yes I'm young, no I'm not buying a home. I am unemployed and a full time student scraping by on roughly $200 a month total.
As I mentioned in my previous article, I am employed. For the past several years I have made enough money to max out Social Security so that my paychecks late in those years have been untaxed by FICA (that should give you an indication of my income level). I am very, very highly skilled. And further, I ask for and generally tend to receive some of the hardest assignments at work. I like it that way; I enjoy feeling like I have actually done something at work.
I know the definition of a "McJob" (a recent addition to the Webster's Dictionary which defines the "American" language) and I realize that the skill levels in those jobs don't tend to be what you classify as high. But Wal-Mart asserts in the present television advertisement campaign that they are a good Corporate Citizen. This is to counteract the claims of those who are suing them over bad practice in the workplace. Essentially, this is "jury tampering" in that jurors who see these ads may think more kindly of the company and they're trying to influence all Americans, knowing that the jury pools may come from anywhere.
But you asserted that Wal-Mart pays well if I understand you correctly. I suggested (and offered you a link to a study) that you may be misinformed. Perhaps what you meant to say was, "They pay well to college students who receive health insurance from their parents and who can live on next to nothing." You will find that I agree with you there. It's a great "McJob" that requires low skills and allows you to be thinking of your College classes while you are at work instead of actually concentrating on work.
But when I look at jobs, I consider the kind of person one usually finds there. And college students don't make up the majority of Wall-Mart cashiers where I live. Most of them are single mothers who would rather work in the Safeway down the street because Safeway has a union that requires benefits and a 401(k) program. The union also requires an allowance for child care so that the single mothers can actually afford to work.
I don't see Wal-Mart doing that and I do see them doing everything they possibly can to prevent employees from unionizing.
I was a college student too, once. And, frankly, I know how to live on very little if I need to. But at my age I also insist that I be able to retire easily and buy a home. I don't insist on a new car every three years (I have never once owned a new car) and I do everything I can to save money for my child's education as well as my retirement.
Wall-Mart doesn't allow their workers to do that. I assert you cannot really do that until or unless you are making in the mid to upper $40,000s in low income states; at least $60,000 on the coasts. That means you'll need skills that are better than what a dead-end job at Wall-Mart offers and you'll need better pay
One of the rather interesting facts of life about the US Court system is that Judges have powers within their courtrooms that are very close to those exercised by despotic monarchs two centuries ago. Here's how it works:
Attorney General gets a judgement for the plaintiff (the State or the Federal Government). The judgement is pretty light and totally within all sentencing guidelines. The judgement is not what's important.
What you have here is a trap.
If the spammer was truly forced by the judge to agree to live by the Court's order to not violate federal and state laws as a part of the guilty verdict (or a plea of guilty), the trap is set. Should Mr. Spammer ever, in the judge's eyes, violate his solemn promise to do no wrong in the future, he may be held in contempt of court. And in contempt issues, the judge gets to become a Royal Despot, handing out a bench warrant for the man's arrest and forcing the violator of a direct order of the Court to await the pleasure of the Court in any way the Court wishes.
In other words, dear reader, there are no pesky Federal, State or local sentencing guidelines, no rules, no laws, just what the judge thinks will work. And that may include many years behind bars (being someone's woman) as well as fines that are astronomical (like $500,000 for each UCE found by the Attorney General henceforth to be in violation of said Court order. And that's something that could bankrupt the fool.
So I regard the announcement for what it truly is, a set trap.
WalMart has one of the most generous pay and benefits packages of any retail chain. In a small town like where I live, WalMart stores are typically the number one employer, with queues months long of people trying to a position
I don't know where you live and do not wish in any way to disparage your community, which is most probably an excellent part of the world. But as someone who has spent the last seven years as a "perma-temp" (also known as a "daily hire" and a "regular daily hire" in HR corporatespeak) with no benefits, no kick in to a 401(k) or pension or other retirement program, no paid sick days, no paid holidays, health insurance for me and my family out of my pocket, this is a sore point with me. I equate Wall-Mart with reprehensible employment practice.
Mind you, I do not work at Wall-Mart; never have and hope never to do that. Wall-Mart offers "McJobs" in communities in my area with no benefits. Then they advertise in order to try to counteract the claims made in court recently that they discriminate against woman and against minorities, that they lock their illegal alien cleaning workforce in the store overnight so that, if there were a medical emergency, the ambulance couldn't get to the sick or injured.
Wal-Mart workers in California earn on average 31 percent less than workers employed in large retail as a whole, receiving an average wage of $9.70 per hour compared to the $14.01 average hourly earnings for employees in large retail (firms with 1,000 or more employees). In addition, 23 percent fewer Wal-Mart workers are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance than large retail workers as a whole.
At these low-wages, many Wal-Mart workers rely on public safety net programs--such as food stamps, Medi-Cal, and subsidized housing--to make ends meet. The presence of Wal-Mart stores in California thus creates a hidden cost to the state's taxpayers.
To further question your particular observation, after Wal-Mart replied to the study and stated that their employees aren't paid so badly after all, the authors did more study and found:
If we compare Wal-Mart's stated California wages in 2004 ($10.37) to large retailers in the state overall ($14.82), we find a Wal-Mart wage penalty of 30%, virtually identical to the 31% we found in 2001.
Now this is California (or "Caleefornia," according to the Governor) and not Texas or Oklahoma. I live on the East Coast and know enough about workers at Wall-Mart to know that it's the place where you work if there is nothing else available in retail. A Wal-Mart job is typical of the "jobs" that Reagan touted as demonstrating the health of the American economy. Wal-Mart jobs don't pay anything like what a manufacturing sector job will pay, they don't pay or offer benefits like union jobs. In short, they're service industry jobs that do not enable workers to be able to pay for the college educations of their children or save for retirement.
Again, I do not wish to disparage you or your community. I also suspect that you may be young and not trying to save for a downpayment for a home while paying rent, trying to support a spouse and child, concerned about how the US will deal with the loss of sufficient income to keep Social Security going past 2030 and so on.
I think that, on that one point (generous pay and benefits for American workers) you may be misinformed.
Wal-Mart willingly loses money selling CDs for less than $10 (they buy most hit CDs from distributors for around $12).
I cannot believe that all CDs sell to retailers for $10. If you subtract the $3.89 retail overhead from the price of a CD along with the $.80 and $.90 retail profit and distribution costs of a CD (all are retailer costs and Wall-Mart agressively controls costs in its own channel), you come up with a price per CD of $10.40 (assuming Wall-Mart makes nothing and eats its own costs as reported by Mr. Cohen).
But record companies typically underreport by 20% the sales of releases to artists, writers and unions so let's factor that in, making payments to unions actually $.14, $.68 publishing royalties and $1.28 artists' royalties. We now have a price below $10 per CD. Of course record companies' costs go up a little for every artist who takes advantage of the audit clause in their contract but that tends to be an insignificant minority.
Then Mr. Cohen ignores the fact that the companies typically will offer large lots at a discount to large sellers. I can see where a specialty store might need to charge some $16 for a CD -- they're not buying a small subset of all available CDs in mass quantity like Wall-Mart is. Larger buyers will find their price is a lot lower.
I cannot see how Wall-Mart can be considered a serious music seller if what they are doing is stocking a subset of the fastest-selling music. The article strongly suggests that anything in the top 40 or so of hits that are local to that area (perhaps more CW in the deep south, more alternative rock near large cities) on the various charts will be in Wall-Mart. But you probably won't be able to find the Beatles White Album (you'll find their most recent "1" album though) or any of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays' collaborations in their store.
And that bothers me. It is like how if you have a book and you want to get exposure for it, you will have to pay the large retailers like Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble for shelf space and/or a window display in order to get noticed. This limits what I can find in a bookstore and depresses the sale of otherwise excellent books. In Wall-Mart's case, it diminishes the sales of CDs that are "just outside" of their popularity cut-off point and artificially increases the sales within that zone.
The end result of this will tend to pressure future contracts with artists. And it will give the labels yet another reason to underreport sales to them.
Look for a stronger attack against people trading music. They'll try to cover the Wall-Mart effect through legislation and through the courts.
Which recommendations of the 9/11 Commission do you oppose and feel are inappropriate for implimentation.
What specific steps will you take (are you taking) to find Usama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Exactly what resources ought our military and intelligence services be given to finish the job of capturing these known perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack on the United States?
Exactly how will Social Security benefits be paid for by your policies after 2020?
You are, perhaps, confusing a "representative" government with Democracy. Under Democracy, there is one man, one vote. That's it. The deciders of all outcomes are the people.
On a local level, I have lived within a democracy; a town in New England called Epping. Under the Town Charter we had representatives who would forward, for voter approval, a yearly budget. Most of that budget was taken up by the school, and tended to pass without much comment. Everyone in town wanted a decent education for their children and most parents tended to occasionally volunteer their time at the schools (a grammer school, a middle school and a secondary, or "high" school) and that tended to keep everyone who had children aware of whether or not there was a pencil or book shortage.
Then there was the 10% or so of town funds that went to everything else, from stop signs to road repairs to repainting of the Town Hall and so on. That was gone over line item by line item with factions warring over dollar amounts like it was life or death.
It was cumbersome and we did have some really late nights but it was absolutely democratic.
If you live in the United Kingdom, I'm not sure you could call your country a Republic. And it's not really a "Constitutional Monarchy" because there is no real written Constitution. I'd call the UK system more of an "evolved" monarchy with some representative government based on the Parliamentary system and a House of Lords to stave things off a bit in a most un-representative manner. There is also the bit about "home rule" for Scotland and Wales, as well as an attempt (sadly unsuccessful so far) at the same for Northern Ireland. The "home rule" aspect doesn't really have too much bearing on the strong centralized system in the House of Commons and the Executive that is derived from it.
Please don't mistake the Republican party for espousing a particular form of government. That's a name and so is the name Democratic (as in party). The "Democratic" party traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson, who never referred to himself as a "democrat," that word -- being associated with Jacobism in Revolutionary France -- was an epithet or a slur. He considered the form of government he espoused to be "republican."
The party which opposed Jefferson was out of New England, mostly, and was known as The Federalist Party. They completely lost their standing with the voters in the United States when they passed, and their President, John Adams signed The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and proceeded to establish a standing army to enforce them and other dictates of the Adams administration.
Because King George had sent a standing army over to the Colonies in order to enforce his unpopular acts only a few years prior to Adams' actions, the Federalist party very quickly lost power and was pretty much dissolved by 1810.
The next party to challenge the party of Jefferson was the Whig Party, which became pretty well established by 1830. It stood for protectionist tarrifs on imports, the use of money derived from the sale of Federal lands (in our territories and new States) for the improvement of those selfsame States and territories, like for road systems and levees and dams to prevent flooding. They also favored the creation of a new Bank of the United States.
Slavery became an issue by 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the party even further. Disaffected Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started a new party and called themselves Republicans. Their initial platform was to oppose slavery and to oppose the dissolution of the Republic (the Union), which was being threatened by Southern States.
I would suggest that the "Republican" party, as founded by those ex-Whigs is dead, dying when Reconstruction was stopped during the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes did not win the Electoral College or the popular vote. Hayes's election depended upon contested electoral votes in Louisi
And if you care to make wagers, I recommend you put your money on Bush because he has a better than even chance to win. And it will be very bad for this country. And it will probably be worse for other countries.
Part of this "war on terror" stuff is an attempt to diminish the influence of a number of people who are considered "religious extremists." Frankly, I don't think religion has much to do with it and I also think that terror is a tactic, not a nationality.
But part of why Bush stands a good chance of re-election is some 15% of our electorate is made up of religious extremists. And it is their system of beliefs that has perpetrated terror on other innocents abroad, like the State of Palestine, the "average joe taxidriver" in Iraq who was swept up in raids and tortured in Abu Graib and the "collateral damage" in Afghanistan (as well as Iraq).
In a speech before the Society of Professional Journalists, Bill Moyers said:
One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal.... How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That's what I said - the Rapture Index; google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series which have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors who earlier this year completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush's armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.
According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its "biblical lands;" when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. "True believers" will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow....
When the President asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, over one hundred thousand angry Christian fundamentalists barraged the White House with emails and Mr. Bush never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon's expansions of settlements on the West Bank.
So that 15% of the electorate actually doesn't care that there will be no Social Security or that taxes will have to be increased or that lots of people will die in the Middle East. They're thinking, "I'll be up in Heaven watching all the wicked people die."
Guilty as charged (I work for a national news network).
The process of election monitoring does include watching what official news agencies within a given country say. For example, if, in country "X" all pre-election coverage favors one candidate and does not offer equal time to the other candidates, that is considered an irregularity and is reported. Also gross inaccuracies in the media are reported.
Also please note, as a broadcast professional, my definition of a "reporter" in a third-world country is "mike stand for government official," typically there is little fairness in elections in these countries
What happened in Florida is a real screw-up of chilling proportions. But when you examine what was actually happening, you can understand what is going on. I shall elaborate for the good of/.
All of the news outlets are in a very tight race themselves. They all want to scoop one another.
We spend a whole lot of money trying to do just that and Election Night is a really big spending spree for us. We used to use mainframe computers to calculate the results of the exit polls quickly so that we could get the numbers out faster than anyone. Presently we're using some pretty high-end computers for graphics for the results but any pee cee can come up with exit poll statistics really fast.
All of the larger news outlets along with polling companies like Pew Research and Harris conduct surveys of voters as they exit the polls. They ask people who are willing, chosen at random, how they voted. They use normal, standard statistics and report the margin for error.
In Florida in 2000, those persons who voted the infamous "Butterfly Ballot" may have believed their vote was correct. Remember, Buchannan picked up a whole lot of votes from one section of Dade County that tends to not vote for his particular brand of politics. Exit pollers asked these people as well as all others in other counties.
Based on the "best available" information, the networks broadcast what they broadcast based on that information. As the precincts closed their polls and began their counts, they reported something significantly different from the exit polls. It was after the networks received that information that they recanted their earlier predictions.
I can say with a good conscience that the networks did not intentionally miscall the election and what they did certainly did not influence the outcome. Were we to do that again, it would be called "fair" reporting by the UN observers.
I think that what happened afterwards would be called questionable. The US Constitution has a provision for dealing with a questionable Electoral College vote and had the Supreme Court and Congress followed the Constituion, the outcome would have been the same and the US Congress would have chosen Bush. It would have been a straight party-line vote.
Then, perhaps, the Republicans would have been a little more circumspect and Bush might not have declared a "mandate" (as he wrongly did after being sworn in) for his policies. Or maybe not. Fact is, September 11th would have still happened on his watch and I'll bet he would still have used an Al Qaeda attack as justification to try to set up another "shah of Iran" in Baghdad, but the public would have more problems with the legitimacy of his presidency than they do now and might have held their congressmen to account more.
Instead, the US Supreme Court got involved and selected Bush, perhaps as a favor to their friends in Congress and as a favor to Bush and Cheny. This was a direct violation of the powers reserved to the States in the matter of sending their electors who will choose the President, which is one of the few remaining powers reserved to the States in our Constitution that have not been trod on by the Federal Government (until now).
I think the UN observers will be particularly interested in anything like that in this election.
I graduated from high school in 1974. My draft number was 16. The draft had been abolished the year before and I have voted in every election (even school board) since I turned 18. The maturity you see there may be partially due to the fact that "children" just out of high school were coming back from a (then, in 1960) popular war against Communism in body bags but the draft was not calling up as many 18-year-olds --yet.
Also there were teaching methodologies that were not oriented towards "preserving the self-esteem" of students at all costs. There was no such thing in 1960 as "social promotion." If you didn't pass the fourth grade (for example), you stayed in the fourth grade until you did pass and everyone knew that.
I would respectfully disagree with you that "it wasn't particularly possible to spend 95% of your freetime watching (television) yet... Parents back then did their uttermost to limit television viewing as a means by wich they might promote the completion of one's homework assignments; some parents were more concerned about television viewing than others. I thought mine incredibly strict because I didn't go to school quoting all of the best lines from the popular shows. But also television was very different then because there was outright censorship of the medium. Lucille Ball was the first to mention the word "pregnant" on the air and there were no sexual innuendoes like one finds all over the dial today.
Additionally, we had three networks plus PBS (which was "educational television" and not a network yet) back then. In 1960, most television networks broadcast 15 minutes of network news, with the anchorperson (a word that had not been invented yet) reading the newswires and no actual footage of any of the news events, for the most part. It was not until the late 1960s and the 1970s that we could actually see footage of material from the field, as the technology of 1960 did not permit recording of material on a portable tape machine or microwave transmission of a live event. Remote transmission was done over telco lines and was horrendously expensive. "Actuality" material from a news event was done on film (usually 16MM double-system) and edited for air in several days. That kind of on-the-scene material was rare in 1960.
We regard children today as generally more mature in terms of sexuality, less mature in terms of what to do with it.
With respect to your comment about penmanship and spelling, we didn't have computer spell-checks back then and only 10% of males in your father's class could efficiently operate a typewriter (that was something secretaries in a typing pool did -- a "girl job"). He and those around him hand wrote all of their term papers and they had to be neat or they'd be graded down, so they learned good penmanship out of necessity.
Football was not the million-dollar career choice back then as it is today, so I can see a winning debate team getting equal column inches -- especially if the football team didn't have a wonderful year and/or wasn't in Texas, where football is a religion.
The real lesson to be learned about the government reaction to the "flashmob" creation generated by websites and call phones is that this is a new reaction to a new medium and the assumption on the part of conservatives is that it's automatically bad and destructive of youth.
Governments that exercise the kind of abusive actions towards the results of new media ought to be turned out of office. I would encourage you to register and to always vote, lest you get the kind of government that follows when the vast majority of our country chooses to not register.
I remain a student of history, lest I participate in its recapitulation. I should also mention several stories about the birth of film and photography (first mass uses were pornographic, sound familiar?) but I have to scrape the rot off my brain.
People of a certain age remember when "Television would rot the minds of the youth of America" and "Rock and Roll was 'dangerous jungle music' that would cause uncontrollable urges in today's youth." These were horrified reactions to new media on the part of the more conservative elements of society.
At the same time, the "conservative" elements of US society applauded when the fax machine in Soviet Russia became a tool for the masses to communicate without government censorship. Yeltsin came to power largely due to mass faxes in Russia (predomanently in Moscow) told the real story of the government coup attempt on Gorbachev. Gorby lost face because he "allowed" it to happen by remaining Communist and a well-informed (via fax) Yeltsen became an instant hero because he stood up to the Red Army generals who wanted Gorby's ouster.
Obviously, the conservative elements in Soviet Russia didn't think so highly of the fax machine.
I note one Russian news service is called "Interfax" and, for a while, was a very independant and trusted news agency.
What bothers me is that laws have been passed to allow the confiscation of cellular phones and other new media devices to prevent the use of these new media for the purpose of organization "against" something or "for" something else. These laws will be selectively enforced to "edit" what kinds of flash mobs will be permitted by governments who wish to use those laws as that kind of tool.
I would predict that this kind of "editing" will amount to unequal enforcement. For example, were Conservative Christians in the US to "Flashmob" a clinic that offers family planning, there would be few arrests under a Bush government. But a monthly "flashmob," also known as Critical Mass was broken up by police in New York in late September because the riders supposedly went where police decided they should not go (even though they were obeying all traffic laws).
This amounts to unequal enforcement and standing before US law enforcement, as no prior Critical Mass gathering had ever resulted in arrests.
Critical Mass holds the meets in order to promote non-polluting transportation and encourage the construction and maintenence of safe bike lanes. That doesn't sound like terrorism to me
According to the bill the way it is, broadcasters must move their broadcasting service to the higher band (where they are allowed to broadcast in high-definition or may broadcast up to three standard-definition signals). They don't pay for this allocation and still hold the broadcast spectrum "in the public trust." The present location for these stations will be taken back by the government.
When the government recovers the VHF and UHF bandwidth that the stations lose that spectrum will be sold. Stations will be able to broadcast on their higher spectrum allocation without paying anything for it other than their costs of running a broadcast operation.
NPR is a radio service and the stations do not have to move their frequency allocations. CSPAN is a cable service and does not broadcast. I find it very interesting that most PBS stations will have been compliant sooner than their commercial counterparts. They could rightly say, during pledge drives, that their service to their localities would end if their donors did not come up with the cash necessary to comply with the federal regulations.
I would agree with you that stations are increasingly being owned by "the most ruthlessly efficient" in terms of finding ways to pump money out of broadcasting. I would suggest that broadcasters stopped considering the public "need, necessity and convenience" when the FCC decided to get out of the business of regulation during the Reagan administration. But that has been going on for a long time and has little to do with the present changes to high-definition.
And, of course, the government never has to pay for radio spectrum. The government is the allocator, not the payer.
Thanks to supernova87a we all know exactly how it would be done if the government controlled all television and the laws were not written with the help of lobbyists.
Here is what a station has to do:
Purchase a completely new transmitter.
Build a new tower if there is no room on the existing tower (likely).
Purchase a radiating antenna for said tower
Purchase an NTSC upconverter to use during transition and to use later for news and older programs
Purchase a completely new plant with VCRs and/or hard disk arrays that will record and play back HD.
Purchase and pay to wire up that new plant as well as provide links for the old plant to the new system (for upconversion).
Find a way to pay for the maintenance of all of the above as well as to send existing maintenance personnel to school to learn the new stuff.
Find some way to pay for the costs of the electricity to run the new transmitter
Please note, I am probably leaving out a whole lot of stuff here
Not to overly take the stations' side on this issue, these are pretty daunting requirements. And for a station outside of the top 100 markets, it may be really close-on to impossible. Again, during this transition, there is a chicken/egg dichotomy where very few viewers will be seeing your digital signal because they won't have purchased HD television sets yet. This means you cannot report to your advertisers that you have more viewers with HD -- you probably have fewer because the Internet, cable and satellite continue to erode your viewer base.
Small wonder the law, once feelers went out via the FCC, was heavily lobbied by all parts of the television industry. I should mention at this point that part of the reason why Congress was attracted to this law was because all television sets were being made overseas and Congress wanted there to be at least one television manufacturer located in the US. It would appear this aim was unsuccessful as multiplexo and others point out when they write here that they have televisions made in Japan or elsewhere.
I would offer the opinion that, since the death of RCA as a television company (which would be when GE swallowed them up) there has not been any possibility of any manufacture of receivers on US soil since then.
So, the laws were seriously written and rewritten by the lobbyists. Stations get the bandwidth with no requirement that they use it to broadcast in high definition. Congress, after "discovering" this fact called television network executives to Washington to enjoin them (really beg them) to broadcast in HD
Cable companies are required under law to carry local stations ("Must Carry") but, perversely, must pay for "retransmission consent," thus giving all networks a free ride on cable systems for their own cable channels (did you know that NBC owns Sci Fi, Bravo, Trio, and others as well as CNBC and part of MSNBC?).
All NYC stations will, undoubtedly, receive an extension of "Use it or Lose it" due to September 11th, 2001, which only affects towers and transmitters.
There are tons of other fun details in the law and in the FCC rulings. I guarantee you, those shows that will be seen in HD first will not be local programming. Look for news to be "upconverted" for a long time.
A woman I know was "downsized" by a large newspaper corporation some years back after she got pregnant. Out of five groups, her group was the second in performance, so there was no justification other than that of her pregnancy.
Her boss called her into his office and told her, after she took several hours off for a doctor's visit to get an amniocentisis, that "she had better get her priorities straight, and that when she decided her priorities, the manager would decide how valuable she was to the company."
This matter is in litigation presently, with the United States EEOC well involved. The thing that is funny is that the company who let her go had an opportunity to offer some half a million in order to get her to drop her (very good and well-documented) case. Presently, the EEOC is suing the company for "an injunction requiring the [company] to abstain from discrimination. It also seeks back pay with interest and other 'affirmative relief... including but not limited to reinstatement,' punitive damages and reimbursement of the commission's legal expenses." Since the EEOC is a federal commission, they have unlimited means to sue the company. Half a million will look very cheap when all of this is sorted out.
Since she was let go in early 2001, they're looking at back pay that will total nearly half a million without any further damages, which will be considerable.
My best advice, if you work for a company that commits "bad behaviors," keep a complete record of everything. It's a better bet than winning a lottery.
In her case she did not burn any bridges. That would have been held against her in her case against the company.
Actually, the second progressive party in the US was the Republican Party if you define "liberal" in the way I define it (a liberal government must stand for re-election periodically and is generally and genuinely representative of the will of the voting public; the franchise is not restricted by law or custom). They were so progressive that they broke from the former party, which was the party of the moneyed elite and the banking interests in favor of human rights.
That would be the party of Lincoln.
The first progressive party was, of course, the party of Jefferson who would suggest that, at this point, the US is overdue for another revolution, complete with spilled blood. He would have considered what went on in the late 1960s and early 1970s to be a revolution that didn't quite take hold.
Jefferson opposed the Federalists, who wanted more centralized power, so much so that they passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which look a whole lot to me like the "Patriot" act of 2002. Jefferson was elected by a landslide over one-term John Adams, who signed the bill, because the public felt that the Federalists were trying to install a military dictatorship.
It was a near-run thing in my estimation.
The progressive stance of the Republicans was wholly ended by "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes, whose election was through Congress, not through the Electoral College. Congress, in this previous election must have let out a huge sigh of relief when the Supreme Court decided to ignore the Constitution and select Bush as President.
Much to the chagrin of most Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency upon the death of William McKinley and introduced progressive reforms in the United States during his Presidency.
So there is a history of progressive measures taken by Republicans.
I would assert that the Republican Party is no more. They have gone the way of the Federalist party and the Whigs in the Political scene. They have ceased to be but there are still those who call themselves Republicans without thinking too hard.
The Republican party that I grew up with was the Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It was a moderate party that was capable of initiating detante with our neighbors as well as our "enemies." It was largely centrist and passed legislation that helped out normal Americans. It also tended to vote against spending that would break federal budgets.
These Republicans are the party of the extreme right only. They want to limit civil liberties. They want to make all entitlements go away by increasing Federal deficits to the point where the only way they can be paid for is by raising taxes -- something they wish to blame the other party on. They won't raise the taxes, they'll end the entitlements. These entitlements include Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Aid to the Disabled, support for AIDS patients, all welfare programs.
They also want to allow big businesses unfettered access to "develop" land held by the US for prices that might have been charged for the land back in the 1830s. Never mind that this "development" strips the land of its current qualities and makes it into barren wasteland. This land held by the US is called "National Parks" and was set aside by Theodore Roosevelt (you will remember, he was a Republican, but a Progressive).
They also want former lobbyists in charge of enforcing federal laws regulating the very businesses they used to work for. After all, who better to understand these businesses then those familiar with their struggle against government regulations, right?
They also want to give your tax money to churches so that they can take over the role of teaching our children and serving the poor and needy and disabled (because the government is getting out of that business, you know). That way, in order for us to receive
Anonymous Coward wrote: aren't some of the really old shows actually recorded on film?
Depending on how old they are, many of the classic shows were shot on film using the Kinescope process, where the film camera shot the show on a television set as it was being produced live in the studio. That actually results in lower resolution than what NTSC broadcasts can currently support.
The series that were shot in 35mm color film, edited on that film and then transferred to videotape for playback by the stations will do well in being re-transferred to high-definition, though the aspect ratio that the 35mm film was exposed for was more or less the same as standard definition television. But don't expect Soupy Sales to look better than he does presently.
OK, we used to have a third party. Perot funded it and willed it into existence. Ran one year and then turned into a kind of a nutcase the next time around.
Then Pat Buchannan took it over so that Republicans would not lose votes to it. And he lost by such a bad margin that the Reform Party no longer gets federal cash.
Nader doesn't have a party. He doesn't have a party apparatus. The Green Party was so villified after last Presidential election that they refused to support Nader this go-round. The only reason I can figure why he is running is because of ego. He wants attention.
Nader has some good things to say. His comments have become talking points for various candidates. But he lost his credibility when he didn't drop out of the race in 2000 and when he allowed Republicans in 2004 to fund and set up his operations in hopes that he would steal votes from Kerry.
So rather than allow him to have his say the entire Democratic Party, as well as many in niether party who want to re-defeat Bush this time, has taken specific action to keep him out of the running in as many of the so-called "battleground" states as possible.
The single reason why people "union up" is unfair treatment by employers; seeing their employees as cyphers and creating a hostile work environment
While unions do negotiate for pay, I know of several that allow their members to negotiate "personal service contracts" to up their pay. The issue unions are most concerned with have to do with the work environment and work rules, not pay.
So I guess if one is a member of a union, one is not a "capitalist." One thing everyone must sign in order to join any union in the US is a statement that indicates that the person is not a member of the Communist Party. Quite frankly, I think that the requirement that one sign that kind of a statement is a violation of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment but it does strongly suggest that union members are not "commies."
So, if you are a member of a union and you are not a Capitalist, what are you? Unionist?
I agree that I have always been able to negotiate better pay for my services than any union but in a hostile work environment, I generally had no voice. I just did what I could to evade most of the nastiness.
I hear and understand the comment of the small business owner with respect to not wanting to pay overtime. He wants his employees to work hard just like he does.
And so if they work just as hard as he does and he sets them up on a salary basis as exempt workers, do they get to sell part of his company when they retire? Do they get a portion of the proceeds of his sale of the business? Do they get a portion of the company when his son or daughter inherits it?
Obviously not, so their investment in the company's well being is lower. And the small businessman only has one incentive with which to motivate his employees to work as hard as he does, money.
Paid overtime is money. And lots of people across the US are living (at least partially) on their overtime. Which says something about what has happened in our society since the 1930s and before (which is where the right wing of the Republican Party wants to return us). It used to be possible to buy a home and raise children with one income. Now couples need two. And single people need overtime in order to do the same.
But the real reason why the government took issue with this ruling of the Bush administration is that when a worker makes overtime, so does the government. Essentially, what Bush is doing with this ruling is he is setting up for an even larger ballooning of the federal deficit because workers making more than subsistence income may easily be exempted from overtime pay and that middle-class segment of America pays the most taxes.
To a certain extent, moderate Republicans will vote with Democrats on this issue because they want to win re-election and it's hard to face an electorate when your opponent claims you just caused everyone to take a pay cut. And some conservative Republicans may be wooed on this issue if they are budget deficit hawks. The article seems to suggest that the Senate won't pass the amendment. Lets hope they do.
I make around $100,000 yearly and greatly benefit (as well as does my State and the Federal Government) from my overtime pay. Under the DOL's ruling, I'd be forced to take a pay cut to around $87,000 yearly. And that means the difference between living comfortably (in the NYC area) and having trouble paying bills.
My idea of a covenant against spammers... would give me (and other customers) the right to sue the ISP if they fail to keep their address space, and their services, clean of spammers.
I really like your idea and, of course, it could be done easily with a contract you have with any ISP. I think that, were the value of your business high, lots of ISPs would really go for that. Unfortunately, ISPs are in business and must turn a profit.
I would (and do) pay extra for a service that stops spam; it compells us to overengineer the Internet to be able to handle their traffic. And, while overengineering can be a good thing (like the overengineering that went on in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge), we all have to pay for a service that may cost more than it would were there no spammers. Thus, the only way we can force our ISPs to go after spammers is to pay a premium or set a rate that disallows overbuilding. In our present situation, that must be the former, not the latter.
Thank you for your commentary. It's really insightful.
I suppose you would then want to get your service from companies like Earthlink that actively target, sue and defend their users against spammers. I appreciate that -- I have as little love for spam e-mail as you seem to.
But you must agree that a first step for an ISP is to have an AUP that lays the framework for such action against spammers. And that was my point, as earlier in the discussion one comment indicated that the poster had not seen Savvis' AUP and did not know if they had one. I provided a link to such.
I have had an Internet account since 1985. I remember when, to kill a spammer, all one had to do was fire off an e-mail to the spammer's provider (usually a university). At that time the Internet, under the NSF grant that sustained it, had a prohibition on any commercial usage. There was a culture that controlled things. People would flame other people in Usenet Newsgroups but it was seen as all in good fun.
When things opened up, the Internet was offered as a wonderful tool to everyone, most of whom are good, honest people. Unfortunately, there were no safeguards built into the system to disallow spam and prevent software from "spoofing" headers, so the dregs of society have now required that we build in an assumption in the bandwidth we use to support the Internet for a very poor "signal" to "noise" ratio.
I did just had a thought though...
What if the first verified extra-terrestrial signal SETI found was a UCE?
Slashdot Mirror
thelizman wrote:
yes I'm young, no I'm not buying a home. I am unemployed and a full time student scraping by on roughly $200 a month total.
As I mentioned in my previous article, I am employed. For the past several years I have made enough money to max out Social Security so that my paychecks late in those years have been untaxed by FICA (that should give you an indication of my income level). I am very, very highly skilled. And further, I ask for and generally tend to receive some of the hardest assignments at work. I like it that way; I enjoy feeling like I have actually done something at work.
I know the definition of a "McJob" (a recent addition to the Webster's Dictionary which defines the "American" language) and I realize that the skill levels in those jobs don't tend to be what you classify as high. But Wal-Mart asserts in the present television advertisement campaign that they are a good Corporate Citizen. This is to counteract the claims of those who are suing them over bad practice in the workplace. Essentially, this is "jury tampering" in that jurors who see these ads may think more kindly of the company and they're trying to influence all Americans, knowing that the jury pools may come from anywhere.
But you asserted that Wal-Mart pays well if I understand you correctly. I suggested (and offered you a link to a study) that you may be misinformed. Perhaps what you meant to say was, "They pay well to college students who receive health insurance from their parents and who can live on next to nothing." You will find that I agree with you there. It's a great "McJob" that requires low skills and allows you to be thinking of your College classes while you are at work instead of actually concentrating on work.
But when I look at jobs, I consider the kind of person one usually finds there. And college students don't make up the majority of Wall-Mart cashiers where I live. Most of them are single mothers who would rather work in the Safeway down the street because Safeway has a union that requires benefits and a 401(k) program. The union also requires an allowance for child care so that the single mothers can actually afford to work.
I don't see Wal-Mart doing that and I do see them doing everything they possibly can to prevent employees from unionizing.
I was a college student too, once. And, frankly, I know how to live on very little if I need to. But at my age I also insist that I be able to retire easily and buy a home. I don't insist on a new car every three years (I have never once owned a new car) and I do everything I can to save money for my child's education as well as my retirement.
Wall-Mart doesn't allow their workers to do that. I assert you cannot really do that until or unless you are making in the mid to upper $40,000s in low income states; at least $60,000 on the coasts. That means you'll need skills that are better than what a dead-end job at Wall-Mart offers and you'll need better pay
And that was my point.
One of the rather interesting facts of life about the US Court system is that Judges have powers within their courtrooms that are very close to those exercised by despotic monarchs two centuries ago. Here's how it works:
Attorney General gets a judgement for the plaintiff (the State or the Federal Government). The judgement is pretty light and totally within all sentencing guidelines. The judgement is not what's important.
What you have here is a trap.
If the spammer was truly forced by the judge to agree to live by the Court's order to not violate federal and state laws as a part of the guilty verdict (or a plea of guilty), the trap is set. Should Mr. Spammer ever, in the judge's eyes, violate his solemn promise to do no wrong in the future, he may be held in contempt of court. And in contempt issues, the judge gets to become a Royal Despot, handing out a bench warrant for the man's arrest and forcing the violator of a direct order of the Court to await the pleasure of the Court in any way the Court wishes.In other words, dear reader, there are no pesky Federal, State or local sentencing guidelines, no rules, no laws, just what the judge thinks will work. And that may include many years behind bars (being someone's woman) as well as fines that are astronomical (like $500,000 for each UCE found by the Attorney General henceforth to be in violation of said Court order. And that's something that could bankrupt the fool.
So I regard the announcement for what it truly is, a set trap.
thelizman wrote:
WalMart has one of the most generous pay and benefits packages of any retail chain. In a small town like where I live, WalMart stores are typically the number one employer, with queues months long of people trying to a position
I don't know where you live and do not wish in any way to disparage your community, which is most probably an excellent part of the world. But as someone who has spent the last seven years as a "perma-temp" (also known as a "daily hire" and a "regular daily hire" in HR corporatespeak) with no benefits, no kick in to a 401(k) or pension or other retirement program, no paid sick days, no paid holidays, health insurance for me and my family out of my pocket, this is a sore point with me. I equate Wall-Mart with reprehensible employment practice.
Mind you, I do not work at Wall-Mart; never have and hope never to do that. Wall-Mart offers "McJobs" in communities in my area with no benefits. Then they advertise in order to try to counteract the claims made in court recently that they discriminate against woman and against minorities, that they lock their illegal alien cleaning workforce in the store overnight so that, if there were a medical emergency, the ambulance couldn't get to the sick or injured.
A recent report by the University of California at Berkeley states:
Wal-Mart workers in California earn on average 31 percent less than workers employed in large retail as a whole, receiving an average wage of $9.70 per hour compared to the $14.01 average hourly earnings for employees in large retail (firms with 1,000 or more employees). In addition, 23 percent fewer Wal-Mart workers are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance than large retail workers as a whole.
At these low-wages, many Wal-Mart workers rely on public safety net programs--such as food stamps, Medi-Cal, and subsidized housing--to make ends meet. The presence of Wal-Mart stores in California thus creates a hidden cost to the state's taxpayers.
To further question your particular observation, after Wal-Mart replied to the study and stated that their employees aren't paid so badly after all, the authors did more study and found:
If we compare Wal-Mart's stated California wages in 2004 ($10.37) to large retailers in the state overall ($14.82), we find a Wal-Mart wage penalty of 30%, virtually identical to the 31% we found in 2001.
Now this is California (or "Caleefornia," according to the Governor) and not Texas or Oklahoma. I live on the East Coast and know enough about workers at Wall-Mart to know that it's the place where you work if there is nothing else available in retail. A Wal-Mart job is typical of the "jobs" that Reagan touted as demonstrating the health of the American economy. Wal-Mart jobs don't pay anything like what a manufacturing sector job will pay, they don't pay or offer benefits like union jobs. In short, they're service industry jobs that do not enable workers to be able to pay for the college educations of their children or save for retirement.
Again, I do not wish to disparage you or your community. I also suspect that you may be young and not trying to save for a downpayment for a home while paying rent, trying to support a spouse and child, concerned about how the US will deal with the loss of sufficient income to keep Social Security going past 2030 and so on.
I think that, on that one point (generous pay and benefits for American workers) you may be misinformed.
Warren Cohen writes:
Wal-Mart willingly loses money selling CDs for less than $10 (they buy most hit CDs from distributors for around $12).
I cannot believe that all CDs sell to retailers for $10. If you subtract the $3.89 retail overhead from the price of a CD along with the $.80 and $.90 retail profit and distribution costs of a CD (all are retailer costs and Wall-Mart agressively controls costs in its own channel), you come up with a price per CD of $10.40 (assuming Wall-Mart makes nothing and eats its own costs as reported by Mr. Cohen).
But record companies typically underreport by 20% the sales of releases to artists, writers and unions so let's factor that in, making payments to unions actually $.14, $.68 publishing royalties and $1.28 artists' royalties. We now have a price below $10 per CD. Of course record companies' costs go up a little for every artist who takes advantage of the audit clause in their contract but that tends to be an insignificant minority.
Then Mr. Cohen ignores the fact that the companies typically will offer large lots at a discount to large sellers. I can see where a specialty store might need to charge some $16 for a CD -- they're not buying a small subset of all available CDs in mass quantity like Wall-Mart is. Larger buyers will find their price is a lot lower.
I cannot see how Wall-Mart can be considered a serious music seller if what they are doing is stocking a subset of the fastest-selling music. The article strongly suggests that anything in the top 40 or so of hits that are local to that area (perhaps more CW in the deep south, more alternative rock near large cities) on the various charts will be in Wall-Mart. But you probably won't be able to find the Beatles White Album (you'll find their most recent "1" album though) or any of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays' collaborations in their store.
And that bothers me. It is like how if you have a book and you want to get exposure for it, you will have to pay the large retailers like Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble for shelf space and/or a window display in order to get noticed. This limits what I can find in a bookstore and depresses the sale of otherwise excellent books. In Wall-Mart's case, it diminishes the sales of CDs that are "just outside" of their popularity cut-off point and artificially increases the sales within that zone.
The end result of this will tend to pressure future contracts with artists. And it will give the labels yet another reason to underreport sales to them.
Look for a stronger attack against people trading music. They'll try to cover the Wall-Mart effect through legislation and through the courts.
Because "No Child Left Behind" really means "No Wealthy White Non-disabled Child Left Behind."
Which recommendations of the 9/11 Commission do you oppose and feel are inappropriate for implimentation.
What specific steps will you take (are you taking) to find Usama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Exactly what resources ought our military and intelligence services be given to finish the job of capturing these known perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack on the United States?
Exactly how will Social Security benefits be paid for by your policies after 2020?
You are, perhaps, confusing a "representative" government with Democracy. Under Democracy, there is one man, one vote. That's it. The deciders of all outcomes are the people.
On a local level, I have lived within a democracy; a town in New England called Epping. Under the Town Charter we had representatives who would forward, for voter approval, a yearly budget. Most of that budget was taken up by the school, and tended to pass without much comment. Everyone in town wanted a decent education for their children and most parents tended to occasionally volunteer their time at the schools (a grammer school, a middle school and a secondary, or "high" school) and that tended to keep everyone who had children aware of whether or not there was a pencil or book shortage.
Then there was the 10% or so of town funds that went to everything else, from stop signs to road repairs to repainting of the Town Hall and so on. That was gone over line item by line item with factions warring over dollar amounts like it was life or death.
It was cumbersome and we did have some really late nights but it was absolutely democratic.
If you live in the United Kingdom, I'm not sure you could call your country a Republic. And it's not really a "Constitutional Monarchy" because there is no real written Constitution. I'd call the UK system more of an "evolved" monarchy with some representative government based on the Parliamentary system and a House of Lords to stave things off a bit in a most un-representative manner. There is also the bit about "home rule" for Scotland and Wales, as well as an attempt (sadly unsuccessful so far) at the same for Northern Ireland. The "home rule" aspect doesn't really have too much bearing on the strong centralized system in the House of Commons and the Executive that is derived from it.
Please don't mistake the Republican party for espousing a particular form of government. That's a name and so is the name Democratic (as in party). The "Democratic" party traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson, who never referred to himself as a "democrat," that word -- being associated with Jacobism in Revolutionary France -- was an epithet or a slur. He considered the form of government he espoused to be "republican."
The party which opposed Jefferson was out of New England, mostly, and was known as The Federalist Party. They completely lost their standing with the voters in the United States when they passed, and their President, John Adams signed The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and proceeded to establish a standing army to enforce them and other dictates of the Adams administration.
Because King George had sent a standing army over to the Colonies in order to enforce his unpopular acts only a few years prior to Adams' actions, the Federalist party very quickly lost power and was pretty much dissolved by 1810.
The next party to challenge the party of Jefferson was the Whig Party, which became pretty well established by 1830. It stood for protectionist tarrifs on imports, the use of money derived from the sale of Federal lands (in our territories and new States) for the improvement of those selfsame States and territories, like for road systems and levees and dams to prevent flooding. They also favored the creation of a new Bank of the United States.
Slavery became an issue by 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the party even further. Disaffected Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started a new party and called themselves Republicans. Their initial platform was to oppose slavery and to oppose the dissolution of the Republic (the Union), which was being threatened by Southern States.
I would suggest that the "Republican" party, as founded by those ex-Whigs is dead, dying when Reconstruction was stopped during the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes did not win the Electoral College or the popular vote. Hayes's election depended upon contested electoral votes in Louisi
I know and I understand.
And if you care to make wagers, I recommend you put your money on Bush because he has a better than even chance to win. And it will be very bad for this country. And it will probably be worse for other countries.
Part of this "war on terror" stuff is an attempt to diminish the influence of a number of people who are considered "religious extremists." Frankly, I don't think religion has much to do with it and I also think that terror is a tactic, not a nationality.
But part of why Bush stands a good chance of re-election is some 15% of our electorate is made up of religious extremists. And it is their system of beliefs that has perpetrated terror on other innocents abroad, like the State of Palestine, the "average joe taxidriver" in Iraq who was swept up in raids and tortured in Abu Graib and the "collateral damage" in Afghanistan (as well as Iraq).
In a speech before the Society of Professional Journalists, Bill Moyers said:
According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its "biblical lands;" when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. "True believers" will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow.
When the President asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, over one hundred thousand angry Christian fundamentalists barraged the White House with emails and Mr. Bush never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon's expansions of settlements on the West Bank.
So that 15% of the electorate actually doesn't care that there will be no Social Security or that taxes will have to be increased or that lots of people will die in the Middle East. They're thinking, "I'll be up in Heaven watching all the wicked people die."
Guilty as charged (I work for a national news network).
The process of election monitoring does include watching what official news agencies within a given country say. For example, if, in country "X" all pre-election coverage favors one candidate and does not offer equal time to the other candidates, that is considered an irregularity and is reported. Also gross inaccuracies in the media are reported.
Also please note, as a broadcast professional, my definition of a "reporter" in a third-world country is "mike stand for government official," typically there is little fairness in elections in these countries
What happened in Florida is a real screw-up of chilling proportions. But when you examine what was actually happening, you can understand what is going on. I shall elaborate for the good of /.
We spend a whole lot of money trying to do just that and Election Night is a really big spending spree for us. We used to use mainframe computers to calculate the results of the exit polls quickly so that we could get the numbers out faster than anyone. Presently we're using some pretty high-end computers for graphics for the results but any pee cee can come up with exit poll statistics really fast.
All of the larger news outlets along with polling companies like Pew Research and Harris conduct surveys of voters as they exit the polls. They ask people who are willing, chosen at random, how they voted. They use normal, standard statistics and report the margin for error.
In Florida in 2000, those persons who voted the infamous "Butterfly Ballot" may have believed their vote was correct. Remember, Buchannan picked up a whole lot of votes from one section of Dade County that tends to not vote for his particular brand of politics. Exit pollers asked these people as well as all others in other counties.
Based on the "best available" information, the networks broadcast what they broadcast based on that information. As the precincts closed their polls and began their counts, they reported something significantly different from the exit polls. It was after the networks received that information that they recanted their earlier predictions.
I can say with a good conscience that the networks did not intentionally miscall the election and what they did certainly did not influence the outcome. Were we to do that again, it would be called "fair" reporting by the UN observers.
I think that what happened afterwards would be called questionable. The US Constitution has a provision for dealing with a questionable Electoral College vote and had the Supreme Court and Congress followed the Constituion, the outcome would have been the same and the US Congress would have chosen Bush. It would have been a straight party-line vote.
Then, perhaps, the Republicans would have been a little more circumspect and Bush might not have declared a "mandate" (as he wrongly did after being sworn in) for his policies. Or maybe not. Fact is, September 11th would have still happened on his watch and I'll bet he would still have used an Al Qaeda attack as justification to try to set up another "shah of Iran" in Baghdad, but the public would have more problems with the legitimacy of his presidency than they do now and might have held their congressmen to account more.
Instead, the US Supreme Court got involved and selected Bush, perhaps as a favor to their friends in Congress and as a favor to Bush and Cheny. This was a direct violation of the powers reserved to the States in the matter of sending their electors who will choose the President, which is one of the few remaining powers reserved to the States in our Constitution that have not been trod on by the Federal Government (until now).
I think the UN observers will be particularly interested in anything like that in this election.
I graduated from high school in 1974. My draft number was 16. The draft had been abolished the year before and I have voted in every election (even school board) since I turned 18. The maturity you see there may be partially due to the fact that "children" just out of high school were coming back from a (then, in 1960) popular war against Communism in body bags but the draft was not calling up as many 18-year-olds --yet.
Also there were teaching methodologies that were not oriented towards "preserving the self-esteem" of students at all costs. There was no such thing in 1960 as "social promotion." If you didn't pass the fourth grade (for example), you stayed in the fourth grade until you did pass and everyone knew that.
I would respectfully disagree with you that "it wasn't particularly possible to spend 95% of your freetime watching (television) yet... Parents back then did their uttermost to limit television viewing as a means by wich they might promote the completion of one's homework assignments; some parents were more concerned about television viewing than others. I thought mine incredibly strict because I didn't go to school quoting all of the best lines from the popular shows. But also television was very different then because there was outright censorship of the medium. Lucille Ball was the first to mention the word "pregnant" on the air and there were no sexual innuendoes like one finds all over the dial today.
Additionally, we had three networks plus PBS (which was "educational television" and not a network yet) back then. In 1960, most television networks broadcast 15 minutes of network news, with the anchorperson (a word that had not been invented yet) reading the newswires and no actual footage of any of the news events, for the most part. It was not until the late 1960s and the 1970s that we could actually see footage of material from the field, as the technology of 1960 did not permit recording of material on a portable tape machine or microwave transmission of a live event. Remote transmission was done over telco lines and was horrendously expensive. "Actuality" material from a news event was done on film (usually 16MM double-system) and edited for air in several days. That kind of on-the-scene material was rare in 1960.
We regard children today as generally more mature in terms of sexuality, less mature in terms of what to do with it.
With respect to your comment about penmanship and spelling, we didn't have computer spell-checks back then and only 10% of males in your father's class could efficiently operate a typewriter (that was something secretaries in a typing pool did -- a "girl job"). He and those around him hand wrote all of their term papers and they had to be neat or they'd be graded down, so they learned good penmanship out of necessity.
Football was not the million-dollar career choice back then as it is today, so I can see a winning debate team getting equal column inches -- especially if the football team didn't have a wonderful year and/or wasn't in Texas, where football is a religion.
The real lesson to be learned about the government reaction to the "flashmob" creation generated by websites and call phones is that this is a new reaction to a new medium and the assumption on the part of conservatives is that it's automatically bad and destructive of youth.
Governments that exercise the kind of abusive actions towards the results of new media ought to be turned out of office. I would encourage you to register and to always vote, lest you get the kind of government that follows when the vast majority of our country chooses to not register.
OK, you should be modded "up" for funny.
I remain a student of history, lest I participate in its recapitulation. I should also mention several stories about the birth of film and photography (first mass uses were pornographic, sound familiar?) but I have to scrape the rot off my brain.
People of a certain age remember when "Television would rot the minds of the youth of America" and "Rock and Roll was 'dangerous jungle music' that would cause uncontrollable urges in today's youth." These were horrified reactions to new media on the part of the more conservative elements of society.
At the same time, the "conservative" elements of US society applauded when the fax machine in Soviet Russia became a tool for the masses to communicate without government censorship. Yeltsin came to power largely due to mass faxes in Russia (predomanently in Moscow) told the real story of the government coup attempt on Gorbachev. Gorby lost face because he "allowed" it to happen by remaining Communist and a well-informed (via fax) Yeltsen became an instant hero because he stood up to the Red Army generals who wanted Gorby's ouster.
Obviously, the conservative elements in Soviet Russia didn't think so highly of the fax machine.
I note one Russian news service is called "Interfax" and, for a while, was a very independant and trusted news agency.
What bothers me is that laws have been passed to allow the confiscation of cellular phones and other new media devices to prevent the use of these new media for the purpose of organization "against" something or "for" something else. These laws will be selectively enforced to "edit" what kinds of flash mobs will be permitted by governments who wish to use those laws as that kind of tool.
I would predict that this kind of "editing" will amount to unequal enforcement. For example, were Conservative Christians in the US to "Flashmob" a clinic that offers family planning, there would be few arrests under a Bush government. But a monthly "flashmob," also known as Critical Mass was broken up by police in New York in late September because the riders supposedly went where police decided they should not go (even though they were obeying all traffic laws).
Critical Mass has become a "reason to arrest" for the NYPD only since their August 28th event just before the Republican National Convention.
This amounts to unequal enforcement and standing before US law enforcement, as no prior Critical Mass gathering had ever resulted in arrests.
Critical Mass holds the meets in order to promote non-polluting transportation and encourage the construction and maintenence of safe bike lanes. That doesn't sound like terrorism to me
Sounds like Trump this, Trump that.
At least Mr. Branson had the taste to come up with a company name that was not his own.
According to the bill the way it is, broadcasters must move their broadcasting service to the higher band (where they are allowed to broadcast in high-definition or may broadcast up to three standard-definition signals). They don't pay for this allocation and still hold the broadcast spectrum "in the public trust." The present location for these stations will be taken back by the government.
When the government recovers the VHF and UHF bandwidth that the stations lose that spectrum will be sold. Stations will be able to broadcast on their higher spectrum allocation without paying anything for it other than their costs of running a broadcast operation.
NPR is a radio service and the stations do not have to move their frequency allocations. CSPAN is a cable service and does not broadcast. I find it very interesting that most PBS stations will have been compliant sooner than their commercial counterparts. They could rightly say, during pledge drives, that their service to their localities would end if their donors did not come up with the cash necessary to comply with the federal regulations.
I would agree with you that stations are increasingly being owned by "the most ruthlessly efficient" in terms of finding ways to pump money out of broadcasting. I would suggest that broadcasters stopped considering the public "need, necessity and convenience" when the FCC decided to get out of the business of regulation during the Reagan administration. But that has been going on for a long time and has little to do with the present changes to high-definition.
And, of course, the government never has to pay for radio spectrum. The government is the allocator, not the payer.
Thanks to supernova87a we all know exactly how it would be done if the government controlled all television and the laws were not written with the help of lobbyists.
Here is what a station has to do:
Build a new tower if there is no room on the existing tower (likely).
Purchase a radiating antenna for said tower
Purchase an NTSC upconverter to use during transition and to use later for news and older programs
Purchase a completely new plant with VCRs and/or hard disk arrays that will record and play back HD.
Purchase and pay to wire up that new plant as well as provide links for the old plant to the new system (for upconversion). Find a way to pay for the maintenance of all of the above as well as to send existing maintenance personnel to school to learn the new stuff.
Find some way to pay for the costs of the electricity to run the new transmitter
Please note, I am probably leaving out a whole lot of stuff here
Not to overly take the stations' side on this issue, these are pretty daunting requirements. And for a station outside of the top 100 markets, it may be really close-on to impossible. Again, during this transition, there is a chicken/egg dichotomy where very few viewers will be seeing your digital signal because they won't have purchased HD television sets yet. This means you cannot report to your advertisers that you have more viewers with HD -- you probably have fewer because the Internet, cable and satellite continue to erode your viewer base.
Small wonder the law, once feelers went out via the FCC, was heavily lobbied by all parts of the television industry. I should mention at this point that part of the reason why Congress was attracted to this law was because all television sets were being made overseas and Congress wanted there to be at least one television manufacturer located in the US. It would appear this aim was unsuccessful as multiplexo and others point out when they write here that they have televisions made in Japan or elsewhere.
I would offer the opinion that, since the death of RCA as a television company (which would be when GE swallowed them up) there has not been any possibility of any manufacture of receivers on US soil since then.
So, the laws were seriously written and rewritten by the lobbyists. Stations get the bandwidth with no requirement that they use it to broadcast in high definition. Congress, after "discovering" this fact called television network executives to Washington to enjoin them (really beg them) to broadcast in HD
Cable companies are required under law to carry local stations ("Must Carry") but, perversely, must pay for "retransmission consent," thus giving all networks a free ride on cable systems for their own cable channels (did you know that NBC owns Sci Fi, Bravo, Trio, and others as well as CNBC and part of MSNBC?).
All NYC stations will, undoubtedly, receive an extension of "Use it or Lose it" due to September 11th, 2001, which only affects towers and transmitters.
There are tons of other fun details in the law and in the FCC rulings. I guarantee you, those shows that will be seen in HD first will not be local programming. Look for news to be "upconverted" for a long time.
Insert obligatory statement on karma here
A woman I know was "downsized" by a large newspaper corporation some years back after she got pregnant. Out of five groups, her group was the second in performance, so there was no justification other than that of her pregnancy.
Her boss called her into his office and told her, after she took several hours off for a doctor's visit to get an amniocentisis, that "she had better get her priorities straight, and that when she decided her priorities, the manager would decide how valuable she was to the company."
This matter is in litigation presently, with the United States EEOC well involved. The thing that is funny is that the company who let her go had an opportunity to offer some half a million in order to get her to drop her (very good and well-documented) case. Presently, the EEOC is suing the company for "an injunction requiring the [company] to abstain from discrimination. It also seeks back pay with interest and other 'affirmative relief ... including but not limited to reinstatement,' punitive damages and reimbursement of the commission's legal expenses." Since the EEOC is a federal commission, they have unlimited means to sue the company. Half a million will look very cheap when all of this is sorted out.
Since she was let go in early 2001, they're looking at back pay that will total nearly half a million without any further damages, which will be considerable.
My best advice, if you work for a company that commits "bad behaviors," keep a complete record of everything. It's a better bet than winning a lottery.
In her case she did not burn any bridges. That would have been held against her in her case against the company.
If you go to Versiontracker you will find lots of cool software for the iPod and for iTunes if you enter iPod in their search box.
Colorado has "lots of great wind" that could be used for wind power.
Shouldn't this be in the Politics section of /. ?
Actually, the second progressive party in the US was the Republican Party if you define "liberal" in the way I define it (a liberal government must stand for re-election periodically and is generally and genuinely representative of the will of the voting public; the franchise is not restricted by law or custom). They were so progressive that they broke from the former party, which was the party of the moneyed elite and the banking interests in favor of human rights.
That would be the party of Lincoln.
The first progressive party was, of course, the party of Jefferson who would suggest that, at this point, the US is overdue for another revolution, complete with spilled blood. He would have considered what went on in the late 1960s and early 1970s to be a revolution that didn't quite take hold.
Jefferson opposed the Federalists, who wanted more centralized power, so much so that they passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which look a whole lot to me like the "Patriot" act of 2002. Jefferson was elected by a landslide over one-term John Adams, who signed the bill, because the public felt that the Federalists were trying to install a military dictatorship.
It was a near-run thing in my estimation.
The progressive stance of the Republicans was wholly ended by "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes, whose election was through Congress, not through the Electoral College. Congress, in this previous election must have let out a huge sigh of relief when the Supreme Court decided to ignore the Constitution and select Bush as President.
Much to the chagrin of most Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency upon the death of William McKinley and introduced progressive reforms in the United States during his Presidency.
So there is a history of progressive measures taken by Republicans.
I would assert that the Republican Party is no more. They have gone the way of the Federalist party and the Whigs in the Political scene. They have ceased to be but there are still those who call themselves Republicans without thinking too hard.
The Republican party that I grew up with was the Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It was a moderate party that was capable of initiating detante with our neighbors as well as our "enemies." It was largely centrist and passed legislation that helped out normal Americans. It also tended to vote against spending that would break federal budgets.
These Republicans are the party of the extreme right only. They want to limit civil liberties. They want to make all entitlements go away by increasing Federal deficits to the point where the only way they can be paid for is by raising taxes -- something they wish to blame the other party on. They won't raise the taxes, they'll end the entitlements. These entitlements include Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Aid to the Disabled, support for AIDS patients, all welfare programs.
They also want to allow big businesses unfettered access to "develop" land held by the US for prices that might have been charged for the land back in the 1830s. Never mind that this "development" strips the land of its current qualities and makes it into barren wasteland. This land held by the US is called "National Parks" and was set aside by Theodore Roosevelt (you will remember, he was a Republican, but a Progressive).
They also want former lobbyists in charge of enforcing federal laws regulating the very businesses they used to work for. After all, who better to understand these businesses then those familiar with their struggle against government regulations, right?
They also want to give your tax money to churches so that they can take over the role of teaching our children and serving the poor and needy and disabled (because the government is getting out of that business, you know). That way, in order for us to receive
Anonymous Coward wrote: aren't some of the really old shows actually recorded on film?
Depending on how old they are, many of the classic shows were shot on film using the Kinescope process, where the film camera shot the show on a television set as it was being produced live in the studio. That actually results in lower resolution than what NTSC broadcasts can currently support.
The series that were shot in 35mm color film, edited on that film and then transferred to videotape for playback by the stations will do well in being re-transferred to high-definition, though the aspect ratio that the 35mm film was exposed for was more or less the same as standard definition television. But don't expect Soupy Sales to look better than he does presently.
OK, we used to have a third party. Perot funded it and willed it into existence. Ran one year and then turned into a kind of a nutcase the next time around.
Then Pat Buchannan took it over so that Republicans would not lose votes to it. And he lost by such a bad margin that the Reform Party no longer gets federal cash.
Nader doesn't have a party. He doesn't have a party apparatus. The Green Party was so villified after last Presidential election that they refused to support Nader this go-round. The only reason I can figure why he is running is because of ego. He wants attention.
Nader has some good things to say. His comments have become talking points for various candidates. But he lost his credibility when he didn't drop out of the race in 2000 and when he allowed Republicans in 2004 to fund and set up his operations in hopes that he would steal votes from Kerry.
So rather than allow him to have his say the entire Democratic Party, as well as many in niether party who want to re-defeat Bush this time, has taken specific action to keep him out of the running in as many of the so-called "battleground" states as possible.
The single reason why people "union up" is unfair treatment by employers; seeing their employees as cyphers and creating a hostile work environment
While unions do negotiate for pay, I know of several that allow their members to negotiate "personal service contracts" to up their pay. The issue unions are most concerned with have to do with the work environment and work rules, not pay.
So I guess if one is a member of a union, one is not a "capitalist." One thing everyone must sign in order to join any union in the US is a statement that indicates that the person is not a member of the Communist Party. Quite frankly, I think that the requirement that one sign that kind of a statement is a violation of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment but it does strongly suggest that union members are not "commies."
So, if you are a member of a union and you are not a Capitalist, what are you? Unionist?
I agree that I have always been able to negotiate better pay for my services than any union but in a hostile work environment, I generally had no voice. I just did what I could to evade most of the nastiness.
I hear and understand the comment of the small business owner with respect to not wanting to pay overtime. He wants his employees to work hard just like he does.
And so if they work just as hard as he does and he sets them up on a salary basis as exempt workers, do they get to sell part of his company when they retire? Do they get a portion of the proceeds of his sale of the business? Do they get a portion of the company when his son or daughter inherits it?
Obviously not, so their investment in the company's well being is lower. And the small businessman only has one incentive with which to motivate his employees to work as hard as he does, money.
Paid overtime is money. And lots of people across the US are living (at least partially) on their overtime. Which says something about what has happened in our society since the 1930s and before (which is where the right wing of the Republican Party wants to return us). It used to be possible to buy a home and raise children with one income. Now couples need two. And single people need overtime in order to do the same.
But the real reason why the government took issue with this ruling of the Bush administration is that when a worker makes overtime, so does the government. Essentially, what Bush is doing with this ruling is he is setting up for an even larger ballooning of the federal deficit because workers making more than subsistence income may easily be exempted from overtime pay and that middle-class segment of America pays the most taxes.
To a certain extent, moderate Republicans will vote with Democrats on this issue because they want to win re-election and it's hard to face an electorate when your opponent claims you just caused everyone to take a pay cut. And some conservative Republicans may be wooed on this issue if they are budget deficit hawks. The article seems to suggest that the Senate won't pass the amendment. Lets hope they do.
I make around $100,000 yearly and greatly benefit (as well as does my State and the Federal Government) from my overtime pay. Under the DOL's ruling, I'd be forced to take a pay cut to around $87,000 yearly. And that means the difference between living comfortably (in the NYC area) and having trouble paying bills.
My idea of a covenant against spammers ... would give me (and other customers) the right to sue the ISP if they fail to keep their address space, and their services, clean of spammers.
I really like your idea and, of course, it could be done easily with a contract you have with any ISP. I think that, were the value of your business high, lots of ISPs would really go for that. Unfortunately, ISPs are in business and must turn a profit.
I would (and do) pay extra for a service that stops spam; it compells us to overengineer the Internet to be able to handle their traffic. And, while overengineering can be a good thing (like the overengineering that went on in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge), we all have to pay for a service that may cost more than it would were there no spammers. Thus, the only way we can force our ISPs to go after spammers is to pay a premium or set a rate that disallows overbuilding. In our present situation, that must be the former, not the latter.
Thank you for your commentary. It's really insightful.
I suppose you would then want to get your service from companies like Earthlink that actively target, sue and defend their users against spammers. I appreciate that -- I have as little love for spam e-mail as you seem to.
But you must agree that a first step for an ISP is to have an AUP that lays the framework for such action against spammers. And that was my point, as earlier in the discussion one comment indicated that the poster had not seen Savvis' AUP and did not know if they had one. I provided a link to such.
I have had an Internet account since 1985. I remember when, to kill a spammer, all one had to do was fire off an e-mail to the spammer's provider (usually a university). At that time the Internet, under the NSF grant that sustained it, had a prohibition on any commercial usage. There was a culture that controlled things. People would flame other people in Usenet Newsgroups but it was seen as all in good fun.
When things opened up, the Internet was offered as a wonderful tool to everyone, most of whom are good, honest people. Unfortunately, there were no safeguards built into the system to disallow spam and prevent software from "spoofing" headers, so the dregs of society have now required that we build in an assumption in the bandwidth we use to support the Internet for a very poor "signal" to "noise" ratio.
I did just had a thought though...
What if the first verified extra-terrestrial signal SETI found was a UCE?