"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
The Ultimate Time-Money Trade-off
Topic: Politics and Law
3:46 am EST, Feb 12, 2007
Of the 2,377 respondents who answered all or part of the survey, 84.2 percent indicated they would be willing to earn less money in exchange for lower billable-hour requirements....
“Partners will view this as further confirmation of the different affirmations of Generation Y,” he says, adding that incremental additional hours are where law firms make a profit, which is why billable-hour requirements shouldn’t be lowered.
NOTE: You have to be really, really old to understand the origin of the phrase "banned in Boston."
Truly? Is there a history of this sort of thing?
Because it seems rather apropos of recent events...
You don't have to be old. You just have to have Wikipedia.
"Banned in Boston" was a phrase employed from the late 19th century through Prohibition to describe a literary work, motion picture, or play prohibited from distribution or exhibition in Boston, Massachusetts. During this period, Boston officials had wide authority to ban works featuring "objectionable" content, and often banned works with sexual or foul language.
Videos such as "Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out" and those posted by Lonelygirl15 on You Tube may help sell products or kick-start a budding actor's career. But they also have a more pernicious effect on our tendency to trust what seems genuine.
"I can't see how they don't make people more cynical," says Gillian Watson, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia.
"If one is always skeptical, then goes to cynicism, you end up feeling pretty negative about the world," Mr. Federman says. "You end up with a very sour disposition. You tend to look at people and interactions as everyone trying to manipulate you, and tend to have a miserable existence, quite frankly."
Can flogging have the same sort of impact on trust in a society that a police state can have? If everyone is suspected of being a shyster, is that any different than if everyone is suspected of being a terrorist, in terms of the strength of casual bonds that make business and social discourse operate?
Con artists and swindlers in China who try to use fake ID will have a tougher time trying to pass themselves off as someone else now that the public has access to the Ministry of Public Security's population database.
Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country's population information center's website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person's identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder's picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen's privacy is protected.
Cartoon Network Chief Quits Over Marketing Stunt - New York Times
Topic: War on Terrorism
1:35 pm EST, Feb 10, 2007
The head of the Cartoon Network resigned Friday following a marketing stunt that caused a terrorism scare in Boston and led police to shut down bridges and send in the bomb squad.
He said he regretted what had happened and felt ''compelled to step down, effective immediately, in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under my watch.''
ATHF Boston Bomb Analysis - Puritan Remix? Psychology of a Witch Hunt?
Topic: Society
1:25 pm EST, Feb 10, 2007
The Generational Warfare Strategies of a Greying Populace
This remix of Puritanism and the neo-liberal imaginary (obsessed with what Ericson dubs "the myth of certainty and security") is a necessary but not sufficient set of conditions for declaring this peculiar "state of emergency." [6] The remaining variable is demographic. It pits an aging, declining and reactive population (the third or fourth generation descendants of Irish, Italian, German, and English immigrants) straining to secure the slipping remnants of a mid-20th Century state-centered set of expected benefits, against a more vigorous and adaptable creative subculture within the Millennial Generation. Not surprisingly, there's been a steady outflow of educated Millennials from the Bay State to points South and West, where a younger, educated demographic is welcomed and treated with greater public courtesy.
Georgia Legislative Watch offers an inside look at the various legislation introduced in the Georgia General Assembly for the purpose of educating and informing individuals on the legislative process, as well as to offer readers the opportunity to comment and critique legislation.
A friend of mine has cofounded a website that tracks legislation in Georgia.
As much as I think engineering is a dysfunctional profession, I am often shocked at how other professions seem to work. As all of you know I've been interested in the law for a long time. So I took the LSAT. I got a good grade. So I applied to some schools. I got into a good school. And now, right now, I have to make a decision that will determine the rest of my life. I don't know if I can go through with this, inspite of how much I love the subject matter or what kind of difference I feel that I can make.
Its all about fear. Law firms pray on fear. Some of that fear is real. A lot of it is imaginary, and it is the imaginary fears that have created a system that appears to take really bright people and chew them up.
When I look at all the C&Ds that end up on Chilling Effects, I see fear. A lawyer has convinced a corporation that if they don't vigorously defend their trademarks by threatening every blogger who mentions them in passing they won't be successful at defending that trademark when they do have a real competitive threat. This fear isn't real. There is a substantive difference between a competitive threat and a blogger, and any lawyer worth his salt ought to be able to articulate that difference in a court room. But its in the interest of the firm to stoke that fear. That fear turns into billable hours. By telling corporate managers with a straight face they have to generate these C&Ds or toss their trademark away, the firm generates revenue.
Fear is the reason that a handful of lawschools have dominated the market. All the professors, all the judges, and most of the top lawyers all come from a handful of schools. Those schools are expensive. Astronomically expensive. Because they can be. Because every school in the country wants professors who went to the top schools, and every corporate manager is afraid that if he isn't getting defended by a student from a top school he is going to loose his shirt.
You don't see that in engineering. No one cares what school professors attended. They care whether or not they are engaging communicators and whether or not they are doing useful research. This is because engineering is about results. Law is not about results. Its about perceptions.
Law students have to assume hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to attend one of these top notch schools, and in fact many of the not so top notch schools are similarly expensive and offer the added benefit that its really difficult to get a job when you graduate because everyone is afraid to have you defending them. That debt becomes an indenture. You have to pay it off. The only way to pay it off is the get a job at a big firm. The big firms have to pay you $150,000, because a third of it is going to pay off your loans, and the rest of it is the minimum you'd really expect someone with that level of responsibility to be paid.
The firm can only afford to hire so many people at such a rate, and furthermore... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
In this special 3-minute-long episode of 24, agent Jack Bauer tracks down the members of the deadly Aqua Teen Hunger Force in order to stop the LED Lite Brites from blowing up
