JayB

6', 165. My ex-wife was is a raw-food psycho. Looks like we actually have something in common after all. Let's hope not. It didn't end well for me. Big red flag. Seems to be a marker for a certain incapacity to engage in critical thinking and a tendency to make impulsive commitments to whatever transient obsessions happens to catch their fancy. I've also noticed that significant others pretty much also have to at least feign the same commitment to or find themselves cast as part of the sinister forces that they've dedicated themselves to fighting against. There's plenty of room for folks that don't fit that generalization, but on par with religious fundamentalism on the red-flag score board IMO.

Actually, there's another option, when wages offered together with prevailing working conditions fail to attract qualified candidates. The state can/does hire poorly qualified candidates. Not long ago, a local school district posted three teaching positions for high-school mathematics. Precisely three applied, and three were hired. Each had earned a bachelor’s degree, not one in mathematics. Not one was even minimally qualified according to state standards to teach secondary mathematics. In fact, not one was licensed by the state to teach. Yet they were hired. I guess they had a pulse and a temperature, and via some “emergency” clause, they joined the force, with the understanding they would begin work on certification. One guy made it beyond the first year. Friday at lunch some members of his department explained to him how to solve the equation log(10^x)=3. I agree with the theory….let the free market (the labor market) dictate wages. If only that were the way it worked, I’d probably be making double my salary. Then I could give up my second job, and I probably wouldn’t have to pay a health care premium for my family equal to almost half my mortgage. Not a problem when seeking to fill a social-studies vacancy, I'd wager. I've always argued that it was ludicrous to pay all teachers the same salary, irrespective of their qualifications. Unfortunately for you, and the students, the teacher's unions have always insisted on paying people with a B.S. in Physics the same as those with a B.A. in Physical Education. I'm glad that there are qualified people like yourself who chose to go into teaching, but am not optimistic that your status as a relative anomaly will be going away any time soon. Not a prayer of that happening until there's massive reform of the entire sector of the kind that the free-market wackos running....Sweden...imposed a few years ago.

So...why aren't the folks at Microsoft, who also lack collective bargaining privileges also working for Walmart wages? Ditto for everyone else in the private labor market that earn higher total compensation than Walmart offers its retail employees, which are higher than the retail average. If collective bargaining is what determines wages rates, why isn't the pay for the store manager the same as the greeter's?

The political leadership is in quite a bind. The crisis is systemic, it is global, and it is occurring simultaneously, if unevenly. Politicians by definition are bound by their respective nations or states, and those in turn are bound to the dictates of the capitalist global economy. Hence you see what's outlined in the article above: competitive devaluation, a race to the bottom in terms of labor costs, and keeping the bond markets happy so you can borrow more money. All this is simply to maintain even the sickliest of growth rates. In democratic states, maintaining power means selling this to the electorate either through inciting ideological class warfare or invoking the slightly less distasteful, if essentially identical "there is no alternative" or "we're all in this together". What isn't addressed is how intensifying the dynamics already driving us to stagnation: budget cuts, cuts in wages and benefits, jobs, and services and the multiplier effect from these, is going to stimulate the economic growth that's necessary to maintain stability in our political systems. There is a strange schizophrenic separation in the current narratives that suggests jobs and growth are separate issues from the politics of austerity and debt reduction. Obama's only begun to touch on this with the "invest in the future" stuff which capitalists should be rejoicing over but as most economists would tell you would be a drop in the bucket even if America's teabagging jihadis weren't hellbent on taking us back to the 18th century. No, I don't think our politicians do know. For those who are interested in problem solving, Keynesian stimulus is essentially off the table either due to the Democrat's own shift to the right or the intractable political climate. For others, problem solving simply isn't part of the equation, those are the obfuscators, obstructionists, and petty kleptocrats who're either ideologues or they're filling their frat brothers' pockets or both (see Burlusconi). For them, maintaining power simply means appealing to the electorate's reptilian fear and pleasure centers in varying measure in what's now a permanent campaign season. In term's of strategy, I'm not sure I buy the notion that Obama and the Dems are on "our side". If they are, they need to mobilize their base, go on the offensive, change the trajectory of the story that's being told. They've done well when they paint the opposition into a moral corner as with the extension of unemployment benefits but have rolled over to the rigged cat food commission on its suggestions. They done plenty of "messaging" with regards to the budget balancing crap (as the New York Times interactive feature showed us). The framework we're being provided is short sighted groping in the dark for pols with short term ambitions. The stakes are higher than they know. Whether they're "problem solvers" or not, politicians should be recognizing that the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere are about bread, butter, and jobs not religious fervor. Keynesianism's done wonders for Japan. How does a Keynesian account for the massive economic expansion that occurred in the immediate wake of WWII when public spending as a percentage of GDP dropped by something like a factor of 5 and millions of servicemen returned to the private labor force all at once? "When this war comes to an end, more than one out of every two workers will depend directly or indirectly upon military orders. We shall have some 10 million service men to throw on the labor market. We shall have to face a difficult reconversion period during which current goods cannot be produced and layoffs may be great. Nor will the technical necessity for reconversion necessarily generate much investment outlay in the critical period under discussion whatever its later potentialities. The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable--were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties--then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced." That's from Paul Samuelson's "Full Employment After the War," published in 1943.

More historical denialism from Laissez Faire boy: public workers without collective bargaining rights were systematically fired when they tried to improve their conditions by demonstrating, striking, etc .. it's well known that pay scale, working conditions, etc... in non-union, "right-to-work" states is conditioned by working conditions in neighboring states where workers have collective bargaining. Dickensian squalor already exists in many industries where collective bargaining is denied. Yes - we've all seen the starving public sector workers milling about the ruins of the administrative buildings in the wake of rulings that don't allow them to bargain collectively... If wages and working conditions in the public sector become comparatively less attractive than options outside of the public sector, state and local governments won't be able to attract and retain the staff with the skills necessary to deliver public services and they'll have to respond by increasing wages or improving working conditions. It's not like people working in the public sector have been forcibly conscripted and locked in fenced compounds. Presumably the reason they're working in the public sector because the tangible and intangible benefits of doing were more appealing than the alternatives available to them in the private sector. If the tangible and intangible benefits of working for the public sector are no longer satisfactory - they can and should leave. If enough public sector employees do so and the state or municipality can't fill the position at the same wage and benefit level, then the state will have to....increase the wages and benefits until they are sufficient to attract a replacement. Where is the nightmare scenario here?

Kidding about what?

Are you seriously suggesting that workers were treated just fine back then, and had the full recourse of law behind them to deal with mistreatment? Do you really believe that? Do you have evidence of systematic abuse of non-unionized public employees before they were granted collective bargaining rights at the state and federal level? How about in the states like Virginia that don't grant public employee unions collective bargaining rights? Is the state falling apart? Hovels full of assistant file secretary IV's and public diversity liaison III's living in Dickensian squalor via the depredations of the state's avaricious and cruel electorate?

There's no employment crisis that central planning can't make worse. Transferring resources to the unemployed to help them stay afloat and letting employment expand wherever the real growth actually occurs is a much better option than having a central committee attempt to predict the future and borrow to make massive investments in a particular sector in anticipation of demand that may never actually materialize.

1. I personally love hearing the folks hearken back to the nightmarish days before collective bargaining, when the only thing standing between public employees and grievous exploitation by a rapacious electorate and their representatives was the full suite of civil service code protections, plus the full complement of legal and statutory protections available to workers in the private sector. 2. Kind of amusing to reflect back on the original progressive movement's campaigns against corruption, waste, graft, and inefficiency in government and contrast it with the priorities of today's progressives. Boss Tweed would have a much more congenial relationship with the progressive activists of today.

I've actually advocated liberalizing the health care market quite a bit before - and don't think that anyone working within it should have the government jacking up their wages. As a class doctors are no different than anyone else, and if they can profit by constraining the supply of physicians - as a class they'll do so. I'm all for eliminating barriers that are designed to keep qualified foreign doctors from practicing in the US, and for maximizing price transparency in medicine in general.

yes. seem to recall something very simliar to this in texas a bunch of years back? That was a fight over who got to rig the game of redrawing the congressional districts to favor their own party.

Yes - absolutely. The fact that that there's a soviet-style medical price setting body embedded in the public sector in the first-place is insane, and the fact that it's composed of doctors is even crazier. The RBRVS has lead to massive distortions in to the incentive structure that physicians respond to, and is one of the primary factors driving the shortage of primary care physicians in the US. Ditto for the process of determining how many residencies are available in what specialities, etc, etc, etc. Doing away with the central planning apparatus would mean that some types of physicians would make more money, and others would make less - but I don't think that the government should be engaged in perpetuating distortions that allow them to earn more than they would otherwise. Same as any other profession.

BTW - how do you personally define the classes here? There are those who gain from their capacity to use collective bargaining to extract more compensation from the public treasury and there are those who lose via public sector service delivery that is more expensive and less cost-efficient than it would be otherwise, but that's about it.

Wonder if Intrade has a line on this one yet...

Yeah, more quixotic horseshit. "We must first eliminate the State and then..." Put your money where your mouth is on eliminating subsidies by backing efforts to reduce corporate influence over our political process or STFU. Eliminating the state is something quite different than attenuating the incentives for rent-seeking. Speaking of which - quite an impressive display of that going on today in Madison. Unionized public sector patronage networks can clearly give private commercial interests a run for their money when someone threatens their preferred rent-extraction mechanism.

I've never really dirtbagged but after encountering a few folks that have I do have a few thoughts. The first would be to realize that for all but a handful of people, dirtbagging is going to be a transient phase in your life and it's best to have a plan for what you are going to do afterwards. The people that seemed to get the most out of the experience and were able to maintain the carpe diem mentality while living out of their cars knew they'd be heading off to grad/professional school, starting an apprenticeship for a skilled trade, etc at some pre-determined date and this seemed to make them wicked motivated to get after it as much as possible before re-joining the real world. The second group of folks who seemed to have it wired were people who had more or less figured out what they wanted to do and were dirt-bagging during a sabbatical from a career they enjoyed, and which enabled them to sock away a stash of cash beforehand that made life much more pleasant while playing the dirtbag game. I knew a guy who spent 2-3 months in J-Tree doing the whole dirtbag thing - all the way to dumpster diving for food and getting 1/2 of his calories from the stuff that the local bakery tossed out after it had sat on the shelf for a couple of days - who had enough cash socked away to cover the mortgage on his 400K home, health insurance, etc while he was out doing the minimalist living thing. When it was time to come home and his head gasket blew on the trip back - he had the cash set aside to swipe his card and cover it without sweating the bill. While he was there he ran into more than a few people who literally had no money for food, gas, etc and were making the rounds trying to sell all of their gear to get a ride home, scrounge up enough money to take their dog to the vet, etc, etc. I know what position I'd rather be in, but YMMV. If all of the above is a bunch of quasi-philosophical yammering that you could do without and you're looking for technical knowhow on the ins and outs of day-to-day dirtbagging, I totally understand. Here's a previous thread to help you out. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/837896/

Opposition from established wealthy communities to rail service? Georgetown and Metro being a shining example - it doesn't have a stop because they didn't want the poor. Various uppity Bay Area subs (Palo Alto, etc) who oppose high speed rail being secondary. Wealth follows public trans in America, not vice versa Couldn't agree more.

you clearly don't ride the bus very often. hyperbolic blowhard. I don't ride the bus because I commute by bike. I've walked or biked to work or school for all but three years since 1992, so I see your eco-righteousness and raise you a dozen worn out chainrings. What percentage of Metro ridership is below the poverty line? How about on The Sounder and the S.L.U.T. I ride past the S.L.U.T. every day, and when all 20 tons of it aren't almost completely empty on off-peak hours, it's filled with people that work for Microsoft, Amazon, and whoever else has operations in SLU..

It sure is, but it's no excuse to claim that Islam as a whole is worse than judeo-chritianity based on rhetorical hypocrisy about 'suicide bombers' and 'collateral damage', and big fucking blank in response to the historical record of who used terror, and of colonial-imperialism in the ME. It's not just the slaughter of non-Muslims, it's the entire apparatus of intimidation and repression that has been perpetuated in the name of Islam for centuries, and it's clearly Muslims themselves who have and will continue to bear the brunt of the suffering meted out by Islamists via the death-penalty for apostasy, etc, etc, etc. Even if Islamists hadn't engaged in a single act of aggression against anyone outside of their borders/faith there'd still be plenty for any principled liberal to criticize.

What evidence do you have to suggest that plotting rail-based mass transit routes has anything to do with the transportation needs of poor people? If anything, the study that you linked suggests a tendency for rail transit to price them out of neighborhoods that are in close proximity to rail lines. When push comes to shove, as it has with Metro - service is the first thing that gets cut. If getting poor people from point A to point B was the foremost priority, just the opposite would happen. It's much easier to understand the priorities that actuate the development and maintenance of public mass transit operations as a heavily unionized patronage network with benefits that aggregate primarily to the non-poor than a means of helping poor people getting too and from work.

Love the fact that you keep trotting this argument out despite the fact that Tawfik Hamid, Ayan Hirsaan Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, have articulated precisely the same arguments. While they are in the distinct minority, the incredibly weak geographic/experiential variant of the ad hominem that you keep rolling out over and over again simply doesn't apply to any of them. Don't give up on that one though! I'm looking forward to equally compelling arguments like "Have *you* ever been beheaded? Well then, you're clearly in no position to make an informed argument against beheading then, are you, hotshot..." Keep them coming. How about applying that one to clitorectomy, etc....?

Ten to one says that says that you are about to have someone demand to know exactly what it is that *you* know about being a woman....

Wow! You *heard* that? Holy shit - that's impressive 2nd-hand info! "The Trouble With Islam By TAWFIK HAMID April 3, 2007; Page A15 Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world’s decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis’s implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right. But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists’ defense. These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name -- Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion. It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong. The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace. Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals -- who unceasingly claim to support human rights -- have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah’s inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror. Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria -- which happened in the last few decades -- or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please. The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods. Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine’s formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession. Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners.It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America’s enemies. Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience inAmerica, and indeed, the West, today. Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand -- but so far haven’t -- that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media.Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not beconsidered "moderates." All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices. Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us." *"Dr. Tawfik Hamid, is an Islamic thinker and reformer, and one time Islamic extremist from Egypt. He was a member of a terrorist Islamic organization JI with Dr. Ayman Al-Zawaherri who became later on the second in command of Al-Qaeda. Some twenty-five years ago, he recognized the threat of Radical Islam and the need for a reformation based upon modern peaceful interpretations of classical Islamic core texts."

It's clearly quite possible to look at all of the sociohistorical complexities you cite and conclude that there's a causal link between the rise of Islamism and...Islam. If all we were talking about was what the Marin County Unitarian League's male-quilting collective did after reading ancient religious texts then there'd be little or nothing to worry about. When you change the context to a society in which all of the most fundamental beliefs, norms, customs, laws, etc have been fundamentally shaped by persistent interpretations of those ancient texts, then what's actually in those books matters a great deal more. I personally hope that all of the revolutions in the Middle East succeed, and we're well on our way to a Muslim civilization where criticizing the fundamental aspects of Islam and renouncing your faith via a megaphone in a public is no more likely to entail adverse consequences than a Christian doing so in Copenhagen, but that's a long way off. It's also not at all clear how holding our collective tongues while witnessing every bit of depravity, repression, and barbarism conducted in the name of Islam is going to benefit the moderate Muslims, secularists, etc who are the most likely to suffer directly from them.

Yeah, low income folks who can't live within walking distance of mass transit get zero benefit from it, right? Pretty much on par with the rest of your...ehm...logic. I'd actually argue that the benefits of public expenditures on mass transit are overwhelmingly captured by and/or transferred into the hands of people who are a long way from being poor. The poor certainly do benefit, but they are a long, long way away from being the primary beneficiaries of such expenditures. "The poor" are to mass transit subsidies what "Green Energy" or "Energy Independence" are to corn ethanol subsidies.