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My friend’s a baker in Safeway. Not the most glorious job in the world, but the fact and matter is, it’s a labor intensive job (her shift starts at 4:00 AM and ends at noon) and she’s very glad to have a job in this economy. I give her two thumbs up for her awesome attitude because most people would just complain and bitch about the hours, the pay, etc etc. I am not certain how much she makes but I do remember her saying that the pay’s not too shabby.

But what really bothers me is the fact that she HAS to join a freakin’ baker’s union. And get this.. $400 BUCKS up front initiation fee plus $50 somewhat dollars PER month to belong in this union. What does she get out of this? Probably not much. Ok, maybe a good health care plan and some “group” leverage when it comes to sucking out more money from management. Job security? Apparetly, some of her baker coworkers were apparently NOT immune to the economy downturn. What did the union do? Nothing. Did it hurt the union? You bet! They’re no longer getting $50/month from each and every one who got laid off.

A baker at Safeway or Bill Gates… $400 is a lot of money.

And how much of her work does the union do? NADA. ZIP. ZILCH. CERO. ZERO. I’m no Yoda, but i’m guessin’ that it was HER job hunting effort that got her the job, not the union. They just stood there with their hands out to collect when Safeway gave her the job.

Unions are evil. They’re the legalized Mafia that brings down the American competitiveness. Want to have an edge in the competitive world of international business? Let’s get rid of this century old concept of job protectionism and self entitlement. Unions and their lobbyists trying to have more unions this is NOT the way to solve the economic crisis.

F*cking leeches.

We’re going to modify loans and sometimes even just “forgive” some debt to those poor owners who apparently had no idea that they shouldn’t be buying $500k homes when they work as warehouse clerks for WalMart. What message does that send out when we’re asking China for a couple of hundred billion dollars in loans?

Uncle Sam to China: ”Don’t worry. Our credit is good. We honor all debts. We’ll pay off yours, no problem.”

Uncle Sam to banks/noteholders: “No. Your contract is no good. They don’t have to pay you.” 

No wonder the Chinese gov’t is asking for guarantees on their future loans.

I hope someone in Chinese gov’t has some common sense.

How to scrape for links on Google using notepad..

This requires cygwin or some sorta shell interpreter with grep/sed capability.

1) Search for whatever you wish.  Make sure you get 100 results per page (under “advanced search”)

2) Copy paste the entire screen

• Ctrl+A  - this selects all text
• Ctrl+C - copies text onto buffer
• Open Notepad (or your fav. text editor), press Ctrl + V - pastes text onto editor
• Save (i.e. urls.txt).

3) Run this command on the file

 grep “Cached” urls.txt | sed -e ’s/ - .*//g’ -e ’s/\?.*//g’ -e ’s/^      //g’ | sort | unq

Voila