Boss Hogg Lives! Okay, here’s the scenario: somewhere in a town probably deep down in the rural South, the politicians decide unceremoniously to dump part of the city’s utility system. The line given to the townsfolk, is that the utility system is losing money. This issue of losses is hotly contested, but the town fathers are able to stall off an independent audit to determine if the utility is really losing money. The only daily newspaper in town is owned by basically the same group of people that run the town – they’re all good ol’ boys – so it…
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The whole problem with Click! Network is that their management are idiots. They never have had any idea how to compete in selling broadband access. Click’s always controlled the wholesale prices that the ISP’s use to set their prices. They kept the wholesale prices higher than they should have been because they were trying to milk the bandwidth for all they could – trying to wring out every little last penny. And they always followed Comcast’s pricing rather than trying something innovative – like offering discounted service for low income, handicapped and seniors. And they always lagged behind in speeds,…
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In a day and age when organized labor seems largely irrelevant to many, this is an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the gains made by unions in the past 100 years. Although no one seems to remember now, some of the most basic protections we presently enjoy – like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance – came to workers courtesy of the push from organized labor. This package also includes the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage, overtime, the child labor laws and much more, including some very basic things like the right to join a union and the right…
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A liberal’s long journey away from Barack Obama and the Democratic party By Michael Pellegrini About seven and a half years ago following the 2008 elections, I wrote a blog post titled America: Disgraced then reborn. I absolutely gushed about how happy I was at the election of Barack Obama. I was dead certain he would right all the wrongs caused by eight years of George Bush, and particularly, that he would make good on his pledge to end all our wars. To me, implicit in that promise was ending the phony war on terror. A “war” that was nothing…
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From a Muslim perspective, this whole “war on terror” has to look a whole lot like a “war on Muslims.” We’ve invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Innocent civilian deaths in the Iraq war – and that’s just innocent civilian deaths by themselves – run overall between an estimated 110,000 to over 600,000 lives. Can there be many people over there who haven’t lost a friend or relative to the Iraq war? Life under Saddam Hussein was actually pretty pleasant for a majority of Iraqis. He was a secular Muslim. The Shia Muslim minority was terribly oppressed. But the Sunni majority had…
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The thing that disturbs me the most about this methanol/LNG mess is not the methanol or LNG per se. Rather it’s that these issues bring home the hard, cold fact that while we were sleeping, there’s been a coup. Our city’s been taken over by hostile forces. Tacoma and the United States are both well on their way to becoming oligarchies. When people talk about the country becoming an oligarchy on the national level, it’s hard to grasp. We still have our homes and jobs, the same programs are on TV. We’re going on a vacation to…
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To recap, Vancouver has a slight edge in certain factors like the cost of transiting terminals, they have more large super-post-Panamax cranes, they have slightly better rail delivery rates through state-subsidized Canadian National Rail, slightly better productivity, and they get a break of about $100 per container on Harbor Maintenance Tax. And they have massive plans for expansion. One of the most obvious things we can do to improve our competitive position is to improve our productivity, and having modern, state of the art equipment would make it a lot easier. The slight edge Vancouver enjoys in productivity could…
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According to a report prepared for Port Metro Vancouver (PMV), their Container Traffic Forecast (which again, I encourage everyone to read), they predict that West Coast container volumes will increase between 3.4% and 5.7% per year through 2030. Based on that, they’re forecasting their share of the traffic will provide increases for PMV from 3.51 million TEUs in 2014 to 7.02 million TEUs in 2030. According to the report, they believe they will capture the lion’s share of this work because: “…Vancouver is considered to have a better competitive position than its immediate competitors – Prince…
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I read a really good book recently, on the evolution of container shipping: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson. It’s a great book. Anyone interested in understanding the Port of Tacoma and/or the shipping business should read it. One of the things that struck me was how quickly the shipping world transitioned from “breakbulk” cargo to containers. Breakbulk was where everything was all shipped individually, or more recently, on pallets. It’s the same basic system that’s been used for hundreds of years. A breakbulk ship might take…
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Self determination is really important to Americans. That is after all, why we fought the Revolutionary War — so the American people could decide their own fate, not King George and the English aristocracy. Well it’s obvious some people in Tacoma have forgotten that. Most elected leaders in this democracy would err on the side of the democratic process. If a sufficient number of citizens were riled up about any particular issue to qualify an initiative for an election, the leaders would typically champion that as our democracy at work, and then abide by the results. That is what…