The Village Voice’s Sharon Lerner has an excellent article on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s ongoing delays in approving RU-486, Another Setback for RU-486. According to Lerner, the FDA is set to make an announcement on RU-486 approval on September 30, though in the past it has repeatedly said it would make such announcements only to delay them further.
Day: September 13, 2000
Jon Katz Watch: Should Corporations Try to Do Good?
Katz has an article at Slashdot focusing on a recent Business Week poll showing most Americans think corporations have too much power. At the end of his article, Katz notes with glee that 95 percent of the people in the survey agreed with the following statement,
U.S. corporations should have more than one purpose. They also owe something to their workers and the communities in which they operate, and they should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities.
I am in the 5% minority who thinks it is a very bad idea to expect businesses to do things for the community. Corporations used to want to do a lot of things for their community, resulting in company towns where they controlled everything. More recently when corporations decide to do the “ethical” thing it usually involves caving in to predominant community standards.
When Wal-Mart and K-Mart announced they would stop selling violent video games to children under 17, they were sacrificing profits for a greater good. I’d personally prefer not to be subjected to that sort of corporate paternalism.
As usual Katz misses the really big issue which is whether or not we really need big corporations anymore. On the one hand, a lot of people seem to dislike working for large corporations. Plus it’s hard to tell whether or not the underlying economic basis for corporations will hold. Corporations have typically had an advantage due to economies of scale both in producing goods as well as contracting for labor. One of the main advantages of a corporation, for example, is reducing the transaction costs of managing thousands of employees.
But the Internet may undercut both of those since it undercuts the transaction cost advantage and allows very small businesses to compete on a relatively equal playing field with large corporations. We’re even beginning to see the first serious hints of the so-called virtual corporation, with some products quickly coming to market today that are designed by one firm, manufactured by a second firm, and then marketed and sold by several other firms under different brand names.
I don’t think we’re going to see the corporation disappear, but I do think we’ll see a gradual winnowing of very large corporations and are likely to end up with an economy dominated by even more small business and medium sized companies than today.
Barney vs. Britney
One of the things I hear from adults who don’t have children is that they’re glad they don’t have to put up with stuff like Barney. In fact, I probably reviled Barney as much as the next guy before my daughter became a Barney fanatic. But once you get past the fact that it’s a show aimed at very young children, the show isn’t as bad as it first seems. In fact I have to confess that I’ve actually found myself playing one of the many Barney CDs we’ve bought even when my daughter isn’t around (don’t ask).
The other recent obssession my daughter has picked up on is far more annoying than Barney ever was — I’m talking about Britney Spears. For some reason my daughter loves Spears’ “music”. When she couldn’t even understand the lyrics, she’d start bopping in her car seat every time that inane “Hit Me One More Time” (or whatever that song is called) came on the radio. Which unfortunately meant her mom and dad couldn’t immediately change the station without a very vocal protest.
So imagine our horror when our daughter came home one day and started singing lyrics from “Oops, I Did It Again.” Yuck. But it was cute and so we relented and bought the CD. The good part is that my daughter only wants to hear the “Oops” song, with the bad news being that she wants to hear it over and over again. The worst part, though, is that one day I actually decided to listen to the rest of the album. As Spears herself might say, ohmigod.
I saw in USA Today some parents weren’t happy at her striptease act during the MTV video awards. I am more horrified that a generation of kids is going to grow up listening to Spears’ version of the Rolling Stones classic “Satisfaction” — yes, she actually covers the song on her latest CD. But that’s not the worst part; she actually had the gall to change the lyrics. Apparently it just wouldn’t do for a teen idol such as Spears to sing the last part of the song wherein Mick Jagger informed the world that the man on television telling him how white his shirt should be “can’t be a man/Because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.”
So somebody wrote new lyrics for her to sing instead. Bizarre. Give me “I love you, you love me” any day of the week.
Another Student Murdered By A Mentally Ill Person
This is sad, and it’s not the first time. Kevin Heisinger, 24, had attended student orientation at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was taking the train back to his home in Evanston, Illinois. That train makes a stop in Kalamazoo, where I live, and while he was using the station bathroom a schizophrenic man who had stopped taking his medications beat him to death.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time in recent years that a mentally ill person has killed a student in Kalamazoo. About 6 years ago, a schizophrenic man in an assisted-living style community stabbed to death a female graduate student who was working at the facility as part of her efforts to become a social worker.
I covered the murder trial for a local paper, and to be honest I don’t know how court reporters do that kind of work. The testimony was very graphic, and I had more than a few nightmares over the three or four weeks of the trial (this was especially so since it was clear that the victim likely suffered immensely as she was still alive but way past medical help when passersby found her).
In Detroit a couple years ago two women murdered a social worker who was doing her best to try to help one of the women regain custody of her child, who had been removed from the home following abuse charges. After that there was briefly a movement to get a law passed that would have required police to accompany social workers if the social worker requested it.
The sad irony of these cases is that social workers and others tend to dismiss as ignorant and even bigoted people in communities who oppose having mental health facilities located near them. For awhile the state of Michigan wanted to put an assisted living home for mentally ill individuals. When the local neighborhood association protested that there was already one such facility in the immediate area and the state should try to find someplace else to locate it, the opponents were generally portrayed as backwards and to a large degree bigoted by the local media and those advocating for the facility. Eventually, though, the state did change its mind.
Clearly society needs to offer assistance to the mentally ill, but too often state agencies, officials, and social workers have a “my way or the highway” attitude that dismisses legitimate community concerns.
Conversant: It’s Like Having a Paid Assistant
I have always been a compulsive writer. I have been writing 10 to 20 pages a day for so long that it is second nature. Maintaining a web site, however, is definitely not second nature.
The real pain for me was always managing a site’s structure. On a static site this can be a nightmare. Suppose, for example, I write an article about Fidel Castro criticizing Bill Clinton over U.S. free trade policies. Where do I put the file that contains that story? In a directory with other stories about Castro? Clinton? Free trade? And then I have to remember where I put it six months from now. An obvious solution would have been to just create an /articles/ directory and sequentially number all articles, but again this is difficult to manage when I might write 200 stories for a site in a year. Next year there’s going to be no way I will remember that the story on Castro and U.S. free trade policy is articles/2000/000035.html. That will never happen.
As I mentioned the other day, with Conversant this becomes effortless since I can link to that story automatically just by typing in the headline and surrounding it with pipes (the “|” character) and forget about the underlying structure.
Similarly tomorrow morning when I wake up and post a new article for this site, I do not have to worry about cutting and pasting the old articles to an archive and then re-uploading half a dozen files — the software takes care of archiving and keeping track of everything automatically.
The upshot: more time for writing. I conservatively estimate that when I was using Dreamweaver, for every hour I spent on writing, I had to spend about 15 to 20 minutes in web site maintenance, which was a serious incentive not to write. Every new article I wrote meant a new headache in updating the site. With Conversant, there was a relatively time consuming initial startup period in converting a couple thousand pages to Conversant which took about 30 to 40 hours overall. On a daily basis, however, I estimate that for every hour I spend writing I only have to spend 3 to 5 minutes maintaining the site. In addition I can concentrate that in an hour or two at the end of the week. It is very nice to spend an hour on Sunday night taking care of the administrative tasks rather than 90 minutes or more each day.
On Monday, for example, I wrote almost 7,000 words which is a lot even for me (that is about 30 typed pages). There is simply no way I could have possibly done that and got all of those articles up on my static web site in only a 16 hour day. With Conversant, I finished everything with plenty of time to go home and catch up on my taped episodes of “The Power Puff Girls.”
I an pretty much a one person operation — my wife does some editing for me occasionally — but Conversant makes it feel like I’ve got a paid assistant who I can hand off all of the routine, boring stuff to while I work on what I enjoy, updating the content. It is nice not to be up at 10:30 p.m. trying to upload changed pages to a static server.
Clinton-Gore: Venus Williams Is Your Enemy
On Saturday Venus Williams won the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The rise of Venus and her sister Serena is one of the biggest stories in sports over the past couple years. As was originally reported by the Washington Post, Williams received a phone call from President Bill Clinton congratulating her on the win. Williams took the time to ask Clinton about something close to her heart — “Can you lower my taxes?”
As Citizens for a Sound Economy points out, Williams earned $800,000 for her U.S. open win, but will only get to take home about $480,000 after taxes. Taxes for athletes are extremely complex since along with traditional federal and state taxes, they have to pay income and sometimes performance taxes in every state and many municipalities in which they make a paid appearance (entertainers face the same mind numbing array of taxes).
Al Gore formulated the Democratic response to Williams request — screw the rich. The Democrats rely on a muted form of class warfare. Rather than admire or be happy for the Williams sisters for accomplishing so much in their lives, and earning the just rewards of those accomplishments, those of us in the middle and lower level of wage earners are supposed to demand that Gore squeeze every last penny out of Williams. Letting her keep more of her winnings is the sort of risky right wing extremists proposition that only someone like George W. Bush would propose to help his rich friends.
After all without Williams’ tax dollars, how is Gore going to be able to afford to throw billions of dollars at failing public schools or prop up the ridiculously inefficient Social Security system for a few more years? I mean those of us who aren’t in Williams’ tax bracket already understand how this works. If Gore lowered my taxes, for example, I might be able to work less and spend more time with my daughter in which case Gore wouldn’t be able to do good by providing her with a lavish government-run after school program.
Imagine the horrors of it all; I hope Clinton put Williams in her place for such temerity.