Thursday, February 26, 2004

Union-busting, DoD style. The Defense Department is proposing to drastically cut the size and influence of its unions. At least half of the more than 400,000 employees covered by collective bargaining units could lose that right under DoD’s proposal. It would be harder for employees to join a bargaining unit and easier for them to drop out. Third-party reviews of employees’ appeals and union grievances would be replaced with in-house reviews. Unions could consult with management on big changes to work conditions, but management would have the final say. (link) Interesting story. [Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs] The article doesn't even hint at what I consider to be the most likely reason for the DoD's actions. Unions are unofficial subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, and this move is a simple (if imaginative) move by the Republican Party to weaken the rival faction. 9:20:02 PM    comment () Give Me A Break, and Another Break, and Another. New at Reason: You paid for John Stossel's beach house. The well-heeled ABC newsman explains how he and other plutocrats game the government for free money, price supports and other goodies. [Hit & Run] 2:29:01 PM    comment () This is a classic but bizarre example of human behavior.  Managers at 4 different Wendy's restaurants in the Boston area strip searched an employee in response to a prank phone call.  The caller posed as a policeman and told the manager to stand a specific employee naked on a chair and search him for items stolen from a customer.  All four managers did as told.  Are people so accepting of "authority" now that a prank phone call can cause them to wildly overstep the bounds of decency and common sense? [John Robb's Weblog] This reminds me of a study I read about that was done sometime around the 1950s or 1960s (I think). The subjects were told they were participating in an experiment, but not that they were the subject. A person dressed up in a lab coat (an "authority figure") told them to inflict painful or even lethal electric shocks to an "experimental subject" (actually an actor who pretended to scream in pain and beg for mercy). The results of the study was that many of the subjects were willing to torture and kill a complete stranger because an authority figure told them to. As I recall, they found that significantly more Germans were willing to do it than Americans, but I'd be willing to bet that if it were done again today there would be little or no difference--and probably a lower percentage would refuse. 10:26:13 AM    comment () Mr. President, An Asteroid Impact Is Imminent.... As reported by Dr. David Whitehouse of BBC: Some scientists believed on 13 January that a 30m object, later designated 2004 AS1 [SciScoop aside - also known as AL00667], had a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours. It could have caused local devastation and the researchers contemplated a call to President Bush before new data finally showed there was no danger. The procedures for raising the alarm in such circumstances are now being revised. At the time, the president's team would have been putting the final touches to a speech he was due to make the following day at the headquarters of Nasa, the US space agency. In it he planned to reset the course of manned spaceflight, sending it back to the Moon and on to Mars, but he could have had something very different to say. He could have begun by warning the world it was about to be hit by a space rock. Bush would not have known where it would impact - only somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Experts would have been bouncing radar signals off the huge rock as he spoke in order to get more information about its trajectory. At about 30m wide, the asteroid was cosmic small fry, not the type of thing to wipe out the dinosaurs or threaten our species, but still big enough to cause considerable damage after exploding in the atmosphere. Potentially, the loss of life could have been much worse than 11 September. In the end, Bush made no such announcement, but astronomers have admitted they were on the verge of making the call. In a paper presented at this week's Planetary Protection conference in California, veteran asteroid researcher Clark Chapman calls it a "nine-hour crisis". He explains how word reached the astronomical community of an asteroid that had just been discovered by the twin optical telescopes of the Linear automated sky survey in New Mexico. [SciScoop] I'm not so concerned about the possibility of almost giving a false alarm. What I'd like to know is, if a rock really was going to hit us, would the astronomers at some point tell ordinary people, or would they just tell the President? 10:14:25 AM    comment ()

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