slamboard

I have actually taken a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I chose my title based on my experience. People who are learning English as adults generally love idioms. This post is mostly a shout out to a school with a very cool advertising campaign. I first saw this video on something called The Pop Culture Translator. This thing is a promotional tool for the Canadian College of English Language.

With fuel costs breaking new records everyday, lots of people are considering curtailing their driving. For some people, this may involve putting a car into storage for months or longer. I was considering it and I realized that there are probably a few things that I should do to the car if I want it to stay in the condition that it is in. Here are a few links with helpful information:

Mothballing your car

AAA has advice that seems to cater to people with really nice cars.

After moving in 2005, we went carless for a whole year. It can be done. I consider my 1990 Skoda to be a time saving device. It is not a necessity and it is not a part of my identity.

You will not find too many Presidential candidates vowing to carry on the torch for Bush and Cheney. I think at last count, it stood at Zero. Since the present administration is not in a position to help with any campaigns, they have more time to do what they have been doing all along… hand out favors and alienate the rest of the World.

The general public has enough to worry about with the really big issues, like the war (which Bush and Cheney can take full credit for) and the economy (for which they deserve at least partial credit). The administration has walked behind this giant pile of lemons and opened up a little lemonade stand where they are giving away judicial appointments and other sweet stuff to the little people that have helped make it all possible.

Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV was on loan to team Cheney to prepare him for debates in 2000 and 2004. He has made millions as the general counsel for CCA the private company that houses many of America’s federal prison inmates. Putting a man who has made obscene profits from imprisonment on the bench as a trial judge seems counterintuitive, but so does installing a man who made obscene profits as an executive for a defense contractor as Vice President.

I was just checking out a global internship placement agency. I was surprised to see that they have an office on Second Life. Students and companies can sit down for a free consultation in that virtual environment during their regular business hours. I personally wouldn’t feel like I was really doing business in that kind of environment. When I did some research, I found that it really does seem like more of a gimmick than a real business tool. One business even had some over the top stereotypical receptionists.

Second Life has opened an office (IRL) in China. I can’t see Second Life being very successful in that totalitarian state.

This needs to be seen.

I am posting this because of it’s implications about how big business is in control of how news is reported. I don’t want to be alarmist about the story that FOX killed at the behest of Monsanto. I have a degree in agriculture and I was part of a big discussion about the use of hormone injections in the dairy industry in one of my classes. My professor was very much in favor of the practice. This was during the period of time in which it was unclear which way the Canadian government agency was going to swing on this issue. The use of low levels of antibiotics in feed for animals that are raised for meat production is, in my mind, a much greater human risk and it is a practice that is widespread.

Canada prohibits the use of rbST because of its adverse health effects on cows, not humans.

In a lot of ways, I hated tree planting. I spent a season performing this job in Nova Scotia when I was still in high school and I lived the cliché of planting trees in Ontario after my first year of college. This is a job that is almost always paid based on production. I made about half the amount that was printed on the poster that lured me there. I have many interesting stories from those few months. None of them fit well in this business blog.

There is a line in a BareNakedLadies song about not planting trees. The song is called Never is Enough. In a lot of ways, I hate BNL, but that’s a different story.

Sugar Land, Texas is a nice place to live, according to Forbes and CNN. It is the headquarters for Imperial Sugar. This company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2001. It has since managed to turn itself around partly through smart business decision, downsizing and effective implementation of new technologies. Having a Texas politician in the White House may have been beneficial as well.

Another large sugar company is Flo-Sun, Inc. Its owners, the Fanjul brothers, make huge donations to politicians both Red and Blue. Their reward, in the form of their share of protective tariffs and price floors, equals approximately $65 million annually.

NAFTA may mean that Mexico will be able to step up sugar exports. I can only assume that lobbyists for the US sugar industry have the ear of government and that they are looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

This post is an example of me starting out with an assumption and then not finding any really interesting facts to support it. I find it interesting that the Fanjul brothers belong to two groups of people that are pointed to as being special interest groups that buy politicians. They are owners of a huge agribusiness and they are also Cuban Americans. They get to have two interests served for the price of one. It’s no wonder they are so generous.

In the USA, there are some pundits who hold outsourcing as a major pet peeve. They are voicing a popular opinion. Americans don’t like to see skilled work being sold to the lowest bidder outside their borders.

Big business feels some pressure to apease this peeve as much as possible. Yesterday I noticed a transcription company that employs people both domestically and in the Philippines. They offer their clients a choice of employing a blend of both. I have to wonder if some large clients have a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy with regard to outsourcing.

The Fair Trade Coffee Roaster that I became involved with had an amazing mural in its cafe. It came into existence when a Mexican artist who was a part of a coffee producing cooperative in Chiapas made an inquiry about English lessons. JustUs! Coffee is based in a quaint university town and they made the offer of providing the artist with travel and accommodation and arranging his language instruction, etc., in exchange for a commissioned work of art.

Larry’s Beans is a coffee company that recognized the value of the music that was being made by some of the farmers that supplied them with coffee. Larry went down to Nicaragua with some recording equipment and he is now selling CDs back in the US with all the proceeds going back the the Nicaraguan coffee producers.

I checked out their store and the CDs are out of stock, but they have lots of coffee as well as books and t-shirts.

Calabash Music is a fair trade music company. They have lots of free music on the website to help you whet your appetite. One of my favorite genres is soukous.

I have transcribed depositions before. One of the reasons that I was not very productive was the fact that I would become interested in the actual context and back story instead of just typing the words in as quickly as possible. The main reason that I would never choose transcription as a vocation is the fact that I just don’t type very fast. I would encourage any fast typists who would prefer to work at home to look into transcription. Most of the time the content is boring enough that you won’t become over engaged, although we all tend to have emotional responses when we listen to someone lie.

The largest source of work by a wide margin is health care. Most employers prefer to hire trained and certified medical transcriptionists.

Legal transcription is a pretty big business as well. Licensed court reporters outsource a lot of verbatim transcription that they review and edit themselves before submitting certified documents. General transcription can include creating transcripts of television and radio shows, typing authors notes and even creating transcripts of podcasts.