Narnia 3: "Not Dead Yet"

Third "Narnia" film moves to new studio  - Yahoo! News UK:

"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" -- the third instalment of the "Chronicles of Narnia" franchise -- will be setting sail from a new port.

The Walden Media project, which was let go by Walt Disney Pictures last month, is landing at Fox 2000, a unit of 20th Century Fox, which will develop it with an eye to release the movie in the holiday season of 2010.

Many of the key players are expected to stay with the project, including director Michael Apted and actor Ben Barnes, though a new writer might come aboard.

the peanut butter recall list has grown...

As one can see here.

Worst part about it: the company actually continued to keep the production lines open and shipped product AFTER a first round of FDA tests showed the contamination.  Without doing any cleaning, a second batch just happened to have come up negative (probably within a statistical possibility) so they just kept on shipping.

Peanut plant problem forces fresh recall - Yahoo! News:

Salmonella had been found previously at least 12 times in products made at the plant, but production lines were never cleaned after internal tests indicated contamination, FDA inspectors said in a report. Products that initially tested positive were retested. When the company got a negative reading, it shipped the products out.

That happened as recently as September. A month later, health officials started picking up signals of the salmonella outbreak.

[...obligatory and not very helpful or sincere denial by company spokesman went here...]

Michael Rogers, a senior FDA investigator, said it's possible for salmonella to hide in small pockets of a large batch of peanut butter. That means the same batch can yield both positive and negative results, he said. The products should have been discarded after they first tested positive.

This is the very reason why a plant is totally closed and cleaned when foot-n-mouth or e-coli show up in hamburger. It only takes 1 contaminated beast to infect the grinder that hits others, but then when all of the product is effectively put back into the same "pile" before being weighed, packaged, and shipped, that contaminated section can both contaminate many others AND still leave others untouched and "clean".

'bout the only good thing about this one is it shows corporate malfeasance is still alive and well and "Made in the U.S.A.".  We can't blame China for this one, and we have to own up to the fact that ALL corporations can be lazy bums (that will harm the customer) if given the chance.

(I do have an "on the other hand" post later today, though, on how the reaction to the lead paint in toys from china is greatly overblown and harming small businesses and one-of-a-kind craftsmen, and may also really harm the antiques market.)

"no new taxes" remains a curse...

Stranger Fruit: I get 12 days off … or maybe not. I blame the Republicans.:

Apparently I have to take 12 days of unpaid furlough before May 15th. And it can’t be days I teach on, i.e. it has to be Monday or Friday. All because the Republicans in the state senate want to gut K-16 education in Arizona. Seriously, in a state that hasn’t raised state taxes in 20 years, we’re having to do this to keep education afloat. A read somewhere that a 1c sales tax on alcohol would keep the K-16 system afloat, but no … that would be raising taxes.

What galls is simply this. Staff on furlough will go home and rest. Sure, they’re not being paid, but they will at least rest. Faculty will do what faculty do - prepare classes, read, grade, maintain labs; all the usual stuff we do, except for twelve days we’ll be working for free. We’d love to have the balls to take those days off but it’s not like we can say to our students, “Sorry, yesterday I was on furlough so I didn’t prepare the class … so talk among yourselves.” We have a commitment to the students that we made when they signed up for our classes … so we don’t get to take days off.

Don’t get me wrong … I’d rather have this than lose my job, but I cant help but feel that the administration realizes that the faculty will keep on trucking because, hey, that’s what we do. Do they save money? Yes. Do we work any less? No.

Dear "no new taxes" assholes: fucking get over yourselves.

Dear Travelocity...

You might piss off fewer potential customers if, next to your advert for "45% off San Diego hotels", actually had a picture of San Diego...

...and not the skyline of San Francisco, like in the email I just received.

Once again, a law that should have had a limited, directed purpose, goes to far...

Not cutting this one, as it's too damn important.
Adventures in Ethics and Science: Good intentions, bad effects: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.:

Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children's toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the law is to protect kids from harm from lead (and other substances) in children's products. However, the effect of the law may be something else altogether.

[...]

In August of 2008 Bush signed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act which sets strong limits on lead in toys and all other children's items (when read from the broadest perspective). Beginning February 10th, one toy out of each lot of toys/books/clothes manufactured by ANY TOYMAKER must be tested for lead by a third party and every toy must carry certification that this has occurred. Third party testing is expected to cost hundreds to thousands of dollars PER ITEM.

Unfortunately, the legislation is written so that only large manufacturers can survive. Even if your handmade items are made with materials that are benign like wood or use only previously manufactured and tested items like textiles and paint, one item from each lot must be tested. One of a kind toy and children's clothing makers would be out of business or face $100,000 fines. We do want to protect children, but this is not the way!

To put the cost of the required testing into context, one small maker of children's apparel considered a single item:

I solicited a lab quote. I was told it was $75 to test for lead per garment component and each substrate. Coated or painted items such as buttons are $100. So my Little Red Riding Hood Shirt, a 100% cotton knit shirt with an appliqué made from 7 cotton fabrics and 2 buttons eyes would cost $625 to test for lead. Flammability testing is also required and is either $50 for a certificate per component stating it meets weight code or $100 for actual testing. So add another $400-$800 for a grand total of $1,025-$1425 in testing costs for a shirt that retails for $40. If the shirt is offered in another colorway, the same testing is required despite the fact that the same fabrics are used throughout.

Small manufacturers have no way of absorbing the price of such redundancy. And all manufacturers will be required to test a finished component/item from each batch. Easy to do in mass production--simply pull one sample from a lot of thousands. But how does one comply when your "batches" are made-to-order batches of one? SKUs will also be required for each product with a permanent label on the item itself.

[...]

Among the people who have decried the foreseeable effects of the CPSIA as it currently stands are makers and consumers of handmade toys and apparel, but they are not the only ones who will be affected. CPSIA will also matter:

To the Parents of Young Students: Due to the new law, expect to see the cost of school supplies sky rocket. While those paper clips weren't originally intended for your student to use, they will need to be tested now that your 11-year-old needs them for his school project. This law applies to any and all school supplies (textbooks, pencils, crayons, paper, etc.) being used by children under 12.

To the Avid Reader:
Due to the new law, all children's books will be pulled from library and school shelves, as there is no exemption for them. That's okay though, there's always television. Our children don't need to learn the love of reading after all.
Article from the American Library Association http://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=1322 ...

To the Environmentalist:
Due to the new law, all items in non-compliance will now be dumped into our already overflowing landfills. Imagine not just products from the small business owners, but the Big Box Stores as well. You can't sell it so you must toss it. Or be potentially sued for selling it. You can't even give them away. If you are caught, it is still a violation. ...

To the Antique Toy Collector:
Due to the new law, you'd better start buying now because it's all going to private collection and will no longer be available to purchase. "Because the new rules apply retroactively, toys and clothes already on the shelf will have to be thrown out if they aren't certified as safe." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189645948879745.html

[...]

Take, for instance, the microscope in the elementary school (whose students are nearly all 12 and under). If the manufacturer tests each component of the microscope (one per lot, as is required), the solder in the light bulb puts the lead level over the CPSIA threshold. This means the manufacturer can legally sell schools the microscope, but not the light source. Our kids will avoid the damaging effects of lead on their brain, but those brains will not get to partake of hands-on science. (Indeed, I submit to you that if a child were to ingest a microscope light bulb, lead poisoning would not be at the top of the list of expected injuries.)

[...]

Keeping kids safe is important, and we have a collective obligation to do so. But there are plausible ways to live up to this obligation and stupid ways. Our legislators ought to be able to make some laws that make sense, that consider what kinds of materials can be expected to cause actual harm to children and focus on those. As Rick Woldenberg points out:

What exactly happened in 2007? The lead-related recalls related to LEAD-IN-PAINT, not lead in substrates. [In addition, there was one tort involving one piece of lead jewelry.] Lead-in-paint has been illegal for decades. I hate to be a killjoy, but this means that the problem in 2007 was compliance with law, not the strictness of the rules. This is a behavioral issue, not a restrictions issue, and requires a thoughtful solution tailored to the nature of the problem (lack of compliance). By extending the law well beyond the known safety issue (lead-in-paint) to a laundry list of imaginary risks not associated with actual injuries, we end up arguing about whether cloth dolls, culturally-authentic clothing, microscope bulbs and Harry Potter books present a lead danger.

Tragically, thanks to the Commerce Clause, this isn't anything a court can undo.  Fighting it through campaigns to repeal it are the only thing that'll work.

Like everything else passed from censorship to the drug war, if it is done by the government and "for the children", it'll be done wrong.

click the link for more pointers to who you can write to to help this cause.

crap they don't teach you in schools...

The Infamous Brad - Yes We Can Put Americans Back to Work. We Probably Won't, Though.:

We call one particular financial industry collapse that rippled outward around the globe (among other things, ultimately bringing the Nazis to power in Germany) not just any recession or depression, but the Great Depression, because the number of people needing work in the US rose to about 3.5 million, or about 20% of all working-age heads of households. In the hardest-hit parts of the country, it reached 50%. And it's not a coincidence that the next several years saw three credible attempts to topple the United States government: a half-million man general strike called by Soviet-influenced CIO labor unions aimed at sparking a general uprising and Communist revolution that couldn't quite hold out long enough to get their revolution before it collapsed, Huey Long's astronomically-growing Poor People's Army that aimed at overthrowing the Constitution which was only thwarted via its leader's assassination, and an attempt by the 1930s equivalent of the Democratic Leadership Council, then called the American Liberty League, to use corporate money to bribe US military generals into placing them in power via coup d'etat. No, we know as a matter of objective fact: somewhere in the near vicinity of 20% prolonged unemployment, the USA starts running a serious risk of anarchy followed by totalitarianism.

Reminder to those wanting tax cuts over "shovel-ready" infrastructure programs: trickle-down doesn't work, and it never has.  On the other hand, FDR's public worls solution might not have worked as well as the popular history paints it either, as the essay points out...

I do think a difference today is that there ARE "shovel-ready" works to be done, unlike '33, because of the way in which the state budgets were hit FIRST by the recession since it hit housing prices first and that in turn hit property tax revenues and as sales halted through the credit crunch, housing sales taxes and mortgage fees.  States were left with only income tax, and then the layoffs started, leaving them with significantly less, yet the road projects were already out there, some already started.

I think the difference is that Obama is coming into this NOW, only a year into it.  FDR didn't arrive until 1933, by which time there were <i>three</i> years of the Depression already under the belt.  There were no works waiting in the wings for funding because they'd already given up ever getting them funded.  Today, the works are there and waiting, hoping for something to come along before they have to do what was done back then: fire the people who are waiting.

The article goes on to talk about the success rate of the CWA and the WPA, which basically had the federal government directly hiring and directing those public works projects instead of dolling them out to contractors who sat on them, or refused to bid leaving the work proposals unfinished.  It also talks about how many of the "pointless" projects done through those programs are actually still in use today.

HOWEVER (yeah, I keep thinking of crap), one difference between 1930-1935 and now is the nature of the layoffs.

In 1930 most of the layoffs were factory people, and there were always the starving writer/starving artist problem as there is today.

Today, while GM and friends have been doing the layoff thing, factory workers have for some time now represented the minority of layoffs.  Many layoffs today are of college education.  Sprint, IBM, drug makers, the L.A. Opera, Kodak, and of course every layoff in the financial sector itself as a result of the mortgage fiasco.

These educated workers will be in no mood to pick up a shovel for 10% of their original salary.  Their jobs required creativity and mathematical skills that would go to waste, and no government can come up with enough "thinking" jobs for this potential workforce.

this paragraph alone is beautiful...

The Infamous Brad:

When someone is oh-so-quick to rush forward in a moment of crisis with a plan to save us all, and it just happens to be the same thing they wanted before the crisis, it almost never means that they really think that their plan will save us from the crisis. It's almost always naked political opportunism combined with cynical emotional blackmail. It means that they've got something to "sell" that they know you wouldn't "buy" if there weren't a crisis to blackmail you with.