I Can't Hear The Excuses Now

Well, I used to feel fairly good, or at least okay, about having worked for Verizon Wireless. I had even been in the habit, up until now, of telling my girlfriend she should switch to Verizon, iPhone be damned. Then I read this:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2167/t/5243/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27824

Cooperatives And Other Thoughts

1) For all the talk of a public plan for health care, the myriad lies and distortions that have been brought to bear against health care reform, and the talk of health co-ops, I have to say that co-ops are not without merit as a system of administering needs and utilities and services. Co-ops can take many forms, such as utility co-ops and credit unions.

Working for a credit union, I can say that they work as a viable alternative to banks, depending on what you are looking for and how the community of the credit union operates, what sort of offerings are used, and what sort of costs and expenditures are at play.

My credit union charges very few fees and offers many perks to members. Revenue is mostly earned from interest on loans to members. If people participate and buy into the notion of their own responsibility to the credit union as a whole, the relationship is beneficial to all.

The trouble, of course, with this idea is that there is this misconception of what public or communal options would be. There is a notion of cooperation and community that gets lost behind notions of 'communism', as if that is an inherent evil.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the general public often doesn't research the implications of efforts to change the status quo. The people who do the research are naturally the ones who have an economic stake in the status quo, and they are then in position to pick and choose what items the media should focus on.

Are there flaws with the notions of a public or community-based option? Yes, but it has to be better than a capitalist-based system, where the benefit of the patient is not necessarily the benefit of the provider. In a public health care system, if a member is healthy and taken care of, that would seem to benefit the system as a whole.

2) On a related note, it is interesting how a subtle change in work routine can re-energize you. I am on a temporary assignment away from the call center, yet doing substantially the same sort of work, contacting members, being contacted by members, helping them with their needs, concerns, and questions, maintaining the relationship between the member and the credit union. Nevertheless, I am feeling more engaged with work than I have in a while.

Of course, it helps that I also won two more tickets to a Giants game for next Thursday; once again, work was directly responsible for the preservation of my one game a month program.

To be satisfied with the place where you work, and to be able to live a rich life outside of work, that's quite enough to be getting on with.

A Tale Of Two Contract Disputes

Ah, Labor: the virtue of the working class; the sufferings of a mother bringing another future worker into the world to compete for resources; the source of hundreds of thousands of sports fanatics around the world. And typically, the side I would choose in any dispute.

A Bay Area Rapid Transit Union is calling a strike as of the end of service on Sunday night, which would shut down the central spine of the local public transit hub, overloading the other transit agencies and leaving thousands of workers free to worry less about whether their own jobs are secure, because they will be worrying about just how they will get to those jobs in the first place.

Keep in mind, we are also approaching the Labor Day weekend, when the Bay Bridge will be shut down for construction efforts. That could be interesting.

Why am I talking about a labor strike in a sports blog? Well, every story of a dispute needs a good cop/bad cop angle, and in this case, the BART union is the good cop. Even though the average BART worker salary is more than twice what I make.

The bad cop, sadly, comes from the world of sports.

The bad cop is San Francisco 49ers top draft pick, Michael Crabtree, who is threatening to hold out for an entire season. He wants to be paid 'top 5' money, commensurate with what someone drafted among the top five selections would earn, even though he was drafted at number 10.

A few disclaimers on this before people doubt my sympathy for the 'laborer': yes, as far as the BART union goes, it would be a hard job; they deserve to be well paid; and historically, management has been known to use economic downturns to stick it to the worker. As far as an athlete goes, yes, they can be considered labor, and have had legitimate labor issues over the decades--watch certain episodes of Ken Burns' excellent Baseball documentary; and yes, sports are physically demanding, with many consequences for the athlete in later years, so they do need to be well paid to take care of themselves and their family in later years.

But Michael Crabtree, regardless of wanting top five money without the rationale of, you know, actually being in the top five, seriously, can you really not live with whatever you are certain to earn as a top draft pick in the NFL? Every year the trend has been for players and agents to ask for more and more money. This is not a cost-of-living sort of trend; this is nothing to do with inflation. If Crabtree gets the sort of money he is looking for, according to SI.com's John Lopez, he would earn $3 million more per season than Jerry Rice ever made. Michael Crabtree is not yet Jerry Rice.

Michael, if you think you're going to struggle to make it in this admittedly expensive city, I can tell you where the cheap sushi and the good happy hour deals can be found.

Here's the thing: Crabtree's holdout may be a negotiating ploy, but it sure seems tactless, to say the least. Assuming you want to be a success at the game, and assuming you want fans to love you, don't you think you should avoid pissing everyone off as to how much money you think you deserve?

Sports are simply sports. This is a country where socialism is considered a dirty word--it's considered this mostly by people who don't pay attention to what socialism really is and whether it might be beneficial to them, instead relying on the advice of people with a vested interest in capitalistic trends. Nevertheless, until our currency becomes useless for anything except kindling, I don't think athletes should take our 'free market' spirit for granted, because it isn't like they are short of cash.

How much do you really need to live well?

Selling A Pelican A Cell Phone

Watching Mad Men is to watch a world of illusion and images, pretense and affectation, a polished surface above . . . what? They are constantly looking for ways to sell things: cigarettes, lipstick, Nixon, themselves. The irony is delicious, seeing the characters dismiss John F. Kennedy as a threat to Nixon; as a modern audience, we know of the effect that the camera and television had on that campaign.

But I don't know that our world is any different than theirs. We're always looking to sell . . . stuff. Advertising is ubiquitous, in sometimes hilarious ways.

Look at this article from www.sfgate.com. It's an article about a pelican that swallowed a cell phone. The article is sponsored by Verizon Wireless. The first line of the article is even "Can you hear me now?" That's just perfect absurdity.

In the magazine Travel And Leisure, published by American Express and which is a recent discovery I love for the travel essays, there was a feature touting a computer case stylized to look like a world map. They said in evident sincerity that every serious traveler needed one.

Another example: my blogspot account offers the chance to earn money through AdSense, a Google tool to post advertisements on my blogs, linked to keywords in the text. It would be possible to have some fun with that, I would think, by seeing just what sort of obscure/obscene/conflicting ads popped up. I have to admit that I was tempted to try it out, because I would love to make money by writing, but I would feel kind of cheap and dirty, which might make it hard for me to write professionally, I suppose. Plus, I realized it would be another ThemeStream, because I'd be writing for clicks, rather than my own satisfaction.

Let me clarify: ThemeStream, for those of you whom I didn't meet on the site--which is a smaller percentage than you might expect, not even counting my mom, whom I met prior to ThemeStream--was a site where you could write something and be paid based on the number of views you received. Needless to say, that pay structure didn't last long, and the site folded. The problem with it, for the people who ran the site, at least, was that you would get networks of writers who would subscribe and follow each other's writing, which would inflate the number of views each person got. Great for the writers--great for me, getting to meet some wonderful personalities and talents--not so great for the people running the site.

My point is, I made some money from that site, but I wasn't really selling anything of value, and I think that is the problem I have with advertising, and specifically, with advertising on my blog. I would feel fraudulent and sleazy.

I think this is also why we have such a negative feeling in this country towards advertising, used car sales, politics, etc. We always think that someone is trying to sell us something. They are, of course. And for some reason, even though we know they are selling to us, it works, which makes us cynical and grumpy.

Wouldn't it, perhaps, be better if we all accepted that we're all selling something? Then we could get on with evaluating exactly what is being sold. It sounds a lot more fun to me, because it's not like advertising is going away anytime soon.

Besides, it looks like so much FUN on Mad Men. You know, minus the misogyny.

Thoughts on The News, Or Some What the Heck Moments

I.

In the news yesterday, it was reported that Iran detained three American citizens that crossed into Iran from Iraq, ostensibly as a result of getting lost while hiking.

I'm sure there is no way this could be anything but exactly what it was reported to be; I mean, the border region between Iraq and Iran is such a well-known vacation hot spot.

Although it begs the question, what sort of tourist would consider now to be the ideal time to explore that area of the world?

II.

Italy approved the "abortion pill" RU-486 for use in a hospital prescribed by a physician. There is some confusion as to whether or not this pill is the same as the morning-after pill; it appears that it is not the same, but that it can be used for the same function through a smaller, properly-timed dosage.

The Vatican protested, warning of immediate excommunication for doctors who prescribe it or women who take it.

A search on Google found that the majority of websites covering this drug are either pro-life sites or abortion sites; it is a little hard to tell which sites can be trusted for objective information. However, it appears there is controversy over this drug due to the fact that there have been deaths subsequent to its usage.

I am not qualified to argue for or against this specific drug; however, I will say this: we should totally trust the Vatican in all things related to a woman's right to choose, because they have an absolutely unblemished record when it comes to equal rights regardless of gender, race, creed or orientation. In no way should their statement be viewed as a propagation of a patriarchal modality that discourages contraception. The pope, after all, is infallible. Pay no attention to the implications of the Vatican's 1998 apology for not taking action on the Holocaust.