AdamSmith

Agree, except that with the economy the way it is, there is an abundance of talent here in NC, and I think a lot of other places, that is eager or even desperate for work, or for better work. And of course not every worker who objects to local politics has the freedom to move somewhere that better suits his conscience. In all, it is an employer's market.

I just posted this in the N.C. voting rights act thread, but on reflection it deserves a standalone post, I think. Editorial The Decline of North Carolina By THE EDITORIAL BOARD The New York Times Published: July 9, 2013 Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage. In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot. The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks. The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program. At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped. “We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes. Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics. And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build. http://www.nytimes.c...d=fb-share&_r=0

Editorial The Decline of North Carolina By THE EDITORIAL BOARD The New York Times Published: July 9, 2013 Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage. In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot. The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks. The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program. At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped. “We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes. Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics. And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/opinion/the-decline-of-north-carolina.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Seriously:

ROFL very good

So what's going on there? I went to college with Joe Gordon, who once had, justifiably I thought, high hopes and confidence in the place as Democratic. What gives today?

Ever been to Indiana? JK.

RA1 may rap my knuckles for posting this speculation so far in advance of release of much real information about the accident. But it was interesting to see this reader comment posted below a CNN article: Tim Sall I am a current airline capt. flying a 767, with 29 years experience. If you understand the automatization modes of a B757,767,747,777 and what they do, or don't do, then it is fairly easy to understand what most likely happened. The ILS was out of service, they were doing a visual approach, not being being backed up by the ILS, which would cause the autothrottles to be working. Instead they were decending down using flt. level change mode, where the autothrottles are not active and they forgot this, because 98% of the time they are backed up by the ILS. Nobody was watching the airspeed, because they are so use to the autothrorttles working. Then when they realized it it was to late. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/07/us/asiana-214/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

http://www.hecklerspray.com/paula-deen-without-makeup

Not quite a joke...

No, same old same old...

Agreed. A human pustule waiting to burst. Like some of his brethren... "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox." -- Christopher Hitchens

LOL Now be nice, suck -- jarheads have their place. And they know it

Warmest congratulations. But don't do that!

Pope Francis criticizes indifference toward immigrants' plightBy Tom Kington LA Times July 8, 2013, 10:06 a.m. ROME -- Against a backdrop of growing anti-immigration sentiment in Europe, Pope Francis on Monday used his first papal trip outside the Vatican to denounce the "globalization of indifference" to migrants, calling their suffering "a painful thorn in my heart." The pontiff traveled to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa to drop a wreath of flowers into the Mediterranean in mourning for the thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have drowned while sailing from Africa to Europe in search of a better life. "We have become used to the suffering of others," said Francis, who made the surprise decision to visit Lampedusa after reading about the recent sinking of a boat that resulted in the deaths of a dozen migrants. "Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families?" he asked. "We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion." Addressing Muslims on the island, the pope said that "the church is with you in the search for a more dignified life for you and your families." Francis' fiercely worded homily, delivered before a crowd of 10,000 people, highlighted his focus on the plight of the poor and marginalized. Just 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia, Lampedusa is a favored landing point in Europe for African migrants, who travel on rickety fishing boats that often run out of fuel or sink in rough weather. About 8,400 migrants landed in Italy and the nearby island of Malta in the first half of this year, up from 4,500 in the same period last year, but down from the many thousands who headed for Lampedusa during the political upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2011. More than 6,000 people are believed to have drowned in the waters around Lampedusa between 1994 and 2012. The United Nations recorded 500 deaths of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean during 2012. Hostility toward immigrants is on the rise in Europe as the region contends with a stubborn economic recession. Countries such as Britain are trying to tighten restrictions on newcomers; anti-immigrant political parties, some on the far right, have become potent forces in France, Greece, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In 2009, Italy struck a deal with Libya's then-ruler, Moammar Kadafi, to send back migrants intercepted at sea without hearing claims for asylum. Pope Francis, whose own forebears migrated from Italy to Argentina, was accompanied by a flotilla of local fishing boats as he sailed into Lampedusa's harbor after dropping a wreath of yellow and white flowers from an Italian coast guard vessel. The pope celebrated Mass on a sports field near where the wrecks of migrants' vessels have been piled up. He used an altar fashioned from a small boat and a lectern made from the helm of one of the vessels. His staff and chalice were also made from piece of wood taken from the wrecks. The pope met a group of migrants and thanked locals for their kind treatment of new arrivals. After his visit, he tweeted: "God will judge us on the basis of how we have treated the most needy." http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-pope-immigration-20130708,0,4473843.story

Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business Behind the scenes of standardized testing By Jessica Lussenhop Minneapolis CityPages published: February 23, 2011 After three years working as a scorer, Dan DiMaggio says he's a skimming machine. "It's ugly," he says. "You just go as fast as possible." Todd Farley worked for 15 years in the testing industry before quitting to write a tell-all book about his former employer's scoring procedures Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it. The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions. At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him. "You know this stuff better than I do!" he said. "Stop asking me questions!" DiMaggio was struck dumb. "I definitely didn't feel like I knew what was going on at all," he remembers. "Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what's going on or everything falls apart." DiMaggio's question concerned an essay titled, "What's your goal in life?" The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds. Although DiMaggio had been through a training process, he found himself tripped up as he began scoring the essays. What made the organization "good" as opposed to "excellent"? What happens when the kid doesn't answer the question at all, but writes with excellent organization about whatever the hell he wants? Did it matter that it was insane for seventh-graders to think they'd be benching 200 pounds? DiMaggio had good reason to worry. His score could determine whether the school was deemed adequate or failing—whether it received government funding or got shut down. DiMaggio soon learned that his boss was a temp like him. In fact, the boss was only the team leader because he'd once managed a Target store. DiMaggio found out that the human resources woman who'd hired them both was a temp. He realized that their office space—filled with long tables lined with several hundred computer monitors and generic office chairs—was rented. Eventually, DiMaggio got used to not asking questions. He got used to skimming the essays as fast as possible, glancing over the responses for about two minutes apiece before clicking a score. Every so often, though, his thoughts would drift to the school in Arkansas or Ohio or Pennsylvania. If they only knew what was going on behind the scenes. "The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted," he says. "It's a farce." THOUGH THE EFFICACY of standardized testing has been hotly debated for decades, one thing has become crystal clear: It's big business. In 2002, President George Bush signed the infamous No Child Left Behind Act. While testing around the country had been on the rise for decades, NCLB tripled it. "The amount of testing that was being done mushroomed," says Kathy Mickey, a senior education analyst at Simba Information. "Every state had new contracts. There was a lot of spending." The companies that create and score tests saw profits skyrocket. In 2009, K-12 testing was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry. The Twin Cities were early beneficiaries of the gold rush. Minnesota's history as an early computer hardware hotbed led to the creation of some of the earliest data-scanning and numbers-crunching businesses here, including Scantron and National Computer Systems. By the '90s, NCS was grading 85 percent of the standardized tests for the nation's largest school districts. In 2000, NCS was bought by Pearson, a multinational corporation based in London, making it a part of the largest education company in the world. In 2009, it posted $652 million in profits. Today, tens of thousands of temporary scorers are employed to correct essay questions. This year, Maple Grove-based Data Recognition Corporation will take on 4,000 temporary scorers, Questar Assessment will hire 1,000, and Pearson will take on thousands more. From March through May, hundreds of thousands of standardized test essays will pour into the Twin Cities to be scored by summer. The boom in testing has come with several notable catastrophes. The most famous happened in 2000, when NCS Pearson incorrectly failed 8,000 Minnesota students on a math test. Pearson shelled out a $7 million settlement to the students, and Gov. Jesse Ventura participated in a makeup graduation for students who were wrongly denied their diplomas. In 2010, Pearson again miss-scored two questions on Minnesota's fifth- and eighth-grade tests. Delays in its Florida scoring resulted in a $3 million fine and glitches in Wyoming led the company to offer a $5.8 million settlement. But while a mistake on a bubble form is a black-and-white problem, few scandals have broken on the essay side of the test-scoring business. "It requires human judgment," says Michael Rodriguez, of the University of Minnesota's educational psychology department. "There is no way to standardize that." Now scorers from local companies are drawing back the curtain on the clandestine business of grading student essays, a process they say goes too fast; relies on cheap, inexperienced labor; and does not accurately assess student learning. "The entire testing system in the U.S. needs to be restructured," says Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest. "That would likely result in the disappearance of these essay-scoring sweatshops." DANI INDOVINO DIDN'T want to score tests. She wanted to work in nonprofit administration. But she was fresh out of school in September 2008, just as the economy was entering its freefall. Desperate to get out of her parents' house, she perked up when some friends told her about becoming a "reader" for one of the local test companies. It was easy work to get and there was lots of it. All you needed was a college diploma. "I was like, 'Yeah, I have a degree, I can do that,'" she recalls. On Indovino's first day, she drove out to Questar Assessment in Apple Valley, a beige warehouse, and followed the signs that said "Scoring Center" in bright red letters. During her brief interview, she'd been asked repeatedly if she was able to follow a "rubric"—a set of guidelines to assess the essays in as uniform a way as possible. "I guess they've had bad experiences with English teachers," she says. Inside Questar, Indovino took a seat in a room that looked like a classroom, crammed with as many computers and desks as could fit. It was here that the team leaders unveiled the scoring rubric, which was like a secret decoder ring for the job. The rubrics are most often developed in conjunction with the state's department of education and its testing contractor. Currently, Minnesota contracts both its test writing and scoring to Pearson. Local teachers are included in the rubric-writing process, as well as test-writing academics called "psychometricians." At first blush, the rubric seemed simple enough to Indovino. It was a chart with one- or two-sentence explanations of each number grade. Scorers are forbidden from taking the rubrics out of the Questar building or talking about them, but they generally look something like this: 6. An excellent response, the essay includes• excellent focus and development • excellent organization • excellent language skills and word choice • excellent grammar, usage, and mechanics 5. A good response, the essay includes • good focus and development • good organization • good language skills and word choice • good grammar, usage, and mechanics 4. An adequate response ... On down to 1s, which were reserved for barely decipherable language. As part of their training, Indovino and her co-workers read through pre-graded examples out loud, then discussed why each had been scored the way it was. The process quickly divided the room into two camps—the young, unemployed kids who were just there for a paycheck, and the retired teachers. "The retired teachers would argue everything," says Indovino. After two days of going through example papers, each scorer had to pass a qualifying exam. Indovino scored three sets of ten pre-scored papers. In order to be approved to work on the project, she had to pass two of the sets with at least an 80 percent "agreement rate" with the rubric. She did so with relative ease; most of the rest of the room passed on their second try. Her first project was from Arkansas, an essay written by eighth-graders on the topic, "A fun thing to do in my town." And that's where the troubles began. Suddenly, she was being asked to crank through 200 real essays in a day. The scanned papers popped up on the screen and her eyes flitted as fast as they could down the lines. The difference between "excellent" and "good" and "adequate" was decided in a matter of seconds, to say nothing of the responses that were simply off the reservation. How do you score a kid who rails that his town sucks? What about an exceptionally well-written essay on why the student was refusing to answer the question? All over the room, the teachers were raising their hands and disputing the rubric. Indovino preferred to keep her head down and just score the way she was told to. "I was good at the bad system," she says. Over the next several months, Indovino got to know her co-workers better. The young people were mostly laid off or in foreclosure. They came straight from paper routes and went off to waitressing jobs afterward. They also made for a very dedicated workforce. Indovino says she saw her co-workers hung-over, extremely ill, and even fresh from surgery. "I scored a full day without glasses on," Indovino says with a shrug. "I sat with my nose up to the glass all day. I couldn't read it." When she eventually got a full-time job, Indovino quit scoring. Although she'd done well by the company's standards, following the rubric provided little sense of accomplishment. "Nobody is saying, 'I'm doing good work, I'm helping society,'" she says. "Everyone is saying, 'This isn't right.'" DAVID PUTHOFF WAS an experienced reader with Questar when he started getting the warnings that his job performance wasn't up to snuff. "Your numbers are down a little bit," his supervisor said at the end of one day. "Make sure you bring those back up." Most essays, depending on the criteria established in the state, are scored by two readers. As Puthoff and his fellow scorers whipped through their essays, their supervisor had their own eyes glued to a screen, keeping them apprised of whether Reader #1 agreed with Reader #2. If so, both got a 100 percent agreement score for that essay. If one differed by a point or so, the essay would be counted as "adjacent" agreement. Puthoff had thus far been an agreement-rate superstar. He was consistently in the high 80s. Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: "What are the qualities of a good leader?" One student wrote, "Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader." With artfulness far beyond the student's age, the essay delved into King's history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership. There was just one problem: It didn't fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as "honesty" and "inspires people." This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2. He hesitated the way he had been specifically trained not to. Then he hit, "3." It didn't take long before a supervisor was in his face. He leaned down with a printout of the King essay. "This really isn't a 3-style paper," the supervisor said. Puthoff pointed out the smart use of examples and the exceptional prose. The supervisor just shook his head and pointed out how short the paragraphs were. "You know, it's more of a 2," the supervisor repeated. "Not enough elaboration." Puthoff quickly learned these were not arguments he could win. But as time went on, he found himself having more and more of them. There were the students who wrote extremely well but whose responses were too short—in his mind he saw them, bored with the essay topic, hurrying to finish. Or the essays where the handwriting got rushed and jumbled at the end, then cut off abruptly—he imagined the proctor telling the frantic student to lay down his pencil on a well-written but incomplete response. And there were the kids who just did what they wanted. Like the boy from Arkansas who, instead of writing about the most fun thing to do in his town, instead wrote a hilarious essay on why his town is terrible and how he wanted to burn it down and pee on the ashes. "I wanted the kid to get the score they deserved," Puthoff says of his time in the business. "But they want to put them in boxes." In defiance, Puthoff started giving creatively written essays an illicit score bump. His agreement numbers noticeably suffered. The industry calls this "scorer drift," a well-documented tendency to begin deviating from the rubric over time. One case of scorer drift actually resulted in some 4,100 teachers failing the essay portion of their certification exams. The teachers successfully sued for $11.1 million. What was different about Puthoff's scorer drift was that he was doing it on purpose. "I'll bring them up, don't worry," he'd say of his agreement rate, then go back the next day and do the exact same thing. "I know this kid is good," he'd tell himself. "I know this kid's a good writer." TODD FARLEY TREATED his supervising position at a scoring company like a joke. "At the time, testing wasn't that big," he says. "I never had to feel like I'm actually deciding someone's future. It was just silly." Farley had started at the bottom rung of the testing industry in Iowa City. A part-time graduate student with bills to pay, he was more interested in partying and trying to become a writer than he was in getting a real job. So he took one scoring job after another for NCS. "It was always a temporary gig," he remembers. "It was a lovely, slacker-y life." Farley had no official training in teaching, education, or test writing, but the longer he remained at NCS, the more responsibilities he was handed. He took the offer to become a team leader because it paid a little extra money and got him out of scoring. Teaching his first group of scorers, Farley walked them through the rubric the same way he'd been shown. He fielded the inevitable bombardment of confused questions as best he could, in particular from one man: Harry the laid-off refrigerator plant worker. Even though Harry eventually passed his qualifying exams, he was a disaster. As Farley monitored Harry's scoring, he found himself walking back over to Harry repeatedly. "Look," Farley would say. "You're giving this essay a 2 even though it's perfectly formatted." Harry would nod. But a short time later, another ridiculous low ball from Harry would land on Farley's desk. Before long, Harry began to drag down the all-important agreement level. Farley now understood the reasons why, when he'd been a scorer, his team leaders would tell the room he wanted to start seeing more 3s or 4s or whatever. Supervisors were expected to turn the test scores into a nice bell curve. If his room did not agree at least 80 percent of the time, the tests would be taken back and re-graded, wasting time and money. The supervisor would be put on probation or demoted. When Farley complained to a fellow supervisor about his problem, she smiled wryly and held up a pencil. "I've got this eraser, see," she told him. "I help them out." So Farley simply began changing Harry's scores to agree with his peers'. The practice soon spread well beyond Harry. "I'd just change a bunch of answers to make it look like my group was doing a great job," Farley says. "I wanted the stupid item to be done, and so did my bosses." There were a few other tricks to keep the numbers up. One was to send a wayward scorer off into a corner to study example papers long enough for the group's numbers to rebound. Another was to pair up a couple of bad scorers and make them decide together what to give a paper. Or he could make the same announcement he'd heard from his supervisor back when he was a scorer. "It's time we see more sixes," Farley would tell the group, which was code that his bell curve was off. "We're in trouble here, we need higher scores, give higher scores." Though Farley and his fellow team leaders were fudging the numbers, even he was shocked when a representative from a southeastern state's Department of Education visited to check on how her state's essays were doing. As it turned out, the answer was: not well. About 67 percent of the students were getting 2s. That's when the representative informed Farley that the rubric for her state's scoring had suddenly changed. "We can't give this many 1s and 2s," she told him firmly. The scorers would not be going back to re-grade the hundreds of tests they'd already finished—there just wasn't time. Instead, they were just going to give out more 3s. No one objected—the customer was always right. Eventually, Farley was hired away by a rival testing company and moved to the East Coast. As he saw standardized tests becoming more and more important to the fate of schools and kids, he got fed up, quit the industry, and decided to write a whistle-blowing book. Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, came out in 2009. Though the tell-all chronicles Farley's many misdeeds while scoring tests and supervising, he has nonetheless been invited back to work for the testing companies several times. The boom has just made his experience too valuable. "They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers," he says. "They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me." PEARSON SPOKESMAN ADAM Gaber warns against taking the opinions of former scorers too seriously. In an email, he characterized their concerns as "one-sided stories based upon people who have a very limited exposure and narrow point of view on what is truly a science." Questar declined a request to visit their facilities, but reached by phone, Susan Trent, vice president of assessment services, said that the essays are scored as objectively as is possible. "We're really insistent that readers understand they're dealing with kids," she says. "Decisions are being made about these kids based on these scores, and we're absolutely committed to getting them right." She denies that graders are pressured to work too quickly and says that any evidence of scorer drift results in test re-scoring. She is also adamant that well-trained temps are the best way to score essays objectively. "You do not have to be a teacher in order to score student response," adds Terry Appleman, vice president of performance assessment. "You have to have a good rubric and good training." Asked what to make of the former Questar employees who felt they couldn't do a good job given their training and time constraints, Appleman quickly answers: "If they don't think they're qualified, it's not the job for them." Most of the scorers interviewed for this story agree, but nearly all plan to return to the scoring center. They say they need the money. http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/1782234/

LOL You are perfectly describing the scene at after-hours establishments in NYC (and doubtless worldwide) after 4am nominal closing time on Sat night, i.e. Sunday morning. Almost always something out of Star Wars. To which situation both of your observations apply.

A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West Monica Almeida/The New York Times Joe Klorman, a retired police officer, before treatment for a severe case of valley fever that affects his brain. By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN The New York Times Published: July 4, 2013 BAKERSFIELD, Calif. In 36 years with the Los Angeles police, Sgt. Irwin Klorman faced many dangerous situations, including one routine call that ended with Uzi fire and a bullet-riddled body sprawled on the living room floor. But his most life-threatening encounter has been with coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever, for which he is being treated here. Coccidioidomycosis, known as cocci, is an insidious airborne fungal disease in which microscopic spores in the soil take flight on the wind or even a mild breeze to lodge in the moist habitat of the lungs and, in the most extreme instances, spread to the bones, the skin, the eyes or, in Mr. Klormans case, the brain. The infection, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled a silent epidemic, is striking more people each year, with more than 20,000 reported cases annually throughout the Southwest, especially in California and Arizona. Although most people exposed to the fungus do not fall ill, about 160 die from it each year, with thousands more facing years of disability and surgery. About 9 percent of those infected will contract pneumonia and 1 percent will experience serious complications beyond the lungs. The disease is named for the San Joaquin Valley, a cocci hot spot, where the same soil that produces the states agricultural bounty can turn traitorous. The silent epidemic became less silent last week when a federal judge ordered the state to transfer about 2,600 vulnerable inmates including some with H.I.V. out of two of the valleys eight state prisons, about 90 miles north of here. In 2011, those prisons, Avenal and Pleasant Valley, produced 535 of the 640 reported inmate cocci cases, and throughout the system, yearly costs for hospitalization for cocci exceed $23 million. The transfer, affecting about a third of the two prisons combined population, is to be completed in 90 days, a challenge to a prison system already contending with a federal mandate to reduce overcrowding. Jose Antonio Diaz, 44, who has diabetes and was recently relocated to Avenal, is feeling very scared of catching it, said his wife, Suzanne Moreno. Advocates for prisoners have criticized state agencies for not moving the inmates sooner. If this were a factory, a public university or a hotel anything except a prison they would shut these two places down, said Donald Specter, the executive director of the Prison Law Office, which provides free legal assistance to inmates. The pending transfer has underscored the complexities and mysteries of a disease that continues to baffle physicians and scientists. In Arizona, a study from the Department of Health Services showed a 25 percent risk of African-Americans with newly diagnosed valley fever developing complications, compared with 6 percent of whites. The working hypothesis has to do with genetic susceptibility, probably the interrelationships of genes involved in the immune system, said Dr. John N. Galgiani, a professor at the University of Arizona and the director of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, founded in 1996. But which ones? Were clueless. Kandis Watson, whose son Kaden, 8, almost died, had a gut feeling that something was not right, she said, when Kaden began feeling sick two years ago. The pediatrician prescribed antibiotics, but Kadens health deteriorated, with a golf ball-size mass developing at the base of his neck. The infection enveloped Kadens chest, narrowing his trachea. Kaden was essentially breathing through an opening the size of a straw, said Dr. James M. McCarty, the medical director of pediatric infectious diseases at Childrens Hospital Central California in Madera, where Kaden spent six months. Today the boy is back to his mischievous self, surreptitiously placing a green plastic lizard in his mothers hair. But how he contracted valley fever is still guesswork. I think he got it being a boy, digging in the dirt, Mrs. Watson said. Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, had more than 1,800 reported cases last year. At Kern Medical Center, Dr. Royce H. Johnson and his colleagues have a roster of nearly 2,000 patients. Many, like Mr. Klorman, have life-threatening cocci meningitis. I got a bad break, said Mr. Klorman, who is known as Joe. Until illness forced his retirement, he preferred a squad car to a desk job. Now he travels four hours round trip three times a week so Dr. Johnson can inject a powerful antifungal drug into his spinal fluid. In other patients, the disease has been known to eat away ribs and vertebrae. It destroys lives, said Dr. Johnson, whose daughter contracted a mild form. Divorces, lost jobs and bankruptcy are incredibly common, not to mention psychological dislocation. Once athletic, Deandre Zillendor, 38, dropped to 145 pounds from 220 in two weeks, and lesions erupted on his face and body. You keep it forever, like luggage, he said of the disease. Todd Schaefer, 48, who produces award-winning pinot noirs in Paso Robles, was told by his doctors that he had 10 years to live. That was 10 years ago. But valley fever has disseminated into his spinal column and brain, and his conversation is interrupted by grimaces of pain. Ruggedly handsome, he still outwardly resembles the archetype of the California good life. But Mr. Schaefer has had a stroke, a hole in his lung, two serious heart episodes and relapses that put me on the edge of life, he said. He believes he got infected with valley fever atop a tractor during the construction of Pacific Coast Vineyards, which he runs with his wife, Tammy. One doctor initially suggested bed rest, chicken soup and cranberry juice. Today Mr. Schaefer can no longer can drink wine, and he begins every morning retching. I told her to leave me, he said at one low point, of his wife, who is 37. Shes too young, too beautiful. Dr. Benjamin Park, a medical officer with the C.D.C., said that the numbers of cases are under-estimates because some states do not require public reporting. They include Texas, where valley fever is endemic along the Rio Grande. In New Mexico, a 2010 survey of doctors and clinics by the states public health department revealed that 69 percent of clinicians did not consider it in patients with respiratory problems. Numbers spike when rainfall is followed by dry spells. Many scientists believe that the uptick in infections is related to changing climate patterns. Kenneth K. Komatsu, the state epidemiologist for Arizona, where 13,000 cases were reported last year, said that another factor may be urban sprawl: digging up rural areas where valley fever is growing in the soil, he said. In Avenal, citizens have become activists, looking into possible environmental factors, including a regional landfill that accepts construction waste. Three of the four children of James McGee, a teacher, have contracted the disease, including Marivi, 17, who was found convulsing in the ladies room at school. Dr. McCarty of Childrens Hospital is seeing an increasing number of children from Avenal. Valley fever was a familiar presence during the Dust Bowl, and in Japanese internment camps throughout the arid West. Yet there is still no cure, and research on a fungicide and a potential vaccine have been stalled by financing issues. One company, Nielsen Biosciences Inc., has developed a skin test to identify cocci but has not yet been able to make it financially viable. Part of the difficulty is that cocci is a hundred different diseases, Dr. Johnson said, depending on where in the body it nests. His patients include farm workers, oil field workers and construction workers. One of his patients, Barbara Ludy, 61, had a job that involved taking care of a man who is quadriplegic. She was strong enough to lift his 175-pound frame, plus his wheelchair, into a van. Cocci meningitis affected her ability to think, to remember, to walk, to live independently. When her weight dropped to 71 pounds, her distraught daughters went to Goodwill to buy their mother size zero clothes. One daughter, Jennifer Gillet, now takes care of her mother full time. Ms. Ludy is recuperating, slowly. And things are looking up: She is now a size 10. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/health/a-disease-without-a-cure-spreads-quietly-in-the-west.html?WT.mc_id=TOP-D-E-OB-AD-BNR-OFF-0513&WT.mc_ev=click&_r=0

LOL. And how could the thread have gotten this far with no sniggering about their fascination with... Anal Probing Greetings, Earth Human, we have traveled millions of light years to explore new planets... and now, we seek to explore Uranus! Alien 1: Couldn't we, at least, abduct their political and religious leaders, instead of just any idiot in a pickup truck? Alien 2: I'm sure the Great Leader has his reasons. Alien 1: Well, I'm sure the Great Leader is just some sort of twisted ASS FREAK!— The Kids in the Hall One of the most pervasive (and perverted) story-telling tropes of Alien Abduction lore amounting to being nothing more than a very vulgar form of Orifice Invasion. In other words, it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. All humans taken on board a spaceship against their will are subjected to grueling tests and experiments by their Strange Captors for intended purposes ranging from studying foreign biology, researching the prospects of interbreeding, and monitoring for long periods of time via tracking chip implants. Fortunately for the abductors, all three of those things can be achieved through a single method which involves inserting vaguely described alien technological instruments into the rectal cavity of the victim. If the audience learns anything about the probing tech itself, it's usually never much more than just what it looks like, which is typically either an insanely large torture device with pincers and needles and spinning blades mounted on a rotating head or a dildo. Naturally, the trope can be used to great effect to either showcase the sheer horror of or, more frequently, use Vulgar Humor to explore the total absurdity of the nature of Alien Abductions; it can also be a novel way of fitting jokes about gay sex (abductees depicted as being subjected to this are much more frequently male) and rape into a story or work. Anal Probing is a Dead Unicorn Trope. This trope is rarely, if ever, taken seriously in fiction, and even when it's supposed to be seen as something truly horrible and undesirable, there's usually enough room to interpret the trope's use as Comedic Sociopathy. Real Life UFO abduction communities, which would seem like the most likely place to hear straight-forward examples, don't even discuss probing as something that exclusively involves the rectal cavity (if they do at all). The Science Fiction equivalent to a cavity search. Be on the lookout as well for puns about space programs launching probes to Uranus. See Also: Ass Shove, Vulgar Humor; Half-Human Hybrid and Mars Needs Women which are both popular motivations for one kind of alien probing or another. This trope is practically synonymous with The Greys and is often evident whenever Aliens Are Bastards, especially if the probing doesn't appear to have any real significance apart from torturing the abductee. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnalProbing