Tag Archives: Professional

Facebook Is Being Sued for Gender and Racial Discrimination. Here’s Why.

by ArnoldMidgett Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

In a lawsuit filed against Facebook on Monday, former employee Chia Hong accused the company of gender discrimination, racial discrimination, and sex harassment.* She is represented by Lawless & Lawless, the same law firm representing Ellen Pao in the high-profile gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. (And yes, Lawless really is the last name of the two sisters who head the firm.)

Hong, who worked as a product manager at Facebook until October 2013, alleges that she suffered from discrimination by her boss, Anil Wilson, and dozens of other coworkers during her three years at the company. She also claims that she was wrongfully terminated after complaining about the harassment and discrimination.

The complaint states that Facebook employment policies were “neutral on their face” but “resulted in a disparate impact” on Hong, due to her gender:

The harassment included, but was not limited to, ANIL WILSON regularly ignoring or belittling plaintiff’s professional opinions and input at group meetings in which she was the only woman or one of very few; asking plaintiff why she did not just stay home and take care of her child instead of having a career; admonishing plaintiff for taking one personal day per month to volunteer at her child’ s school, which was permitted under company policy; ordering plaintiff to organize parties and serve drinks to male colleagues, which was not a part of plaintiff’s job description and not something that was requested of males with whom she worked; and telling plaintiff he had heard she was an “order taker,” by which he meant that she did not exercise independent discretion in the execution of her job duties.

It also alleges racial discrimination against her:

The discrimination included, but was not limited to, plaintiff having her professional opinions belittled or ignored at group meetings in which she was one of the only employees of Chinese descent; plaintiff being told that she was not integrated into the team because she looks different and talks differently than other team members, and plaintiff being replaced by a less qualified, less experienced Indian male.

This latest case comes as various Silicon Valley companies are struggling to diversify their conspicuously white, male workforces. According to a report issued by Facebook last June, 69 percent of its employees are male—including 77 percent among senior staff and 85 percent among its tech workers. The report also found that Facebook’s overall workforce was 57 percent white and 34 percent Asian.

In a statement to TechCrunch on Wednesday about the lawsuit, a Facebook spokesperson refuted Hong’s allegations: “We work extremely hard on issues related to diversity, gender and equality, and we believe we’ve made progress. In this case we have substantive disagreements on the facts, and we believe the record shows the employee was treated fairly.”

Correction: The initial version of this post misstated the allegation as “sexual harassment.”

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Facebook Is Being Sued for Gender and Racial Discrimination. Here’s Why.

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California Nutritionists Just Voted Not To Invite McDonald’s Back as a Sponsor

by LieselotteRinal Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, I attended the annual conference of the California Dietetic Association, the state’s chapter of the country’s largest professional organization for nutritionists and dietitians. Its premier sponsor—and lunch caterer—was McDonald’s. That won’t be the case at this year’s conference in April: The organization just voted not to invite the fast-food chain back.

Today a member of the California Dietetics Association shared the following letter from conference leadership on the Facebook page of Dietitians for Professional Integrity:

We would like to direct your attention to what the California Dietetic Association (CDA) has done to address our own issues surrounding sponsorship. We heard your concerns regarding CDA Annual Conference sponsorship and we have listened. We voted and McDonalds was not invited as a sponsor in 2015. This decision has impacted our finances; however, we believe it was important to respond to our member feedback. In addition, an ad hoc committee approved by the CDA executive board, reevaluated the sponsorship guidelines. The new sponsorship policy will be posted soon on www.dietitian.org. Any questions regarding the new policy can be directed to Kathryn Sucher, CDA President-elect email address redacted
We look forward to seeing you at the CDA Annual Conference.
Your 2014-2015 CDA Executive Board

That’s not to say that the conference organizers have ditched corporate funders entirely. According to the schedule (PDF), Kellogg’s is sponsoring a panel called “The Evolution of Breakfast: Nutrition and Health Concerns in the Future,” while Soy Connection, the communications arm of the United Soybean Board, is hosting a session titled “Busting the Myths Surrounding Genetically Engineered Foods” (and sponsoring a “light breakfast”). A few other sessions sponsored by corporations and trade groups:

“Why We Eat What We Eat in America and What We Can Do About It” (California Beef Council)
“Probiotics and the Microbiome: Key to Health and Disease Prevention” (Dairy Council of California)
“New Research – Understanding Optimal Levels Of Protein And Carb To Prevent Obesity, Sarcopenia, Type 2 Diabetes, And Metabolic Syndrome” (Egg Nutrition Center)
“New evidence of Non-Nutritive Sweeteners: Help or Hindrance for Weight and Diabetes Management” (Johnson & Johnson McNeil, Inc, LLC)
“Plant-based Meals from Around the Globe” (Barilla Pasta)

Still, says Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and leader of the group Dietitians for Professional Integrity, ditching McDonald’s as a sponsor is a step in the right direction. “There’s still a long way to go,” he said. “But the McDonald’s sponsorship was just so egregious. I’m glad they came to their senses and got rid of it.”

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California Nutritionists Just Voted Not To Invite McDonald’s Back as a Sponsor

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Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s

by ColumbusReilly Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s a fascinating little anecdote about lead and crime from a recent paper by Rick Nevin. It shouldn’t be taken as proof of anything, but it’s certainly an intriguing little historical tidbit about the association between lead exposure and increases in crime rates.

Here’s the background. Homicides increased dramatically between 1900-11, but most of that appears to be the result of increased rural homicides, not urban homicides. If lead exposure is part of the reason, it would mean that rural areas were exposed to increasing levels of lead about 20 years earlier, around 1880 or so. But why? Nevin suggests that the answer to this question starts with another question: Why are barns red?

Professional painters in the 1800s prepared house paint by mixing linseed oil with white lead paste. About 90% of Americans lived in rural areas in the mid-1800s, and subsistence farmers could make linseed (flaxseed) oil, but few had access to white lead, so they mixed linseed oil with red rust to kill fungi that trapped moisture and increased wood decay. Red barns are still a tradition in most USA farming regions but white barns are the norm along the path of the old National Road. Why?

….The reason the red barn tradition never took root along that path is likely because the National Road made freight, including white lead, accessible to nearby farmers. USA lead output was a relatively stable 1000 to 2000 tons per year from 1801-1825, but lead output was 15,000 to 30,000 tons per year from the mid-1830s through the mid-1860s after the completion of the National Road.

….The first American patent for “ready-mixed” paint was filed in 1867; railroads built almost 120,000 track miles from 1850 to 1900; and Sears Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs combined volume buying, railroad transport, and rural free parcel post delivery to provide economical rural access to a wide variety of products in the 1890s.

The murder arrest rate in large cities was more than seven times the national homicide rate from 1900-1904 because lead paint in the 1870s was available in large cities but unavailable in most rural areas. The early-1900s convergence in rural and urban murder rates was presaged by a late-1800s convergence in rural and urban lead paint exposure.

In short, lead paint simply wasn’t available in most rural areas before the 1880s except in very narrow corridors with good transportation. You can see this in the prevalence of white barns along the National Road. Then, starting in the 1880s, revolutions in both rail transport and mail order distribution made economical lead paint available almost everywhere—including rural areas. A couple of decades later, homicide rates had skyrocketed in rural areas and had nearly caught up to urban murder rates.

By itself, of course, this would be merely speculative. What makes it more than this is that it adds to the wealth of other evidence that lead exposure in childhood leads to increased violence in adulthood. In the post-World War II era, lead exposure came mainly from automobile exhausts, but in the post-Civil War era it came mainly from the growth in the use of lead paint. And when lead paint became available in rural areas, farmers found it just as useful as everyone else. Given what we now know about the effects of lead, it should come as no surprise that a couple of decades later the murder rate in rural areas went up substantially.

There’s much more in the full paper, including another question: why did murder rates in St. Louis increase 10-fold from 1910 to 1916? Can you guess the answer? I’ll bet you can.

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Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s

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Canadian meteorologists barred from talking about climate change

by LorrieNuyts Posted on June 4, 2014

D’oh, Canada

Canadian meteorologists barred from talking about climate change

By

Shutterstock / Nic Neufeld

In the U.S., President Obama recently invited meteorologists to the White House to talk about climate change. In Canada, federal government meteorologists are banned from talking about climate change.

But maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise in a country that’s become a rogue petrostate.

Environment Canada, the national environmental agency that also serves as the government’s weather service, does not allow its weather forecasters to discuss climate change publicly. “Weather Preparedness Meteorologists are experts in their field of severe weather and speak to this subject,” an agency spokesperson told journalist Mike De Souza. “Questions about climate change or long-term trends would be directed to a climatologist or other applicable authority.” Here’s more from a blog post by De Souza:

[T]he department’s communications protocol prevents the meteorologists from drawing links to changing climate patterns following extreme weather events such as severe flooding in southern Alberta or a massive wildfire in Northern Quebec in the summer of 2013. …

[S]ome recently-released quotes from a union-sponsored survey by Environics Research … demonstrat[e] fears among scientists about speaking out.

“With meteorology we are in a somewhat unique position in that our availability to the media is relatively unrestricted,” one government employee told the survey. “We do have to be careful what we say and keep it to the weather however. I outright refuse to answer climate questions, it is an issue fraught with too many traps. Could be career limiting.”

The quote was among dozens of first-hand accounts from federal scientists who expressed frustration about what they described as political interference in research based on the ideological views of Prime Minister Harper’s government.

The quotes, released by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, include references to “Orwellian” practices and descriptions of Canada as a “Banana Republic.” The union didn’t release the names of employees in order to protect their identities.

This is not the first time we’ve heard about science censorship from our neighbor up north. Government scientists have been barred from discussing everything from the ozone layer to snowflake research. That must just mean that there are no fossil-fueled environmental problems facing Canada. Right? Oh, maybe not.


Source
Government’s weather forecasters shouldn’t discuss climate change, says Environment Canada, Mike De Souza’s blog

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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This Pharmacist Is One of Greg Abbott’s Biggest Donors. Here’s Why.

by UBZJacelyn Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Greg Abbott, the Republican attorney general of Texas, has many of the usual suspects funding his gubernatorial campaign: Energy tycoons, construction company magnates, leveraged buyout moguls, sports team owners. But one of his biggest backers hails from an industry not typically known for bankrolling political campaigns. J. Richard “Richie” Ray is the owner of a compounding pharmacy, one of those loosely regulated entities that have been mixing up lethal injection drug cocktails for prisons as these pharmaceuticals have become harder and harder to obtain. According to a new report from the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice, Ray, the owner of Richie’s Specialty Pharmacy in Conroe, Texas, has given Abbott $350,000 to help him defeat democratic challenger Wendy Davis.

Ray’s big investment in Abbott comes as death row inmates and good-government groups are trying to force Texas to disclose the supplier of its lethal injection drugs, thought to be a compounding pharmacy. The pharmacies themselves are under fire for selling tainted and mislabled medicine that has killed dozens of people in recent years. During Abbott’s tenure as AG, he has already taken on one Texas compounder, ApotheCure, after three people in Oregon died after taking painkillers from the pharmacy that were eight times more potent than the label indicated. (In 2012, Abbott settled state civil charges against the company.) Last summer, tainted medicine from an Austin compounding pharmacy caused blood infections in 17 people; two deaths are suspected to be related to the products, which are still under investigation.

Abbott is also in the middle of a pitched legal battle over whether the state has to identify the supplier of its lethal injection drugs. Over the past several years, international pharma companies have started refusing to sell execution drugs, including pentobarbital, to US prisons for use in lethal injections, and the EU has banned their export. This has left state prisons desperate to find replacement drugs to continue moving the machinery of death. After several states were caught illegally importing the drugs from abroad, state officials have tried obtaining their execution drugs from compounding pharmacies, which can legally mix them up but that have been plagued with problems like those in Texas. Defense lawyers have argued that their condemned clients have a right to know what they’re going to be injected with to ensure that the executions will not violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and they’ve cited the well-documented problems with drugs produced by compounders in their challenges. The botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma only reinforced those claims.

In October, in response to a formal request under the state’s open-records law, staff who handle such requests in the AG’s office said Texas law required disclosure of the execution drug supplier, a move that resulted in the exposure of Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy as the state’s lethal injection supplier. Woodlands promptly quit supplying execution drugs. As a result, the state is now fighting disclosure of the name of its new supplier, and Abbott is caught in the middle, with his lawyers arguing in state and federal court that the name of the pharmacy doesn’t have to be disclosed, even as his open-records staff say it does.

In the midst of all this controversy, Richie Ray has become a major donor Abbott’s campaign. He gave $100,000 in June 2013, just before the state bought several doses of compounded pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy. (By comparison, Ray has given only a little more than $40,000 to Rick Perry’s campaigns.) Ray’s pharmacy is not supplying execution drugs to the state, according to the Texans for Public Justice report, apparently because his pharmacy isn’t certified as a “sterile” facility. However, Richie’s is a member of the Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA), a Houston-based national trade group that not only owns the lab that tested some of the state’s compounded execution drugs for purity but also sold Woodlans the raw materials to make one of the drugs.

Ray himself is active in fighting tougher regulation of compounding pharmacies. He’s the director of the Texas Pharmacy Association PAC and chairman of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists’ federal PAC. His employees are the top donors to the campaign of Sen. John Barasso (R-WY), a doctor and the Senate’s leading defender of compounding pharmacies like ApotheCure.

Given the massive conflicts between his current job and one of his biggest campaign contributors, Abbott can only hope that defense lawyers manage to drag out the legal battles over lethal injection long enough for him to get elected in November.

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This Pharmacist Is One of Greg Abbott’s Biggest Donors. Here’s Why.

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Here’s a Great Argument for Easing Up on Professional Licensing Restrictions

by LanoraKitamura Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Adrianna McIntyre has a fascinating little tidbit up today about how Medicaid expansion affects access to health care. Here’s the question: By increasing demand for doctors, is it likely to result in longer wait times for everyone?

A trio of researchers took a look at dental care to get an idea. Some states cover it for adults, some don’t. So what happens in states where adult Medicaid is expanded to cover dental care? The first-order answer is surprising: more dentists participate; their incomes go up; and wait times barely budge. But how is that possible? The second-order answer is even more interesting:

Dentists accomplish this mainly by making greater use of hygienists: following the expansion of public coverage, dentists employ a greater number of hygienists and hygienists provide about 5 additional visits per week. As a result, dentists’ income increases following the adoption of Medicaid adult dental benefits by approximately 7 percent. These effects are largest among dentists who practice in poor areas where Medicaid coverage is most prevalent.

We also find that these coverage expansions cause wait times to increase modestly less than a day, on average. However, this effect varies significantly across states with different policies towards the provision of dental services by hygienists. The increased wait times are concentrated in states with relatively restrictive scope of practice laws. We find no significant increase in wait times in states that allow hygienists greater autonomy.

Licensing and “scope of authority” restrictions are sort of a hot topic these days, and this is a pretty good example of why. I haven’t yet dived into the whole thing enough to have a settled opinion, but it’s becoming fairly common to believe that licensing restrictions are far too strict in some professions, acting more as a way of propping up salaries than as genuine public safety measures. Nurses and hygienists could be given more autonomy, for example, but this is often resisted by doctors and dentists who don’t want to give up a lucrative monopoly on the services they provide.

The arguments are sometimes arcane, but this example brings it down to earth. Ease up on the restrictions placed on hygienists, and dental practices can provide more and better service to the poor—and, in the end, do it without sacrificing income. That’s worth knowing.

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Here’s a Great Argument for Easing Up on Professional Licensing Restrictions

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Justice Department Bad Boys: More Than 650 Cases of Misconduct Documented in 12-Year Period

by Andrew6a8 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Federal prosecutors, judges, and other officials at the Justice Department committed over 650 acts of professional misconduct in a recent 12-year period, according to a new report published by a DC-based watchdog group, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). POGO investigators came up with the number after reviewing documents put out by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). According to one little-noticed OPR document published last year, a DOJ attorney failed to disclose a “close personal relationship” with the defendant in a case he was prosecuting, where he negotiated a plea agreement to release the defendant on bond. An immigration judge also made “disparaging remarks” about foreign nationals. POGO contends that this number is only the tip of the iceberg and OPR needs to release more information about this misconduct to the public.

“The bottom line is we just don’t know how well the Justice Department investigates and disciplines its own attorneys for misconduct when it occurs,” says Nick Schwellenbach, a contributor to POGO.” The amount and types of misconduct DOJ’s own investigators conclude has happened suggests more information should be public than is already, including naming names of offending prosecutors that commit serious misconduct.”

OPR is responsible for investigating ethics complaints at the Justice Department, but the office reports directly to the attorney general. POGO argues that this insular system might not be sufficient to provide effective oversight of prosecutor wrongdoing. Last year, for example, two federal judges issued court orders complaining that DOJ attorneys had misled them about the full scale of the NSA’s surveillance activities—but OPR was never aware of the complaints and didn’t investigate them even though a former OPR attorney said that they should have triggered an inquiry, according to USA Today.

Between FY2002 and FY2013, of the more than 650 documented cases of DOJ employee misconduct, 400 were characterized as “reckless” or “intentional” by OPR. In OPR’s latest report, from FY2012, the office received over 1,000 complaints and other correspondence about Justice Department employees (over half of these complaints came from incarcerated individuals) and opened 123 inquiries and investigations.

In one case from 2012, a Justice Department attorney falsely told a court that the government didn’t have evidence that a key witness suffered from an ongoing mental health disorder—when the prosecutor did have that evidence, according to OPR. The attorney was suspended for two weeks and the state bar was notified. In another case, an immigration judge presiding over a case where a father and his daughter were fighting removal from the United States, was found by OPR to have “engaged in professional misconduct by acting in reckless disregard of his obligation to appear to be fair and impartial” and to have made biased statements against immigrants. The judge was suspended for 30 days.

OPR isn’t responsible for disciplining employees; that’s up to others in the Justice Department. OPR also no longer publicly names Justice Department employees found to be conducting misconduct, although it did so for a brief period during the Clinton presidency. In 2010, the American Bar Association passed a resolution asking the Obama administration to release more information about Justice Department investigations, potentially including names, but so far, not much has changed.

“The department takes all allegations of attorney misconduct seriously, and that is why the Office of Professional Responsibility thoroughly reviews each case and refers its findings of misconduct to relevant state bar associations when the rules of the state bar are implicated,” says a Justice Department spokeswoman. “OPR also regularly provides detailed information on the resolution of complaints to the defense attorneys, judges, and others who send allegations of misconduct to the department.”

A bill proposed on Thursday by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) would overhaul how misconduct is investigated at the Justice Department. Right now, only OPR is allowed to look into ethics complaints, instead of the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which is widely considered to be more independent. The senators’ bill would move that authority to the IG’s office. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who supports the bill, says: “When Americans pledge to abide by ’liberty and justice for all,’ that does not mean that those pursuing justice can creatively apply different standards or break the rules to get convictions – it means that in America everyone is held equally accountable.”

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Justice Department Bad Boys: More Than 650 Cases of Misconduct Documented in 12-Year Period

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You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

by NanceeDundalli Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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What does it take to break the mold in a prestigious, white-male-dominated industry? I took that question on in a recent piece on how women chefs, who, despite impressive advances in recent years, get short shrift when it comes to big-name awards and invitations to high-minded culinary confabs. But restaurants’ diversity problem is bigger than just a gender imbalance. More then two centuries after the invention of the fine-dining restaurant in the wake of the French Revolution, chefly prestige remains largely—but not completely—the domain of not just males, but white males. What gives?

On a frigid evening in Harlem last week, I got the opportunity to put the question directly to four mold-breakers in a public conversation at Ginny’s Supper Club, the cozy, red-tinted, speakeasy-like saloon in the cellar of Red Rooster, Chef Marcus Samuelsson’s neo-soul-food establishment on Lennox just north of 125th Street. The evening started with wine and snacks, which included house-made charcuterie, cheese, and cornbread madeleines—the latter, I thought, a clever mashup of French and US traditions, a Proustian nod to our most memory-drenched and historically fraught region, the South. My own melancholic musings aside, the room buzzed and glowed in the hour or so leading up to the panel—a diverse crowd of 150 or so chatted and circulated, young, old, and in between, culinary students, chefs, writers, and food lovers of all stripes, from the neighborhood and other parts of Manhattan, from Brooklyn, and even, I hear, from Chicago.

Eventually, we took to the stage: to my right Marcus himself; then Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/proprietor of the highly influential East Village spot Prune; then Charlene Johnson-Hadley, a daughter of Brooklyn’s West Indian diaspora who worked her way up through Samuelsson’s Red Rooster kitchen and is now executive chef at his Lincoln Center outpost American Table Bar and Cafe; and finally Floyd Cardoz, chef at North End Grill in Battery Park City, who brought the cooking of his native India into the glamor of a buzzy Manhattan restaurant with the late and much-lamented Tabla.

Unfortunately, our conversation wasn’t recorded; but Eater delivered a “10 Best Quotes” piece; Serious Eats’ Jacqueline Raposo has a very thoughtful post on the event, also with several quotes; and the blogger Ronda Lee offered worthy commentary on the event.

My favorite parts of the discussion were:

Two New York icons: Samuelsson and Hamiton.

1) Marcus—wgo was born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden—talking about coming up as an ambitious young cook in France, where the message he got was “ce n’est pas possible,” i.e., it’s not possible for a black man to command his own kitchen. His outsider status served as a spur, he said: with the conventional path to chefdom blocked to him, he had to forge his own, which included moving to the melting pot of New York and grabbing the reins of the Swedish restaurant Aquavit.

2) Gabrielle talking about how she found herself in the restaurant world not out of a passion for cooking but rather out of the need to support herself at a very young age—and about how being a woman in kitchens when she came up in the 1980s meant having to forge an identity, a way to fit in, since there was no pre-existing identity to fall into. Here’s her money quote, which I’m cribbing from Eater because I didn’t take notes:

Yes, there were horrible white men in the kitchens and the hardest part of that is the contortions you’d put yourself through to figure out your place in that kitchen. Should I be a chain-smoking dirt-talking motherfucker who can crank it f*cking out? Or should I be kind of a dainty female with lipstick and be like ‘Can you help me with this stock pot because I just can’t?’ Frankly it’s a freaking second job on top of what you’re already doing. One of the hardest parts is trying to a viable self that you can live with and and go home and respect at the end of the day.

3) Charlene talking about how she was drawn to cooking as a child through her grandmother’s Jamaican-inflected kitchen, and how, while in college in the 1990s, she realized she wanted to make a career of cooking, which sent her to culinary school and her current path. It struck me that unlike Marcus and Gabrielle, who came up by in the 1980s, Charlene could envision for herself a conventional path to success: go to chef’s school, get a job. Here’s Charlene’s take on being a woman of color in the professional kitchen (quote from Raposo’s piece): “I just think you need to get past yourself and not think of yourself as ‘the different one.’ That shouldn’t be your focus. Your focus should be following your ambition, making sure you are doing what it is you want to do, and making yourself an asset to wherever you are.”

4) Floyd on aspiring to cook professionally while growing up middle class in India—and the culture shock it gave his parents, who hoped he would be a doctor. Until pretty recently, the professional kitchen was a place middle class people aspired to flee. Now, with the rise of the celebrity chef, it has emerged as a site of aspiration. Hamilton touched on that topic, too, when she mentioned that suddenly, “40-year-old white males” are applying to work in her kitchen. She went on (quote from Raposo):

Now we have the whole new problem of, “I used to be an architect” and “I have a trust fund” and “I have so much more money and power than you’re ever going to have in this world.” And you have to go up to that guy and say, “You know, your sauce is a little salty.”

As Ronda Lee put it in her blog post, “gender and race in the professional kitchen is a lot to cover in a two-hour discussion.” And our panel in Harlem last week barely scratched the surface. I learned again what I learned when writing my piece on gender: This is a fascinating and complex conversation, one that people working to make the restaurant world more inclusive are eager to have. There’s so much we didn’t get to—for example, what about the role of Mexican immigrants, who are the lifeblood of kitchen lines from Los Angeles to New York? We at Mother Jones plan to continue exploring it. Stay tuned.

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You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

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Apparently the Denver Broncos Have Lots of Dumb Fans

by TerenceBuchholz Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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The other day I noticed that the Broncos were favored to win the Super Bowl, and I was puzzled. I thought the Seahawks were favored. But I don’t pay a lot of attention to this stuff, so I figured I just misread something somewhere.

But no! Apparently the betting line has changed substantially over the past week or so. The New York Times explains why:

The oddsmakers know things. They know there are two kinds of money: the sharp dough of professional gamblers and the square dollars of the public. They know that betting lines are meant to be moved….They know that square money is enthralled by favorites and falls hard for teams that have done a lot for them lately. The Broncos, for instance, not only covered against New England, but looked good doing it. It’s part of the reason Denver is currently the 2 ½-point favorite even though oddsmakers opened with the Seahawks — a team they believe is better — as a 2- to 2 ½-point favorite.

That’s a big swing. Apparently the dumb money is falling hard for the Broncos. If that’s the case, the smart guys ought to make a killing. We’ll see about that.

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Apparently the Denver Broncos Have Lots of Dumb Fans

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Behringer EUROPOWER EP2000 Professional 2,000-Watt Stereo Power Amplifier with Atr (Accelerated Transient Response) Technology

by Myrna Posted on August 24, 2013

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Posted in Behringer USA | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Behringer EUROPOWER EP2000 Professional 2,000-Watt Stereo Power Amplifier with Atr (Accelerated Transient Response) Technology