I have Little Snitch installed, and every website I've designed with iWeb phones home to mac.com before a page will load, even when the site is not hosted at mac.com.
If you block mac.com with Little Snitch, you cannot navigate to your domain. Somehow the code in the sites generated by iWeb is passing some kind of information to Apple's servers and tracking every access by every user to every website ever designed with iWeb.
This cannot be accidental or an oversight, because this must generate huge amounts of traffic to Apple's servers, and this traffic costs them money and bandwidth to receive & transmit. They must be doing something with all that traffic data.
go live in the 3rd world for a while. I am an American (USA) who lived the in Caribbean for 19 years before moving back. Taxes were low, because collection was virtually non-existent, but government services were equally invisible. You had to bribe people to get work and residence permits, the police never came when you called them and it took forever to get a telephone, a driver's license or a post office box. Everyone hand delivered their utility payments for electricity and water because if you didn't, you could not prove you had paid your bill and would be disconnected.
Life without government is even more fun after a Cat 5 hurricane and the looters and robbers come out to prey on the weak - because at that point, it's the government that everyone is looking to for salvation.
Yes, America, land of opportunity and privatized... prisons. We've been knocking government since Ronald Reagan (who was a government employee for a significant portion of his career) but the truth is, when you let the private sector run government services for profit, most people suffer. If you want roads on which the police can drive to you when you call, guess what? That costs money. We have some of that "hire your own government services" crap over here, and it mostly sucks for most people, while benefiting the wealthy few.
I respect the career civil servants who are actively trying to make a positive difference (and the majority of government employees ARE) while being bashed and slandered by media, politicians and taxpaying whiners. Is it perfect? No. But if you want low taxes, move to Somalia and carry your RPG into Starbucks anywhere you like. Oh, there's no Starbucks? Maybe because there's no stable government....
Software gets developed for paying customers. I work for a web development company. When the client is waiting and there's money to be made, no effort is spared. Once the app is launched, there's no incentive to update anything, even if its broke - everyone's already started working on the next paying job.
XP is elderly. Vista just plain sucked. Win7 is where the money is - MS's attitude is that if an older product is giving you fits, don't patch it, punt it, and buy something shiny new...
(note that I don't necessarily agree with this approach, it's just 21st century "business ethics")
In free and democratic societies, an individual deciding on his or her own to leak classified information is a subversion of that very democratic process.
How about, In free and democratic societies, a corrupt individual or group who decide to classify information in order to cover their crimes is a subversion of that very democratic process.
From my observation, the latter occurs much more often than the former. Given government crimes of late, how does a free and democratic society overcome corruption when evidence of same is declared classified information?
What goes around comes around, as they say in America. One of the greatest bailouts for a company in history came in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration authorised a CIA-backed coup in Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owned by the British government, had been expropriated and nationalised in 1951 by the unanimous vote of Iran's parliament. The '53 coup evicted prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq and installed Shah Reza Pahlevi, the creature of the West's oil companies, with full dictatorial powers. The AIOC got back 40 per cent of its old concession and became an internationally owned consortium, renamed... British Petroleum.
In short, those in power shouldn't do anything they might not want to later read about on the front page of the news. And, indeed, those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it - and it's hard to even remember the past if its classified.
I say release the emails and let the chips fall where they may.
To be honest, I was being sarcastic. The point I was making in a roundabout way was that a suit against Google has as much merit as a suit against Apple.
Apple does not have anywhere near a market monopoly in smartphones. iThing is available on exactly ONE carrier in the US, and Apple's total deployed smartphone marketshare is still dwarfed by RIM.
I am unclear as to what position Apple is abusing? Access to an innovative form of advertising within their iThing ecosystem - using mobile apps instead of annoying links or pop-ups?
There is nothing stopping RIM, Google, Nokia, et al, from doing in-app-based mobile platform advertising - on their respective platforms.
RIM has an app store, Nokia does, Android does too. There's nothing stopping any of them, or HP with their upcoming WebOS, from trying to emulate Apple's approach.
I seriously doubt that any of these mobile space players would let Apple's cat shit in their sandbox, and the opposite is also true. Litigation will only make Apple's lawyers richer.
Personally, I HATE advertising and what it has done to human culture. It's every-freaking-where. Before 1890 advertising was informational. Now it's confrontational, in-your-face-tional. "Rolling Stones Live - brought to you by Depends and Viagra!"
That being said, in the current legal and cultural environment, Apple has every right to control advertising within their iThing ecosystem. If this is a bad idea, it will fail, Apple will lose money, and they will move on to something else.
So, Apple invents in-app-based mobile platform advertising to go along with an entire ecosystem enabling them to share the profits with their developers as traditional media dinosaurs are dying a slow technical death, but the FTC is going to try to restrain Apple in the beloved "free market"?
When is the FTC going to investigate Google for having a near monopoly on internet search advertising?
I bet Apple wins this case - they will only have a monopoly on app-based advertising within their own product platform.
You will still see Google's and others' ads when you are browsing the web on your iThing, unless you turn it off in Safari 5 - and what user is going to complain about that? Bully for Apple for sticking their finger in Google's eye.
Combined RIM + Android smartphone sales exceed Apple's market share, so sorry, no monopoly. iThing is available for one carrier in the US, RIM + Android are available on all carriers.
I will admit that Apple has a monopoly on innovative smartphone ecosystems, because none of the others have successfully emulated Apple's low cost hardware, high manufacturing quality, imaginative OS and proprietary lock-in. The App Store is just the icing on the cake, or rather, the sizzle on the steak.
Apple's relentless cost reduction keeps their competitors off balance. The first $199 smartphone was the iPhone 3G, after the iPhone 3GS was released. The latest $99 smartphone is the iPhone 3GS, repriced as the iPhone 4 was released.
Personally, I am not paying $120 a month to use an iThing, even if it walks on water. Obviously, a lot of other people will, even if call quality is inconsistent at best. The allure of the shiny.
HP is moving to duplicate this success with the purchase of Palm's WebOS, so there is hope for more competition. I suspect that HP will eventually give Apple a run for their money if their WebOS devices aren't just crappy mobile versions of their flimsy consumer gimcracks. (Thanks, Carly Fiorina, for ruining a once-great American engineering powerhouse! Hope you do better for the state of California...)
If IOS were available as a product for other manufacturers' hardware and began significantly encroaching on RIM or Android's OS turf, the FTC might have an anti-trust case à la Microsoft 1998. Otherwise, any impartial observer can see that this case is completely without merit.
Does Google let other advertisers inject ads into their search results? No.
Does NBC let CBS run CBS-placed ads during NBC's TV or radio programming? No.
This is what the FTC (and the Adobe / Google whiners) are saying to Apple: you have to let anyone's cat shit in your sandbox. Well, guess what? That's just not going to fly in court.
The real loser in all this is Microsoft - a tragic waste of a formerly omnipotent money machine, now reduced to chasing a mobile marketplace which is leaving behind the desktop (truck?) paradigm at the speed of light, sucking Dell along in its wake.
along with "10 Minutes with The Residents", "Yello: I Love You" and "The Mentors: Get Up and Die" (the worst biker band ever).
A friend of mine worked for Storer Cable, and we would drive his cable truck out to a cable pedestal in the middle of nowhere, get totally baked and watch Night Flight on a 12" Trinitron test monitor...
Apple makes 40% margins on their 5% market share of computers. They also make 35% margins on their 20% market share of mobile smartphones. Apple makes a quality product at a significant profit. Their stock is making people rich. All HP & Dell do is piss people off with crappy consumer products and ignorant customer service. HP & Dell dominate the business server / workstation market, with boring 6% margins.
more like, if they don't want you in your job, fuck you. i am going through something like this now. i've been with the same company for four years. 1st two years, exemplary reviews, good raises, placement on fast track to management.
while waiting for assignment, an offer to move to another state to run a project. sounds good, another raise, good reviews, etc, then the mid-level manager leaves that office and is replaced by a total fucking idiot.
she winds up the GM, making trivial things look catastrophic. she alienates clients and blows up a multi-million dollar project, blowing a big hole in the division budget. now they need to reduce costs and staff, so they start to find things "wrong" with my performance, because I am one of the better paid staff. they could have just come to me and said "we're having budget problems, how about moving to another state". instead its a 90 day warning right before (ONE HOUR BEFORE) i am going on my first vacation in almost two years.
I lived outside the US for 19 years before moving back. I read Dilbert and laughed because things like that don't happen in real life, right? WRONG - there are really dangerously psychotic people who would have been bullies in high school, now they are bullies in the office.
Even our most important client HATES this woman - exact quote from their division manager "if she treats her employees the way she treats us, we feel sorry for you..."
I have found another job, and at least half of the staff are looking. all hell's gonna break loose, but my work is done here. it is sad, because I was told over and over again that I had a bright future with the company, and it is a good company to work for, but not for this person.
I dont know what the moral is, or what could be done to protect people from this kind of nonsense.
Why does anybody even listen to Steve any more? Just because he's first to market? It's not like 8,000 other monkeys didn't have the idea for the iPhone before he did. He just got it to market first. BIG DEAL.
To quote Mr. Jobs, "Real artists ship". $99 for a smartphone? It's expensive? You know of a cheaper one, equally capable? To paraphrase, bullshit artists bullshit, real artists ship..
People listen to Steve because he delivers the goods.
These "giant plumes" are total hyperbole. A few miles is NOTHING in the context of a body of water the size of the Gulf of Mexico.
Well, hey then, nothing to worry 'bout at all. I'm sure the same was true at Chernoybl. Those whales and dolphins have echolocation, they can just swim around the oil. Why even bother cleaning it up - after all, it's only "a few miles of oil" floating around...
Except, it's going all end up somewhere unpleasant. The flow has not abated. It's likely ten times the volume being reported. A month from now, they'll still be struggling to stop the flow. The technology to "fix" this does not exist.
Why is BP still in charge of this mess? Why isn't the US Navy using the same tech to fix this problem that they used to tap undersea communication cables? We're paying for all the secret military tech - time to pull it out of the closet and turn it on.
Keep in mind that you have to wear a hazmat suit to handle the oil, as well as the dispersants, due to their toxicity. People who cleaned up Exxon Valdez are still suffering the ill heath effects of exposure to petroleum and dispersants, 20 years later. This is not the open ocean, its a gulf. Nobody knows how dispersants will work a mile below the surface - they're designed to work on the surface of the water. This is the world's biggest fucked-up science experiment, with disastrous consequences for getting it wrong.
Where will all this stuff end up? Whether it sinks to the bottom of the gulf or washes ashore, it ends up in your water, killing your food, putting fumes into the air you breathe. A year from now, gulf-coast property values will have plummeted to zero, all recreational and fishing activities will completely cease and the Gulf of Mexico will resemble a clogged toilet. ONE THIRD of fish consumed in the US originates in the coastal waters of the gulf - those wetlands are not coming back in our lifetimes.
We are not being told the truth about any aspect of this disaster, because the reporters (media, government, business) think they can avert a panic by keeping people ignorant. This is the greatest ecological disaster to ever hit the Earth, capiche?
This is going to be THE issue of the next presidential election. It has the capacity to wreck the US Economy. You are entitled to your opinion, so let's check back in a year from now and see where things stand.
In the development shop where I work, the project managers love Big Bang Theory, but the developers don't think it's funny at all. Nobody likes seeing their ox being gored...
Well, after Apple sold HP a load of iPods, they lowered the price so that HP was stuck selling at the old price, or the new price at a loss... that was a classic RDF execution....
Absolutely. The immigration issue would end tomorrow if a felony charge for hiring illegals applied to businesses and individuals alike. Direct your anger to your local and federal elected representatives. Wonder why Arizona didn't enforce THAT law instead...?
There are illegal immigrants in the US because everyone from rich people to meatpacking companies like to exploit cheap labor. It also provides a straw man for the right to knock down over and over again. At the end of the day, who's gonna weed whack your lawn if there's a $50,000 fine for hiring illegals and they all left to find work elsewhere?
this article has more SF douchery. A good friend of mine was a paramedic for the city of SFO. Her ambulance was broadsided and her back was injured, and she was let go and had to fight for severance.
She knew more than one firefighter who was injured on the job and was let go with minimal compensation, and ended up homeless in the Tenderloin district.
Unless you are one of the six-figure privileged, you need to watch your back as a city of San Francisco employee...
From the San Francisco Chronicle this week:
More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco's nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year - a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade.
The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn't include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions.
The pay data obtained by The Chronicle show that many of the high earners bolstered their base pay with overtime and "other pay," a category that includes payouts for unused vacation days and extra money for working late-night shifts.
Leading 2009's $100,000 Club was the Police Department's Charles Keohane, a deputy chief who retired midyear.
His total payout was $516,118, city records show, the bulk of which came from cashing out stored-up vacation, sick days and comp time. Several other police employees who changed rank or retired also saw their annual earnings swell.
When asked how he felt about landing in the No. 1 spot, Keohane joked, "Not so good, if it's going to get my name in the paper."
The 36-year SFPD veteran, whose last assignment was head of administration, said much of that pay was taken out in taxes. "I helped reduce the deficit," he said.
The average city worker salary in San Francisco is $93,000 before benefits, according to Deputy City Controller Monique Zmuda. The data take into account everyone from park gardeners and street cleaners to attorneys and technology specialists.
Almost 100 city employees made $200,000 or more in 2009; six bumped past $300,000 when overtime and other cash-outs were included. Muni chief's base pay
Only one city employee had a base salary topping $300,000. Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, made $332,489.
Mayor Gavin Newsom had a base salary of $250,903 in 2009, which put him 29th on the list of best-paid city employees.
The ballooning number of highly paid workers is driven by several factors, including inflation, a persistent reliance on overtime and generous contracts in a city known for its politically potent unions.
The city also negotiated a deal to give raises to some workers who agreed to pick up a portion of their pension contributions, City Controller Ben Rosenfield said. That arrangement pushed almost 2,000 city employees above the $100,000 mark in recent years, he said.
In years past, the $100,000 Club included large numbers of Muni operators, transit supervisors, firefighters, police officers and sheriff's deputies who padded their paychecks with hundreds of hours of overtime, paid out at a rate of time-and-a-half.
But a 2008 rule capped most employees' overtime to 30 percent of base pay, in effect spreading out overtime opportunities to more employees, Zmuda said. That and other efforts to curtail overtime appear to be working, with payments projected to drop to $139.8 million this fiscal year, down from $142.1 million last year and $167.7 million the year before, according to the controller's office.
In the fiscal year that ended in June 2009, city salaries accounted for $2.5 billion of the $6.6 billion budget. That does not include the cost of benefits.
Faced with a $483 million deficit heading into the new fiscal year that
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I have Little Snitch installed, and every website I've designed with iWeb phones home to mac.com before a page will load, even when the site is not hosted at mac.com.
If you block mac.com with Little Snitch, you cannot navigate to your domain. Somehow the code in the sites generated by iWeb is passing some kind of information to Apple's servers and tracking every access by every user to every website ever designed with iWeb.
This cannot be accidental or an oversight, because this must generate huge amounts of traffic to Apple's servers, and this traffic costs them money and bandwidth to receive & transmit. They must be doing something with all that traffic data.
go live in the 3rd world for a while. I am an American (USA) who lived the in Caribbean for 19 years before moving back. Taxes were low, because collection was virtually non-existent, but government services were equally invisible. You had to bribe people to get work and residence permits, the police never came when you called them and it took forever to get a telephone, a driver's license or a post office box. Everyone hand delivered their utility payments for electricity and water because if you didn't, you could not prove you had paid your bill and would be disconnected.
Life without government is even more fun after a Cat 5 hurricane and the looters and robbers come out to prey on the weak - because at that point, it's the government that everyone is looking to for salvation.
Yes, America, land of opportunity and privatized... prisons. We've been knocking government since Ronald Reagan (who was a government employee for a significant portion of his career) but the truth is, when you let the private sector run government services for profit, most people suffer. If you want roads on which the police can drive to you when you call, guess what? That costs money. We have some of that "hire your own government services" crap over here, and it mostly sucks for most people, while benefiting the wealthy few.
I respect the career civil servants who are actively trying to make a positive difference (and the majority of government employees ARE) while being bashed and slandered by media, politicians and taxpaying whiners. Is it perfect? No. But if you want low taxes, move to Somalia and carry your RPG into Starbucks anywhere you like. Oh, there's no Starbucks? Maybe because there's no stable government....
Software gets developed for paying customers. I work for a web development company. When the client is waiting and there's money to be made, no effort is spared. Once the app is launched, there's no incentive to update anything, even if its broke - everyone's already started working on the next paying job.
XP is elderly. Vista just plain sucked. Win7 is where the money is - MS's attitude is that if an older product is giving you fits, don't patch it, punt it, and buy something shiny new...
(note that I don't necessarily agree with this approach, it's just 21st century "business ethics")
i found Jerry Pournelle insufferably pompous...
How about, In free and democratic societies, a corrupt individual or group who decide to classify information in order to cover their crimes is a subversion of that very democratic process.
From my observation, the latter occurs much more often than the former. Given government crimes of late, how does a free and democratic society overcome corruption when evidence of same is declared classified information?
Here's something to think about:
In short, those in power shouldn't do anything they might not want to later read about on the front page of the news. And, indeed, those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it - and it's hard to even remember the past if its classified.
I say release the emails and let the chips fall where they may.
To be honest, I was being sarcastic. The point I was making in a roundabout way was that a suit against Google has as much merit as a suit against Apple.
Apple does not have anywhere near a market monopoly in smartphones. iThing is available on exactly ONE carrier in the US, and Apple's total deployed smartphone marketshare is still dwarfed by RIM.
I am unclear as to what position Apple is abusing? Access to an innovative form of advertising within their iThing ecosystem - using mobile apps instead of annoying links or pop-ups?
There is nothing stopping RIM, Google, Nokia, et al, from doing in-app-based mobile platform advertising - on their respective platforms.
RIM has an app store, Nokia does, Android does too. There's nothing stopping any of them, or HP with their upcoming WebOS, from trying to emulate Apple's approach.
I seriously doubt that any of these mobile space players would let Apple's cat shit in their sandbox, and the opposite is also true. Litigation will only make Apple's lawyers richer.
Personally, I HATE advertising and what it has done to human culture. It's every-freaking-where. Before 1890 advertising was informational. Now it's confrontational, in-your-face-tional. "Rolling Stones Live - brought to you by Depends and Viagra!"
That being said, in the current legal and cultural environment, Apple has every right to control advertising within their iThing ecosystem. If this is a bad idea, it will fail, Apple will lose money, and they will move on to something else.
The FTC is out of line here...
you read my mind. hope never to read his....
So, Apple invents in-app-based mobile platform advertising to go along with an entire ecosystem enabling them to share the profits with their developers as traditional media dinosaurs are dying a slow technical death, but the FTC is going to try to restrain Apple in the beloved "free market"?
When is the FTC going to investigate Google for having a near monopoly on internet search advertising?
I bet Apple wins this case - they will only have a monopoly on app-based advertising within their own product platform.
You will still see Google's and others' ads when you are browsing the web on your iThing, unless you turn it off in Safari 5 - and what user is going to complain about that? Bully for Apple for sticking their finger in Google's eye.
Combined RIM + Android smartphone sales exceed Apple's market share, so sorry, no monopoly. iThing is available for one carrier in the US, RIM + Android are available on all carriers.
I will admit that Apple has a monopoly on innovative smartphone ecosystems, because none of the others have successfully emulated Apple's low cost hardware, high manufacturing quality, imaginative OS and proprietary lock-in. The App Store is just the icing on the cake, or rather, the sizzle on the steak.
Apple's relentless cost reduction keeps their competitors off balance. The first $199 smartphone was the iPhone 3G, after the iPhone 3GS was released. The latest $99 smartphone is the iPhone 3GS, repriced as the iPhone 4 was released.
Personally, I am not paying $120 a month to use an iThing, even if it walks on water. Obviously, a lot of other people will, even if call quality is inconsistent at best. The allure of the shiny.
HP is moving to duplicate this success with the purchase of Palm's WebOS, so there is hope for more competition. I suspect that HP will eventually give Apple a run for their money if their WebOS devices aren't just crappy mobile versions of their flimsy consumer gimcracks. (Thanks, Carly Fiorina, for ruining a once-great American engineering powerhouse! Hope you do better for the state of California...)
If IOS were available as a product for other manufacturers' hardware and began significantly encroaching on RIM or Android's OS turf, the FTC might have an anti-trust case à la Microsoft 1998. Otherwise, any impartial observer can see that this case is completely without merit.
Does Google let other advertisers inject ads into their search results? No.
Does NBC let CBS run CBS-placed ads during NBC's TV or radio programming? No.
This is what the FTC (and the Adobe / Google whiners) are saying to Apple: you have to let anyone's cat shit in your sandbox. Well, guess what? That's just not going to fly in court.
The real loser in all this is Microsoft - a tragic waste of a formerly omnipotent money machine, now reduced to chasing a mobile marketplace which is leaving behind the desktop (truck?) paradigm at the speed of light, sucking Dell along in its wake.
here ya go: http://psychicpolitics.com/psychic_politics/psychic_politics/Entries/2010/5/15_release_the_kraken.html
along with "10 Minutes with The Residents", "Yello: I Love You" and "The Mentors: Get Up and Die" (the worst biker band ever). A friend of mine worked for Storer Cable, and we would drive his cable truck out to a cable pedestal in the middle of nowhere, get totally baked and watch Night Flight on a 12" Trinitron test monitor...
if he didn't turn him in, he would have gone to prison with him.
Apple makes 40% margins on their 5% market share of computers. They also make 35% margins on their 20% market share of mobile smartphones. Apple makes a quality product at a significant profit. Their stock is making people rich. All HP & Dell do is piss people off with crappy consumer products and ignorant customer service. HP & Dell dominate the business server / workstation market, with boring 6% margins.
Which steak has more sizzle?
the one who bullied smaller weaker students, popped guys in the nuts with a towel in the shower and forced guys' heads into toilet bowls?
he grew up to be... a dentist.
Dude, you're getting a Dell... (sound of marijuana smoke being sharply inhaled...)
no-name blog...
pampers...?
... monitor offshore oil drilling and respond to emergencies...?
more like, if they don't want you in your job, fuck you. i am going through something like this now. i've been with the same company for four years. 1st two years, exemplary reviews, good raises, placement on fast track to management.
while waiting for assignment, an offer to move to another state to run a project. sounds good, another raise, good reviews, etc, then the mid-level manager leaves that office and is replaced by a total fucking idiot.
she winds up the GM, making trivial things look catastrophic. she alienates clients and blows up a multi-million dollar project, blowing a big hole in the division budget. now they need to reduce costs and staff, so they start to find things "wrong" with my performance, because I am one of the better paid staff. they could have just come to me and said "we're having budget problems, how about moving to another state". instead its a 90 day warning right before (ONE HOUR BEFORE) i am going on my first vacation in almost two years.
I lived outside the US for 19 years before moving back. I read Dilbert and laughed because things like that don't happen in real life, right? WRONG - there are really dangerously psychotic people who would have been bullies in high school, now they are bullies in the office.
Even our most important client HATES this woman - exact quote from their division manager "if she treats her employees the way she treats us, we feel sorry for you..."
I have found another job, and at least half of the staff are looking. all hell's gonna break loose, but my work is done here. it is sad, because I was told over and over again that I had a bright future with the company, and it is a good company to work for, but not for this person.
I dont know what the moral is, or what could be done to protect people from this kind of nonsense.
To quote Mr. Jobs, "Real artists ship". $99 for a smartphone? It's expensive? You know of a cheaper one, equally capable? To paraphrase, bullshit artists bullshit, real artists ship..
People listen to Steve because he delivers the goods.
Well, hey then, nothing to worry 'bout at all. I'm sure the same was true at Chernoybl. Those whales and dolphins have echolocation, they can just swim around the oil. Why even bother cleaning it up - after all, it's only "a few miles of oil" floating around...
Except, it's going all end up somewhere unpleasant. The flow has not abated. It's likely ten times the volume being reported. A month from now, they'll still be struggling to stop the flow. The technology to "fix" this does not exist.
Why is BP still in charge of this mess? Why isn't the US Navy using the same tech to fix this problem that they used to tap undersea communication cables? We're paying for all the secret military tech - time to pull it out of the closet and turn it on.
Keep in mind that you have to wear a hazmat suit to handle the oil, as well as the dispersants, due to their toxicity. People who cleaned up Exxon Valdez are still suffering the ill heath effects of exposure to petroleum and dispersants, 20 years later. This is not the open ocean, its a gulf. Nobody knows how dispersants will work a mile below the surface - they're designed to work on the surface of the water. This is the world's biggest fucked-up science experiment, with disastrous consequences for getting it wrong.
Where will all this stuff end up? Whether it sinks to the bottom of the gulf or washes ashore, it ends up in your water, killing your food, putting fumes into the air you breathe. A year from now, gulf-coast property values will have plummeted to zero, all recreational and fishing activities will completely cease and the Gulf of Mexico will resemble a clogged toilet. ONE THIRD of fish consumed in the US originates in the coastal waters of the gulf - those wetlands are not coming back in our lifetimes.
We are not being told the truth about any aspect of this disaster, because the reporters (media, government, business) think they can avert a panic by keeping people ignorant. This is the greatest ecological disaster to ever hit the Earth, capiche?
This is going to be THE issue of the next presidential election. It has the capacity to wreck the US Economy. You are entitled to your opinion, so let's check back in a year from now and see where things stand.
In the development shop where I work, the project managers love Big Bang Theory, but the developers don't think it's funny at all. Nobody likes seeing their ox being gored...
Well, after Apple sold HP a load of iPods, they lowered the price so that HP was stuck selling at the old price, or the new price at a loss... that was a classic RDF execution....
check the article heading!
Absolutely. The immigration issue would end tomorrow if a felony charge for hiring illegals applied to businesses and individuals alike. Direct your anger to your local and federal elected representatives. Wonder why Arizona didn't enforce THAT law instead...?
There are illegal immigrants in the US because everyone from rich people to meatpacking companies like to exploit cheap labor. It also provides a straw man for the right to knock down over and over again. At the end of the day, who's gonna weed whack your lawn if there's a $50,000 fine for hiring illegals and they all left to find work elsewhere?
this article has more SF douchery. A good friend of mine was a paramedic for the city of SFO. Her ambulance was broadsided and her back was injured, and she was let go and had to fight for severance.
She knew more than one firefighter who was injured on the job and was let go with minimal compensation, and ended up homeless in the Tenderloin district.
Unless you are one of the six-figure privileged, you need to watch your back as a city of San Francisco employee...
From the San Francisco Chronicle this week:
More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco's nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year - a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade.
The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn't include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions.
The pay data obtained by The Chronicle show that many of the high earners bolstered their base pay with overtime and "other pay," a category that includes payouts for unused vacation days and extra money for working late-night shifts.
Leading 2009's $100,000 Club was the Police Department's Charles Keohane, a deputy chief who retired midyear.
His total payout was $516,118, city records show, the bulk of which came from cashing out stored-up vacation, sick days and comp time. Several other police employees who changed rank or retired also saw their annual earnings swell.
When asked how he felt about landing in the No. 1 spot, Keohane joked, "Not so good, if it's going to get my name in the paper."
The 36-year SFPD veteran, whose last assignment was head of administration, said much of that pay was taken out in taxes. "I helped reduce the deficit," he said.
The average city worker salary in San Francisco is $93,000 before benefits, according to Deputy City Controller Monique Zmuda. The data take into account everyone from park gardeners and street cleaners to attorneys and technology specialists.
Almost 100 city employees made $200,000 or more in 2009; six bumped past $300,000 when overtime and other cash-outs were included.
Muni chief's base pay
Only one city employee had a base salary topping $300,000. Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, made $332,489.
Mayor Gavin Newsom had a base salary of $250,903 in 2009, which put him 29th on the list of best-paid city employees.
The ballooning number of highly paid workers is driven by several factors, including inflation, a persistent reliance on overtime and generous contracts in a city known for its politically potent unions.
The city also negotiated a deal to give raises to some workers who agreed to pick up a portion of their pension contributions, City Controller Ben Rosenfield said. That arrangement pushed almost 2,000 city employees above the $100,000 mark in recent years, he said.
In years past, the $100,000 Club included large numbers of Muni operators, transit supervisors, firefighters, police officers and sheriff's deputies who padded their paychecks with hundreds of hours of overtime, paid out at a rate of time-and-a-half.
But a 2008 rule capped most employees' overtime to 30 percent of base pay, in effect spreading out overtime opportunities to more employees, Zmuda said. That and other efforts to curtail overtime appear to be working, with payments projected to drop to $139.8 million this fiscal year, down from $142.1 million last year and $167.7 million the year before, according to the controller's office.
In the fiscal year that ended in June 2009, city salaries accounted for $2.5 billion of the $6.6 billion budget. That does not include the cost of benefits.
Faced with a $483 million deficit heading into the new fiscal year that