Penny Hero (dot) Net

Part I

Did you know that the Federal Govt. spends about $91,687,500.00 (that’s nearly $92 million, for those of us who don’t often see numbers bigger than 4 or 5 digits) a year on the salaries of 551 people?

Did you know that our president makes $400,000 a year? (sources: 1, 2) The average US salary in 2002 was $36,764 (ask.yahoo).

Let’s compare that to the Presidents and Prime Ministers of other nations (in US dollars):

• Mexico: was $245,000 (new President’s salary not announced yet). Mexican minimum wage salary (couldn’t find annual average salaries): about $8/day, or $3,000 a year.
• Canada: PM was $123,500 (USD) in 2004. Avg. Canadian salary: $40,000 (USD) (source).
• I’m trying to get Japan’s numbers too.

Anyway, my numbers are not going to be exact because I’m taking info from places that seem reputable after really quick google searches. I’m not trying to be totally scientifically accurate. I just want to show the trends.

This means that our President officially makes 11 times what the average American makes. The Mexican president made much more: 81 times more than their minimum wage earners during a good year, granted my data is probably pretty off. The Canadian Prime Minister makes only 3 times that of the average Canadian.

The moral of this story? I don’t know. Maybe “I’m glad we’re not Mexico and I wish we were more like Canada” ?

Part II

Did you know that US Govt. salaries increase every year (in 2001, it increased by about $4,000) unless they vote to block it?

I didn’t either (2001 about.com article explaining how it happens).

Now, on the one hand, I understand that US congresspersons must maintain homes in more than one location, and they have all kinds of work-related and personal stresses that come with a job that literally doesn’t end at 5pm each day like our jobs do. However, i can’t help but wonder if it would be cheaper if the government paid for Washington-area homes for our representatives and gave a lower salary.

Lastly, did you know that Hillary Clinton proposed a bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to tie the national minimum wage increase to the percentage increase that congress receives every year? It’s called the Standing with Minimum Wage Earners Act of 2006 and I kind of like it. While it doesn’t address the fact that congress makes a ton of money each year, it would guarantee that next time congress fails to stop itself from getting a pay increase this year, we’ll get a minimum wage increase by the same percentage.

The pessimistic side of me wouldn’t be surprised if congress finally starts voting to stop their (and our) wage increase if this bill passes.

Anyway, this is just stuff I ran across and started to investigate for kicks. Really. I enjoy this kind of stuff.

A friend of mine sent me this link about people dressed as V (from V for Vendetta) visiting security check points at the White House, the main Treasury, IRS and Justice Department Buildings and the Capitol in order to

…deliver the People’s Petitions for Redress of Grievances relating to the Government’s violations of the war powers, tax, privacy and money clauses of the Constitution, and to inform key Government officials that at least 100 more “Vs” would be at their doorstep on November 14th expecting a response to the Petitions.

The article is both a sort of press-release-style write-up of Nov 6th stuff, and an invitation to participate in the event on the 14th complete with hotel information and itinerary.

It’s run by “We The People” at givemeliberty.org, so I assume that it’s organized by them (and the invite at the bottom mentions when the ‘WTP’ participants will arive, etc.)

I can’t find any news about this, but it’s also currently linked to from their front page. Seems to me that if they really want participation, they’d promote the event a little better nationally in the news.

(or perhaps they did, and I just missed it, considering this happened on Nov. 6. Google news search doesn’t turn up anything that I can find though… it’s all being overshadowed by news of “V for Vendetta” coming to HD-DVD, or basic movie reviews)

My Thoughts:

On one hand, I think it’s cool that a group is borrowing the image of the movie to raise awareness of issues such as the petition of grievences, and our rights as americans (not to mention the whole ‘remaining anonymous and representative’ through wearing the mask. It’s clear that they understood the law when they made this demonstration.

I also think that using the image of V (rather than some other anonymous costume like a ski mask) was a smart move too, because V is decidedly non-threatening (because it’s now a movie-icon) AND it’s decidedly political (rather than axe-murderer-ish).

On the other hand, it really does seem a little tiny bit like an unecessary and tacky stunt. I don’t believe that our government has progressed so far down the wrong path that we should be afraid to identify ourselves when we protest. I’m not afraid to protest, and I would if I felt the need. I’m partly of middle-eastern descent too! (granted, I live in the Super Liberal Eugene area… not sure how I’d feel in Texas, for example.)

Did WTP forget that the Nov. 11 elections were coming up and that a shift in power might (and did) occur? I wonder how the elections have changed things, if at all.

It just seems a little silly since The Vote seems to have accomplished more than what V’s trying to accomplish with this petition of grievences.

Either that, or I’ve misunderstood something. Someone enlighten me?

On the Virginia race:

An Associated Press count Wednesday night showed Webb with 1,172,538 votes and Allen with 1,165,302, a difference of 7,236, or less than one-third of 1 percent.

Wow. There are more people enrolled in some high schools than that. My high school was something like 6,000 people when I was enrolled. Nevermind! I just checked. it was more like 2.5k. I was thinking of my graduating class of 600 people.

Anyway, I guess this means is that Allen can request a re-count on the state’s dime since it’s fewer than half a percentage point difference (if these numbers are the final count).

Cassady just told me that voter turnout exceeded 40% for yesterday’s midterms (preliminary analysis). I know that I was one of those people who decided to stop feeling apathetic and start actually trying to understand what’s going on and get people to vote. Seems I wasn’t the only one.

Other news is saying they projected 45% turnout, and some states (like Michigan) are breaking major voter turnout records.

Not to mention the youth voter turnout record, as well as women turnouts increasing since 2000 in general!

Check out Oregon:

Democrat turnout outpaces Republicans’ and we’re likely to set a 16 year record for voter turnout in a non-presidential election (Nov. 7th story). I’m searching to find out what the end numbers were. That story implies that we could have hit 70%? that sounds very very high to me, but maybe it’s right? someone correct me.

Oregon:
Did you see the OregonLive results yet??

I’m pretty happy about pretty much everything there. :) Except, uh… laughably 47 is passing without 46. Considering that 46 ALLOWS laws regulating campaign funds in the first place, you can’t pass a MEASURE THAT WOULD REGULATE FUNDS (measure 47) without it. And thus… right now, measure 47 is passing…but meaningless if 46 fails. (ORmeasures.org).

(12:09:14 AM) Xander: obviously, someone didn’t read the ballot measures.

Understatement FTW!

Edit: Isaac Laquedem and his readers have much more intelligent things to say about this.

Nation:

I’ve had this insane I-cant-turn-off-the-news night. I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m ending the night with the Daily Show / Cobert Report mash-up. Cobert paraphrase of the day:

Democrats are going to use our tax dollars to buy electric cars for NPR and teach evolution to illegal immigrants!

Go Cobert go! (someone correct me on the exact text of that quote please?)

In my head:

Another thing that’s spiffy is how all of this led to me having really great conversations with people I don’t get to talk to very often. Like Maiki and Xander to name just two. I suppose it’s not BAD that politics brings people into productive, unexpected, heated, and awesome conversations with each other. That’s what it’s supposed to do.

Anyway. It seems that only three of the friends I talked to didn’t vote, so I think that’s a good sign. People my age … CARE! I feel less disenfranchised!

(or titled “part 2 of the “hole in the wall” India literacy experiment post!”)

Google announced yesterday that it’s launching the Google Literacy project to help spread literacy and provide resources and lots of other stuff for teachers, parents, mentors, students, and just regular people (with internet access) to help do so.

While promoting literacy worldwide via the internet is not a new thing (just do a google search. basically every self-respecting university, and a number of big organizations also are working to create a more literate world), I think google’s visibility, their philosophies, and their resources can add a lot to this.

Google’s literacy project basically acts as a portal to some of its services, like book search, google scholar, and other things, all acting as a kind funnel and pointing to things related to literacy. It draws attention to literacy, education, and pro-actively does something about it in the google-way of doing things… by organizing information and making it more accessible.

That’s way more powerful than you’d initially think, really. Honestly. Because most people in “literacy initiatives” or projects try to open schools, try to gather volunteer support, write and publish, or they manually collect links to resources and re-post them. But google uses it’s own technologies to sort and find these resources for you, so there’s no manual lists of resources to sort and maintain, and all the results are current, relevant, etc.

Plus, making this kind of portal (rather than yet another technology/news/omg-cool-stuff! portal) shows what kinds of values Google celebrates and wants to promote.

So… India. The googleblog announcement talks about India, and how it has 1/3 of the worlds “literacy problem”. And just yesterday, I blogged about the hole-in-the-wall experiment from India, which showed that there was some exciting and active research going on involving literacy, technology, and accessibility to this education.

Coincidence? maybe. Awesome? yes.

Gotta read more.

But first, must go back to work.

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451″ came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence

Hahahahahaha. coincidence, my ass.

so… I’ve been hanging out on reddit.com this morning. can you tell?

Wow.

I didn’t even hear about this before now, but today while reading some of my work-related rss feeds, I came face-to-face with the story of AOL’s big screw up last July… and the fact that now they’re being sued for $5k a person-whose-data-was-released…

wow.

Here’s a link to the complaint and here’s a story and another story.

The “Factual Allegations” in the complaint outline the basic facts of what happened and the consequences of AOL’s mistake. (I read all of it. yeah. really I did.) It explains the basic mechanics of the search marketing business, how companies and regular people can (and have) profited improperly from the release of the data, and the types of potential damage that could still occur from it (including the steps necessary to connect the data with the real names, addresses, SSNs, etc of the searchers).

The thing that makes me sick is that AOL did nothing to make this up to their members once they started realizing what AOL did. All they did was offer members who complained a free month of service (this is even described in the suit). *boggles*

Item 23 describes what happened to one woman whose data was released and the New York Times apparently wrote an article about her after tracking her down THROUGH HER SEARCH DATA. Quote from the complaint:

Once identified, the reporters contacted the individual and asked her questions about her Internet Searches, which included…. As expressed, by the AOL member, her “whole personal life” was revealed. AOL’s response has been to do nothing. AOL has not even bothered to notify its members that their private communications have been released. AOL readily admits that the release of the Database was wrong. In AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein’s own words, “This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it.”

Crazy. (the language-nerd in me cringes at the use of “AOL has not even bothered to…” because “not even bothered to” is not a very neutral way of describing AOL’s (lack of) response.)

Anyway… someone’s heads are probably rolling (three people lost/gave up their jobs over this incident already… I imagine a few more will too once this really heats up in court.)

Anyway… newsworthy, yes.

Distraction from work, yes.

Important? hell yeah.

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.

Macworld shares the happy OO news.

Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, will ship in a native version for OS X next month.

You have NO IDEA how happy this makes me. It’s soo difficult for me to run OO on my mac, because NeoOffice and running X11 take up too many resources and slow everything down. NeoOffice is really buggy for me and has been both when I was using Tiger and Panther. It was just awful. Friends have tried to help me, have told me to stop complaining and buy some $20 word processor… no one seemed to understand my pain.

I’ve blogged about my wordprocessor pain before and it resulted in some big discussion, which basically added up to “you’re screwed because no one writes FOSS for OSX.

Well, I needed free, I needed open source, and I needed it to be stable. I especially needed this as an English major. And next month, I’ll finally have it!

Well, I wish this’d been released a few months ago. :) Sure would have helped… haha.