Some of you may have heard the story on NPR this week about how the Bush administration is proposing changes to the overtime rules. They are touting it as a way to give more OT to some million low wage workers. But, what it’s really about is not allowing overtime to many more millions. Anybody who makes over $22,000 and supervises two or more people. So, your 7-11 manager? Executive, ineligible for overtime. Your McDonald’s boss? Management: ineligible.
NPR pointed out that the last day to comment is Monday. I looked high and low on the Labor Department website and couldn’t figure out how. So, I called. They told me it may be too late. Got another number. Was transferred. Finally got the email address. If they want to keep people from commenting this much, I’d say it’s worth it so send an email.
HERE’S WHO YOU WRITE:
whd-reg@fenix2.dol-esa.gov
HERE’S WHERE THE INFO IS
http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/
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Everyone remembers the videotape of Andy Card whispering into President Bush’s ear on September 11th. It was at a Florida elementary school, and Card tells the President: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” The President then looks into the distance. Some understood the look as a summoning of strength, others saw bewilderment. In any case, take a look at the next five minutes of the video, courtesy of Memory Hole. They don’t end the photo-op. The Secret Service doesn’t hustle the President out of the room. Ari Fleischer and Andy Card wait patiently. Remember what were you doing that day? The President sits there and does nothing.
The videotape doesn’t provide good context, which is unfortunate. This could be a clever edit job — for all we know, Card whispers to the President at the end of the video. It hardly matters, though. The image of the President and advisors finishing their self-serving photo-op while the country is being attacked and before the Pentagon was hit is heartbreaking. How does this match with the other accounts from that day? The President left the photo-op and proceeded to fly around the Southeast until the afternoon. There was confusion in the Situation Room as to whether planes could be shot down — eventually, Dick Cheney made the call. This video tells us that the President wasn’t rushed to safety. He wasn’t consulting with his aides. He was hanging out. Jokes about Cheney, Rove, et al being the real power behind the Presidency are common — after watching this, they’re not funny. They’re terrifying.
Arabic-speaking Lieutenant-General John Abizaid is replacing Tommy Franks. In his confirmation hearing, he admitted to being confused about the missing weapons of mass destruction. “Intelligence was the most accurate that I’ve ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the operational level and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction.”
Every month, Google takes the results of the previous month’s deep crawl, and pushes the results up to the Google servers. This results in some weird and unpredictable search results as each of the thousands of Google servers receive the updates. This is called the “Google Dance.” At WebmasterWorld this month, Google Dances were given names, like Hurricanes. As we write this, Esmerelda is hitting the Google servers.
The recent updates have been strange, though. This points to some major changes in the way Google works. In the past, Google has operated two sets of web crawlers: the “fresh” crawl and the “deep” crawl. The deep crawl is exhaustive, and runs once a month. The fresh crawl is superficial, and runs continuously. Recently, webmasters have noticed that the deep crawler has disappeared, and instead the fresh crawler is behaving like the deep crawler. The conclusion is that Google is moving towards a more continuous update process. Some speculate that Google’s responding to the prospect of a Microsoft search engine as well as increased competition from the existing search services. Our pet theory is that PigeonRank is finally being implemented.
A more thorough explaination can be found at Kuro5hin.
You love wasabi. You love sorbet. Dr. Memory brings you wasabi sorbet. Warning: if you try this at home, wasabi powder is strongly contraindicated.
David Plotz has a nice piece at Slate on Iraq: The Computer Game. Everyone’s heard of the Department of Defense using shoot-’em-ups like Doom to train soldiers, but another game genre is starting to take hold as well: massively multiplayer role-playing games. If you can create a virtual world, like the Sims or EverQuest, that matches real-world conditions, the outcome of the game can provide hints for how the real world will unfold.
This isn’t just blue-sky thinking, either. General Wesley Clark commissioned a didactic system called SENSE, in which each player played a stakeholder in postwar Bosnia. He had the new Bosnian government play different roles in the game, to show them the consequences of different policies. The game got so heated that the opposition leader had to go on television after one session and explain why the country fell apart while he was playing the role of President.
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Anyone who thinks for a living has been plagued by “business talk.” “Synergy”, “leverage”, “touch base”, etc. They’re weapons in the hand of consultants, and can be shields for the stupid. More than anything, they’re shibboleths, a substitute for real thinking. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu helped create this golem, but now they’ve seen the error of their ways. To aid in the battle against handwaving, they’re released a piece of free software: Bullfighter. It analyzes documents for these bullshit words, and ranks them accordingly. Oh! Those bandy-legged roustabouts! They’re in touch with my inner Dilbert! They understand what’s it’s like here in the trenches! They sympathize with me! They’re here to help. Physician, heal thyself.
Leave it to the gadget fetishists in Japan to give us the GPS collar. If you lose your dog, the collar will be able to locate the dog within 200 feet.
OnePeople has no plans to visit hipster hangouts, but it’s nice to know that superfuturecity can help us find them.
Kuro5hin is running a good piece on political classification systems. The overview of the field is more interesting than the model proposed.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
