About the current economic crisis

This video about the Wall Street protests and the need for the government to provide jobs and the current economic future, watch it and think for yourselves.

Agustín Perez Villafañe

Argentina's Teflon Lady ( About Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and 23rd October ellectionS in Argentina)

I have found a very interesting article in Newsweek by Mac Margolis.An objective perspective about Cristina's Government: the events that make her popular or unpopular, her husband and former president's death, her projects and an outlook of the future after 23rd October ellections in Argentina. To my mind, it well worth reading this article.
             Link:    http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/16/cristina-de-kirchner-argentina-s-teflon-lady.html

Work idioms

Hiring and firing

take on = hire someone: "They're taking on more than 500 people at the canning factory."
get the boot = be fired: "She got the boot for being lazy."
give someone the sack = fire someone: "He was given the sack for stealing."
give someone their marching orders = fire someone: "After the argument, he was given his marching orders."

How do you work?

get your feet under the table = get settled in: "It only took him a week to get his feet under the table, then he started to make changes."
burn the candle at both ends = work day and night at something: "He's been burning the candle at both ends to finish this project."
knuckle under = stop wasting time and start working: "The sooner you knuckle under and start work, the better."
put pen to paper = start writing: "She finally put pen to paper and wrote the letter."
work all the hours that God sends = work as much as possible: "She works all the hours that God sends to support her family."
work your fingers to the bone = work very hard: "I work my fingers to the bone for you."
go the extra mile = do more than is expected of you: "She's a hard worker and always goes the extra mile."
pull your weight = do your fair share of the work: "He's a good team worker and always pulls his weight."
pull your socks up = make a better effort: "You'll have to pull your socks up and work harder if you want to impress the boss!"
put your feet up = relax: "At last that's over – now I can put my feet up for a while."

WALL STREET PROTESTERS

These Occupy Wall Street Protesters Have A Message

by The Associated Press

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NEW YORK October 14, 2011, 05:47 pm ET

NEW YORK (AP) — The Occupy Wall Street protests are hitting a nerve.
A dearth of jobs, overwhelming student loans and soaring health-care costs are just three major issues protesters have targeted. And regardless of politics, economic data suggests they're not alone in their frustrations.
It may be why the protests have spread to other cities — including Boston, Cincinnati, Seattle and Washington, D.C. — after taking root in downtown New York nearly a month ago.
Take for example the unemployment rate, which has been stuck near 9 percent since the recession officially ended more than two years ago. When counting those who settle for part-time work or have quit looking, that rate rises to about 16.5 percent.
A crippled labor market also shifts bargaining power to employers, giving workers less leverage to seek raises. That could help explain why pay was nearly 2 percent less in August than it was a year earlier when adjusted for inflation.
Student loans are another common rallying point for protesters — as expressed in one sign that read "Want demands? How about student loan bailouts?"
The struggle to keep up with payments is clear; about 320,000 borrowers who entered repayment in 2009 defaulted on their student loans by the end of 2010, according to the Institute for College Access & Success. That's up about 33 percent from the previous year.
Meanwhile, the cost of annual health insurance premiums for family coverage rose 9 percent this year and surpassed $15,000 for the first time, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust. Some don't have to worry about the uptick; an estimated 16 percent of the population does not have health insurance.
It's that economic backdrop that has driven a diversity of protesters to the streets
While a few hundred have been camping out in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, many more join in for a few hours or a day to add their voices. Here's a look at some of the protesters who ventured by in the past week, and the financial issues they're dealing with:
____
John Smith, 31, of Brooklyn, N.Y., works part time at Trader Joe's because he hasn't been able to find work in his field for over a year, despite having a master's degree. He has about $45,000 in student loan debt. His girlfriend, Meropi Peponides, 27, a graduate student at Columbia University, will have about $50,000 by the time she graduates.
"I don't know in the end what exactly this will achieve, if anything. But if it makes people wake up just a little bit, it's worth it," Peponides said. "The potential is huge. That's why I'm here. I felt the potential somehow."
Smith said he has sent out about 200 resumes in his search. He's looking mainly for work with non-profit organizations. "The jobs that I've been applying for are all entry level jobs in my career field. I don't think I'm shooting for the stars trying to get those jobs." Smith said, noting that five years ago, before grad school, he was able to get work at that level.
He was carrying a sign that said, "I am the 99 percent," a slogan that resonated with him. "It's true. I am one of the many people that are having a lot of trouble finding ways to make it through things right now."
___
Tracy Blevins, 41-year-old Manhattan resident, has a doctorate in biomedical science but lost her job as an adjunct professor at Touro College this spring. She's since been getting by on odd jobs; most recently, she acted as a cross-country driver for $2,000.
"I'm earning money off a license I got when I was 16, and still paying off the loans I had to take out to get my degree," she said.
Even after nine years of paying down her loans, Blevins said she owes $10,000. She's current on payments now, but said the loans have crippled her credit score and even prevented her from getting work in the past.
"I have paid and paid and paid and I still owe $10,000. It's the interest that keeps me in debt," she said.
____
Steve and Barbara Diamond traveled nearly 100 miles to take part in the protest. They were motivated mainly by what they see as a disappearance of the middle class; and a connection between the economic problems of recent years and the amount of influence money has on politics. He held a sign criticizing the 2010 Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United, which overturned a previous ban on corporate spending in federal elections.
"Our government is being bought by wealthy people and corporations," said Steve Diamond, a physician. "Unless you get the money out of the elections, you'll end up with an oligarchy in this country."
"My father used to say when he came to here from Europe that this was the 'Golden Land,'" he said. But he's not telling that to his own children: "This is what's happened inside two generations."
___
Joe Foley, a 48-year-old freelance cinematographer living in Manhattan, finished paying off his $45,000 in student loans just five years ago. His girlfriend has $120,000 in student loans.
Foley said work has been fairly steady in recent years, but he worries that he doesn't have any retirement savings or health insurance. He rents an inexpensive apartment and doesn't carry a big credit card balance, but realizes he's one broken leg away from being in serious debt.
"I was really hoping there was going to be a public option," he said of the federal health care reforms. "It was pretty disappointing that it didn't happen."
For now, he considers himself lucky that he's never had any health issues. His approach has been to "drink lots of water and miso soup and do yoga."
___
Ben Bear, 56, a San Francisco resident visiting his daughter in New York, works at a food bank and feels his job is secure.
"Unfortunately I'm doing well because I'm in a growth industry," Bear said. "The demand for food keeps going up. Everyone's got this image of who accesses a food bank as a homeless person. But it's families and the working poor."
___
Susan Knauss, 55, from upstate Livingston, N.Y., worked in the telecommunications industry for the past 25 years. But she was laid off a few weeks ago from the New York State Department of Transportation. She plans to get by on unemployment checks for the time being.
"But in two weeks, I won't have health insurance," she said.
She's also worried about her retirement savings. Even after making maximum contributions for most of her career, she worries that she hasn't saved enough and that the volatile market could eat away at the value of her 401(k).
"Where can you put your money where it doesn't go away?"
____
Maureen McMahon, 62, of Manhattan, a former school teacher, works part time by choice at a museum. She pointed to problems like the high number of uninsured as among the concerns that brought her out to protest; noting that the disparity in health care reflects that the economic system doesn't treat everyone equally.
"I'm an investor, I have stock," she said with some irony, as she held a sign that said "Tax Wall Street."
"I believe that corporations can be very useful and very compassionate," she said, adding that unfortunately, that kind of corporate responsibility seems to have diminished lately.
____
Katy Ryan, 35, of Jersey City, N.J., made a good living for years as a makeup artist, but since the downturn has struggled to make ends meet. She's getting fewer clients and having to cut her rates. These days she even has to take some work as a bartender so she and her 8-year-old daughter can get by. "I didn't have to do that for years."
Her main concern is that the widening gulf between the rich and poor, and the notion that a better life is slipping out of reach for those who aren't wealthy. She noted that her mother was a long time member of the United Auto Workers, and that she saw her benefits and wages chiseled away over the years.

Apocalypse Soon: our love affair with health scares

There’s nothing we like more than a good apocalypse — or, to be more precise, a good apocalyptic vision. We like being frightened by danger, so long as we believe that the danger is sufficiently unreal. The moment it becomes real, of course, the pleasure disappears. If the world were full of vampires, we should take no joy in films about Dracula.

That is why severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease of unknown causation that has so far claimed the lives of nine victims, most of them in China, has so caught our imagination. It offers an apocalyptic vision without convincing anyone as yet that it will turn into a genuine apocalypse. We secretly enjoy imagining a mysterious disease sweeping across the globe and thinning out the ranks of the population, particularly those whom we detest, though in our wildest thoughts we do not conceive of ourselves as being a victim. Good people like ourselves will be spared.

We love to read about the end of the world. The publisher Jonathan Cape once said that there were only two things you needed to know about publishing, the first being that books about Nelson never made a loss, and the second being that books about South America never made a profit. Nowadays, he might have replaced Nelson as a subject by the forthcoming untreatable plague that will wipe out the human race. Of course, the imminent end of the human race does not inhibit authors from collecting their royalties.

Apocalypse Soon is also a useful concept for bureaucratic groups such as the World Health Organisation that, always threatened by budget cuts and unpaid contributions, need to project themselves as defenders of humanity against disaster.

And the latest apocalyptic epidemic is likely to prove particularly effective in strengthening the WHO’s position. The symptoms of the disease are both vague and common, and therefore many thousands of people will imagine that they have caught it. They will ask their doctor whether they could have SARS, and the nearness of their miss will haunt them for some time to come: until the next health scare, in fact.

Because of the ease of travel to the tropics, for example, we have been warned that epidemics of diseases caused by exotic viruses, such as Ebola, could scythe their way through the unprepared populations of Europe and North America, whose folk memory of epidemic disease is almost extinct, so secure from epidemic — with the partial exception of Aids — have they been for a number of decades. You can tell that no one really believed in the threat posed by Ebola virus, because a thriller was made about it. No one would have made such a film (had the technique been available) about the arrival of the Asiatic cholera in Britain in 1831 or 1848, after which scores of thousands died.

Many diseases have been put forward recently as the agent of apocalypse. Multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis is one example: the white plague, or the Captain of the Men of Death as it was once known, is making a comeback. No one should underestimate the seriousness of the recrudescence of TB, of course, but it is worth remembering that tuberculosis declined as a killer disease well before there was any specific treatment for it. Thus the appearance of untreatable TB does not mean that we shall all contract it, though it might mean the death rate will go up. Most of us still enjoy the improved social conditions that probably led to a decline in the disease’s incidence.

Then there is humble influenza, the disease that killed many more people in the aftermath of the Great War than died in the war itself. We still don’t know what the strain – called Spanish Lady at the time – was, and epidemiologists have suggested that there is no reason why such an epidemic should not occur again. The great thing about such a prediction is that it can never be proved wrong: just because we escaped last year doesn’t mean that we shall again next year. We can go on being pleasantly frightened for ever.

It isn’t only apocalyptic diseases that we like: we like extinction by asteroid and by climatic change as well. Some people may be old enough to remember the time when not global warming, but global cooling, was what was going to put paid to us. Robert Frost was right when he wrote:

Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice./ From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favour fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/ I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.

A few years ago we were, in the opinion of the best futurologists, threatened by famine because of overpopulation. Wars would break out over scanty and declining grain supplies. Now our health is threatened more by a superfluity of food than by a lack of it, in spite of the vast increase of population that has occurred since those predictions were made. The means may come and go, but the end — that is to say the apocalypse — goes on for ever.

I don’t argue for complacency, of course. Even the worst of epidemics has to start somewhere, on a small scale. Presumably the Black Death had a first victim. Old World diseases decimated (and worse than decimated) New World populations when first they collided. I can still remember the days when Aids seemed to be confined to a few cases in San Francisco, manifested by the rare skin condition of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Look at Africa now: in many of its countries, life expectancy has almost halved.

Still, we like a good apocalyptic health scare. We are so fundamentally healthy that a distant epidemic is for us what a Grimm fairy story at bedtime is to a child. We love to be snug, yet feel ourselves to be in danger. It is the only way to appreciate snugness.

The writer is a doctor and author of Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares

From The Times

March 19, 2003

 Sofia. 

THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF FACEBOOK

The Democratic Republic of Facebook

By Robert Shrimsley

The social network is not especially keen on consultation, preferring diktat and data collection on your every move

Status update: It is not your Facebook page; it’s Facebook’s. You will be a lot happier if you can remember this.
Once upon a time Facebook did not exist. There were forerunners but it was only with Facebook that everyone suddenly took full advantage of the chance to re-engage with people we’d spent the past decade forgetting; school friends with whom we never had that much in common; that couple we met on holiday but probably wouldn’t like if we invited them to dinner.

This fabulous new opportunity to stay in touch with people we didn’t care about very much came free of charge. Yes, free; this is important. Facebook took its payment in kind by using the data we gave it to make money selling adverts. As it tightened its grip on our lives, Facebook started changing its conditions to maximise its revenue. Each time, we complained because those Facebook weasels, were messing around with “our” site – for which we didn’t pay – in order to make money. The rotters; perhaps we should have sided with the Winklevosses, after all.

FT readers know there is no such thing as a free lunch. Well, Facebook was the free lunch that had the temerity to change the menu. Last week it did it again, to the usual bellyaching. Over the weekend your news feed may also have been littered with a generic message recirculated by friends that began “Do me a favour...” and set out instructions that would restore some privacy to their bleatings. The instructions didn’t seem that complex but on the other hand it also looked like a lot of hassle. This is the kind of inertia upon which Facebook relies when making changes.

Facebook also announced plans to feature increasing amounts of your web activity. Apparently, this will put it at the centre of everything we do online and thus raise its earning potential. Soon it will automatically tell your friends what you are reading and which sites you are visiting. That’s fine, if you buzz between the FT and the London Review of Books, but is perhaps a less enticing thought if a chunk of your day is spent on Youporn – or worse still, the Mail Online. You can even discover you are watching a movie at the same time as Angelina Jolie, which is a thrill, I’m sure – though it falls some way short of an actual date. As with everything on Facebook, it will be possible to mitigate most of this. If you wish to restore your privacy you can adjust your settings in little more than the time it takes to assemble an Ikea bookcase.
But what really drives users’ anguish is the sense of betrayal that came from thinking they had a say in Facebook’s evolution. This delusion of ownership – or at least stakeholding – is heightened because Facebook, like so many modern businesses, dresses up its commercial decisions as being designed to put the users first. The anger is based on people’s failure to appreciate their position in the Facebook equation. Nobody wants to be told they are nothing more than the eyeballs for advertisers; that their personal life is just packaging. So instead, users have come to believe that Facebook is a borderless democracy. But the Democratic Republic of Facebook is not especially keen on consultation. It prefers diktat and data collection and constant exhortation to users to “share more”. It wants to know your every move; what you watch, who you talk to. You may wander freely within its borders – which are constantly expanding. You are free to say what you like. You are even free to leave but it would prefer you stay and, frankly, there aren’t many places to go.
Facebook’s users are not the customers; or stakeholders. We are the product, and as such, we should remember that the meat on sale in a supermarket does not get to decide how it is eaten. We still have some choice. We can leave, or narrow our base of friends to those we might actually choose to see. Or we can stay, but if we do, we need to know our place in the food chain. Status update: We are the livestock for Facebook’s online supermarket and we are being fattened up for consumption.