Letters to the Editor
jwr_12
Published Letters: 149 Editor's Choice: 45
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Is my math wrong? This doesn't seem so bad
[Read the article: "I make $1.45 a week and I love it"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm all prepared to worry about the possibility of a "virtual sweatshop," but something doesn't add up here.
The article cites transcription jobs available through MT for .19/minute.
Working that out per hour on my calculator, I get 60 x .19= $11.40 or so.
I live in a part of the US where a lot of people would LOVE a $11.40/ hour job. (We pay our babysitter $8/hour, for instance, and are told we are overpaying the market). And I imagine elsewhere in the world, they'd be even happier.
In short, at first glance, this doesn't seem so bad, as an hourly wage.
So is the threat here not so much the wage, but rather the oodles of people willing to sell extremely small units of labor (say .38 cents worth), which, while they would add up to an okay wage, get dissolved into lots of nothing jobs?
Please deprogram me.
John
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Ah!!!
[Read the article: "I make $1.45 a week and I love it"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear everybody,
Thanks for helping me understand that its .19/minute of tape, not labor. Now I see how the transcription work parcelled out this way would return a perilously low hourly wage.
John
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Voters not so stupid
[Read the article: The elephant in the room]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One bit of daylight: a poll of registered democrats reported by the NYT today shows that 31% of registered Democrats picked Iraq as the number 1 issue for the next election. That's a large number, in this particular kind of poll (where choices are stacked up against eachother).
If the DLC hasn't figured out yet that Iraq matters to people, perhaps they could read newspapers.
Iraq scored #1 among Republicans as well, though not by as much.
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Bolton not Effective
[Read the article: Revoltin' Bolton]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]With all due respect to the writers (jpincus and someone whose name I believe was shmidt, excuse the spelling if it's wrong) the problem with Bolton was well summed up by Senator Dodd, who said that he's an ineffective bully.
Note the qualifier ineffective. Any diplomat is certainly welcome to use any strategy, as long as it works.
Jpincus cites the ability of Bolton to get a resolution on North Korea's missile launch. Given the huge threat that poses to the entire far eastern order (China, as well as Japan Korea and eventually the US) that was a gimme, on the grand scale of things.
What we need is someone in the UN who has the credibility to help forge consensus on tough issues--Iraq, Lebanon, terrorism, the environment--and Bolton can't come within sniffing distance of that, because he's too worried--in the end--about acting like he's on Sean Hannity's show. He's too theatrical, too caught up in his own image (the same thing, btw, that makes his style controversial). He clearly likes the strokes he gets by being a bomb thrower, but does he care enough about anything else to stop hogging the stage?
After a year in the UN, it seems to me the answer is pretty clear. Bolton is about Bolton, in the end, not US interests, regardless of whether the UN itself needs the reforms he uses as an excuse for his behavior.
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Exactly Right
[Read the article: Demonizing fellow Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think the author of this entry (sorry, missed the name) put his finger on it. Lieberman's criticisms of the anti-war position repeate Republican slurs.
I personally believe that the country would be stronger in the world without the war in Iraq--actually, I think that's more or less a mathematical certainty, as even W. F. Buckley would agree--though my opposition is more rooted in moral revulsion at the costs of this tragedy than in my fears for American security.
Thus, anti-war is not equal to soft on security.
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Snip this one in the bud
[Read the article: The coming earthquake]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As any sampling of my many posts will clarify, I am both a moderate supporter of Israel and a critic of the Bush administration. Still, as long as the Israelis are gearing up for some soul-searching, let me try to snip one tendency that I've noticed in a couple Haaretz columns right in the bud.
Namely, the tendency to try to shift blame for this whole situation onto the Bush administration, by implying that the Israelis went to war expecting to be restrained by the US, thus preventing the fighting from going on so long. Benn calls this the Bush administration's failure to flip the "normal diplomatic hourglass."
I personally think that the Bush administration should have intervened much sooner, and that if they did, this whole situation would be less tragic. I also think that the reason the Bush government didn't intervene is that they wanted to use Israel as a proxy for their greater strategic goals. As we say in the US, no duh!
But as for passive-aggressive finger pointing, and implications that the Israeli plan would have worked better if only the US had done its job, no dice! This is as lame as the architects of our current fiasco in Iraq (Kenneth Pollack, the people at the New Republic, and of course the neo-cons) saying "the war was a good idea, but they didn't fight it the way I wanted."
That, my friend, is the nature of war. It's messy, tragic, and almost always the worst possible choice. Pundits, politicians, and of course the general populace should understand this . You never get the war you want; and if you go to war, you shouldn't defend yourself by blaming others that it went badly.
I say this not just because my remaining national pride is offended (though it is) but rather because I'm tired of abstract arguments for war--and even more clinical post-facto analyses--that seem to avoid dealing with war's essential nature, and its predictable costs every goddamn time.