Friday, July 26, 2013
Call of the Wild: Pouncing on Reports of Anchorage’s Big Wild Life
One day in mid-June, her first call was from Laura Krip in Muldoon, but Coltrane was chasing bears and moose in east Anchorage and couldn’t check her office messages until after noon. Krip’s message, now some six hours old, said she and her 6-year-old daughter had just found themselves nose to nose with a grizzly bear.
Krip has walked her dogs in a wooded area along Chester Creek, just east of Muldoon Road, one or more times a day for years. By her estimate she’s walked those trails “thousands of times.” That day was different. (...)
In May and June it’s not just the bears that keep Coltrane hopping. She gets as many calls about moose. Cow moose drop calves from mid-May to mid-June and the young calves are often separated from their mothers by fences, traffic and other urban hazards. Young moose calves are also vulnerable to bears. Hiding out in the city is not a surefire way to avoid the big predators.
On the same morning as Krip’s close encounter, before she got to her office, Coltrane fielded several moose calls. A caller had heard thrashing and bawling in his backyard off Upper DeArmoun Road and assumed that a bear had killed a calf, a cow, or both during the night. He wanted any carcasses hauled away so the bear wouldn’t linger and possibly defend its kill. This situation occurs as many as a dozen times each summer in Anchorage. Sometimes the bear is still there. Coltrane and her assistant, Dave Battle, spent several hair-raising minutes crawling through a dense thicket of alders looking for a dead moose. Battle’s 12-gauge shotgun was locked and loaded; Coltrane was packing a can of bear spray because her finger’s broken and bandaged. The search didn’t turn up any carcasses. A cow moose is a formidable opponent, even for a bear, and it appears that she won the skirmish. (...)
Being the Anchorage area wildlife biologist is a lot like being a firefighter. You’re on standby and whatever your immediate plans might be, the rest of your day is just a phone call away.
Coltrane and Battle arrived at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game office after noon and Coltrane finally heard Krip’s adrenaline-spiked phone message. She headed for Muldoon, knowing it was too late to find the bear, but wanting to familiarize herself with the trail where Krip had encountered the bear. On the way she received a more-urgent call. A woman, who had locked herself in a bathroom, was reporting a bear in her house. Coltrane called the woman and headed for the Hillside.
by Rick Sinnott, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Rick Sinnott
Special Lady Friend
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As she closed her hand in mine, I introduced myself, but instead of returning the courtesy, she said, "you know, someone from your office could have told me what this fucking meeting was about." I was hooked. I laughed, told her to give me her card and I would personally call her prior to any future engagements. We settled in with the larger group and I'm not going to lie, I placed myself in a spot where I could take a good look at her. She was opinionated, passionate and believed very much in her cause; I spoke once or twice, but was completely taken with her. A few hours later, in the spirit of dishing a little bit back to her, I called her at her office … something something about being a man of my word and making sure she had my contact information. We fell into a casual conversation that crept past 10 minutes, then 15, 20, and well past half an hour she was as smart as she was foul mouthed, sharp as she was sexy.
She told me she was meeting a friend for a drink and I should join them. She asked me to go outside my comfort zone (I'm introverted by nature and can be reluctant to just up and meet strangers). I was nervous, didn't know if she was dating someone, engaged, hell, maybe even married (though she wore no ring), but I took a chance, and said yes. Her friend peeled off after about an hour, the sparks between us were unmistakeable. We sat and talked for another four hours, the time just flew by. I felt as comfortable in her presence as if I had known her for years and could not believe that I literally had awoken that morning not even knowing she existed.
We were on the phone the next morning, that afternoon and had a dinner date the following night. Hours bled away as the details of our lives unfolded organically, naturally, like two people who just knew each other. That we ran in similar professional circles helped, we could relate to each other's work and laugh at the absurdities we saw every day, but also that we were independent types who did not suffer fools gladly and liked being the smartest people in the room. The attraction was intense and unthinking, something I had not experienced in a very very long time. Friends and family told us how happy we looked and sounded and were shocked that we had literally just met. (...)
Memorial Day weekend we went "down the shore" and spent the day with her family and a larger group of her family's friends who get together every year at that time for a day long party. Another affirmative statement of the seriousness with which she viewed our relationship. I could not know it would be the last time we would see each other (at least on good speaking terms). The following day, she got called out of state on business for a week - I was totally supportive, offered to do what I could in her absence (check her mail, stop by her house, etc.) and we kept up our nightly calls while she was away.
When she came back … I don't know, she was different. She called me the afternoon she returned (a Saturday) and I offered to make her dinner. She had to take another call and then … around midnight she got around to sending a text message saying she had been pulled into work. We spoke the following day with another offer for dinner and she again demurred. We made plans for lunch on Wednesday. When Wednesday rolled around, she did not return a message I left until 12:30 claiming she lost track of time (we both had meetings at 2 so by 12:30 it would have been impossible to meet). I asked her what was going on. She was cagey, she sounded stressed and distant. The thing is, she had not been like this AT ALL until then. In fact, knowing she had been out of the office for a week, I kept trying to give her outs to NOT make plans, but she would make them and then totally ignore them. It was so out of character for her and it made me confused, not mad. She was always good about keeping in touch, in fact had told me early on that touching base for no other reason than making sure the other one wasn't lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs was important to her ("help, I've fallen and I can't get up.") but now, almost out of nowhere, all that went out the window.
We talked briefly on Thursday, and then again on Friday from work. She had to go but told me, "I'll call you tonight." And that was it. She was a ghost. Never called, never returned a call, voice mail or the (humiliating) "so I guess we broke up" email I sent 10 days later after she went totally radio silent. (...)
None of it made sense. How do you go from wanting to know someone else is not in a pile at the bottom of a flight of stairs to shutting them out completely? Not even saying goodbye? People date, things don't work out, you move on, but this was not a went-out-once-there-was-no-chemistry-so-you-just-dont-return-a-phone-call-or-text-message situation. I was left to wonder what was really going on and why this woman, whose FIRST WORDS TO ME were rather blunt, suddenly couldn't scare up the courage to just explain what happened, even if it was to pick up the phone for 2 minutes to say, whatever, "it's not you, it's me" "thanks for the memories" "good luck, asshole." My relationship history may be a bit spotty, but even *I* know enough to know that pulling this kind of disappearing act is wrong.
None of it made sense. How do you go from wanting to know someone else is not in a pile at the bottom of a flight of stairs to shutting them out completely? Not even saying goodbye? People date, things don't work out, you move on, but this was not a went-out-once-there-was-no-chemistry-so-you-just-dont-return-a-phone-call-or-text-message situation. I was left to wonder what was really going on and why this woman, whose FIRST WORDS TO ME were rather blunt, suddenly couldn't scare up the courage to just explain what happened, even if it was to pick up the phone for 2 minutes to say, whatever, "it's not you, it's me" "thanks for the memories" "good luck, asshole." My relationship history may be a bit spotty, but even *I* know enough to know that pulling this kind of disappearing act is wrong.
by SLG, Scary Lawyer Guy Blog | Read more:
Image: Arles (by Antonio Palmerini) via:
They Know Much More Than You Think
[ed. Excellent article. If there's anyone wondering why this Snowden thing is such a big deal, read the take-away quote at the end.]
For much of the next century, the solution would be the same: the NSA and its predecessors would enter into secret illegal agreements with the telecom companies to gain access to communications. Eventually codenamed Project Shamrock, the program finally came to a crashing halt in 1975 when a Senate committee that was investigating intelligence agency abuses discovered it. Senator Frank Church, the committee chairman, labeled the NSA program “probably the largest governmental interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”
As a result of the decades of illegal surveillance by the NSA, in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was signed into law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) came into existence. Its purpose was, for the first time, to require the NSA to get judicial approval for eavesdropping on Americans. Although the court seldom turned down a request for a warrant, or an order as it’s called, it nevertheless served as a reasonable safeguard, protecting the American public from an agency with a troubling past and a tendency to push the bounds of spying unless checked.
For a quarter of a century, the rules were followed and the NSA stayed out of trouble, but following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided to illegally bypass the court and began its program of warrantless wiretapping. “Basically all rules were thrown out the window and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans,” I was told by Adrienne J. Kinne, who in 2001 was a twenty-four-year-old voice intercept operator who conducted some of the eavesdropping. She or her superiors did not have to get a warrant for each interception. “It was incredibly uncomfortable to be listening to private personal conversations of Americans,” she said. “And it’s almost like going through and stumbling and finding somebody’s diary and reading it.”
All during this time, however, the Bush administration was telling the American public the opposite: that a warrant was obtained whenever an American was targeted. “Anytime you hear the United States government talking about a wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order,” President George W. Bush told a crowd in 2004. “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.” After exposure of the operation by The New York Times in 2005, however, rather than strengthen the controls governing the NSA’s spying, Congress instead voted to weaken them, largely by codifying into the amendment to FISA what had previously been illegal.
At the same time, rather than calling for prosecution of the telecom officials for their role in illegally cooperating in the eavesdropping program, or at least a clear public accounting, Congress simply granted them immunity not only from prosecution but also from civil suits. Thus, for nearly a century, telecom companies have been allowed to violate the privacy of millions of Americans with impunity. (...)
One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs, Church issued a stark warning:
That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.by James Bamford, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: NSA
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Halliburton Agrees to Plead Guilty in Spill
[ed. Sweet... and now they're on Double Secret Probation. Destroying evidence? That's so Guantanamo these days. Let's only hope Dick Cheney's stock options are secure.]
Halliburton Energy Services has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the Department of Justice said Thursday.Federal officials said in a news release that a criminal information charging Hallburton with one count of destruction of evidence was filed in federal court in Louisiana.
Halliburton has agreed to pay the maximum fine, be on probation for three years and continue to cooperate with the government's criminal investigation, according to the news release, which did not list the amount of the fine.
The Houston-based company has also made a $55 million voluntary contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It was not a condition of the court agreement, the news release says.
The company said in a statement Thursday night that it had agreed to plead guilty "to one misdemeanor violation associated with the deletion of records created after the Macondo well incident, to pay the statutory maximum fine of $200,000 and to accept a term of three years probation."
The Justice Department has agreed it will not pursue further criminal prosecution of the company or its subsidiaries for any conduct arising from the 2010 spill, Halliburton's statement said, adding that federal officials have also "acknowledged the company's significant and valuable cooperation during the course of its investigation."
by AP | Read more:
Image: Halliburton
Say Goodbye to the Tech Sounds You’ll Never Hear Again
The boops and beeps of bygone technology can be used to chart its evolution. From the zzzzzzap of the Tesla coil to the tap-tap-tap of Morse code being sent via telegraph, what were once the most important nerd sounds in the world are now just historical signposts. But progress marches forward, and for every irritatingly smug Angry Pigs grunt we have to listen to, we move further away from the sound of the Defender ship exploding.
Let's celebrate the dying cries of technology's past. The following sounds are either gone forever, or definitely on their way out. Bow your heads in silence and bid them a fond farewell.
The Telephone Slam
Ending a heated telephone conversation by slamming the receiver down in anger was so incredibly satisfying. There was no better way to punctuate your frustration with the person on the other end of the line. And when that receiver hit the phone, the clack of plastic against plastic was accompanied by a slight ringing of the phone's internal bell. That's how you knew you were really pissed -- when you slammed the phone so hard, it rang.
There are other sounds we'll miss from the phone. The busy signal died with the rise of voicemail (although my dad refuses to get voicemail or call waiting, so he's still OG), and the rapid click-click-click of the dial on a rotary phone is gone. But none of those compare with hanging up the phone with a forceful slam.
Tapping a touchscreen just does not cut it. So the closest thing we have now is throwing the pitifully fragile smartphone against the wall.
The Modem
Go ahead and imitate the bleep bleep boop hiss of a 56k modem in front of anyone under the age of 20. They'll give the same look a dog makes when you present it with a hardcover book as a toy. But those noises where the first indication that you were joining, at the time, a new and wonderful world. A connected world where information (most of it wrong) flowed freely, and you could talk with both friends and complete strangers without running up a huge phone bill. Now, everything is constantly connected, and internet access is like electricity. It's just there. But there was a time when your desire to chat on IRC and check on your Geocities' guestbook was behind a magical handshake of beeps and hisses, all coming out of a tiny box plugged into your landline.
Go ahead and imitate the bleep bleep boop hiss of a 56k modem in front of anyone under the age of 20. They'll give the same look a dog makes when you present it with a hardcover book as a toy. But those noises where the first indication that you were joining, at the time, a new and wonderful world. A connected world where information (most of it wrong) flowed freely, and you could talk with both friends and complete strangers without running up a huge phone bill. Now, everything is constantly connected, and internet access is like electricity. It's just there. But there was a time when your desire to chat on IRC and check on your Geocities' guestbook was behind a magical handshake of beeps and hisses, all coming out of a tiny box plugged into your landline.
by Roberto Baldwin, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
How Publix's People-First Culture Is Winning The Grocer War
When a middle-aged woman asks about a box of crackers, no aisle number is blurted out. Instead, an employee races off to find the item, just as he is trained to do. At checkout, shoppers move to the front quickly, thanks to a two-customer-per-line goal enforced by proprietary, predictive staffing software. Baggers, a foggy memory at most large supermarket chains, carry purchases to the parking lot. Even Publix’s president, Todd Jones, who started out as a bagger 33 years ago, stoops down to pick up specks of trash on the store floor.
“We believe that there are three ways to differentiate: service, quality and price,” Jones says. “You’ve got to be good at two of them, and the best at one. We make service our number one, then quality and then price.”
If that’s a dig at Wal-Mart–traditional slogan: “Always low prices”–which has recently targeted Publix’s home turf, Florida, it’s a subtle one. The more direct retort comes via the numbers. As best we can tell, Publix is the most profitable grocery chain in the nation: Its net margins, 5.6% in 2012, trounced Wal-Mart’s (3.8%), as well as those of every public competitor, ranging from mass market Kroger (1.6%) to hoity-toity Whole Foods (3.9%).
Those numbers in a field notorious for razor-thin margins stem from another heady fact: Publix, the seventh-largest private company in the U.S. ($27.5 billion in sales) and one of the least understood thanks to decades of media reticence, is also the largest employee-owned company in America. For 83 years Publix has thrived by delivering top-rated service to its shoppers by turning thousands of its cashiers, baggers, butchers and bakers into the company’s largest collective shareholders. All staffers who have put in 1,000 work hours and a year of employment receive an additional 8.5% of their total pay in the form of Publix stock. (Though private, the board sets the stock price every quarter based on an independent valuation; it’s pegged at $26.90 now, up nearly 20% already this year.) How rich can employees get? According to Publix, a store manager who has worked at the company for 20 years and earns between $100,000 and $130,000 likely has $300,000 in stock and has received another $30,000 in dividends.
The route to that payday is completely transparent. Publix almost exclusively promotes from within, and every store displays advancement charts showing the path each employee can take to become a manager. Fifty-eight thousand of the company’s 159,000 employees have officially registered their interest in advancement. Associates are encouraged to rotate through various divisions, from grocery to real estate to distribution, to get a broad sense of the business. A former cake decorator in a store bakery is now in charge of all strategy for its bakeries. A distribution-center manager overseeing 800 associates got his start unloading railcars. When Lakeland store manager Edd Dean started bagging groceries as a teenager, he never expected to still be working in a supermarket 30 years later. “When I graduated college I had been seven years at Publix, and I started looking for a ‘real job,’?” he says. “I interviewed at a lot of companies, but the manager I was working with kept hounding me to come to Publix. Eventually it just clicked.” Dean is one of 34,000 employees who have more than ten years of tenure.
“I’m always amazed that more companies don’t recognize the power of associate ownership,” says Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw, 62, the grandson of founder George Jenkins and the fourth family member to run the company. While Crenshaw has a 1.1% stake in Publix, worth $230 million, and his entire family has 20%, worth $4.2 billion (see box, p. 102) , the employees (and former employees) are the controlling shareholders, with an 80% stake, worth $16.6 billion. Not surprisingly none of them belongs to a union.
by Brian Soloman, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Bob Croslin for Forbes
America Has a Stadium Problem
[ed. I became acquainted with CVM during the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill litigation process, i.e., "how much would you pay not to have oiled beaches, or dead sea otters, etc.?" As I recall, the results (and potential financial liabilities) were quite controversial at the time.]
Economists have long known stadiums to be poor public investments. Most of the jobs created by stadium-building projects are either temporary, low-paying, or out-of-state contracting jobs—none of which contribute greatly to the local economy. (Athletes can easily circumvent most taxes in the state in which they play.) Most fans do not spend additional money as a result of a new stadium; they re-direct money they would have spent elsewhere on movies, dining, bowling, tarot-card reading, or other businesses. And for every out-of-state fan who comes into the city on game day and buys a bucket of Bud Light Platinum, another non-fan decides not to visit and purchases his latte at the coffee shop next door. All in all, building a stadium is a poor use of a few hundred million dollars.This isn’t news, by any stretch, but it turns out we’re spending even more money on stadiums than we originally thought. In her new book Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities, Judith Grant Long, associate professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, shatters previous conceptions of just how much money the public has poured into these deals. By the late ’90s, the first wave of damning economic studies conducted by Robert Baade and Richard Dye, James Quirk and Rodney Fort, and Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist came to light, but well afterwards, from 2001 to 2010, 50 new sports facilities were opened, receiving $130 million more, on average, than those opened in the preceding decade. (All figures from Long’s book adjusted for 2010 dollars.) In the 1990s, the average public cost for a new facility was estimated at $142 million, but by the end of the 2000s, that figure jumped to $241 million: an increase of 70 percent.
Economists have also been, according to Long, drastically underestimating the true cost of these projects. They fail to consider public subsidies for land and infrastructure, the ongoing costs of operations, capital improvements (we need a new scoreboard!), municipal services (all those traffic cops), and foregone property taxes (almost every major-league franchise located in the U.S. does not pay property taxes “due to a legal loophole with questionable rationale” as the normally value-neutral Long put it). Due to these oversights, Long calculates that economists have been underestimating public subsidies for sports facilities by 25 percent, raising the figure to $259 million per facility in operation during the 2010 season. (...)
The basic evolution behind subsidies for sports stadiums is as follows: owner wants new stadium to make more money and increase the value of the franchise. Owner threatens to move team. Politicians save face by pretending they won’t offer millions of dollars in subsidies. Politicians eventually offer millions of dollars in subsidies and keep the team in the city. If there’s a justification for all this, it comes from the concept of a public good.
“The traditional definition of a public good is that the benefits aren’t scarce, they’re non-rival and non-excludable, so the consumption by one person doesn’t limit the consumption by someone else,” Professor J.C. Bradbury, a sports economist at Kennesaw State University and author of Hot Stove Economics, told me over the phone. “So if I’m happy Charlotte has a basketball team, that doesn’t make anyone else less happy.” The stadium itself, though, is a private good. There are only a limited number of seats, and if my ass is in Section 101, Row V, Seat 21, your ass isn’t.
Still, the thinking goes, a fan can enjoy a team without giving the franchise a penny. If you don’t buy Sunday Ticket, don’t attend any games, and don’t purchase any merchandise, then your favorite football team won’t see any of your money, no matter how passionately you follow them. But how do you quantify this? This is where Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), a survey method originally designed by environmental economists to value public park space or clean air, comes into play.
by Aaron Gordon, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image: KKIMPHOTOGRAPHY/FLICKR)
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
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