3.31.2006

Daddy, I want a job and I want it now!


Veruca, Daddy can’t give you a job whenever you want them anymore, there are no jobs left.

You'll give me a job now!!!

Sweetheart, nearly 30% of people your age also want a job and the other
70% are so incredibly lazy
because they never can be fired that companies cannot hire anymore.

Daddy if you don’t give me a job I’m going to SCREAM!!!

Darling the only way companies would be willing to hire more people
your age is if they were allowed some recourse if you decided to smoke, smell bad
and listen to your incredibly gay French club music instead working.
Oh Veruca, how this pains me. I’m going to have to give them 2 years after
you graduate from college to fire you if things are not working out.

Daddy you make me so MAD! It doesn’t matter how hard I work or how smart I am I’m entitled to the same way of life you had. I hate you! I hate you! I don’t care if people in China are willing to work 80 hours a week at $1 an hour with no vacation time. I want 100% job security, a generous salary, generous, free benefits, 3 months of vacation and a 35 hour work week and I’m not going to let your cowboy capitalist ideas turn people my age into the Kleenex generation. I went to COLLEGE daddy. My reward is a lifetime vacation from reality and it starts NOW!

Alright, Alright Veruca honey here’s what I’ll do, I’ll only give companies 1 year to fire you IF they have an approved reason.

Not good enough Daddy!!! Now I want a pony!!!

UPDATE: A very funny take on the subject of france openly embracing sloth.

UPDATE: One of NPR’s favorite guest authors and progressive activist, Barbara Ehrenreich writes in this month’s Progressive Magazine:

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing
the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” too fattened on Camembert to
stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another
look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March
and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a
right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s
whim.

And…

You may recognize in the French government’s reasoning the same arguments
Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a
halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: “What?” scream the
economists who flack for the employing class. “If you do anything, anything at
all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly
failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you—lacking, of course, the
health care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state—will quickly
spiral down into starvation.”


Ah yes progressives may have briefly publicly flirted with the Scandinavian social model (which is now rapidly crumbling) but their hearts will always belong to France. No system more fully embraces the progressive credo: “Don’t like economic reality? Protest it!”.

UPDATE: France surrenders to itself.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan declares France dead:

If the French cannot accept even the teensiest attemp to bring market discipline and free labor markets to their over-regulated economy, then they need no longer be considered a nation with a future. They are a nation committing an extremely slow suicide by suffocation. The suffocation is caused by an overdose of insecurity. Its only cure is nerve. But nerve was never a very common French trait, was it?

3.30.2006

Are you annoying or boring?

If you're not sure, then perhaps you need one of these:

A device that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's sad because people then avoid having conversations with them.
Hmmm, I'm sure we can all think of some folks who would benefit from this who aren't autistic. But wait, they thought of that too!
People with autism are not the only ones who stand to benefit. Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people's emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. "I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 per cent of them were bored or confused.

NR likes ‘The Blade’

Since my only source for State news is the unfortunate 10+ hours of WFYI I listen to every week (my commute) I’ve apparently been under the apparently false impression that Governor Mitch “The Blade” Daniels sucks and everyone hates him. Even with my trust of Public Radio news reporting at a historic low I too believed that the “Major Moves” program and the Telcom deregulation bill would consign our children to a future of slavery to jackbooted Australians and be forced to watch 130 channels of HSN. As surprising as it may be, National Review and WFYI have different assessments of My Man Mitch.

There’s about to be a building boom in Indiana, which is desperate good news
for a state that has been severely challenged by the global manufacturing shift
and years of ambivalent leadership.

The chief architect of the boom
is the state’s decisive Governor Mitch Daniels, President Bush’s former budget
director. In Washington, Daniels drew scorn from congressional big spenders,
acquiring the nickname “the blade” for his cost-cutting and privatizing ways.
(The moniker could just as easily apply to his sharp wit and intellect.) The
spenders in Washington, however, won those battles — big time — swallowing the
blade and earning today’s enmity from the Republican base. But now Daniels is
back home and in charge, and he is engineering a turnaround of an entire state
with sophistication.

In the state’s short legislative session, just
completed, Daniels achieved two sweeping victories. The first is the nation’s
most aggressive telecommunications deregulation, which will spur hundreds of
millions of dollars of investment in invisible infrastructure — the “fibers and
frequencies” of the digital age, as Daniels describes it. The second is a $4
billion privatization lease of the Indiana Toll Road and the new I-69
interstate. This will fund the largest-ever upgrade of Indiana’s visible
infrastructure: its antique roads and bridges.

Ironically, Daniels’
“Major Moves” plan to lease the Indiana Toll Road, the seemingly more tame and
obvious measure, turned out to be far more controversial. It passed by a single
vote with just 15 minutes remaining in this year’s legislative session. Weeks
before anyone had heard of Dubai Ports World, the bid by Australian-Spanish
consortium Macquarie-Cintra to manage Indiana’s 157-mile stretch of I-80/90 had
already ignited a xenophobic melee in the heartland. But unlike the DP World
roll-out, Daniels had actually sought bidders for the Toll Road. His proposition
was simple: The winning contractor will pay Indiana $4 billion for an asset that
has never been profitable in government hands; the state gets to keep that
asset; the contractor upgrades the asset with new technology and an additional
$4 billion in improvements; and the state gets to fund a decade’s worth of other
major infrastructure projects, some of which have been on the drawing board for
twenty years. (Just last year Chicago leased its “Skyway” to Macquarie-Cintra
for $1.8 billion. The Skyway connects Indiana’s Toll Road to Chicago, thus
yielding a seamlessly managed road from Ohio to the Windy City.)

3.29.2006

Total lack of options

I’m very sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan’s criticisms of the current spendthrift incarnation of “conservatism” in Washington. There hardly seems to be anyone in Washington that seems interested in spending cuts anymore. Where I have a problem with such critics is their apparent belief that having Democrats assume control of the purse strings would somehow improve the situation. Sullivan would be crapping in his pajamas if the following was the consensus of Republicans in Washington (NYTimes):

Democrats say that while their policies lack detail in some respects, they
were able at least to put together a package of proposals to which all
members of the party could subscribe, calling for more money to be spent
on a broad array of items

Has there ever been a Democratic pet cause that demanded something other than more funding?