An email I sent to Greg:
I just spoke with Elaine Chaps in the Congressman's office. She told me that she will call the State Department this Friday if she does not hear from the embassy in Budapest by then. She is not allowed to call the embassy directly -- she HAS to go through the state department.Whatever it takes... I'll tell you once about our administration, and you'll be grateful you support a cheaper and still more efficient one. It's pretty unpredictable here - once it took me two weeks to renew my ID, and then it took me one day to get a new passport.
BTW, does this stop you from calling the embassy?
Keep hanging on. Hopefully, someone in the U.S. Government will help us -- right now, we're still stuck in the cracks and no one outside of our Congressman's office seems too concerned with achieving results. I'm sure our government is not much different than yours when you get down to the clerk level ! :-))At the clerk level, you can expect direct or indirect signs of a required bribe - which doesn't seem to be the case on your side.
Makes me wonder if it would be different if you got the paper in your hands, sent it to my friend in Hungary, and if then I went there myself with the paper in my hand. Or is this variant just another WWIBIIWHB (what would it be if it would have been - sounds much better in Serbian).
My girls are in low spirits today - we just announced the possibility that they might have to go to school again, and Go should resume her exams (she's got one complete course and two half-exams to complete the year, or so). They had no real contact with the school ever since 25th of march - when they told them to go home and later just formally completed the year. It's OK legally - you're entitled to your grades if you've attended more than 2/3 of the curriculum, which they all did, but you may imagine how lazy can they get after five months of doing nothing... and then facing the possibility of resuming work ;). We didn't push them much into doing any work, 'cause we probably shared their lack of motivation.
This is another reason we need to develop the Yugo-land office. Dealing with our INS and the U.S. embassies is definitely bad for business. If we could get 4 more good programmers there and shift more work out of the United States, things would probably work out better for all of us.
We re-employed our roommate from Hungary [Joška, that is]- he's been an employee of his old partner in Novi meanwhile, who's a network guy and knows heaven knows what about routers, protocols and cables. This guy was his sales manager, but since the war there's not much to sell, and the supplies are hard to get anyway, so their business declined, so we took him back (he was employed in Avai for three months in '96). He's a weird coder - totally lacking mathematical background (graduated Marxism :), writing much more code than needed, but does a very good job regarding visual design, and knows more about Web than we do. I'm still not thinking about him as a member of the team - he's willing to learn the VFP stuff, and seems very visually oriented (you should see his enthusiasm regarding visual aspects of Cica to get the whole picture). I'll keep an eye on him, of course. He's been away from coding for three years now.
Although there are clear advantages to all working together in one place here, it's just too difficult to deal with these hassles. (I think they actually count on that as a form of immigration control! Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect and US companies just send more work overseas.)
What's the proper English for "circulus vitiosus" - the enchanted circle, or what? Well, the whole purpose of such circles is to filter out those who don't know how to break it.
Actually, working in two places may have some benefits - it may need some more planning, but 70% of the OOP development is planning.
BTW, is there any time estimate? I think it will soon be a year since you posted your ad at UA.
CU
From - Thu Aug 12 20:08:19 1999
Other than that, more exchange with Zero, about using NetMeeting (which I uninstalled from my W95 OSR2, because of various kinds of spam and idle teenagers and hookers trying to contact me). We used ICQ most of the time, and perhaps IRC sometimes.
In another email, I told some outfit called Serbian Angels to go fuck themselves, I'm not donating five para to anything called serbian that can't be read in serbian - and invited them to visit aman, which is in two proper languages, one of which has all the šćđ required. And on aman mailing list, this analysis by me, in response to someone's questions:
>Thanks for all the information, next question is how much have sanctions effected this situation? I am trying to understand ; I hope you will be patient.
The sanctions have helped the regime destroy the remaining institutions, get together with the organized crime, and installing bribe and/or racket on almost everything. The mafia-that-be is draining money from completely unexpected places, and most of this money doesn't reappear on the streets - it leaves the country, ending up in Swiss, Cyprus, Mauritius, South African and whatever banks.
Take the example of petrol - during the sanctions lots of petrol was smuggled, using most imaginative ways, but it actually established a monopoly of few who control the market. We could have been called the country with most gas stations in the world - and we're getting there again - because on almost every corner there was someone with a couple of ten liter canisters, but these were actually dealers who bought petrol from the guys at the border.
Nowadays, a mayor of a small city at a border crossing has installed his own ramp on no man's land, and charges each gas carrying car a certain amount (which then makes the petrol some 15-20% more expensive). Some companies which managed to import petrol were then forbidden to sell it through their own retail, then they were allowed again. Back in 1992 many private companies had their channels for smuggling fuel - and some of them were praised later as saviors of the economy, and others were fined immediately for smuggling and the fuel was taken to the state refinery. You may guess which owners had good connections with which parties.
>This bothers me aren't Nato/UN looking after things like this (below)?
>>The other day four died of starvation, because they were isolated, have eaten up all of their reserves during the war, and the aid from Democratic party got through a couple of days too late.
It seems they're looking at it, with the accent on the after. They first let it happen.
>Incomes etc : I am a little confused with the figures you gave me.
It's monthly income (we always calculate monthly, with the tax withdrawn, and the social security and retirement fund also taken off, but that's not sure anymore - many state-run companies and/or institutions actually don't pay those social things for their workers anymore, while the private companies (whose owners don't adhere to the Parties & Family) have to pay every cent of it, else they can't pay their workers). The figure is actually only statistical, and nobody knows does it include only the money paid to the employees in that month or what, because many of the salaries are late from two to six months (sometimes even more), the pensions are now three months late, the children subsidy is 13 months late (or 14... don't remember when we got it last time, and it's worthless, anyway - about ł10 per kid), the state officials (clerks, inspectors etc) are receiving only half a salary now (so by the end of the year their salaries will be about 6 months late, they're about three months late now).
>Is the uppercase 3 followed by 1 meant to be 31and hence for basic food alone 7875 would last for 254 days ?
Food only, and not rich. "You can live" means "you can get through a day" - but not every day.
>If all this is correct how would a family with only one earner survive?
By miracle. That's what amazes me for years - whenever you try to calculate, you get that an average family can't possibly survive with the average income, and yet they do survive. Well, did so far. Many people do some little stuff on the side - fix your washer, dig the vegetables for a couple of days, grow their own vegetables or poultry, even pigs, make a smuggling tour to some neighbouring country - but that's wearing off rapidly, because most of them are running out of customers. In my street I've seen goats grazing, and my house is daily occupied with fleas, because a neighbor keeps pigs (and doesn't wash their quarters regularly). I've become a grand master of flyswatter.
> Guess I am wrong somewhere? If I take 3 instead of 31 then a factor of 10 is obtained, but, that makes food so very cheap, could this be so?
Food was always cheap here, it's the everlasting communist policy - they should make the life of the working class easier, since the workers were supposed to be the ruling class, and the peasants were mostly under political suspicion for being owners of their land. So they screw the farmers every year - they take the wheat, milk, sunflower seed etc, and pay later, much later, or very much later. The peasants, then, must pay the tax on time, and get a heavy interest added in if they don't, and the State Reserves (or whoever buys off their product) never pays any interest to them... worked fine so far - a liter of milk is 3.20 dinars (to be 4.00 or 4.50 soon), 0.6 kg loaf of bread was 2.40 until yesterday or so, now it's 3.00. The peasants are getting sort of organized - there already were some roadblocks. They just park two combine harvesters and organize guard.
26-XII-2013 - 16-VII-2026