There’s a reason I moved a thousand miles and took a low paying dead-end job: I used to live in Brevard County, a hop, skip, and jump away from the Kennedy Space Center, I could watch shuttle launches from my yard. Now, that region is devastated by the shuttle’s retirement, cuts to NASA, and the economy: [Read more…]
It struck me that a lot of readers may not know the back story on the post about Watts, below, so here’s some context. The Heartland Institute is a right-wing org originally created in 1984, appropriately, to spread lies about issues like the health effects of tobacco use. When that gig started drying up in the 90s they had to find new wealthy benefactors, fast. One of the biggest clients they landed was the fossil fuel energy industry, interested in using similar disinformation tactics to combat pollution regulations and especially the growing scientific consensus on human induced climate change.
Last week internal documents from Heartland came to light reportedly showing the lengths to which the institute would go to further their sponsors’ interests. Via the Wiki: [Read more…]
I am in too much pain to post much right now. Chat away, btw the FMLA didn’t apply to my broken back – lung deal because I hadn’t worked where I work for a year at the time. I have now though.
Incidentally, I work in Texas, and there’s a reason companies locate facilities to Texas: they can pay shit wages and avoid all kinds of red tape that they’d might be subject to in states like California or New York. Texas is a Right to Work state, which is a pretty Orwellian term considering what it really means.
The online uprising against SOPA and PIPA is being credited far and wide, even in the tradmed that reported little on the proposals, for killing the ledge. Just think of the effect this kind of activism could have on other issues:
(TimesUnion) — In the U.S., momentum against the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, known popularly as PIPA and SOPA, grew quickly on Wednesday when the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and other Web giants staged a one-day blackout and Google organized a petition drive that attracted more than 7 million participants. That day alone, at least six senators who had co-sponsored the Senate legislation reversed their positions. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in statements at the time and again on Friday, stressed that more consensus-building was needed before the legislation would be ready for a vote.
There’ll be an online protest of sorts tomorrow. Markos has a post up on Daily Kos saying we have a gimmick up our sleeve (No, I don’t know what it is). There are rumors other sites — which may or may not include FTB — will do something as well. Why you ask? The cyber ruckus is about the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA. [Read more…]
From a just released bulletin — that I had to sit on for a couple of hours and wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about publicly. The recall Governor of Wisconsin, i.e., Scott Walker, seems to have scored big. About 46% of the entire Wisconsin electorate signed the recall petition, that’s huge. And where is Walker as this unfolds? He’s at an NYC fundraiser far away from his home state, begging the guy who founded the firm that crashed the economy for money so he can keep handing out gravy-laden middle-class tax-payer goodies to the pampered 0.01% who preyed on the rest of us for the last 30 years. Some stats from the recall release below the fold: [Read more…]
If you’ve been an executive, don’t join a company as an “enlisted” man even if it looks good. You won’t be able to climb out of that hole in most cases, and even if it is possible at some times and places it will probably take years to get back to even close to where you were, and you’ll live in near poverty during that climb. Hold out for the executive job, work wherever you need to in the meantime but don’t expect any advancement if you start out low. That’s what dead-end job means, Dead End Ahead. I made a very big mistake joining a great company but at the lowest rung of the ladder, thinking that, because I had a strong track record of personal sucess followed by two decades of running teams of people in the same environment, I would be able to move up.
Uh-uh, doesn’t work like that. You start as a scrub and a scrub you will remain for a very long time. So, while that company’s pay checks clear and they don’t generally screw me over the way I’ve heard others do and the way others have, I’m going nowhere. I literally am not allowed to even apply for a management job where I am; although if I did not work here then I could. It’s an insane policy but, alas, a common one in the corporate world. That is all.
An analyst in the investment racket once told me “Things don’t usually move as fast as you think they will, but when they start moving they often keep going longer and further than you think they will.” The year was 1994, at the end of a long recession, and boy was he right. Hopefully, last week’s unemployment stats together with this one bode well too: [Read more…]
Who wouldn’t want to believe you could lay around all day eating cake and fried cheese and become a healthier, lean-mean muscular god? The idea is so seductive that, despite real world experience to the contrary, variations of it form the basis for weight loss and workout scams to this day. The economic equivalent is the claim that getting rid of annoying rules and cutting the taxes on billionaires leads to a healthier economy and prosperity for all. We know for a recent historical fact that that isn’t true, because we’ve been cutting taxes on billionaires and deregulating for decades and the economy went straight into the shitter. Finally, someone with a megaphone used it to point this out. [Read more…]
Once the super committee failed the House and Senate were boxed in tight. Usually, legislation has to be passed for tax increases and cuts to kick in. But this deal was set up differently, taxes go up and cuts kick in automatically unless ledge is passed. Those tax increases affect half the population, including the very wealthy, and the cuts affect sacred cows, including the DoD. Which means the Senate in particular is hoisted by their own filibuster petard: [Read more…]