Unpaid..?

Search for “unpaid internship” on job listing aggregation site Indeed.com and you will find a staggering 2,300 listings. Among them: “analyst intern” at an outfit in Cambridge, MA called Cloud Spectator, which advises cloud companies on marketing and helps companies choose cloud providers.

Michael Harper, a Boston University labor law professor who has written casebooks on employment law, and he says it’s clearly illegal, given courts’ interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). 

In the ruling last week, the court wiped out that standard and applied a totally new test, a requirement that the “Primary beneficiary” of the internship must be the intern rather than the employer.  The ruling seems to open the floodgates to internships that deliver school credit, a factor that was irrelevant before the ruling.

Ross Perlin, author of a book on internships, argued eloquently in the New York Times that “these very same institutions have been complicit in the internship boom by ignoring abuses, requiring internships for graduation and charging students for academic credit when they go off campus to do unpaid work.”

The ruling sends the Black Swan case back to the district court for a decision, where it’s likely that plaintiffs Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, who aren’t seeking class status, will prevail, since it’s clear that the primary beneficiary of their work was the production, not them as interns. It’s tough to argue that emptying the garbage and fetching a pillow is educational.

The ruling paves the way for employers to make deals with educational institutions for school credit, perpetuating a system that exploits student labor, takes jobs from would-be entry-level workers, favors the privileged who can afford to make no money and flouts the basic tenet of the FLSA, that people who work deserve to get paid at least a minimum wage.

Just a thought.

Heroin instead?

The maker of OxyContin released an abuse-resistant formulation of the drug to deter addicts from crushing it and inhaling or injecting it.  As abuse of OxyContin fell, other opioids moved in to fill the gap: drug users choosing high-potency fentanyl and hydromorphone rose.  A new abuse-resistant version of Opana hit the U.S. 

[A]n abuse-deterrent formulation successfully reduced abuse of a specific drug but also generated an unanticipated outcome: replacement of the abuse-deterrent formulation with alternative opioid medications and heroin, a drug that may pose a much greater overall risk to public health than OxyContin. Thus, abuse-deterrent formulations may not be the “magic bullets” that many hoped they would be in solving the growing problem of opioid abuse.

The dirty secret is that prescription drug misuse is safer than heroin use  not because the inherent overdose or addiction risk is any lower with prescription opioids, but because these drugs come in known doses with specific ingredients and often involve contact with a medical doctor.

The most effective known treatment for opioid addiction is maintenance treatment with another opioid, typically methadone or buprenorphine (Suboxone, Subutex). Such treatment reduces the spread of blood-borne disease, cuts crime and saves lives better than any other known method. It may be that the maintenance opioids help treat depression or act as a salve for some other underlying problem, allowing some people to function better on the drugs than off.

Whatever the case, people can and do lead full, productive loving lives of recovery while taking these medications. Add appropriate counseling, job training and psychiatric medication where needed and you can sometimes see even better results.

Rather than driving prescription opioid misusers to the illegal heroin market, then, we should be pushing them in the other direction: trying to get as many opioid addicts as possible into the medical system and using opioids themselves in treatment when necessary. It may seem counterintuitive, but effective strategies often are.

Just a thought.

Zorba, the Dirty Dance

Zorba's Dance is a song by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. It is based on two traditional Cretan songs, "Armenohorianos Syrtos" and "Kritiko syrtaki", composed by Giorgis Koutsourelis. The song featured in the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, for which Theodorakis wrote the soundtrack, and became popular around the world. It is now commonly played and danced to in Greek tavernas. The track has been recorded by many different musicians from around the world.

The current dilemma with Greece is the pensions programs among others in the standoff with IMF, EU and the ECB.

The previous government cut pensions, became better at identifying bogus claims and collecting debt, and had passed legislation to reduce supplementary pensions by preventing the state from subsidising such payments.

There has been some progress on pensions under the leftwing government, however. The current administration has pledged to continue to integrate pension funds to phase out some early retirements and progressively reduce higher pensions. It has also promised to halt legal oddities, including those loopholes enabled by job categories. But Greece need more money than before and no one is an idiot.
Greece's dance now is with itself. .  Enjoy the fabulous music.

Just a thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UgndyMfe-8

Exhausted...

A young Swedish woman who sued her former Wall Street executive boss over lurid allegations of sexual conquest, betrayal and stalking was awarded $18 million by a federal jury.

Hanna Bouveng, 25, accused Benjamin Wey, a Chinese-born American Wall Street financier, and CEO of New York Global Group, in an $850 million lawsuit of using his power as owner of the Group to coerce her into four sexual encounters before firing her after discovering she had a boyfriend.

Bouveng, who was raised in Sweden, testified that soon after Wey hired her, the CEO began a relentless quest to have sex with her. She says he fired her six months later after she refused any more sexual contact and he found a man in her bed in the apartment he helped finance.

Wey, 43, also sought to defame Bouveng by posting articles on his blog accusing her of being a "street walker," a "loose woman" and an extortionist, her lawyers say.

Wey walked into a Stockholm cafe in April 2014 where she was working a few months after she was fired from Global Group, her attorney told jurors. "The message was: 'Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I am going to find you and I am going to get you," Ratner said.

The married financier denied ever having sex with Bouveng. He portrayed her as an opportunist. Wey testified that Bouveng knew nothing about finance before he hired and began mentoring her. She betrayed his generosity by embracing a party-girl lifestyle that left her too exhausted to succeed.  Apparently she did... Just a thought.

Driven Part 4-Pao Pao

Controversy over Pao's handling of the firing of a popular Reddit administrator continued to grow, as the uproar prompted several discussion boards to be taken offline, while the CEO lost more support among Reddit's users.

According to the Change.org petition, Pao is responsible for "a new age of censorship" on the website. The petition began three weeks ago after five forums (known as subreddits) on the site were banned for breaking Reddit's anti-harassment policy.

The appointment of Pao, the plaintiff in a high profile Silicon Valley discrimination lawsuit recently, was polarizing from the start. Some users were concerned that she would censor certain of the site's more freewheeling communities. Reddit's recent clampdown on a number of offensive subreddits led some users to deride her as "Chairman Pao."

"A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top," has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground" the petition says.

At the same time, over 100 of Reddit's most popular forums have been set to "private," locking them off, by their moderators in protest against the company's decision to dismiss Director of Talent Victoria Taylor.

In a Friday interview with Time Magazine, Pao apologized for the abruptness of Taylor's firing, saying the company didn't handle the transition well, although she declined to comment on the reasons behind Taylor's dismissal.

The moderators (unpaid, voluntary web users who help to run the subreddits) relied on Taylor to help arrange Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, a highly popular feature where members of the public or celebrities could answer questions from Reddit users.

Taylor's dismissal is not the only reason moderators are unsatisfied. "There is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits," Gilgamesh added.

An online petition calling for Ellen Pao to step down, signed by over 100,000 people who are deeply critical of her leadership.

Just a thought. 

Who Done This?

Who is burning churches in the USA? Does this have any thing to do with the Supreme Court Gay rights decision?     Just a thought.

No Sweat.

"There cannot be any cleaner situation than this one," said Maria Haberfeld, head of the law and police science department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "You cannot shoot any fleeing felon, but certainly you can shoot the one who poses a real threat. There was no reason to believe this person who had killed a police officer before was not posing a real threat."

The same legal reasoning applied to the killing of his accomplice, Richard Matt, who was shot three times in the head.

Sweat eluded capture for two more days, until he ran across Sgt. Jay Cook. Sweat had been serving life without parole in the killing of a sheriff's deputy, by shooting him twenty two times. Matt had been serving 25 years to life for the killing of his former boss.

Cook was alone in his car when he spotted someone walking along the side of a road less than 2 miles from the Canadian border. He got out of his car, approached the man and said, "Hey, come over here. Sweat fled, and Cook chased him, firing twice.

A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case known as Tennessee v. Garner laid out how force can be used to capture a fleeing suspect: Deadly force can't be used to prevent escape unless "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others."

New York state law also allows for deadly force if a dangerous convict is escaping from a detention facility, which is why armed guards may be stationed in towers at prisons.

Now, all can go back to their regular life, No Sweat.

Grace... Amazing Grace

 

With a rousing eulogy and a chorus of "Amazing Grace," President Barack Obama called on the country Friday to honor the nine victims of the South Carolina church massacre by working toward racial healing.

He said that includes removing the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, which he said would be not an act of political correctness but a "meaningful balm" for the unhealed wounds of slavery and the Jim Crow era.
Here it is
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102792347

Roe.. Roe

Roe v. Wade, (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. Decided simultaneously with a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the Court ruled 7–2 that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that this right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women's health. Arguing that these state interests became stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the third trimester of pregnancy


The Supreme Court ruled that President Obama’s health care law allows the federal government to provide nationwide tax subsidies to help poor and middle-class people buy health insurance, a sweeping vindication that endorsed the larger purpose of Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

The 6-to-3 ruling means that it is all but certain that the Affordable Care Act will survive after Mr. Obama leaves office in 2017. For the second time in three years, the law survived an encounter with the Supreme Court. But the court’s tone was different this time. The first decision, in 2012, was fractured and grudging, while Thursday’s ruling was more assertive.

Republicans now saying Repeal and replace. Will appoint conservative judges to make sure that these two decision reversed.                                                               
We will be talking about that for the next fourty years, but not able to change it. . .   Just a thought.

Medications' prices



Two U.S. Senators have re-introduced legislation that would allow Americans to purchase medicines from Canada. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John McCain (R-Az.) have advocated the Safe and Affordable Drugs from Canada Act.

The bill would permit Americans, who must have a valid prescription from a physician licensed in the U.S., to order up to a 90-day supply of medicines from a licensed Canadian pharmacy. Prescription drugs would have to have the same active ingredients, dosage form, and potency as medicines that are approved by the FDA.

Whether the legislation will progress is uncertain. The bill introduced last year went nowhere, despite bi-partisan sponsorship. Nonetheless, the effort may gain some attention at a time when prices for medicines from the latest cancer treatments to some older generic salves are rising at a rapid pace. The cost of new hepatitis C medicines, for instance, prompted a Congressional hearing last year.

“The cheaper alternatives [in Canada] come with the same safety standards and are the same dosages sold in the U.S, but currently law prevents Americans from importing them and benefiting from the savings,”  Klobuchar says in a statement. “That just doesn’t make sense.”

Maine began allowing its residents to purchase prescription drugs from some pharmacies in the U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The first-in-the-nation law garnered support from the business community, but has come under attack by the pharmaceutical industry.

Drug makers have argued.....   filed lawsuit in hopes of overturning the state law. 
Canadian pharmacy may not resell drugs from online pharmacies located outside Canada to the U.S. 

Klobuchar  was one of several senators to introduce legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate prices with drug makers and last year she co-sponsored a bill that would restrict patent settlements between drug makers that can delay the introduction of lower-cost generic drugs.

Prices of medications in Canada is 30% the prices in USA.  Passing this law will even the prices in both countries.
Just a thought.