brappy!

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Link: Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger

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After last night's depressing story, now, I find this little nugget. I'd struggled to find a job when I graduated in December, and no one seemed to believe that finding a job was hard. Incredibly hard!

80,000 Jobs Cut in March; Unemployment Rate Rises

The economy shed 80,000 jobs in March, the third consecutive month of rising unemployment, presenting a stark sign that the country may already be in a recession. Sharp downturns in the manufacturing and construction sectors led the decline, the biggest in five years. The Labor Department also said employers cut far more jobs in January and February than originally estimated. There were fewer jobs in March than there had been five months earlier. In the last 50 years, whenever there has been an employment downturn like the one of the last few months, a recession has followed.

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Simply astounding.

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002. Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

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Ma has admitted to having a green card during his time as a student in the US, but said it was automatically invalidated in 1985 when he applied for a visa to travel to the US. Hsieh maintains that Ma's green card is still valid, arguing that the KMT presidential candidate has not completed an I-407 form to relinquish his permanent residency or had the green card invalidated by a US immigration court.

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Today in Taipei, the head of the KMT said that he might kill himself if Ma Yingjiu loses the upcoming election. Is this ridiculous or what? Sometimes I wonder if people will take him seriously, but then I remember that, when it comes to Taiwan politics, one shouldn't ever be surprised.

Earlier this year, one politician threatened to jump into the sea if his party failed to win any seats in Taipei. They didn't win any, and he jumped into the sea and apparently survived.  Quelle drama!

KMT lawmaker threatens suicide if Ma loses presidential election - The China Post

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A Taiwanese opposition lawmaker said Friday he will consider suicide if party presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou loses the presidential election on March 22. Alex Fai of the opposition Nationalists said he felt extremely sad about the controversy surrounding an opposition invasion into the Taipei headquarters of Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Frank Hsieh on Wednesday. If the incident costs Ma his presidential victory, Fai said, "I will not exclude the possibility of ending my own life." Ma enjoys a 6-8 point lead in opinion polls.

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2.50 pm, last Friday, The Bubble is Over, Folks..., originally uploaded by brappy★.

Despite what locals keep saying about Seattle's housing market, I would like to now draw your attention to the fact that it has now obviously tanked.

Any student of history, or long-time resident (not that there are many of either in this area) could tell you that national economic slowdowns <b>always</b> hit this area later than the rest of the country, and we always recover later. It's a function of geography and trade. We're far from the rest of the country and close to our major trading partners[1]. Next up, the job market will slow down. Oh wait. It has.

[1] Seattle being the closest mainland-US port to Asia.


I spotted this plethora of signs when i was shooting photos of a car crash near my house.

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In this article from the Seattle P-I, Todd Bishop outlines the alternatives for Mac Office. While I'm not a big fan of office, I did explore other options before buying 2008... He lists them:

• Open Office - It's great on a PC, but on a Mac, it uses some weird windows emulator window called X10 or something like that. It's a really ugly program, it looks like Windows 98, and the program runs slow on my iMac (with 4GB of RAM).

• Google Apps - Very basic, slow and awkward to use. A very light version of a text editor. Only good for when Office is broken.

• iWork and Nisus Writer Pro - I've never tried either. I'm sure it's a competitor... Another option he mentions is kind of bizarre:

And in a technological twist, people can use the Windows version of Office on Macs, using software that runs Microsoft's operating system on the Apple machines.

To be sure, analysts and even some of the company's rivals say Microsoft isn't at risk of losing its position atop the Mac productivity-software market anytime soon.

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Just what no one suspected, it looks like Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha are claiming that without Mesa Air's go! creating artificially low fares, regular interisland fares would rise, sometimes even doubling.

Fares will rise without go!

Hawaiian Airlines President Mark Dunkerley has acknowledged interisland fares will go up if his airline wins its case against Mesa Air Group and go! airlines pulls out of Hawaii.

Continue reading "A return to the duopoly?" »

Posted by arion at 03:38 PM | Permalink

On a day when one of my photos was used in a popular local blog (with permission), I found yet another worry for amateur photographers. It's the Creative Commons license and understanding the bizarreness of copyrights, as pointed out in this New York Times article today: Use My Photo? Not without permission.

Having had my photos used bizarrely on other blogs in the past, I recently changed the license of my photos to be All Rights Reserved, which restricts legal uses of photos somewhat. The Creative Commons licenses, I found, were too broad and didn't give me the control I wanted. Of course, putting any photo on the web means that it can be readily stolen, used, abused, altered, etc., but if you're dealing with an established organization, tracking down that use, abuse, alteration, what-have-you, is easier.

 I recently came across a bizarre flickr group that was full of Chicken Little wannabes that were outraged!!!1! that some user saved the cache file (which your browser creates for every web site you visit) of photos that she liked for her own personal viewing later. This group started blocking this user en masse, but what was really funny, was that by blocking this user, they did nothing to stop her from viewing their images, only blocking her from communicating with them. Like most internet mobs [1] and online petitions[2], they yelled loud, but did nothing. So sad for them.

As an amateur photographer, I am well aware that my work probably has been stolen and misappropriated, miscredited, printed out and put on a wall in a foreign country [3] and generally not credited to me as it should be. That's the way it goes. I knew that going into photography.

So what can I do?

 Well, what I do, is I make a lot of photos and enjoy telling a story with them. I don't put a big ugly watermark on them, and I don't flip out (much) if I find one being misused online [4]. What I can do is control the message as good as I can, and reserve my vitrol for the truly egregious (read: commercial) use of my photos without my permission. Like that case in the link above.

[1] something that I totally loathe. 

[2] Has an online petition ever been taken seriously? I hear about them all the time, but I've never heard of one having any effect. 

[3] That really happened. I was flattered and annoyed at the same time. 

[4] Like for a blog posting in Czech about visa issues in Germany. 

Now for your entertainment... a lovely flower photo I shot to help you continue on your day. 

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Stupidity in the skies, or rather, in Congress. Is this a bid to make in-flight movies even worse?

"Under federal legislation introduced yesterday, airlines that show adult-themed movies on overhead screens would be required to create seating sections to shield children from graphic content.

The legislation was prompted by complaints from parents and others who said airlines were increasingly showing movies and television reruns with sexual content and violence to in-flight audiences that include children, said a spokesman for Representative Heath Shuler, Democrat of North Carolina, one of two authors of bill, the Family Friendly Flights Act."

See: Bill to Restrict In-Flight Movies - New York Times

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The city of Chongqing has unveiled a massive public toilet with some 1,000 stalls...

"We are spreading toilet culture. People can listen to gentle music and watch TV," said Lu Xiaoqing, an official with the Yangrenjie, or "Foreigners Street," tourist area where the bathroom is located. "After they use the bathroom they will be very, very happy."

Footage aired on CCTV showed people milling about the sprawling facility and washing their hands at trough sinks. For open-aired relief, there is a cluster of stalls without a roof.
 

Details are here.

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