Saturday, November 12, 2016

Strolling Thru Twitter: Still Picking Up the Pieces

Good morning, everyone.  Sally's away on business, & I don't start teaching swimming for a couple of hours.  The kids are still asleep, and coffee's on.

Let's see what's on Twitter.


From the article:
"AS MORE CVs glitter with university degrees and straight A-grades, companies have devised a new tiebreaker for admission to the best jobs: the internship. Careers in finance, the media, politics and other popular fields now often begin with a temporary stint lasting from a few weeks to more than a year. The government reckons that at any time up to 70,000 interns are toiling in Britain. Yet about a third are unpaid. This gives rich, London-based candidates an edge."

 This is the kind of thing that caused me to say yesterday that those with money will get further ahead in Trump's America.  We've already seen cases against free internships come up in the U.S. with various courts siding various ways, depending on the educational value of the internships on offer.  You can do something for your education for free or as part of a class assignment, but if you're working for a company, you have to be paid at least minimum wage.

Entertainment companies in NYC lost this argument recently on the basis that their interns have been little more than glorified gofers, fetching coffee, etc--for free--in exchange for the chance to make contacts in the industry.  When those contacts failed to materialize in tangible ways--after a year (or more) of unpaid work--former interns sued and won.

The takeaway here is that this is very much about who you know, both before and after the internship.

Trump may have run on an anti-elite platform, but his Vice has already started doing most of the work associated with running the government, and Trump himself is very much about "keeping it all in the family".  The cabinet is already being filled with old-school GOP insiders.  What's actually happening is therefore almost exactly the reverse of what was promised--hilariously so.

As I said on Friday, I don't think any of this is going to hurt me at all.  But if you're out in rural America waiting for the factories to come back...  Ouch.



I do not think Sanders would have won.  He certainly deserves a place in the conversation as the Dems try to pick up the pieces, but had Sanders won, Bloomberg would have entered the race as a centrist 3rd-party candidate.  And I think Bloomberg would have won that 3-way contest pretty easily.

But yeah, that was when I personally lost the election.  Mike Bloomberg was my candidate.



Yeah.  This is why the protesters are premature.

Want to help?  Join the ACLU.  No, really.  They've been doing the work you've only just realized is important for many decades.



An interesting question.  Also: will the GOP Congress support such a move?



"At the Pentagon, Hunter said, he would work to overturn a string of initiatives launched by President Barack Obama’s administration that he believes make the country less safe, such as opening up infantry and special-operations units to women. 

 “'I’d reverse (that policy) immediately,' Hunter said.

 "He also wants to preserve the Army’s armored brigades and fix a naval force that’s increasingly dependent on vessels like the nimble but small littoral combat ship, which Hunter called a 'Navy screw-up and a congressional screw-up.'”

 Cautiously optimistic here.  I'm not against women in the infantry or in Ranger School, but some of the rest of this is much-needed reform.  Procurement has gotten completely out of control, especially on big-ticket innovations, and the guys I know who are still on active duty have been going crazy from all the non-mission-critical bullshit they now have to accomplish on an ongoing basis.

Prediction: Lots of feelings get hurt, both in and out of the Pentagon.





Final score was 91-77, with Army winning the second half.  Army's got a new coach this year, but this was a decent result.



I'm out.  Happy Saturday.

Go Army!  Beat Notre Dame!!! 
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