When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask
why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara,
archbishop (1909-1999)
Factory hours at Thomas Edison were 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.; in the winter, it was dark when workers went in and dark when they came out. Twenty-two saloons and bars lined the street that faced the main plant, and they opened at 5:00 A.M. for workers who had difficulty facing the grimness of the workday. When Thomas Edison departed for Washington to aid the war effort in 1917, Charles Edison, Thomas' son recently raised to the position of CEO, got the chance to make changes at Thomas A. Edison, Inc., that made life for factory workers less harsh and dangerous. Charles shortened the workday to ten hours; put in a dispensary staffed with a nurse or doctor on duty; and subscribed to the state's workmen's compensation plan, even though other managers were convinced it would bankrupt the company. When Tomas returned he reversed or cancelled all of his son's new policies.
In the President's speech he said that Tashfeen Malik, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino, California, attack, arrived in the US as part of the US's visa waver program. The entire world--except for him--knows she came on a fiancé visa. That is at least strange.
China will allow two children for every couple, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. China, now a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, instituted a policy of one child per couple to control population growth in the 1970s. The policy eased over the years: In late 2013, the country announced couples could have two children if one of the parents was an only child.
Satellite temperature readings have shown no warming trend for the last 18 years, 8 months and counting. None.
Satellite temperature readings are supposed to be the most comprehensive and thus the most accurate. And, of course, the pause in warming since 1998 undercuts the entire global warming argument of the environmental movement and its allies. Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found that the "pause" in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn't exist. Instead of a pause, they found a surge. Huh? The House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to the study. NOAA refused to hand them over. Huh?
Factory hours at Thomas Edison were 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.; in the winter, it was dark when workers went in and dark when they came out. Twenty-two saloons and bars lined the street that faced the main plant, and they opened at 5:00 A.M. for workers who had difficulty facing the grimness of the workday. When Thomas Edison departed for Washington to aid the war effort in 1917, Charles Edison, Thomas' son recently raised to the position of CEO, got the chance to make changes at Thomas A. Edison, Inc., that made life for factory workers less harsh and dangerous. Charles shortened the workday to ten hours; put in a dispensary staffed with a nurse or doctor on duty; and subscribed to the state's workmen's compensation plan, even though other managers were convinced it would bankrupt the company. When Tomas returned he reversed or cancelled all of his son's new policies.
In the President's speech he said that Tashfeen Malik, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino, California, attack, arrived in the US as part of the US's visa waver program. The entire world--except for him--knows she came on a fiancé visa. That is at least strange.
China will allow two children for every couple, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. China, now a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, instituted a policy of one child per couple to control population growth in the 1970s. The policy eased over the years: In late 2013, the country announced couples could have two children if one of the parents was an only child.
Satellite temperature readings have shown no warming trend for the last 18 years, 8 months and counting. None.
Satellite temperature readings are supposed to be the most comprehensive and thus the most accurate. And, of course, the pause in warming since 1998 undercuts the entire global warming argument of the environmental movement and its allies. Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found that the "pause" in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn't exist. Instead of a pause, they found a surge. Huh? The House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to the study. NOAA refused to hand them over. Huh?
Rectitude: n: 1. Moral uprightness. 2. Correctness. 3. Straightness. ety: From Latin rectus (right, straight). Ultimately from the Indo-European root reg- (to move in a straight line, to lead or rule) that also gave us regime, direct, rectangle, erect, alert, source, surge
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish philosopher whose famous work was On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History. He argues that the key role in history lies in the actions of the "Great Man", claiming that "History is nothing but the biography of the Great Man". Is this a worse position than history's invisible materialistic hand?
Who is....Arthur Rimbaud?
Crowdsourcing: In December 2009, DARPA offered $40,000 to anyone who could locate ten balloons that they had placed in plain sight around the continental United States. On a predesignated day, DARPA hid ten large, red weather balloons, eight feet in diameter, in various places around the country. The $40,000 prize would be awarded to the first person or team anywhere in the world who could correctly identify the precise location of all ten balloons. When the contest was first announced, experts pointed out that the problem would be impossible to solve using traditional intelligence-gathering techniques. The contest was entered by 53 teams totaling 4,300 volunteers. The winning team, a group of researchers from MIT, solved the problem in just under nine hours. How did they do it? Not via the kinds of high-tech satellite imaging or reconnaissance that many imagined, but -- as you may have guessed -- by constructing a massive, ad hoc social network of collaborators and spotters -- in short, by crowdsourcing. The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you happened to spot the balloon in your neighborhood and provided them with the correct location, you'd get $2,000. If a friend of yours whom you recruited found it, your friend would get the $2,000 and you'd get $1,000 simply for encouraging your friend to join the effort. If a friend of your friend found the balloon, you'd get $500 for this third-level referral, and so on. The likelihood of anyone person spotting a balloon is infinitesimally small. But if everyone you know recruits everyone they know, and each of them recruits everyone they know, you build a network of eyes on the ground that theoretically can cover the entire country.
One third of the people identified in police lineups by eyewitnesses to crimes are fillers for the lineup picked randomly out of people at the police station.
During the 1880s Chicago's total population increased by 118 percent -- a rate of growth five times faster than that of New York City. The city's foreign-born population doubled, reaching 450,000, a total that made immigrant Chicago larger than the total population of St. Louis or any other city in the Midwest, a total swollen by thousands of impoverished Polish Catholic peasants and Jewish refugees from the ghettos of Russia.
Gravity Payment's CEO Dan Price announced on April 13 that he would raise the minimum wage of his staff to $70,000 a year; the story went beyond viral: it took the media, especially the part of it which has been obsessing with income and wealth inequality which in the aftermath of Piketty would be most of it, by meteoric storm. Not only that, but the soon to be lionized young chief executive doubled down on this story of "purest of corporate nobility" by announcing he would cut his own compensation of $1.1 million to offset the cost. Well, it looks as if this altruism was a lot more complicated. http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gravity-ceo-dan-price/
In the early 1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin extracted as much grain as possible from the farmers of the Soviet Union, especially those in the Ukraine, resulting in a forced famine with an estimated 7,000,000 deaths. The main purpose was to fund his country's rapid industrialization projects, but he also wanted to force the "kulaks" (formerly wealthy farmers that had owned 24 or more acres) into submission and bring about the "collectivization" of privately held lands. In the Ukraine, he also wanted to stave off the stirrings of an independence movement.
The Depression of the 30s was filled with recriminations towards various groups. One specific problem was said to be "profit." Yet 18 of 19 businesses went bankrupt during the period.
In Georgia Catholics were expressly banned, along with rum, lawyers, and blacks, under the original Georgia Trust in 1733. While that law had long ago been overwritten, and waves of Irish immigrants arrived during the potato famines of the 1840s, an anti-Catholic law was still on the books when Flannery O'Connor's was born: the Convent Inspection Bill became Georgia law in 1916. Under this weird legislation, grand juries were charged with inspecting Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages, to search for evidence of sexual immorality and to question all the 'inmates,' ensuring that they were not held involuntarily. Tom Watson, elected U.S. senator from Georgia in 1920, went so far as to accuse the bishop of Savannah of keeping 'white slave pens' of missing girls.
London boasts the world’s oldest underground train network (opened in 1863) and Boston built the first subway in the United States in 1897, the New York City subway became the largest American system. Every day, some 4.5 million passengers take the subway in New York. With the exception of the PATH train connecting New York with New Jersey and some parts of Chicago’s elevated train system, New York’s subway is the only rapid transit system in the world that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In 1885, the poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to become a gun-runner in Ethiopia. This was the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life. By the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud had renounced his lover Paul Verlaine and poetry for a vagabond tour of Europe -- tutor, beggar, docker, factory worker, soldier, thief, and more. By the age of twenty-five, he had renounced Europe for Africa, becoming at first a coffee trader and then turning to gun-running (and possibly slave-trading) as a get-rich scheme. Thus he proved that poets could not just have crazy tendencies, crazy people could have poetic tendencies.
Golden oldie:
The largest number of fatalities ever in a production of a film occurred during the shooting of the 1931 film Viking. Twenty-seven people died, including the director and cinematographer, when a ship they were shooting from exploded in the ice off the coast of Newfoundland.
If scientific principles can be applied to spiritual questions, should other principles apply? Should logistical concepts apply to the spiritual? Or economic ideas? And can scientific--or logistical or economic--concepts be applied to other areas like reproduction or marriage?
"I was working for Ross Perot during the 1992 presidential campaign. I had three videos to test: a) a Perot biography; b) testimonials of various people praising Perot; and c) Perot himself delivering a speech. Without giving it much thought, I'd been showing the videos to various focus groups of independent voters in that order-until, at the beginning of one session, I realized to my horror that I'd failed to rewind the first two videotapes. So, I was forced to begin the focus group with the tape of Perot himself talking.
The results were stunning.
In
every previous focus group, the participants had fallen in love with
Perot by the time they'd seen all three tapes in their particular order.
No matter what the negative information I threw at them, they could not
be moved off their support. But now, when people were seeing the tapes
in the opposite order, they were immediately skeptical of Perot's
capabilities and claims, and abandoned him at the first negative
information they heard. ... I repeated this experiment several times,
reversing the order, and watched as the same phenomenon took place.
Demographically identical focus groups in the same cities had radically
different reactions -- all based on whether or not they saw Perot's
biographical video first and the third-party testimonials second (and
were therefore predisposed and conditioned to like him) before or after
the candidate spoke for himself.
The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction."-- Frank Luntz
AAAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnddddddd.........a graph on foreign vs. native American workers:
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