No. Read it again. He never admits to doing anything, whether or not it is illegal, so all the pertinent questions of law and fact are still out there. All he does is state the fact that Sony's own filing admits that the information that they are seeking to prevent getting out is already widely distributed on the internet, and argues, based on that, that on the basis of the claims in Sony's own filing requesting a TRO (temporary restraining order) such an order would serve no purpose.
Yeah, last I saw, those were only available on T-Mobile.
Well, its available not locked to any carrier, though T-mobile is the only US carrier whose network uses a 3G band that the Nexus S supports, so it won't do 3G on any other (US) network.
Between the discontinuation of consumer sales of Nexus One and the introduction of the Nexus S, advanced users had to register as developers to get a Nexus One.
Yes, so?
Why should current purchasers be concerned with hoops they would have had to jump through if they had wanted to get what they want now in the past?
Should the Nexus S disappear from stores, as you conjectured, advanced users will have to register as developers to get a Nexus S.
Yes, so?
Why should current purchasers be concerned with hoops they would have to jump through if they would want to get what they want now in some speculative hypothetical future scenario?
The fact is that the Nexus S is available now through consumer channels, and that Google has shown that they will support the Nexus line with future updates (as the Nexus One, which is no longer available new through consumer channels, though it is still available as a Dev Phone continues to be supported.)
Neither of the points you raise has any relevance to current options.
Advanced users, but not developers, won't go through the hassle of obtaining a dev phone. They'll instead use a phone where they can get the latest updates and are automatic.
You mean like the Nexus S, Google's current high-end (and only) consumer oriented phone?
The OHA has stated the intention to always have at least one Android Dev Phone available.
I thought about the Nexus One and the it disappeared.
The Nexus One is still available as an Android Dev Phone.
What's to say the same doesn't happen to the Nexus S which I didn't even have a clue was coming out till it did till because of Google's dropping of Nexus One?
I would expect that if there is insufficient consumer demand to maintain the Nexus S as anything other than a dev phone, the same thing will happen with the Nexus S that happened with the Nexus One (e.g., it won't continue to be sold maintained as a consumer focussed product, but will still be just as capable of being updated to new OS versions.)
Unless a vendor (Google) shows up and shows that I can expect to upgrade to the next couple of softwear iterations without issue I'm not changing.
Yes, just as the iPhone is a great open platform, for after all we have jailbreaking.
I would not characterize official products that are under user control like the Nexus S and Android Dev Phones as equivalent to the availability of unofficial hacks that to allow user control that the vendor is constantly fighting against.
That's "on the gripping hand", and I fucking hated that book for constantly repeating that.
I am aware of the expression and its source, had a similar reaction to it (and to the constant use of it outside of the book in some things that I encountered long ago, though I can't recall exactly where that was), and consequently when I'm doing a post in an informal forum and I've done the "one hand, on the other hand" bit and find a third point that I really think ought to be included (even if it is a more important point so it firts the "gripping hand" paradigm) I use some other expression.
Of course, I should have considered that on Slashdot, approaching but avoiding that idiom would actually draw more attention than the substantive point.
They can do work to acheive motivation if they are good, which is what I said. They can't simply declare a policy (and have it work) that "there will be motivation and efficiency".
You motivate people with rewards, not just direct monetary ones either.
Actually, there is plenty of research that concrete rewards can be demotivating, and can decrease efficiency. What really works well for motivation and efficiency is involving working staff in improving the methods used in their own work.
You know, for a company with a total equity of US $36.004 billion (2009) the sum of $14,000 being spent to improve their product doesn't seem that good of a deal for the people doing the work...
They are spending a lot more than that to improve their product -- they do have paid development staff. These are "thank yous" in cash form awarded after the fact to people who have, on their own, reported problems.
Many companies don't reward people for reporting problems with their product at all.
I'm pretty sure the announced release schedule is one release every six weeks (which is 2 in 12 weeks), which is a little faster than 2/quarter (which is 2 in 13 weeks.)
Hows all that "open platform" "not locked to a walled garden" "no need to jailbreak" Android working out for all the people that rant and rave against the iPhone?
Quite well, as long as the Nexus S and/or the various Android Dev Phones are available.
Well rested and happy people are far more productive than tired and unhappy people.
This is certainly true if you measure productivity in value of output per unit of time worked. OTOH, if you have exempt employees, your labor costs don't scale with hours worked, and you may, within a certain range, get more output per unit of labor cost by expanding hours past the point where that would be beneficial in a system of hourly wages.
On the third(?!) hand, there is going to be a point at which that becomes counterproductive, even in the short-term, and in the long-term it probably isn't good for morale and retention.
A successful focus would be on motivation and efficiency, not on length of workday.
But a boss can't just declare motivation and efficiency, whereas a boss can just declare longer workdays. "Motivation and efficiency" require the boss to do work...
IF you cause me quantifiable damages, then I have a valid lawsuit even if there isn't a law to govern it.
Wrong. I mean, you can file a lawsuit anytime you want, but if there is no law providing an actual remedy for the harm you allege occurred, no matter what the magnitude of the harm is or how directly related it is to my action, that lawsuit will (if the court is doing its job) be dismissed when I file a motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action.
And while I feel dirty citing it, the famous McDonalds Coffee lawsuit comes to mind.
The famous "coffee lawsuit", Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, was brought under negligence law, which is law, and thus not an example of your claim that "quantifiable damages" produce a "valid lawsuit even if there isn't a law to govern it".
Someone spilled coffee on themselves, and McDonalds had to fork over something like 14 million.
There was a $3 million jury award, which was reduced by the judge to $640,000; the award was appealed by both sides, and settled prior the appeal being heard for an amount reported as less than $600,000, which is just a little less than $14 million.
There was no criminal law broken.
Sure, there was no criminal law at issue because it wasn't a criminal case. But not all law is criminal, and there would not have been a judiciable claim without an applicable law. The absence of criminal law is not the absence of law.
You can sue someone for anything. There doesn't have to be a criminal law for the basis of a lawsuit.
There doesn't have to be a criminal law to file a civil lawsuit, but there does have to be a law; the absence of a legal basis for the suit is, unsurprisingly, a ground for dismissal.
You cannot have a law prohibiting libel or slander if free speech rights are absolute. In fact, even in the US legal system which actually exists without absolute free speech protections, the free speech rights that do exist limit the ability to sue for libel or slander -- consider, e.g., New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 US 254 (1964).
We now have Amazon Kindle Store, B&N Nook Store, etc because everyone wants to try to lock their customer into their devices.
Nope, wrong. Nook books can be read in nook apps on a variety of platforms (PC, Android, iOS, etc.) Kindle likewise. The real product being sold here is the content, the dedicated stores and the devices that have the store integrated (though they can import content from other sources) are designed to encourage purchases from the stores. The stores do not exist to lock people into the devices, otherwise, they wouldn't provide access to the stores and content purchased from them on other devices.
Oddly, having made that mistake above, you get it right later:
Every corporation loves the idea of the specialized viewer because it locks the customer in to their store.
Right. The specialized viewer promotes the store (which is why the viewer technology is as widely distributed among "open" devices as possible as well as being available in dedicated devices), the store doesn't serve principally to lock people into the specialized viewer device as you claimed previously.
Your explanation doesn't hold water at all. Both the iPhones and Android phones were on the same network, AT&T, and yet of those who chose the AT&T network people overwhelmingly chose the iPhone.
You assume that people chose a network first, and then chose a phone after chosing a network. If some people chose a phone first, and/or some people chose using a combination of phone and network features, the fact that the iPhone was available only on AT&T would mean that that factor draws people who prefer to iPhone to AT&T's network, making iPhone more dominant on AT&T's network, compared to other OSs, than it would be if iPhone was available on other networks.
I love how Android users try to take some intellectual snob approach and yet can't see their hand in front of their face some times.
My wife and I each got an iPhone 3G to replace our previous Palm smartphones. We'll probably each get an iPhone 3GS in the next couple of days. Simple analysis is not an "intellectual snob approach", and I'm not a Android user.
Call it a shiny toy all you want, but my example stands unchallenged by you or the anonymous coward before you.
You example, again, is only valid in any sense if you assume that everyone is choosing a network first, and then a phone. Otherwise, the predominance of iPhone over Android among AT&T subscribers doesn't say much.
And even if you make that assumption, it doesn't say anything unless you further assume that not only does every user choose network first, but also that users who chose AT&T first are representative in their phone preferences of all users of whatever network preference.
I would submit that both assumptions are unjustified, and the first is clearly false.
However per http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66K6BX20100721 [reuters.com] (Reuters) - A municipal manager in California who makes nearly $800,000 a year working for a small, poor city could draw pension payments exceeding $30 million in retirement, according to an activist who has been calling for an overhaul of the state's public pension system.
So there's a news article that claims that someone with an overt bias and incentive to distort claims, without any identified basis, that a particular thing is possible without identifying the frequency with which it occurs or even any concrete examples.
I'm less than impressed. There is no reason provided to believe that the claim is accurate, and no basis for assigning any particular significance to it even if one assumes it is exactly accurate as written (that is, it is under some combination of duration of employment, age, and lifespan after retirement factors possible for someone working at that salary to attain such a total retirement benefit.)
[In fact, since CalPERS pensions are usually annuity, if you assume a long enough lifespan, anyone drawing even the most minimal retirement can, in theory, attain any arbitrarily large total of retirement benefits.]
And...so? Its not an unfunded liability -- most pensions in the systems are funded out of funds already deposited on behalf of the employee (the employee and employer share varies between public employers, and between bargaining units and other groupsing within those employers, that participate in CalPERS.)
The comparison made in that blog of total pension liability to number of current taxpayers (or to current tax receipts) is completely irrelevant. Total pension liabilities to the total assets in the retirement funds would be a more relevant comparison.
(Though, really, to do policy, you need to assess the health of the particular funds within the retirement systems, since even the main systems, CalPERS, has a large number of defined benefit and defined contribution retirement funds which are separate funds with separate policies set in law -- e.g., most of the independent funds are paid out of prior contributions, but, e.g., the Judicial Retirement Fund [the older of two defined-benefit judicial pension plans, and one that is not open to new members] is done on a pay-as-you-go basis out of current contributions and State General Fund augmentation.)
For some reason I can't find a simple 2010 total pension payments.
CalPERS -- like the rest of the State of California -- runs on a July-June fiscal year. The reports for each fiscal year are dated mid-December following the end of the year following. They are actually released online somewhat later than that.
But, with a 500 BILLION dollar deficit, I'm betting the pensions do not add up to 1.4billion your figures suggest.
There is no $500 billion dollar deficit. Even if you assume the entire population of the State is working age, and use the $10,000 per working age Californian figure your source suggests total pension liabilities will grow to in 2014, the total pension liability (not a deficit) of 41 million (California's projected 2014 population) times $10,000 -- or 410 billion. Obviously, that overstates even what that source claims (since the working age population will be significantly smaller than the total population), but its enough to demonstrate that your own sources projection of the total liabil
Telling people what to buy is not a budget decision. A budget decision is telling people how much they can spend.
Actually, a budget specifies both what you can spend money on, and how much money you can spend on those things.
Now, it is true that it is a poor budget that is more specific on the "what you can spend money on" part than is warranted by the objectives intended to be served by the limitations expressed, but the fact that a particular requirement of that type may be a bad budget decision doesn't make it into something other than a budget decision.
California has many $200k+ pensions for people who worked 10 years to vest.
No, it doesn't. It has -- per advocates of the need for urgent reform, who have no incentive to understate the case -- 9,111 drawing from CalPERS (the retirement fund for almost all State workers, and many local public workers in California) with pensions over $100,000 per year.
Per CalPERS most recent annual report, the system has 505,862 current beneficiaries (so something less than 2% are drawing over $100k/yr -- total, far les than that for people who worked under 10 years to vest.) Retirees have an average of over 20 years of service, and draw an average of $2,220/month ($26,400/yr.)
In what sane universe does it take six months to return a cell phone?
It takes very little time to return a cell phone.
It takes more time to determine which 48,000 of the 96,000 cell phones issued by the State are least needed and have them reach the end of their contracted service period and not get renewed.
It's a good start-- but i hope they find some real meat.
The things that you see reported that are being implemented now -- this cellphone takeback, Brown returning most of the funds allocated for the gubernatorial transition to the State treasury rather than spending them, etc., are all the things that are within the Governor's direct control. The "real meat" is in the the Governor's proposed budget which requires action by the legislature (and, for those things that Brown has proposed, also action by the voters). An overview of can be found in the Introduction.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that a confession?!
No. Read it again. He never admits to doing anything, whether or not it is illegal, so all the pertinent questions of law and fact are still out there. All he does is state the fact that Sony's own filing admits that the information that they are seeking to prevent getting out is already widely distributed on the internet, and argues, based on that, that on the basis of the claims in Sony's own filing requesting a TRO (temporary restraining order) such an order would serve no purpose.
Yeah, last I saw, those were only available on T-Mobile.
Well, its available not locked to any carrier, though T-mobile is the only US carrier whose network uses a 3G band that the Nexus S supports, so it won't do 3G on any other (US) network.
Between the discontinuation of consumer sales of Nexus One and the introduction of the Nexus S, advanced users had to register as developers to get a Nexus One.
Yes, so?
Why should current purchasers be concerned with hoops they would have had to jump through if they had wanted to get what they want now in the past?
Should the Nexus S disappear from stores, as you conjectured, advanced users will have to register as developers to get a Nexus S.
Yes, so?
Why should current purchasers be concerned with hoops they would have to jump through if they would want to get what they want now in some speculative hypothetical future scenario?
The fact is that the Nexus S is available now through consumer channels, and that Google has shown that they will support the Nexus line with future updates (as the Nexus One, which is no longer available new through consumer channels, though it is still available as a Dev Phone continues to be supported.)
Neither of the points you raise has any relevance to current options.
Advanced users, but not developers, won't go through the hassle of obtaining a dev phone. They'll instead use a phone where they can get the latest updates and are automatic.
You mean like the Nexus S, Google's current high-end (and only) consumer oriented phone?
How long are they available?
The OHA has stated the intention to always have at least one Android Dev Phone available.
I thought about the Nexus One and the it disappeared.
The Nexus One is still available as an Android Dev Phone.
What's to say the same doesn't happen to the Nexus S which I didn't even have a clue was coming out till it did till because of Google's dropping of Nexus One?
I would expect that if there is insufficient consumer demand to maintain the Nexus S as anything other than a dev phone, the same thing will happen with the Nexus S that happened with the Nexus One (e.g., it won't continue to be sold maintained as a consumer focussed product, but will still be just as capable of being updated to new OS versions.)
Unless a vendor (Google) shows up and shows that I can expect to upgrade to the next couple of softwear iterations without issue I'm not changing.
A vendor (Google) has shown up which does that.
Yes, just as the iPhone is a great open platform, for after all we have jailbreaking.
I would not characterize official products that are under user control like the Nexus S and Android Dev Phones as equivalent to the availability of unofficial hacks that to allow user control that the vendor is constantly fighting against.
That's "on the gripping hand", and I fucking hated that book for constantly repeating that.
I am aware of the expression and its source, had a similar reaction to it (and to the constant use of it outside of the book in some things that I encountered long ago, though I can't recall exactly where that was), and consequently when I'm doing a post in an informal forum and I've done the "one hand, on the other hand" bit and find a third point that I really think ought to be included (even if it is a more important point so it firts the "gripping hand" paradigm) I use some other expression.
Of course, I should have considered that on Slashdot, approaching but avoiding that idiom would actually draw more attention than the substantive point.
They sure can do that if they are good.
They can do work to acheive motivation if they are good, which is what I said. They can't simply declare a policy (and have it work) that "there will be motivation and efficiency".
You motivate people with rewards, not just direct monetary ones either.
Actually, there is plenty of research that concrete rewards can be demotivating, and can decrease efficiency. What really works well for motivation and efficiency is involving working staff in improving the methods used in their own work.
You know, for a company with a total equity of US $36.004 billion (2009) the sum of $14,000 being spent to improve their product doesn't seem that good of a deal for the people doing the work...
They are spending a lot more than that to improve their product -- they do have paid development staff. These are "thank yous" in cash form awarded after the fact to people who have, on their own, reported problems.
Many companies don't reward people for reporting problems with their product at all.
They're doing two releases a quarter
I'm pretty sure the announced release schedule is one release every six weeks (which is 2 in 12 weeks), which is a little faster than 2/quarter (which is 2 in 13 weeks.)
For a product claiming to be "8.x", it sure could use a lot of refinement. [...]
However, for *actually* only being about 2.0 [...]
I don't think you understand what version numbers mean.
Hows all that "open platform" "not locked to a walled garden" "no need to jailbreak" Android working out for all the people that rant and rave against the iPhone?
Quite well, as long as the Nexus S and/or the various Android Dev Phones are available.
Well rested and happy people are far more productive than tired and unhappy people.
This is certainly true if you measure productivity in value of output per unit of time worked. OTOH, if you have exempt employees, your labor costs don't scale with hours worked, and you may, within a certain range, get more output per unit of labor cost by expanding hours past the point where that would be beneficial in a system of hourly wages.
On the third(?!) hand, there is going to be a point at which that becomes counterproductive, even in the short-term, and in the long-term it probably isn't good for morale and retention.
A successful focus would be on motivation and efficiency, not on length of workday.
But a boss can't just declare motivation and efficiency, whereas a boss can just declare longer workdays. "Motivation and efficiency" require the boss to do work...
IF you cause me quantifiable damages, then I have a valid lawsuit even if there isn't a law to govern it.
Wrong. I mean, you can file a lawsuit anytime you want, but if there is no law providing an actual remedy for the harm you allege occurred, no matter what the magnitude of the harm is or how directly related it is to my action, that lawsuit will (if the court is doing its job) be dismissed when I file a motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action.
And while I feel dirty citing it, the famous McDonalds Coffee lawsuit comes to mind.
The famous "coffee lawsuit", Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, was brought under negligence law, which is law, and thus not an example of your claim that "quantifiable damages" produce a "valid lawsuit even if there isn't a law to govern it".
Someone spilled coffee on themselves, and McDonalds had to fork over something like 14 million.
There was a $3 million jury award, which was reduced by the judge to $640,000; the award was appealed by both sides, and settled prior the appeal being heard for an amount reported as less than $600,000, which is just a little less than $14 million.
There was no criminal law broken.
Sure, there was no criminal law at issue because it wasn't a criminal case. But not all law is criminal, and there would not have been a judiciable claim without an applicable law. The absence of criminal law is not the absence of law.
Microsoft is notorious for working hard until they get it right and then steadily eating into their competition.
So is Google.
And Google's known for doing it more recently than Microsoft, and faster.
A single person's subjective analysis of 20 search terms is a small sample indeed!
See that word "subjective"? That renders the issue of small sample size pretty much irrelevant in criticizing the results.
You can sue someone for anything. There doesn't have to be a criminal law for the basis of a lawsuit.
There doesn't have to be a criminal law to file a civil lawsuit, but there does have to be a law; the absence of a legal basis for the suit is, unsurprisingly, a ground for dismissal.
You cannot have a law prohibiting libel or slander if free speech rights are absolute. In fact, even in the US legal system which actually exists without absolute free speech protections, the free speech rights that do exist limit the ability to sue for libel or slander -- consider, e.g., New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 US 254 (1964).
We now have Amazon Kindle Store, B&N Nook Store, etc because everyone wants to try to lock their customer into their devices.
Nope, wrong. Nook books can be read in nook apps on a variety of platforms (PC, Android, iOS, etc.) Kindle likewise. The real product being sold here is the content, the dedicated stores and the devices that have the store integrated (though they can import content from other sources) are designed to encourage purchases from the stores. The stores do not exist to lock people into the devices, otherwise, they wouldn't provide access to the stores and content purchased from them on other devices.
Oddly, having made that mistake above, you get it right later:
Every corporation loves the idea of the specialized viewer because it locks the customer in to their store.
Right. The specialized viewer promotes the store (which is why the viewer technology is as widely distributed among "open" devices as possible as well as being available in dedicated devices), the store doesn't serve principally to lock people into the specialized viewer device as you claimed previously.
One thing most apps also offer that the web browser doesn't is they work when you don't have internet access.
One thing HTML5 features offer that older web technologies didn't is that properly designed web apps work when you don't have internet access.
Your explanation doesn't hold water at all. Both the iPhones and Android phones were on the same network, AT&T, and yet of those who chose the AT&T network people overwhelmingly chose the iPhone.
You assume that people chose a network first, and then chose a phone after chosing a network. If some people chose a phone first, and/or some people chose using a combination of phone and network features, the fact that the iPhone was available only on AT&T would mean that that factor draws people who prefer to iPhone to AT&T's network, making iPhone more dominant on AT&T's network, compared to other OSs, than it would be if iPhone was available on other networks.
I love how Android users try to take some intellectual snob approach and yet can't see their hand in front of their face some times.
My wife and I each got an iPhone 3G to replace our previous Palm smartphones. We'll probably each get an iPhone 3GS in the next couple of days. Simple analysis is not an "intellectual snob approach", and I'm not a Android user.
Call it a shiny toy all you want, but my example stands unchallenged by you or the anonymous coward before you.
You example, again, is only valid in any sense if you assume that everyone is choosing a network first, and then a phone. Otherwise, the predominance of iPhone over Android among AT&T subscribers doesn't say much.
And even if you make that assumption, it doesn't say anything unless you further assume that not only does every user choose network first, but also that users who chose AT&T first are representative in their phone preferences of all users of whatever network preference.
I would submit that both assumptions are unjustified, and the first is clearly false.
However per http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66K6BX20100721 [reuters.com]
(Reuters) - A municipal manager in California who makes nearly $800,000 a year working for a small, poor city could draw pension payments exceeding $30 million in retirement, according to an activist who has been calling for an overhaul of the state's public pension system.
So there's a news article that claims that someone with an overt bias and incentive to distort claims, without any identified basis, that a particular thing is possible without identifying the frequency with which it occurs or even any concrete examples.
I'm less than impressed. There is no reason provided to believe that the claim is accurate, and no basis for assigning any particular significance to it even if one assumes it is exactly accurate as written (that is, it is under some combination of duration of employment, age, and lifespan after retirement factors possible for someone working at that salary to attain such a total retirement benefit.)
[In fact, since CalPERS pensions are usually annuity, if you assume a long enough lifespan, anyone drawing even the most minimal retirement can, in theory, attain any arbitrarily large total of retirement benefits.]
Per here:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/10/california-pension-promises-exceed-550.html [blogspot.com]
In 2009, the pension liability came out to $3,000 per working-age adult in the state. By 2014, it will triple to over $10,000 per working-age Californian.
And...so? Its not an unfunded liability -- most pensions in the systems are funded out of funds already deposited on behalf of the employee (the employee and employer share varies between public employers, and between bargaining units and other groupsing within those employers, that participate in CalPERS.)
The comparison made in that blog of total pension liability to number of current taxpayers (or to current tax receipts) is completely irrelevant. Total pension liabilities to the total assets in the retirement funds would be a more relevant comparison.
(Though, really, to do policy, you need to assess the health of the particular funds within the retirement systems, since even the main systems, CalPERS, has a large number of defined benefit and defined contribution retirement funds which are separate funds with separate policies set in law -- e.g., most of the independent funds are paid out of prior contributions, but, e.g., the Judicial Retirement Fund [the older of two defined-benefit judicial pension plans, and one that is not open to new members] is done on a pay-as-you-go basis out of current contributions and State General Fund augmentation.)
For some reason I can't find a simple 2010 total pension payments.
CalPERS -- like the rest of the State of California -- runs on a July-June fiscal year. The reports for each fiscal year are dated mid-December following the end of the year following. They are actually released online somewhat later than that.
But, with a 500 BILLION dollar deficit, I'm betting the pensions do not add up to 1.4billion your figures suggest.
There is no $500 billion dollar deficit. Even if you assume the entire population of the State is working age, and use the $10,000 per working age Californian figure your source suggests total pension liabilities will grow to in 2014, the total pension liability (not a deficit) of 41 million (California's projected 2014 population) times $10,000 -- or 410 billion. Obviously, that overstates even what that source claims (since the working age population will be significantly smaller than the total population), but its enough to demonstrate that your own sources projection of the total liabil
Telling people what to buy is not a budget decision. A budget decision is telling people how much they can spend.
Actually, a budget specifies both what you can spend money on, and how much money you can spend on those things.
Now, it is true that it is a poor budget that is more specific on the "what you can spend money on" part than is warranted by the objectives intended to be served by the limitations expressed, but the fact that a particular requirement of that type may be a bad budget decision doesn't make it into something other than a budget decision.
California has many $200k+ pensions for people who worked 10 years to vest.
No, it doesn't. It has -- per advocates of the need for urgent reform, who have no incentive to understate the case -- 9,111 drawing from CalPERS (the retirement fund for almost all State workers, and many local public workers in California) with pensions over $100,000 per year.
Per CalPERS most recent annual report, the system has 505,862 current beneficiaries (so something less than 2% are drawing over $100k/yr -- total, far les than that for people who worked under 10 years to vest.) Retirees have an average of over 20 years of service, and draw an average of $2,220/month ($26,400/yr.)
In what sane universe does it take six months to return a cell phone?
It takes very little time to return a cell phone.
It takes more time to determine which 48,000 of the 96,000 cell phones issued by the State are least needed and have them reach the end of their contracted service period and not get renewed.
It's a good start-- but i hope they find some real meat.
The things that you see reported that are being implemented now -- this cellphone takeback, Brown returning most of the funds allocated for the gubernatorial transition to the State treasury rather than spending them, etc., are all the things that are within the Governor's direct control. The "real meat" is in the the Governor's proposed budget which requires action by the legislature (and, for those things that Brown has proposed, also action by the voters). An overview of can be found in the Introduction.