followed by a page dedicated to my updated resume.

Download the PDF version here

Mark David - Producer, Director and old friend asked us to help with his online marketing, poster and logo art.

Here’s a snapshot of the evolving logo for his latest film, “American Cowslip” (Link to pre-production site)

that a Democrat is nothing more than a Replublican in sheeps’ clothing.

This is the sort of conversation that usually gets people mad at me, but I think alot of people are being steered away from bigger social issues, that if we had the courage to address would solve our problems.

I figured out that there’s not much of a difference between the right and left anymore, but they do like us to think that there is. Unfortunately, in Washington they all are out ot do the same thing, and what they do is sell provide services to the highest paying customer. Whoever pays the most is the one who gets a law written in their favor, and most of those laws create allocations of money.

And the really surprising thing is that it doesn’t go to the groups either of us expect:

A liberal thinks that tax money goes to big business. In fact, the democrat lawmakers like big business much more than republicans, because big business provides a stable (but minimal) social security, ie, stable (but minimal) wages and benefits which are marginal. This satisfies their inner socialist. They however like to make liberals feel like big business is in cahoots with Republicans, and Democrats are out there fighting to protect them.

A conservative thinks that tax money is being wasted on social programs, which they also believe discourages working, self-discipline and skills aquisition. Everyone has heard that before. I personally have been on unemployment before and know people who have had to temporaily be on welfare, it did not harm the work ethic of any of those people. The conservatives really don’t dislike social assistance programs such as welfare or think that universal healthcare is such an evil, they just resent that they are being taxed on just about everything they do and are told that this is where their hard-earned money goes. This is where they are being fooled by the Republicans.

The fact of the matter is that social programs do not take up a big portion of what the government collects in taxes. I’ll get to that in a sec.

I own my own business, and I have had to benefit from social programs; so this affects me personally too. I made less than minimum wage last year in fact my income was less than the poverty level, I paid emplyees a good wage. I paid more in taxes than I paid my self. And I was the one working.

I like to say that a democrat is just a republican in sheeps clothing.

But my beef, and I’m surprised that no one else ever says anything about it, is that these Democrats and Republicans give away billions, maybe even trillions of our hard-earned dollars to other countries and trick us into fighting over the peanuts left over. And to get what, the respect and friendship of foreign nations, we give aid to Palestine, we give aid to Isreal, we give aid to France, Egypt, probably every country in the world, We spend 2 billion a WEEK in Columbia on the war on Drugs. And they still don’t like us. WTF? Maybe it’s not to buy their friendship. I guess a lame excuse distracts from the ugly truth. It’s more likely that some foreign dignitary wrote a fat check to our senator, so we wrote a bill to give a few billion to their country in aid, and then that foreign dignitary gets to keep as much of it a he wants….. You get the point.

So I used to argue that welfare and universal healthcare were bad things, but I recently realized that if our government quit giving away all this money, which they don’t have the right to give away.

In my opinion, and that’s really all it is, if our government quit giving away money in foreign spending and foreign aid, we would be able to have these neat social programs, or a greater coverage of healthcare more NASA or whatever you want, and as a bonus We (employees and employers) wouldn’t have to pay so much money in taxes. And we’d all be richer.

Christmas is over and I’m not going to work tomorrow. I need another day to rest before I go back to work.
I’m tired but, I’m going to do some writing anyhow.
The good stuff; Daphne is crawling alot and is able to pull herself up by grabbing onto furniture. I got Hannah a bike for Christmas. My brother Andy came to town from Austin and spent Christmas Eve and Morning with us. It was Daphne’s first Christmas, so we did everything, lights on the house, tree, wrapped presents Christmas music et cetera. Christmass day we went over to Hannah’s parent’s in th evening. Good food and fun.
The bad stuff; My grandma is in the hospital and all her kids are fighting over whether she should be kept alive or not. There is a living will but she is not anything near braindead. She is under heavy sedation because she is in great pain. There is a breathing tube, a feeding tube and dialysis (spelling?) drip. Because of the breather, she cannot talk, just look around and nod. She’s only in her 80’s, young for her family’s typical lifespan. But she was a smoker till she was 50, so she’s having difficulty healing. A friend died from cancer this morning. I won’t claim to have been his best friend, but it’s always a trajedy when young people die. I’m sure plenty of people will use this for their own personal politics. Then there’s my company, where my partner and former friend quit and has been trying to make it difficult for the rest of us that are trying to continue to earn a living, more on that later(trust me),

Overall the holiday was a mix of very good and very bad. But the good very much outweights the bad. Gotta go to bed. more later.

[audio:http://www.benjaminlagrone.com/wp-content/audio/Daphne.mp3]

Hello world! Of all the billions and billions of web pages out there on the internet, here you are. This page did not exist before you asked the server to create it for your viewing pleasure.

I’m typing with my right hand and rocking Daphne on her rocking horse with my left, and watching Baby Einstein. So more introductions later.