aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, June 22, 2007
Brits hate jargon
British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults:
LONDON (AFP) - “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published Thursday.
Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.
“Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth.
“Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.
Would it be any different on our side of the pond?
Taxing broadcasters to pay for elections
A new bill in congress would tax each television station’s gross advertising 2% to pay for presidential campaigns. The proposal is sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Illinois), Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pennsylvania), Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wisconsin) and Sen. Barack Obama (D., Illinois).
“This would cost [broadcasters] a ton of money, but they make a fortune on candidates,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told TV Week. “The broadcast industry does quite well. To ask them to play a part in this is quite reasonable.”
Debate - and commentary - should be interesting.
Isakson’s squalid little amendment
A NYTimes editorial today says our own Senator Johnny Isakson wants to add a squalid little amendment to the immigration bill to benefit a corporate constituent, Home Depot:
The amendment would prohibit state and local laws that required big home-improvement stores to provide rudimentary shelter for day laborers. There aren’t any such laws yet, but the City Council in Los Angeles, where Home Depot wants to open 13 stores, is considering one. Mr. Isakson’s pre-emptive strike would be an extraordinary intrusion of federal power into a local land-use matter.
Home Depot is a magnet for day laborers. Small contractors and homeowners load up on lumber, drywall and buckets of screws, and then grab a crew. Communities have struggled to deal with these often-untidy labor bazaars where looking for work can be hard to distinguish from loitering.
The combative approach, with anti-loitering laws and police harassment, seldom works and has been overturned repeatedly in the courts. The Los Angeles City Council is considering something more constructive, an ordinance that would charge big retail chains that attract day laborers - Home Depot, essentially - about $200,000 per store to provide a bare-bones space with shade, benches and toilets, to bring some order, cleanliness and safety to the daily mixing of men and trucks.
The ordinance treats day labor as a measurable and inevitable effect of Home Depot’s buy-in-bulk business. Just as stores must obtain conditional-use permits, operate at certain hours and install lights and signs to mitigate traffic and other problems they cause, Home Depot would have to help make its stores safer and less unsightly. But after more than two years of discussions with Home Depot, council members were stunned to learn that the company’s backdoor lobbying had gotten Mr. Isakson’s proposal onto the short list of Republican amendments for the Senate’s climactic debate next week.
RELATED: more on Georgia companies and immigration reform here.
