finknottle

People seem upset about the decline of American wages. Should an American, a school teacher say, or a bricklayer, earn 10 times as much as somebody doing the same work somewhere else? Whatever your leanings on the trade issue, you should first answer that. And if you think they should, you should address why you think free trade/barriers will preserve it. Otherwise you are just howling at the moon.

Depends on what you mean by quickly. Isn't it the case that you need to give a failing review, followed by counsoling and mentoring, followed by an additional failing review, even before you bump it to the union for 90 days? And only after that can you begin the 90 day adjudication process. So even in the best of circumstances - assuming the administrators have their ducks in a row from the get-go, and the reviews are done as promptly as allowed - you are still looking at 9 months minimum.

I don't wish to get in the middle of this Alaska-inspired retard rodeo, but I assume Exiled is not refering to the dividend checks (a shining but all too rare example of fiscal maturity), but rather the imbalance in federal expenditures (which does favor Alaska).

So what is the value then? Your disconnect between the two reminds me of the welfare state. To most voters, asking the state to pay for something is not the same as asking them to. So by all means, let's make the US the sugardaddy of freebie apologies! Let's apologize for discrimination, and then apologize for reverse discrimination. Let's apologize to the left for the war in Iraq, and to the right for the anti-war protests. Let's apologize for abortion, and for banning abortion. In fact, the government of the US should provide a personalized apology to each and every person for all the unjust things that ever happened to them or their ancestors.

Actually, I'm suggesting that the fault lies with the city for not allocating enough money to the arbitrator process. Whether the process is reasonable or insane is one topic for discussion. But they signed on to it. And if it is going to be implemented, money must be spent accordingly else you get exactly what we have here - regulatory paralysis. So NYC should budget enough for lawyers to handle disciplinary actions in a reasonable amount of time. *Then* we can have a discussion of whether it is good public policy to have a system in which it takes a year of preparation and $250k in legal fees to remove somebody.

What about the third type, the type that actually reads the article? The article say's there are only 23 arbitrators each working five days a month. It seems pretty clear that the problem is that the city does not have sufficient arbitrators on the payroll for the system it has agreed to, and that's the bottleneck. Here's another piece on the cost of removing somebody there, which they claim is up to $250,000 after legal fees. http://www.njchalktalk.com/?p=37 One positive note: the state legislature agreed that it could revoke the teaching certificate of a teacher convicted of sex crimes against students, forgoing the year-long administrative proceedure which normally follows conviction. And here's a piece from the bible, from five years ago, highlighting the time-consuming difficulties: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/education/15teach.html

No. But excessive regulation means that the hearings can only be done in certain ways and by certain people which, the article points out, are not sufficient for the backlog. So by locking yourself in to these proceedures you are mandating that an organization devote resources to it. You basically need a full-time cadre of disciplinarians on the payroll, money which in a sane company would go to productive employees.

In the real world, Mr Smith's superior considers the accusation and handles it accordingly. Maybe he's skeptical and ignores it, maybe he gives a warning, maybe its the last straw. If he's a good manager, great. If he's not, the company suffers and people won't stay there. But if his hands are tied by HR proceedures (such as in a unionized workplace), you can guarantee that the company will suffer.

It's called the real world. Life isn't always fair, but it usually favors those who can pick themselves up after misfortune (whether deserved or not) and move on.

Seriously, what's in it? (Now that I think of it, I do remember seeing a deduction in the Virginia tax code for being a Holocaust victim, wedged somewhere between having made payments in a tobacco settlement and paying for avian bird flu imdemnification.)

That's presumably if they launched an attack with limited warning. They wouldn't advance far at all if we and South Korea prepared for conflict. Nevertheless they could still destroy the Souths economy in the first few hours of fighting whether we were prepared or not. And that's the only point that matters.

I'm giving the US forces the benifit of the doubt - my point is simply that even a complete route has an unacceptable price. With a proper build-up of forces I think there would be no problem quickly immobilizing and suppressing the NK forces by air, cutting off all communications, and advancing step-by-step. The only difference is that quickly punching through the lines somewhere is improbable, owing more to extensive mining than anything else.

I was unaware that we are paying Holocaust reparations, or that it was even considered. Why do African-Americans think this? IMO if the idea of the US paying reparations were brought up, it would be a far more heated debate than this one. Is Obama going to apologize for the Holocaust too?

Yes we can, but there is a difference. NK has thousands of artillary pieces positioned and ready to rain destruction on northern South Korea. That's where the capital and much of the industry is. If it only takes two hours to defeat the North Koreans, that is too long - their forces are primed for an instant response, for just this reason. So that's the key difference. Past Kuwait, Saddam was facing desert. If he let loose with his arsenal, so what? No big deal if sand gets blown up. But South Korea plays such a critical role in manufacturing that it's destruction would send everybodys economy into a tailspin.

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting getting the private sector out of the medical insurance business - I assume in favor of a government-controlled entity, since somebody has to do it. Beyond the onbious objections about the inefficiency of the government, have you seen what happens when the government meddles in insurance? It listens to polls, not accountants. In Florida, the insurance companies decided that too many houses were getting damaged every year by hurricanes, so they raised the rates. The state stepped in and mandated that they lower them if they want to continue to do business there. So now the rates are lower than the payouts, and people keep rebuilding on the shore. The premiums are effectively subsidized by artificial increases in every other type of insurance. So what happens in your scenario when the AMA or whomever lobbies congress claiming that their insurance rates are too high? Congress tells the agency/regulators top lower them, end of story. Any budgetry shortfall is somebody elses's problem.

With apologies to the opening scene of Roots, the Atlantic slave trade was largely fueled by African strife. Slave traders didn't go into the interior to get slaves. Rather, warring kingdoms in the interior would take slaves and sell them to the coastal markets - a system the Europeans were all to happy to encourage. The banning of the Atlantic slave trade started in the late 1700's. On the demand side, there was legislation against the further importation of slaves throughout the beginning of the 1800's, with the last holdout Brazil outlawing it in 1831. The remaining illicit trans-atlantic trade in slaves was treated akin to piracy. The British navy took the lead in enforcement. Curtailment on the supply side was slower and had to be imposed. Again, Britian played a pivotal role by stationing a squadron on patrol off Africa and taking military action against recalcitrant African states. By ~1860 the coastal kingdoms too had banned the trade in the Atlantic. So - will somebody explain why we should be apologizing to Africa for what they did to us and not the other way around? Aren't we the victims? Who owes who an apology - the junkie, the dealer, or the producer?

Card-check also makes it easier for corrupt unions to beat out non-corrupt ones. It now becomes a race to submit a list of signatures, and the advantage goes to the unscrupulous with money and manpower (and maybe a little ACORN magic). Once that list is in, *that* union represents the workers, and the burden of proof falls on another union to prove it invalid.

The warm self-satisfaction that exists in the hearts of local pontificating anti-science environmentalists.

The reservations bit was a merely humorous aside by the poster. His basic point still stands: why not generate nuclear power in WNY?

Looking at the history objectively, shouldn't Brazil be the one apologizing? Brazil was the driver. They were the destination for most of the slaves by far, were the last to outlaw the importation of slaves, and didn't end slavery until 1888. It was all about sugar cane in Brazil - cotten in the US was a side-show.

Anytime I hear someone suggest a political solution which kills two birds with one stone, I have to wonder: at what point in our history was there ever too many birds and not enough stones?

Does it bother anyone else that Sen. Dodd took the lead in writing the Senate version of the health care reform bill - while his wife earns more than $500,000 a year sitting on the boards of several health care companies?

That's what he led the suckers to believe, whether he believed it or not. A generation now thinks every problem is the fault of Bush and heavy-handed american diplomacy (or lack thereof), and that with proper humility and by acting like the Dutch all of these problems will go away. As Obama put it to Hillary during the debates, you have trouble seeing it because you lack fresh thinking. You're part of the problem in politics, not the solution.

I'm not sure. I think the game-theory way to play this out is to ignore it, don't let it change the basic situation, and continue to try to negotiate (if you believe in negotiations), based on the thinking that it is just sabre-rattling and the extreme improbability of NK hitting it even if they tried. But having that be known as your response is politically disasterous.

About the only committment towards far-thinking economic development we'll see in WNY is for allocating grazing land to the rainbow-farting unicorns and other politically-correct but economically-dubious initiatives.