"Another reason is that no one has yet proved that better spaces mean better education. No matter how enthusiastically Cheryl Hines touts the test scores after her upcoming NBC show, School Pride, made over a Compton, Calif., elementary school, no solid research proves that student achievement is affected by physical surroundings. Many of our nation’s top-performing schools are getting the job done in rectangles filled with desks."
the first rock he threw struck me in the back of the head slightly down from the top from a distance of about 75 feet and probably 45 foot in elevation.
Interesting. When I researched cases of people being seriously injured or killed by rocks, the few cases that I found were of people being hit by rocks that were dropped or thrown from an elevation. Vandals seem to drop rocks or paving stones from overpasses onto passing cars, which sometimes does a lot of damage, because the rocks can be much heavier, and have more kinetic energy from the fall, than anything than the vandals could throw level.
Nonetheless, I still maintain that it's almost impossible for a policeman or soldier in riot gear, wearing a helmet and face shield, to be killed by a demonstrator throwing a rock, and I believe on weaker evidence that they probably wouldn't be seriously injured either. It's as dangerous as a baseball game.
In most jurisdictions, cops are allowed to use deadly force only to defend themselves against deadly force. So in Kent State, Israel or anywhere else, cops should be told in their training that, if they're wearing riot gear, rocks are not deadly force, and it would be excessive force to shoot stone-throwing demonstrators. If they do kill a demonstrator, they would be guilty of homicide or murder, though juries often let cops off.
Ever been hit in the face with a thrown rock? It won't just leave a bruise; you WILL require surgery, and pray to God you don't have a fractured skull or spinal column (the likely result if the rock busts through your teeth into your mouth).
This sounds as if you were hit on the face with a thrown rock. Were you?
I actually researched this once, in the context of the Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian rock-throwers and justifying it with the claim that stones were "lethal weapons."
No Israeli soldier was ever killed by a Palestinian throwing a rock at him.
As it turned out, Slate had an article on the more general subject ("Getting stoned: how many police officers have been killed by rocks?"), which reported 3 police officers killed by rocks, 1 of them thrown, since 1792, and none in the last 70 years (out of 18,983 fatalities). Police departments teach that a rock isn't deadly beyond 50 feet.
I can't imagine how a policeman wearing riot gear, which includes a helmet and face shield, could be killed by a thrown rock.
(Actually, I was hit in the face myself with a thrown rock, by a neighborhood kid who was pelting my house with stones. He broke the window I was looking through. I had a minor cut from the glass, but no serious damage. I caught the kid and brought him home to his parents, who were profusely apologetic and fixed the window.)
He has a form of muscular dystrophy. They can't replace all his other muscles too and he'll eventually succumb to other problems related to MD.
True. This is an unusual case of muscular dystrophy, because in the most common forms, Duchenne's and Becker's, they have heart muscle abnormalities, but they don't have heart failure. A bigger problem is failure of the muscles that drive the lungs, which is a common cause of death.
Muscular dystrophy affects all the muscles in the body. It's usually due to a mutation in the dystrophin gene. Dystrophin is the protein that connects the actin protein to the muscle cell membrane http://jennyndesign.com/DMD/physiology5.html But any mutation that disrupts any of the proteins in that complex can cause muscular dystrophy. Some of them are much milder, and in some forms they have a normal life expectancy. The muscles are all over the body, but in some places muscular dystrophy is expressed more strongly than others.
I must admit it is frustrating to see this kind of potential treatment stagger through clinical trials when people like me have little to nothing to lose. I have 3 young children so I actually have reason to try and prolong the inevitable.
It is a better article, mostly because it doesn't have the gushing enthusiasm of the Endgaget story (Technology nyphomaniac: Never met a technology I didn't immediately fall in love with.)
I used to write about medical lasers for a few years, and I learned one important lesson:
Don't believe it until they have a randomized, controlled trial that shows patients who get the laser treatment actually do better than the patients who don't. (It doesn't do any good to remove a tumor if the tumor comes back right away.) A lot of laser treatments didn't look too good after the controlled trials.
(It is true that there are some procedures that are so rare that they can't do a randomized controlled trial.)
This system looks like it might be useful in certain not-too-common situations where you can't reach the tumor with anything else. It's like, when you're working on a car, having an offset screwdriver that can reach a blind screw that's hard to reach any other way. It's FDA approved for brain surgery so it passed some kind of review.
A lot of times, a $50 cautery can do just as good a job as a $100,000 laser.
This isn't rocket science.
The fundamental problem is, sadly, those cancers they mentioned are inevitably fatal, within 6 months to a few years. The main purpose of surgery is to make your last few years more comfortable, like when they remove a tumor that's near the optic nerve threatening to make you blind. There are some benign brain tumors that can be cured, though. "Benign" is a relative term when something's growing in your brain. You want to get it out.
It's a pity that the church is not as enlightened in its view of contraceptives where the scientific evidence is clear.
Catholicism's approach to science seems to be, 'We accept it unless it competes with our interpretation of the bible.'
Pope John Paul II was actually pretty cool in some ways. He put together a group called the Papal Academy of Sciences, and invited the best scientists he could get, including several Nobel laureates, regardless of religion, including some atheists. They gave him advice on the scientific background of moral issues,like nuclear war.
One of the panelists (I can't find the citation) said that John Paul was a real intellectual, interested and knowledgeable about everything. There was only one exception -- you couldn't talk to him about human sexuality.
Science 23 February 2001: Vol. 291. no. 5508, pp. 1472 - 1474 DOI: 10.1126/science.291.5508.1472
News Focus PAPAL SCIENCE: Science and Religion Advance Together at Pontifical Academy Charles Seife
VATICAN CITY--The Casina Pio Quattro... now serves as a meeting place for the religious and secular worlds. It is the headquarters for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: 80 esteemed scientists appointed for life to make their cumulative collective wisdom available to the pope. Members run the gamut of disciplines, backgrounds, nationalities, and religious beliefs. Twenty-five of them are Nobel laureates. Some of the most famous scientists in the world are members, such as physicists Stephen Hawking and Carlo Rubbia, astronomers Martin Rees and Vera Rubin, biologist David Baltimore, and numerous others. Every other year, the group gathers in the Vatican Gardens for a plenary session at which members hold forth on the state of science and the world, pass resolutions for improving the latter, and renew acquaintances. They have, by all accounts, a heavenly time. As member Joseph Murray, a 1990 Nobel laureate who performed the first kidney transplant, puts it, "Every day is like Christmas." If so, the gift giving is mutual. The pope gets access to the scientific expertise of people at the top of their fields in astronomy, cosmology, genetics, and other areas that interest the church. In return, the scientists get the ear of one of the most important people in the world--and, through him, a chance to influence whether people accept or reject new knowledge and technology.... http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/291/5508/1472
Even the journalists that focus their entire career on tech subjects often don't gain any appreciable expertise in the field. Besides, journalists aren't meant to be experts, they're meant to know exactly enough that they know when they should be asking questions. That usually isn't that much but for whatever reason (maybe they don't want to look stupid, maybe they don't want to appear to be dumbing down the article) journalists are quite reluctant to do so when it comes to technology issues.
I'm one of those tech journalists. You're right that the job is to ask questions, even when they sound stupid.
The simple solution to getting your facts right (the Principia Mathematica of journalism, as it were) is to check your facts with an independent expert in the field (preferably more than one).
There are single-source stories and multiple-source stories. If a dermatologist claims at a scientific meeting or in a journal article that his method cures baldness, I want to call another dermatologist who treats baldness and get his reaction. Even if the first guy is basically correct, the second guy can usually add some important qualifications. In the ideal situation, after I've interviewed 3 or 4 experts, I usually have a reasonably good understanding of the story. Then when I talk to the *next* expert, I can usually ask him really good questions. I may not be able to get the truth, but I can get as close as humanly possible by deadline.
When I decide whether a news source is worth reading, the first thing I look for is whether they quote a single source, or get a reaction from a second source. Why should I waste my time reading an article that's wrong, when I can read an article that got its facts right? Why should anybody?
I once gave a journalism course and told my students to look up stories in the New York Times. For example, here's a science story http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/earth/14fuel.html Did they just take the promoter's claims at face value, or did they check with an independent expert?
One of the magazines I worked for would pay me $50 extra for every additional source I interviewed, up to about 2 or 3 sources. That reflected on the quality of the story, and the effort required, pretty well.
The big problem today is that the pay for these stories has gone down. You used to have reporters on staff who could spend a full week working on a major story. Now newspapers have laid off half their staff and doubled up the work for the remaing staff. Freelance writers used to get $1,000 or more for a 2,000-word story that would take a week, and give them time to read the literature and interview a lot of people. Now they're lucky to get $500, and sometimes $150. You can't interview a lot of people for $150.
Pacific Book Review, in its profile on amazon.com, describes itself as follows: "We review books for well known authors and emerging authors, and enabling many first time authors to reach the publishers with a recognizable review.
You're right as far as you go, but you're ignoring the role of NAFTA in destroying Mexico's economy.
Government-subsidized U.S. farms destroyed the small Mexican corn farmers.
The big U.S. electrical construction companies, with their monopoly powers and government subsidies, came down and out-competed Mexican electrical contractors. I met a Mexican electrical contractor who came to New York (legally) because he couldn't make a living in Mexico any more. He said they didn't take bids any more, they told you how much they were going to pay.
If you believe that the free market is right or fair or efficient or natural law, then you should also believe in the mobility of labor. If our companies should be free to sell products and services in Mexico, and drive Mexican workers into unemployment, then by the same logic those Mexican workers should be free to come here and sell products and services in the U.S.
The problem with free trade agreements is that they give free trade to corporations, but they don't give free trade to workers.
"Work & Family," by Sue Shellenbarger, Wall Street Journal, 6 Sepember 1991, "New hire loses her job because of pregnancy."
Margaret Ahmad reported for work as medical claims examiner for Loyal American Life Insurance, Mobile, Alabama, told her boss she was 4 months pregnant, and was fired.
Ahmad intended to take only a week off, and the company never asked her how long she planned to be gone, said her attorney, Melissa Posey.
Kirk C. Shaw, attorney for Loyal American, said the company allows 90-day maternity leaves.
Loyal American argued that they would have to train her for five or six months, and then give her a 90-day maternity leave just when she was ready to start working on the job. So Loyal American felt she couldn't do the job. It was a "business necessity" defense.
Federal judge Richard W. Vollmer, Jr., ruled in July that Loyal American had a legitimate business reason for withdrawing its offer.
Ahmad won't appeal because of the cost of further litigation.
Posey said this was a close case. Other judges in other jurisdictions had decided similar cases the other way.
You are correct. Employment at will has a big footnote full of exceptions.
It's complicated, with federal, state and sometimes city regulations.
I do know of a case in which a woman was either not hired, or fired, because she was pregnant. She took it to court, and her case was rejected. (I can't find the citation, sorry.) I talked to the lawyer, and she thought they had a slam-dunk case, but they lost in court.
Oh, you had an employment contract. That's one of the fine-print exceptions to employment at will. You have my sympathy.
The free market is great if you have a skill that is critical to a business in which they make a lot of money. It's not so great when they don't need you any more.
While slashdot can give you eggcelent legal advice, It'll hit you in the face that you don't play dice with the important parts of your life.
When you do see a lawyer, you need to know two things: The law and the facts.
The facts include the details of how domain registration works. The lawyer may not know that. Readers of Slashdot may well know important information about domain registration that the lawyer can't easily get and would need to make the best decision about this situation.
The problem with dealing with employers is they can invent the most flimsy excuses (or just flat-out lies) to remove an employee, and there's little you can do to self-defend yourself. You really need the full weight of government and a court of law if you expect to win an unjustified termination lawsuit.
Why should they invent an excuse or lie? In the U.S., they can fire you for any reason at all, or no reason.
(The exceptions are for government employees, employees with an employment contract, and union members. They can't fire you for reasons that are protected by discrimination law, like race, religion or gender.)
And "biologically plausible mechanism" is not an unscientific claim. You might want to brush up on science yourself.
Thank you, socially awkward Slashdot reader, for your gratuitous insult. I brush up on my science by reading NEJM, among other journals.
A "biologically plausible mechanism" is not 50% plus a feather. It's just a feather.
Scientists come up with a plausible hypothesis, and see whether there are any data to support it. (They wouldn't waste time investigating a hypothesis that *wasn't* plausible.) When the data don't support the hypothesis, then science doesn't support the hypothesis. It is unscientific to say that the hypothesis is true.
It's *plausible* that all diseases could be caused by subluxions of the spinal cord. But the data shows otherwise.
As the NEJM article I cited argued, the NVICP upheld some awards with *no* scientific evidence. I was wondering why the NVICP did that.
This is not how vaccination rewards are decided. They are a part of the special VAERS program which is decided by a "vaccine" court NVICP (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/). There are actually experts who decide compensation.
Yeah, that I understand, but what I don't understand is why the NVICP makes irrational decisions that favor the people who claim that their injury was caused by a "plausable" mechanism.
Unfortunately, in recent years the VICP seems to have turned its back on science. In 2005, Margaret Althen successfully claimed that a tetanus vaccine had caused her optic neuritis. Although there was no evidence to support her claim, the VICP ruled that if a petitioner proposed a biologically plausible mechanism by which a vaccine could cause harm, as well as a logical sequence of cause and effect, an award should be granted. The door opened by this and other rulings...
No case, however, represented a greater deviation from the VICP's original standards than that of Dorothy Werderitsh, who in 2006 successfully claimed that a hepatitis B vaccine had caused her multiple sclerosis. By the time of the ruling, several studies had shown that hepatitis B vaccine neither caused nor exacerbated the disease, and the Institute of Medicine had concluded that “evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis...."
What is this NVICP and why do they accept these unscientific claims of "biologically plausible mechanism"? Are they ignorant of science? Or are they required by the words of the legislation to accept claims like this?
Slashdot Mirror
The Greek philosopher Thrasymachus said: With religion, the clever manipulate the foolish.
"Another reason is that no one has yet proved that better spaces mean better education. No matter how enthusiastically Cheryl Hines touts the test scores after her upcoming NBC show, School Pride, made over a Compton, Calif., elementary school, no solid research proves that student achievement is affected by physical surroundings. Many of our nation’s top-performing schools are getting the job done in rectangles filled with desks."
the first rock he threw struck me in the back of the head slightly down from the top from a distance of about 75 feet and probably 45 foot in elevation.
Interesting. When I researched cases of people being seriously injured or killed by rocks, the few cases that I found were of people being hit by rocks that were dropped or thrown from an elevation. Vandals seem to drop rocks or paving stones from overpasses onto passing cars, which sometimes does a lot of damage, because the rocks can be much heavier, and have more kinetic energy from the fall, than anything than the vandals could throw level.
Nonetheless, I still maintain that it's almost impossible for a policeman or soldier in riot gear, wearing a helmet and face shield, to be killed by a demonstrator throwing a rock, and I believe on weaker evidence that they probably wouldn't be seriously injured either. It's as dangerous as a baseball game.
In most jurisdictions, cops are allowed to use deadly force only to defend themselves against deadly force. So in Kent State, Israel or anywhere else, cops should be told in their training that, if they're wearing riot gear, rocks are not deadly force, and it would be excessive force to shoot stone-throwing demonstrators. If they do kill a demonstrator, they would be guilty of homicide or murder, though juries often let cops off.
Ever been hit in the face with a thrown rock? It won't just leave a bruise; you WILL require surgery, and pray to God you don't have a fractured skull or spinal column (the likely result if the rock busts through your teeth into your mouth).
This sounds as if you were hit on the face with a thrown rock. Were you?
I actually researched this once, in the context of the Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian rock-throwers and justifying it with the claim that stones were "lethal weapons."
No Israeli soldier was ever killed by a Palestinian throwing a rock at him.
As it turned out, Slate had an article on the more general subject ("Getting stoned: how many police officers have been killed by rocks?"), which reported 3 police officers killed by rocks, 1 of them thrown, since 1792, and none in the last 70 years (out of 18,983 fatalities). Police departments teach that a rock isn't deadly beyond 50 feet.
I can't imagine how a policeman wearing riot gear, which includes a helmet and face shield, could be killed by a thrown rock.
(Actually, I was hit in the face myself with a thrown rock, by a neighborhood kid who was pelting my house with stones. He broke the window I was looking through. I had a minor cut from the glass, but no serious damage. I caught the kid and brought him home to his parents, who were profusely apologetic and fixed the window.)
Oh, well. Within an order of magnitude.
Enrico Fermi told me to just make a reasonable guess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
My 60 year old stepmom can go 100 miles a day on a bike over paved roads. And used to be able to do 200 when she was younger.
Yeah, but bicycles were invented in the 19th century.
My mistake.
Circumference of the earth = 24,000 miles / 3 years = 1,095 days
= 22 miles/day
How fast was a boat a few hundred years ago?
Magellan's expedition went around the globe in 3 years.
He has a form of muscular dystrophy. They can't replace all his other muscles too and he'll eventually succumb to other problems related to MD.
True. This is an unusual case of muscular dystrophy, because in the most common forms, Duchenne's and Becker's, they have heart muscle abnormalities, but they don't have heart failure. A bigger problem is failure of the muscles that drive the lungs, which is a common cause of death.
Muscular dystrophy affects all the muscles in the body. It's usually due to a mutation in the dystrophin gene. Dystrophin is the protein that connects the actin protein to the muscle cell membrane http://jennyndesign.com/DMD/physiology5.html But any mutation that disrupts any of the proteins in that complex can cause muscular dystrophy. Some of them are much milder, and in some forms they have a normal life expectancy. The muscles are all over the body, but in some places muscular dystrophy is expressed more strongly than others.
I must admit it is frustrating to see this kind of potential treatment stagger through clinical trials when people like me have little to nothing to lose. I have 3 young children so I actually have reason to try and prolong the inevitable.
Read the program description again. This device is FDA-approved. If it would benefit your condition, and you could afford it, you could go to WUSL for treatment. http://plexus.wustl.edu/surgery/neuro/website.nsf/WV/0800D693FDE25183862577A60063101C?OpenDocument
This would be appropriate for a tumor that can't be removed by any other method, and that can be removed by this device.
I always thought brain surgery was pretty easy.
It is a better article, mostly because it doesn't have the gushing enthusiasm of the Endgaget story (Technology nyphomaniac: Never met a technology I didn't immediately fall in love with.)
I used to write about medical lasers for a few years, and I learned one important lesson:
Don't believe it until they have a randomized, controlled trial that shows patients who get the laser treatment actually do better than the patients who don't. (It doesn't do any good to remove a tumor if the tumor comes back right away.) A lot of laser treatments didn't look too good after the controlled trials.
(It is true that there are some procedures that are so rare that they can't do a randomized controlled trial.)
This system looks like it might be useful in certain not-too-common situations where you can't reach the tumor with anything else. It's like, when you're working on a car, having an offset screwdriver that can reach a blind screw that's hard to reach any other way. It's FDA approved for brain surgery so it passed some kind of review.
There are other ways of doing it. Notice that WUSL also offers a gamma knife http://plexus.wustl.edu/surgery/neuro/website.nsf/WV/23077ADDD22341B28625729F00713CFC which focuses 201 radiation sources on a small spherical target. Brain surgeons are clever.
A lot of times, a $50 cautery can do just as good a job as a $100,000 laser.
This isn't rocket science.
The fundamental problem is, sadly, those cancers they mentioned are inevitably fatal, within 6 months to a few years. The main purpose of surgery is to make your last few years more comfortable, like when they remove a tumor that's near the optic nerve threatening to make you blind. There are some benign brain tumors that can be cured, though. "Benign" is a relative term when something's growing in your brain. You want to get it out.
It's a pity that the church is not as enlightened in its view of contraceptives where the scientific evidence is clear.
Catholicism's approach to science seems to be, 'We accept it unless it competes with our interpretation of the bible.'
Pope John Paul II was actually pretty cool in some ways. He put together a group called the Papal Academy of Sciences, and invited the best scientists he could get, including several Nobel laureates, regardless of religion, including some atheists. They gave him advice on the scientific background of moral issues,like nuclear war.
One of the panelists (I can't find the citation) said that John Paul was a real intellectual, interested and knowledgeable about everything. There was only one exception -- you couldn't talk to him about human sexuality.
Science 23 February 2001:
Vol. 291. no. 5508, pp. 1472 - 1474
DOI: 10.1126/science.291.5508.1472
News Focus
PAPAL SCIENCE:
Science and Religion Advance Together at Pontifical Academy
Charles Seife
VATICAN CITY--The Casina Pio Quattro ... now serves as a meeting place for the religious and secular worlds. It is the headquarters for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: 80 esteemed scientists appointed for life to make their cumulative collective wisdom available to the pope. Members run the gamut of disciplines, backgrounds, nationalities, and religious beliefs. Twenty-five of them are Nobel laureates. Some of the most famous scientists in the world are members, such as physicists Stephen Hawking and Carlo Rubbia, astronomers Martin Rees and Vera Rubin, biologist David Baltimore, and numerous others. Every other year, the group gathers in the Vatican Gardens for a plenary session at which members hold forth on the state of science and the world, pass resolutions for improving the latter, and renew acquaintances. They have, by all accounts, a heavenly time. As member Joseph Murray, a 1990 Nobel laureate who performed the first kidney transplant, puts it, "Every day is like Christmas." If so, the gift giving is mutual. The pope gets access to the scientific expertise of people at the top of their fields in astronomy, cosmology, genetics, and other areas that interest the church. In return, the scientists get the ear of one of the most important people in the world--and, through him, a chance to influence whether people accept or reject new knowledge and technology. ...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/291/5508/1472
(Subscription only, infopeasants)
Even the journalists that focus their entire career on tech subjects often don't gain any appreciable expertise in the field. Besides, journalists aren't meant to be experts, they're meant to know exactly enough that they know when they should be asking questions. That usually isn't that much but for whatever reason (maybe they don't want to look stupid, maybe they don't want to appear to be dumbing down the article) journalists are quite reluctant to do so when it comes to technology issues.
I'm one of those tech journalists. You're right that the job is to ask questions, even when they sound stupid.
The simple solution to getting your facts right (the Principia Mathematica of journalism, as it were) is to check your facts with an independent expert in the field (preferably more than one).
There are single-source stories and multiple-source stories. If a dermatologist claims at a scientific meeting or in a journal article that his method cures baldness, I want to call another dermatologist who treats baldness and get his reaction. Even if the first guy is basically correct, the second guy can usually add some important qualifications. In the ideal situation, after I've interviewed 3 or 4 experts, I usually have a reasonably good understanding of the story. Then when I talk to the *next* expert, I can usually ask him really good questions. I may not be able to get the truth, but I can get as close as humanly possible by deadline.
When I decide whether a news source is worth reading, the first thing I look for is whether they quote a single source, or get a reaction from a second source. Why should I waste my time reading an article that's wrong, when I can read an article that got its facts right? Why should anybody?
I once gave a journalism course and told my students to look up stories in the New York Times. For example, here's a science story http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/earth/14fuel.html Did they just take the promoter's claims at face value, or did they check with an independent expert?
One of the magazines I worked for would pay me $50 extra for every additional source I interviewed, up to about 2 or 3 sources. That reflected on the quality of the story, and the effort required, pretty well.
The big problem today is that the pay for these stories has gone down. You used to have reporters on staff who could spend a full week working on a major story. Now newspapers have laid off half their staff and doubled up the work for the remaing staff. Freelance writers used to get $1,000 or more for a 2,000-word story that would take a week, and give them time to read the literature and interview a lot of people. Now they're lucky to get $500, and sometimes $150. You can't interview a lot of people for $150.
Pacific Book Review, in its profile on amazon.com, describes itself as follows: "We review books for well known authors and emerging authors, and enabling many first time authors to reach the publishers with a recognizable review.
And they say on their web site http://www.pacificbookreview.com/Submit-A-Book.php
Your review will be posted on:
Pacific Book Review
Amazon.com
Barnes and Noble
Google Books
Ezine Articles
PolkaDotBanner.com
And who is Robert Louis Kemp anyway?
He can't be anybody important. He doesn't even have an entry in Wikipedia.
I always wondered if they would still work after you had an iridectomy. http://www.eyecharity.com/images/iridectomy_montage.jpg
You're right as far as you go, but you're ignoring the role of NAFTA in destroying Mexico's economy.
Government-subsidized U.S. farms destroyed the small Mexican corn farmers.
The big U.S. electrical construction companies, with their monopoly powers and government subsidies, came down and out-competed Mexican electrical contractors. I met a Mexican electrical contractor who came to New York (legally) because he couldn't make a living in Mexico any more. He said they didn't take bids any more, they told you how much they were going to pay.
If you believe that the free market is right or fair or efficient or natural law, then you should also believe in the mobility of labor. If our companies should be free to sell products and services in Mexico, and drive Mexican workers into unemployment, then by the same logic those Mexican workers should be free to come here and sell products and services in the U.S.
The problem with free trade agreements is that they give free trade to corporations, but they don't give free trade to workers.
You are in luck. I managed to find the reference.
"Work & Family," by Sue Shellenbarger, Wall Street Journal, 6 Sepember 1991, "New hire loses her job because of pregnancy."
Margaret Ahmad reported for work as medical claims examiner for Loyal American Life Insurance, Mobile, Alabama, told her boss she was 4 months pregnant, and was fired.
Ahmad intended to take only a week off, and the company never asked her how long she planned to be gone, said her attorney, Melissa Posey.
Kirk C. Shaw, attorney for Loyal American, said the company allows 90-day maternity leaves.
Loyal American argued that they would have to train her for five or six months, and then give her a 90-day maternity leave just when she was ready to start working on the job. So Loyal American felt she couldn't do the job. It was a "business necessity" defense.
Federal judge Richard W. Vollmer, Jr., ruled in July that Loyal American had a legitimate business reason for withdrawing its offer.
Ahmad won't appeal because of the cost of further litigation.
Posey said this was a close case. Other judges in other jurisdictions had decided similar cases the other way.
You are correct. Employment at will has a big footnote full of exceptions.
It's complicated, with federal, state and sometimes city regulations.
I do know of a case in which a woman was either not hired, or fired, because she was pregnant. She took it to court, and her case was rejected. (I can't find the citation, sorry.) I talked to the lawyer, and she thought they had a slam-dunk case, but they lost in court.
Oh, you had an employment contract. That's one of the fine-print exceptions to employment at will. You have my sympathy.
The free market is great if you have a skill that is critical to a business in which they make a lot of money. It's not so great when they don't need you any more.
as many will presumably say: See a lawyer.
While slashdot can give you eggcelent legal advice, It'll hit you in the face that you don't play dice with the important parts of your life.
When you do see a lawyer, you need to know two things: The law and the facts.
The facts include the details of how domain registration works. The lawyer may not know that. Readers of Slashdot may well know important information about domain registration that the lawyer can't easily get and would need to make the best decision about this situation.
The problem with dealing with employers is they can invent the most flimsy excuses (or just flat-out lies) to remove an employee, and there's little you can do to self-defend yourself. You really need the full weight of government and a court of law if you expect to win an unjustified termination lawsuit.
Why should they invent an excuse or lie? In the U.S., they can fire you for any reason at all, or no reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
(The exceptions are for government employees, employees with an employment contract, and union members. They can't fire you for reasons that are protected by discrimination law, like race, religion or gender.)
And "biologically plausible mechanism" is not an unscientific claim. You might want to brush up on science yourself.
Thank you, socially awkward Slashdot reader, for your gratuitous insult. I brush up on my science by reading NEJM, among other journals.
A "biologically plausible mechanism" is not 50% plus a feather. It's just a feather.
Scientists come up with a plausible hypothesis, and see whether there are any data to support it. (They wouldn't waste time investigating a hypothesis that *wasn't* plausible.) When the data don't support the hypothesis, then science doesn't support the hypothesis. It is unscientific to say that the hypothesis is true.
It's *plausible* that all diseases could be caused by subluxions of the spinal cord. But the data shows otherwise.
As the NEJM article I cited argued, the NVICP upheld some awards with *no* scientific evidence. I was wondering why the NVICP did that.
This is not how vaccination rewards are decided. They are a part of the special VAERS program which is decided by a "vaccine" court NVICP (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/). There are actually experts who decide compensation.
Yeah, that I understand, but what I don't understand is why the NVICP makes irrational decisions that favor the people who claim that their injury was caused by a "plausable" mechanism.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904
Unfortunately, in recent years the VICP seems to have turned its back on science. In 2005, Margaret Althen successfully claimed that a tetanus vaccine had caused her optic neuritis. Although there was no evidence to support her claim, the VICP ruled that if a petitioner proposed a biologically plausible mechanism by which a vaccine could cause harm, as well as a logical sequence of cause and effect, an award should be granted. The door opened by this and other rulings...
No case, however, represented a greater deviation from the VICP's original standards than that of Dorothy Werderitsh, who in 2006 successfully claimed that a hepatitis B vaccine had caused her multiple sclerosis. By the time of the ruling, several studies had shown that hepatitis B vaccine neither caused nor exacerbated the disease, and the Institute of Medicine had concluded that “evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis...."
What is this NVICP and why do they accept these unscientific claims of "biologically plausible mechanism"? Are they ignorant of science? Or are they required by the words of the legislation to accept claims like this?