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So now people are saying, "oh people need to have a living wage". But that's not what minimum wage was for!

The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 prohibited child labor, established maximum working hours, and also established the minimum wage. Here's what its architect stated as the purpose:

It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level--I mean the wages of decent living.

Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe. It is greatly to their interest to do this because decent living, widely spread among our 125,000,000 people, eventually means the opening up to industry of the richest market which the world has known. It is the only way to utilize the so-called excess capacity of our industrial plants. This is the principle that makes this one of the most important laws that ever has come from Congress because, before the passage of this Act, no such industrial covenant was possible.

On this idea, the first part of the Act proposes to our industry a great spontaneous cooperation to put millions of men back in their regular jobs this summer. The idea is simply for employers to hire more men to do the existing work by reducing the work-hours of each man's week and at the same time paying a living wage for the shorter week.

So, what was the minimum wage for?

The root of the problem is that now more and more people make minimum wage and people have to live on it.

Yes, that happens when minimum wages do not keep up with productivity. Everyone earning above a wage level becomes capable of purchasing more wage-hours at a lower level. Products and services become more commodity, and the quantity demanded for such increases.

In a natural economy, this causes a shortage of labor. Wages increase, unemployment becomes incredibly low, and fertility rises. Two decades later, a boomer generation enters the workforce, creating a labor glut, driving wages down, and expanding the low-wage workforce. This cycle repeats, pumping up an ever-larger, more-desperate low-wage workforce, with the occasional economic boom and crash.

In an economy with immigration, we import workers to alleviate the labor shortage. This prevents the constriction, boom, and bust cycle; however, wages always sit at the minimum, and the poverty workforce expands as it does above.

The solution to all of this is a minimum wage tied to the per-capita income, such that wages rise when the per-person productivity rises. This applies a natural constriction to the growth of the low-wage labor force: it cannot expand beyond what would place it below a certain relative per-worker wealth level compared to our nation's per-capita wealth, else jobs become more-scarce, fertility decisions decrease, and immigrant labor inflow slows. The economy becomes stable. At the same time, the lowest-wage worker suffers less poverty by earning for their necessary time spent a fair share of our nation's great wealth.

Note the salient fact: that more and more of the labor we demand--we as consumers, making the purchasing decisions, thus determining what kind of jobs must be filled--is of a nature of menial work not quite achievable with the same labor employed to different means. Additional labor at a higher price could make and maintain machines to do complex tasks such as unloading trucks and stocking store shelves; yet our techn

Things did not change. The minimum wage was set to ensure that EVERY job pays a living wage, minimum. During boom times, salaries soared and minimum wage jobs were the ones kids took. Adults worked "real" jobs that paid more. That is where that false perception comes from.

FDR made a public speech after signing the minimum wage in to law. He said:

"In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."

http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist....

From http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist....

  Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act June 16, 1933
"In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of decent living."

I'm desperately fucking sick of hearing how the minimum wage is supposed to be for kids, etc.

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” -FDR 1933 statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)

“Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000.00 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company’s undistributed reserves, tell you — using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions — tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.” -FDR 1938 Fireside Chat explaining support for minimum wage and Fair Labor Standards Act.

The '33 statement on NIRA is actually pretty good. http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist....

I'm seeing tons of attacks coming from China and Hong Kong ( http://longtail.it.marist.edu/... ), but only Level 3 seems to be doing anything about blocking them http://www.lightreading.com/se... Even though they'll never be able to block all the attacks, the backbone providers could at least slow them down.

For what it's worth, http://longtail.it.marist.edu/... shows a significant drop off of attacks from China yesterday (Thursday) and today (Friday). FYI: Longtail is an ssh brute force analysis program with 11 ssh honeypots live today. I've been getting almost 300,000 attempts per day, but only got about 75,000 yesterday, and 88,000 (so far) today.

So how long until http://longtail.it.marist.edu/ starts seeing and categorizing SSH Brute Force attacks from Cuba?

"As the economy improved, more Americans were working, and there was an anticipation of increased tax revenues as a result of the recovery. From 1933 to 1937, unemployment had been reduced from 25% to 14% - still a large percentage, but a vast improvement. FDR's reaction was to turn back to the fiscal orthodoxy of the time, and he began to reduce emergency relief and public works spending in an effort to truly balance the budget. The country then lurched into what is now known as the Roosevelt Recession of 1937-1938. Unemployment threatened to rise to pre-New Deal levels, and the economy came grinding to a halt." http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/aboutfdr/budget.html

I have an ssh honeypot analyzer at longtail.it.marist.edu at Marist College and it shows that the second most popular account after root is "admin", and that the most common account/password tried is ubnt/ubnt.

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that default passwords on home routers are high on the bad guy's list of accounts to hack.

I have an ssh honeypot analyzer at longtail.it.marist.edu at Marist College and it shows that the second most popular account after root is "admin", and that the most common account/password tried is ubnt/ubnt.

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that default passwords on home routers are high on the bad guy's list of accounts to hack.

I have an ssh honeypot analyzer at longtail.it.marist.edu at Marist College and it shows that the second most popular account after root is "admin", and that the most common account/password tried is ubnt/ubnt.

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that default passwords on home routers are high on the bad guy's list of accounts to hack.

I have an ssh honeypot analyzer at longtail.it.marist.edu at Marist College and it shows that the second most popular account after root is "admin", and that the most common account/password tried is ubnt/ubnt.

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that default passwords on home routers are high on the bad guy's list of accounts to hack.

In WWII, the Empire of Japan bombed the crap out of a US naval base.

You fail basic history. The United States Navy was shooting at German warships months before Pearl Harbor. We were giving weapons to Germany's enemies. It was the intention of the FDR Administration to intervene openly in the conflict as soon as the political situation allowed. Nobody in Washington wanted a war with Japan and the plan if forced into one was to fight a defensive action against Japan until such time as Germany was defeated.

The GP is correct, a Democrat (FDR) "got us into" WW2, by openly siding with Germany's enemies. FDR's actions in 1940 and 1941 were a wholesale violation of international law concerning neutral powers. The United States was destined to intervene in WW2 regardless of Japan's choice to attack us.

long before it was obvious battleships were obsolete.

They weren't obsolete; they were still a force to take seriously even at the end of the war, capable of a wide variety of missions. They went the way of the dodo because they weren't as cost effective as the other platforms that could perform their missions.

So they decided to build ships that could destroy multiple enemy battleships.

Which they would have failed at completely, given their pathetic fire control technology. I would take my chances in any modern American battleship against those monsters, doesn't even need to be an Iowa, the North Carolina or South Dakota would have beaten them just as readily. Heck, one could almost make a case for the Pearl Harbor survivors after they were modernized with the same fire control systems as their big brothers. If the American battleline had ever met the Japanese battleline (all it takes is Halsey leaving Lee in place when he chases after the carriers at Leyte Gulf) it would have been a curb stomping of the IJN.

Japan was doomed by the decision to go to war against the United States. They thought it would go the same way as their last war against a continental power, overlooking the fact that the United States of 1941 was nowhere near as hapless as 1904 Tsarist Russia. We had them beat in every meaningful measure, technological, economic, population, resources, and most importantly we had the political will to fight the war to the bitter end. They compounded these disparities with a series of incredibly stupid tactical decisions, fretting away their strength with needlessly complicated plans (Midway was a classic Rube Goldberg plan), failing to seize opportunities to inflict lasting defeats on their foes (Savo Island), leaving their most experienced people in combat until attrition claimed them, and so on.

They only lasted as long as they did because of the Germany-first policy. We essentially beat them with the scraps of our war effort. To this day I can't fathom what their policymakers were smoking when they decided going to war with the United States was the best course of action. Had they sought an accommodation with FDR it's probable that Imperial Japan would still exist today; in fact the documents of the day (Plan Dog Memo) say that destroying them is not in the national interest of the United States, since they were a useful counterweight to the USSR in the Far East. Alas, they forced the issue, and in so doing shared the fate of Nazi Germany.

http://wwwcf.fhwa.dot.gov/exit... http://wwwcf.fhwa.dot.gov/exit... http://www.polytrauma.va.gov/d... http://www.wdtb.noaa.gov/scrip... http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.e... http://www.nestlegoodfoodgoodl... http://www.gd.gov.cn/jump.htm?... http://sasisa.ru/go_title.php?... http://4ygeca.com/index.php?na... http://www.stereohead.ru/?name... http://www.transtats.bts.gov/e... http://www.roc.noaa.gov/script...

Blame for the economy:
Feb 23, 2011 52% Bush, 41% Obama, according to the Washington Times
May 4, 2011 51% Bush, % Obama Fox News(warning, video)
May 18, 2011 54% Bush, 39% Obama Rasmussen
The above all are right-wing sources, and all put more of the blame on Bush than Obama. So what about other polls?

April 28, 2011 63% Bush, 30% Obama Marist Poll
May 9, 2011 55% Bush, 33% Obama CNN

Unsurprisingly Bush fares even worse.

(1) This is the bit where you deny that European and American influence has anything to do with the existence of these pirates in the first place. It's so easy to push desperate people into doing something which, on the face of it, seems so unreasonable that you can hand wave the right to sail half way across the world to stop them.

(2) While the US extending its territorial claims (i.e. countering the "freedom of the seas") was one of the moves bringing about UNCLOS, the US is - as always in matters like these - one of the few states not to have ratified. The "freedom of the seas" to the US means nothing more than the freedom to selectively enforce the interests of whoever has the Navy's ear - sometimes not even the Navy itself.

How about this, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/unempl71.html.

How bout this: your link doesn't back up your assertion.

My math may be off, but I believe that 1982 occurred between now and the 1930's. According to Bloomberg, that recession was worse than this recession.

Depends on how you look at the data. This recession is particularly bad on the number of jobs lost. And with our previous economic downturns, we didn't have to grapple with a recession AND a $10 trillion national debt that's 2/3's the size of our GDP.

Only drama-queen democrats are insisting that this is the worst recession we've had since the 30's.

Whatever you say, ostrich.

How about this, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/unempl71.html.

At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the total work force or 11,385,000 people, were unemployed. Although farmers themselves technically were not unemployed, drastic drops in farm commodity prices resulted in farmers losing their lands and homes to foreclosure.

My math may be off, but I believe that 1982 occurred between now and the 1930's. According to Bloomberg, that recession was worse than this recession.

The economy will shrink at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter and at a 2 percent pace in the first quarter of 2009, nearly twice prior estimates, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists led by Jan Hatzius wrote yesterday in a note. That would be the biggest back-to-back contraction since 1982.

Only drama-queen democrats are insisting that this is the worst recession we've had since the 30's.

Freya Mit Uns, huh? I could have sworn I remembered that differently.

Yes, and it was also Christianity which fought for that and lost. I assure you, the American South never has been a hotbed of secular humanism.

Sounds like bullshit to me. See Contacting the Presidential Libraries. It lists the addresses of all the presidential libraries. eg:

• Herbert Hoover http://hoover.archives.gov/
• Franklin D. Roosevelt http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/
• Harry S. Truman http://www.trumanlibrary.org/
• Dwight D. Eisenhower http://eisenhower.archives.gov/
• George H Bush http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/

Most are .edu or .gov, which squatters can't use at all. I guess it's because everyone thinks the have to have a .com. Thus all the presidential candidates have an entirely inappropriate .com site instead of .org for their campaign, for instance. So they can't get "GWBushLibrary.com". Too fucking bad. Get GWBush.archives.gov or a subdomain of whatever institution manages it (probably a .edu).

In the mid 60's IBM created CP-67 which virtualized the IBM S/360. In the following years the system became VM/370, and has evolved to z/VM today http://www.vm.ibm.com/. VM (the general term for z/VM) is made up of two primary components, VM/CP (control program) and VM/CMS (a mini single user operating system). VM/CMS provided the ground work for being able to administer the system, and provided a nice programming environment in that each VM/CMS user had their own "system" that one could edit, compile and run their programs in an interactive environment (think of a MS-DOS type of model -- then remember that this was in the late 60's).

CMS itself provided some limited simulation of IBM's two other mainframe operating systems OS/360 and DOS. Enough that one could write simple OS or DOS programs and do at least some unit testing. The simulation by CMS was by providing a limited set of the OS and DOS API.

Unlike MVS or DOS, (or even the CP/M, Windows, or *nix families) VM/CP itself does not provide many services directly. VM/CP does not provide any filesystems, any application APIs, etc. All VM/CP really did was to provide a barebone virtual machine and only provide those services one would find on the bare hardware. It was the responsibilty of the operating system running within the virtual machine to provide the application API, filesystems, application memory management, etc. Communication between vm's were originally only via the raw hardware model (channel-to-channel adapters, shared disk volumes, and a method of "punching" virtual cards and sending the virtual cards to another vm's virtual card reader.) As time progressed, VM/CP did provide some API's that allowed very simple messaging between two vm's (first VMCF - Virtual Machine Communication Facility, and then IUCV - Inter User Communication Vehicle).

Early on it was "discovered" that the virtual machine model made a lot of sense as a method to implement VM services. For example if one were to look at a modern VM system, you would see that the entire native VM TCP/IP stack is managed within a small collection of vm's. (Under VM/CP, a vm is called a "userid"). The native VM TCP/IP stack consists of a TCPIP userid that manages the network interface devices, and the TELNET server. The FTP userid implements the FTP protocol, etc. Each userid is totally seperate from the rest of the system and from each other (the tcp/ip socket facility "rides" on top of IUCV in a transparent fashion so that a tcp/ip server is coded the same as on *nix).

Because of the facilities provided by CMS, it is fairly easy to write little servers. For example the orginal LISTSERV server http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv-history.asp / was written as a CMS application. As well as several native VM webservers.

If one wants to see what is and has been possible in a virtual machine environment, one should at least look at the history of IBM's VM.

For an excellent history of VM http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/
and the VMSHARE archive, an early BBS used by VM system adminshttp://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

You have way too much obsession with children in this matter, continually bringing them up, and the fact that you think of dead children sexually, even if just to make an ad homiem attack, is disturbing.

If you're gonna link to faked documents, at least link to those that look authentic, and that don't use Copperplate Gothic Light font instead of something standard like Courier. Having all the references to the documents not be conspiricy websites would be nice too.

Is this the same MacArthur that wanted to nuke China? It doesn't really matter what he thought, since some Japanese historians went to the trouble of compiling an account of what actually happened. Read The Longest Day - an account of 14 Japanese Historians about the surrender, or this summary.

Since you claim you understood my post, yet did not believe it, you clearly have no knowledge of feudal Japan to WW2. Instead you make ad homiem attacks and strawman arguemnts that latch onto a phrase that shows how fanatic the Japanese were. I pity you, never understanding the world around you, yelling louder and louder and being ignored more and more, secure in your delusions that there's an evil govt consipricy and anyone who doesn't see is a drone, and never bothering to do some actual questioning and factfinding.

For What It's Worth, this very topic came up recently on the linux-390 list, and an informal poll was taken. SuSE outnumbered the competition by a wide margin.

Oh, and the Marist linux-390 listserver is well worth subscribing to.

The Birthday Balls continued to generate approximately one million dollars per year, but the revenue was still not sufficient to support the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 as a national organization to help victims of polio all across the country and not just in Warm Springs. To heighten awareness, radio personality and philanthropist Eddie Cantor urged Americans to send their loose change to President Roosevelt in "a march of dimes to reach all the way to the White House." Soon, millions of dimes flooded the White House, and this campaign became known as the "March of Dimes;" in 1945 the Foundation raised 18.9 million dollars. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, took the name of its popular campaign to become the March of Dimes. The funds raised by the Birthday Balls and March of Dimes financially supported the creation of a polio vaccine by Jonas Salk in 1955, eradicating the disease throughout most of the world by the 1960s.

I know it's silly but I always love when IBM uses the phrase "FUD" in corporate announcements

The irony is delicious, especially when it was Gene Amdahl who coined the phrase "fear, uncertainty and doubt" to describe IBM's tactics towards his company after he quit IBM and founded Amdahl Computers (see one of the 1975 entries at http://www.academic.marist.edu/pennings/hyprhsty.h tm

Ahhh, another company damaged by Ellen Hancock.

• IBM's PRGS ("Programming Systems") Laboratories, of which she was the overall manager
  
• Apple Computer Corp, as the right-hand of Gil Amelio
  
• Exodus Communications, where she was CEO
  
• Global Crossing, the poor sots that ended up with 108 million worthless shares of Exodus
  

• Cable and Wireless, another batch of poor sots that bought parts of Exodus
  

So, what other companies and organizations are on the watch-list?

• Aetna
  
• Colgate-Palmolive
  
• Marist College
  
• Santa Clara University
  

Disclaimer: Well, duh ... of course I am a disgruntled ex-employee of Ms. Hancock back when she was a IBMer. I just did not realize how bad she really was ... even if none of this was her fault, she has still been at the epicenter of many closed office buildings over the years.

Trouble is, I can't just pick one up and play around with it like I do with all of the other technologies I know.

I just picked this comment at random out of all the comments that expressed the same frustration of lack of training facilities. I've looked into this issue a lot because I run into z/OS boxen enough in my consulting work that it would be useful to know the mainframe.

If you are in a college or university, you're in luck. The IBM Scholars Program basically gives any university to a huge variety of free and deeply discounted training material. You will need to pester a willing CS or MIS professor into teaching a class that can be taken for degree credits, and a local IBM Business Partner needs to participate as well. IBM supplies the mainframe services through the web. Steep requirements, but not impossible, especially if the course is structured like a 1-hour credit course, and you can convince the professor that your local IEEE or ACM chapter will handle all of the administrative tasks.

If you are not associated with an university, Marist College offers a degree credit course remotely. A little spendy, but doable.

If you are not associated with an university and want a self-study option, options are pretty grim. This is my situation. I cannot predict the time demands of my consulting business enough to guarantee I can set aside time for a structured course, and pretty much everything I've learned is by self-study. Some Googling turned up only one vendor who sells z/OS timeshare services. The minimum block of services from Internet TimeShare Resources costs $500 USD per month. Gulp. Another option is to purchase your own mainframe; the minimum configuration I could find through IBM, refurbished, was well into five figures. After I passed out and came to, I decided to try Hercules and the turnkey MVS based upon a much older version of MVS, as mentioned earlier in this thread.

If you're in the same situation as I am and want some MVS timeshare just to play around in, I think five people or companies can feasibly split the cost of the timeshare, by agreeing to use the timeshare only on a particular weekday, with access rotating on the weekend days, so you get access two days out of a week every two weeks, and the rest of the time you get access one day a week. If this kind of setup intrigues you, drop me a note at maildrop001 at yahoo com

Judging by the comments on this article, there is probably a market demand out there for $20/month accounts that would give newbies a pico-LPAR to install MVS programs, install Linux for z/OS, play around in, etc. Wrap some basic web services that let the newbies punch a button to wipe the LPAR to its initial state, download datasets they created, and such so that the support can be bare-bones ("fubar'd your LPAR? Reset it, bud.") and the costs can be kept low. I found three such firms offering this kind of service for OS/400 access.

IMHO, contrary to what the article claims, I don't think the shortage is real. There is and always will be a shortage of top-flight folks, just as in any field, but for a rank and file that is dedicated to just mainframe work, the rates are not reflecting any shortage. There is demand however for folks who can fluidly cross the distributed and mainframe worlds, but as always, industry-specific and domain-specific knowledge is really what is prized by clients, not just straight technical skill. Furthermore, a lot of people's retirement accounts took a serious hit in the dob bomb, so hordes of mainframers retiring is not likely to happen anytime soon. Maybe in 20-30 years we might have a shortage, but to start talking about it now is premature.

People these days seem to forget about the overhead of interpretters and virtual machines. If the article is correct, then the z800's running zVM emulate Intel x86 architecture in order to run Linux.

Sorry, but z/VM has nothing to do with emulation. z/VM is a low-level system that simply (or not so simply ;-) virtualizes the hardware by providing one or more virtual machines, each of which can run any native OS. As far as the client OS knows, it's running on the bare hardware. The z/VM layer provides the ability to flexibly divide the hardware resources between the VMs, and guarantees that each VM is completely isolated from all other VMs. In the case of Linux/390, the Linux kernel and applications have been compiled to run natively on the S/390 architecture. Check out this Linux for S/390 FAQ for more info.

Some of the academic folks I know have had a bit of trouble installing Linux/390 (<----- ibm's linux/390 developer page), but linux390.marist.edu/ has a decent manual they've found helpful.

Of course, it'll long be obsolete before I ever get my hands on one of these beasts. *sigh*

Some of the academic folks I know have had a bit of trouble installing Linux/390 (<----- ibm's linux/390 developer page), but linux390.marist.edu/ has a decent manual they've found helpful.

Of course, it'll long be obsolete before I ever get my hands on one of these beasts. *sigh*

For an ISP or ASP, the savings in terms of facilities and management costs quickly overcome the higher initial cost of the System/390 hardware: if you are building a data center based around Suns, your crossover point is around 25 servers; with Intel, it's more like 150 servers. In either case, this is a small fraction of the several thousand machines VM can run with acceptable performance.

This is actually the subject of my Capping course at Marist College.

If you're looking for a book about crypto and society, i would suggest a book by Whitfield Diffie himself called Privacy on the Line, by MIT press. Its a good read, lots of background info about crypto, why they think its necessary,and how its affecting society.

Hope this helps.

• Article in LinuxPlanet
• Princeton Linux for S/390 site
• Marist College Linux for S/390 site
• IBM's Linux for S/390 site

There are more given in the LinuxPlanet article (which is where I got the other links).