your boss is killing you

really.

Unfair boss could shorten your life: study

Mon Oct 24, 4:16 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - That crummy boss in the window office could be slowly killing you, according to a study of British workers published on Monday.

Researchers in Finland who did the study found that workers who felt they were being treated fairly had a much lower incidence of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in all Western societies.

"Most people care deeply about just treatment by authorities," study author Mika Kivimaki of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health wrote in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine. "Lack of justice may be a source of oppression, deprivation and stress."

People consider that they are being treated fairly at work when they believe their supervisor considers their viewpoint, shares information about decision-making and treats individuals fairly and in a truthful manner, the study said.

The researchers tracked the 10-year incidence of heart disease in over 6,400 male civil servants in London who had been polled on their perceived level of justice and injustice in the workplace.

"In men who perceived a high level of justice, the risk of coronary heart disease was 30 percent lower than among those who perceived a low or an intermediate level of justice," the researchers said.

That finding was not accounted for by other risk factors, from age and socioeconomic status to cholesterol levels, alcohol consumption and physical activity, the authors said.

Rania Sedhom, a labor and employment attorney with Meyer Suozzi English & Klein in New York who commented on the research, said a parallel study in the United States could find even more dramatic results because of the longer American work day.

poodle's insanity now completely clear

Blair has lost touch with reality... he's forgotten that "the presumption of innocence" is an indispensible protection for "the law-abiding citizen". and one big reason it is needed is to protect them from abuses of government power.

``...
TONY Blair yesterday threatened to impose "summary justice" on people accused of offences including terrorism, organised crime and neighbourhood yobbery.
...

Mr Blair identified terrorism, brutal, violent, organised crime and antisocial behaviour as "new types of crime" that require new rules.

"You can't do it by the rules of the game we have at the moment, you just can't," he told a Downing Street press conference.
...

Going beyond that proposal, Mr Blair suggested that police could get more powers to impose fines on suspected offenders, or expel people accused of drug crimes from public rented housing. Only after the penalty had been imposed would the accused have the right to mount a legal appeal to prove their innocence.

"Now that is summary justice," Mr Blair told journalists in Downing Street. "It is tough and it is hard, but in my judgment it is the only way to deal with it, and that comes first."

Hinting at a shift away from the presumption of innocence as the foundation of the legal code, Mr Blair said: "You have got to put the ability to protect the law-abiding citizen at the centre of it."
...
...'' link

opt-out runaround

or should i say, WAMU opt-out system from h*ll runaround?

Mystery of opt-out system

``...
Friedman, an artist, is a fierce opter-outer. He opts out of virtually any marketing scheme or mailing list on which his name pops up.

So he called the number of the local branch that was included at the bottom of the bank's letter and demanded to be taken off the branch's mailing list.

"They said they couldn't take me off the list because I'm not a customer," Friedman told me. "They told me to call Washington Mutual's main customer-service line."

So he did, and once again he was told that the bank couldn't opt him out from future mailings because he wasn't a customer.

Friedman said he was told that his only recourse was to contact the Direct Marketing Association, an industry group, and ask to be placed on the association's do-not-contact list. This list, in turn, would be passed along to Washington Mutual.

Trouble is, Friedman already did that. He said he opted out on the association's list six months ago.

"It's just outrageous for this huge institution to get my name and number, and send me offers I don't want, and say that they have no mechanism to remove me from their list," Friedman said. "It's insane."

[etc]
...''

salmon killed by bush water stunt

salmon problem
Paul McHugh, Chronicle Outdoors Writer

Saturday, October 1, 2005
...

The fish kill occurred after the Department of the Interior gave more water from the Klamath River to irrigate potato farms in the Klamath Basin. Shortly after the water diversion, Indians along the lower Klamath were horrified by what they termed a "salmon holocaust" as 80,000 adult salmon died in low, tepid, parasite-laden water that trickled downstream. Uncountable juvenile, out-migrating salmon perished as well.

The impacts of this event shall reverberate for years along an 800-mile stretch of coast from Monterey to Astoria. It now hits struggling ports like Noyo particularly hard in 2005, a year when most of those dead juveniles would have swum around offshore as adults.

Commercial fishermen estimate a $100 million loss for just this season.