Supporters of a bill that would make union organizing simpler gathered in front of a Home Depot store in Kansas City last week, protesting the company’s opposition.

Nearly 150 people from various labor, religious and community groups showed up in support of the Employee Free Choice Act,
Opponents of the legislation contend it takes away the secret-ballot election Proponents counter that the current system heavily favors employers,we do believe we have a right to have input into the working conditions, benefits and pay,

Labor bill supporters clash with Home Depot - Kansas City Star

Screw the autoworkers.
They may be crying about General Motors bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won t spoil Jamie Dimon s day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders – led by Morgan and Citibank – expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.
Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama s Car Czar - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.Here s the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM s stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.

So what s wrong with seizing workers pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it s illegal.

Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don t even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren t asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?

As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who ve already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama s point-man in winning banks endorsement and campaign donations by far, his largest source of his corporate funding .

If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat s plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.

It doesn t make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.

Greg Palast » Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM

truth in advertising

--timball

40 Gorgeous Vintage Tobacco Advertisements // WellMedicated

janelane wrote:

Acidus wrote:

So there's your tweet from your sweet, Lance Armstrong. He's watching the Belgium cycling race La Fleche Wallone. Does receiving that information make you feel like you're part of something? And if so, what? And why?

Am I sounding negative? Even petty? Sue me. Everybody has a limit, and I've reached mine with Twitter, which isn't just the world's fastest-growing social networking tool. It's a religion, filling the hole in regular people's regular lives.

Don't look at me like that. I'm not the neighborhood crank, kicking you kids off my lawn. I've embraced the blogging revolution, bookmarking multiple sites and visiting them every day. More than 20 million Americans write a blog, many of them for audiences approaching zero. Less than 9 percent of the blogging public makes any money at all, and only 2 out of every 100 bloggers support themselves fully. But still 20 million people do it. And I get that. It's personal expression. It's art. Doesn't matter whether it's done well or not. Art is art. So I get blogging.

Facebook and MySpace? I don't get that, unless it's for dating purposes. Horniness, I understand. The need to tell people what you're doing at various junctures of the day? And to read what other people are doing? Gregg is folding clothes ... I don't understand. And I never will. My life shouldn't be that interesting to you, and your life damn sure isn't that interesting to me.

The only thing more inane than Twitter is people blogging about hating it. Even the people that use Twitter already know how stupid it is. Seriously, how much longer can it stay cool if Barbara Walters and CNN are talking about it?

Just bide your time a little more and then we'll be on to the next lame fad and on and on into eternity. :-)

-janelane

You're all using it wrong.

Sure, using it to report your banal daily activities is shallow. That's not to say it's useless, because I've managed to run into people that I hardly ever see, or get interesting topical and CONTEXTUALLY relevant information that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. In a lot of ways, this usage is like the Agents fad from the early dot com days, but instead of intelligent bots, it's your social network doing the work for you.

A good friend described it this way: Facebook is for the people you know. Twitter is for the people you want to know. If you're an old dog internet person, then you already know the power of connecting online. You got access to people on IRC or via email listservs back in the day that you'd never have gotten any other way. Those people became colleagues, employers, friends, or lovers in the real world. Twitter is more of the same. It allows you to connect with people that you ordinarily wouldn't have. Particularly about a specific topic or event.

I didn't get this eit... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: 'This Twitter thing is annoying as hell' -- Gregg Doyel at 6:01 p.m. - CBSSports.com News, Fantasy, Video

The bug had been around since at least October Thanks to Rose for tipping me off , during which time it had been gleefully exploited by voyeurs, hackers, entrepreneurs and lechers; you can find pages and pages of public message board comments around the web in which posters are peeking in on 14 and 15-year-old girls and sharing what they find.

Ad-supported web sites with NAMEs like Can t Hide and MySpacePrivateProfile.com emerged to earn a buck off the glitch. One such site reports that its users have accessed, or attempted to access, 77,000 private profiles -- 3,000 of them today.

While all this going on more-or-less in plain sight, you have to wonder where MySpace s safety and security team was. Was this glitch that hard to fix?

Apparently not.

MySpace Quietly Fixes Bug that Gave Voyeurs Access to Teens Private Photos | Threat Level from Wired.com

Here are a few of my favorite science fiction books, and what I learned from them (they are roughly in my favorite order):null

Arrington's book list

Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination

Dr. X was the ideal man for this job because of his very disreputability. He was a reverse engineer. He collected artificial mites like some batty Victorian lepidopterist. He took them apart one atom at a time to see how they worked, and when he found some clever innovation, he squirreled it away in his database. Since most of these innovations were the result of natural selection, Dr. X was usually the first human being to know about them.

Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

Excerpt from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson