nemafakei

Hello all you lurkers. Just a quick note to let you know Beccy (my partner of several years) and I have agreed on a plan to get married. As is the custom, I thought I'd let the old-timers at Fed2k know.

Wolf, I'm not sure your conclusions quite hold. It may be that a large proportion of the economy was 'off the books' (there are black markets, informal economies, etc. everywhere else too, mind). When this sector grows big enough, it becomes difficult to pretend it isn't there. I would imagine many Greeks would like to live in a country that didn't have many of these problems, but we . I should also point out that there will be significant variation within the country between those who benefitted from underreporting and those who didn't (many working class people won't have such high incomes to underreport, meanwhile they will have been suffering from the food inflation much more), while the austerity is going to be financially most difficult for the people with the least in savings and for those most dependant on public services. As individuals, it's hard to do a lot about that. "And what did they do? Blamed everyone in sight who wasn't Greek." I remember listening to someone who'd come to the UK after the protests in 2010. It was fairly clear then that people mostly blamed politicians, and I suspect anti-German stuff is probably noise being generated to deflect blame. Maybe it's working, I don't know.

"So the Union must be wanting over $100 million in increases otherwise Canada post would have given in at the start." From the article, it's that Canada Post wants to cut that wage you quoted by 20%. This is a defensive strike that CP is prepared to pay - lots - to win, it looks like a deliberate attempt to break the CUPW. British Airways tried to do the a similar thing recently, and they had a pot of money to absorb losses that was bigger than the terms they were fighting over. In the end, they lost the money, terms stayed more or less the same and the CEO left. Something you've also got to bear in mind with manual industries like the post is that the top salaries for experienced postal workers aren't that much different from the starting salary. At the end of the day, you've got to make ends meet, pay for food, home, shelter, family, all on that wage. That $23 seems to be about the median wage for Canada, and remember that postal work is not only physically demanding, but you're also paying a premium for unsociable hours and for trustworthiness (I should point out here I'm arguing purely from market economics).

Andrew - most unions nowadays organise across employers in the same sector. The aim is in the medium term to improve terms across the industry. Obviously, unions are going to fight to defend terms and conditions if they're threatened, even if they're above the industry average, and naturally, in workplaces where there is a strong union there will be better terms which will be better defended so there will always be some disparity - but that is often just a matter of less well organised workplaces - like Eras', from the sounds of it - needing to catch up. Another important reason why public sector workers are especially important is they're usually the ones who are looking out for public services. Service user groups, where they exist, are often small and have few resources, and importantly, very little actual power. Politicians are up for a quick photo op when a service opens, but cutting budgets, even if it's a really bad idea, is always going to reap political rewards. Between elections, unions are pretty much the only opposition a majority government has to worry about. "I also don't like the mentality of do as little as possible. See some garbage on the floor? If it is not your job to pick it up then you can't pick it up otherwise the janitor will file a complaint (for doing his job)." "Work to rule" encompasses several things, and this is sort of one of them. Where you have good industrial relations, and sufficient staffing to manage the workload, then you don't tend to see this. The solution is normally not to get angry at the person who's sticking to their job description, but for the person who has decided that employing enough janitors is a luxury.

Why is, say, a school teacher less essential than, say, someone who makes disposable packaging for mobile phones that will be obsolete in a few years? And just who are these mythical public servants who do nothing? Other than perhaps a few politicians and senior managers, that is? Just because you work in an office doesn't mean you don't need a union. From health grounds, there's growing evidence of the various mental health problems resulting from office work, not to mention musculoskeletal disorders. And because of this persistent image of office workers who doing nothing (probably because office work is actually quite varied in product and difficult to describe), everyone's looking for ways to make you into an 'efficiency saving'. And many of the basic issues - pay, hours, holidays, sick leave, respect, etc. - are all the same.

Hm, I'm not keen on that the section on autism at Los Horcones. Not sure if it qualifies as treatment, it's really an education programme to drill into autistic children how not to behave autistically. Seems a bit creepy. The Twin Oaks one looks reasonably positive, though, and yes, even if it's not explicitly anarchist or socialist, the right sort of political awareness is clearly there in the community. As Edric points out, Communes are limited, but I'll go further and say even - or especially - if they're 'self-sufficient' they risk drawing people away from the struggles that the rest of society faces without meaningfully challenging the system as a whole. On the other hand, they're useful as explorations of what's possible in more egalitarian societies, and can, if successful, be good examples.

Pretty busy, but I like to check in regularly to lurk. I tend not to have the inclination to post so much nowadays.

Dante, Sandchigger, keep things civil. If you have nothing to add, then don't add anything.

Wilders needs something to differentiate his PVV from the VVD else his voter base is just islamophobic VVD voters. One of his headline policies is not raising the pension age, which the three major parties are in favour of. He's also got some other populist policies. The PVV allows the right block to cover more political ground without committing to much; Wilders' only realistic coalition options are VVD and CDA (with possible SGP support), so basically, he's going to need to drop popular policies and he knows it. So Wilders doesn't much want to participate in government right now, he wants to wait until his hand is stronger.

Well done! Have you considered rewriting it in javascript?

Nice packaging - plastic or cardboard? Open the box, let's see what the mouse looks like.

There and 4.15, I see what you mean, but I'm not convinced it isn't coincidental. Moreover, if they wanted to put it in there's a section around 3.30 where it could actually fit a lot better.

And to be fair, Cameron isn't suggesting actually bringing back tuberculosis. And even if he does, we can rely on the Lib Dems to make a speech in opposition and at least abstain on principle.

"Personally, I don't understand the need to have representatives with a personal link to constituencies in a body that votes only on national issues and whose decisions apply everywhere equally." Arguably, in that you can have a constituency party meeting where you tell your MP how to vote. "what I propose, is that counties are turned into one big constituency" You might want to expand it a bit. Rutland presently has only half a Tory. And his moat. And he is quite a small Tory to begin with. "Although I am a fan of PR, I think we need to keep some kind of link to the constituencies" Why not actually use the second chamber - IRV in the Commons, full PR in the Lords. With regards to extrapolating the results into a PR table bear in mind there are other factors: 1) There is a lot of tactical voting, mostly of the whoever-isn't-the-Tories kind, so the Labour (possibly) and the Lib Dem (certainly) vote is inflated. This might also happen with the Tories and UKIP. 2) Conversely, in safe seats, there's some amount of protest voting, especially for the BNP. Many people who vote for the BNP may not want them in power, they just want to annoy the party hacks in their locality. 3) Some 'safe seats' may just be seats seen as 'lost causes', whereas actually there's a huge number of people who don't vote in them because the same party always gets in - but it would be worth voting in PR. This is more likely the case in rurals where it may be harder to vote, whereas urban voters generally don't have too go far to vote. So there's a lot of 'unknowns' who likely won't be distributed in the same way as the voters. 4) Under PR, parties wouldn't just campaign in marginals and in 'easier' targets, every vote would count. So over time, you'd see some change as people in safer seats may change their mind.

I click on 'Upgrade', and I get this... Damnit.

Oh, that's a growing trend in the UK. It's cheaper and less time consuming for journalists not to have to actually leave their offices to cover stories, and it's easier to manage time and workload if you get your material in advance. PR departments know this, and know they've got a better change of coverage and probably also favourable coverage, and therefore they collude in making things easy for journalists. Moreover, if you feed them stories in advance, you are less likely to get journos turning up at the day and asking awkward questions. I'm not sure if this practice descends from or gave rise to the modern concept of war correspondence, but it's very similar. This is where a country's armed forces will generally have PR people on hand at the hotel where they've recommended all the journalists stay. They then feed them the news, and the ones they can trust to report things favourably, they will then take out to the 'front lines' in armoured vehicles, where they may be allowed to talk to serving soldiers who have received media training and appropriate briefings. If they go off-message, the higher-ups can always mention the correction on the way back. The journalists feel they're dedicated because they're actually in the country where the war is going on - never mind that they're not at the front lines when there's any actual action going on and most of the 'locals' they talk to are hotel, restaurant, and cafe staff. The journalists' employers can say their correspondent is reporting from Baghdad/Jerusalem/Islamabad/Karbul/etc., so they've got all they need to sound authentic, and the military are very happy, as they have near total control over the foreign correspondents - the only thing they have to worry about then are the local journalists.

Congratulations on an excellent use of the trope. Was the proposal timed with Fed2k in mind, or is it something that happened earlier (and you've just held off from announcing it)? Or was the proposal itself in fact on April 1st?

Mm, that's not uncommon - nor is the resistance, there are some groups doing really good work on house demolitions. As an aside, the article mentions "(The foreign ministry is headed by the far-right Avigdor Lieberman. This week, his deputy snubbed five US congressmen, including William Delahunt of Massachusetts, while Tzipi Livni, the opposition leader, warned

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2010/03/eyewitness-report-from-bolton.html Another interesting one. This suggests that the police are resorting to using arrests to find out info about the UAF. Not sure about that. The UAF isn't a secretive organisation, so it's not like they need to. On the other hand, the Police often have a hard time grasping the fact that many left groups can be pretty easily tracked if you're prepared to just read the minutes of their meetings. As you might expect, I can't really comment on impression your friends got on who was 'going after the fight' or not. UAF is, as the name suggests, a fairly broad group, and many people on a UAF demo won't be formally members or affiliates. Likewise, an EDL demonstration is going to consist of a core group of organisers, plus other groups like Combat 18, and the various organised and unorganised football groups, plus some people who've genuinely been attracted to it (the first three can't account for 2000 people without quite a few more coaches than I'm prepared the believe). Amongst UAF and EDL, there are obviously more cautious and more aggressive elements. However, that doesn't have any bearing on the responsibility of the police to do their job properly. As usual, the police seem to have been more concerned with running heavy-handed interference operations than with keeping things calm and facilitating the demonstrations.

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/03/22/edl-the-police-and-our-misleading-mainstream-media/ Here's an interesting commentary on the day, questioning the police line of an 'EDL majority'. There's also a bit of a difference between the EDL 'behaving themselves' and the UAF 'behaving themselves'. When the EDL march, they basically get a police escort. When the UAF march, they tend to get police aggression. For the UAF to 'behave themselves', i.e. not get into any clash with the police, their best bet is not to turn up. The EDL just have to not do anything so blatantly outrageous that the police with have no choice but to take them on. From what pictures I've seen, the EDL were given tonnes of space, for their numbers, and UAF were tightly packed - the police had a plan for the day, and they were going to enforce it at all costs, irrespective if the assumptions on which that plan was based bore no relation to the facts on the ground. Clearly GMP learnt nothing from the Met's dire work at the G20 last year - or the subsequent critical police reports on it.

That looks very dodgy. What the Mail doesn't tell you is that Bennett and the UAF leadership generally have been quite dogmatic about being nonconfrontational, sometimes to the point of trying to lead protests away from the BNP/EDL, etc. In fact, it looks like a deliberate act of provocation. The police tactic described is supposed to be used on really violent types in a situation in which they're likely to offend. It is an organised intervention on the orders of an officer of rank with advice that the individual has been positively identified as an imminent threat. The though of Weyman Bennett or Martin Smith (also mentioned in the article) punching someone is hilarious - Smith is sort of like the John Major of the Socialist Worker's Party.

"* haha I can say dash on fed2k now - yay o/" Hm. Looks like it's searching by word not string. I hope this new forum software compensates with some more advanced 'spellchecking' tools. Edit: Hm... I think I prefer to do the conjugations myself.