Tag: employment

Sunday Train: Going to Disneyland, Disneyworld, and Other Adventures

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Huh, seems me that whatever the state of my various concerns, the agenda of the Sunday Train has been taken over by the White House … funny how announcing the recipients of a total of $8b will do that.

The Transport Politic (aka Yonah Freeman and the TTP commentariat) has a very complete rundown. The allotments over $200m are:

  • California, $2,344m
  • Florida: $1,250m
  • Illinois: $1,236m
  • Wisconsin: $822m
  • Washington: $590m
  • North Carolina: $545m  
  • Ohio: $400m

So, what’s the money for? Join me below the fold.

Sunday Train: A Train Running A Profit is Charging Too Much

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Note that the statement is abbreviated for the title. The full statement is, a common carrier like a train, bus, or plane that running a profit based on passenger revenue while paying its full operating and capital cost is charging too much for its tickets.

The radical abbreviation of the title is in part because of the radical abbreviation of the lie that is commonly used as a frame. The lie is that a common carrier like a train, bus or plane that is paying for its full operating and capital costs out of passenger revenue ought to run a profit, commonly expressed as a charge of, “SERVICE_XYZ is losing money, it needs to be reformed!“, which assumes that Service_XYZ is supposed to be making a profit.

And, of course, in the sense described above, if its a common carrier transport service, of course it shouldn’t be making a profit. And further, if under the above conditions, if its making a profit, you’re doing it wrong. In the sense given above, PROFIT=FAIL.

Sunday Train: Freight and Passenger Trains Should Be Friends

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Flying home from the Economist’s national conference Atlanta (see note1) my brilliant entertainment plan to pass the day lost flying home from Atlanta fell apart.

I could not attend even the 8am session on Tuesday, because the flight left at 11:15, and I was warned about TSA security theater delays. So I got on the MARTA train around 8:30, to stand in line to check-in, to stand in line to get through screening, to get to the gate and wait, to get on the plane which waited in line for a runway. It was, however, only half an hour in the air, so that fact that with a 125mph train to Charlotte I could have gone to the morning conference session and arrived in Charlotte sooner is neither here nor there.

Then I had a 3hr+ layover in Charlotte until the plane back home to NE Ohio. But I had my Netflix and some FullMetal Alchemist DVD’s, so no problem. Except my portable DVD player decided to stop working (see note2), so there were no DVD’s. Which meant I was forced to fall back on a “pbook” (paper book) I had brought with me – Waiting on a Train, which meant that I finally finished it (and still had several hours to wait after I had done so).

And in particular read the fascinating discussion of the touchy relationship between freight and passenger trains. Regular readers will know that this is a critical point: indeed, the entire Steel-Interstate strategy to getting Higher Speed Rail for Appalachia rests on passenger trains running on infrastructure provided in support of 100mph electric freight trains.

I’m Unemployed again and losing hope

Crossposted at Daily Kos

     So the bad news is I lost my job. The good news is, well, coming soon, I guess. If anyone knows of quality employment that can be found in NYC, please let me know about it in the comments below.

     My little adventure as a Paid Progressive Activist (Fundraising) has come to an end because I didn’t make my quotas.

     Our daily quotas were $125 a day or $625 a week. Mind you, we’re standing outside, freezing our asses off while busy NYers scuttle by, bracing themselves against the wind. It is not easy to ask for charitable donations in such conditions. If you make your quota you get paid $375 for the week plus bonuses. If not, you get min. wage. I raised $525 in 5 days, but it broke down to 28 the first day, 10 the second, 425 the 3rd, 5 on the fourth and 20 on the last, so I was dismissed. I raised $525 and will get paid min. wage at 40 hours for the week. It seems a neat little scam, don’t it? You can pay people min. wage then sack them the first week whether they are performing or not. Sucks. At least I’ll get that one pay check though.

    Frankly, I am running out of hope for both myself and the political/economic system that is broken beyond repair.

    More below the fold.

Clean Energy Jobs go swimming

Clean Energy Jobs Go Swimming: $300 million per year for 10,000 jobs

This is part of a series of brief posts on ‘clean energy jobs‘ opportunities for sparking meaningful employment, quickly, in the United States.

Legislation is, they say, analogous to making sausage. Sometimes, in the mixing and mashing, seemingly well-intentioned and sensible options can create counter-productive situations and leave many valued goods on the table. One small example of this could open the door to creating employment, lowering costs for state & local governments (including educational institutions), improving ‘customer’ satisfaction, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

When it came to the stimulus package earlier this year, “swimming pools” were explicitly excluded from ARRA funding mechanisms.  While, amid serious economic stress and government investment to keep the economic from continuing in freefall, it might have seemed morally appropriate to do this, this restriction simply flies in the face of reality and good sense.

Build Steel Interstates with $1/barrel and 1% of the Carbon Fee

crossposted from Agent Orange

The Steel Interstate concept (tagpage) is one that I have been discussing, off and on, in my Sunday Train series. The basic idea is to electrify the Department of Defense STrategic RAil Corridor NETwork, STRACNET (right), and establish 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths, to allow an estimated (Millenium Institute pdf) half of long haul trucking to shift to electric freight rail at a saving of about 10% of our current oil imports.

This diary is about how to overcome the only thing standing in its way: Public Finance. And that is to impose a $1/barrel tax on imported petroleum and petroleum products, and allocate 1% of any Carbon Fee to financing construction.

The Meritocracy Myth

I’ve recently relocated to the Washington, D.C. area. In so doing, I’ve recognized the vast amount of good that can be accomplished with a combination of concentration of wealth and an educated populace situated in one precise location.  The all-important achievement of critical mass proves itself essential yet again.  Still, I have to say that I won’t ever be inclined to take these gifts for granted, like so many in this town seem inclined to do. Growing up where I did, even in the suburban South, I was raised without certain benefits and expectations upon which residents in this city would pitch a fit in protest if they were ever not provided.  For example, I did not have the ability to utilize adequate public transportation. Nor was I inundated with places to purchase organic produce or earth-conscious consumer goods.  I was never reminded to bring my own reusable grocery bags to the supermarket. Walmarts were never banned, instead they were embraced. Republicans were the people one lawn over, not someone miles away far removed from the hustle and bustle of the city.  Likely some family in the neighborhood refused to celebrate Halloween, leaving two bowls full of untouched religious literature instead of candy, thoroughly disappointing trick o’treaters in the process.

Every day on my way back and forth to do daily errands, I wade through a stream of college students whose parents must overwhelmingly well-off.  I know the parents must be, because these students never seem to have to work and I doubt they could afford the things they have on a waiter or waitresses’ salary.  Their privilege shows plainly, down to their expensive clothing, high-priced accessories, and nonchalant, dismissive attitudes.  Despite my best intentions, I admit with no small discomfort that I find it hard not to resent them.  In my own college days, admittedly still not that far in the rearview mirror, I recognize some slight similarities between them as they are now and the person I was a few years back, though the differences are far more glaring.  In seeking to avoid building my own personal mythology upon a foundation of smug superiority or paternalistic moralizing, I instead share my own story.

Though I was a scholarship student, my full college tuition was awarded on the basis of my being disabled.  Though there had been ominous rumblings ever since my birth, namely that I was a frequently sick child, the proper onset of my illness did not arrive until midway through high school.  After frequent, lengthy hospitalizations and other disease-related distractions, my grade point average plummeted.  Until then, I had been on track to go to more than a few schools whose very names themselves connoted mystical respect and unquestioned prestige.  However, by the time college appeared on the horizon and emerged from my latest pleasant hospital stay, I only qualified for in-state offers.  As such, I made my final decision purely on the sensible basis that I ought to stay close to my doctors, since it was highly likely I’d need extensive treatment in the near future. In hindsight, it was a wise decision, and one that proved to be correct, but to this day I have a hard time choking back my bitterness.  How I would have loved attending a prestigious school in a solidly blue city!

At the time, I didn’t realize that often the quality of instruction and educational merit of colleges and individuals isn’t vast, especially since college success is directly proportional to what one puts into it, but what cannot be discounted in the least are the networking opportunities that arise from attending a well-connected school.  What has made my recent job search difficult is that I simply did not have the opportunity to attend a noteworthy college or university.  I do recognize that this fact is due to external factors upon which I had absolutely no control and, as such, it’s not like my own laziness or academic underachievement are to blame.  Still, in this abysmal job climate, who you know, or who you know who knows someone who will go to bat for you is much more important than achievement or merit.  This is especially true in politics and probably has always been.

For example, my tenth grade English teacher became Laura Bush’s press secretary based on having been in a sorority with someone’s daughter, whose father happened to be a well-connected Republican.  On the Democratic side of the ball, I note that this past weekend I attended a huge house party held not far from Capitol Hill. Most of those who attended were Hill staffers, and though it would be a vast oversimplification to state that most of them clearly had not gotten their jobs based on their intellectual prowess alone, they did give every impression of being of the former frat boy persuasion.  One could also safely wager that they had achieved their positions in much the same fashion as my former teacher.  I need to point out here that those of us who believe in government’s inherent capability to skillfully, and competently solve a multitude of problems might have emerged somewhat less certain of it after spending a few hours uneasily rubbing shoulders and listening to conversations.

Andrew Jackson was the first President to advance the spoils system without any apology for the procedure, but I doubt he was the first to utilize it to reward supporters and well-connected constituents.  A rather large and glaring discrepancy exists between the system as it is and the one upon which we place our full trust.  Over the years, a multitude of reforms have been passed to level the playing field, which include everything from Affirmative Action to campaign finance reform, but regardless of intent, interpersonal connections or the lack thereof circumvent our best intentions.  To some degree, it’s understandable that we function in such a way. Anyone in a management position will feel more comfortable hiring someone whom he or she knows he or she can trust or whose good name can be reliably vouched for by someone he or she knows personally.  Even so, it’s people like me who never had the ability to make those sorts of connections in the first place who end up shortchanged.  Nor is this a system that leaves out purely the disabled.

Many highly-qualified candidates get shuffled to the bottom of the deck automatically. If they do not have an in to the established network, then they are much less likely to make it past the very first step.  Nor is this regrettable situation solely applicable to job seekers. It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized how overwhelmingly the Northeast corridor shapes so much of our national discourse and our national identity.  I have observed that those in the news business at times express a justified consternation at the kind of unilateral narratives that are advanced by the Washington-to-New York pipeline at the expense of the rest of the country’s news agencies.  Sometimes these mini-narratives hold water but often they prove themselves to be not quite as notable, nor as important as they’d like to believe.  Even as a child, I recognized how even the stories and historical anecdotes found in the textbooks I read in elementary school focused heavily upon the cities of the East Coast, as though by implication they themselves were all of America.  If the South, by contrast, was ever mentioned, one either read of a romanticized notion of chivalry and gallantry nearly a century out of date or as an invocation to hear again of the shameful history of a racist past—a past never allowed to be forgotten.  At times I feel a sort of kinship with modern day Germans, since I imagine they are never allowed to forget about the Holocaust, either.

As for the problem between the favoritism we have and the meritocracy we believe we have, this is a disconnect that will not change so long as the existing power structure does not recognize the problem and does not make the needed internal reforms.  Much like the entitled rich kids I file past every day, I doubt most even contemplate their own complicity in a system that, if they ever were questioned about it, they would wholly justify by saying that they were merely the latest to inherit it.  Like so many institutionalized and enmeshed inequalities, few feel any compulsion whatsoever towards reform because few give it serious contemplation.  If you’d like my unvarnished opinion, I think that until we get this particularly unfortunate discriminatory practice under control, we’ll run into complication after complication in every other reform measure we push.  It has been my experience that the most virulent ills are not the ones we can plainly see, but the overarching underpinnings and framework that are common to everyone, regardless of identity group or leaning. The basic premise of preferential treatment is not necessarily unjustified, but when we assume that brand name, family name, or college name trump everything else, then we run into massive problems.  The clothes do not make the emperor.

Behind Enemy Lines

As I have been unemployed, or at least severely underemployed for the past several months, I decided yesterday to make another attempt at making some income.  A job poster advertised the need for rudimentary data entry, an activity that, with time, usually turns one’s brain to gelatin, but at least it pays.  After being ushered in to a well-furnished and crisply professional business waiting room, I was taken to a much less well-furnished interior comprised of the maze of the stereotypical generic office.  With a bland name like CMDI, I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what sort of work was needed or even what the nature of it would be.  The matter-of-fact, perfunctory demeanor and expensive clothes of the receptionist provide no indication of what one ought to expect when one’s name is called.

So Yeah, I’m Employed Now, Thanks!

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

After over a year, nearly losing my house, cars and other possessions, I have obtained gainful employment.  It came after applying for hundreds of jobs, not just in my area, but across the country, for anything I am qualified for.

I didn’t do it myself.  It came with help from friends, my network, my family, this community, and from the government.  

Follow me over the fold to tell you about how I see us all as interdependent and what a truly great this country is, if you choose to see it.  

In Their Boots: Holiday Special

Topic: Care Packages for the Troops; Jacob’s Light

Originally aired on December 17th, 2008

Dorine Kenney lost her only child Jacob to the Iraq war. Eleven days after Jacob’s death, on his 29th birthday, Dorine sent a care package to one of her son’s friends still serving in Iraq. This single act spawned The Jacob’s Light Foundation, an organization to honor her son and care for those still fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military Suicide: The War Within

Brave New Foundation:  In Their Boots Episode 23

Topic: Military Suicide Featuring: The War Within: Chapter 1

Originally Aired on December 3rd, 2008 and Will Continue on December 10th, 2008

The War Within

A Marine Reservist seeks help from the Veterans Administration to heal his invisible wounds. But like too many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, his condition worsens, his medical needs go un-met, and he ultimately takes his own life. For the past four years, his family has been advocating to prevent other veterans from experiencing a similar fate.

In Their Boots: Veterans Day 11-11-08 Special

Veteran’s Day Special Chapter 1

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