that other guy’s thoughts

There it is,

There is my biggest problem with labor unions.

“Pinski said the company wants to exempt less-experienced workers from layoffs if they have skills deemed essential to production. The machinists want layoffs based strictly on seniority.”

Is there is any universe it which that is good policy?

When the next inevitable downturn in aviation comes, the union wants to lay off the young skilled workers so that crotchety old guys can keep earning their $40/hour jobs, defined pension, and full-health coverage. I believe we can file this one under “mortgaging our future and blowing the money on Viagra.”

Pop quiz, what do the following have in common?

Rodents
Lions
Labor Unions

Answer: They all eat their young.

Wouldn’t the viable alternative be to evaluate all workers based on their skill and productivity, then if you have to downsize, layoff the workers from the bottom up? It would increase productivity by getting rid of dead weight and ensure the company a quicker ascent and return to profitability. It would also mean, on average, that less people would lose their jobs.

How can anybody be against that? How can any union be against saving their members’ jobs?

Maybe this is the reason union membership has been dropping for a decade. You can blame it on outsourcing, but the real reason is that the younger workers are abandoning unions, because their unions sell them out.

I work with many younger workers who could be represented by the IAM, and I hear the same story again and again. It usually goes something like this, “I joined the union when I first started this job, went to a couple of meetings, read their bargaining agreement and realized that I would lose my job in any layoff because I’m new. The 55-year-old working next to me wouldn’t, simply because he’s been here for 25 years. I’m better and faster at my job, and he makes 3-times as much money. I wasn’t going to pay dues to save that jerk’s job, so I quit the union.”

I’ve heard at least four different variations on that story. It’s not a unique nor irrational sentiment to not want to be sold out. To have it done by your “defenders” is especially heinous. Until the sentiment changes, the preservation of mediocrity will always be my biggest problem with unions.

Have you seen this commercial from American Century Investments with the business guy? He’s all grumpy and brushes off some guy who stops to talk with him in the hall. But it in end he goes to visit some kids dressed up like a rabbit. It’s mildly entertaining, but I don’t like the sentiment. The purpose is encourage people to set up a foundation with their company, but what they are really saying is:

It’s okay to be a dick, as long as you dress up like a bunny for the kids.

I don’t like the approach of evaluating deeds on average either. Doing good doesn’t offset your bad deeds. They are still bad deeds. Your quality as a person is not a sum of the good and bad actions.

If you give away a million dollars to save a thousands African children from dying of malaria, it doesn’t mean you can murder your neighbor and still be a good person.

Crazy lady, thinking I was her nephew, sent me an e-mail with explicit directions to her house in Ft. Collins, CO from the Denver airport. So explicit in fact that I followed them all the way to her house using Google Maps.

It’s a good looking house with a 2-car garage and a nice picket fence.

This is why you should always double check e-mail addresses before you press “send.”

Ticket Taxes Fund Corporate Jets

There is really only one word that can describe this article:

Hackery

“The federal government has taken billions of dollars from the taxes and fees paid by airline passengers every time they fly and awarded it to small airports used mainly by private pilots and globe-trotting corporate executives.”

In the world of US aviation, commercial operators (from an ER135 to an A380) pay taxes based on ticket sales, taxes they directly pass along to each passenger. General Aviation (from a Cessna 152 to a Gulfstream V pays through taxes on the fuel they burn.

A portion of all that money goes to the yearly operation of the FAA, such as air traffic control, maintenance inspection, and aircraft certification. The rest goes to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund The trust fund is used to finance improvements to the aviation infrastructure across the country, be it repaving a runway, replacing radar sites, or even building an all new airport.

That is what Bob Porterfield, writer idiot decepticon hack of the Associated Press is referring too.

The reason we do this, is because a wide-spread and well-maintained infrastructure of airports is in the best national interest of the country, in terms of growth, health, safety, and security. It’s the same reason we have an interstate highway system.

When disaster strikes, natural or man-made, how does help get there? With the help of a local G.A. airport.

When thousands of cattle are stranded by snow drifts in Western Colorado, starving and on the verge death, which would cause food shortage, how do they get food? National Guard helicopters operating out of a nearby GA airport drop hay and feed.

When thousands of people are stranded on their houses by 8 feet of sea water, how do we get them out? We run a massive evacuation through a local GA airport.

When a heart and lung transplant patient finally gets a new chance at life, how do you think the organs got there? Dimes to dollars it was through a GA airport.

GA fuels growth everywhere and it’s a lifeline to the rural communities across the country.

Of course there is not one mention of any of that in the article. It’s all about wealthy fat-cats picking your wallet when you go to Aunt Regina’s funeral in Tampa.

This isn’t a story and it’s certainly not news, it’s a puff piece for the ATA written by a weak-willed man who is obviously bad at his job.

When I was looking for a job straight out of college 2 years ago, I proceeded with a Ulysses S. Grant battle plan. throw 100,000 troops into every battle, and eventually you’ll win. So I applied to every entry-level engineering position in the aerospace business, at least 3 times. I sent out paper copies and e-mail attachments of my resume to everybody I ever met at any company that had anything to do with aircraft. I had 2 or 3 profiles on Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Hotjobs.com, and every other job search website in existence. I was willing to go anywhere and do anything, I would have accepted a job for 75% of the going rate. My over-reaching strategy could be summed up in 2 words, “Saturation” and “Desparation.” So what was the fruit of my massive labor?

1 single offer. But one is all you need, and this one worked out swimmingly.

But now, two years later, without so much as a single application, I get called up and asked to interview for a job at another company. An odd occurrence for sure, but not enough to warrant an entire post on it’s peculiarity.

A 2nd request for a different job halfway across the country? Now that is post-worthy. But that’s where I find myself after being contacted by a head-hunter looking for a structural analysis engineer for some contract work out of El Segundo, California.

The Times, They are a-Change’n!

I recently got an unsolicited request to interview for a new job. The job is identical to what I do now but at a different company, so I have no intention of taking it. I don’t what to give up all my 401(k) match, 2 years seniority, and 5 minute commute to do a job I’m already over-educated for and would pose no real challenge.

I am however, curious as to how much somebody else is willing to pay me.

Is it ethical to go through the interview process, essentially wasting others time, just to satisfy my curiosity? I don’t think so, but I’d like to hear more opinions.

I can’t bring myself to feel anything but sadness. No rage, no pity, no understanding or frustration. I don’t feel heartfelt condolences for their families, I just feel sadness. It seeps up from my bones, it darkens all perspective, and will no doubt keep me awake for hours tonight.

These were kids with futures, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers; guilty of nothing but wanting to be better people and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And now they’re gone, robbed of their future; robbed by a failed mind and humanity’s capacity for destruction.

It didn’t have to be college, it didn’t have to be Virginia. An office in Ohio, a shopping mall in Arizona, it could have been anywhere.

The logician in me says that the alternative is worse. That a world so restrictive as to prevent acts of violence also represses acts of hope or expression. A world so designed isn’t worth living. My sense of history tells me this truth.

But I can’t help but feel sad about it all.

I don’t have the words right now, so I’ll leave it to them…

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down

The telex machine is kept so clean
and it types to waiting world.
And Mother feels so shocked
Father’s world is rocked
And their thoughts turn to
Their own little girl
Sweet 16 ain’t that peachy keen
No it ain’t so neat to admit defeat,
They can see no reasons
Cos there are no reasons
What reasons do you need to be shown

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down

All the playing’s stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with her toys awhile
And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning
That the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles
And the captain tackles
With the problems and the how’s and why’s
And he can see no reasons
Cos there are no reasons
What reasons do you need to die

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down

-I don’t like Monday’s, Boomtown Rats

“More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedom and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people’s strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arise. . . . every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. . . . We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars.”

- President Josiah Bartlet, from ‘20 Hours in America’, West Wing Season 4

Here’s what I don’t get about CBS firing Don Imus

How do we expect people who grew up and were full-fledged adults before the civil right movement to live up to our hyper-sensitive demands for public displays of tolerance?

Don Imus is 417-years old. The culture of what is acceptable public discourse, what’s funny, and what constitutes racism has changed so much since he began broadcasting. I’m surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time.

What was the bad part? Was it “nappy-headed?” because nappy is a term often used within the black community to describe one another’s hair. Typically derogatory, but not always. In the movie Barbershop II, the main characters’ livelihoods are threatened by an new shop opened across the street, the name? “Nappy-Cutz”

Was it the “ho’s” that is so objected to? Because “ho’s” and “bitches” are littered throughout hip-hop lyrics. I don’t see round the clock protests at the doors of Roc-a-Fella Studios or Death Row Records.

Was it the sentiment? I doubt it. Imus was calling the girls ugly when compared to the Tennessee opponents. Do you think there’d be such uproar if he said, “I watched the Women’s college basketball championship game last night. The Rutgers players were ugly, the Tennessee players were cute.” Probably not.

So why the hubbub bub? You caught a elderly white man in an attempting to be funny by using the physical characteristics of a group of people to insinuate they were ugly. What a crusader for peace!

I can live with all that, but I can’t buy this:

“There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society,” CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision. “That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision.”

Bullshit.

I’ll say it again: “Bullshit”

This all happened 2 full weeks ago. If somebody CBS was actually pissed off, they would’ve fired him the next day. But instead they waited to see how much of a ruckus it would cause. They’re not firing him because he called some 20-year olds, “nappy-headed ho’s.” They’re firing him because some other people lathered themselves into a vitriol-spitting rage.

Call it what you will, but there’s nothing about this that is fair.

Will changing jobs lead to more pay - or less?

What pearls of wisdom will Anne Fisher, Fortune senior writer, give us to shed light on the subject?

“researchers found that an eye-popping 92% [of job changers] won equivalent or better salaries, benefits, and titles.”

Wow, really? You’re really telling me if I change jobs, I’ll get more money? Well…no, actually you’re not.

You’re actually telling me that 92% of people who have changed jobs have gotten more money. Which of course begs to ask the question, “Who are these 8% of people who took pay cuts to go somewhere else?”

This article could be subtitled, “How to use misleading statistics to make a point.”

There is inevitable bias in the sampling, by only surveying those people who have actually changed jobs and not all people who were looking to change jobs, the researchers resigned there study to putting a number to an obvious fact. People only make changes they view as beneficial to them.

If the newly crowned Hawker Beechcraft offered me a job with a 30% pay cut and Boeing offers me a job with a 30% pay increase, which do you suppose I’d go for?

There is a difference between using statistics to make a measured observation of the world around us, and using them to find insight into a particular problem. Seeing as how this was a response to a guy in Pittsburgh who was asking about pay-leveling and changing jobs, I think you picked the wrong one.