NFL refs, 401K plans, screwing new workers and the middle class

September 26, 2012 in economics, predator capitalism | No comments

Perhaps the unions deserve to die. They bring on their own demise. As soon as you make a decision that protects existing workers while reducing benefits for new hires you are done. By agreeing to bar new workers from defined benefit retirement plans you lose the high ground. Now you are just sitting ducks allowing management to take pot shots to reduce the expensive workforce. (They call it evaluations.)

It’s not just the NFL refs union. Unions have been reduced to solely protecting existing members. As a force to right the imbalances of predator capitalism and restore and protect a middle class they are impotent.

401K plans suck compared to defined benefit plans. I you’ve got on you know. There just a big pool of money that gets plundered every ten years or so, cleaned out by the financial sector as part of bursting bubbles.

All the value that was defined benefit plans has left the middle class and moved up the food chain to the investors class. Its easy, just under-fund the plans, say ‘oh no’ and then claim the money for your stockholders.

Where are the 99%? Watching football complaining about the refs. Where is the media? Writing about football complaining about the refs. Coverage never rises to to a level that asks how this very public controversy relates to all of our lives, to the bigger picture of the dissolution of the middle class by fat-cat business men used to getting their way. Nobody want to mess with that. We are all stars in our own fantasy league, complicit in our own destruction.

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Evaluating the Chicago Teachers Strike

September 14, 2012 in education, privatization, teaching | No comments

25,000 teachers are on a strike that touches a chord that resonates through the nation. It has something to do with teacher evaluations. Though the contract in Boston is settled, there are issues unresolved and ideas both complex and wide ranging. Some see evaluations as a ploy for the push to eliminate the unions and leave education to private enterprise. For them it bodes ill for the survival of a middle class. They know that charter school teacher salaries ‘max out’ in five years at $20,000-$30,000 less than union salaries. That makes it hard to live in the city you teach in and difficult to send your kids to college. Forget that little place at the Cape. New evaluation standards make it easier to reduce the unionized workforce and open the cities to charter operators and their investors.

Narrow it down to the ‘Race to the Top’ and smart people still disagree. Data driven, directed from the top->down with an empowered administration is the government prescription for a better urban school system. Evaluations are a tool to help fill that prescription.

Life in the trenches is a little confusing. Students wonder if they should get back to working hard on a pre-Civil War project that just got interrupted for 4 days of computer testing of random paragraphs and comprehension questions that have nothing to do with Antebellum America. But they know the adults think it’s important. Read the rest of this entry »

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on Is Algebra Necessary?

July 29, 2012 in education, privatization, teaching | No comments

Is Algebra Necessary? By ANDREW HACKER Published: July 28, 2012 NY Times

‘[D]efenses of algebra …are… unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic…It would be better to reduce not expand the mathematics we ask young people to imbibe’

I was interested, that research would be explained, faulty logic analyzed. A page of evidence follows implicating algebra in the high school dropout rate and the college dropout rate.

In most colleges, out of the 40 courses taken to get a bachelors degree only one needs to be a math class (and maybe one a science course). They are often classes like the author speaks of – quantitative reasoning, citizen statistics or the philosophy, history or art of math. The problem is, in order to be eligible to take that one math class, you have to pass the accuplacer, the placement test most incoming college freshman must take. If you fail it you have to take algebra. For the author, the whole ‘requirement of higher mathematics comes into question’ because of this.

Shall we reduce the requirement from one class in college to maybe 1/2 a class? Eliminate the eight grade level Accuplacer placement requirement. Reduce it to maybe just long-division? Read the rest of this entry »

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Renewable energy program called unfair as lawmakers debate its expansion

July 23, 2012 in building, economics, predator capitalism, privatization, sustainability | No comments

Something fishy about David Abel’s story on wind and solar energy. He seems to be purposely calling everything a subsidy when actually there are two things going on here, one a subsidy to get alternative energy systems off the ground and two the energy produced as a result of that subsidy.

Right now in Massachusetts you can put panels on your roof, run it through an inverter and connect to a breaker in your panel. If you are using less energy than your panels are producing your meter starts running backwards and you are feeding power to the grid. In effect you become a producer, if the rate is .17$/KWH you are getting credited that for every kilowatt hour your solar panels produce.

Things get really interesting as utilities move to a smart grid with different rates for peak and off-peak. I’m in a pilot program with NSTAR; for 20 hours of the day my rates are less than yours: .12$/KWH vs your .17$/KWH. But during the recent heat wave I was notified of a Critical Peak price of .95$/KWH, 8 times as much as off-peak.

If I had had panels on my roof they would have been humming during the 12-5 bright hot critical period and at .95$/KWH I would have been making some serious money producing electricity to run all those air conditioners downtown.

Maybe the real story is that big business and utility companies have a problem with that. Read the rest of this entry »

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back to Haight

July 23, 2012 in building, family | No comments

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in not so hot water

July 23, 2012 in building, family, sustainability | No comments

I have been working with Tobin on a design combining domestic heating and domestic hot water (DHW) using an instant hot water heater, solar and a wood stove as sources and under-slab radiant and baseboard as emitters. It is for his house in Portland. Here is where we were at a couple of weeks ago. Now we tune the system to available components.

An ever-increasing percentage of future hydronics systems will operate at water temperatures of 120 degrees F or less under design load conditions. This is especially true if these systems include renewable energy heat sources. Optimizing energy efficiency is now the motivation for low water temperatures. New heat emitters as well as classic low-temperature radiant panels are the enabling technology. I urge everyone in the North American hydronics industry to embrace low-temperature hydronics and tool up to deliver solutions that ensure its implementation. -John Siegenthaler

space heating design

A low temperature ‘junk heat’ system designed to meet the design temperature load of 25,000 Btu/hr. Most of the space heating is provided by radiant floor heating, most of that through a high thermal mass radiant slab with water at ~100 °. The remainder is provided by panel radiators designed to operate at 120 °. The radiant floor water is drawn from the middle of the 119 gallon storage tank. The panel radiators draw their water from the top of the tank.

A evacuated tube solar panel takes water from the bottom of the tank and returns it to the upper region of the tank. The water in the tanks is at atmospheric pressure. The tank is used for heat storage and as the drainback tank for the solar collector. The level can be determined through the sight glass and is maintained by the user.

The intent is to maintain stratification of temperature within the tank

Additional heat for the storage stank is provided through heat exchange from the DHW system.

hvac005.jpg

Read the rest of this entry »

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on: The biggest tax increase since…1993?

July 3, 2012 in economics, nocat, predator capitalism | No comments

Shereen Marisol Meraji’s piece on yesterdays APR Marketplace did little to unmuddy the waters. More public radio infotainment than good reporting, the report tempers the right wing rhetoric just a little replacing ‘history of the world’ with ‘since Clinton’s increase in ’93′ Hardly informs or encourages public discourse on tax policy.

The brackets and rates don’t change in the obamacare tax increase. Capital gains tax does, but only 3.8% for people with >$250,000 in capital gains/dividends. (The other taxes are a .9% additional tax on medicare for high wage earners and a penalty between 1% and 2.5% of income if you don’t have health insurance starting in 2013)

It turns out to be true that taxes go up for the rich but only marginally so. By raising the capital gains tax by 4% raises in excess of $ 50 billion dollars. I’ve modeled what happens with a 4% capital gains tax increase for every body. Below is a table on overall tax rates for different segments of the population. The last two columns compares overall tax percentage of current and obamacare. You can see the table better here: Read the rest of this entry »

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on Boston Public (district high) Schools

March 1, 2012 in education, teaching | 1 comment

There are better ways to educate our kids

For six years starting in 2005 I taught in Boston Public Schools at a district high school. It pretty much fit the profile of a “failing” urban school: a very large percentage of students who a) qualified for free lunch, b)would be the first in the family to attend college, c)did poorly on standardized tests, d)were ESL students e)were special needs students. What I discovered surprised me. These kids were as bright as the Boston Latin kids. So why did they do so terribly on tests? Why did they have such trouble reading and writing? How come they couldn’t solve a problem they hadn’t already seen? Read the rest of this entry »

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Declaration of #occupyboston

November 30, 2011 in economics, nocat, predator capitalism, sustainability | No comments

Noah has been spending a lot of a time at #occupyboston transcribing from bits of paper and from long sheets of poster that have been spread out on the sidewalk. He’s been working with the group collecting ideas and facilitating public conversation. Last night they brought a proposal to the General Assembly (GA) . Here’s a video of the initial reading. A little over an hour later, after 2 spins trough the GA process, 3 or 4 amendments and approval by consensus it became:

Declaration of Occupation

We, the people of Occupy Boston, have occupied Dewey Square in the heart of the financial district, in order to express dissent over the state of our political and financial systems. We are practicing a form of horizontal participatory democracy in the shadows of anti-democratic institutions that dominate our government and our lives. Through our occupation, we are creating an exemplar society in which no one’s human needs go unmet.

The Occupy Movement has started a nationwide conversation about the realities of economic inequality and the meaning of Constitutional rights. We are committed to living the values of transparency, equality, accountability, awareness, sustainability, and compassion as we struggle against corporate predation, injustice, and oppression. We are actively seeking to include the diverse voices of the 99%. Together, we set a precedent and provide a foothold for people to demand a truer, more horizontal democracy, in which greed has no influence.

Regardless of media spin, police brutality, or sub-zero temperatures, we will continue to peacefully exercise our first amendment rights by occupying, holding general assemblies, and planning for the American Spring. Our goal is a society that prioritizes the needs of all before the profits of the few. We are the 99%.

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South Maui snorkeling and bodysurfing

February 22, 2011 in bodysurfing, snorkeling | No comments

The best guidebook was ‘Maui Revealed’ by http://wizardpub.com.

aloha
hello, goodbye or the feeling or spirit of love or kindness
lanai
porch
mahalo
thank you
pilikino pono’i
private
actually I never saw this in Hawaiian but it was the most used English word south of Kihei

We stayed at Wailea Ekahi vilage. It was nicely done. Units were solid, block, pored floors (w/16″ marble tile) so pretty soundproof. Kitchen wasn’t really functional for 2 cooks, the shower exited awkwardly right into the toilet and the drywall wrapped closet doors had that awkward break in the baseboard where the door closed. The 4-6 unit buildings were on a long gradual hill to the sea with most units oriented just enough off the east-west axis to give you a view down to the ocean from your back porch. Read the rest of this entry »

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