Leslie Patton of Bloomberg News has reported a 1:1,000,000 ratio of pay between a McDonald’s workers ($8.25 per hour, and, between the two McDonald’s restaurants in which he works, not given the opportunity to hit 40 hours, much less get a few hours of overtime at time-and-a-half). See McDonald’s $8.25 Man and $8.75 Million CEO Shows Pay Gap
If Mr. Johnson, of whom Ms. Patton writes. were able to get 40 hours of work a week, he’d be grossing $330 per week.
The America that inspires people all over the world is the America of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Ben Afleck’s “Argo.” It is a place where people can rise from humble origins to run companies or become President. It is the country of Carnegie, Ford, and Edison, of Warren Buffet, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Steve Jobs, and Meg Whitman and the country of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. These men and women inspired and continue to inspire people here in the United States and also in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs and Persians. They inspire people who want freedom and opportunity, a better life for themselves and their children.
This is “American Exceptionalism.” It is not that Americans are better, but that America is better.
And Israel, Palestine, and the Arab Spring …
In 2008, British lawyer Sergei Magnitzky, after
after allegedly uncovering a web of corruption involving senior officials, while working for London-based Hermitage Capital Management.
[Dominic] Raab [Member of British Parliament and Raab, a former Foreign Office lawyer] said: “Between 2007 and 2008, working for Hermitage Capital, he exposed the biggest tax fraud in Russian history, worth $230m US (£146m).
“His legal team was then subject to varying forms of intimidation and, while other lawyers left Russia in fear of their lives, Magnitsky stayed on to make a stand for the rule of law in Russia and strike a blow against the breathtaking corruption that has taken place there.”
Mr Raab added: “That bravery cost him his life. He was arrested in 2008 on trumped up charges of tax evasion. Iin Putin’s Kafkaesque Russian justice system the very tax investigators that Magnitsky exposed turned up to arrest him.”
‘Stark reminder’
After eight months in prison his condition deteriorated and he was taken [pullquote]Magnitzky died in custody aged 37. His cause was taken up by human rights groups as one of the most glaring examples of corruption and prison abuse in modern Russia. He had suffered from pancreatitis and gallstones, and had been found with broken fingers and bruising to his body, the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council said in July 2011.[/pullquote] to hospital for emergency surgery. But he was not treated, but instead handcuffed and beaten, Mr Raab said. “Doctors found him an hour later lying on the floor. He was dead.” Despite 60 people implicated in the abuse of Mr Magnitsky and the original tax fraud, “the Russian authorities blocked all attempts to bring those responsible to justice”, Mr Raab said. “All the suspects were cleared by Russian investigators. Some have been promoted, some decorated. In fact, the only people on trial are Magnitsky’s employer and Magnitsky himself, now the subject of Russia’s first ever posthumous prosecution.” Mr Raab’s motion also covered other cases “wherever there is evidence that a state official anywhere is responsible for torture, extra judicial killing, some other gross human rights abuse or is complicit in covering it up”. Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt said: “The death of Sergei Magnitsky serves as a stark reminder of the human rights situation in Russia, and questions about the rule of law there.”
MPs urge government sanctions against Russia over Magnitsky death (BBC)
The BBC reports we’ve read so far don’t address Sergei Magnitsky’s citizenship – Russian, British, dual or other. And perhaps his nationality is, or should be irrelevant. At a minimum, as a British attorney, he was an officer of the United Kingdom justice system. He uncovered serious corruption in Russia, he was arrested on what appear to be false allegations, and killed in prison. We think that this evidence, taken together, is overwhelming evidence of at least probable cause of a crime and cover-up.
The adult in the cartoon is not Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker formerly of HP, or John Lynch, formerly of HP & Autonomy. While the three ex-CEOs were paid a total of $80 Million after being fired (here), they did NOT create shareholder value. Under their guidance, the company lost 77.92% of its peak value; the shareholders lost $81.54 Billion between Dec. 31, 1999 (here) and the close of trading, Nov. 23, 2012.
While Autonomy’s $10 Billion valuation may have been John Lynch’s fraud – the FBI and it’s counterparts in London are investigating (here) – HP’s acquisition of Autonomy was Leo Apotheker’s error, and has become Meg Whitman’s problem. I’m sure that if Whitman is unsuccessful, or the Board fires her before she can be successful, she will be well taken care of, as were Fiorina, Hurd, and Apotheker. Meanwhile Bill Hewlett & Dave Packard – who created value for the shareholders and other stakeholders – must be turning over in their graves.
Image 1: People enjoying the beach in Montreal, Canada, courtesy Jazz Hostels
While climate change and global warming will mean longer and hotter summers and shorter and warmer winters farther north in the northern hemisphere than previously, and even though we make like longer hotter summers and shorter, warmer winters …
Warmer and shorter winters mean thinner ice on frozen lakes – and people crashing through the thin ice and drowning in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Alaska, and Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia.
Longer hotter summers also mean warmer oceans and an atmosphere that can hold more heat.
The use of computers in conjunction with radio devices is not new: since we’ve been liberated from having to have a crystal, vacuum tube, or transistor specfically fabricated to transmit or receive over particular frequencies, the costs of manufacturing devices which can send and receive voice or data signals has dropped as their flexibility has increased. We’re going to try to explain how this works – and how it works within the United States (i.e. F.C.C. domestically, the International Telecommunications Union – I.T.U., an arm of the United Nations, and F.C.C. equivalent organizations in individual countries). This by way of introducing Alexandre Zcsete, call sign 0Z9AEC (in case readers are wondering, I do not know if the first character is an upper-case letter “O” or tthe number “0”(zero). We’ll be addressing this in a future post or posts; we believe the most elegant solution is to idenify a common, open-source – i.e. F.O.S.S. font which readily distinguishes between the number “zero” and the upper-case “O,” as in “Orange,” “Octagon,” “Oscar” (used by the U.S. Military and Nato, and, depending on your generation, you can imagine The Oscar Awards, Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, or Oscar Madison of The Odd Couple). Without furher digression, we’ll now permit Mr. Csete tto introduce himself, using text from the “About” page on his blog, oz9aec.net.
My name is Alexandru Csete, also known as OZ9AEC. I am a physicist from the University of Aarhus and I work as a development engineer in the antenna department at Thrane & Thrane. Before that I was 8 years in the European space industry working on the Automated Transfer Vehicle called Jules Verne and the Gaia scientific mission.
I have been the holder of a CEPT Cat. 1 amateur radio certificate since 1991. My primary interests today are satellite communications, software radios, digital high-rate modes, microwaves and developing free software for Unix-like operating systems.
It’s my educated guess that Mr. Csete is the holder of a license equivalent to one of the FCC’s amateur or “ham” licenses; we’ll try to pin that down and update this piece. Non- American readers may not be aware of the American-language idiom that “so-and-so” is not a “rocket scientist” is a way of saying that someone isn’t particularly smart, the implication being that being a rocket scientist requires substantial smarts. Alexandru Csete is, in fact, a rocket scientist – or the functional equivalent: he works on teams which use rockets (propulsion systems) to hurl functional systems into space.
At this point, we’re not going to explain how things work – not because we don’t think our readers will follow the explanations. Contrariwise, we’re pretty certain that if it’s my byline on the piece, we’ll get things wrong – perhaps terribly wrong – and we’d like to avoid that.
Here is one extremely cool thing that Alexandru Csete has come up with: a means of adding some software and some hardware to a PC and directly download NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) satellite images. This is, on its own terms, quite a feat, but it has serious practical implications: in a crisis, the NOAA servers are at risk of being overloaded, or suffering from power failure. A greater risk is a local power failure or network failure in your neighborhood or region prevents Internet access. Mr. Csete’s application (that is, the combination of hardware and software) provides a direct link between your PC and NOAA’s satellite(s).
Image(s) retrieved from NOAA on May 23rd, 2012
Yet another good reason that community-based disaster risk assessment, response, and rebuilding should have – among other things – reserve power to keep laptops, radios (both two-way and receivers) and other critical equipment powered. Emergency power is another subject we hope to address comprehensively – although , initially in the form of “posts,” in order to force some discipline in keeping our explanations clear and concise.
If you’re ready to start your swim at the deep end of the pool, with the sharks, gators, and piranhas, you have our admiration and respect, and we wantto hear about it. Start with Simple APT decoder prototype on the oz9aec.net blog. Mr. Csete has his own suggestions for beginner reading and projects in this post: GRC Examples. (“GRC” stands for “GNU Radio Companion”).
Mr. Csete’s Flickr Photostream
This story has now made it around the web and print media, See Navy SEALs punished for revealing secrets to video game designers Robert Burns, AP Correspondent, published at the Christian Science Monitor’s website, CSMonitor.com. Burns credits David Martin, CBS News National Security Correspondent, for breaking the story. Our reading is that Mr. Martin broke the story in two pieces, 7 Navy SEALs disciplined for role with video game and SEALs disciplined for role in “Medal of Honor” video game video.
It’s hard to imagine 7 active-duty SEALs giving away important tactical details. Indeed, Noam Cohen, writing in the Times’ Media Decoder, notes that the SEALs were cited for two violations: First, consulting on the video without prior permission, and second, showing the game producers classified equipment carried by SEALs on missions. Since the second violation might have involved something as trivial as the rails system (which allows attaching flashlights, IR lights, UV lights, video equipment – all manner of gear – to customized versions of standard rifles) – we suspect the more serious violation is the first – failing to ask permission – and perhaps if permission had been asked, it would have been granted – with guidance about what could and could not be discussed.
Hurricane Sandy, the 1,000 mile diameter storm brought rain, wind, water and power failures to 10.4 million from North Carolina up to Maine, and west to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan in the USA and another 145,000 people in Canada, over 1.5 million people. As NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, here, “We have old infrastructure and new weather patterns… climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable.”
We need to build infrastructure that is more resistant to extreme storms, and resilient in the face of these kinds of storms.
Map showing people without power from Hurricane Sandy
Hurricane Sandy, NOAA handout satellite image taken on October 27, 2012. Note the size and position of the storm.
Man made factors that will exacerbate the storm’s damage:
In August of 2011 the Millstone 2 & 3 plants in Connecticut and the Brunswick 1 & 2 plants in North Carolina were operated at reduced capacity during and after Hurricane Irene, while the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey, and the North Anna 1 & 2 plants in Virginia, were offline. The North Anna plants were shut down before the hurricane due to the earthquake. I expect Hurricane Sandy will effect most of those plants, and also the Calvert Creek plant in Maryland, Hope Creek, and Salem in Jersey, Indian Point in New York, and Vermont Yankee, in Vermont.
Solar power, wind, and wave power won’t work during a hurricane, but don’t need emergency crew on hand to make sure cooling systems are operational. And geothermal will function.
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As an analyst with Popular Logistics, I am available for research and analysis on a per project or a per diem basis. I can be reached at ‘L Furman 97” @ G Mail . com and US 732 . 580 . 0024.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? No! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with the treasures of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is this approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It can not come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was likely right for the most part, as he was on most matters. What he doesn’t seem to have foreseen – and how could he have – was that we’d foul our own environment sufficiently to poison entire communities, laying waste to our fellow citizens in ways that Lincoln knew was beyond the reach of outside armies.
Have started to close in on the bug which was preventing me from toggling function frames in the New/Edit Post page. Started by disabling plugins one at a time. Too slow. So I disabled all plugins except those which are security related, and WP-Footnotes, which we’ve used since the first year, and seemed an unlikely suspect. So – I stayed up way too late, bad, but have solved the basic problem, and will, by the end of the day, have identified and deleted.
I’ve forced the evil troll out of the blog, and reclaimed my right to post on it.
Victory is within sight. Please be careful when – or refrain entirely from — activating plugins.
Jon
Do bike helmet laws discourage cycling? is a fascinating and intelligent conversation which starts with the assumption that encouraging bicycle usage is an important objective, for the type of multiple, overlapping outcomes which underly our policy views at Popular Logistics. Public health, energy consumption, carbon footprint, community, transportation, and even urban noise can be positively affected by increased bicycle use. Q, a brilliant CBC-produced show carried on many U.S. public radio station, shows that it’s not looking for simple answers or single-variable equations.
Do bike helmet laws discourage cycling? is a fascinating and intelligent conversation which starts with the assumption that encouraging bicycle usage is an important objective, for the type of multiple, overlapping outcomes which underly our policy views at Popular Logistics. Public health, energy consumption, carbon footprint, community, transportation, and even urban noise can be positively affected by increased bicycle use. Q, a brilliant CBC-produced show carried on many U.S. public radio station, shows that it’s not looking for simple answers or single-variable equations.