Cleaning up a Dirty Mess

This is a big, dirty economic mess we find ourselves in and without getting into the blame game, it's time to work on a realistic fix.

When something is dirty, you need to clean it up. There are a lot of causes to our mess, but for the purpose of this entry I am focused on one in particular, the outsourcing of jobs to other nations. This may have enhanced the profit margins of U.S. corporations, but it hasn't done a thing to help the bottom line of Americans whose jobs were sent overseas, nor has it helped the economies of those communities where those jobs were lost.

So I propose we use some SOAP to clean up this mess. Stop Outsourcing American Propersity would be an act of Congress to penalize U.S. corporations and Multinational Corporations that operate in the U.S. that take U.S. jobs and send them overseas to be done more cheaply. SOAP would do this by establishing the following conditions:

1. Corporations would no longer be able to take a tax deduction for the salaries and other expenses of jobs that are outsourced outside the U.S.

2. These corporations would also be subject to a Federal excise tax on the salaries of jobs outsourced outside the U.S. with the revenue from this tax being used to fund extended unemployment benefits and job re-training benefits for those whose jobs were lost through said outsourcing.

3. For manufacturers who outsource jobs overseas, additional tarriffs would be placed on goods they send back to the U.S. from their overseas factories

4. Tax credits would be given to corporations who had previously outsourced jobs and who bring them back to the U.S.

Apply a little SOAP to any dirty mess, add some elbow grease and effort and pretty soon the mess begins to get cleaned up.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign....in English

Every four years the little envelope arrives in the mail and you renew your California Driver's License. It is an automatic thing, no big deal and I hadn't given it any thought the last two renewals which were done through the mail. Knowing that this year was a renewal year, when the envelope arrived, I fully expected yet another auto-renewal.

I was in for a surprise. "Because your last two renewals were done by mail, this year you must come in to the DMV, make any changes in your personal information as required, and take a vision test. Since I wear glasses, the vision test is no big deal, they don't make you take it until you are so old that your corrected vision might still be suspect, and I have no objection to providing accurate personal info or giving up a thumbprint. What I object to are the horrendous wait-times one experiences at the DMV. Especially since, as the sign says "Due to budget cuts, walk-ins will be cut off at 3:00 p.m., and only clients with appointments will be allowed to join the lines after three.

Wait a second you say, if you have an appointment, why would you be getting in line? Because even though you have an appointment, that's just a way to get you into a shorter, much faster moving line. I had an appointment when I went to the DMV on Friday and after I checked in, five minutes before my appointed time, I found there were seven people in line ahead of me, all of whom also had appointments.

Eventually I was waited on, paid my fee and after posing for a photo, got my temporary license. It was while waiting for the photo I overheard someone being asked if there was a particular langauge they wanted to take the written exam for a driver's license in. The person responsed they wanted to take the exam in Vietnamese and that got me to thinking.

We are so sensitive to immigrants we not only do not require them to learn English, we let them take the driver's license exam in other languages. That might well be no big problem except for one tiny little matter. THE STREET SIGNS LIKE SPEED LIMITS, STOP, YIELD, ETC, ARE ALL IN ENGLISH.

If an immigrant, legal or illegal, can't read the sign, we shouldn't be licensing them to drive on our streets. I don't want to be driving on the same street with people who don't know that "STOP" means what it says.

They don't have to learn the entire English language, but they should certainly know enough to be able to read the street signs.

Can the Tabloid Media be Any Dumber??

Hotel mogul Barron Hilton has decided to follow in footsteps of other billionaires and donate most of his fortune to charity rather than to pass it on to his heirs. 97% of his estimated 2.3 billion dollar fortune will go to worthy causes. For those too lazy to do the math, that means that over 60 million dollars will go to his chosen heirs.

So the tabloid media headlines the story that it's Paris Hilton who is losing out. Pardon me, but did you idiots happen to be unaware of the fact that the man has eight children of his own, without worrying about his grandchildren? Would Paris really have gotten any large chunk of this man's fortune in any event, given his evident disdain for her antics? I think not.

Has it really been a year

since I wrote here? Seems difficult to believe, but it has been more than a year in fact. Sandy Shaw is going to be paroled, but that's not why I'm sitting here at 4:46 a.m., staring at a blank screen. I sit here pondering other things.

Why has Joe Francis become a multi-millionaire (over one hundred million at least) by simply asking young, sexy girls to bare their breasts for his video cameras and will anything stop the growth of "Girls Gone Wild?"

How many times can ESPN2 re-run the same episodes of the World Series of Poker 2007 with the exact same narration and staging?

Is Regis Philbin the living portrait of Dorian Gray?

Am I the real father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby?

How is it possible for the son of a Santa Monica dentist with so little in the way of brains or talent could gain so much fame and fortune (referring to Spencer Pratt)?

Isn't it bad enough we get spam emails about penis enlargement in our email boxes, did they have to add a 30 minute informercial on top of the spam??

Beverly Hills Business Cops

Today is Sunday, September 17th and if you were to stroll down Beverly Hill's famous Rodeo Drive and wander into any of the ritzy establishments that line this extraordinarily expensive thoroughfare (some of the world's most expensive retail space on a per square footage space), you probably wouldn't bother looking for, or even notice if they had a Beverly Hills Business license. But if you did, you would see that it had EXPIRED in December 2005 and the City has not issued a 2006 license to that business just yet.

How can such a broad statement be made, without knowing which business you might or might not wander into? Because as of this past Friday, September 15th, 2006, the City of Beverly Hills has not yet issued a single 2006 business license and according to an official in the city office that oversees such things, they have no estimated date of when those licenses will be issued.

This official, who would not give his name, said that there was some kind of computer problem that prevented the issuing of licenses and it had to do with ensuring that confidential information would not print on the licenses, which are required to be posted for the public to see.

Now according to Beverly Hills City regulation, all city business licenses exprie every December 31, and must be renewed in January. If they have had a computer problem of that magnitude, don't you think it would have been solved by now? It would seem that almost any kind of computer problem should be solvable within 3 or 4 months, let alone 7 or 8. The city says nothing, apparently is doing nothing, and businesses just continue to do business, with expired licenses.

If you pay for your license late, you pay a penalty. What penalty will the City of Beverly Hills pay, for failure to issue those license? Probably nothing more than a slight bit of embarassment.

If I lived in Beverly Hills, I would sure hope they have better organization for their public safety departments.

Inconsiderate potential employers

I am once again searching for a job and I want to relate an experience I had recently with one potential employer that I will someday write up as an example of how not to screen employees. It was rude, inconsiderate and wasted my time and theirs.

I won't mention the type of employer or their location, but they were in the market for more than one person to beef up their Human Resources department. They had advertised in several sources (newspaper, internet, etc) and I had responded to an ad on the net and I got a form email saying that they had reviewed my resume and they were inviting me to a "interview screening" on a certain date/time. No human contact, no check to see if that date/time was workable for me, just a form letter that said if the time didn't work, to respond cancelling.

I showed up. The screening consisted of tests, four in all, two of which had nothing to do with human resource work whatsoever. One involved reading a 3 page business description for over 30 minutes, without being allowed to take notes that could be retained, and then being tested on the functions of that business, including complex calculations using formulas that were in the description that were not available on the test sheet. The other non-HR related test was a MENSA type intelligence test that was fairly easy for the most part although the last three questions required having taken calculus, trig and advanced geometry at some point in your life, again, none of which you use on a regular basis in the Human Resource field unless you are developing HR software (none of these positions were doing that).

So after finishing all of these tests, I was supposed to interview with someone, but that person wasn't available and so I found myself interviewing with the company's president instead. He said and I quote "I don't know anything about HR and so I don't know what to ask you, but I was the only one available to meet with you, so here we are. So why would you want to work here?" Before I could answer he had to take three phone calls and then halfway through the answer, someone came in to join us, the person I was to interview with. A few minutes later when I was in the middle of answering the president's second question, there was a conference call that the president had to take and that was the end of my interview. Then, to add insult to injury, the form letter telling me that they had elected to pursue employment with other candidates was in my email box before I could make the short drive home.

Now there is no way they could have possibly evaluated all of those tests they gave me, especially since the two on HR were essay type in response, so that email wasn't based on the testing. So, why bother putting me through all that testing if they weren't going to use it in the evaluation process? I suspect they realized after they had me there that I was overqualified for the opening that they had brought me in for, and that my desired pay range was outside of what they were willing to pay. But that is no excuse for wasting my time.

If you are going to make someone spend three hours filling out tests, at least take the time to grade and evaluate those tests and in your response to that person, let them know how they did on those tests, which you can do even if you are telling them you've chosen to go with another candidate. It might take a little effort, but it is the right and considerate thing to do.

Pity Poor Chad Lowe

He wakes up to find out that his estranged wife, two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank has aired his substance abuse problem in public and he's angry....

I'm sorry, but since when did a public personage's substance abuse issue become a totally private matter, even when they've somehow managed to keep it a secret to some degree? Congratulations to the man for three years of sobriety, and in her remarks, Swank says she is proud of him for getting and staying sober. But what is wrong for her choice to say that his issue was at least partly to blame for their break-up? Given the public fascination for the details of the lives of celebrities, if some celeb wants to pass out details then more power to them.

It is more of a sad commentary on our society that we are so wrapped up in wanting to know those intimate details of the lives of celebrities which indicates the level of dissatisfaction with our own lives. As for Chad, stop being angry and focus on staying sober.

Oh Those Grapes are Indeed Sour

Pity poor Annie Proulx, author of the short story that led to the acclaimed film "Brokeback Mountain". She wanted the honey pot of gold known as Oscar for her story but instead of the Pooh wanna-be having the pot stuck on her nose, the Heffalumps stole the pot and gave it to the film Crash. At least that is how one must interpret her diatribe in "The Guardian".

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1727309,00.html

The critical portion of Ms Proulx's piece follows:

"We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline."

I wonder if she saw "Crash". I did. I thought it was excellent. I say the same thing about all five of the Best Picture nominees of this year. That she felt the need to name-call the winner in order to attempt to make a point illustrates the invalidity of her argument. Neither of these films were "trash", but were the roles reversed and writer Paul Haggis to have been the loser and to have written a diatribe where he referred to Proulx's piece as "Poke in the Back Mountain", cries of "You can't say that, that's homophobia" would have rung out from Proulx and her crowd. Further, if Ms Proulx is angered by the "conservative" side of Hollywood, where is her anger at the decision to re-write and re-cast characters that she wrote as Hispanic as Caucasians? Doesn't that bit of Hollywood conservativism bother her, or was that acceptable because it involved getting her work onto the big screen. Can you say "hypocrite" rather than "sour grapes"?

Award contests where members of an academy like the Oscars do not really choose a "Best" Picture. They hold an election campaign and choose what should more properly be called a "Most Popular" Picture. "Best" Picture awards should be chosen by panels of professional film critics.

As for Ms Proulx's sour grapes, let us hope that in the future, the woozles do not join the heffalumps in attempting to frustrate her efforts to stamp her signature on the fermenting culture.