Wow: The guy outside my window with the mike and the booming voice wasn't just making this up. Despite playing Little League, and growing up in a very red state, I'd never heard of this pledge before.
No kidding the atheists don't like it.
I'm quite confused that on June 14, a baseball season is ending (awards ceremony) rather than beginning. Maybe Stage 2 begins in a week or two?
Should I explain why this particular replay implementation would be shatbit crazy, or will commenters save me the effort by pointing out the most glaring flaws?
(I strongly support instant replay in baseball, and any sport where there's a common sense context to deploy it. I even think it's a good idea to use all available video feeds. It's just the gratuitous layers of bureaucracy and protocol that telegraph themselves as single points of failure.)
"It's like watching sports with your best friend. If your best friend actually knew what he was talking about."
--ESPN banner ad promoting Bill Simmons as "The Sports Guy"
(Given ESPN's focus on sports, how weird is it to have a singular designation "the sports guy." By contrast would Rob Neyer be "the weather guy" or something?)
Two more along these lines: If you've heard those radio ads where a guy compares beer to darts, or to the world wide web, you know that in real life everyone around that guy would recognize him as a tool and yearn for the day he shut up.
Meanwhile, in real life the frosted hair guy who talks to the camera (across the table) on those TGIF TV ads would have a painfully obvious, just all-around awkward, homosexual crush on his table mate. ("And then you could buy something for those girls at that other table"? - totally a front.)
Why did I even bother reading this piece?
"[W]ith each passing year, more Americans view something that used to be an entitlement—paid time off—as an increasingly unaffordable or unavailable luxury."
I remember when I used to accrue vacation hours. Then they stopped doing that -- those meanies! No, wait [checks pay stub], the hours still accrue.
"Many Americans are struggling to cope with job creep—the phenomenon of work quietly grabbing more and more of our leisure time. We are forever receiving co-worker or client messages on our BlackBerrys, or responding to work e-mails on our home computers on weekends, or lugging our laptops on vacation."
...because if we don't, we'll be fired?
"In the pre-air-conditioning era, many factories closed down in August. No longer."
See now, August is slave labor month at aforementioned factories. And even worse, the assembly line workers themselves have to receive co-worker and client messages on THEIR BlackBerrys!
"A common complaint is that it's not worth going on vacation for more than two or three days because, with work piling up and hundreds of e-mails waiting to be opened, it is so maddeningly difficult to catch up after returning."
An almost as common complaint is that people have become pathologically incapable of delegating, or of covering for each other.
"[T]he proportion of Americans who said they would take a vacation over the next six months has fallen to a 30-year low of just 39 percent."
Just two out of five?! [a single tear falls down my eye]
"Jeffrey Immelt, GE's chief executive, has boasted of working 100 hours a week for more than two decades. That translates to working six days a week from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. One software engineer I wrote about at Electronic Arts, a video game company, had to work 179 out of 180 days during one stretch in 2004, usually for 13 hours a day."
They're quite typical, you see.
"Many economists view job creep and disappearing downtime as important contributors to the surge in employee productivity in recent years—a blessing for corporate America and its bottom line. But workers are paying for this, in the currency of higher blood pressure and stress levels."
Ah, "corporate America," that faceless monolith of evil. Why, I ran into Corporate America on the street the other day. He (it?) cackled with glee at my misfortune, and at the sheer injustice of all the things in life that benefit Corporate America and only Corporate America.
By which I really mean mutual funds, index funds, pension funds, and individual shareholders. But I'm sure some of them are no less evil.
"In researching my book, I was surprised to learn that the United States is the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee its workers any paid vacation at all."
This is the line that inspired the title of the post -- assuming you take it at face value rather than as a slimy rhetorical trope. You're writing a BOOK ABOUT ECONOMIC TRENDS and you're SURPRISED to learn that America's work place laws are significantly less paternal than the rest of the world? Feh.
Oh, while we're here, a lefty(?) blog rant excerpt quoted without comment:
Envy is simply not good economics. It has never led anywhere except to trouble.
I'll start things off: How about the French Revolution?
Back to Mr. Greenhouse... or not. Lines like "The presidential candidates may not be able to [...] halt globalization and the way it erodes job security for factory workers and white-collar workers alike" should be in pull-quotes so that you get a distant early warning of where these people are coming from and how clearly they're capable of thinking, much less writing.
To commemorate the news, I'm now 7 minutes and 30 seconds into this.
this morning anchor Dimitri Sotis was interviewing Sen. Byron Dorgan, who’s been demagoguing the gas price issue. I don’t know if he’s pissed because he filled up on the way into work this morning, but Sotis stepped completely out of character to fawn over Dorgan’s efforts to “do something” about high gas prices. “The government is supposed to help people,” Sotis pled. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?”
After the interview, Sotis said with exasperation of Dorgan, “Well at least he’s trying. It’s about time someone tried to do something.”
Sotis and his co-anchor then reported four straight stories of government failure, including the failure of U.S. diplomats in Pakistan to properly gage that country’s terror threat, outdated and useless computer software at the FBI, delays and cancellations in Maryland’s mass transit program that forced the state to apologize to commuters, and a story about how the Virginia Lottery has been misrepresenting its payoffs to customers.
Blows my mind how media people report on government failure after government failure after government failure, then still enthusiastically embrace the idea that the solution to every problem is more government.
--Radley Balko
While we're here: I listen to about five minutes of Rush Limbaugh every month or two. This time he was being sarcastic about Barack Obama's "clinched the nomination" speech and its references to the point at which America started to ensure jobs, health care, etc. Limbaugh claimed that LBJ must be rolling in his grave.
I see the point he was trying to make but I don't think the way to tear down Obama is to give LBJ undue credit for programs that have been spectacular failures given how much money they've cost.
(Yes, I'll readily acknowledge the strong argument that the Iraq War could also be so described.)
Going into the bottom of the 10th (11th?) inning Sunday the A's PA system played "Welcome to the Jungle."
Incoming college freshmen were not born yet when "Welcome to the Jungle" became a hit.
(They were also not yet born when Ronald Reagan left the White House. So not even Reagan babies: They're post-Reagan babies!)
(That's two more than before this past weekend.)
Saturday we went to visit friends who have a new baby. They also happened to be watching gymnastics (live from the Boston University campus!) on NBC, on HD. I wonder if I'll ever get used to seeing close-ups of athletes where you can also clearly see the person in the front row idly sucking 32 ounces of Pepsi through a straw.
Anyhow, Shawn Johnson reminds me of someone (facially) but I can't place who. Near the end of the first page of results for Google Image Search for her name also happens to be, even with Moderate Safe Search on, an image of a bare backside (yet completely unrelated to the gymnast herself).
The other name I know is Nastia. She's in her teens (I presume), she's a gymnast, and her name is Nastia. Ten years from now she'll be a 20-something named Nastia who'd been a gymnast ten years ago. She'll probably be way too rich and famous to have to resort to being a stripper, yet that's a stripper name if I ever heard one.
Despite knowing of its existence for months (years?) I'd never actually read Curt Schilling's weblog until King Kaufman pointed out how astute an observation he'd made about the NBA.
Tie game, going into the bottom of the 12th. You've just used your 2nd and 3rd best relievers. Now do you bring in:
A. This guy?
B. This guy?
If you said B, you are a true major league manager, with the loss to prove it. (Given my allegiance, obviously I was happy with this particular bullpen usage.)
Meanwhile, satellite oops...
(Certainly not Islam)
"Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul."
--Mark Morford, SF Chronicle (as requoted here)
The world would be a slightly better place without the JFK diehards, or for that matter the Diana diehards.