Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Will someone PLEASE put Safire out of his misery??? Is there any major pundit out there who has been more consistently wrong, more obviously wrong, more stubbornly wrong, about Iraq than Bill Safire???? Once again, he is attempting to INSIST that's there's PROOF of a connection between Saddam and al-Queda. I've always thought that there probably were some low-level contacts, on the order of exploring common interests, and keeping an eye on each other. One day we may know more details of contacts like that (such as what might have, but probably did not, occur with that ol' Safire favorite, "Atta in Prague with the Candlestick"). But Bill's over the top. In a nutshell, he's saying that A) Ansar al-Islam is associated with al-Queda; and B) Saddam supported Ansar al-Islam in their fight against the Kurdish pesh merga; therefore, C) Saddam and Osama are the same. Both A and B are true. Ansar is almost certainly close to al-Queda in their vision of jihad. Saddam almost certainly was giving them some assistance. C, however, is just ridiculous -- Baghdad has been interfering in Kurdish politics for several hundred years. Their goal has almost always been to maintain instability in the region, thus keeping an independent Kurdish political entity from happening, or to use the Kurds as a player in political and military machinations against Iran. Bill should read a book on the region every now and again. If that proves too difficult, maybe someone could send himone with a few key sentences underlined, or something. 10:21:32 AM    Comment []  trackback []

These are important stories...according to CNN The CNN website features Kerry's wins yesterday as the main story. No surprise, no quibble.But on the top right side of the page, under the title "Other Top Stories", we get this compiliation: "Car Bomb kills 45 would-be Iraq soldiers" "Bush to unveil new push to combat proliferation of WMD" "FBI releases pizza bomb note" "Woman marries dead boyfriend" "Swimmer drives for help with shark attached to leg" "Stranded sea lion has bullet in head"  "Reba missing from Reba set" " SI.com: Josh is top dog at Westminster" Now, take a second or two and count the number of serious, real, "top stories" here. (Checking watch...ok, times up). Did you come up with two, or three? Out of a total of eight. I expect some people will consider the "pizza bomb note" a major story. It IS news, but it's just a local crime story to me, with a high bizarre factor. Do these people take us for fools???? Can't we have a series on the 2005 budget? Isn't there, like, legislation to cover? Gay marriage? Attorneys general sub poena'ing private medical records and targeting war protestors? Heads of the military services testifying before Congress on the failure of the Bushies to budget ANY money for Iraq/Afghan funding for the whole first quarter of the next fiscal year? Legislators taking up jobs with industries they just pushed legislature for? Vice Presidents humping sheikhs' legs? Call me a fool, but I remember when Turner owned this house, and you could watch it to see people read the news. 8:03:55 AM    Comment []  trackback []

Productivity? Here's a guess There seems to be a lot of speculation, guessing and consternation over what the last year's robust growth in productivity means -- why it's occurring, what are its long term implications, etc. Brad Delong has addressed this many times, and speaks to the issue far more intelligently than I ever could; hell, he's an actual economist (which is why I'd guessed the current administration probably despises him). But not actually knowing anything will not stop me from my take... I work in a small group (approx. 25) that's a waystation in a far-flung global enterprise; our bailiwick here is writing financial software. We have programmers (such as yours truly), analysts, customer service, admin, your basic office crew). Happily, most of us are liberals, so lunches don't turn into food fights. But I digress. Of the 25, only about 5 of us are hourly employees, who never, ever, ever work more than 40 hours. If a "40.02" shows up on their time sheets, a call is made to our manager from World Headquarters demanding an explanation. The rest of us, the "exempt", are expected to work as long as it takes to keep up with the work load. If it only takes 30 hours a week, well, luck you, you only work 30 hours a week, and get paid for 30 hours. If deadlines loom and the pressure is on, you work 50, 60, 70...and get paid for 40. We are, as you might expect, grateful little puppies for this circumstance.   Now, of course, I have no statistics or high-falootin' analysis here, but it seems to me that the rate of productivity for our group, as measured by the government people who measure such things, would be based on our total output divided by a maximum of 40. Even if we worked 80 hours each and doubled the actual output. I suspect this happens a lot, and the incidence is increasing due to several factors. Corporations that downsized probably did so beyond the point where work load per employee remained constant with pre-downsizing staffing. Offshoring and layoffs may disproportionately affect the hourly employee. Businesses may be re-classifying more and more workers as exempt (is it no coincidence that the Bushies want to make it even easier to exempt employees from time-and-a-half?). Just speculatin'. (If this post looks funky, it's because I'm still trying to figure out how to use the mail-to-weblog feature properly. Yes, I'm doing it from work. Please don't tell!) 6:11:55 AM    Comment []  trackback []

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