The New York very rich are angry at the ubber-rich's helicopter noise pollution

This is so ironic. I found this New York Times article through Daily Kos:

On an evening during the last stretch of summer, 385 people arrived at the studios of LTV, a cable-access programmer in Wainscott, on the East End of Long Island, for a town-hall meeting to discuss mounting aural assaults from commuter helicopters going to and from Manhattan. The issue had been igniting tempers all season — especially in the communities of Shelter Island, the Springs and parts of the North Fork, areas where a lot of the noise has been absorbed and where local self-perception runs less toward the glossy and indulgent than it does elsewhere on the East End.

"In 2007 we banned helicopters," Jim Dougherty, Shelter Island’s town supervisor, told me, pointing out that none of his constituents ever complained about the prohibition. "So it is the height of irony that we should become the dustbin for the East Hampton airport."

Helicopter traffic at the airport this summer has increased by close to 40 percent over last and with it has come a comparable rise in tension between the very affluent and the exceptionally rich.

"Quality of life truly is being diminished for commercial greed and the convenience of the same people who burned the economy," a longtime Shelter Island summer resident said to me.

"When I look up at small planes and choppers I see a fleet of middle fingers across the sky."

So what we have here now are the very rich getting angry at the ubber-rich flying their helicopters low over their exclusive neighborhoods during the commute hours. Of course, the ubber-rich have the money to purchase and fly their commuter helicopters, while the very rich are stuck driving their Range Rover SUVs and Beemers in rush-hour commuter traffic. Or the very rich have to listen to all these ubber-rich helicopters flying back-and-forth in their exclusive, gated communities at all hours of the day, drowning out the natural serenity of wild bird songs and crickets chirping. Do the ubber-rich care about the noise pollution they are causing? Probably not. But what is important here to realize is that this is an other symptom of the extreme inequality that exists in the U.S. between the 'haves' and 'have-nots,'but also the disconnect between the ubber-rich 'One Percenters,' and and everyone else--including those very rich individuals who provide the tax services, legal advice, financial advising, day-to-day company management, and a host of other professional services that have made these One Percenters' so ubber-rich that they could afford to commute by helicopter. I get the impression of the very rich people working hard and following the rules that were laid down by the ubber-rich for getting ahead that, one day, they could become part of that One Percent Club. Only now, the One Percent Club have snubbed their noses to the very rich, ignoring any sense of common courtesy, respect, decency and manners to them--just as they have done to the poor, working and middle classes. When you are so insulated with such extremely lavish wealth and power, are you ever going to see a growing, resenting backlash from the rest of the 99 percent that you have insulted and ignored?

At the turn of the last century it was the bourgeoisie in New York and other major cities who might have envisioned similar gestures of contempt directed at them by robber barons fleeing to Saratoga and Newport during July and August via the era’s own elaborate and expensive means of transport, private rail cars or yachts.

Richard Hofstadter, in his classic work of historical analysis "The Age of Reform," published in 1955, argued that it was the disgust and disruption felt by those who had previously occupied the highest ranks of the social order toward the new superseding class of self-lavishing bankers and industrialists that ultimately allowed the Progressive movement to flourish. The undermining of status radicalized the formerly complacent, and class politics took shape because one segment of the population had so much money that the merely respectable could now identify with the actually poor.

"To face the insolence of the local boss or traction magnate in a town where one’s family had long been prominent was galling enough,” Hofstadter wrote, “it was still harder to bear at a time when every fortune, every career, every reputation, seemed smaller and less significant because it was measured against the Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Goulds, Carnegies, Rockefellers and Morgans." A survey of Progressive Party leaders in 1912, he noted, revealed how overwhelmingly urban and middle-class they were. None were farmers and only one came from labor.

Makes me wonder, are we heading towards another Progressive revolt against the One Percent? Update: Looks like the ubber-rich are building monster McMansions in the Bel-Air hills over the more "modest" very rich homes.

Two stories on net worth loss by the poor, and minimum wage loss from inflation

I found a couple of stories that I wanted to comment on.  The first is this story by Kevin Drum, showing a real eye-opening chart on the Great Recession's impact on the poor:

Graph showing median household net worth from 2000 -- 2011.  From Kevin Drum.

If you look at the chart, Kevin shows that the net worth of the poor has dropped in a ten-year period, from zero to around -$6,000.  In fact, the median net worth has dropped for what is essentially the poor, the working, and possibly the middle class households.  Upper middle class households made some gains in their median net worth, while the extreme rich have taken huge gains in their net worth.  According to the Census Bureau report:

Between 2000 and 2011, experiences of households varied widely depending on their net worth quintile (See Figure 1). Median household net worth decreased by $5,124 for households in the first (bottom) net worth quintile,2 $7,056 (or 49.3 percent) for the second quintile, and $5,072 (or 6.9 percent) for the third quintile. Median household net worth increased by $18,433 (or 9.8 percent) for households in the fourth quintile, and by $61,379 (or 10.8 percent) for households in the highest (top) quintile (See Tables A1-A2 and Figure 2).

The distribution of net worth became more spread out between 2000 and 2011. The ratio of median net worth of the highest quintile to the second quintile increased from 39.8 to 86.8 between 2000 and 2011, and the ratio of the highest quintile to the third quintile increased from 7.7 to 9.2. The ratio of the highest quintile to the fourth quintile was 3.0 in 2000 and showed no statistically significant change over this period (See Figure 3).

Between 2010 and 2011, the ratio of median net worth of the highest quintile to the second quintile decreased by 3.85 percentage points, and the ratio of the highest quintile to the third quintile decreased by 0.25 percentage points.The ratio of the highest quintile to the fourth quintile showed no statistically significant change over this period.

The second story that I found is through The Daily Kos, showing a couple of calculator clocks on how much minimum wage workers have lost in pay due to inflation.  These clocks were created by The Center for Economic and Policy Research:

In a sense, both stories complement each other.  If you think about it, the poor are really the minimum wage workers in this country, living on paycheck-to-paycheck.  With the minimum wage remaining in stagnation for almost 30 years, these workers have lost anywhere between $3 to $6 trillion worth of wages due to inflation--whichever way you measure that loss.  These poor workers are the ones that are going to spend much of their paycheck on the goods and services that power the U.S. economy.  But with inflation eroding the minimum wage over a long period of time, and the double whammy of the Great Recession slamming into the poor, they are no longer living from paycheck-to-paycheck, but are falling behind.  They are no longer purchasing the goods and services that make up the U.S. economic growth.  And that creeping of the loss of household net worth and loss of wages due to inflation is moving up through the working and middle class.  

What we end up having is a lack of demand in the U.S. economy.  The loss of household net worth, coupled with the wage stagnation and loss through inflation, means that nobody has any money to spend on goods and services.  Or they are only spending on the bare necessities, such as food and shelter, but no extra goods, services, or luxuries.  The only group that seems to have the money to spend are the extreme rich, where businesses are catering to their tastes.  But there is only so much goods and services that the rich can buy--the rest of the money will have to be parked into more bank accounts, and invested in the Wall Street gambling casino, to generate even more income inequality for the extreme rich.  The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and nobody will have any more money to spend--not just on goods and services, but even the basic necessities.  It is a system that is unsustainable.

Sooner or later, that system is going to collapse.

Work scheduling software creates havoc on low wage employees' lives

I found this NY Times story on both Daily Kos, and Kevin Drum:

SAN DIEGO — In a typical last-minute scramble, Jannette Navarro, a 22-year-old Starbucks barista and single mother, scraped together a plan for surviving the month of July without setting off family or financial disaster.

In contrast to the joyless work she had done at a Dollar Tree store and a KFC franchise, the $9-an-hour Starbucks job gave Ms. Navarro, the daughter of a drug addict and an absentee father, the hope of forward motion. She had been hired because she showed up so many times, cheerful and persistent, asking for work, and she had a way of flicking away setbacks — such as a missed bus on her three-hour commute — with the phrase, “I’m over it.”

[....]

But Ms. Navarro’s fluctuating hours, combined with her limited resources, had also turned their lives into a chronic crisis over the clock. She rarely learned her schedule more than three days before the start of a workweek, plunging her into urgent logistical puzzles over who would watch the boy. Months after starting the job she moved out of her aunt’s home, in part because of mounting friction over the erratic schedule, which the aunt felt was also holding her family captive. Ms. Navarro’s degree was on indefinite pause because her shifting hours left her unable to commit to classes. She needed to work all she could, sometimes counting on dimes from the tip jar to make the bus fare home. If she dared ask for more stable hours, she feared, she would get fewer work hours over all.

“You’re waiting on your job to control your life,” she said, with the scheduling software used by her employer dictating everything from “how much sleep Gavin will get to what groceries I’ll be able to buy this month.”

Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. She braced herself to ask her aunt, Karina Rivera, to watch Gavin, hoping she would not explode in annoyance, or worse, refuse. She vowed to somehow practice for the driving test that she had promised her boyfriend she would pass by the previous month. To stay awake, she would formulate her own behind-the-counter coffee concoctions, pumping in extra shots of espresso.

Like increasing numbers of low-income mothers and fathers, Ms. Navarro is at the center of a new collision that pits sophisticated workplace technology against some fundamental requirements of parenting, with particularly harsh consequences for poor single mothers. Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing. Managers are often compensated based on the efficiency of their staffing.

Scheduling is now a powerful tool to bolster profits, allowing businesses to cut labor costs with a few keystrokes. “It’s like magic,” said Charles DeWitt, vice president for business development at Kronos, which supplies the software for Starbucks and many other chains.

Welcome to the world of Just-In-Time-Scheduling.   Just-In-Time is a production strategy where manufacturers reduce inventory, waste, and storage costs by ordering only enough parts to manufacture the product at the right time, right place, and right amount.  This type of manufacturing process started in the 1950s with Japanese car companies, and is pretty much adopted on a world-wide basis by manufacturers today.  Well, the Just-In-Time manufacturing model is now being adopted by companies for creating work schedules of employees in order to wring out even more efficiency.  Employees' work schedules are no longer created by managers, but rather sophisticated computer programs which factor in sales trends, economic indicators, and even weather patterns, to create a company work schedule with the right number of employees for both the day, and the hour.  The problem with these "workforce optimization systems"  is that they reduce the employee to a number that can be plugged in anywhere on a schedule to the benefit of the company's efficiency, while at the same time creating a havoc to the employee's work / life balance.  That employee will not have a regular, stable, weekly shift from they can both plan their life around and budget a stable paycheck.  Again from the NY Times:

Yet those advances are injecting turbulence into parents’ routines and personal relationships, undermining efforts to expand preschool access, driving some mothers out of the work force and redistributing some of the uncertainty of doing business from corporations to families, say parents, child care providers and policy experts.

In Brooklyn, Sandianna Irvine often works “on call” hours at Ashley Stewart, a plus-size clothing store, rushing to make arrangements for her 5-year-old daughter if the store needs her. Before Martha Cadenas was promoted to manager at a Walmart in Apple Valley, Minn., she had to work any time the store needed; her mother “ended up having to move in with me,” she said, because of the unpredictable hours. Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks.

By Saturday afternoon of the Fourth of July weekend, Ms. Navarro had made it through “clopening,” closing late at night and opening again just a few hours later. But she had not yet worked up the courage to ask Ms. Rivera and Ms. Rivera’s boyfriend, Oscar Nuñez, for help the next day with Gavin.

In a sense, Ms. Navarro's entire life--both her work life and personal life--has gone under complete control by Starbucks, all in the name of corporate efficiency.  As a minimum wage worker, her paycheck will fluctuate according to how many hours she will be working for each week.  The shift times will vary, according to when Ms. Navarro's Starbucks store will have their coffee rushes, and even the shift times will have an effect on her--Ms. Navarro does not have a car, and needs to take a bus to work, adding even more time to her commute.  This is an even greater hardship if Ms. Navarro is performing a "clopening," forcing her to sleep on the sidewalk before opening the store.  While Starbucks calls Ms. Navarro's fate"an anomaly," saying the company provides a week's notice on the work schedule as well as a stable schedule per employees' requests.  However, the NY Times interviewed current and recent Starbucks workers at 17 Starbucks stores around the country, and only two have confirmed that they received a week's notice on the schedule, with some employees saying they have received their schedule in as little as one day.

While scheduling software can be a useful, productivity tool, such a tool has been taken to extreme by Starbucks and other companies.  An individual human being has been replaced by a number in these software scheduling programs  to be used to maximize efficiency and profit for the company's benefit.  What is more, as these "numbers" are more likely part-time retail workers, who are at the low end of the social and economic scale with little resources and advancement.  They are one paycheck away from disaster, and if they complain to their managers about their erratic, software optimized, work schedule, they can be easily replaced by new hires.  These part-time retail workers are also trapped in this hellish, company optimized work schedule in that they are denied the stability they will need to take college classes and job training programs to improve their skills.   Ms Navarro was only a "few credits shy of an associates degree in business," before having to place her "degree was on indefinite pause because her shifting hours left her unable to commit to classes." 

We have sold our soul to the company store.

The real Amazon drones

I found this story through the Huffington Post:

At least five days a week, Myron Ballard races around Washington, D.C., with a cargo van full of Amazon Prime packages. A career delivery driver with 20 years behind the wheel, Ballard typically gets paid $1.50 for each address he visits. If he delivers 150 Amazon boxes -- a fairly routine number -- he can pull in $225. Not bad for a day's work.

That is, until he starts tallying up all his out-of-pocket costs. Ballard works for an Amazon contractor called LaserShip. He's technically an "independent contractor," not an employee, meaning all of the costs stemming from the deliveries fall on him rather than on LaserShip or Amazon.

Ballard had to purchase the cargo van he drives for work. He doesn't get reimbursed for the wear and tear he puts on it; for the gasoline he pours into it on a near-daily basis; for the auto insurance he needs to carry; or for the parking tickets he inevitably racks up downtown. He doesn't even get reimbursed for the LaserShip uniform he's obliged to purchase and wear.
At the end of the day, much of that $225 has vanished.

"It's like they want us to be employees, but they don't want to pay for it," said Ballard, 45.

Anyone who shops regularly online, particularly with Amazon, has to marvel at how quickly and cheaply packages arrive on the doorstep these days. Many of the millions of Amazon Prime members -- including this reporter -- may have noticed, however, that not all packages are ferried by workers wearing the familiar UPS, FedEx or U.S. Postal Service uniforms. Instead, they’re sometimes handled by smaller companies like LaserShip, with drivers working on contract and out of their own vehicles.

Delivery drivers are the real Amazon drones -- workers who hustle to feed our growing demand for next-day or same-day delivery from online retailers. And as the e-commerce industry continues to grow, the drivers classified as independent contractors are the ones feeling the squeeze.

These particular drivers work under a system that shifts the costs associated with employment away from the company and onto the worker. In this arrangement, a busted transmission can be the difference between putting food on the table and being out of a job. That's partly why the service is so cheap for retailers, and, ultimately, for customers as well.

For starters, a delivery company using independent contractors avoids paying payroll or unemployment taxes on its drivers, as well as workers' compensation insurance -- nevermind basic workplace benefits like health coverage and a 401(k). Such companies also aren't obliged to pay workers overtime under federal law, meaning no time and a half when the delivery day stretches into a 12-hour shift. And since they pay drivers on a per-delivery basis, they don't owe them anything for non-delivery work, like loading the van at the warehouse before hitting the road, a task that can take up to two hours.

The arrangement also makes it virtually impossible for the drivers to unionize since they're non-employees.

"The biggest savings for the employers, and the reason they're so devoted to the business plan, is the workers’ comp and the tax stuff. It's really lucrative," said Catherine Ruckelshaus, a lawyer with the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. "The work is all dictated by the employer, and they're not investing anything in [the driver's] business."

The arrangement appears essential to the bottom line of LaserShip, a once-small "last mile" courier company founded in 1986 and based in Vienna, Va., that's grown right along with the e-commerce boom. Although as a privately held company LaserShip doesn't disclose its size or revenue, it now handles deliveries for Amazon and others in areas stretching from New England down to Florida. Without the elaborate and costly distribution network of, say, UPS, a courier company like LaserShip is well-positioned to perform fast, cheap deliveries in dense areas like Washington.

The story is fairly long, and especially illuminating on how companies are exploiting the independent contractor clause.  LaserShip has expanded their service area into New Hampshire, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Delaware for driver deliveries, while at the same time, forcing drivers to accept new contracts which reduced their pay by around 10 percent.  LaserShip also extracts fees from driver's earnings through a $6 "administrative" fee, a $23 weekly "insurance" fee that is separate from drivers own auto insurance costs, and a $22.50 weekly fee to "lease" LaserShip's hand-held computers for scanning boxes for delivery.  According to the Huffington Post, "over the course of a year, a driver could pay as much as $1,170 for the privilege of renting a piece of equipment that the company requires him or her to use."  This doesn't even include the costs for vehicles, gas and maintenance that drivers need to spend for working their profession.

According to the Huffington Post:

A driver like Ballard can gross $60,000 a year if he's willing to work 80-hour weeks, but expenses will drive that haul down closer to $40,000. Then he takes a big tax hit come springtime, having had no withholdings throughout the year. He also gets no health coverage or paid time off through the job, and his pay fluctuates from week to week.

Despite his two decades in the field, Ballard said he now earns significantly less than he used to in a previous job with UPS. According to the job survey site Glassdoor.com, hourly UPS drivers earn an average of about $55,000 per year, and salaried drivers make $70,000 with benefits.

One current LaserShip driver, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing his contract with the company, said that when his vehicle recently broke down while delivering Amazon packages, he invested in a used van to make sure he kept his route. In addition to leveraging $7,000 of his own savings and credit, he took out a loan facilitated by LaserShip. The principal plus interest were deducted directly from his paychecks, which were reviewed by HuffPost.
After taking on debt in order to keep his job, the man was asked to accept a lower per-delivery pay, he said.

"That's part of their pitch: 'You're investing in your company,'" the driver said. "I thought I was investing. But now I'm facing a pay cut."

The problem is that companies have forced extreme cost cutting, reduced pay and incentives on the backs of drivers.  With LaserShip, there is no guarantee on the delivery routs or number of packages drivers are expected to deliver.  There is no job security for the drivers, and LaserShip can terminate the contract if a driver refuses to accept lower pay.  LaserShip is forcing the drivers to pay the cost of company equipment, such as the hand-held computers as "leases," and extracting profit from administrative and insurance fees.  In other words, LaserShip has discovered a loophole in misclassifying drivers as independent contractors, rather than employees, as a means to reduce costs and save money.  With the extremely tight labor market, and companies continued demand for increasing productivity in doing more with less, it is not surprising that companies like LaserShip can find contractor drivers to work for them at slave wages.   As the drivers are independent contractors, and not employees, there may be a diffusion of opinion and potential single voice to represent the interests of such contractors, or even to unionize.  But that change may be coming--at least in the courtroom.  According to the Huffington Post, a judge has approved a class-action settlement where LaserShip is required to pay $800,000 to drivers in Massachusetts due to this missclassifying of the drivers as independent contractors, giving them minimum wage and overtime protections. 

The problem doesn't just stop with LaserShip.  There is also a WalMartization effect taking place here.   According to the Huffington Post article, delivery companies are forced to relentlessly cut costs in order to maintain contracts with Amazon.com, and if they can't perform the work at the price Amazon demands, then Amazon will terminate the contract with the delivery service:

That's what a LaserShip co-founder, Farhang Aryan, suggested in a deposition related to the Massachusetts lawsuit. Aryan said an increase of 5 percent in what the company asks of its customers like Amazon could get it "terminated" from its contracts.

"I know of situations [where] a customer says, 'If you do not increase the rates, I will give you [an] additional year of contract, and if you want to do any increases, this has to go to a bidding process,'" he said.

William Deschenes, a former Lasership manager, noted in his deposition that Amazon is now LaserShip's largest customer by any measure. According to Deschenes' testimony, Amazon expects that 98.5 percent of its deliveries arrive on time, and LaserShip drivers are measured under a rubric known as "deficiencies per million opportunities," or DPMOs, i.e., failed deliveries. Drivers told HuffPost that LaserShip management informed them they could lose their work through Amazon if the drivers can't keep their DPMO levels down.

It isn't clear how large or small a piece of Amazon's delivery operation LaserShip handles, or how much the retailer relies upon companies using contractors and their personal vehicles. Amazon didn't respond to interview requests.

One of the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts lawsuit, Milton Sanchez, testified that LaserShip management suddenly cut his pay. He alleged that it was customary for drivers to be pressured "under duress" to sign new contracts lowering their own rate.

"At the beginning we were making a decent pay," Sanchez testified. "And then they started cutting, cutting. … They couldn't make money with the client, so they make money with us. That's the way I see it." Asked about the various costs that drivers are forced to swallow, Sanchez said, "You break it down, and I'll start crying."

 If what LaserShip's co-founder Aryan suggested is true, then even Amazon is complicity guilty in the abuses of independent contractors.  Amazon is forcing relentless cost-cutting of delivery service contracts on LaserShip, which forces more pay cuts and fees on its drivers, who end up performing the deliveries for almost no pay.  Again, it is do more with less, but only now it is Amazon that is forcing LaserShip to do more deliveries with less cost.  It is a system that can't sustain itself--sooner or later, the system will end up crashing.  If a driver for LaserShip is forced to sign contracts for less pay to LaserShip than last year, due to Amazon's insistence on reducing LaserShip's delivery rates for shipping Amazon's packages, then that particular driver is not going to be purchasing products through Amazon.  We have a reduction in demand for Amazon's products, and a need for delivery services through LaserShip.  This is a demand problem here.  If companies do not want to pay workers for labor, the workers are not going to purchase company products. 

Saturday Morning Cartoons--Superman Meets My Little Pony

 I saw this browsing through YouTube, and it is just brilliant.  Created by an animator named ToucanLDM, the Man of Steel is transported to My Little Pony's world, where he meets those cute, wide-eyed, talking ponies, and battles against both General Zod and evil ponies from taking over the My Little Pony kingdom. 


Saturday Morning Cartoons--Superman Meets My Little Pony:

Barbie is dying!

I found this Huffington Post story:

* First-qtr net loss $0.03/share vs $0.11 profit year earlier

* First-qtr adjusted profit $0.01/share vs est. $0.09

* Sales fall 5 pct to $946.2 mln vs est. $952.9 mln

* Shares fall as much as 3 pct (Adds details, analysts comments; updates shares)

April 17 (Reuters) - Mattel Inc, the world's largest toymaker, reported its first quarterly net loss in nearly five years due to a double-digit fall in sales of its iconic Barbie dolls, sending the company's shares down as much as 3 percent in early trading.

Mattel's worldwide sales fell 5 percent to $946.2 million in the quarter ended March 31 due to lower demand for its key toy brands.

Sales of Barbie dolls fell 14 percent, while those of Fisher-Price line aimed at infants and preschoolers declined 6 percent.

Mattel has looked to newer products to boost sales as children increasingly opt for electronic games and other gaming activities over traditional toys that are decades old.

Barbie made her debut in 1959, distinguishing herself in the mass market for dolls with her fashion model-like figure.

"(Barbie is) still a $1.2 billion business. It is still very meaningful for Mattel and it is very hard to grow a $1 billion business," Morningstar analyst Jaime Katz told Reuters.

I don't know yet if Barbie is dying. I have a niece in sixth grade, and she was never into playing with Barbie--she wanted to play with My Little Pony, Littlest Pet Shop, and Leggos--Harry Potter Leggos first, and now Star Wars.  Competition in the toy market is intense,  with a range of themed toys competing for children's interests.  Even the toy doll market is competitive, with the wholesome Barbie going up against the semi-slutty Bratz Dolls, and the gothic Monster High Dolls--which are owned by Mattel!  It appears to me that there are more toy choices out there for girls than just Barbie. 

The Huffington Post story does give this interesting detail:

Mattel's gross sales declined 10 percent in the all-important holiday quarter as shoppers spent less on discretionary items such as toys, especially the action figures and preschool toys that represent the largest categories for Mattel and rival Hasbro Inc.

So the parents of children have a choice in spending their stagnating wages on either food or toys, which are they going to spend their money on?

NASA discovers first Earth-size planet inhabiting Goldilock's Zone

This story is just totally cool:

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.

The artist's concept depicts Kepler-186f , the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. [Click link below for more.]

Image Credit: 

NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size Planet in the Habitable Zone

While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.

"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."

Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky.
"We know of just one planet where life exists -- Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth," said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. "Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward."

The diagram compares the planets of our inner solar system to Kepler-186, a five-planet star system about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The five planets of Kepler-186 orbit an M dwarf, a star that is is half the size and mass of the sun. [Click link below for more.]

Image Credit: 

NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Kepler-186 and the Solar System

Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

 It was only a matter of time before the scientific instruments, imagination, and new means to discover such small, rocky, planets were to take place.  Now that we've discovered our first, Earth-like planet, I'm excited to hear when more will be discovered, or the discovery of liquid water on such planets, or even an oxygen atmosphere.  Then we can truly say that we are no longer alone in the universe.  Life exists on this neighboring star!

We just need to build one of these to to pay a visit:

Download Star Trek Enterprise into White Noise.  whitenoisemarket.com

Saturday Morning Cartoons--Superman "Volcano"

For this morning's Saturday Morning Cartoons, I'm posting 1942's Superman cartoon, Volcano.  From YouTube:

Chelsea Clinton is pregnant

I found this story through Americablog, which reported that former president Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea Clinton is now pregnant.  And it appears that the famous Clinton First Couple, Bill and Hillary, are excited about being grandparents.

Okay.  Ho-hum.  Congratulations to Chelsea, and all the other young women who have discovered they will be expecting a package from the stork. Chelsea Clinton is married to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky. To me, this is a non-story. 

But then I went over to Talking Points Memo, and found two interesting stories.  The first is this story, where New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin speculates that Chelsea Clinton's pregnancy will become a "game changer" for the 2016 presidential election, and Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions on MSNBC's Morning Joe program.  Sorkin believes that Hillary Clinton's grandmother status will result in a "softening effect" on Hillary's political image for the 2016 presidential election--even though MSNBC reported a Fox News poll showing Hillary's approval ratings remained unchanged after the pregnancy was announced:

The gang on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" is usually game to analyze (if not set) the latest political narrative, but as Andrew Ross Sorkin proved on Friday, even that show has limits.

Following a discussion about Hillary Clinton's poll numbers, the New York Times financial columnist eagerly turned the panel's attention to the real story.

"Can we talk about the human drama that is Grandma Clinton?" Sorkin asked, referring to Chelsea Clinton's announcement that she's pregnant.

"I don't want to be cynical and I'm not suggesting anyone's having a baby for election purposes, but —" Sorkin added before being drowned out by the panel's collective groans.

And with that, Sorkin had lost the room, despite his best efforts to salvage his argument. He insisted that the pregnancy was a game changer for Hillary Clinton.

"It's gonna change the dynamic of the campaign," he said.

How exactly?

"It's a softening, there's a compassion thing," Sorkin explained. "You don't think that over the next two years on the campaign trail this is gonna be part of the narrative? Come on. That's interesting."

The other panelists did not find his observation interesting.

Here is the video via Morning Joe:



I then saw a second story on Talking Points Memo, reporting Newsmax conservative host Steve Malzberg speculating that Chelsea Clinton's pregnancy was designed as a "prop" for Hillary Clinton's upcoming 2016 presidential run:

Hillary Clinton shoe-throwing truthers, meet Hillary Clinton baby-truthers.

Newsmax host Steve Malzberg on Thursday speculated that Chelsea Clinton's pregnancy was no accident, and that Hillary Clinton's grandchild would arrive just in time to serve as a "prop" for a widely expected 2016 presidential run.

"Now pardon the skeptic in me," Malzberg said. "Oh I can see Media Matters, I can see everybody going crazy on me now. Malzberg thinks this was a staged, planned pregnancy?"

"Well, now I'm not saying, when I say staged I have to believe she's pregnant, if she says she's pregnant," he continued. "I don't mean that they're making up she's pregnant. But what great timing! I mean purely accidental, purely an act of nature, purely just left up to God."

"And God answered Hillary Clinton's prayers and she's going to have the prop of being a new grandma while she runs for president," he added. "It just warms the heart, it brings a tear to my eye. It really does."

And here is the video:

 

 Looks like the crazies are really coming out to speculate on how a young woman's pregnancy will affect the outcome of a presidential election, that is still two years away!  It is complete madness here!  I could care less if a presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, became an expecting grandparent before or during a presidential campaign.  Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin became a grandmother a year before being picked as the GOP vice presidential candidate for 2012.  Did Sarah Palin's grandmother status affect my opinion of her as a political candidate?  Not really.  Although the story of Palin's grandmother status did raise a social issue of unwed teen pregnancy.

Personally, I'm going for CNN's take on the political impact of Chelsea's pregnancy for 2016--Chill Out and Shut Up!

Florida GOP legislature bans teen interns from floor during abortion debate

I found this Gawker story through Daily Kos.  Even I'm a little surprised at it.  From Gawker.com:

During discussion of controversial issues on abortion and fetuses Wednesday, Republican leaders of Florida's Legislature sent all of the House's teenage pages out of the chamber, and they weren't allowed back in until debate opened on the next issue: guns.

The unusual "precaution" was noted by members of the Capitol press corps who attended the House session yesterday. The Legislature is considering a bill that would effectively ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, as well as a "crimes against the unborn" measure to put stiffer penalties on criminals who assault pregnant women leading to the death of their fetus.

The House pages and messengers, who have served the state's legislators since at least 1865, are all students who spend a week running errands for lawmakers and learning the business of state government. But Wednesday they were led off the floor, presumably so they couldn't be tainted by that business of government.

Okay, first thing I'm going to comment on is that these Florida teenage pages probably know more about what is going on inside a woman's body than the Republican legislators could ever imagine--or even dream about!  Are the Republican lawmakers so afraid of having young teens learning such words as "uterus" and "vaginas" in the government halls?  Do Republican lawmakers even say the words "uterus," and "vaginas?"  What is even more ironic is how they teenage pages were banned from the chambers during the abortion debate, but then it was okay to let them in during the gun debate! 

Talk about crazy incompetence....

Saturday Morning Cartoons: A Corny Concerto

For this morning's Saturday Morning Cartoons, it is time to get Merrie with Merrie Melodies "A Corney Concerto."  The cartoon is a parody of Walt Disney's 1940 feature film Fantasia, in which the Disney film sets eight animation sequences to classical music.  Directed by Bob Clampett, and released in September, 1943, A Corney Concerto sets up two stories to Johann Strauss' waltzes, Tales from the Vienna Woods, and the Blue Danube.  The film was voted #47 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time by animation professionals.

From YouTube:  A Corney Concerto:

Saturday Morning Cartoons--Happy Harmonies "To Spring!"

 After the week of rain we had here in the Bay Area (and we probably need more rain), the sun is out and Spring is here.  I found this MGM cartoon series Happy Harmonies short cartoon, To Spring!  Happy Harmonies was a series of 36 cartoons, produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, from 1934 to 1938.  They were distributed by Metro Goldwyn-Mayer.

Harman and Ising started their animation work with Disney in the early 1920s, however, they dreamed of opening their own animation studio.  The pair created and trademarked an animation character named Bosko in 1928, hoping to capitalize on the new technology of motion pictures with synchronized sound with animation.   After a short stint at Universal, working on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons,  Harman and Ising created their pilot animation short, Bosko, The Talk-Ink Kid, which emphasized synchronized dialog and speech in animation over music.  Warner Brothers Leon Schlesinger saw the pilot film, and signed the pair to produce cartoons for Warner Brother's new Looney Tunes cartoon series, making Bosko one of Warner's first animation stars. 

In 1933, Harman and Ising left Warner Brothers over budget disputes, taking their trademarked Bosko character with them.  In 1934, they found work at MGM in creating both a new series of Bosko short films, and the Happy Harmonies animation series.  Harman and Ising worked on the Happy Harmonies, until the series went over-budget in 1937 and MGM fired them.  MGM then went on to build their own in-house animation studio, headed by Fred Quimby.

Harman and Ising would continue to work as animation freelancers, selling short films to both Disney's Silly Symphony series, and to Quimby at MGM.  In 1938, Harman created Peace on Earth, an anti-war morality tale which was nominated for an Academy Award.  In 1940, Ising would win the Oscar for his short film The Milky Way, becoming the first non-Disney animation film to win an Academy Award.  While both Harman and Ising attempted to create memorable cartoon characters in their later years, they were unsuccessful.  Where Harman and Ising's work especially shines is in the refined, quality of their cartoons, and their refusal to skimp on such quality to the producers who wanted cheaper budgeted cartoons.  You can view that commitment to quality in To Spring, as the elves wake up and start mining the colors that would grow into the green grass and colorful flowers.  But will Spring ever be able to release itself from the blowing snow and winds of Old Man Winter?  Will the colorful pumps of Spring coldly crash down in that final winter's storm?  Will the black-bearded elf ever get his pair of blue pants on?

From YouTube:  Happy Harmonies, "To Spring!"

UPS fires 250 workers after they protest against a long-time co-worker's firing

I'm not sure how to respond to this NewYork Daily News story, via Think Progress.   From the New York Daily News:

UPS has delivered a special message to 250 of its Queens drivers: You’re fired!

The Atlanta-based company is booting 250 of its unionized drivers from its Maspeth facility because they walked off the job for 90 minutes Feb. 26 to protest the dismissal of a long-time employee, UPS told the Daily News.

Twenty employees were terminated Monday after their shifts — and the remaining 230 notified that they’ll be canned as soon as replacements are trained, a company spokesman said.

“They just called me in ... (and) said, ‘Effective immediately, you are no longer on the payroll,’” said Steve Curcio, 41, a 20-year employee earning $32 an hour.

The mass firing has enraged Tim Sylvester, head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 804, especially since the company gets some lucrative perks from the city.

Apparently UPS decided to fire a 24-year employee and union activist, Jairo Reyes.  The NY Daily News story does not provide details on why Reyes was fired by UPS.   After Reyes was fired, 250 unionized UPS workers staged an impromptu strike for 90 minutes, in protest of the firing.  UPS escalated in firing those 250 workers.  ThnkProgress is reporting that Reyes was fired over a "complicated saga" regarding hours that senior UPS workers can hold.

The rest of the story is about the city of New York trying to get UPS and the workers into negotiations, due to the fact that UPS has a $43 million city contract to provide delivery services to city and state government agencies, and that UPS participates in a special city program to reduce and expedite parking ticket fines and payments to the city.  Some New York City officials are now wondering whether to threaten UPS in negotiating with the workers, or cancelling these contracts.

I don't want to get into the details on Reyes' dispute with UPS, or whether UPS was justified in its firing of Reyes.  But I will say that UPS has a public relations disaster on their hands.  Do the UPS managers even watch the news stories regarding the labor strikes by fast food workers demanding living wages?  Or the McDonald's workers suing several stores in three states over wage thefts?  Or the stories of WalMart paying their employees so little that they employees are forced to apply for government food stamps?  Let alone, WalMart's own wage theft issues.  Like it or not, there is a battle growing between big Corporate America and their employees.  The employees have watched their own jobs being outsourced, wages stagnate, working conditions deteriorate, pensions and retirement eviscerated, and the endless demands of Corporate America to "do more with less," while not receiving any benefits for their increased productivity.  On the other side is Corporate America, with ever-growing productivity gains, increasing profits, and soaring multimillion paychecks and golden parachutes to their CEOs.  UPS may have been justified in their firing of Reyes, and the 250 employees who went on strike to support Reyes.  However, in this larger narrative, UPS is looking like the cold, uncaring corporation whose only interest is to screw their employees--UPS can always remove higher paying, experienced older workers for cheap, minimum wage scabs and make more profit due to reduced labor costs. 

UPS is projecting itself as being the "bad guy" in this story--rightly or wrongly. 

Supreme Court kills overall limits on individual political campaign donations

This is from the Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court struck another major blow against long-standing restrictions on campaign money Wednesday, freeing wealthy donors to each give a total of $3.6 million this year to the slate of candidates running for Congress.

Rejecting the restriction as a violation of free speech, the 5-4 ruling struck down a Watergate-era limit that Congress wrote to prevent a single donor from writing a large check to buy influence on Capitol Hill. It was the latest sign that the court's conservative majority intends to continue dismantling funding limits created over the last four decades.

Under those limits, donors could give up to $5,200 to any individual candidate for Congress per election cycle, and no more than $123,200 to all candidates and political party committees put together.

Acting on an appeal from the Republican National Committee, the high court left the individual candidate limits intact but declared the overall limit unconstitutional.

As a result, individuals will be able to give the individual maximum to every candidate for Congress, either directly or through contributions to a political party. That in effect raises the new maximum that can be given to candidates and party committees during a two-year election cycle to $3.6 million.

We now have the very best political system that money can buy.  If you have $3.6 million dollars, you can give to every candidate and through both political parties to make sure that your political viewpoints are heard above everyone else.  Toss in the practically unlimited corporate campaign contributions of Citizens United,  and you can pretty much purchase your own congress-critter.  It seems like we're moving away from a one man / one vote, to a $1 / one vote.  What choice is there between corporate and ultra-rich sponsored Candidate A, and corporate and ultra-rich sponsored Candidate B, when both candidates have pretty much the same political opinion on business regulations, environmental regulations, labor, wages, and economic issues?  When both candidates support big business and the ultra-rich? 

Saturday Morning Cartoons--South Park parodies Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch

I found this over at Americablog, and it is just fricking brilliant!  Seems like the creators of South Park created a parody of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot sketch--one of the best of the series. 

From YouTube:

 

And here is the original Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch:



I'd like to see how South Park parodies other Monty Python sketches, such as the Spanish Inquisition, or Spam, or even the Upperclass Twit of the Year Games.

Supreme Court hears arguments in Hobby Lobby case for corporation's religious rights

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc, where Hobby Lobby is challenging the Affordable Care Act's insurance coverage for birth control is violating the religious beliefs of the owners of Hobby Lobby, and that the company should be exempt from this birth control requirement.  This is from CBS News.com:

Two privately-held, for-profit companies -- Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. -- are suing the United States government over a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires large employers to offer their workers comprehensive health coverage, including contraception, or pay a fine. Hobby Lobby's owners, David and Barbara Green of Oklahoma, say they have strong objections based in their Christian faith to providing health care coverage for certain types of contraception. The Pennsylvania-based Hahn family, the Mennonite owners of Conestoga Wood Specialties, have the same complaint.

For Christian conservatives, the cases represent the threat of government overreach.

"This case will decide whether a family gives up their religious freedom when they open a family business," Lori Windham, a senior counsel for the Becket Fund, which is representing Hobby Lobby, told CBS News. "The question here is whether the Green family can be forced to do something that violates their deeply held religious conviction as a consequence of the new health care law."

Reproductive rights advocates, meanwhile, consider the notion that some businesses could pick and choose which contraception methods to cover "out of touch [and] out of line," Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro Choice America, told reporters.

Contraception is "integral with our economic security and our ability to hold jobs for our lifetime," Hogue said. "We've had enough of this idea our reproductive health is somehow separate from our economic well being... Our bodies are not our bosses' business."

The two cases, however, have implications that go well beyond the so-called "wars" on women or religion. If Hobby Lobby and Conestoga prevail, it would prompt "a fundamental shift in the understanding of the First Amendment," David Gans, the civil rights director for the Constitutional Accountability Center, told CBS News.

That shift in thinking could open the floodgates for unprecedented protections for corporations that some say amount to a license to discriminate. The ramifications could be felt nationwide, in states that are enacting laws to shield businesses from regulations that may violate their "religious beliefs." Gov. Jan Brewer, R-Ariz., last month vetoed one such bill, which would have allowed Arizona businesses to refuse to serve gays on religious grounds. A number of other states across the country have been considering similar legislation.

The ramifications could theoretically go further than that. U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued in a brief to the court that siding with Hobby Lobby "would entitle commercial employers with religious objections to opt out of virtually every statute protecting their employees" -- such as laws that ban gender discrimination, minimum wage and overtime laws, the collection of Social Security taxes, or mandated health coverage for vaccinations.

This case certainly worries me.  The big question I would have to ask is, who defines a corporation's religious belief?  Hobby Lobby is a privately held company,  so I can see the Green family's religious argument against providing birth control.  But who defines a publicly-held corporation's religious belief?  The CEO?  The Board of Directors?  The shareholders?  Will such religious beliefs have to be placed up for a shareholder vote on the next shareholder meeting?  How does such religious beliefs in God, Satan, Original Sin, birth control, relate towards selling of shoes by Nike Corporation?  Wait--Jesus Christ wore shoes.  How does religious beliefs relate towards the selling of  iPhones and iPads by Apple Computer Corporation?

There have been a lot of arguments that I've read criticizing Hobby Lobby, and their arguments for corporate religious beliefs--Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, Daily Kos has multiple postings on their site, and Americablog has four postings.  What worries me is that if the Supremes rule in favor of Hobby Lobby, then we may see that floodgate of corporate protections on taxes, discrimination, exemption on regulations on everything--all based on religious beliefs.  Corporations only believe in one God--and that is the God of Money!  They will say anything and do anything they can to accumulate even more of their God. 

And one more thing, the Supreme Court will rule 5-4 in favor of Hobby Lobby, with Justice Kennedy being the swing vote.  Because corporations are people too, my friend.