Year: 2017

Not The Onion

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Real headline from the Los Angeles Times:

Nevada Has a Drug Problem: Shops Are Running out of Marijuana

Nevada is running out of pot, and the Department of Taxation is freaking out, because they have been making serious bank from this new industry.

Basically, it’s an artifact of lobbying from (you guessed it) liquor distributors, who were opposed to competition for chemically induced stupid:

Nevada officials have declared a state of emergency over marijuana: There’s not enough of it.

Since recreational pot became legal two weeks ago, retail dispensaries have struggled to keep their shelves stocked and say they will soon run out if nothing is done to fix a broken supply chain.

“We didn’t know the demand would be this intense,” Al Fasano, cofounder of Las Vegas ReLeaf, said Tuesday. “All of a sudden you have like a thousand people at the door.…We have to tell people we’re limited in our products.”

In declaring a state of emergency late last week, the state Department of Taxation warned that “this nascent industry could grind to a halt.”

As bad as that would be for marijuana consumers and the pot shops, the state has another concern: tax revenue. A 10% tax on sales of recreational pot — along with a 15% tax on growers — is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for schools and the state’s general fund reserves.

………

In the run-up to last year’s state referendum over legalization — which was overwhelmingly approved by voters, allowing people aged 21 and over to buy or possess up to an ounce of marijuana — the state’s powerful alcohol lobby worried that legalized weed would cut into liquor store sales.

So in a concession to the the alcohol industry, the ballot measure stipulated that for the first 18 months of pot sales only wholesale alcohol distributors would be allowed to transport marijuana from cultivation facilities to the dispensaries.

When legalization took effect July 1, nearly 50 dispensaries — all of them already in the medical marijuana business — had been licensed to sell recreational pot. But no alcohol distributors had been approved to transport it.

The state Department of Taxation, which regulates legal marijuana, said it had received about half a dozen applications from alcohol distributors but that none had so far met the state licensing requirements, which include background checks and security protocols.

As a result, the dispensaries have had to rely on marijuana already in stock.

Dispensaries and state officials had anticipated the problem, and in late June the Department of Taxation attempted to loosen the licensing rules to allow dispensaries to transport their own marijuana.

But a District Court judge blocked the request, arguing that the state needed to go through the regulatory process to determine how many distributors were needed. The state appealed the decision to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Needless to say the juxtaposition of legislative cowardice and regulatory and judicial missteps has created a complete clusterf%$#, which has the state of Nevada scrambling to secure a reliable supply of weed.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be asking, “What the f%$# were they smoking when they came up with this?” but in this case, I think that we actually know what they were smoking.

Deep Thought

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I’m trying to figure out a way to comment on the rapidly accumulating major f%$# ups by Donald Trump and his Evil Minions™.

I’m think that every time I refer to a Trump-related scandal, I should append the phrase, “and zombies,” to the end.

So, it would be, “Russiagate, and zombies,” and “Jared Kushner’s business dealings, and zombies,” or, “Anything involving Betsy Devos, and Zombies.”

I would appreciate comments from my reader(s) about this.

Also, I would be much obliged for any suggestions for alternate phrases.

Dried Out School Marm Cancels Recess

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By “School Marm”, I mean Mitch McConnell, and by “recess”, I mean that he is delaying the Senate recess in an attempt to pass some variant of TrumpCare.

I understand where he is coming from, Republican politicians are getting savaged at their public meetings by their constituents, and one of the things that goes on when the Congress is on recess is meetings with the public.

McConnell is clearly trying to minimize opportunities for members of his caucus to interact with the public before they vote on the bill, because being screamed at by the mother of a profoundly disabled child who would lose coverage tends to make politicians skittish.

If this weren’t literally a matter of life and death, I would be amused at the Republican discomfort at their current situation.

While We Are on the Subject of, Treason, Bribery, or Other High Crimes and Misdemeanors ………

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It does appear that Donald Trump (père, not fils) may have been using his position as President in an attempt to secure a bailout for a disastrous real estate deal made by Jared Kushner.

Specifically, Trump’s immediately taking the side of the House of Saud in their dispute with Qatar on Twitter may very well have been retaliation for their turning down a deal with his son-in-law:

Not long before a major crisis ripped through the Middle East, pitting the United States and a bloc of Gulf countries against Qatar, Jared Kushner’s real estate company had unsuccessfully sought a critical half-billion-dollar investment from one of the richest and most influential men in the tiny nation, according to three well-placed sources with knowledge of the near transaction.

Kushner is a senior adviser to President Trump, and also his son-in-law, and also the scion of a New York real estate empire that faces an extreme risk from an investment made by Kushner in the building at 666 Fifth Avenue, where the family is now severely underwater.

Qatar is facing an ongoing blockade led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and joined by Egypt and Bahrain, which President Trump has taken credit for sparking. Kushner, meanwhile, has reportedly played a key behind-the-scenes role in hardening the U.S. posture toward the embattled nation.

That hard line comes in the wake of the previously unreported half-billion-dollar deal that was never consummated. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue, the sources said.

Trump himself has unsuccessfully sought financing in recent years from the Qataris, but it is difficult to overstate just how important the investment at 666 Fifth Avenue is for Kushner, his company, and his family’s legacy in real estate. Without some outside intervention or unforeseen turnaround in the market, the investment could become an embarrassing half-billion-dollar loss. It’s unclear precisely how much peril such a loss would put Jared’s or his family’s finances in, given the opacity of their private holdings.

HBJ, a former prime minister of Qatar who ran the country’s $250 billion sovereign wealth fund, is a billionaire and one of the world’s richest men. He owns a yacht worth $300 million called Al Mirqab, the same name he gave to the private investment firm that Kushner pitched. The former emir of Qatar summed up HBJ’s power with a quip: “I may run this country, but he owns it.”

HBJ ultimately agreed to invest at least $500 million through Al Mirqab, on the condition that Kushner Companies could raise the rest of a multibillion refinancing elsewhere. The negotiations continued long after the election, carried out as recently as this spring by Charles Kushner. “HBJ basically told them, we’re good for 500, subject to a lot of things, but mainly subject to you being able to raise the rest,” said one source in the region with knowledge of the deal. The talks were confirmed by two additional sources with knowledge of the talks. One of those sources claimed that the potential deal was not contingent on the rest of the money being raised and that the HBJ investment was on hold as the overall structure of the financing was reconsidered. None of the sources would agree to talk on the record about a private financial transaction that has until now remained a secret.

………

The revelation of the half-billion-dollar deal raises thorny and unprecedented ethical questions. If the deal is not entirely dead, that means Jared Kushner is on the one hand pushing to use the power of American diplomacy to pummel a small nation, while on the other his firm is hoping to extract an extraordinary amount of capital from there for a failing investment. If, however, the deal is entirely dead, the pummeling may be seen as intimidating to other investors on the end of a Kushner Companies pitch.

………

On June 6, President Trump took sides, taking credit for the moves by the Gulf nations.

…extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017


So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017


During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017


On June 9, after Saudi Arabia and the UAE had begun to blockade Qatar, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to calm nerves, calling for mediation and an immediate end to the blockade.

Within hours, Trump, at a White House ceremony, contradicted Tillerson, slamming Qatar again and claiming it had “historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”

Trump’s White House remarks, Tillerson came to believe, had been written by UAE Ambassador Yousef Al-Otaiba and delivered to Trump by Jared Kushner.

(emphasis mine)

This is Teapot Dome level crap.

It’s easy to understand, and the violation of the law is clear.

What’s more from a power politics perspective, if this becomes a major political issue, it would scare off any potential investors for 666 5th Avenue, which would likely cripple the Kushner Company empire when the balloon payment comes due.

Quoting Billy Ray Valentine from the movie Trading Places, “The best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”

OK, This is Now Officially a Legitimate Sh%$ Storm

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TheNew York Post states the obvious.*

OK, so now we know that in June of last year, Donald Trump, Jr., aka “Fredo”, was setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer at the request of a publicist for a Russian to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Yes, this is profoundly weird and f%$#ed up)

This is now a big deal, not because this was necessarily a crime, I find the claims of a violation of Section 30121 of Title 52 to be a stretch in the world of Citizens United, but because we now have evidence of a conspiracy and a coverup.

It was a conspiracy to obstruct justice that took down Richard Nixon, after all.

I don’t think that this is the most impeachable thing that Trump has done (that will be a later post), but this has a potential to hamstring the Trump administration, particularly if the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2018.

The underlying crime here is still a violation of campaign finance law, not espionage, not treason† or some similar heinous crimes.

From a political perspective, I do not think that this is a good thing for the Democratic Party.

This provides yet another opportunity for the Dems to miss the opportunity to reform, and ditch the incompetent and clueless deadwood that populate the party’s professional consultant class.

As opposed to a movement toward some sort of ideological coherence, the national Democratic Party will remain in, “A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin,” mode, which I do not believe will resonate with voters.

If hostility toward Russia were a political winner nationwide, Hillary Clinton would be President now.

My guess is that right now, Republicans will slow walk any investigation, saying that they need to wait for Special Prosecutor Muller’s report.

I expect months of overwrought press coverage over this, because this is a classic example of catnip for reporters.

*I cannot f%$#ing believe that I am f%$#ing citing the f%$#ing New York f%$#ing Post.
†It was never treason. Treason is specifically defined in the US Constitution because of at least a millennia of abuse in Europe, and this does not meet that very specific definition.‡
‡That being said, Nixon’s sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968, and Reagan and Poppy Bush’s deal with Iran to keep the hostages held in Iran in 1980 might meet the statutory requirements of Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution.

France is About to Get What it Voted For

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I admit that the French voters were caught between the Scylla and Charbdris in the second round of voting for President. 

While Emmanuel Macron was in a number of ways a better choice than Marine Le Pen, but both the self-absorbed banker and the polished bigot were a losing proposition for the French people.

Now they have Macron, and they know that in addition to having the values of a lifelong banker, he has the ego of one as well.

First, is is attempting to make Frances nearly dictatorial Presidency even more overbearing by aggressively issuing and changing regulation by decree.

In particular, he is fixated on gutting worker protections in France, because ……… Capitalism.

Second, Macron, someone for whom distancing France from the EU is unthinkable, is looking to shower tax cuts on bankers and the finance industry, because as a banker, he believes that whatever is good for the bankers is good for the country:

The French Prime Minister on Friday laid out a raft of measures aimed at boosting Paris’s attractiveness to high finance in order to cash in on Britain’s exit from the European Union, including cutting income tax for high earning bankers and opening international schools.

France continues to make eyes at London’s bankers and on Friday the Prime Minister Edouard Philippe laid out a raft of measures to attract financiers who may have to leave London when the UK leaves the EU.

Among them are scrapping a plan to widen a current 0.3 percent tax on financial transactions, eliminating the top income tax bracket for top earning bankers (those picking up over €150,000 a year), and keeping bonuses out of the calculation of severance pay for “risk-takers” such as stockbrokers in order to make redundancies less expensive.

Those measures might have been unthinkable in France under the previous government of former President François Hollande, who famously declared the world of finance was his “enemy”, but given the fight for the scraps from the Brexit fallout, France under former banker Emmanuel Macron seems prepared to do whatever it takes to fight off the competition.

This really isn’t about competing with Frankfurt or Brussels, they simply lack the living infrastructure to appeal to the banksters, the bankers who would want to move there already live in these (dull) cities or (even duller) Switzerland.

Places like Madrid and Rome are simply too unstable politically and socially to compete, given the secessionist movements (Spain) and a potential Greek style economic collapse (Italy).

I suppose that Amsterdam might be a possibility, but it’s rather eclectic nature (see their red light district, defacto legalization of pot, etc.) might require a significant change in the governance and culture of that city.

The real reason that he is making much of a competition for bankers. even though it’s pretty clear that they contribute to the overall well-being of society in the same manner that tapeworms contribute to the overall well-being of a dog, is because he wants to make nice with People Like Him.

It’s bankster tribalism, and the French people will suffer for it.

Thankfully, his latter effort might be blunted by EU budget rules, as it would open a gaping hole in the French budget, and the Germans won’t tolerate that, both because they fetishized balanced budgets, and because want the to draw as as much of the finance industry to Germany as possible.

Now We Know Why the Republicans Hate the CFPB

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has just issued a rule for banks that prohibits them from using arbitration agreements to ban class action suits:

In roughly 240 days from now, banks and other financial companies will no longer be allowed to prohibit customers from banding together in class-action lawsuits through the use of binding arbitration clauses, as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today released a long-awaited finalized rule on arbitration.

The 775-page rule [PDF] doesn’t ban the use of forced arbitration clauses outright, but it dictates when financial institutions, lenders, and others can use the provisions and creates specific language to be included in consumer contracts. 

………

The most troubling aspect of arbitration clauses is the fact they almost universally contain bans on class actions. This means that if several customers are all wronged by a bank in the same way, they must each go through the arbitration process individually.

To make matters worse, arbitration rulings are final, even when the arbitrator made an error that would have changed the outcome. In some instances, the arbitrator doesn’t even give a reason for their decision — just a simple ruling in favor of one party.

………

Instead, affected companies can still use arbitration rules in their contracts with individual customers, but they can not use these clauses to stop consumers from being part of a group action.
The rule includes specific language that companies must use if they include an arbitration clause in a new contract.

The rule, which will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register and become enforceable after 241 days, does not apply to all consumer contracts. For instance, the CFPB notes that existing accounts are not subject to the arbitration ban.

………

In addition to prohibiting certain uses of forced arbitration, the CFPB’s rule aims to make the arbitration process more transparent.

Because companies claim that arbitration actually benefits consumers, these businesses will be required to provide information to the CFPB regarding the number of arbitration claims that are filed against it and details on the awards provided to consumers who arbitrate.

The information such as initial claims, counterclaims, answers to claims, and awards issued in arbitration must be submitted to the CFPB with customer information redacted. The Bureau intends to publish these redacted materials on its website beginning in July 2019.

By gathering this data the CFPB says it will be enabled to better understand and monitor arbitration, including whether the process itself is fair.

Of course, this is an anathema to Republicans:  They want to ensure that there is no accountability of big business ever, because they should be ordinary folks’ lord and master.

It’s a toxic mix of neo-feudalism, Objectivism, and class bigotry that drives Republicans, and it ain’t pretty.

Here is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s press release.

Linkage

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John Oliver on Sinclair Group and media consolidation in the local news sphere:

Not Enough Bullets

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Hedge fund workers in London, England, have been given a button on their desk to order Champagne:

Soho office workers will be able to order a glass of champagne for their desks at the touch of a button in a new £100 million “five-star” development.

The planned “at desk” champagne buttons will allow the hedge fund workers expected to be its occupants to order a celebratory drink after a “good day at the office”.

The buttons were inspired by one of Kylie Minogue and Tamara Ecclestone’s favourite restaurants, nearby Bob Bob Ricard, where every table has a “press for champagne” button.

Workers will be able to order cocktails or caviar, as well as bubbly, from the ground floor Sticks’n’Sushi restaurant. They will delivered to the relevant office floor by dumb waiterstyle lifts running through the building.

On the bright side, they can’t do any worse than they did sober.

Still, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Also, this is not The Onion.

Baltimore Just Got Smaller

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It’s alt-weekly, The Baltimore City Paper, will be closed down by the end of the year:

The Baltimore Sun Media Group plans to close City Paper later this year. No official end date has been announced for the alt-weekly, now in its 40th year.

“Like many alternative weeklies across the country, declining ad revenue at City Paper continues to be a challenge,” BSMG’s director of marketing, Renee Mutchnik, said in a statement. “It became clear to us this past fall that we would cease publishing City Paper sometime in 2017. Details about the closing date are still being discussed. This is a difficult decision and we are mindful of how it affects our employees, the readers and advertisers.”

Editorial staffers found out about the news in June during a meeting with senior vice president Tim Thomas, who cited declining ad revenues and future projections for those numbers as reasons for the closure.

City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg offered the following: “This is Brandon Soderberg, City Paper editor reporting live from the deck of the Titanic. Yes, we’re being closed by BSMG/Tronc/and so on. We were told this news last month and there isn’t a clear date but what we’ve been told is no later than the end of the year. We were trying to hold off announcing it because, well, it’s very sad, but also because I’m not sure about how this is all going to play out and I’m half-convinced this won’t be the end of the paper and someone will swoop in and buy us.”

The Sun bought the paper from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the paper for more than two dozen years, in early 2014. In an announcement of the purchase, BSMG’s then-publisher, president, and CEO Tim Ryan praised City Paper’s independent streak. 

(emphasis mine)

That last bit, about The Sun is the most important bit: The fate of the City Paper was sealed when The Sun bought it.

As A. J. Liebling noted in his seminal book The Press, the only way to make money by buying a newspaper is to be a competitor in the market, and the profit comes from shutting it down, which allows the survivor to increase its own advertising revenue.

Even if only 10% of the ads in The City Paper go to The Sun, they will get a non trivial amount of revenue from this.

I think that Baltimore is too large and too dynamic not to have an alt-weekly.

I’m considering starting a crowd funding effort to buy them from the Tribune Company.

Any advice/aid would be appreciated.

For the Love of God, Please Make it Stop!!!!!

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Gaahhhhhh!

There I am, cruising down the information superhighway, and then this headline popped up in front of me, and I found myself in the ditch:

Hillary Clinton Looks for Her Role in Midterms.

You lost a Presidential election to an inverted traffic cone, and were it not for numerous self inflicted wounds, you would be in the White House now, bombing Syria and Iran and engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with Russia..

Certainly, you, and your campaign’s, foibles were not the only reason that you lost, but as close as it was, it’s clear that if there had been a meaningful attempt to address these problems, you would have won.

And now, you are trying to buy your way back to the cool kids table with your “Onward Together” PAC.

Please make it stop!!!!!!

Once again I feel compelled to murder the genius of Dr. Seuss for political commentary. (After the break)

“Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don’t care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Rodham Clinton
I don’t care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion’s tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Don’t you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Hillary C.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don’t care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Rodham Clinton!
I don’t care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT.”

OK, I Did Not Expect This

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In 2001, Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) following 9/11.

She found it over-broad, and has been trying to repeal it ever since.

History has proved her right, as it has authorized dozens of military actions, the majority having nothing to do with the original attack, since then.

Lee has been trying to roll it back ever since, and the House Approriations Committee has finally voted to add repeal of the AUMF it its latest appropriation bill:

In September 2001, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) was the only member of Congress to object to an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a resolution in response to the terrorist attacks that paved the way for the war in Afghanistan.

In the 16 years since, the resolution has been used by President George W. Bush, President Obama and now President Trump as justification for more than 35 military actions in nearly 20 countries around the world — which means those presidents have not gone back to Congress for new permission to send troops into harm’s way.

On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee opened the door to ending that 2001 authorization when it added Lee’s amendment to a Defense Department measure. Congress would have 240 days to debate a new authorization. At the end of that time the 2001 authorization would be repealed.

Lee has lobbied hard just to get to this first step, which was approved by a voice vote in the Republican led committee.

“I’ve been working on this for years and years and years. I’m just really pleased that Republicans and Democrats today really understood what I’ve been saying and I’ve been explaining for the last 16 years, and that is, this resolution is a blank check for perpetual war,” Lee said.

I don’t expect this to make it through the House, and if it did I would not expect it to make it through the Senate,  and I would expect a veto threat from the White House, so I don’t expect this to make it into law, but it is a first step.

Boaty McBoatface Lives

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I still think that that the whole boat should have been so named, but I am still heartened by the maiden voyage of the remotely operated submersible:

A yellow submarine dubbed Boaty McBoatface has obtained “unprecedented data” from its first voyage exploring one of the deepest and coldest ocean regions on Earth, scientists have said.

The robotic submersible was given the name originally chosen for a new polar research ship by irreverent contestants in a public competition. Embarrassed officials decided to ignore the popular vote and instead named the vessel the RRS Sir David Attenborough in honour of the veteran broadcaster. A storm of protest led to a compromise that allowed the name to live on.

The submarine plunged to depths as far as 4,000 metres to obtain information about temperature, water flow speed and turbulence from Orkney Passage, a region of the Southern Ocean about 500 miles from the Antarctic Peninsula.

 Huzza!

Reality 1 : Republican Dogma: 0

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In Illinois, with significant Republican support, the state legislature has overridden the Governor’s veto of the latest budget, which increases taxes:


After more than two years of political sparring, missed payments to creditors and plunging credit ratings, Illinois did on Thursday what most states do every year. It finished a budget.

Yet as some lawmakers and state officials cheered an end to the longest state budget impasse in the nation’s modern history, at least one prominent and unyielding critic remained. Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who has clashed with the Democratic-held Legislature since the moment he took office, had vetoed the spending plan, which includes a tax increase.

The governor doubled down on his disgust even as at least 10 members of his own party joined Democrats to override his veto, ending the standoff.

“This is a two-by-four smacked across the foreheads of the people of Illinois,” he said this week, imploring fellow Republicans to stand by him. “This tax hike will solve none of our problems and in fact, long run, it’ll just make our problems worse.”

The narrow veto override in the state House, with exactly the 71 votes that were needed, ended a stalemate that had gone on so long that Illinois had fallen $15 billion behind on bills and been warned that its credit rating might fall to junk status, worse than any other state.

Rauner has been demanding a property tax freeze, term limits, worker’s comp reductions, restrictions on lawsuits, and a wide range of measures to cripple unions.

This happened in Kansas too.

Republicans have been selecting for insanity level extremism for decades, and now it appear that they have achieved it.

Luckily for the rest of us, it appears that not everyone in the GOP is along with for the ride.

Yes

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The Guardian asks, “Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?“

Why yes, yes it is.

With reasonable regulation and antitrust enforcement, parasites like Elsevier have plundered publicly funded knowledge.

The end of this business model has been predicted for years, but with great profits comes the resources to engage aggressive rent seeking, which mitigates against this.

I don’t think that we will see any change in this until the government mandates another model for research that it funds.

Meanwhile in Oregon*………

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Oregon has passed passed “Fair Work Week” Legislation, which requires a week’s notice of employee schedules and a 10 break between shifts:

Oregon is set to become the first U.S. state requiring certain businesses to furnish workers with a week’s notice of their job schedules and a minimum of 10 hours rest between daily shifts under a bill that won final legislative approval on Thursday.

The bill, dubbed the “fair work week” act by supporters, is aimed at giving greater predictability to low-wage employees whose hours tend vary widely from day to day or week to week. Democratic Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign the bill into law.

The measure would go into effect next year and apply to Oregon workers on the payrolls of retail, food service and hospitality companies with at least 500 employees worldwide.

Under the bill, those companies must provide employees in Oregon, starting on July 18, with written estimates of their work schedules seven days in advance, with the required scheduling notice increased to two weeks beginning in July 2020.

Workers also would be entitled to a break of at least 10 hours between work shifts from one day to the next, and to receive extra pay if they agreed to a shorter rest interval – typically between closing hours at night and opening hours the next morning.

Moreover, the bill protects employees from workplace retaliation for merely expressing a scheduling preference to their bosses.

Work schedule predictability has emerged as a major issue causing growing anxiety in the American labor force even as the U.S. jobless rate has fallen to below-average levels.

My daughter works in a restaurant, and their weekly schedules frequently come out less than 24 hours before the new week.

It’s lazy management, and it they do it because they can.

Putting a cost of laziness on the employer is a very good thing.

*If I had said “Texas” or “Florida” instead of “Oregon”, you know that it would be a clusterf%$#, but in most other states, you have to read the article to figure out which way it goes.

Why J-School Sucks

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In the old days, someone would become a journalist by working as a copy boy or a cub reporter and working their way up, and they saw themselves as tradesmen.

Now, they get a Bachelors in Journalism, and they fancy themselves professionals, and the contrast is both striking and depressing:

I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine. I told them I’d worked in public media in Alaska before moving to the Lower 48. I was a couple of months from wrapping up my time as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. They asked about what I worked on and I explained my research around collaboration in journalism and that I intended to continue working in this space after the fellowship ended.

“Well, what does your husband do?”

“He’s a truck driver and a mechanic.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, right now he drives for a trash company.”

“That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”

While they didn’t explicitly say it, the person was very much thrown off by the nature of my husband’s work. I was left with a very strong feeling they were expecting a more middle-class answer than a garbage worker. Their facial reaction has been stuck in my head for a while now. Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice. Obviously, this one instance isn’t representative of an entire industry. But it is a symptom.

The last two ‘graphs say it all:

If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? If talking about someone to that person’s spouse isn’t enough to cause one to mask aversion, how do they talk about people to whom they feel even more distance from? What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?

 Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

It’s natural for professors to see themselves as professionals, but by inculcating their students in this mindset, they have created a generation of journalists who afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.

This is not a recipe for good or responsible journalism.

Normally, I Would Condemn Anything That a Eurocrat Says, but I Can’t This Time

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‘Tis but a scratch

The reason that I endorse his statement is because one of my hard and fast rules in rhetorical technique, if you invoke Monty Python, you win.

The win is double plus good if invoke Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

The first vice-president of the European Commission has mocked the UK’s post-Brexit trade ambitions by comparing a Ukip MEP to a comically over-confident character from a Monty Python film.

Frans Timmermans likened Eurosceptic politician Ray Finch to the Black Night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a hopelessly optimistic character who refuses to concede a fight even after all his limbs are severed.

Mr Finch had told the Strasbourg assembly the EU would suffer while Britain was negotiating new trade agreements with countries outside the bloc.
 ………

 “Mr Finch really reminds me of a character created by John Cleese in Monty Python’s the Holy Grail, the Black Knight, who after being defeated terribly and having all his limbs cut off says to his opponent ‘let’s call it a draw’,” he continued.

I have no choice but to congratulate Mr. Timmermans for the proper and appropriate use of Monty Python.

Well played, sir.