Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Slashdot: “How Were You Fired?”

Posted on October 6, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Slashdot is running a discussion entitled How Were You Fired? It's full of personal stories, some with happy endings, many of them horrible, some totally disgusting, others compelling.

Yet another reason to be really, truly, grateful for tenure.

Someone somewhere, must write manuals about How To Fire Employees, and those manuals must be full of stuff about turning off computer IDs, escorting people of the premises under guard as if they were felons, and not letting them have their personal possessions from their desks.

I know, from talking to victims in places I've worked after they were RIF'd, that these things happen even in work environments where they are utterly unnecessary. It can only be due to mindless automatons in Human Resources reading from a one-size-fits-all playbook.

Posted in Econ & Money | 2 Comments

Iraq

Posted on October 5, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I've added three items to the left column:

I have not personally checked these numbers, but they all look as if they are serious attempts to provide meaningful estimates [and in the case of the military data, a simple tally] of very gloomy data sets.

Posted in Discourse.net, Econ & Money, Iraq, Politics: US | 3 Comments

Of Pigs and the Ballot Box

Posted on October 5, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

In Legalizing Miss Daisy, my item on pigs' rights in Florida, I neglected to mention that pigs have state Constitutional rights in Florida—or rather, pregnant pigs will have state Constitutional rights as of 2008, thanks to an Initiative Petition adopted in the 2002 election.

Article X, § 21 of the Florida Constitution, bans “cruel and inhumane confinement of pigs [helpfully defined as 'any animal of the porcine species'] during pregnancy.” (Full text quoted below.) The initiative that produced this amendment was amazing. I have never been stopped so many times by so many passionate people who wanted my signature. On every occasion I refused, suggesting there were more important issues that we might be spending our time on. Most of the petition gatherers were politely incredulous at this reaction; only one or two were really rude about it.

Despite this example of voter silliness, on balance I actually think that the ballot initiative process has served the state of Florida well. For example, the voters have approved some environmental measures that might well have not gotten through a legislature in which well-funded businesses seem to have a lot of clout.

But the best example is the recent class size initiative.

Continue reading →

Posted in Florida | Comments Off on Of Pigs and the Ballot Box

George W. Bush – Poetaster

Posted on October 4, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Who knew that George W. Bush was an even better poet than he is leader and policy-maker?

Posted in Completely Different, Politics: US | Comments Off on George W. Bush – Poetaster

Nobody Listens to the Words Anyway

Posted on October 4, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I heard about these language removal people on NPR earlier this week. The Language Removal Service has produced audio tapes of speech by leading candidates in the California gubernatorial election…with all the words removed. All that's left is breathing noises, “um's”, “ah's” and the like. They played some of their tapes on the radio, and you can hear them at their website. I found it deeply weird, especially given the utterly dead-pan way in which the guy describing it kept calling it a 'service to the public' as if the results were revelatory of something essential about the speaker's character. He was very good—it was hard to tell if he was a prankster, a Dadaist, or a new species of loon.

I deeply pray that no one ever does one of those to my lectures.

Posted in Completely Different | Comments Off on Nobody Listens to the Words Anyway

Blog Enhancements

Posted on October 4, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I've made a few blog enhancements by tweaking the Movable Type template. The most significant controls the way that the extended text is handled. I didn't like the way that long posts take up too much space, but nor did I like it when clicking on the extension took you to another document. Now I have one of those cute pop-in pop-out Javascript extensions. You can test it on the following line.

Continue reading →

Posted in Discourse.net | 15 Comments