Alert to non-unionized workers out there, be wary of joining a union during contract negotiations. Recent news has shown a plethora of contract negotiations where new members are stuck getting the short end of the stick. Union officials will throw you under bus as soon as negotiations get tough, and why not? Workers normally will either be forced to join a union and pay dues, so why should union officials fight for your benefit?
In contract negotiations between UAW and GM to stave off bankruptcy created a two-tiered pay system. New hires will receive $14.50 per hour to work in automaker plants, about half of what tenured autoworkers and union members receive. These wages are being implemented in the New York parts plant that GM invested $100 million. Solidarity is not present from these negotiations. UAW could have suggested a merit-wage system. In a merit-wage system senior members and workers would still have advantage because they have more experience and should be more efficient and productive than new hires. However, unions normally do not think logically and have no need to please a class of workers who will be forced to join the union.
In professional sports, the lack of concern for new members is astonishingly blatant. In NFL collective bargaining negotiations, one of the only concessions made by the NFL Players Association is to put caps on the salaries of rookies entering the league. The savings from capping rookie salaries would be redistributed to veteran players. Clearly, the union is not looking out for all members or interested in bargaining for equality of all members.
After years of fighting and failed attempts to force Los Angeles County to require condom-usage on adult film sets, AIDS activists were finally successfully in getting the county to vote in their favor, thanks in large part to a very public incident this year where a male porn star was diagnosed with HIV. As a result of the council’s vote, some in the porn industry worried that their continued non-usage of condoms on set could result in the city denying requests for permits to film, but a new letter from the LA City Attorney suggests that will not be the case.
As I have written about before, the major push for mandating condoms on porn film sets has come from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which is an LA-based organization dedicated to reducing the infection rate and providing medicine, care, and education throughout the world regarding HIV and AIDS.
While the work that the AIDS Healthcare Foundation does is laudable and most people can agree that porn actors would be wise to demand condoms in a profession where they are often exposed to blood-borne pathogens, mandates aren’t the way to go. First of all, mandates just don’t work. Secondly, and more importantly, mandates are a violation of both the freedom of expression and a violation of the right for individual actors and producers to make their own decisions about their health and careers.
DOJ gets court permission to attack botnet: “The U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation have obtained a temporary restraining order allowing them to disrupt a computer virus that created an international botnet controlling more than 2.3 million computers as of early 2010, the DOJ announced Wednesday.”
Internet ad revenue hits high in ‘10: “U.S. Internet advertising revenue jumped 15 percent to $26 billion in 2010, setting a record high and proving that more companies are opening up their coffers to reach people online.”
Only a carrier could trumpet $500 per gigabyte as a price cut: “AT&T announced today that it was cutting the price of data access for prepaid customers — those who don’t sign contracts but instead pay as they go — to $5 for 10MB of data access on select smartphones, a major cut from the previous $5 for 1MB. But press reports haven’t done their math: The costs are 50 times what so-called postpaid customers — those who sign a contract and get a bill each month — are charged. An AT&T GoPhone customer pays $500 per gigabyte of data usage, whereas a postpaid Android or iPhone user pays $10 per gigabyte.”
Tax Freedom Day is the first day in the calendar year when the nation has paid enough to fund its annual debt burden. Everything you’ve earned up to this point goes directly to the government. A free sandwich is as good a way as any to celebrate finally arriving at the point in the year when you can spend what you earn on things you actually care about.
Mother Jones created a great visual of the national tax burden, represented in beers and burritos:
And here’s the explanation, also from Mother Jones:
The 2010 tax bill for a typical American family earning $50,000 comes out to about 1,752 Chipotle burritos. From that, the feds spent about 2,811 bottles of Bud Light on defense, 244 packs of cigarettes on Medicare, and 13 Red Bulls on energy spending. Unfortunately, it does not show how many decaf soy lattes went to NPR.
In further proof that communists never won the culture war in China, they merely shut down culture altogether, the Chinese government decided this week to enforce an outright ban on the popular “time travel” genre of Chinese films.
The reason? Chinese officials claim that using history as a basis for fiction “disrespects history.”
Forget for a moment the implications of a government whose reins on free speech are so tight that a top-down committee can ban an entire popular film genre.
What makes this story interesting is the fact that Chinese filmmakers — and the film-consuming Chinese public — are so interested in finding a connection to another time and place.
China has banned Google and Facebook and Twitter. Traveling to another time is the only chance many Chinese have of exploring at all.
The Chinese government is not banning time travel because it wants to protect history. It is banning time travel because letting anyone besides the Chinese government tell any story threatens the Communists’ death grip on Chinese culture.
Communists never won the culture war in China; they merely silenced the opposition. Even the memory of opposition is a threat to the Communists’ hold on power; banning time travel is the Chinese government’s attempt to wipe out any memory of the time when China was free.
Indeed. Free society relies on discourse and the arts to bolster transparency and individual expression. People in China have no access to Google, Twitter, or Facebook, and the yuan only goes so far in travels abroad.
Time travel is a popular film genre because it is a last bastion of hope for communism-quashed imaginations. Free governance thrives on free speech; count your blessings that we live in a society where individuals can still do so much to protect the freedom we have.
President Obama today stressed in his speech that when it comes to spending, it is important to comb the budget with a “scalpel but not a machete.” But when it comes to tax hikes — or as the president calls it, reducing “tax expenditures” — the Obama administration is charging at small businesses and venture capital with a Texas-size chainsaw.
In his speech, the president was short on specifics, but referenced his 2012 budget for proposals to remove “tax expenditures.” But in addition to raising tax rates, the budget contains direct attacks on the structure of partnerships that are used by innovative businesses — from small firms to venture capital and private equity groups — that make an outsized contribution to economic growth and job creation.
And recent testimony by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner hints at take hikes that would also eviscerate subchapter S corporations (S-corps) relied on by small business entrepreneurs. If the tax hikes on S-corps are similar to the ones proposed last year by the then-Democratic controlled House Ways and Means Committee, they would hit small businesses engaged in such services such as “management, health, law … engineering, architecture, accounting, actuarial science, and consulting,” according to an analysis from the global law firm Ropes & Gray.
In unveiling his deficit reduction plan, Obama stated that his spending cuts “will not sacrifice the core investments we need to grow and create jobs” Yet his tax hikes on entrepreneurs and innovators would do just that and put in jeopardy America’s chance to, in the president’s famous phrase, “win the future.”
Re: “EPA’s days as ‘rogue’ agency are numbered” & “Democrats will yield on everything but abortion,” April 11
Congressional Democrats’ approach to their pet projects demonstrates that their spending policies are not about economics. They are about power.
The evidence is their different reactions to proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Agency. The former is being defended tooth and nail because of its consistent support for Democratic candidates. The latter is being reined in because it is unpopular with the electorate.
As members of Congress on both sides of the aisle often are, Democrats are being tempted by power at the expense of ideology. The policy proposals that have emerged from the latest budget debate are merely a means to that Machiavellian end.
Yesterday, I filed a comment letter with the Surface Transportation Board (STB) on behalf of CEI regarding the board’s request for comments prior to a scheduled June 22 hearing on competition in the railroad industry. Based on the notice filed in the Federal Register, the debate will largely center on two issues some shippers have been complaining about for years: “captive shipper” pricing and a lack of “open access.”
“Captive shippers” are those who lack an economical transport alternative to their present single rail line. Think a coal mine or a coal-fired power plant or a chemical plant. Generally these segments — known as bottlenecks — are only used by a handful of customers. This comparatively low demand is why another railroad hasn’t built its own infrastructure to compete with the monopolist.
Railroads generally charge these captive shippers significantly more — and why shouldn’t they? Do customers deserve to be treated equally even when serving some presents a much greater risk to the railroad? I would argue no, but some of these shippers wish to use regulation to force railroads to furnish rates that they find adequate.
Sometimes people wonder why I favor abolishing the TSA outright and putting airlines in charge of their own security. One reason is incentives. If airlines don’t keep people safe, they go out of business. That’s a powerful incentive to have high standards.
The TSA’s incentives aren’t geared towards performance — and it shows. Instead, its incentives are geared toward growing its budget and expanding its mission.
That’s the primary intellectual argument. But some reasons for getting rid of the TSA are more visceral. This video of a TSA agent groping a 6-year-old girl shows one of them.
US Police increasingly peeping at email, instant messages: “Law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL, but few detailed statistics are available, according to a privacy researcher.”
Cisco Gives Up On Flip: “The biggest change is for the Flip digital video camera business which is being closed down. Cisco acquired Flip as part of its acquisition of Pure Digital Technology in March of 2009 for $590 million.”
Only a carrier could trumpet $500 per gigabyte as a price cut: “AT&T announced today that it was cutting the price of data access for prepaid customers — those who don’t sign contracts but instead pay as they go — to $5 for 10MB of data access on select smartphones, a major cut from the previous $5 for 1MB. But press reports haven’t done their math: The costs are 50 times what so-called postpaid customers — those who sign a contract and get a bill each month — are charged. An AT&T GoPhone customer pays $500 per gigabyte of data usage, whereas a postpaid Android or iPhone user pays $10 per gigabyte.”
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