Wednesday, June 19, 2013
"Progressive" language lessons
I felt like having a ramble recently about the way our "centrist" leaders in the Democratic Party explain their policy agenda, so I wrote this.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Skills Gap
We've been getting regular reports of employers who are deeply concerned that they don't have a vast pool of highly skilled workers with specialty training willing to work in undesirable locations for 12 bucks an hour. That isn't actually a skills gap.
Afternoon Thread
This has to be the most absolute stupidest thing I've ever heard:
Notice, he doesn't think female babies do the same. Asshat.
There is no question in my mind that a baby at 20-weeks after conception can feel pain. The fact of the matter is, I argue with the chairman because I thought the date was far too late. We should be setting this at 15-weeks, 16-weeks,” said the former OB/GYN during the House Rules Committee debate on the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he continued. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?
Notice, he doesn't think female babies do the same. Asshat.
HAMP'd
The key point here is that these are ongoing practices (one ex-employee confirms BofA was deliberately pushing their customers into foreclosure as late as last August) and that there's documentary evidence in addition to sworn statements (the plaintiffs already submitted emails under seal).
Somehow every state and federal law enforcement official in the country skipped over talking to bank employees who got Target gift cards as bonuses for putting homeowners in foreclosure, and this had to come out in a class-action lawsuit. Funny how that goes.
Oh, and also, mortgage servicers try to rip off natural disaster victims.
Your bowl of sadness for the day.
The Grift Goes On
Everything Is Illumilooted.
Its most interesting feature, however, is not architectural, but financial. The house, which is owned by John Sexton, the president of New York University, was bought with a $600,000 loan from an N.Y.U. foundation that eventually grew to be $1 million, according to Suffolk County land records. It is one of a number of loans that N.Y.U. has made to executives and star professors for expensive vacation homes in areas like East Hampton, Fire Island and Litchfield County, Conn., in what educational experts call a bold new frontier for lavish university compensation.
N.Y.U. has already attracted attention for the multimillion-dollar loans it extends to some top executives and professors buying homes in New York City, a practice it has defended as necessary to attract talent to one of the most expensive cities on earth. Mortgage loans to Jacob Lew, a former N.Y.U. executive vice president, part of which was eventually forgiven, became an issue during Mr. Lew’s confirmation hearings as treasury secretary this year.
I Hate Waking Up To An Alarm Clock
Yes, yes, that's a problem most of you face regularly but since I rarely need to, whenever I do, I spend the night being paranoid that I set it incorrectly, it won't go off, and I'll miss my flight or whatever. So crappy sleep.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Spooky Action At A Distance
No I didn't have wireless broadband for my Commodore 64, but as a fairly early adopter I do remember people being relatively freaked out by Wifi when they first saw it. Some of you oldsters might remember that having a wired home broadband connection was pretty miraculous not all that long ago. I remember when a friend was visiting and we needed to check something online and he kept telling me that I needed to plug in my internet. That wifi worked at all and was actually pretty fast (even then - newer protocols are faster) freaked people out at first.
Culture
One never quite knows the truth of stories like this, because SECRET, but if true this hardly portrays an institutional culture which respects privacy and has meaningful safeguards (from 2008).
This isn't just individual abuse of power, it's an environment where people thought it was cool to share.
US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
This isn't just individual abuse of power, it's an environment where people thought it was cool to share.
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