Securing your Wireless Access

Come ho scritto sul titolo per eliminare questo problema vi basterà scaricare WPa-kill e successivamente seguire questo procedimento:

Avviare il Computer in “Modalità Provvisoria con Prompt dei Comandi”
  premiamo CTRL+ALT+CANC e dal menù File, scegliamo Nuova Operazione
  scriviamo explorer.exe e premiamo INVIO.
  dal’interfaccia grafica recuperiamo dalla chiavetta il file wpa_kill.exe ed esaguiamolo.

Infine vi basterà riavviare il pc e il gioco è fatto!!!!

According to Robert Kuttner’s piece in HuffPo, we need a second stimulus package fast if the Democrats have any chance of winning in the 2010 midterm election. (The recent losses in the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races weren’t very comforting). And this is after Ross Douthat argued that: “If the midterm elections were held today, the Democrats would probably take an unemployment-driven beating. In Gallup’s generic Congressional ballot, Republicans are up 22 points among independents, and they’ve opened up a rare lead among the voting public as a whole.”

So Kuttner suggested Obama begin shadowing another famous, heroic president. And this isn’t the one known for his legal expertise, tall height, and gnarly distinguished beard.

The Roosevelt administration, in an era before computers, got a lot of public works spending going in less than a year. There are massive unmet needs in public infrastructure. The Obama administration needs a short term and a long term strategy. Projects such as school repair and expansion, which can get underway in a few months, should get fast-tracked funding commitments right away. Longer term needs, such as smart electrical grids and modernization of water and sewer systems, expanded mass transit, and green energy, should be targeted for funding in 2011, so that plans can get on the drawing boards now.

So for all of you aimless people looking for work: I hope you get out those hammers and start practicing.

“This lack of security is quite serious and quite expensive. Many credit card theft rings have intercepted card numbers being transmitted over Wi-Fi networks. Many individuals have fallen victim to identity theft because someone intercepted their traffic on public Wi-Fi networks.” The secured iSecurf network is designed to work with your laptop’s built in security standard to protect your data on public networks.

View Article Here:

“And that’s the problem. Not all Wi-Fi is secure. In fact, it is simple to hack into your computer whether you are at the airport or at home.” Connect to the iSecurf secured network where available…and you will have faster internet than a VPN can provide.

View Article Here:

“Remember, it’s a public network, so anything they send could be captured, including passwords, client lists, and other intellectual property IP. In addition, they are vulnerable to attacks and malware. You have to ask yourself, what then are the costs to your organization if any of this information is stolen?” A network solution like iSecurf would allow everyone at airports to connect and protect without downloading any software that might conflict with their operating system.

View Article Here:

Introduction:

In previous installments of the Job Insurance series, I’ve used a simple $20 a month premium, split 50/50 between workers and their employers, to give a rough idea about how a Job Insurance program could be financed as a significant new social insurance program, without creating a heavy fiscal burden.

However, there are important alternatives for financing a Job Insurance program that should be considered – especially as we think of how to construct a jobs bill without triggering an internal struggle with our party’s “deficit hawks.”

Why Social Insurance:

In my segment on jobs for youth, a commenter asked why people in need of work should have to pay a premium to be eligible. This is a very fair question, and the answer largely boils down to a mix of politics and policy. Politically, social insurance programs are much harder to attack than non-contributory social programs. The usual methods of de-legitimization don’t work – beneficiaries are workers, not an easily stigmatized group of unemployed poor; the benefits they receive aren’t “government handouts” but “getting their money back” and the program tends to be more universally open (at least in the sense that everyone will eventually gain access), as opposed to “giving your tax dollars away to [insert minority here].” In the minds of voters, they feel that their contributions gave them an “earned right” to their benefits, and that this makes the program inherently more “fair” than a non-contributory program; voters are also more likely to identify themselves with beneficiaries, rather than viewing them as some disliked “other.” That’s why Social Security and Medicare are politically untouchable, to the point where conservatives have essentially had to give up on trying to eliminate them, and now try to use them to block health care reform.

Policy-wise, the advantage of designing a social policy as social insurance is that it creates a certain element of independence from the party in power. Programs that are funded through general taxation and the regular budgetary process can be de-funded the moment that one party loses their majority and is replaced by the opposition, and this is just as true of social policy as any other. When a conservative majority gradually formed in Congress between 1938 and the 1940s, FDR saw many of his New Deal spending programs phased out – with the significant exception of the Social Security system, which didn’t need Congressional appropriations thanks to its payroll tax-driven Trust Fund. Similarly, much of LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty programs were eliminated between the end of his presidency and the rise of Reagan – again, because many of those programs depended on Congressional appropriations for survival.

A premium-financed Job Insurance program would thus be constantly generating revenue (at about $37 billion a year), allowing it to fund jobs programs without having to go hat-in-hand to a potentially hostile Congress. At the same time, creating an enormous constituency of 150-odd million workers who’ve paid their dues and expect to get a job when they get laid off, as well as a smaller but significant constituency of Job Insurance alumni who have positive memories of the program would make it much harder for even a conservative Congress to repeal Job Insurance once enacted.

How to Finance:

However, it is also true that a flat premium – just like the FICA tax that funds Social Security and Medicare or the FUTA/SUTA tax that funds Unemployment Insurance – is just one option, and that there are other funding mechanisms than a $20/month premium.

1% Payroll Tax – in many ways, a 1% payroll tax would simply be an extension of the $20 premium, but it illustrates why historically we’ve turned to payroll taxes to fund some of our largest social policy programs – they can raise an enormous amount of money, especially if you’re dealing with a periodic event like a recession and can build up a reserve in the meantime. Given an average weekly earnings of $619, a 1% payroll tax (average of $25 a month, split to $12.50/$12.50) would generate $46.2 billion a year. This level of revenue would allow for a 5 million job reserve within four years, enabling the Job Insurance system to cope with even quite severe recessions.

On the other hand, a flat payroll tax is rather regressive in nature. Just as it would be possible to make our existing payroll tax progressive, it would also be possible to make the Job Insurance premium more progressive. It would probably be possible to, say, levy a .25% payroll tax on workers making $25k or less a year, .5% on workers making between $25k-50k a year, 1% on workers making between $50-75k, 1.5% on workers making between $75-100k, 2% on workers making $100-150k, and so on up the income scale and generate enough revenue to operate a robust Job Insurance system.

Tobin Tax – another revenue option that has increasingly been suggested since the financial crisis (it’s prominently mentioned in regards to the jobs bill, for example) is a Tobin Tax. A Tobin Tax, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a small tax on financial transactions (buying and selling stocks, bonds, currency, futures, derivatives, etc.), usually anywhere between .1 to .25% of volume (or in other words, a 10-25 cent tax per transaction). Because of the enormous volume of financial transactions that happen every second of every day, such a tax would generate about $100-150 billion per year, and would have a beneficial side-effect of decreasing market volatility by making rapid, short-term speculative transactions (also known as “churn”) more expensive.

Half of a Tobin Tax’s revenues could easily create a robust Job Insurance system with a 5 million job reserve inside of four years. The remainder of the revenues could be tasked to any other purpose – funding health care reform, reducing the deficit and national debt, funding a multi-year project to restore America’s infrastructure, and so on.

Income Tax Surcharge – one of the smaller lessons learned from the health care reform debate is the sheer amount of of money that can be raised from a surcharge on the richest Americans. In the House’s bill, one of the ways that the bill is paid for is a surcharge of “1 percent of income between $280,000 and $400,000; 1.5 percent of income between $400,000 and $800,000; and 5.4 percent of income in excess of $800,000″ for individuals and “1 percent of income between $350,000 and $500,000; 1.5 percent of income between $500,000 and $1 million; and 5.4 percent of income in excess of $1 million” for couples filing jointly. Keep in mind that we’re talking about only 1.2% of American taxpayers, and an average rate increase of about 3%. And yet, this surcharge will likely generate $55 billion a year.

This should suggest two things. First, conservative arguments that our tax system is too progressive and that we simply can’t solve our problems by raising taxes on the rich are disingenuous at best. If a mere 3% increase can generate $55 billion a year, then returning to the 50% top bracket that the rich enjoyed in the notoriously liberal years of 1982-1986, could easily generate enough revenue to put a massive dent in our fiscal problems. Second, an income tax surcharge could easily finance a robust Job Insurance system with a 5 million job reserve in about three years.

The point here is that there isn’t necessarily one right way to raise tax revenue – you can generate $50 billion a year in many different ways; the question then becomes one of the  relative merit of the different options.

Supercharging Job Insurance:

Before I evaluate the merits of the different options, I do want to discuss a point that has come up in some of my previous discussions regarding the Federal Reserve and central banking. Namely, that the Federal Reserve has an enormous power in its role as a “lender of last resort” that we have for some inexplicable reason decided can only be used to assist the financial sector and not the public sector, or even the public at large. The relevance here is that, while with a revenue stream of about $50 billion a year you can create an effective Job Insurance system, if the Job Insurance system is allowed to use its revenues as collateral for a loan from the Federal Reserve, the potential for public action on a grand scale becomes immense.

First, enabling the Job Insurance system to borrow from the Fed would allow the system to punch way above its weight. Instead of having to build up reserves for multiple years in order to respond to recession-driven mass layoffs, the Job Insurance program could easily take out a loan for $175 billion, put 5 million people back to work, halting the recession in its tracks, and pay back the loan within 3 years. Even in a catastrophic depression, a Job Insurance system could borrow enough to put 10 or 20 million people to work (dropping the unemployment rate by 6.5 and 13 percentage points respectively), and pay back the loan in 6 to 12 years. Looked at another way, if the Job Insurance system only had to build up enough reserves to take out and pay for a loan from the Fed, instead of paying 100% of the costs of creating millions of jobs up front, you could drop the social insurance premiums down to $10 a month (split $5/$5).

Second, such a system would be good for the Fed. As we can see from the current political discourse, the Federal Reserve currently has both an image problem in that it’s viewed as being interested only in the well-being of the financial industry and not that of the people from whom it borrows the inherently public monetary powers that give it force, and a policy problem in that has much less in the way of tools to deal with the “maximum employment” part of its mission than it does with the “price stability” part of its mission. At the moment, because the Federal Reserve works on the economy primarily by influencing interest rates, the Federal Reserve’s ability to actually achieve “maximum employment” is something akin to the captain of a giant ocean liner trying to turn the ship – it can be done, but it takes a huge amount of effort (in terms of pushing interest rates), and the ship is slow to respond. Lowering interest rates will generally boost economic growth and employment, but it takes several quarters, if not years to generate job growth. By acting as “lender of last resort” to the “employer of last resort,” the Federal Reserve would be able to create millions of jobs in a few months, giving it a degree of control over the unemployment rate equivalent to its control over interest rates.

Conclusion:

While bringing the power of the Fed to bear on the jobs crisis is alluring, there’s still the question of how we raise the revenue. As I suggested above, each model has different attributes. For example, each way of financing Job Insurance has different economic effects: payroll taxes make employment marginally more expensive, Tobin taxes decrease the volatility in our financial markets, and an income tax surcharge would modestly redistribute wealth from the richest to the poorest.

However, it’s also my firm belief, based on my understanding of policy history, that public policy is as much (if not more) about political ideology and culture as it is about technocratic details. Each tax tells a different story and makes a different argument about how and why we want to do things. A payroll tax, as was the case with Social Security and Medicare, evokes the idea of an earned right to public benefit, but it also makes a case for understanding social insurance as a collective responsibility shared by the state and citizens, between citizens and citizens, and between workers and their employers. A Tobin Tax suggests instead the idea of a systemic imperative; fluctuations in the financial markets can have ruinous consequences in the real economy, so we must reduce volatility and ensure that financial activity contributes towards the stability of the labor market. A surcharge on the rich expresses an egalitarian principle: concentrations of great wealth are bad for the health of the economy, because they reduce the ability of the masses to consume and concentrate income among the speculating classes; by redistributing income from those who will never miss it to those who need to work to survive, we create a more equal and humane society.

What principle would you enshrine in the heart of Job Insurance?

A clip from a short government film about the the Works Progress Administration, one of the New Deal programs started during the Great Depression.

Uploaded by YouTube user: FasttrackHistory, 30 January 2009

Introduction:

Up until a week ago, the prospects for a second round of economic stimulus looked bleak; an ominous coalition of Senate moderates (the same folks who shrank the stimulus and cut out Pelosi’s teacher preservation program, and who’ve tried their level best to stop the health care reform effort in its tracks) threatened to force the U.S government into default unless Congress agreed to a deficit-reduction committee with authority over Social Security and Medicare, and President Obama responded by talking up deficit reduction in his next budget.

And then the October jobs report came out, showing unemployment rising over the magical 10% level that signals political disaster in a midterm election. Suddenly, President Obama began to talk up a December “jobs summit,” and Senator Reid announced that he’s pulling together a pre-election jobs bill.

This sudden momentum is welcome, but if we want to significantly reduce unemployment, and thereby protect our Democratic Congress at the same time, we need to be very careful about what goes into this jobs bill.

Evaluating Options:

To begin with, let’s start by analyzing the policy options that have been widely discussed in the media – a new jobs tax credit for employers, a payroll tax holiday, and a package of infrastructure public works projects.

New Jobs Tax Credit: one of the elements that the Obama administration has repeatedly mentioned, which was initially proposed but eliminated from the stimulus bill back in January, is a tax credit of $3,000 per new worker hired. Economists tend to be rather skeptical of such tax breaks: given that the average total compensation per worker is about $50,000 a year, they argue, $3,000 is unlikely to make much of a difference in hiring decisions.

The historical evidence suggests more of a mixed bag. During the Nixon Administration, a New Jobs Tax Credit was established, providing a 50% subsidy on the first $10,000 in wages (or about $5,000 per head). Taking the average of three different studies’ estimates, the New Jobs Tax Credit created about 468,000 jobs, at a cost of $6,480-$58,000 per job (in 2008 dollars).

While this suggests that a new jobs credit could conceivably create some jobs, given that the current proposal is quite a bit less, we might only see 280,000 jobs for $840 million. While that isn’t bad on a per-dollar basis, it’s still only a .18% drop in the bucket – not even enough to bring us down to 10% even.

(Note: to be completely fair, I should note that Timothy Bartik and John Bishop of the Economic Policy Institute, who have more expertise in these kinds of calculators than I do, estimate that a properly-designed New Job Tax Credit of 10-15% could create 2.8 million jobs in the first year, at a gross cost of $80 billion (net cost of $27 billion. This would give us an unemployment rate of 8.1%, which is pretty good for $27 billion.)

Payroll Tax Holiday: one idea that has an unusual amount of bi-partisan support from progressive economists like L. Randall Wray and conservative anti-taxers is a payroll tax holiday for employers. The strange thing about it is that, when you think about what it does, a payroll tax holiday only differs from Obama’s new jobs credit in terms of scale, not kind, coming out to a $2,500 credit for employers and a $2,500 credit for employees.

This comes out roughly equivalent in scale to the New Jobs Tax Credit of the 1970s, suggesting a potential direct effect of somewhere around 468,000 jobs, which is good, but would only drop the unemployment rate from 10.2% to 9.87%. On the other hand, as Wray and others have pointed out, a payroll tax credit – since it also results in increased take-home pay for workers – would provide additional stimulus of about $685 billion, which might increase the overall effect (if we take the stimulus’ 3.3 million for $787 billion) to 3.339 million jobs. This would bring unemployment down to 8%, which is a significant improvement. (Note: the Center for Budget and Policy priorities is rather more skeptical of the idea.)

The downside of the payroll tax holiday is twofold: first, politically, a $685 billion price tag would be extremely hard to swallow, even in the context of 10% unemployment. Second, there is the issue of timing. As we have seen, the stimulus has shown significant results in terms of turning economic growth around and at least stemming layoffs – but it’s taken 8-9 months, and we still haven’t gotten to the point of substantial jobs growth. It is unlikely that the electorate would see enough in the way of results before November to make this effort worth the political effort.

Public Works/ Stimulus:

Another option that has been discussed, especially since the stimulus package only ended up containing about $275 billion in public works (another $288 billion went to tax cuts and $224 billion to entitlement programs like UI and Food Stamps), is a second round of stimulus. Ideas for said stimulus have been varied – Lawrence Mishel and Ross Eisenbray have recommended $160 billion in aid to the states and another $10 billion in school repair and maintenance, L. Randall Wray has called for $400 billion split between Unemployment Insurance and aid to states, others have called for more money for a “smart” energy grid and other green projects, and so on.

What we have learned from the current stimulus is that your bog-standard Keynesian stimulus does work. Despite being split into tax cuts, entitlements, and public works, and despite the fact that only 58% of moneys have been awarded, and only 13% received (according to recovery.org), we’ve still created or saved 685,000 jobs and created about 2.3% in additional GDP growth. At this rate, we’re on track to hit 3.3 million jobs created or saved overall, which should mean an additional 2.7 million jobs once the public works contracts are fully let and the crews are hired. However, what we have learned is that it takes time. We very likely won’t see the stimulus take its full effect for at least a year.

A new stimulus package would undoubtedly have a significant economic impact; what is more doubtful is how quickly traditional public works and/or stimulus could take effect.

Direct Job Creation:

As I have discussed in my Job Insurance series, the direct creation of jobs is a potentially powerful vehicle for creating a large number of jobs for a relatively low amount of money (compared to traditional aggregate stimulus) quickly.

A youth jobs program, as discussed here, could create jobs at about $22 billion for every million jobs created. An adult jobs program, that seeks to provide a wage that could keep a family of four out of poverty, could create jobs at the rate of about $35 billion per million jobs created. The direct job creation route has certain advantages over the options discussed before: unlike a new jobs tax cut or a payroll tax holiday, direct job creation does not depend on the uncertain reaction of employers in what is a very dicey market. As we have seen, despite the marked improvement in terms of economic growth, employers have been rather hesitant to add employees, and have turned instead to getting more out of their existing workforce – even as average hours worked per week has dropped to about 32, output per hour has risen by 9.7% in the third quarter of 2009. Secondly, direct job creation can be extremely fast (in part because it doesn’t have to wait for the effects of stimulus to percolate throughout the economy) – the Civil Works Administration in 1933 was able to put 4.27 million people to work in three months. A direct jobs creation program would produce visible results well in advance of the 2010 midterm elections.

One of the most positive signs that I have seen recently is that the idea of direct job creation, which wasn’t even mentioned during the stimulus debates, has started to make its way back into the discourse. Both Mishel and Eisenbray call for a “public service employment” program (i.e, a jobs program where workers are tasked to providing public services instead of constructing public goods) of at least $40 billion. It’ somewhat hard to calculate how many jobs that works out to (given that Mishel and Eisenbray call for such jobs to pay the prevailing wage, which varies from state to state), but if we take an extremely rough estimate of $15 an hour, that would come out to at least a million jobs per $40 billion.

Getting Where We Need to Go:

So the question is, how do we build a jobs bill from this range of options? The trick here is to balance our objective of making a significant and fast dent in our U3 unemployment rate of 10.2% and our political constraints here regarding the budget deficit.

Wray and the other progressive economists, as is the wise political move, are arguing for the largest possible package, to push the “Overton window” of this debate as far as it will go, which is why Wray is calling for $400 billion just in aid to the states, and Mishel/Eisenbray call for a package to roughly works out to $293 billion (including $160 billion in aid to states, $40 billion in direct job creation, $80 billion for a new jobs credit, and $13 billion for school repair/maintenance). My guess would be that at the very most, we’re talking about anywhere from $100-300 billion. I certainly don’t think anything larger than that will fly at the moment. Granted, this effort becomes much easier if the jobs bill can be made to be deficit-neutral by raising some revenue. Mishel and Eisenbray’s suggestion for a Tobin tax to generate about $100-150 billion a year is a good one, allowing potentially a quite strong package to be funded without much difficulty.

Taking Mishel/Eisenbray’s $293 billion package as a rough guideline, I think we could create a package that created 8.8 million jobs if we combined a strong direct jobs creation package of 2.25 million jobs for youth (price tag = $49.5 billion) and 3.75 million jobs for adults (price tag = $131.25 billion) with Bartik/Bishop’s version of the New Jobs Tax Credit (price tag = $80 billion), coming in at $281 billion. This would drop unemployment down to 4%, and it would do it well within a year, creating a drastic sea-change in both the larger economy and in the public eye.

Making the package deficit neutral isn’t particularly easy, but it is possible – the suggested Tobin Tax would make it deficit-neutral within 3 years; establishing the youth and adult jobs programs as social insurance would generate enough revenue to pay back the initial cost within 7 years. And as I’ll discuss in my next section, this is only scratching the surface of potential revenue mechanisms.

Conclusion:

Back in January when the stimulus was being debated, a jobs bill was but one element among many, and the political winds favored tax cuts and traditional public works (and let’s not forget, a smaller package than initially proposed).

Now a jobs bill has become a matter of political survival. And this is by no means a bad thing. Because it is when politicians most fear defeat that their traditional fear of the new and the untried becomes weakest. We should take advantage of this sudden change in the winds; it might not come again.

From The Progressive, posted 27 October 2009, by Julianne Malveaux:

[snip]

By [1932] the Great Depression was raging, with unemployment rates rising to 25 percent.

To combat unemployment and alleviate poverty, the federal government engaged in a massive public works and jobs program through the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Private markets weren’t about to create jobs, and the public sector became the employer of last resort. The job creation from the WPA provided survival and sustenance for millions of American families. Where is the contemporary WPA?

Absent public job creation, it is likely that the economy will not fully recover…

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Hey Obama, while you’re at it, bring back the CCC

Now that we’ve crowned the truly uninspring 2009 World Series Champions, we can move onto the offseason hoping that 2010 offers a little more drama than the richest team in the league winning it all.

Next week, the MLB Writers will announce the 2009 MLB awards, so on that note, I’m posting my ballot (if I had a vote …)

All players listed with their WPA and WAR (from FanGraphs)

Rookie of the Year

American League:

1. Brett Anderson SP (Oakland) - 0.12/3.8
2. Jeff Neimann SP (Tampa Bay) – 1.87/3.2
3. Elvis Andrus SS (Texas) - (-0.66)/3.0

WAR tends to heavily favor starters in these situations and also favors defense, which is why Andrus snuck in at #3 instead of Gordon Beckham (3B CHI).

National League:

1. Andrew McCutchen OF (Pittsburgh) - 2.02/3.4
2. Tommy Hanson SP (Atlanta) – 2.04/2.6
3. Randy Wells SP (Chicago) - 1.64/3.0
4. Garrett Jones OF (Pittsburgh) - 1.25/2.6

UPDATED 11/13: You know, somehow I completely forgot Tommy Hanson (SP Atlanta). He rolls in with a 2.04/2.6, which puts him very close to McCutchen. My gut says to rank the position player higher than the pitcher, so there you have it.

Amazingly, J.A. Happ’s WAR was only 1.8, below all of the above and guys like Casey McGehee (UT MIL) and Chris Coghlan (OF FLA).

MVP

American League:

1. Joe Mauer C (Minnesota) - 3.64/8.2
2. Ben Zobrist UT (Tampa Bay) - 4.10/8.6
3. Derek Jeter SS (New York) - 1.41/7.4
4. Franklin Gutierrez OF (Seattle) - 3.72/5.9
5. Zack Grienke SP (Kansas City) - 6.07/9.4
6. Kevin Youkilis 1B/3B (Boston) – 2.36/5.6
7. Miguel Cabrera 1B (Detroit) - 1.59/5.4
8. Mark Teixiera 1B (New York) – 3.58/5.1
9. Shin Soo Choo OF (Cleveland) – 2.11/5.0
10. Victor Martinez C (Boston) – 3.23/4.9

A few surprises, wouldn’t you say? I couldn’t bring myself to putting Zobrist at the top over Mauer – too many questions in my mind about the value of C defense in the WAR calculations. It was also hard to figure where to slot in the pitchers, but Grienke belongs in the list somewhere. Franklin Gutierrez looks like the steal of the year for the Mariners – adequate hitting and remarkable defense = high WAR (yet no Gold Glove … gotta love it). I was also surprised to see the good showing of Shin Soo Choo.

National League:

1. Albert Pujols 1B (St. Louis) - 8.24/8.4
2. Chase Utley 2B (Philadelphia) - 4.3/7.6
3. Tim Lincecum SP (San Francisco) - 4.26/8.2
4. Hanley Ramirez SS (Florida) - 3.09/7.3
5. Prince Fielder 1B (Milwaukee) - 7.79/6.8
6. Adrian Gonzalez 1B (San Diego) - 4.2/6.3
7. Derek Lee 1B (Chicago) - 3.84/5.3
8. Pablo Sandoval 3B (San Francisco) – 4.71/5.2
9. Ryan Howard 1B (Philadelphia) - 6.03/4.8
10. Ryan Braun OF (Milwaukee) – 4.73/4.8

Nothing too shocking – Pujols wins by a (not as big as I expected) margin over Chase Utley. Tim Lincecum is the on the list as the only starter. This was quite a year for 1B in the NL.

Cy Young

American League

1. Zack Grienke (Kansas City) – 6.07/9.4
2. Justin Verlander (Detroit) – 4.19/8.2
3. Roy Halladay (Toronto) - 3.52/7.3
4. Felix Hernandez (Seattle) – 3.26/6.9
5. Jon Lester (Boston) – 2.50/6.2
6. CC Sabathia (New York) - 2.89/6.0
7. Andrew Bailey (Oakland) - 2.68/2.4
8. Mariano Rivera (New York) - 3.99/2.0
9. Jonathan Papelbon (Boston) - 5.13/1.9
10. Josh Beckett (Boston) – 2.2/5.3

OK, anyone who says Grienke shouldn’t be the Cy Young should be excommunicated from baseball fandom. There was a steep dropoff in starters after CC, thus the three relievers in a row … and yes, Andrew Bailey was the best of that bunch.

National League

1. Tim Lincecum (San Francisco) – 4.26/8.2
2. Javier Vazquez (Atlanta) - 2.41/6.6
3. Dan Haren (Arizona) - 2.95/6.1
4. Adam Wainwright (St. Louis) - 3.60/5.7
5. Ubaldo Jimenez (Colorado) – 3.16/5.7
6. Josh Johnson (Florida) - 3.05/5.5
7. Chris Carpenter (St. Louis) - 5.41/4.5
8. Jair Jurrjens (Atlanta) - 3.35/3.9
9. Randy Wolf (Los Angeles) - 0.69/3.0
10. Huston Street (Colorado) - 3.38/1.5

Much like the AL, anyone who thinks Lincecum shouldn’t win the Cy Young (again) is silly. He didn’t get the wins, but everything else was hands-down better. And two Colorado pitchers in the top 10? Go figure.

Wireless network has become the default package when you install internet access at home. It always comes with a wireless router that gives you the option to connect wirelessly or via cable.

Read more…

Introduction:

Peter Coy’s article, “The Lost Generation – Bright, Eager, and Unwanted” drew much-needed attention to the disastrous impact of the current recession on the young. Unemployment rates for those under 24 are nearly twice the national average, and the trajectory for youth employment is not heartening. As young people, many of whom have sunk themselves deep into debt for college educations that were sold to them as tickets into the middle class, face years of empty spaces on their resumes and lost wage income and promotions they will begin to fall further and further back from their potential and become a truly lost generation.

Something needs to be done to save a generation from a blighted economic life, and to recover untold amounts of potential labor power that will go unused in the interim. Luckily, history gives us a perfect example of how to save this generation in the youth policies of the New Deal.

The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration – Learning the Right Lessons:

When pundits today talk about how to deal with the plight of young workers drowning in today’s labor market, they often bring up the Civilian Conservation Corps as an example of how to tackle the crisis. The CCC is a favorite New Deal program for pundits because it brings up a whole host of romantic associations – the great outdoors and the positive environmental policy associated with reforestation and anti-erosion work, shirtless young men swinging pick-axes, the military discipline instilled by the U.S Army, which managed the CCC’s 250,000 strong workforce (the CCC would serve about 3 million young men in its 10 year operation), and so on.

The problem is that people’s romanticism gets in the way – they can’t see the workers for the trees, as it were. Because they focus on the moral virtue of physical labor in a wilderness environment, they de-emphasize what should be the point: the CCC was supposed to take young people out of an overcrowded labor market (just as Social Security was supposed to take old people out of the labor market) and give them work. When LBJ tried to replicate the program in the Great Society through his Jobs Corps which was supposed to “save” young people from the negative environment of their neighborhoods that had created a “culture of poverty” by setting up job training camps in rural and wilderness areas, it was something of a disaster. Only 10,000 openings were created (versus 300,000 applicants), the program offered job training as opposed to real jobs, and city kids hated the rural camps. As a result, about 2/3rds of enrollees dropped out, and the program showed no positive effects on wages.

It’s not enough to dump young people in the forest, hand them a pickaxe and a minimum wage, and trust in the healing power of nature.

This is why I thin the National Youth Administration is actually a superior model for our current problem. Designed as an adjunct to the Works Progress Administration, the NYA employed 500,000 young people at a time (the CCC peaked at 500,000, and usually employed about 250,000), and helped far more young people than the CCC (4.7 million over nine years versus 3 million over ten). The NYA especially understood the need for a flexible approach to work with a diverse population – the NYA included both part-time work-study jobs for students (all the way from high school to graduate school) with full-time jobs for young workers that provided on-the-job training in a number of professions. Unlike the CCC, which was restricted to young men, the NYA provided assistance to men and women. The point here is that the NYA treated young people as workers and students who needed help, not as a moral problem to be solved.

Thus, as we move forward in adapting the New Deal’s solutions to our own times, we must resist our romantic impulses and treat young people seriously. We are not out to “rescue” lost children, and we are not trying to instill a rugged outdoors spirit. What we need is to construct a social insurance system for the young that parallels the Social Security system for the old; just as Social Security helps to ensure that the elderly can retire with dignity and security, a system is needed to help young workers “launch” themselves into their adult lives with some kind of economic security and protection against their own particular risks (high debt levels, lack of built-up assets that could protect them in sudden down-turns, etc.). In short, we need to recognize that youth policy has to be about more than just education.

Job Insurance For the Young:

Currently, the unemployment rate for young people between 16-24 is about 18%. Given that many young people in that age group are still in school (only about 52% of people aged 16-24 were in the workforce prior to the recession), what we’re really looking at here is a decline in employment of 6 percentage points, or roughly 2.25 million jobs lost or never created.

In order to get back to pre-recession levels, we need to re-create those 2.25 million jobs. In my series on Job Insurance, I’ve laid out the mechanisms for creating a large number of jobs, and what kind of resources we need to make a jobs program work. In some respects, creating a job insurance program for the young is easier than for their older peers. Because younger workers are less likely to have dependents,  the poverty line that you need to clear is much lower. Similarly, since many younger workers need part-time jobs to help them pay their way through college as opposed to full-time jobs, that also brings down the cost of employment.

In the past, I’ve assumed that, at $24k a year, plus FICA contributions and 30% non-labor costs, it costs about $36-40 billion dollars per million jobs created. Given an average of $15k a year for a Youth Job Insurance job (averaging out part-time and full-time and a lower poverty line bar), a million jobs for the young should only cost $22 billion. A comprehensive 2.25 million youth jobs package, which would bring youth employment rates back to their pre-recession levels, would cost a shade under $50 billion. At such a low price tag and a very high number of definite jobs created, a jobs program for the young should be a winning candidate for a second round of economic stimulus.

If established as a social insurance program, a modest $10/month premium from all 16-24 year olds would result in $4.5 billion in yearly revenues. After 5 years, such a program could build up reserves of $22.5 billion, enough to create a million jobs without additional funding from Congress, or two million jobs with a simple 50/50 split between the Youth Job Insurance fund and Congress, which should be enough to compensate for a severe recession like the current recession.

Conclusion:

The question might be asked, why not try some of the other options suggested in Peter Coy’s article, like a lower minimum wage for the young, or job training?

To begin with, lowering the minimum wage for the young is a bad idea. It does enormous damage to people who are already trying to hold on to their jobs amid declining hours and stagnant wages, including the 46% of 16-24 year olds who are working right now, by creating a huge incentive for employers to fire their existing workers and replace them with cheaper, younger alternatives. We already have 13 job applicants for every job opening; why increase that number? Furthermore, given that the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is just barely enough to keep a single adult out of poverty, if you can get and keep 40 hours a week, cutting the minimum wage for young workers will result in a mass of working poor, which is hardly an improvement.

Job training is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Our labor market policy towards the young has been entirely directed at labor supply – pushing college as a way to become a skilled worker who is more attractive to employers. In the current circumstances, we’ve got many more skilled workers than there is demand on the part of employers. Without doing something to increase labor demand, job training will continue to be a runaround.

If we’re going to save the young, it’s got to be jobs, not jobs-light.

“While this is one of the best ways to protect yourself while using a public wireless hotspot, a VPN is not something that the average consumer can set up easily,” said Michael Phillips, Broadbandchoices.co.uk product director.” Right…VPN’s are complicated and iSecurf is SIMPLE.

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In a statement, T-Mobile also urged customers to mitigate risk by using VPNs. “On the landing page of the HotSpot service, advice is prominently displayed alerting customers they should use free software provided by T-Mobile,” the operator said. “This VPN software encrypts the radio link between the laptop and the HotSpot, providing a level of security typically enjoyed by business users.” Software…even when it’s free, means setup and interference issues. iSecurf will not interfere with any software on your device, because it is not software like a VPN. Hotspot operators that use iSecurf have taken the onus upon themselves for easy and fast Wi-Fi security offered to  it’s users.

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“Most users buy a router from the store, take it out of the box and plug it in, following a few easy steps to set it up. You want to configure it to a secure mode with a password, which will take a few extra steps. When hopping on to Wi-Fi, look for a little padlock sign.” The little padlock sign is your wireless utility telling you you’re on a security protocol. The little padlock sign is exactly what you will see when you use iSecurf.

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“The use of private keys, such as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and more recently, the not entirely secure WPA (WiFi Protected Access) protocols, are not suitable for public hotspots particularly when using mobile and hand-held devices, as the users would have to obtain security credentials before being able to access the network. This would make accessing the internet beyond the skill levels of ordinary consumers.” The iSecurf process is an individual WPA key created on the spot by the user and takes under two minutes to connect to the secure network.

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“Laptop WiFi users simply need to use technologies such as a secured and trusted web browser, hardware-based session encryption, virtual keyboards and two-factor authentication or similar authentication technologies to ensure you – and only you – can log into a web-based email session, with no chance of being intercepted,” said Woodland. iSecurf is a hardware based session encryption solution second to none.

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“Here’s what you need to know: Public hot-spots — most of which are open and don’t require a password — are, by nature, insecure. Sure, they may be easy and convenient to hop on from your computer, but that very openness is also what allows anyone, including hackers, to just walk in and sign on. In other words, when you’re signed on to a public Wi-Fi hotspot (or at an unsecured network at your or someone’s private home), it’s entirely possible for someone to come along and snatch your data, literally out of the air.”  Surf at locations with iSecurf and you always create and surf with your own network key.

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We (Glenn and I) both have fond memories of Christmas. We don’t remember ever having a special meal at Christmas, just the same each day, you ate what you had. Always had a tree (cedar) trimmed in popcorn and paper ribbon. He remembers getting a red wagon and I remember getting a doll and a ball. My mother made my doll and ball. So much for being poor, but makes you appreciate the better life. We neither one can recall seeing a dollar bill until later in life. Lots of fifty cents as that was the day’s pay. Even pennies were precious back then as they would buy lots of candy or whatever. A truck came around once a week called a “huckster” wagon and sold groceries. We would sell eggs and chickens. This was the only grocery we knew for a long time.

We can’t remember ever going to a doctor until we were around 14. I had a headache for days and Glenn had a stone bruise which was lanced. The doctor lived at Trafalgar, his name was Dr. Ragsdale. He seemed very old to me then, but he was about the only doctor we had. If you were very bad sick most people just died from who knows what.

I went to Bridge School for four years then on to Buckner School, then to Trafalgar. My dad had a 1924 Studebaker touring car with side curtains used in winter and he drove it as the bus to Bridge school for six years. He put a bench behind the front seat and picked up about 8 kids. It was a big car and I always sat on the bench because I was in the 1st grade, otherwise with no buses I’d never have got to go to school. My teacher was Mr. Condon; we had a one room school to the 6th grade. Glenn had a one room school for all grades also. We had 2 subjects a day, one in morning and one in evening.

Our clothes were mostly, “hand-me-down” or made over. We both worked picking beans or tomatoes for farmers. We started out at 1 cent per pound and finally got two cents a pound for picking beans and five cents a hamper for tomatoes, I was small but I learned to work. We bought our school shoes and used books with the money. Life was hard but it does seem like it was a happy time. We got to go to the fair one night to spend a small amount of our money and that made all that hard work worth it all.

At night we sat out in the yard and neighbors would come and it was so special when my aunt and uncle came in their horse and buggy. We could always hear that horse and buggy coming down the road. They usually came early for supper then visited and got home before dark. It was Uncle Johnny and Aunt Bessie – I’ll always remember them as they were special.

Usually went to Fair on a Thursday night as all the neighbors went so it was really a big gathering event for all the neighbors. Just turned kids loose and they all visited and checked out all the barns and livestock. I know my Mom and Dad enjoyed going.

We both grew up with the “outhouse” which was our outside bathroom. Dad made our “outside outhouse” a two seater. They were usually a distance from the house but at night we used a lantern. We honestly never knew what toilet paper was back then. It was the Sears catalog. Kids today don’t even know about J.C. Penney or Sears-Roebuck catalogs as they aren’t around anymore.

We both also know what an outside freezer is, just a big hole dug in the garden, put straw in the bottom and put our potatoes, apples, turnips, cabbage or whatever you could save in there, put straw on top of that an covered with dirt. That kept our winter supply of food. We both grew up with no electricity, only had kerosene lamps to see at night and carried it from room to room. The rooms were cold and our water bucket would freeze at night.

Our moms did washing on wash boards in a kettle outside with a fire that would boil the clothes until they were white and a bluing was put in the rinse water and they would hang up clothes outside and they would freeze stiff which was hard work. God forbid we’d ever have to through all this hardship again. With canning or growing our own foods, we survived. Dad would work for enough wheat or corn from farmers to take to the mill out on State Road 252 (still there today) to have flour and corn meal ground to last the winter. It was stored in 5 gallon lard cans and mom baked bread every day. We never saw store bought bread until I grew up. It was either corn bread, biscuits or home baked bread; cows were used for milk, butter and cottage cheese. We had to color our own margarine as it looked like lard, but you mixed in the yellowing coloring. We neither one ate a hamburger until we grew up as teenagers, never knew what coke was.

We had chicken (we raised our own) or pork and that wasn’t too often. We had a cow for milk, butter (which we churned our own) and made our own cottage cheese (out of clabbered milk).

Hominy was made from corn, bleaching it with ashes. We made lye soap out of ashes too.

We had homeless people in our time also only we called them Hobos or tramps. They would come walking in through the woods or up the lane. They just wanted a meal and a place to bed down. Mom and Dad always fed them and they slept in the barn. They would work cutting firewood or anything. Usually hang around 2 to 3 days then move on to another neighbor. Times have changed as we sure wouldn’t do that today but they were never turned away. They were always decent men and respectable but down on their luck I guess.

I could go on and on about our life but it was the depression time and times were hard but can’t say we were ever hungry. We just never ate all you wanted and what you might want if you knew any different. We ate whatever was put in front of us and liked it because at times it was very good no matter what it was. We didn’t know that chickens had anything but wings as that was what we as kids ate.

Anyhow we eventually had a little better times as we grew up. Dad worked on the Trafalgar gymnasium back in 1936. That sure helped so many people as it was a job. It was called W.P.A. and it’s the same thing that is being created today, a “Roosevelt New Deal”.

It’s difficult sometimes to be your department’s Writing Program Administrator especially in a department that has some very entrenched (if ultimately dysfunctional) ways of doing things.  Don’t get me wrong here; I genuinely like my colleagues but, in terms of teaching freshman writing, it’s as if they never even heard of process theory. Most come out of a literary background (Victorian, many of them) and this informs their pedagogy. I have one colleague who tells students that they must never lapse into first-person, that they must refer to themselves as “the present author” or “this writer.” I have another who literally measures the margins on papers. They remark that their freshmen are more poorly prepared than ever before but, when you ask them what they are doing differently to address this, they look you straight in the eye and say “nothing.” Some even routinely give grammar quizzes. I recall one Comp Faculty meeting where we discussed some of the writing behaviors and needs of our international students. One of the non-tenure track instructors launched into a tirade. “That’s all well and good, William. But, they are going to go into the business world. They must learn to do it our way.”  “So, we are going to keep them here in OK?” I wondered.  Another said, “These Africans. I thought they spoke English.” I attempted to talk about African varieties of English but to no avail.

Oh, I know. It’s not just here. I have colleagues at other universities who see the same things.

The statue of Vulcan stands atop Red Mountain and has been linked to the City of Birmingham for over a hundred years. People from the other side of the mountain, however, saw the statue’s bare rear end, leading to the standing joke that Vulcan was mooning Homewood.

Created for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the statue was designed to highlight Birmingham’s historical tie to the iron and steel industry. It’s the largest cast iron statue in the world and continues to serve as a symbol for the city. Birmingham is the only place on earth where one can find large deposits of the three minerals required for the manufacture of iron – coal, iron ore, and limestone. For years it was known as the Pittsburgh of the South, but the furnaces are quiet now and the air cleaner. I remember in the 1960’s when TCI poured iron, and the sky around the facility was bright with the reflection of the molten metal.

So Vulcan, the god of the forge, was a perfect representation of Birmingham. The statue, which won a first prize at the World’s Fair, was created in pieces, and after the fair the pieces were left by the railroad tracks, abandoned due to unpaid freight fees. The pieces were later moved to the Alabama State Fairgrounds. My sister-in-law’s mother told me when she was a little girl and went to the fair her mother told her if she got lost to go to Vulcan’s toe and wait. My mother also remembered seeing the pieces at the fairgrounds.

It was later assembled at the state fairgrounds, but didn’t get its permanent location atop Red Mountain until the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration partially funded a park on the mountain in 1936. Having lost his original spear during transport from St. Louis, Vulcan was given a neon torch in 1946. If the city had gone 24 hours without a traffic fatality, the torch glowed green; otherwise, it was red.

The father of one of my best friends from high school was the man who maintained the torch, a responsibility I found admirable. He later worked to design all of the neon at Galleria, a gigantic mall south of Birmingham. He was also a wonderful person.

Vulcan’s bare butt was a constant joke when we were growing up; two local disc jockeys tried to get the city should put Bermuda shorts on the statue. This was shortly after a local woman’s group had statues in one of the downtown parks covered to hide their nude forms.

When I was growing up, it was common for teenagers to end their dates by climbing Vulcan’s inside stairs and look at the city. Once my brother came home from a date with lipstick smeared on his white sports coat, but he said he’d gotten it by brushing against the wall inside Vulcan.

The statue was taken down in 1999 and fully restored, along with a new observation deck which opened in 2003. Shortly after the statue’s restoration began, I was on a buying binge on eBay, trying to put together an album of postcards of what Birmingham was like when she grew up there. I missed out on a set of five postcards, but the winning bidder tracked me down and we began emailing each other. I told him what I was doing, and he said he was gathering information for Vulcan’s restoration – I believe his firm was in Washington, DC. He asked me to scan and send him any postcards I had of Vulcan’s early years which I did, of course. In return, he sent me the non-Vulcan postcards for my album, plus a scan of the one of the statue. I like to think that in a small way I helped with the restoration. And in the restoration, Vulcan got back his spear.

A final note is about the wonderful Birmingham writer, the late Anne George who wrote the Southern Sisters mystery series. In her book Murder Gets a Life, fifth in the series cut short by Anne’s untimely death, the author includes a recipe for Vulcan’s Buns which I’ll gladly send anyone who requests it.

©2009 jgschenck