text:
A 9-year-old autistic boy who misbehaved at school was stuffed into a duffel bag and the drawstring pulled tight, according to his mother, who said she found him wiggling inside as a teacher's aide stood by.
The mother of fourth-grader Christopher Baker said her son called out to her when she walked up to him in the bag Dec. 14. The case has spurred an online petition calling for the firing of school employees responsible.
"He was treated like trash and thrown in the hallway," Chris' mother, Sandra Baker, said Thursday. She did not know how exactly how long he had been in the bag, but probably not more than 20 minutes.
Mercer County schools Interim Superintendent Dennis Davis said confidentiality laws forbid him from commenting.
"The employees of the Mercer County Public Schools are qualified professionals who treat students with respect and dignity while providing a safe and nurturing learning environment," Davis said in a statement.
State education officials said they were investigating.
Chris is a student at Mercer County Intermediate School in Harrodsburg in central Kentucky. The day had barely begun when his family was called to the school because Chris was acting up. He is enrolled in a program for students with special needs.
Walking toward his classroom, Baker's mother saw the gym bag. There was a small hole at the top, she said, and she heard a familiar voice.
"Momma, is that you?" Chris said, according to his mother.
A teacher's aide was there, and Baker demanded that her son be released. At first, the aide struggled to undo the drawstring, but the boy was pulled out of the bag, which had some small balls inside and resembled a green Army duffel bag, Baker said.
"When I got him out of the bag, his poor little eyes were as big as half dollars and he was sweating," Baker said. "I tried to talk to him and get his side of the reason they put him in there, and he said it was because he wouldn't do his work."
Baker said when school officials called the family to pick him up, they were told he was "jumping off the walls." Days later, at a meeting with school officials, Baker said she was told the boy had smirked at the teacher when he was told to put down a basketball, then threw it across the room.
At a meeting with school district officials, the bag was described as a "therapy bag," Baker said, though she wasn't clear exactly what that meant. She said her son would sometimes be asked to roll over a bag filled with balls as a form of therapy, but she didn't know her son was being placed in the bag. She said school officials told her it was not the first time they had put him in the bag.
So far, almost 700 people have signed a petition on the website change.org. Lydia Brown, an autistic 18-year-old Georgetown University freshman from Boston, said she started it after reading a story about Chris.
"That would not be wrong just for an autistic student. That would be wrong to do to anyone," Brown said.
Advocates for the autistic were outraged.
Landon Bryce of San Jose, Calif., a former teacher who blogs about issues related to autism, said the school's treatment of Chris was "careless and disrespectful."
"A lot of the damage that we do to students with all kinds of disabilities is by treating them as though they deserve to be treated in a way that's different from other people," Bryce said.
Baker said she heard different accounts about her son's behavior that day.
Baker stopped short of calling for the dismissal of school employees, but she said they should be suspended. They also need more training, she said.
In Kentucky, there are no laws on using restraint or seclusion in public schools, according to documents on the state Department of Education's website.
A July letter from the state agency to special education directors said the state had investigated two informal complaints this year.
In one, "a student (was) nearly asphyxiated while being restrained," and in the other, a student vomited from panic attacks after spending most of an academic year "confined to a closet, with no ventilation or outside source of light," according to the letter.
Baker's case was first reported by WLEX and WKYT.
Associated Press writer Janet Cappiello contributed to this report.


text:
A weekly look at Wyoming business questions from the Wyoming Small Business Development Center (WSBDC), part of WyomingEntrepreneur.Biz, a collection of business assistance programs at the University of Wyoming.
By Leonard Holler, WSBDC Regional Director
"What questions should I ask the seller to get the 'real' story behind my business purchase?" Joyce, Casper
According to an article by Mike Handelsman, from BizBuySell.com, most buyers ask some basic questions about the company's financial performance and value. The sellers are usually ready with answers that best represent the company. However, the buyers' questions usually do not unveil enough information to make an informed decision.
The five must-ask questions for an investigation are listed below.
-- When did the seller decide to sell the company? Buyers will ask sellers about why they are exiting, but not about when they decide to put the company on the market. Discovering a seller's timing can be more important than learning a seller's motivation. If there was no plan to sell the business and suddenly there is, it could be due to family or health reasons, or it may be a sign that the company is in trouble.
-- How did the seller determine the asking price? By understanding how the seller set the price, is it possible to gain information that will be important during negotiations. Sellers frequently use an asset-based or income-capitalization method for the sake of simplicity, but another valuation method could be more accurate.
-- What are the seller's desired outcomes? It may be assumed that a seller wants to walk away from a sale with cash, but they may have a variety of non-cash outcomes that they hope to achieve. A seller may be interested in making sure that the business will continue for its employees. Some sellers are interested in seeing the company grow and also have the desire to stay, just with less involvement. A willingness to accept seller-financing can help determine eagerness to get the deal done. Never assume a seller is motivated only by financial outcomes, so this information can be used as a negotiating tool.
-- How would the seller grow the company? Since a seller has a stake in convincing buyers that a business is poised for growth, one way to get a more honest answer is to ask a seller for specific strategies that they would use to grow the business, such as what obstacles might be encountered and what it would take to put those plans in motion. This question can help to gain insights about how to expand the business or it might create the need to reassess its potential.
-- Will a seller agree to a non-compete? What if the owner sells you the company only to launch a new business and take the business's existing customers with them? To reduce this risk and uncover a seller's true motives, ask if they are willing to sign a non-compete. This will give an indication of the true value and if a deal should be made.
Although there are plenty of healthy businesses, there also are some lemons. The best way to protect an investment and achieve goals is to expand the normal list of questions and discover the company's condition and potential.
A blog version of this article and an opportunity to post comments is available at http://www.wyomingentrepreneur.typepad.com/blog/.
The WSBDC is a partnership of the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Wyoming Business Council and the University of Wyoming. To ask a question, call 1-800-348-5194, email firstname.lastname@example.com or write 1000 E. University Ave., Dept. 3922, Laramie, WY, 82071-3922.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Issue 11
Stories by Christopher Ringrose, Bethany Williams, Michael Garvey, Vicki Thornton & Siobhán Harte. Cover by Laurie Kang.
Issue 10
Stories by John Bartlett, Mark Brandi, John Christensen, John Connell and Laurie Myers-Bishop. Cover by Aleana Egan
Issue 9
Issue 9 of The South Circular. Stories by Mary McGill, Mary O'Donoghue, Warwick Sprawson and Gila Green. Cover by Dave Comiskey
Issue 8
Nominated for a writing.ie Short Story of the Year Award 2014 for Danielle McLaughlin's story 'Five Days to Polling Day'. Stories by Víctor Balcells Matas, Ronan Flaherty, Danielle McLaughlin and […]
Issue 7
Stories by Krishan Coupland, Jonathan Gibbs, Shane Mac an Bhaird and Hila Shachar. Cover by Philip White.
Issue 6
Stories by Helen Chandler, Pierce Gleeson, Séan Kenny & Tim Smyth. Cover by Hannah Doyle/DoyleyDesigns.
Issue 4
Stories by Anthony Colclough, Michael Naghten Shanks, Margaret O'Brien & Cathal Wogan. Cover by Reuben Whitehouse/Rocketfuelled.
Issue 3
Stories by Colm Brennan, Donna McCabe, Oisín McKenna & Nathan O'Donnell. Cover by Sarah Bodil Hansen.
Issue 2
Stories by Sheila Armstrong, Paddy Doherty, Andrew Meehan & Albert Moore. Cover by John Cowhie.
Issue 1
Stories by Adrian Duncan, Shane Hulgraine, Eddie Stack & Eley Williams. Cover by Fuchsia Macaree.


text:
Liberal economists pine for days no liberal should want to revisit.
"The America I grew up in was a relatively equal middle-class society. Over the past generation, however, the country has returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality." So sighs Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize'"winning Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, in his recent book The Conscience of a Liberal.
The sentiment is nothing new. Political progressives such as Krugman have been decrying increases in income inequality for many years now. But Krugman has added a novel twist, one that has important implications for public policy and economic discourse in the age of Obama. In seeking explanations for the widening spread of incomes during the last four decades, researchers have focused overwhelmingly on broad structural changes in the economy, such as technological progress and demographic shifts. Krugman argues that these explanations are insufficient. "Since the 1970s," he writes, "norms and institutions in the United States have changed in ways that either encouraged or permitted sharply higher inequality. Where, however, did the change in norms and institutions come from? The answer appears to be politics."
To understand Krugman's argument, we can't start in the 1970s. We have to back up to the 1930s and '40s'"when, he contends, the "norms and institutions" that shaped a more egalitarian society were created. "The middle-class America of my youth," Krugman writes, "is best thought of not as the normal state of our society, but as an interregnum between Gilded Ages. America before 1930 was a society in which a small number of very rich people controlled a large share of the nation's wealth." But then came the twin convulsions of the Great Depression and World War II, and the country that arose out of those trials was a very different place. "Middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation."
The Great Compression is a term coined by the economists Claudia Goldin of Harvard and Robert Margo of Boston University to describe the dramatic narrowing of the nation's wage structure during the 1940s. The real wages of manufacturing workers jumped 67 percent between 1929 and 1947, while the top 1 percent of earners saw a 17 percent drop in real income. These egalitarian trends can be attributed to the exceptional circumstances of the period: precipitous declines at the top end of the income spectrum due to economic cataclysm; wartime wage controls that tended to compress wage rates; rapid growth in the demand for low-skilled labor, combined with the labor shortages of the war years; and rapid growth in the relative supply of skilled workers due to a near doubling of high school graduation rates.
Yet the return to peacetime and prosperity did not result in a shift back toward the status quo ante. The more egalitarian income structure persisted for decades. For an explanation, Krugman leans heavily on a 2007 paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin, who argue that postwar American history has been a tale of two widely divergent systems of political economy. First came the "Treaty of Detroit," characterized by heavy unionization of industry, steeply progressive taxation, and a high minimum wage. Under that system, median wages kept pace with the economy's overall productivity growth, and incomes at the lower end of the scale grew faster than those at the top. Beginning around 1980, though, the Treaty of Detroit gave way to the free market "Washington Consensus." Tax rates on high earners fell sharply, the real value of the minimum wage declined, and private-sector unionism collapsed. As a result, most workers' incomes failed to share in overall productivity gains while the highest earners had a field day.
This revisionist account of the fall and rise of income inequality is being echoed daily in today's public policy debates. Under the conventional view, rising inequality is a side effect of economic progress'"namely, continuing technological breakthroughs, especially in communications and information technology. Consequently, when economists have supported measures to remedy inequality, they have typically shied away from structural changes in market institutions. Rather, they have endorsed more income redistribution to reduce post-tax income differences, along with remedial education, job retraining, and other programs designed to raise the skill levels of lower-paid workers.
By contrast, Krugman sees the rise of inequality as a consequence of economic regress'"in particular, the abandonment of well-designed economic institutions and healthy social norms that promoted widely shared prosperity. Such an assessment leads to the conclusion that we ought to revive the institutions and norms of Paul Krugman's boyhood, in broad spirit if not in every detail.
There is good evidence that changes in economic policies and social norms have indeed contributed to a widening of the income distribution since the 1970s. But Krugman and other practitioners of nostalgianomics are presenting a highly selective account of what the relevant policies and norms were and how they changed.
The Treaty of Detroit was built on extensive cartelization of markets, limiting competition to favor producers over consumers. The restrictions on competition were buttressed by racial prejudice, sexual discrimination, and postwar conformism, which combined to limit the choices available to workers and potential workers alike. Those illiberal social norms were finally swept aside in the cultural tumults of the 1960s and '70s. And then, in the 1970s and '80s, restraints on competition were substantially reduced as well, to the applause of economists across the ideological spectrum. At least until now.
Stifled Competition
The economic system that emerged from the New Deal and World War II was markedly different from the one that exists today. The contrast between past and present is sharpest when we focus on one critical dimension: the degree to which public policy either encourages or thwarts competition.
The transportation, energy, and communications sectors were subject to pervasive price and entry regulation in the postwar era. Railroad rates and service had been under federal control since the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, but the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 extended the Interstate Commerce Commission's regulatory authority to cover trucking and bus lines as well. In 1938 airline routes and fares fell under the control of the Civil Aeronautics Authority, later known as the Civil Aeronautics Board. After the discovery of the East Texas oil field in 1930, the Texas Railroad Commission acquired the effective authority to regulate the nation's oil production. Starting in 1938, the Federal Power Commission regulated rates for the interstate transmission of natural gas. The Federal Communications Commission, created in 1934, allocated licenses to broadcasters and regulated phone rates.
Beginning with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, prices and production levels on a wide variety of farm products were regulated by a byzantine complex of controls and subsidies. High import tariffs shielded manufacturers from international competition. And in the retail sector, aggressive discounting was countered by state-level "fair trade laws," which allowed manufacturers to impose minimum resale prices on nonconsenting distributors.
Comprehensive regulation of the financial sector restricted competition in capital markets too. The McFadden Act of 1927 added a federal ban on interstate branch banking to widespread state-level restrictions on intrastate branching. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 erected a wall between commercial and investment banking, effectively brokering a market-sharing agreement protecting commercial and investment banks from each other. Regulation Q, instituted in 1933, prohibited interest payments on demand deposits and set interest rate ceilings for time deposits. Provisions of the Securities Act of 1933 limited competition in underwriting by outlawing pre-offering solicitations and undisclosed discounts. These and other restrictions artificially stunted the depth and development of capital markets, muting the intensity of competition throughout the larger "real" economy. New entrants are much more dependent on a well-developed financial system than are established firms, since incumbents can self-finance through retained earnings or use existing assets as collateral. A hobbled financial sector acts as a barrier to entry and thereby reduces established firms' vulnerability to competition from entrepreneurial upstarts.
The highly progressive tax structure of the early postwar decades further dampened competition. The top marginal income tax rate shot up from 25 percent to 63 percent under Herbert Hoover in 1932, climbed as high as 94 percent during World War II, and stayed at 91 percent during most of the 1950s and early '60s. Research by the economists William Gentry of Williams College and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University has found that such rates act as a "success tax," discouraging employees from striking out as entrepreneurs.
Finally, competition in labor markets was subject to important restraints during the early postwar decades. The triumph of collective bargaining meant the active suppression of wage competition in a variety of industries. In the interest of boosting wages, unions sometimes worked to restrict competition in their industries' product markets as well. Garment unions connived with trade associations to set prices and allocate production among clothing makers. Coal miner unions attempted to regulate production by dictating how many days a week mines could be open.
MIT economists Levy and Temin don't mention it, but highly restrictive immigration policies were another significant brake on labor market competition. With the establishment of countryspecific immigration quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924, foreign-born residents of the United States plummeted from 13 percent of the total population in 1920 to 5 percent by 1970. As a result, competition at the less-skilled end of the U.S. labor market was substantially reduced.
Solidarity and Chauvinism
The anti-competitive effects of the Treaty of Detroit were reinforced by the prevailing social norms of the early postwar decades. Here Krugman and company focus on executive pay. Krugman quotes wistfully from John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of the corporate elite in his 1967 book The New Industrial State: "Management does not go out ruthlessly to reward itself'"a sound management is expected to exercise restraint." According to Krugman, "For a generation after World War II, fear of outrage kept executive salaries in check. Now the outrage is gone. That is, the explosion in executive pay represents a social change…like the sexual revolution of the 1960's'"a relaxation of old strictures, a new permissiveness, but in this case the permissiveness is financial rather than sexual."
Krugman is on to something. But changing attitudes about lavish compensation packages are just one small part of a much bigger cultural transformation. During the early postwar decades, the combination of in-group solidarity and out-group hostility was much more pronounced than what we're comfortable with today.
Consider, first of all, the dramatic shift in attitudes about race. Open and unapologetic discrimination by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against other ethnic groups was widespread and socially acceptable in the America of Paul Krugman's boyhood. How does racial progress affect income inequality? Not the way we might expect. The most relevant impact might have been that more enlightened attitudes about race encouraged a reversal in the nation's restrictive immigration policies. The effect was to increase the number of less-skilled workers and thereby intensify competition among them for employment.
Under the system that existed between 1924 and 1965, immigration quotas were set for each country based on the percentage of people with that national origin already living in the U.S. (with immigration from East and South Asia banned outright until 1952). The explicit purpose of the national-origin quotas was to freeze the ethnic composition of the United States'"that is, to preserve white Protestant supremacy and protect the country from "undesirable" races. "Unquestionably, there are fine human beings in all parts of the world," Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) said in defense of the quota system in 1965, "but people do differ widely in their social habits, their levels of ambition, their mechanical aptitudes, their inherited ability and intelligence, their moral traditions, and their capacity for maintaining stable governments."
But the times had passed the former Klansman by. With the triumph of the civil rights movement, official discrimination based on national origin was no longer sustainable. Just two months after signing the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ending the "un-American" system of national-origin quotas and its "twin barriers of prejudice and privilege." The act inaugurated a new era of mass immigration: Foreign-born residents of the United States have surged from 5 percent of the population in 1970 to 12.5 percent as of 2006.
This wave of immigration exerted a mild downward pressure on the wages of native-born low-skilled workers, with most estimates showing a small effect. Immigration's more dramatic impact on measurements of inequality has come by increasing the number of less-skilled workers, thereby increasing apparent inequality by depressing average wages at the low end of the income distribution. According to the American University economist Robert Lerman, excluding recent immigrants from the analysis would eliminate roughly 30 percent of the increase in adult male annual earnings inequality between 1979 and 1996.
Although the large influx of unskilled immigrants has made American inequality statistics look worse, it has actually reduced inequality for the people involved. After all, immigrants experience large wage gains as a result of relocating to the United States, thereby reducing the cumulative wage gap between them and top earners in this country. When Lerman recalculated trends in inequality to include, at the beginning of the period, recent immigrants and their native-country wages, he found equality had increased rather than decreased. Immigration has increased inequality at home but decreased it on a global scale.
Just as racism helped to keep foreign-born workers out of the U.S. labor market, another form of in-group solidarity, sexism, kept women out of the paid work force. As of 1950, the labor force participation rate for women 16 and older stood at only 34 percent. By 1970 it had climbed to 43 percent, and as of 2005 it had jumped to 59 percent. Meanwhile, the range of jobs open to women expanded enormously.
Paradoxically, these gains for gender equality widened rather than narrowed income inequality overall. Because of the prevalence of "assortative mating"'"the tendency of people to choose spouses with similar educational and socioeconomic backgrounds'"the rise in dual-income couples has exacerbated household income inequality: Now richer men are married to richer wives. Between 1979 and 1996, the proportion of working-age men with working wives rose by approximately 25 percent among those in the top fifth of the male earnings distribution, and their wives' total earnings rose by over 100 percent. According to a 1999 estimate by Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, this unanticipated consequence of feminism explains about 13 percent of the total rise in income inequality since 1979.
Racism and sexism are ancient forms of group identity. Another form, more in line with what Krugman has in mind, was a distinctive expression of U.S. economic and social development in the middle decades of the 20th century. The journalist William Whyte described this "social ethic" in his 1956 book The Organization Man, outlining a sensibility that defined itself in studied contrast to old-style "rugged individualism." When contemporary critics scorned the era for its conformism, they weren't just talking about the ranch houses and gray flannel suits. The era's mores placed an extraordinary emphasis on fitting into the group.
"In the Social Ethic I am describing," wrote Whyte, "man's obligation is…not so much to the community in a broad sense but to the actual, physical one about him, and the idea that in isolation from it'"or active rebellion against it'"he might eventually discharge the greater service is little considered." One corporate trainee told Whyte that he "would sacrifice brilliance for human understanding every time." A personnel director declared that "any progressive employer would look askance at the individualist and would be reluctant to instill such thinking in the minds of trainees." Whyte summed up the prevailing attitude: "All the great ideas, [trainees] explain, have already been discovered and not only in physics and chemistry but in practical fields like engineering. The basic creative work is done, so the man you need'"for every kind of job'"is a practical, team-player fellow who will do a good shirt-sleeves job."
It seems entirely reasonable to conclude that this social ethic helped to limit competition among business enterprises for top talent. When secure membership in a stable organization is more important than maximizing your individual potential, the most talented employees are less vulnerable to the temptation of a better offer elsewhere. Even if they are tempted, a strong sense of organizational loyalty makes them more likely to resist and stay put.
Increased Competition, Increased Inequality Krugman blames the conservative movement for income inequality, arguing that right-wingers exploited white backlash in the wake of the civil rights movement to hijack first the Republican Party and then the country as a whole. Once in power, they duped the public with "weapons of mass distraction" (i.e., social issues and foreign policy) while "cut[ting] taxes on the rich," "try[ing] to shrink government benefits and undermine the welfare state," and "empower[ing] businesses to confront and, to a large extent,crush the union movement."
Obviously, conservatism has contributed in important ways to the political shifts of recent decades. But the real story of those changes is more complicated, and more interesting, than Krugman lets on. Influences across the political spectrum have helped shape the more competitive more individualistic, and less equal society we now live in.
Indeed, the relevant changes in social norms were led by movements associated with the left. The women's movement led the assault on sex discrimination. The civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and '60s inspired more enlightened attitudes about race and ethnicity, with results such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a law spearheaded by a young Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). And then there was the counterculture of the 1960s, whose influence spread throughout American society in the Me Decade that followed. It upended the social ethic of group-minded solidarity and conformity with a stampede of unbridled individualism and self-assertion. With the general relaxation of inhibitions, talented and ambitious people felt less restrained from seeking top dollar in the marketplace. Yippies and yuppies were two sides of the same coin.
Contrary to Krugman's narrative, liberals joined conservatives in pushing for dramatic changes in economic policy. In addition to his role in liberalizing immigration, Kennedy was a leader in pushing through both the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which deregulated the trucking industry'"and he was warmly supported in both efforts by the left-wing activist Ralph Nader. President Jimmy Carter signed these two pieces of legislation, as well as the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978, which began the elimination of price controls on natural gas, and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, which deregulated the railroad industry.
The three most recent rounds of multilateral trade talks were all concluded by Democratic presidents: the Kennedy Round in 1967 by Lyndon Johnson, the Tokyo Round in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, and the Uruguay Round in 1994 by Bill Clinton. And though it was Ronald Reagan who slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1981, it was two Democrats, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who sponsored the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which pushed the top rate all the way down to 28 percent.
What about the unions? According to the Berkeley economist David Card, the shrinking of the unionized labor force accounted for 15 percent to 20 percent of the rise in overall male wage inequality between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. Krugman is right that labor's decline stems in part from policy changes, but his ideological blinkers lead him to identify the wrong ones.
The only significant change to the pro-union Wagner Act of 1935 came through the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed closed shops (contracts requiring employers to hire only union members) and authorized state right-to-work laws (which ban contracts requiring employees to join unions). But that piece of legislation was enacted in 1947′"three years before the original Treaty of Detroit between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. It would be a stretch to argue that the Golden Age ended before it even began.
Scrounging for a policy explanation, economists Levy and Temin point to the failure of a 1978 labor law reform bill to survive a Senate filibuster. But maintaining the status quo is not a policy change. They also describe President Reagan's 1981 decision to fire striking air traffic controllers as a signal to employers that the government no longer supported labor unions.
While it is true that Reagan's handling of that strike, along with his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, made the policy environment for unions less favorable, the effect of those moves on unionization was marginal.
The major reason for the fall in unionized employment, according to a 2007 paper by Georgia State University economist Barry Hirsch, "is that union strength developed through the 1950s was gradually eroded by increasingly competitive and dynamic markets." He elaborates: "When much of an industry is unionized, firms may prosper with higher union costs as long as their competitors face similar costs. When union companies face low-cost competitors, labor cost increases cannot be passed through to consumers. Factors that increase the competitiveness of product markets increased international trade, product market deregulation, and the entry of low-cost competitors'"make it more difficult for union companies to prosper."
So the decline of private-sector unionism was abetted by policy changes, but the changes were not in labor policy specifically. They were the general, bipartisan reduction of trade barriers and price and entry controls. Unionized firms found themselves at a critical disadvantage. They shrank accordingly, and union rolls shrank with them.
Postmodern Progress
The move toward a more individualistic culture is not unique to the United States. As the political scientist Ronald Inglehart has documented in dozens of countries around the world, the shift toward what he calls "postmodern" attitudes and values is a predictable cultural response to rising affluence and expanding choices. "In a major part of the world," he writes in his 1997 book Modernization and Postmodernization, "the disciplined, self-denying, and achievement-oriented norms of industrial society are giving way to an increasingly broad latitude for individual choice of lifestyles and individual self-expression."
The increasing focus on individual fulfillment means, inevitably, less deference to tradition and organizations. "A major component of the Postmodern shift," Inglehart argues, "is a shift away from both religious and bureaucratic authority, bringing declining emphasis on all kinds of authority. For deference to authority has high costs: the individual's personal goals must be subordinated to those of a broader entity."
Paul Krugman may long for the return of self-denying corporate workers who declined to seek better opportunities out of organizational loyalty, and thus kept wages artificially suppressed, but these are creatures of a bygone ethos'"an ethos that also included uncritical acceptance of racist and sexist traditions and often brutish intolerance of deviations from mainstream lifestyles and sensibilities.
The rise in income inequality does raise issues of legitimate public concern. And reasonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won't lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.
Brink Lindsey (email@example.com) is vice president for research at the Cato Institute, which published the policy paper from which this article was adapted.


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Overall, 3.5 percent of the trees (based on those areas sampled during the blitzes) were found to be P. ramorum positive, a threefold drop from 2017. Yet, in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, infection levels were estimated to be as high as 19 percent, followed by 12.7 percent in the East Bay.
"Oaks and tanoaks were infected last year and will be showing symptoms such as bleeding in the stem and canopy drying this year and in the next two years to follow. Hence, despite a reduction of SOD infection on leaves of California bay laurels and leaves of tanoaks in 2018, we can expect a sharp increase in oak and tanoak mortality in 2018, 2019 and 2020."
Notable outbreaks were detected in Alameda (El Cerrito and Oakland urban parks, San Leandro, Orinda, Moraga), Marin (Novato, Day Island, Woodacre, Sleepy Hollow, McNears Beach, China Camp State Park, north San Rafael, Tiburon Peninsula, east and west peak of Mt. Tamalpais, Marin City), Mendocino (south of Yorkville), Monterey (Carmel Valley Village, Salmon Creek Trail in southern Big Sur), Napa (east Napa city), San Mateo (Burlingame Hills, west of Emerald Hills and south of Edgewood Rd, Woodside ), Santa Clara (Los Altos Hills, Saratoga, Los Gatos, along Santa Cruz Co border), Santa Cruz (along the Santa Clara Co border, Boulder Creek), and Sonoma (near Cloverdale, east and west of Healdsburg, west of Windsor, east of Santa Rosa, west of Petaluma) counties.
Several popular destinations where P. ramorum was found positive during the 2017 Blitz were negative for the pathogen in 2018, including Golden Gate Park and the Presidio of San Francisco, the UC Berkeley campus, and Mount Diablo State Park. Samples from San Luis Obispo and Siskiyou counties were also pathogen-free as were those from the southern portion of Alameda County.
"It is encouraging that SOD has yet to be found in the forests of California's northern-most counties, San Luis Obispo County and southern Alameda County," said Garbelotto.
"It is also encouraging to see that despite its continued presence in the state for more than 20 years, SOD infection rates drop during drier years," he said. "However, in 2018, we identified a number of communities across several counties where significant outbreaks were detected for the first time, and the Salmon Creek find in Monterey County is the southernmost positive WUI (wildland-urban interface) tree detection ever. Until the 2018 Blitz, only stream water had been found positive in the Salmon Creek area. We encourage everyone in affected counties to look at the Blitz results online and to attend one of the fall workshops to learn how to protect their oaks from SOD."
Citizen-science SOD Blitz workshops
SOD Blitz Workshops are being held this fall in Santa Rosa (Oct. 10), Portola Valley (Oct. 16) and Berkeley (Oct. 17). The trainings will discuss Blitz results and recommendations for protecting oaks in the WUI. Workshops are intended for the general public, tree care professionals and land managers (see www.sodblitz.org for details). Two International Society of Arboriculture continuing education units will be offered at each training. Data collected from the Blitz (both positive and negative samples) have been uploaded to the SOD Blitz map (www.sodblitz.org ) as well as to SODmap (www.SODmap.org) and to the free SODmap mobile app, which can serve as an informative management tool for people in impacted communities.
Twenty-five SOD Blitz surveys were held in 2018 in the WUI of 14 coastal California counties from the Oregon border to San Luis Obispo County and included three tribal land surveys. The 304 volunteers surveyed approximately 13,500 trees and submitted leaf samples from over 2,000 symptomatic trees to the Garbelotto lab for pathogen testing.
SOD Blitzes are a citizen science program, which train participants each spring to identify symptomatic tanoak and California bay laurel trees in the WUI and to properly collect samples in the interest of generating an informative map of P. ramorum disease symptoms over time. Samples are tested for the presence of the pathogen at UC Berkeley and results are posted electronically each fall. Now in its eleventh year, the SOD Blitz program is one of the first in the world to join researchers and volunteers in a survey for a tree disease.
SOD Blitz surveys were made possible thanks to funding from the US Forest Service State and Private Forestry, Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and the PG&E Foundation. The Blitzes were organized by the UC Berkeley Garbelotto lab in collaboration with the National Park Service, Presidio Trust, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, Save Mount Diablo, Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, East Bay Regional Park District, Santa Lucia Conservancy, Sonoma State University, UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, Los Padres National Forest, City and County of San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks, UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, and California Native Plant Society.
For information on the status of P. ramorum/SOD tree mortality in California wildlands, see the US Forest Service 2018 Aerial Detection Survey results at https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r5/forest-grasslandhealth/?cid=fseprd592767.
For more information on the SOD Blitzes, visit www.sodblitz.org or contact Katie Harrell at (510) 847-5482 or firstname.lastname@example.com. For more information on Sudden Oak Death and P. ramorum, visit the California Oak Mortality Task Force website at www.suddenoakdeath.org or contact Harrell.


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British Pseudoscorpion Recording Scheme
Gerald Legg
To date over 6600 records plot the current distribution of the British species of pseudoscorpion, as of january 2006. Originally the scheme was set up, administered and run by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Monks Wood [now Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who employed P.E. Jones to work on the group. In 1980 he produced a Provisional Atlas of the distribution of pseudoscorpions. Around 1982 I took over as recorder and over a period of time data-based all the Monks Wood Records concurrent with starting up a recording scheme and adding new records.
In 1988 the Linnean Society of London with the Estuarine and Brackish-Water Sciences Association published Synopses of the British Fauna (New Series) No. 40, edited by Doris M. Kermack and R.S.K. Barnes: Pseudoscorpions. Written and technically illustrated by Gerald Legg it was also illustrated with superb pen and ink drawings of the then known British species by Richard E. Jones (Dick).
Dick can has an avid interest in, amongst other things, 'creepy crawlies' and has a web site devoted to Norfolk's fauna:
Since 1988 further records have been and continue to be added. In addition two new species to Britain have been discovered and included on the British List. One of these, Larca lata, had been mistakenly identified as Chelifer cancroides and the specimen used as reference for producing the drawing that appeared in the Synopsis. A revised Synopsis is in preparation.
An attempt at producing a regular News Letter in 1984 failed to take off. The scheme continued to function but it was not until 1998 that a revitalized News Letter, Galea, appeared. This is amalgamated with the News Letter of the British Arachnological Society, although a separate edition will be produced for those who are not BAS members and are available here to download as pdf files.
Articles and records are most welcome and should be sent to [email protected].


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corps: bespoke text codecs
Happy 12/12/12, peoples! In honor of repeated subsequences, today I'm happy to release a new set of compression tools, Corps.
Corps is a toolkit for generating custom text codecs, specialized to particular bodies of text. You give it an example corpus to analyze, and Corps can generate codecs based on what it finds.
For example, if you want to develop a compression algorithm that operates on JavaScript source text, you probably want to use a special code to represent the multi-character sequence function.
I say "probably", because in reality you don't know what substrings are most common. Corps uses the Re-Pair algorithm to build up an optimal token set. This algorithm treats all characters in the input as tokens, and recursively creates composite tokens from the most common pair of adjacent tokens, repeating the process until there are no more repeated pairs of tokens. For full details, see "Off-Line Dictionary-Based Compression" by Larsson and Moffat.
Corps is mostly useful for creating special-purpose fixed codecs based on a dictionary generated by its offline analysis. Although pre-generated codecs often do not compress as well as adaptive codecs like the one used by gzip, fixed codecs are typically faster as they can use the fixed code table to generate optimized encoders and decoders. Corps currently generates encoders in C and Scheme, and decoders in C, Scheme, and JavaScript.
Special-purpose codecs can also provide some interesting properties, such as the ability to decompress a substring of the original text.
get source
Corps is written for Guile version 2.0. See http://gnu.org/s/guile for more information on Guile and how to install it on your system.
To build Corps from git, do:
git clone git://gitorious.org/corps/corps.git cd corps ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && make check
You can install using make install, but it's often more convenient to just run corps uninstalled, using the env script.
stinky cheese
Corps includes a simple command-line tool called corps. For full documentation, run corps help. You can run it uninstalled by prefixing the ./env from the build tree.
As an example, say you want to build a database of wikipedia pages on cheese. Let's fetch a page:
$ curl -s 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroilles_(cheese)' > cheese $ ls -l cheese -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 43123 Dec 12 15:12 cheese
Now we analyze it to determine common substrings:
./env corps extract-all cheese > cheese-tokens
This generates a list of (string,frequency) pairs. An extract-all token set is usually quite large. We can pare it down to something manageable, the 500 most common substrings:
./env corps extract-subset cheese-tokens 500 cheese > 500-tokens
With this dictionary, we can huffman-code the page:
$ ./env corps encode -t 500-tokens -m huffman cheese cheese.huff $ ls -l cheese.huff -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 18060 Dec 12 16:09 cheese.huff
Well that's pretty cool -- it's less than half the size of the source text. We can also pare down this set of tokens to an appropriate number of tokens for a bytecode, and try doing a byte-encode of the file:
$ ./env corps extract-subset 500-tokens 254 cheese > 254-tokens $ ./env corps encode -t 254-tokens cheese > cheese.bc $ ls -l cheese.bc -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 22260 Dec 12 16:19 cheese.bc
It's larger than the huffman-code, not only because of the smaller dictionary, but also because a bytecode is less dense. In practice though a bytecode is good enough while being very fast, so we'll continue with the bytecode.
Now let's generate a C encoder and decoder for this token set.
$ ./env corps generate-c-byte-encoder 254-tokens > encoder.inc.c $ ./env corps generate-c-byte-decoder 254-tokens > decoder.inc.c $ cp ~/src/corps/corps/decoder.c . $ cp ~/src/corps/corps/encoder.c . $ gcc -o decoder -O3 decoder.c $ gcc -o encoder -O3 encoder.c $ ls -l encoder decoder -rwxr-xr-x 1 wingo wingo 13192 Dec 12 16:23 decoder -rwxr-xr-x 1 wingo wingo 31048 Dec 12 16:23 encoder
Nice! We could use the corps tool to decode cheese.bc, but to vary things up we can use our zippy C decoder:
$ ./decoder < cheese.bc > cheese.out $ cmp cheese.out cheese && echo 'excellent!' excellent!
The performance of the C encoder is pretty good:
$ for ((x=0;x<1000;x++)) do cat cheese >> megacheese; done $ time gzip -c < megacheese > megacheese.gz real 0m1.418s user 0m1.396s sys 0m0.016s $ time ./encoder < megacheese > megacheese.bc real 0m0.523s user 0m0.480s sys 0m0.044s $ ls -l megacheese* -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 43123000 Dec 12 17:03 megacheese -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 22370002 Dec 12 17:04 megacheese.bc -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 11519311 Dec 12 17:04 megacheese.gz
Gzip gets better compression results for many reasons, but our quick-and-dirty bytecode compressor does well enough and is quite fast. The decoder is also quite good:
$ time ./decoder < megacheese.bc > /dev/null real 0m0.179s user 0m0.160s sys 0m0.016s $ time gunzip -c < megacheese.gz > /dev/null real 0m0.294s user 0m0.284s sys 0m0.008s
Amusingly, for this text, gzipping the bytecoded file has quite an impact:
$ gzip -c < megacheese.bc > megacheese.bc.gz $ ls -l megacheese* -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 43123000 Dec 12 17:03 megacheese -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 22370002 Dec 12 17:04 megacheese.bc -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 175246 Dec 12 17:12 megacheese.bc.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 wingo wingo 11519311 Dec 12 17:04 megacheese.gz
It so happens that byte-compressing the original text allows it to fit within the default gzip "window size" of 32 KB, letting gzip detect the thousandfold duplication of the source text. As a codec that works on bytes, gzip tends to work quite well on bytecoded files, and poorly on bit-coding schemes like huffman codes. A gzipped bytecoded file is usually smaller than a gzipped raw file and smaller than a gzipped huffman-coded file.
I'll close with a link to the 254 most common substrings in one corpus of JavaScript code that I analyzed: here. I have a set of patches to integrate a codec optimized for JavaScript source into V8, to try to reduce the memory footprint of JS source code. More on that quixotic endeavor in some future post. Until then, happy scheming!
One response
Rupert Swarbrick says: Heh, that's cool! Only one niggle: I think it should be kilocheese, rather than megacheese :-)
Comments are closed.


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Newly appointed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Timothy J. Muris will provide the keynote speech on Thursday morning October 4, at Privacy2001. The conference, one of the top privacy events in the country, will be held at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio October 2-4, and will be attended by more than 250 leaders and policy makers from government, industry and consumer organizations. Information about the conference is available at www.privacy2000.org.
Appointed by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the United States Senate, Muris took office as FTC Chairman June 4, 2001. Among the jurisdictions of the Federal Trade Commission, is the enforcement of a variety of federal antitrust and consumer protection laws that ensure that the nation's markets function competitively, and are vigorous, efficient, and free of undue restrictions. The Commission also works to enhance the smooth operation of the marketplace by eliminating acts or practices that are unfair or deceptive or that threaten consumers' opportunities to exercise informed choice.
Peter Swire, formerly Chief Counselor for Privacy to President Clinton, will also participate as a panelist at the conference.
Special sessions on the future of privacy are scheduled for the following areas:
- Privacy Up North: Top government and industry leaders from Canada will discuss the impact of Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act on NAFTA, trans-border data flows with the U.S., and North American views on privacy. This groundbreaking session is the first of its kind to be held in the United States.
- Privacy & Pervasive Computing: This session will discuss the privacy implications of Bluetooth and other pervasive computing technologies as they are integrated into everyday devices. What will privacy mean in a world where people, products, and machines are all linked by wireless communication? How will privacy be defined when office and household appliances and PDAs routinely exchange personal information?
In addition to discussions about possible future legislation in the privacy arena, attendees at the Privacy2001 conference will be able to participate in up to 18 hands-on workshops that include the following areas:
· Privacy & Security Technology
· Banking and Financial Services
· Health Care Industry
· Federal, State & Local Government
· General Business
· Marketing
There will also be panels on:
· Privacy in the International Arena
· Use of Consumer Information - What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
· Privacy in the Wireless World
· Privacy and Public Records - Balancing Public Access versus Individual Privacy
· Managing Your Privacy & Security Image - When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies
· Privacy in Litigation - The Latest From the Legal Front
The TPG is an initiative of OSC (the Ohio Supercomputer Center), the state's flagship high performance computing and networking resource.


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New NSA phone dragnet proposals blasted as flawed
Proposals by Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, to extend expiring parts of the counterterrorism Patriot Act, "contain flaws and omissions that are incompatible with the goal of stopping domestic bulk collection," the coalition said in a letter to Senate leaders sent Thursday.
The proposals from the two senators, both senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "fail to properly address overbroad surveillance activities, and would weaken privacy, civil liberties, and the digital economy," said the letter, signed by 51 companies, trade groups, digital rights groups and advocacy organizations.
Press liaisons for Burr and Feinstein didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the letter.
Among the groups signing the letter are The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Gun Owners of America, the Republican Liberty Caucus, and left-leaning mobile carrier Credo.
Section 215 the Patriot Act, the provision the NSA has used as authorization to collect millions of domestic telephone records, is scheduled to expire Sunday night, but the Senate is scheduled to return earlier in the day to debate whether to extend it.
In a joint press conference Friday, the ACLU and conservative activist group Tea Party Patriots called on the Senate to vote against a straight renewal of Section 215. The Tea Party group supports the USA Freedom Act, a bill that limits NSA phone records collection while extending Section 215, said Jenny Beth Martin, its president.
While Martin said the USA Freedom Act would be a positive step toward surveillance reform, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero called on the Senate to kill Section 215 entirely to allow time for a national debate about counterterrorism surveillance.
Killing Section 215 would "allow the country and the Congress to have a proper conversation about what surveillance powers are necessary and what oversight mechanisms are necessary to make sure they're not abused," Romero said. "It's a time for us to keep that debate going and not to short-circuit it in some type of 11th-hour, backdoor deal."
Last week, before a week-long break, the Senate failed to renew Section 215 or pass the USA Freedom Act. That act ends the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. phone records, while allowing the agency to search domestic phone records in a more targeted manner.
Burr's draft proposal, presented as a compromise between the USA Freedom Act and a renewal of Section 215 with no new limits, would allow the NSA to restart a bulk telephone collection program using other surveillance authorities, according to an analysis by CDT. Burr's proposal would also give the FBI new authority to demand electronic transaction records from companies, CDT said.
Feinstein's proposal would allow the NSA to continue to collect telephone and business records under the broad language that the information is "consistent with the purpose and need to obtain foreign intelligence information," CDT said.
Feinstein's proposal would allow the FBI to require that telephone carriers retain all their call records for two years, even though officials with President Barack Obama's administration have said that the carriers' current data retention policies are sufficient, CDT said.
Meanwhile, in a protest launched late Thursday by digital rights group Fight for the Future, about 14,000 websites have agreed to block access to the sites to IP addresses coming from Congress. Congressional visitors to the sites are instead redirected to BlackoutCongress.org, which shows nude pictures of protestors, with the hashtag, "#ifeelnaked."
Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's email address is email@example.com.