Well, there's not much point in sending humans to Venus right now.
What would humans do in orbit around Venus that can't be done from a remote station here on earth? "Hello Mission Control, the Venesian atmosphere is cloudy, and I cannot see a thing. I am about to launch the Venus probe with it's IR/UV/Radio-scannerthingamagig. BTW, I am still stuck in this tin can. I haven't experienced gravity in over a year, and my bones are disintigrating. The air is stale, the food is boring and I am about to go crazy."
Before you even start thinking about sending someone to another planet, there's a zillion other things to think about first. How to build a ship, how to feed the crew, what are the long term effects of space travel, etc. We still have a ways to go. A Satellite could go there now.
Remove satellites can do it far cheaper then a manned mission. If we're going to send humans anywhere, let send them someplace where they could acually walk.
Well, Mars isn't necessarily more interesting, it's just more accessible.
We can see the surface of Mars pretty well, probes that we send to the surface Mars will survive for more then a few hours, and it's possible that humans may go to Mars in the next 20 years.
With Venus, sure she's pretty, but she'll turn you into a cinder really quickly.
It's unlikely that we will ever see proof. The documents always come from 'a confidential source'.
If the confidential source is exposed, some poor MS employees will be fired, sued, and probably dumped into Puget Sound with a lead weight around their ankles.
I'm just waiting for the day when all of these Aibo's get bored with filming their skateboarding, and start filming Aibos racing themselves in shopping carts and smashing themselves into a brick wall for kicks.
"Hey dude, you broke your left navigational antenna. DUDE, IT'S BROKEN. That's so funny dude! Yip yip!"
These pumpkin chuckers may be strong, but they're not strong enough to throw anything at the speed of sound.
Re:I was replying to an AC
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
but explain we why the servers at the canteen at work were dressed up too.
Same reason as the gas-station attendant... to have fun. Hell, a canteen can be a very boring place to work. You need all the fun you can get.
Re:I know this is an american forum...
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
Well, like everything, Halloween is in the eye of the beholder. It's what you make of it.
Halloween here IS way too commercialized, but that doesn't make Halloween a bad thing. There's a whole halloween subculture out there dedicated to creating cool halloween effects. The best costumes and the best decorations are the homemade ones.
If there's one thing that Europeans are good at it's resisting corporate culture (Well, ok, maybe mostly the Europeans who are 20+. I was shocked at the amount of American TV I saw while in Germany this summer...).
When Halloween becomes more popular in Europe, hopefully you'll be able to keep the commercialism in check. Turn off the TV, come up with your own traditions, and create your own flavor of Halloween...
Because like it or not, Halloween is in Europe to stay.
Re:What's everyone doing?
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
Thrift store: Wild crazy hawaiian shirt. I still have mine. it has naked hula dancers. Cheesy as hell.
Drug store: fishermans cap.
Service station: Cheap cigars
Drink beer. Get drunk.
"Drunk fisherman"
Re:I know this is an american forum...
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
but isn't halloween that night kids throw rotten eggs at your window (the "trick part") if you don't open of fake not to be home. That makes it hard not to participate because if you don't, you have to clean your house the next day. Fun eh?
This doesn't really happen. If it does happen, it's a prank: Done by some teenagers (Teens do not usually go trick-or-treating), it'll happen weather their's candy or not, it might happen any night of the year, not just halloween, it's usually something less damaging like toilet paper, and it's usually the house of someone you know (like a coworker or a teacher or the principal). In short, it's a prank. An annoying prank.
Most kids are too polite to pull tricks like this. If there's no candy, the kids usuall shrug their sholders and go on to the next house.
Re:I was replying to an AC
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
Heck today, at the gas-station I was served by a witch! Why? I just don't get it, it's not going to make me buy more gas or so.
You misunderstand. The witch didn't dress up to please you, and she didn't dress up to see you more gasoline. She dressed up for herself, perhaps for her friends at the station (No offsense, but you're a customer, not a friend), and perhaps for a party afterwards.
What's wrong with that? Let her have her fun.
Re:Because it's fun
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 3, Funny
The whole thing is just dumb for dumb unimaginative people who don't know how to have fun by themselves.
Thanks for being so 'fun'. With those dictionary references, I'm sure you're a riot at parties.
Another thing: why does society have to give you a reason to have fun and party and perhaps even dress up? What's wrong with doing it on some other day in the rest of the year when you're not being a sheep
So tell me, in the last year, how many times did you wake up one morning and say "Today, I'm going to dress up in a costume and go to work|school|to the park|whatever!". Let me guess... zero. And I wouldn't do it either. Why? Because if I was the only person wearing a costume, I'd feel like an idiot.
Look, Halloween gives me an excuse to dress up as a scarecrow and take my nephew out to get candy from the neighbors. We like it. It's fun. It's full of imagination and creative energy. I can't wait until I have my own kids and can take them out.
I love making my house look haunted. I like the toys, I like the special effects.
There is nothing wrong with communities dressing up and celebrating the same thing on the same day. Doing this does not make us 'sheep' any more then celebrating New Years on the same day. It's a fucking holiday.
Don't like it? Fine, don't do it. Nobody's forcing you. Now go back to your 'fun'...
You want sheep, try Valentines day. But leave my holiday the fuck alone.
Currently, gas taxes go to support maintaining and expanding the roadways.
I'd suspect that cities would simply siphon more funds from sales tax. most of this would probably go unseen by the average citizen.
Gas taxes only pay for part of the roads. The rest of it comes from federal and state sources (From your federal and state income tax). If you check into your county & city roads, you'll find that the majority of projects are paid for by non-gas-related sales tax.
Because it's fun
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Gee whiz, don't be so negative.
You don't need a day off to have a holiday. Some holidays are just for fun. Are all of the holidays in your country _serious_ holidays? Don't you just want to go out and play sometimes?
Not everyone in America celebrates halloween so extremely. It's mostly celebrated by people 35 and under (with many exceptions), and is a big holiday for many college kids, geeks, artists, and people who veer from the mainstream.
I'll give you a perspective from someone in the San Francisco, California area. Halloween is a holiday because:
- It's fun - It's creative. I get to exercise my creative juices by decorate my house in spiderwebs, skeltons and blacklights. Next year I'm planning Robotic flying ghosts in my front yard. - It's an excuse to dress up - The children love it - It's an excuse to party. Halloween is by far the biggest holiday in the San Francisco area. In the city, you'll have parties that stretch for 10 blocks, with tens-of-thousands of people dancing and having a good time. - Day of the dead is tomorrow (Big holiday in Mexico and here in California).
Now, there are historical roots to the trick-or-treating, and the dress up, and pumpkins, and the day of the dead, but I won't go into that now. (Wait, looks like you're from the UK. You should know the roots already!)
Let me tell you, those Exodus rooms are BIG, and oddly shaped. It's actually easy to get lost in there.
Just over a year ago, I was part of the IT team to move 50 computers from Exodus to another facility
We had all these computers in a cage in Big Room A. We needed to get all of the equipment to the loading dock, which was on the other side of this huge building.
So there we were, by the back entrance. Got the truck up to the loading dock, loaded some equipment. Then it was time to go back to the cage and get the second batch.
The guard opened the door for us, pointed us down one hallway, and shut the door. *click* Door's locked. We walked down the hallway, opened the door, and entered the cage room.
"Wait," said my friend "Let me make sure this is the right..." *click*
Like in a bad horror movie, the last person into the room let the door slam shut. So we were stuck.
So we walked around for a few minutes, trying to find our way.
"Wait, wait. We're going the wrong way!" said my friend, who had only been here once, and in a different part of the building.
So we turned around and traced our way back to the first door. The door, of course, is locked. We knocked. No answer. We pounded the door. Still no answer. No intercom. No guard to open the door. The door could be opened in a fire, but that would set off the alarms, halon, whatever. This wasn't a fire. We were just... lost... and embarrassed...
So we tried a second hallway, hoping it would be a more direct route to the other door.
"It's this way" my friend said, "I think..."
After walking 100 ft down the hallway, turning left and walking down another hallway and turning past a few more corners, we came to a 4-way intersection, and NOTHING looked familiar. Just a long 100-ft hallway of identical cages in each direction. No landmarks, no maps... blank walls at the end of every hallway.
Being that it was almost Halloween, I half expected our numbers to start droping one-by-one.
So we proceded down a random hallway and came to a blank wall. No door. Turned around , tried another hallway. Blank wall.
"Where'd the fucking door go?"
"I don't know. Maybe we should split up."
"Shuttup. That's what they do in the fucking horror movies."
Eventually we found our way, and everyone survived... except I smashed my foot by dropping a 100-lb loading ramp 2 feet onto it.
Refusing is always an option. If the boss wants to fire you for having a life, you're a moron to continue working for them. Sounds like you were in a losing job (as were most dotcom jobs) and just didn't want to leave because of the big stock carrot dangled in front of you.
The carrot was part of it. But mostly I didn't want to be looking for a new job in today's crappy economy, so I stayed with it. After a while, I started refusing new projects and requested that they hire more help, or at least reorganize the priorities to something sane. A few months later my complaints, I was part of the staff that got laid off, probably in (small?) part to me refusing the new work...
Sucks, but it's probably better to be out here. I feel even more sorry for the people who kept their jobs, and now have quite a heavy workload. Or maybe I'm just in denial...
- You can still get bonuses based on merit and goals. Depends on your union. My partner's union just disallowed this. Can you believe that?
Yeah, that sucks. We had a similar proposal in our group, but it didn't pass. It's a common contraversy in unions...
Yeah, that's why my girlfriend paid %15 of her salary to her union. And after she got fired, she STILL owed the union money.
Smells like a Limbaugh...
As I said, I know many people in unions and trade associations: grocery workers, nurses, teachers, tech workers, doctors, and have NEVER heard anything remotely close to 15%.
Here's some data from a non-union-friendly org that shows that a typical union due is $200-500 a year: http://www.epf.org/research/newsletters/1996/ff2 -1 1.asp
The highest deduction that I've heard of was 5%. This was for the Longshoremans Union, they used that 5% to provide healthcare, life insurance, unemployment benefits, build affordable housing developements (nice developments) for the members in the center of San Francisco, and provide a great pension for all retired workers.
Yes, they probably used some of it for partisan politics. And yes, for some jobs it's a compulsory union. Not things I agree with, but the union is the only thing that makes the job bearable. Without the union, longshore workers would have the shittiest job in town.
Alot of the Slashdot Libertarians will post their negative views on unions (And I agree with some of those negative points), so I'll post a positive view.
I'm actually amazed that IT wokers don't organize. IT workers are willing to bend over backwards for their bosses: 15 hour work days, no weekends, cancelling vacations, endless workloads, changing goals. You would rarely see this in a union shop.
I used to work at one of the only unionized IT shops in the US: www.igc.org (Some of you may remember IGC from the early-web days. We provided usenet, web, and mailinglist services to nonprofits and NGOs). I served as a union rep for 1 year.
After 2.5 years in a union shop and 2 years at a non-union-shop, I prefer the Union. Here's why:
- At the union, we all worked 40 hours a week, sometimes more to meet the deadlines. I rarely worked weekends. We got more pay for pager duty.
- Most union members get Wage pay vs Salary (but this isn't specific to the union). More then 40 hours = overtime pay. This financial incentive encourages management to hire enough staff. With Salary pay, it doesn't matter if you work 70 hours vs 40 hours, you get paid the same. Management has a financial incentive to squeeze you for as much time as they can get
- At the dotcom, I worked 50-70 hours a week. Refusing the work was not an option. Even though I made 20% more money at the dotcom job, I made LESS PER HOUR then at the Union.
- Equitable pay rates. None of this "John and Jane both do the same job and have the same experience, but John makes $30K more then Jane because he was hired during the dotcom boom" bullshit.
- You can still get more pay with more experience
- You can still get bonuses based on merit and goals.
- You can have a Union rep on the board of directors/management team/leadership circle . None of this "Managment is switching all of your tasks. You need to have project Y done by next week! Now get going!" crap that I see in typical businesses.
- The union reps have special legal protections in most states. A union rep can go to the head of the company, and say that their plan is doomed to failure. In a typical business, you might get fired or disciplined for 'subordination'. That can't happen to you if you are a union rep (In most US States).
- We had monthly union meetings to make sure that our shop was on track
- Union reps were elected in a fair, anonymous, democratic process
Note: Most of the above points can occur in any business. But it's rare unless the workers organize.
At the same time, none of the above issues are mandatory to a union. It's your union, and your membership can decide what it wants to do. You can be as strict or as flexible as you want.
3. A ghost. I picked up one of those white skeleton heads (filled with foam) from the store, and got some cheese cloth from Lowes. I'll string together a couple coat hangers, stick the head on top, throw the cheese cloth all around, and hang it w/ a black light underneath.
I think some people apply hairspray to their ghosts. THe hairspray makes the cloth glow more under blacklight.
I'm looking into making a Flying Crank Ghost next year. There are dozens of plans online. It's a ghost-marionette. The attached machine gives a real natural-looking movement to your ghost. The project doesn't look very hard, and it won't take alot of space to store. Just need to clean up my workshop:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's not much point in sending humans to Venus right now.
What would humans do in orbit around Venus that can't be done from a remote station here on earth?
"Hello Mission Control, the Venesian atmosphere is cloudy, and I cannot see a thing. I am about to launch the Venus probe with it's IR/UV/Radio-scannerthingamagig. BTW, I am still stuck in this tin can. I haven't experienced gravity in over a year, and my bones are disintigrating. The air is stale, the food is boring and I am about to go crazy."
Before you even start thinking about sending someone to another planet, there's a zillion other things to think about first. How to build a ship, how to feed the crew, what are the long term effects of space travel, etc. We still have a ways to go. A Satellite could go there now.
Remove satellites can do it far cheaper then a manned mission. If we're going to send humans anywhere, let send them someplace where they could acually walk.
Well, Mars isn't necessarily more interesting, it's just more accessible.
We can see the surface of Mars pretty well, probes that we send to the surface Mars will survive for more then a few hours, and it's possible that humans may go to Mars in the next 20 years.
With Venus, sure she's pretty, but she'll turn you into a cinder really quickly.
When I try to write my Representative, I am directed to http://www.house.gov/writerep/
which works fine with Mozilla.
No funny IE tags, no funny forms, just a classic, simple webform.
The fact that Microsoft acknowledged them as an "internal memo with comments added" counts for nothing?
I've heard the rumors, but I asked for proof. Rehashing the same old rumors is not proof.
If you provide a link with proof, I will shut up.
There's really no proof that the first set of Halloween Documents were truely an internal MS document either.
It's unlikely that we will ever see proof. The documents always come from 'a confidential source'.
If the confidential source is exposed, some poor MS employees will be fired, sued, and probably dumped into Puget Sound with a lead weight around their ankles.
I only know the comics (They were pee-in-your-pants great. I still have them in the garage).
Never saw the TV show... the poor, poor moon...
They tried this one. Chairface Chippendale once tried to write his name on the moon, but he only got the first 3 letters before running out of room.
And then The Tick kicked his ass...
And then the Man Eating Cow showed up... but that was after the Ninjas....
Or something...
Skateboards, eh?
I'm just waiting for the day when all of these Aibo's get bored with filming their skateboarding, and start filming Aibos racing themselves in shopping carts and smashing themselves into a brick wall for kicks.
"Hey dude, you broke your left navigational antenna. DUDE, IT'S BROKEN. That's so funny dude! Yip yip!"
Do those urinals have CAMERAS strategically attached to them????? Creepy...
Well yeah, for security, duh! I mean, look at the teeth on that thing...
These pumpkin chuckers may be strong, but they're not strong enough to throw anything at the speed of sound.
but explain we why the servers at the canteen at work were dressed up too.
Same reason as the gas-station attendant... to have fun. Hell, a canteen can be a very boring place to work. You need all the fun you can get.
Well, like everything, Halloween is in the eye of the beholder. It's what you make of it.
Halloween here IS way too commercialized, but that doesn't make Halloween a bad thing. There's a whole halloween subculture out there dedicated to creating cool halloween effects. The best costumes and the best decorations are the homemade ones.
If there's one thing that Europeans are good at it's resisting corporate culture (Well, ok, maybe mostly the Europeans who are 20+. I was shocked at the amount of American TV I saw while in Germany this summer...).
When Halloween becomes more popular in Europe, hopefully you'll be able to keep the commercialism in check. Turn off the TV, come up with your own traditions, and create your own flavor of Halloween...
Because like it or not, Halloween is in Europe to stay.
Thrift store: Wild crazy hawaiian shirt. I still have mine. it has naked hula dancers. Cheesy as hell.
Drug store: fishermans cap.
Service station: Cheap cigars
Drink beer. Get drunk.
"Drunk fisherman"
but isn't halloween that night kids throw rotten eggs at your window (the "trick part") if you don't open of fake not to be home. That makes it hard not to participate because if you don't, you have to clean your house the next day. Fun eh?
This doesn't really happen. If it does happen, it's a prank: Done by some teenagers (Teens do not usually go trick-or-treating), it'll happen weather their's candy or not, it might happen any night of the year, not just halloween, it's usually something less damaging like toilet paper, and it's usually the house of someone you know (like a coworker or a teacher or the principal). In short, it's a prank. An annoying prank.
Most kids are too polite to pull tricks like this. If there's no candy, the kids usuall shrug their sholders and go on to the next house.
Heck today, at the gas-station I was served by a witch! Why? I just don't get it, it's not going to make me buy more gas or so.
You misunderstand. The witch didn't dress up to please you, and she didn't dress up to see you more gasoline. She dressed up for herself, perhaps for her friends at the station (No offsense, but you're a customer, not a friend), and perhaps for a party afterwards.
What's wrong with that? Let her have her fun.
The whole thing is just dumb for dumb unimaginative people who don't know how to have fun by themselves.
Thanks for being so 'fun'. With those dictionary references, I'm sure you're a riot at parties.
Another thing: why does society have to give you a reason to have fun and party and perhaps even dress up? What's wrong with doing it on some other day in the rest of the year when you're not being a sheep
So tell me, in the last year, how many times did you wake up one morning and say "Today, I'm going to dress up in a costume and go to work|school|to the park|whatever!". Let me guess... zero. And I wouldn't do it either. Why? Because if I was the only person wearing a costume, I'd feel like an idiot.
Look, Halloween gives me an excuse to dress up as a scarecrow and take my nephew out to get candy from the neighbors. We like it. It's fun. It's full of imagination and creative energy. I can't wait until I have my own kids and can take them out.
I love making my house look haunted. I like the toys, I like the special effects.
There is nothing wrong with communities dressing up and celebrating the same thing on the same day. Doing this does not make us 'sheep' any more then celebrating New Years on the same day. It's a fucking holiday.
Don't like it? Fine, don't do it. Nobody's forcing you. Now go back to your 'fun'...
You want sheep, try Valentines day. But leave my holiday the fuck alone.
Currently, gas taxes go to support maintaining and expanding the roadways.
I'd suspect that cities would simply siphon more funds from sales tax. most of this would probably go unseen by the average citizen.
Gas taxes only pay for part of the roads. The rest of it comes from federal and state sources (From your federal and state income tax). If you check into your county & city roads, you'll find that the majority of projects are paid for by non-gas-related sales tax.
Gee whiz, don't be so negative.
You don't need a day off to have a holiday. Some holidays are just for fun. Are all of the holidays in your country _serious_ holidays? Don't you just want to go out and play sometimes?
Not everyone in America celebrates halloween so extremely. It's mostly celebrated by people 35 and under (with many exceptions), and is a big holiday for many college kids, geeks, artists, and people who veer from the mainstream.
I'll give you a perspective from someone in the San Francisco, California area. Halloween is a holiday because:
- It's fun
- It's creative. I get to exercise my creative juices by decorate my house in spiderwebs, skeltons and blacklights. Next year I'm planning Robotic flying ghosts in my front yard.
- It's an excuse to dress up
- The children love it
- It's an excuse to party. Halloween is by far the biggest holiday in the San Francisco area. In the city, you'll have parties that stretch for 10 blocks, with tens-of-thousands of people dancing and having a good time.
- Day of the dead is tomorrow (Big holiday in Mexico and here in California).
Now, there are historical roots to the trick-or-treating, and the dress up, and pumpkins, and the day of the dead, but I won't go into that now. (Wait, looks like you're from the UK. You should know the roots already!)
Seen at on an ISP page:
:)
"If your Internet Connection is down, please contact us by email."
Let me tell you, those Exodus rooms are BIG, and oddly shaped. It's actually easy to get lost in there.
... lost... and embarrassed...
Just over a year ago, I was part of the IT team to move 50 computers from Exodus to another facility
We had all these computers in a cage in Big Room A. We needed to get all of the equipment to the loading dock, which was on the other side of this huge building.
So there we were, by the back entrance. Got the truck up to the loading dock, loaded some equipment. Then it was time to go back to the cage and get the second batch.
The guard opened the door for us, pointed us down one hallway, and shut the door. *click* Door's locked. We walked down the hallway, opened the door, and entered the cage room.
"Wait," said my friend "Let me make sure this is the right..." *click*
Like in a bad horror movie, the last person into the room let the door slam shut. So we were stuck.
So we walked around for a few minutes, trying to find our way.
"Wait, wait. We're going the wrong way!" said my friend, who had only been here once, and in a different part of the building.
So we turned around and traced our way back to the first door. The door, of course, is locked. We knocked. No answer. We pounded the door. Still no
answer. No intercom. No guard to open the door. The door could be opened in a fire, but that would set off the alarms, halon, whatever. This wasn't
a fire. We were just
So we tried a second hallway, hoping it would be a more direct route to the other door.
"It's this way" my friend said, "I think..."
After walking 100 ft down the hallway, turning left and walking down another hallway and turning past a few more corners, we came to a 4-way intersection, and NOTHING looked familiar. Just a long 100-ft hallway of identical cages in each direction. No landmarks, no maps... blank walls at the end of every hallway.
Being that it was almost Halloween, I half expected our numbers to start droping one-by-one.
So we proceded down a random hallway and came to a blank wall. No door. Turned around , tried another hallway. Blank wall.
"Where'd the fucking door go?"
"I don't know. Maybe we should split up."
"Shuttup. That's what they do in the fucking horror movies."
Eventually we found our way, and everyone survived... except I smashed my foot by dropping a 100-lb loading ramp 2 feet onto it.
But those were good times.
Refusing is always an option. If the boss wants to fire you for having a life, you're a moron to continue working for them. Sounds like you were in a losing job (as were most dotcom jobs) and just didn't want to leave because of the big stock carrot dangled in front of you.
The carrot was part of it. But mostly I didn't want to be looking for a new job in today's crappy economy, so I stayed with it. After a while, I started refusing new projects and requested that they hire more help, or at least reorganize the priorities to something sane. A few months later my complaints, I was part of the staff that got laid off, probably in (small?) part to me refusing the new work...
Sucks, but it's probably better to be out here. I feel even more sorry for the people who kept their jobs, and now have quite a heavy workload. Or maybe I'm just in denial...
- You can still get bonuses based on merit and goals.
Depends on your union. My partner's union just disallowed this. Can you believe that?
Yeah, that sucks. We had a similar proposal in our group, but it didn't pass. It's a common contraversy in unions...
Yeah, that's why my girlfriend paid %15 of her salary to her union. And after she got fired, she STILL owed the union money.
2 -1 1.asp
Smells like a Limbaugh...
As I said, I know many people in unions and trade associations: grocery workers, nurses, teachers, tech workers, doctors, and have NEVER heard anything remotely close to 15%.
Here's some data from a non-union-friendly org that shows that a typical union due is $200-500 a year:
http://www.epf.org/research/newsletters/1996/ff
The highest deduction that I've heard of was 5%. This was for the Longshoremans Union, they used that 5% to provide healthcare, life insurance, unemployment benefits, build affordable housing developements (nice developments) for the members in the center of San Francisco, and provide a great pension for all retired workers.
Yes, they probably used some of it for partisan politics. And yes, for some jobs it's a compulsory union. Not things I agree with, but the union is the only thing that makes the job bearable. Without the union, longshore workers would have the shittiest job in town.
They organized brilliantly. More power to them.
You'll work for scale, and give a (large) percent of your income to the union
I know dozens of people in unions. Union dues are typically 0.5% of your base pay. That's hardly a 'large percent'.
Alot of the Slashdot Libertarians will post their negative views on unions (And I agree with some of those negative points), so I'll post a positive view.
I'm actually amazed that IT wokers don't organize. IT workers are willing to bend over backwards for their bosses: 15 hour work days, no weekends, cancelling vacations, endless workloads, changing goals. You would rarely see this in a union shop.
I used to work at one of the only unionized IT shops in the US: www.igc.org (Some of you may remember IGC from the early-web days. We provided usenet, web, and mailinglist services to nonprofits and NGOs). I served as a union rep for 1 year.
After 2.5 years in a union shop and 2 years at a non-union-shop, I prefer the Union. Here's why:
- At the union, we all worked 40 hours a week, sometimes more to meet the deadlines. I rarely worked weekends. We got more pay for pager duty.
- Most union members get Wage pay vs Salary (but this isn't specific to the union). More then 40 hours = overtime pay. This financial incentive encourages management to hire enough staff. With Salary pay, it doesn't matter if you work 70 hours vs 40 hours, you get paid the same. Management has a financial incentive to squeeze you for as much time as they can get
- At the dotcom, I worked 50-70 hours a week. Refusing the work was not an option. Even though I made 20% more money at the dotcom job, I made LESS PER HOUR then at the Union.
- Equitable pay rates. None of this "John and Jane both do the same job and have the same experience, but John makes $30K more then Jane because he was hired during the dotcom boom" bullshit.
- You can still get more pay with more experience
- You can still get bonuses based on merit and goals.
- You can have a Union rep on the board of directors/management team/leadership circle . None of this "Managment is switching all of your tasks. You need to have project Y done by next week! Now get going!" crap that I see in typical businesses.
- The union reps have special legal protections in most states. A union rep can go to the head of the company, and say that their plan is doomed to failure. In a typical business, you might get fired or disciplined for 'subordination'. That can't happen to you if you are a union rep (In most US States).
- We had monthly union meetings to make sure that our shop was on track
- Union reps were elected in a fair, anonymous, democratic process
Note: Most of the above points can occur in any business. But it's rare unless the workers organize.
At the same time, none of the above issues are mandatory to a union. It's your union, and your membership can decide what it wants to do. You can be as strict or as flexible as you want.
3. A ghost. I picked up one of those white skeleton heads (filled with foam) from the store, and got some cheese cloth from Lowes. I'll string together a couple coat hangers, stick the head on top, throw the cheese cloth all around, and hang it w/ a black light underneath.
:)
I think some people apply hairspray to their ghosts. THe hairspray makes the cloth glow more under blacklight.
I'm looking into making a Flying Crank Ghost next year. There are dozens of plans online. It's a ghost-marionette. The attached machine gives a real natural-looking movement to your ghost. The project doesn't look very hard, and it won't take alot of space to store. Just need to clean up my workshop