Archive for February, 2009

As I noted in a previous posting, our current health care delivery system logs in as a $7,000-per-person-per-year behemoth. And I mean per all 300 million of us. (Do the math: $2.1 trillion divided by 300 mil.) That’s why I get a good laugh everytime I read the results of a new survey. The one [...]

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) marks its 16th anniversary today (Feb. 5, 2009) in a beefed-up version that now allows family of service members to take up to 26 weeks of unpaid leave to care for their relatives in the military. Of course, provisions for 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for [...]

Gotta pity poor Randall Hinton, who says he’s running out of music to listen to on his $93,803-a-year guv job, where he otherwise has nothing to do from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Oh, but he does also idle away his away counting cars passing by on the New York Thruway as he gazes out [...]

An undercover reporter for New York’s Daily News recently paid $125 to attend an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) 10-hour training class. The class was over in 2 hours, 17 minutes. Held above a Bronx bar, the course enabled several of the attendees to slip away on breaktime to sip beers downstairs. Nice gig [...]

Nothing new here, as both Democrats and Republicans do it. When Dubya came to office, he reversed Clintonian mandates, and now Barack Obama has taken a few swipes at George W. and his executive orders. First, under the Rahm Emanuel rule, all government agencies have been forced to place on hold any directives that hadn’t [...]

American automobile pioneer Henry Ford is famous for many things, including the introduction of assembly-line production and, to make sure workers could endure the boredom of his assembly lines, the $5-a-day pay rule, which was unheard of in 1914. (At the same time, he reduced the workday from nine to eight hours, but we haven’t [...]

A group going by the name of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) has solved the Riddle of the (Health Care) Sphinx, or so it proclaims. The PDA folk claim that, by just extending Medicare to all Americans (thereby jettisoning, one would presume, all other current health care delivery systems), the country could–bugles blaring, drums rolling–create [...]

The Wall Street Journal, which has been chronicling the nation’s economic woes industry by industry, today ran a a piece about the latest cost-cutting strategy being employed at some restaurants–letting the busboys go. Of course, this means that the wait staff must now clear tables and scrape dishes clean, tasks that most of them frown [...]