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| Good holiday spot I think.... |
August 30, 2013
Holiday weekend....
Holiday this weekend so no posts till Tuesday... I have other things to do, but I am sure I will have a few things to add.
The Other NRA
In some parts of the world, making $8 an hour is a lot of money. But in America that just isn't much. This is about $12,000 a year before any tax. In most cities you would have a very hard time living on this alone.
By Steven Rosenfeld:
In June, the National Restaurant Association boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage.
The NRA’s lobbying didn’t stop there. It also told members that it blocked a dozen states this year from passing laws that would require earned paid sick leave, which is what New York City and Portland, Oregon adopted. Meanwhile, it boasted that six states, including Florida, passed NRA-backed laws that preemptively ban localities from granting earned and paid employee sick time.
“These are horrible things, but there are amazing things that are happening to change it,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), which has been working a dozen years to slowly change the industry’s exploitive business model and labor practices. “And there will be increasingly important stuff coming up.”
As fast-food workers across the country prepare for a second nationwide walkout over wages on Thursday, most Americans have little idea how profitable and politically aggressive the corporate mainstays of America’s second biggest employer have become. While labor activists have had victories in 2013, such as New York and Portland passing sick leave laws, and New Jersey poised to raise its minimum wage via a ballot measure this fall, the restaurant industry’s lobbying powerhouse is at war with the industry’s workers.
“It’s an old-boy network. It’s very old-school thinking. It’s very, very conservative,” said Paul Saginaw, founder of Zingerman’s food companies in Michigan, which employes 600 people and unlike the NRA, supports better benefits for employees like healthcare. “There has to be some pressure put out to provide better lives for people.”
Most Americans are unaware that millions of people who work in the industry — especially the 2.5 million fast-food preparers and servers who earn an average of $8.74 an hour, according to federal labor statistics — are not just teens in their first job, but adults with families to support. They may not know there’s a separate minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, that hasn’t changed in 22 years — although 32 states have raised it slightly. They may not realize that they, as the restaurant-going public, subsidize owners via cash tips, even as the NRA routinely tells legislators its industry cannot afford to pay better wages or basic benefits.
Most Americans don’t know that restaurant salaries are so low that the industry’s 12.2 million workers use food stamps at twice the rate of the U.S. workforce, and are three times as likely to be below the poverty line. Or that women earn less than men in similar jobs. Or that restaurants are among the biggest low-wage employers of people of color. Or that virtually every chain — except for In and Out, according to ROC — don’t want to pay living wages and benefits or offer real opportunities for advancement.
Most tellingly, almost every national chain — from fast-food outfits such as Yum! Brands Inc. (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) and McDonald’s to full-service dining such as Darden Restaurants Inc. (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Capital Grille) — have reported higher revenues, profits, margins and cash holdings to Wall Street analysts despite the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project. Giants like McDonalds had 7.8 percent revenue growth over the past decade, according to Gurufocus.com, a financial reporting site. Yum had 10-year revenues of 8.7 percent, and Darden’s 10-year revenues grew 9.1 percent.
But last winter, as the NRA was fighting minimum wage increases and paid sick leave, it was telling lawmakers that the industry could not afford to pay employees more. Yet this August, the NRA’s newsletter was predicting another profitable year, where revenues would be up 4 percent compared to 2012. “Restaurant and foodservice sales are expected to reach a record high of $660.5 billion this year,” another 2013 revenue forecast on its website said.
“The NRA is the worst employer lobby in the U.S.,” Jayaraman said, speaking about its lobbying and PR operation that pretends it is not an industry dominated by Fortune 500 companies, but instead a rickety mom-and-pop operation teetering on the brink of ruin. “The [earnings] data does not bear any resemblance to what they say is true.”
There are many reasons why America’s restaurant industry, which employs nearly one in 10 Americans, gets away with underpaying its workers and blocking laws that would benefit employees. These reasons include the industry’s longtime low-wage business mode; its longstanding fear-based lobbying that any wage or benefit increase would kill jobs; and a sophisticated political operation that nurtures ties to both parties, encouraging lawmakers to adopt anti-worker laws.
“The question is where is it coming from and who benefits,” said Ben Goldfarb, executive director of Wellstone Action, a group that trains progressive activists. “We know who benefits. It’s the Restaurant Association members and the electeds [legislators] who do their bidding… It’s not about what’s good or bad for the economy.”
The business model — where almost everyone except for top management earns an average of slightly more than $11 per hour — is premised on paying workers the lowest legal salary and has not changed in decades. As The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki recently explained, many of today’s largest service-sector companies, particularly restaurants and big-box retailers, were founded decades ago and sought to hire young people and housewives as low-wage, part-time employees, to give them work experience and spending money. “The reason this has become a big political issue is not that the jobs have changed; it’s that the people doing the jobs have.”
This summer’s fast-food walk-outs — which will continue this fall — are part of a campaign to challenge and change that status quo, particularly as the media is discovering that the largely non-unionized restaurant workforce is filled with people with families. One consequence of the Great Recession is that millions of middle-class jobs have been replaced by lower paying service jobs — food sector jobs that are now filled by adults with children, and jobs that offer little opportunity for advancemment.
“On what I’m earning right now you have to choose between paying your rent and eating the next day,” Christopher Drumgold, a 32-year-old father of two from Detroit who earns $7.40 an hour after a year at McDonald’s, told reporters during July’s fast-food worker walk-out. “Fifteen dollars an hour would be great. We’d be able to pay our living costs.”
This kind of working-class struggle prompted President Obama to call for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 in his 2013 State of the Union speech. Some Democrats in Congress quickly responded by going higher, proposing it be raised to $10.10, and that the minimum cash wage for tipped workers be 70 percent of the federal (or higher state) minimum wage.
While polls consistently find that 80 percent of Americans, including majorities of Republicans and people earrning more than $100,000 a year, support a $10.10 wage, the industry’s national and state-level lobbyists went to work to kill any increase at the state or federal levels. And if that didn’t work, they sought exemptions for tipped workers in states where the increase was seen as passing.
What unfolded in New York, which raised its minimum wage but not for tipped restaurant workers, and in Maryland, where the NRA stopped a minimum wage increase in a legislative committee, shows just how the NRA wields its power and influence.
“The NRA is a very conservative organization… my values are so different,” said Saginaw, who has been in the restaurant business for 31 years and was a former member. “They certainly weren’t representing my interests. They talk the small business owner game a lot but their lobbying efforts are dictated by the large corporate chains. I’m a small businessman.”
Many Americans are not aware that there is more than one minimum wage. There’s the federal wage for non-tipped workers, which is $7.25 an hour or $15,080 a year and took effect in July 2009. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have raised that rate. A few states, such as New Mexico and California, allow jurisdictions to set locally higher minimums.
Then there’s the tipped wage, for jobs where the public tips workers. The federal tip wage, which is $2.13 an hour, was last raised in 1991. Thirty-two states have raised it slightly. Employers are supposed to pay the difference between that base and other state or federal minimum. But, as ROC United said, that doesn’t always happen. And then there are other minimum wages for immigrants, minors and people with disablities.
In New York, the minimum wage increase in 2013 fell prey to partisan games. “It could be seen as good intentions gone awry,” said Frank Sobrino, press secretary for New York State Democratic Sen. Jose Peralta, explaining what happened as his state legislature raised the state’s minimum wage this year from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour by 2016.
New York’s Senate is controlled by an odd majority of Republicans and so-called independent Democrats — not his boss, Sobrino said. When the GOP agreed to raise the wage in secret last-minute negotiations — after blocking it for years — the final bill did not include a tip wage increase for waiters and bartenders, which is what the industry wanted. Tipped workers at car washes and airports will get a raise, said Working Families spokesman Joe Dinkin. “But hotel and restaurant waiters and bartenders, which are the largest group of tipped workers, do not get an automatic increase. Rather, the tipped minimum wage will go to the Wage Board, which is controlled by Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo, to do what he wants with it. And yes, this is because of the National Restaurant Association.”
The bill also contained an unprecedented and alarming payoff to fast-food chains and big retailers: a tax credit offsetting the cost of hiring teenagers, but only for minimum wage. That subsidy drew the media’s attention. A Wall Street Journal editorial, “Minimum Intelligence,” said it provided an incentive to fire workers 20 years and older and replace them with teens. “For a teen working full time, the annual subsidy could be worth as much as $2,800 per worker by 2016,” the Buffalo News editorial said.
Sen. Peralta, the Queens Democrat, has since proposed a bill to nullify the tax break that analysts say will be worth millions to big employers.
There were two features of this deal that exempifly how the NRA operates, ROC’s Jayaraman said. First, NRA lobbyists keep telling lawmakers that their industry primarily employs teenagers and young people who don’t need higher wages and benefits. Their PR shop has even absurdly claimed that raising minimum wages would kill entry-level jobs. That line apparently was bought by the New York State Republican senator who inserted the tax subsidy at the last minute.
But the brouhaha over the tax subsidy also helped the NRA keep its last-minute deal on excluding the minimum wage for food servers somewhat hidden. “They are worried about public outrage,” Jayaraman said, noting that the same kind of secret last-minute deal excluding tip wages emerged in Connecticut when it raised its minimum wage. “That happened at the last minute with legislators and lobbyists for the NRA,” she said. “Everyone who had been working on this was blindsided.
Typically, they don’t bring it [excluding tip wages] up at hearings.”
But in Maryland, the NRA’s lobbyists were more brazen. They did bring up excluding tipped workers — and they trashed them — but only after waiting six hours to testify, long after most labor activists had testified and the hearing room was almost empty.
First came Carville Collins, representing a regional Wendy’s chain with 108 stores and 3,100 employees. He rolled out the NRA’s standard “job killer” speech, which was also presented by NRA lobbyists in Congress this spring. Carville said that raising wages “imposes costs we cannot pass onto consumers.” He said a proposed three-step increase to $10 an hour would cause “five to eight” stores to close, putting as many as 300 people out of work. Moreover, if Maryland’s minimum wage was higher than nearby states, it would attract out-of-staters who would “come and displace Maryland workers.” Carville then cited research from the NRA-funded Employment Policy Institute, projecting that a national $9.80 minimum wage would kill “256,000 to 768,000 jobs,” including thousands of jobs in Maryland.
Melvin Thompson, senior vice president of the NRA’s state affiliate, the Restaurant Association of Maryland, immediately followed, and opposed raising minimum wages “for all the reasons you have heard already.” But then he attacked, claiming that servers often stole tips — saying they didn’t need an increase. He said restaurant workers made two to three times the minimum wage and some waiters earned more money than owners. He concluded, “the tip portion doesn’t need to be included in this bill.”
Needless to say, progressive restaurant owners, activists and economists have thoroughly debunked each of these claims. As Zingerman’s Saginaw said, “The workforce has changed. It’s not just students and people out of college. It’s much more diverse than that.” Economists have pointed out that at McDonald’s, for example, half of the cost of raising its minimum hourly pay to $10.50 could come by adding a nickel to the price of a $4 Big Mac. Other studies by ROC have found that a dime increase in daily food prices could support a 33 percent raise for minimum wage workers and a doubling of the base tip wage.
But, as the Wellstone Institute’s Ben Goldfarb explained, NRA lobbyists seek to sow just enough doubt and gray areas that it becomes easy for legislators to vote against proposed wage-increase bills, or just exempt their industry entirely.
These fear-based scripts — which have been studied and rebutted by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) — prompted legislators, including a handful of Democrats, to vote against the Maryland bill in committee. The local advocates, Raise Maryland, are not giving up. They have analyzed how much Maryland gave away in business subsidies this year and written memos rebutting the NRA’s testimony. Raise Maryland volunteers have been knocking on thousands of doors this summer to generate support and get people to write to lawmakers to change their minds and reconsider the issue, campaign coordinator Matt Hanson said.
The NRA did not respond to a list of questions from AlterNet beyond an initial phone call where a spokeswoman emphasized that the industry’s profit margins are so slim — 3 or 4 percent — it can’t afford to do more. Yet the industry is America’s largest low-wage sector and is filled with corporations that have been consistently profitable despite the sluggish economy, according to NELP’s analyses of Wall Street earnings reports. Yet the NRA not only opposes raising wages and linking wages to inflation, it has another draconian priority: opposing local laws granting earned sick leave.
Despite protests by workers who have publically explained what it’s like to have to go to work sick, the NRA has been lobbying in statehouses to preempt cities and counties from passing local laws that would require employers to grant earned paid sick leave. ROC notes that 90 percent of restaurant workers don’t have paid sick days, and “two-thirds report cooking, preparing and serving food while sick.” That reality, captured in videos by sick workers, helped a coalition led by Working Families in New York City and Connecticut to adopt local sick leave laws. These were significant victories. The New York City law will affect a million workers. (San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and the District of Columbia also require earned sick time.)
New York’s passage of sick leave legislation grabbed headlines, especially as it became law when the city council overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto. But in the past two years, NRA lobbyists have pushed eight states to preempt or repeal local labor laws that include requiring paid sick leave. The industry — helped by prominent Democrats such as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter — also beat proposed sick leave laws in Denver and Philadelphia.
This trend started in Wisconsin and shows how right-wing alliances spread anti-labor legislation. In 2011, Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker backed an industry-led effort to ban paid sick leave laws, like the one Milwaukee’s voters adopted as a ballot measure in 2008 while Walker was county executive — its top elected official. Seventy percent of voters had backed paid sick leave. That spring, the passage of Wisconsin’s bill preempting local laws was touted as a model by the NRA at meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the pro-corporate lobbying mill. ALEC members, almost all Republicans, introduced copycat bills in their states, Wellstone Action’s Goldfarb said, saying this was how the NRA’s priority spread and “scaled.” These were passed by GOP-majority statehouses, sometimes using strongarm tactics that dismayed labor organizers.
This summer, for example, Republicans in Florida’s Orange County — near Walt Disney World — were lobbied by fast-food giants, including Darden, which owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Capital Grille, and Disney, and intentionally delayed acting on another sick leave ballot measure that had 80 percent support in polls. That tactic gave the restaurant lobby time to push its preemption bill through its legislature, which GOP Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in July. Arizona, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas, Indiana and Tennessee have all passed bans on local sick leave laws. Michigan, Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina are considering it.
The Arizona Restaurant Association lobbyist said last March that no one was proposing a sick leave law in her state, but “we’re fortunate to get out in front of it.” In Memphis, Tennessee, the prospect that Shelby County was considering a wage theft ordinance — because restaurants there hadn’t paid $270,000 in back wages to workers that a coalition of lawyers and churches recovered in court — prompted its GOP-majority state legislature to act and preempt local labor laws. “That [wage-theft law]… would have been very harmful to local businesses,” the Tennessee Hospitality Association told its members.
In all these political fights, the question of who is being harmed is the critical question. The NRA is touting an old anti-regulatory script — trotted out by state chambers of commerce for years — that any cost that cuts into profits is a job killer and must be stopped. But advocates like ROC and Working Families say that argument is upside down. Low pay and no benefits not only hurts worker productivity, it also hurts families and undercuts local consumer spending.
“It’s an old-school chamber of commerce attitude — it’s anti regulation,” Zingerman’s Saginaw said. “We believe that by paying higher wages and benefits we will get better productivity from our staff and have more satisfied customers.”
And when it comes to sick leave, there is another dimension: the public is at risk when food is prepared by workers who can’t afford to take a day or a few hours off to visit a doctor. ROC’s 2012 report on Darden described a North Carolina Olive Garden worker who came to work in 2011 with Hepatitis A, prompting the county to vaccinate thousands of people and a class-action lawsuit.
“Almost no laws anywhere in the country require restaurants to provide paid sick leave for employees who come down with anything from the sniffles to a norovirus,” noted Grubstreet.com. “On the other hand, pretty much every single municipal health department in the country has a rule or law requiring employers to keep sick employees away from food and out of the restaurants, and that’s where things get problematic.”
Problematic is not exactly the correct word. When it comes to the NRA and its state affiliates, greedy and shamelessly political are more accurate. And that is why thousands of fast-food workers across the country plan to walk out of their jobs on Thursday, in what organizers says will be months of continuing labor actions — including a focus in September on raising tip wages.
“The NRA is a lobbying machine — it is for the owners of restaurants and restaurant chains that are turning a profit off the backs of workers,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer and owner of Just Crust, a pizza restaurant in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Meanwhile, advocates like ROC have formed a progressive restaurant trade association, RAISE, and are encouraging people to sign petitions to raise minimum wages and benefits, as well as use its new National Diners’ Guide identifying which restaurants treat employees fairly. They’re also encouraging people dining out to ask owners about paying fair wages, just as the public asked about organic and local foodstuffs and gradually changed menu offerings.
“We try to encourage that kind of economic inquiry,” said Liss-Riordan, a RAISE member. “A few years ago, it was pretty revolutionary to ask, ‘How fresh is your arugula?’ Now we want people to ask, ‘Are you paying fair wages?’ It’s just getting started. We are hoping that it’s a powerful idea that will take off.”
By Steven Rosenfeld:
In June, the National Restaurant Association boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage.
The NRA’s lobbying didn’t stop there. It also told members that it blocked a dozen states this year from passing laws that would require earned paid sick leave, which is what New York City and Portland, Oregon adopted. Meanwhile, it boasted that six states, including Florida, passed NRA-backed laws that preemptively ban localities from granting earned and paid employee sick time.
“These are horrible things, but there are amazing things that are happening to change it,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), which has been working a dozen years to slowly change the industry’s exploitive business model and labor practices. “And there will be increasingly important stuff coming up.”
As fast-food workers across the country prepare for a second nationwide walkout over wages on Thursday, most Americans have little idea how profitable and politically aggressive the corporate mainstays of America’s second biggest employer have become. While labor activists have had victories in 2013, such as New York and Portland passing sick leave laws, and New Jersey poised to raise its minimum wage via a ballot measure this fall, the restaurant industry’s lobbying powerhouse is at war with the industry’s workers.
“It’s an old-boy network. It’s very old-school thinking. It’s very, very conservative,” said Paul Saginaw, founder of Zingerman’s food companies in Michigan, which employes 600 people and unlike the NRA, supports better benefits for employees like healthcare. “There has to be some pressure put out to provide better lives for people.”
Most Americans are unaware that millions of people who work in the industry — especially the 2.5 million fast-food preparers and servers who earn an average of $8.74 an hour, according to federal labor statistics — are not just teens in their first job, but adults with families to support. They may not know there’s a separate minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, that hasn’t changed in 22 years — although 32 states have raised it slightly. They may not realize that they, as the restaurant-going public, subsidize owners via cash tips, even as the NRA routinely tells legislators its industry cannot afford to pay better wages or basic benefits.
Most Americans don’t know that restaurant salaries are so low that the industry’s 12.2 million workers use food stamps at twice the rate of the U.S. workforce, and are three times as likely to be below the poverty line. Or that women earn less than men in similar jobs. Or that restaurants are among the biggest low-wage employers of people of color. Or that virtually every chain — except for In and Out, according to ROC — don’t want to pay living wages and benefits or offer real opportunities for advancement.
Most tellingly, almost every national chain — from fast-food outfits such as Yum! Brands Inc. (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) and McDonald’s to full-service dining such as Darden Restaurants Inc. (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Capital Grille) — have reported higher revenues, profits, margins and cash holdings to Wall Street analysts despite the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project. Giants like McDonalds had 7.8 percent revenue growth over the past decade, according to Gurufocus.com, a financial reporting site. Yum had 10-year revenues of 8.7 percent, and Darden’s 10-year revenues grew 9.1 percent.
But last winter, as the NRA was fighting minimum wage increases and paid sick leave, it was telling lawmakers that the industry could not afford to pay employees more. Yet this August, the NRA’s newsletter was predicting another profitable year, where revenues would be up 4 percent compared to 2012. “Restaurant and foodservice sales are expected to reach a record high of $660.5 billion this year,” another 2013 revenue forecast on its website said.
“The NRA is the worst employer lobby in the U.S.,” Jayaraman said, speaking about its lobbying and PR operation that pretends it is not an industry dominated by Fortune 500 companies, but instead a rickety mom-and-pop operation teetering on the brink of ruin. “The [earnings] data does not bear any resemblance to what they say is true.”
There are many reasons why America’s restaurant industry, which employs nearly one in 10 Americans, gets away with underpaying its workers and blocking laws that would benefit employees. These reasons include the industry’s longtime low-wage business mode; its longstanding fear-based lobbying that any wage or benefit increase would kill jobs; and a sophisticated political operation that nurtures ties to both parties, encouraging lawmakers to adopt anti-worker laws.
“The question is where is it coming from and who benefits,” said Ben Goldfarb, executive director of Wellstone Action, a group that trains progressive activists. “We know who benefits. It’s the Restaurant Association members and the electeds [legislators] who do their bidding… It’s not about what’s good or bad for the economy.”
The business model — where almost everyone except for top management earns an average of slightly more than $11 per hour — is premised on paying workers the lowest legal salary and has not changed in decades. As The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki recently explained, many of today’s largest service-sector companies, particularly restaurants and big-box retailers, were founded decades ago and sought to hire young people and housewives as low-wage, part-time employees, to give them work experience and spending money. “The reason this has become a big political issue is not that the jobs have changed; it’s that the people doing the jobs have.”
This summer’s fast-food walk-outs — which will continue this fall — are part of a campaign to challenge and change that status quo, particularly as the media is discovering that the largely non-unionized restaurant workforce is filled with people with families. One consequence of the Great Recession is that millions of middle-class jobs have been replaced by lower paying service jobs — food sector jobs that are now filled by adults with children, and jobs that offer little opportunity for advancemment.
“On what I’m earning right now you have to choose between paying your rent and eating the next day,” Christopher Drumgold, a 32-year-old father of two from Detroit who earns $7.40 an hour after a year at McDonald’s, told reporters during July’s fast-food worker walk-out. “Fifteen dollars an hour would be great. We’d be able to pay our living costs.”
This kind of working-class struggle prompted President Obama to call for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 in his 2013 State of the Union speech. Some Democrats in Congress quickly responded by going higher, proposing it be raised to $10.10, and that the minimum cash wage for tipped workers be 70 percent of the federal (or higher state) minimum wage.
While polls consistently find that 80 percent of Americans, including majorities of Republicans and people earrning more than $100,000 a year, support a $10.10 wage, the industry’s national and state-level lobbyists went to work to kill any increase at the state or federal levels. And if that didn’t work, they sought exemptions for tipped workers in states where the increase was seen as passing.
What unfolded in New York, which raised its minimum wage but not for tipped restaurant workers, and in Maryland, where the NRA stopped a minimum wage increase in a legislative committee, shows just how the NRA wields its power and influence.
“The NRA is a very conservative organization… my values are so different,” said Saginaw, who has been in the restaurant business for 31 years and was a former member. “They certainly weren’t representing my interests. They talk the small business owner game a lot but their lobbying efforts are dictated by the large corporate chains. I’m a small businessman.”
Many Americans are not aware that there is more than one minimum wage. There’s the federal wage for non-tipped workers, which is $7.25 an hour or $15,080 a year and took effect in July 2009. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have raised that rate. A few states, such as New Mexico and California, allow jurisdictions to set locally higher minimums.
Then there’s the tipped wage, for jobs where the public tips workers. The federal tip wage, which is $2.13 an hour, was last raised in 1991. Thirty-two states have raised it slightly. Employers are supposed to pay the difference between that base and other state or federal minimum. But, as ROC United said, that doesn’t always happen. And then there are other minimum wages for immigrants, minors and people with disablities.
In New York, the minimum wage increase in 2013 fell prey to partisan games. “It could be seen as good intentions gone awry,” said Frank Sobrino, press secretary for New York State Democratic Sen. Jose Peralta, explaining what happened as his state legislature raised the state’s minimum wage this year from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour by 2016.
New York’s Senate is controlled by an odd majority of Republicans and so-called independent Democrats — not his boss, Sobrino said. When the GOP agreed to raise the wage in secret last-minute negotiations — after blocking it for years — the final bill did not include a tip wage increase for waiters and bartenders, which is what the industry wanted. Tipped workers at car washes and airports will get a raise, said Working Families spokesman Joe Dinkin. “But hotel and restaurant waiters and bartenders, which are the largest group of tipped workers, do not get an automatic increase. Rather, the tipped minimum wage will go to the Wage Board, which is controlled by Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo, to do what he wants with it. And yes, this is because of the National Restaurant Association.”
The bill also contained an unprecedented and alarming payoff to fast-food chains and big retailers: a tax credit offsetting the cost of hiring teenagers, but only for minimum wage. That subsidy drew the media’s attention. A Wall Street Journal editorial, “Minimum Intelligence,” said it provided an incentive to fire workers 20 years and older and replace them with teens. “For a teen working full time, the annual subsidy could be worth as much as $2,800 per worker by 2016,” the Buffalo News editorial said.
Sen. Peralta, the Queens Democrat, has since proposed a bill to nullify the tax break that analysts say will be worth millions to big employers.
There were two features of this deal that exempifly how the NRA operates, ROC’s Jayaraman said. First, NRA lobbyists keep telling lawmakers that their industry primarily employs teenagers and young people who don’t need higher wages and benefits. Their PR shop has even absurdly claimed that raising minimum wages would kill entry-level jobs. That line apparently was bought by the New York State Republican senator who inserted the tax subsidy at the last minute.
But the brouhaha over the tax subsidy also helped the NRA keep its last-minute deal on excluding the minimum wage for food servers somewhat hidden. “They are worried about public outrage,” Jayaraman said, noting that the same kind of secret last-minute deal excluding tip wages emerged in Connecticut when it raised its minimum wage. “That happened at the last minute with legislators and lobbyists for the NRA,” she said. “Everyone who had been working on this was blindsided.
Typically, they don’t bring it [excluding tip wages] up at hearings.”
But in Maryland, the NRA’s lobbyists were more brazen. They did bring up excluding tipped workers — and they trashed them — but only after waiting six hours to testify, long after most labor activists had testified and the hearing room was almost empty.
First came Carville Collins, representing a regional Wendy’s chain with 108 stores and 3,100 employees. He rolled out the NRA’s standard “job killer” speech, which was also presented by NRA lobbyists in Congress this spring. Carville said that raising wages “imposes costs we cannot pass onto consumers.” He said a proposed three-step increase to $10 an hour would cause “five to eight” stores to close, putting as many as 300 people out of work. Moreover, if Maryland’s minimum wage was higher than nearby states, it would attract out-of-staters who would “come and displace Maryland workers.” Carville then cited research from the NRA-funded Employment Policy Institute, projecting that a national $9.80 minimum wage would kill “256,000 to 768,000 jobs,” including thousands of jobs in Maryland.
Melvin Thompson, senior vice president of the NRA’s state affiliate, the Restaurant Association of Maryland, immediately followed, and opposed raising minimum wages “for all the reasons you have heard already.” But then he attacked, claiming that servers often stole tips — saying they didn’t need an increase. He said restaurant workers made two to three times the minimum wage and some waiters earned more money than owners. He concluded, “the tip portion doesn’t need to be included in this bill.”
Needless to say, progressive restaurant owners, activists and economists have thoroughly debunked each of these claims. As Zingerman’s Saginaw said, “The workforce has changed. It’s not just students and people out of college. It’s much more diverse than that.” Economists have pointed out that at McDonald’s, for example, half of the cost of raising its minimum hourly pay to $10.50 could come by adding a nickel to the price of a $4 Big Mac. Other studies by ROC have found that a dime increase in daily food prices could support a 33 percent raise for minimum wage workers and a doubling of the base tip wage.
But, as the Wellstone Institute’s Ben Goldfarb explained, NRA lobbyists seek to sow just enough doubt and gray areas that it becomes easy for legislators to vote against proposed wage-increase bills, or just exempt their industry entirely.
These fear-based scripts — which have been studied and rebutted by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) — prompted legislators, including a handful of Democrats, to vote against the Maryland bill in committee. The local advocates, Raise Maryland, are not giving up. They have analyzed how much Maryland gave away in business subsidies this year and written memos rebutting the NRA’s testimony. Raise Maryland volunteers have been knocking on thousands of doors this summer to generate support and get people to write to lawmakers to change their minds and reconsider the issue, campaign coordinator Matt Hanson said.
The NRA did not respond to a list of questions from AlterNet beyond an initial phone call where a spokeswoman emphasized that the industry’s profit margins are so slim — 3 or 4 percent — it can’t afford to do more. Yet the industry is America’s largest low-wage sector and is filled with corporations that have been consistently profitable despite the sluggish economy, according to NELP’s analyses of Wall Street earnings reports. Yet the NRA not only opposes raising wages and linking wages to inflation, it has another draconian priority: opposing local laws granting earned sick leave.
Despite protests by workers who have publically explained what it’s like to have to go to work sick, the NRA has been lobbying in statehouses to preempt cities and counties from passing local laws that would require employers to grant earned paid sick leave. ROC notes that 90 percent of restaurant workers don’t have paid sick days, and “two-thirds report cooking, preparing and serving food while sick.” That reality, captured in videos by sick workers, helped a coalition led by Working Families in New York City and Connecticut to adopt local sick leave laws. These were significant victories. The New York City law will affect a million workers. (San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and the District of Columbia also require earned sick time.)
New York’s passage of sick leave legislation grabbed headlines, especially as it became law when the city council overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto. But in the past two years, NRA lobbyists have pushed eight states to preempt or repeal local labor laws that include requiring paid sick leave. The industry — helped by prominent Democrats such as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter — also beat proposed sick leave laws in Denver and Philadelphia.
This trend started in Wisconsin and shows how right-wing alliances spread anti-labor legislation. In 2011, Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker backed an industry-led effort to ban paid sick leave laws, like the one Milwaukee’s voters adopted as a ballot measure in 2008 while Walker was county executive — its top elected official. Seventy percent of voters had backed paid sick leave. That spring, the passage of Wisconsin’s bill preempting local laws was touted as a model by the NRA at meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the pro-corporate lobbying mill. ALEC members, almost all Republicans, introduced copycat bills in their states, Wellstone Action’s Goldfarb said, saying this was how the NRA’s priority spread and “scaled.” These were passed by GOP-majority statehouses, sometimes using strongarm tactics that dismayed labor organizers.
This summer, for example, Republicans in Florida’s Orange County — near Walt Disney World — were lobbied by fast-food giants, including Darden, which owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Capital Grille, and Disney, and intentionally delayed acting on another sick leave ballot measure that had 80 percent support in polls. That tactic gave the restaurant lobby time to push its preemption bill through its legislature, which GOP Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in July. Arizona, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas, Indiana and Tennessee have all passed bans on local sick leave laws. Michigan, Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina are considering it.
The Arizona Restaurant Association lobbyist said last March that no one was proposing a sick leave law in her state, but “we’re fortunate to get out in front of it.” In Memphis, Tennessee, the prospect that Shelby County was considering a wage theft ordinance — because restaurants there hadn’t paid $270,000 in back wages to workers that a coalition of lawyers and churches recovered in court — prompted its GOP-majority state legislature to act and preempt local labor laws. “That [wage-theft law]… would have been very harmful to local businesses,” the Tennessee Hospitality Association told its members.
In all these political fights, the question of who is being harmed is the critical question. The NRA is touting an old anti-regulatory script — trotted out by state chambers of commerce for years — that any cost that cuts into profits is a job killer and must be stopped. But advocates like ROC and Working Families say that argument is upside down. Low pay and no benefits not only hurts worker productivity, it also hurts families and undercuts local consumer spending.
“It’s an old-school chamber of commerce attitude — it’s anti regulation,” Zingerman’s Saginaw said. “We believe that by paying higher wages and benefits we will get better productivity from our staff and have more satisfied customers.”
And when it comes to sick leave, there is another dimension: the public is at risk when food is prepared by workers who can’t afford to take a day or a few hours off to visit a doctor. ROC’s 2012 report on Darden described a North Carolina Olive Garden worker who came to work in 2011 with Hepatitis A, prompting the county to vaccinate thousands of people and a class-action lawsuit.
“Almost no laws anywhere in the country require restaurants to provide paid sick leave for employees who come down with anything from the sniffles to a norovirus,” noted Grubstreet.com. “On the other hand, pretty much every single municipal health department in the country has a rule or law requiring employers to keep sick employees away from food and out of the restaurants, and that’s where things get problematic.”
Problematic is not exactly the correct word. When it comes to the NRA and its state affiliates, greedy and shamelessly political are more accurate. And that is why thousands of fast-food workers across the country plan to walk out of their jobs on Thursday, in what organizers says will be months of continuing labor actions — including a focus in September on raising tip wages.
“The NRA is a lobbying machine — it is for the owners of restaurants and restaurant chains that are turning a profit off the backs of workers,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer and owner of Just Crust, a pizza restaurant in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Meanwhile, advocates like ROC have formed a progressive restaurant trade association, RAISE, and are encouraging people to sign petitions to raise minimum wages and benefits, as well as use its new National Diners’ Guide identifying which restaurants treat employees fairly. They’re also encouraging people dining out to ask owners about paying fair wages, just as the public asked about organic and local foodstuffs and gradually changed menu offerings.
“We try to encourage that kind of economic inquiry,” said Liss-Riordan, a RAISE member. “A few years ago, it was pretty revolutionary to ask, ‘How fresh is your arugula?’ Now we want people to ask, ‘Are you paying fair wages?’ It’s just getting started. We are hoping that it’s a powerful idea that will take off.”
They Struck....
By Allison Kilkenny
Fast-food workers in cities all across the country are expected to strike Thursday as part of growing protests against the nation’s biggest restaurant and retailer chains. Low-wage workers at businesses like McDonald’s and Macy’s are fighting for a living wage of $15 an hour in pay, which is more than double the current national minimum wage of $7.25.
Organizing against low-paying jobs at fast-food restaurants began last November in New York when hundreds of workers went on strike in a one-day protest. By the summer, the movement expanded to include thousands of workers across the country in cities like Detroit, Chicago and Kansas City.
This time around, workers in places like Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Memphis and Raleigh plan on getting involved with backing from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
There have already been tangible results from the strikes. Jonathan Westin, who helped organize New York’s first fast-food strike as the executive director of New York Communities for Change, says some local workers have seen wage increases of twenty-five to fifty cents per hour, and Steve Ashby, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations, says some Chicago strikers have also gotten higher wages post-strike.
The achievements, while modest, have also had another effect: lending courage to other workers who want to strike for living wages.
Angela Gholston, 24, has been working at a McDonald’s in Detroit for two years, and says she’s participating in the strike to help form a union, and make better wages so she can support her family and pay her bills.
“I receive Medicaid because I can’t even afford to pay for my employer’s healthcare plan,” she says.
Gholston has participated in past strikes at work, and says she feels emboldened by the organizing she’s seen in other states.
“They’re trying to help us and we’re trying to help them, and that’s good. We have to stand together in order to keep this movement going. We need [$15-per-hour minimum wage], not $7.40. What can we do with $7.40?”
Gholston says she wasn’t hesitant to participate in the strike, even though she lacks the protection of a union.
“We need to make a union. That’s the whole point of going on strike. If you don’t take action and stand up for what’s right, who is going to do it for you? I wasn’t scared at all.”
Mike Wilder, co-founder of the African-American Civic Engagement Roundtable in Milwaukee and Community Coalition Coordinator with Wisconsin Jobs Now, and campaign leader of Raise Up MKE — a group focused on fighting for living wages — says the strike is about holding profitable companies accountable for not paying workers enough to afford basic amenities like food and rent.
In Milwaukee, Wilder says organizers and workers have planned a day full of actions at specific stores throughout the city.
“Here in Milwaukee, the day will end with a march and a rally in support of low-wage workers in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods,” says Wilder.
Wilder says Thursday is one step in a much larger movement.
“All across the country, workers are standing up and demanding higher wages so they can support themselves and their families without having to seek government assistance,” he says. “In Milwaukee, we started with a few dozen workers on strike in May, and now we have hundreds striking. Workers are planning future escalating actions until their demands are met.”
Wilder adds the goal of these types of actions is to send a message to “these billion-dollar corporations that workers are no longer going to struggle to survive on minimum wage, while record-breaking profits are generated by the companies that employ them. Workers are demanding [$15-per-hour minimum wage] and the right to form a union without retaliation.”
Dwight Murray, 27, has been working at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis since March, and says he’s participating in the strike because he gives a lot to McDonald’s.
“I work hard and I deserve to make enough to meet my family’s basic needs,” says Murray. “I struggle to get my three-year-old daughter what she needs, and we have to make sacrifices on a regular basis. I’m going on strike because I deserve to make a liveable wage and to be able to take care of my daughter and even have money saved up for emergencies.”
Murray says fast-food workers aren’t treated with the respect they deserve on the job.
“We’re working hard to live up to the ‘hot, fresh and ready in a minute-and-a-half’ standard, but sometimes there’s not enough staff, so we work eight hours without a break.”
Murray claims he’s been told that no overtime is allowed, but then if his replacement doesn’t show up, he can’t leave, and then his superiors “gripe” about paying for a single hour at the overtime rate. He adds that none of the employees can count on raises, and the people who work hard and have been there the longest in crucial roles sometimes don’t get raises at all.
This is the first time Murray has ever gone on strike, but he says he feels bolstered by actions in other states.
“It gave me even more incentive to join and put a fire in my belly to stand up for this. Before, I didn’t feel that there was a proper avenue for me to be heard. Now, I see that there is, and that I’m not alone. I’m standing up for myself and my coworkers, but also the millions of other workers across the country that also deserve a liveable wage.”
Proving that indeed courage is contagious, Murray says he feels safe striking because he knows other workers have his back, and there are workers across the country standing up together.
“I know my rights and I’m talking to other workers about their rights. There are workers in cities across the country going on strike together. We’re standing together in order for us to obtain a liveable wage.”
Fast-food workers in cities all across the country are expected to strike Thursday as part of growing protests against the nation’s biggest restaurant and retailer chains. Low-wage workers at businesses like McDonald’s and Macy’s are fighting for a living wage of $15 an hour in pay, which is more than double the current national minimum wage of $7.25.
Organizing against low-paying jobs at fast-food restaurants began last November in New York when hundreds of workers went on strike in a one-day protest. By the summer, the movement expanded to include thousands of workers across the country in cities like Detroit, Chicago and Kansas City.This time around, workers in places like Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Memphis and Raleigh plan on getting involved with backing from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
There have already been tangible results from the strikes. Jonathan Westin, who helped organize New York’s first fast-food strike as the executive director of New York Communities for Change, says some local workers have seen wage increases of twenty-five to fifty cents per hour, and Steve Ashby, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations, says some Chicago strikers have also gotten higher wages post-strike.
The achievements, while modest, have also had another effect: lending courage to other workers who want to strike for living wages.
Angela Gholston, 24, has been working at a McDonald’s in Detroit for two years, and says she’s participating in the strike to help form a union, and make better wages so she can support her family and pay her bills.
“I receive Medicaid because I can’t even afford to pay for my employer’s healthcare plan,” she says.
Gholston has participated in past strikes at work, and says she feels emboldened by the organizing she’s seen in other states.
“They’re trying to help us and we’re trying to help them, and that’s good. We have to stand together in order to keep this movement going. We need [$15-per-hour minimum wage], not $7.40. What can we do with $7.40?”
Gholston says she wasn’t hesitant to participate in the strike, even though she lacks the protection of a union.
“We need to make a union. That’s the whole point of going on strike. If you don’t take action and stand up for what’s right, who is going to do it for you? I wasn’t scared at all.”
Mike Wilder, co-founder of the African-American Civic Engagement Roundtable in Milwaukee and Community Coalition Coordinator with Wisconsin Jobs Now, and campaign leader of Raise Up MKE — a group focused on fighting for living wages — says the strike is about holding profitable companies accountable for not paying workers enough to afford basic amenities like food and rent.
In Milwaukee, Wilder says organizers and workers have planned a day full of actions at specific stores throughout the city.
“Here in Milwaukee, the day will end with a march and a rally in support of low-wage workers in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods,” says Wilder.
Wilder says Thursday is one step in a much larger movement.
“All across the country, workers are standing up and demanding higher wages so they can support themselves and their families without having to seek government assistance,” he says. “In Milwaukee, we started with a few dozen workers on strike in May, and now we have hundreds striking. Workers are planning future escalating actions until their demands are met.”
Wilder adds the goal of these types of actions is to send a message to “these billion-dollar corporations that workers are no longer going to struggle to survive on minimum wage, while record-breaking profits are generated by the companies that employ them. Workers are demanding [$15-per-hour minimum wage] and the right to form a union without retaliation.”
Dwight Murray, 27, has been working at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis since March, and says he’s participating in the strike because he gives a lot to McDonald’s.
“I work hard and I deserve to make enough to meet my family’s basic needs,” says Murray. “I struggle to get my three-year-old daughter what she needs, and we have to make sacrifices on a regular basis. I’m going on strike because I deserve to make a liveable wage and to be able to take care of my daughter and even have money saved up for emergencies.”
Murray says fast-food workers aren’t treated with the respect they deserve on the job.
“We’re working hard to live up to the ‘hot, fresh and ready in a minute-and-a-half’ standard, but sometimes there’s not enough staff, so we work eight hours without a break.”
Murray claims he’s been told that no overtime is allowed, but then if his replacement doesn’t show up, he can’t leave, and then his superiors “gripe” about paying for a single hour at the overtime rate. He adds that none of the employees can count on raises, and the people who work hard and have been there the longest in crucial roles sometimes don’t get raises at all.
This is the first time Murray has ever gone on strike, but he says he feels bolstered by actions in other states.
“It gave me even more incentive to join and put a fire in my belly to stand up for this. Before, I didn’t feel that there was a proper avenue for me to be heard. Now, I see that there is, and that I’m not alone. I’m standing up for myself and my coworkers, but also the millions of other workers across the country that also deserve a liveable wage.”
Proving that indeed courage is contagious, Murray says he feels safe striking because he knows other workers have his back, and there are workers across the country standing up together.
“I know my rights and I’m talking to other workers about their rights. There are workers in cities across the country going on strike together. We’re standing together in order for us to obtain a liveable wage.”
Cleaning Up “This Town”
By Lauren Feeney:
In his book This Town, journalist Mark Leibovich paints a compelling picture of corruption and greed in Washington. But as many critics pointed out, for all its delightfully disgusting insider detail, the book is missing one important thing — solutions. For that, we turn to The Sunlight Foundation‘s Lisa Rosenberg. A registered lobbyist herself, Rosenberg advocates for greater transparency and accountability in government.
Lisa Rosenberg: I’ve read parts of it. I have to admit, it’s a little bit like work for me . But I’ve read some key chapters.
Feeney: And does any of it shock or surprise you?
Rosenberg: No. I’ve been working on issues involving money in politics for such a long time that there was nothing really surprising in there. It didn’t shock me in any way. But I think it’s great for the rest of the country, for people who have not been paying as close attention, to get a picture of what’s been happening. Outrage is good, and I think this might foster some outrage.
I guess what did surprise me, or maybe disappointed me, is that the book doesn’t seem to offer any solutions.
Feeney: That’s of course why I called. But before we get to solutions, can you review what’s so wrong with the picture painted in Leibovich’s book, of former politicians going on to make big bucks as lobbyists?
Rosenberg: When congressmen or staffers leave to go lobby, they cash in on the connections that they’ve made on Capitol Hill. They also cash in, very often, on the work they’ve done on the Hill, which sounds okay on the surface, but when it’s cashing in on the fact that, for example, they wrote a law so they know where all the loopholes are, and then they go lobby for somebody who can take advantage of those loopholes, then I think we have a real conflict of interest. I think that’s the real problem with the so-called “revolving door.”
Feeney: So what are some solutions to this problem?
Rosenberg: One of the most obvious solutions is a longer cooling off period before legislators can lobby. Right now, a House member can’t lobby for one year after leaving the House and a Senator can’t lobby for two years after leaving the Senate. But as you can imagine, the contacts, the ties, the influence are still really prevalent after one or two years. I don’t think that’s enough time to distance yourself. Also, if there were a longer cooling off period, it might not be as tempting for people to go directly from Capitol Hill to K Street, and they might find other sources of employment in the meantime that would be less troubling.
We also advocate for transparency and reporting of who lobbyists have actually met with. Right now, as a lobbyist, all I have to say is that I’ve lobbied the House, the Senate or the Executive Branch, which really doesn’t tell you very much. We think it’s really important to be able to connect the dots. If I’m holding a fundraiser, and my corporation or organization gives a lot of money to a member of Congress, and then you see that a lobbyist has met with that same member of Congress, then you can follow how that member of Congress voted on the issue and really connect the dots.
Feeney: How do you manage to legislate the legislators? Is there any hope of ever enacting any of these reforms when they are the ones who make the rules?
Rosenberg: I have to think there’s hope or I’d lose my mind. I think, honestly, reform may have to result from a scandal. That’s what the public responds to, for better or worse. Maybe a book like This Town will be the next impetus for reform, if enough outrage comes from it. As reformers, it’s our job to lay the groundwork and be prepared with good, solid legislative ideas ready to go when some scandal does happen.
Feeney: There’s another “revolving door” depicted in Leibovich’s book — between government and big media. Of course, the most important rule to the media is the First Amendment. Is there any way to close the revolving door between government and media without limiting freedom of speech?
Rosenberg: Well, it’s interesting. The First Amendment applies to lobbying as well — we have a right to petition the government. So if you can legislate a cooling off period for lobbying, maybe you can also legislate a cooling off period for the media. I don’t know, it’s not something Sunlight has really advocated for. Transparency would help of course. Right now the media serves as a filter, but when those who are reporting the information have spun through the revolving door, they may be biased interpreters of information. If, for example, government contracts were public, then you wouldn’t have to worry about who’s delivering the information about the contracts and whether or not they have some kind of vested interest, or their own slant or spin. We need a little more unvarnished information directly available to the public.
Feeney: What about some of the more abstract problems in the book, like the culture of greed in Washington? Can anything be done to change that?
Rosenberg: That’s a lot harder. I wonder sometimes if it’s a more fundamental problem with our country as a whole, that we’ve lost any sense of civic duty or belief in public service. Maybe we need more civics lessons in elementary school. Perhaps it’s linked to this whole idea of corporate personhood. I don’t think the Supreme Court did us any favors in Citizens United, giving corporations many of the same rights as individuals. The purpose of corporations is to make money. And I think that value system is permeating politics as well.
Feeney: Is there anything that regular people can do to help change the culture in Washington?
Rosenberg: They’re critical! The only thing that might be more influential to members of Congress than money is the threat of losing votes, losing their seat. People need to make it clear: “I am not going to vote for you again if you don’t support more transparency, or if you don’t represent my needs rather than the needs of some corporation.” Members of Congress need to know that voters are disgusted with money in politics, with the pay-to-play system that we have now, with the cronyism. People need to demand change.
Not falling into a Black Hole...
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have taken a major step in explaining why material around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is extraordinarily faint in X-rays. This discovery holds important implications for understanding black holes.
New Chandra images of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, indicate that less than 1 percent of the gas initially within Sgr A*'s gravitational grasp ever reaches the point of no return, also called the event horizon. Instead, much of the gas is ejected before it gets near the event horizon and has a chance to brighten, leading to feeble X-ray emissions.
These new findings are the result of one of the longest observation campaigns ever performed with Chandra. The spacecraft collected five weeks' worth of data on Sgr A* in 2012. The researchers used this observation period to capture unusually detailed and sensitive X-ray images and energy signatures of super-heated gas swirling around Sgr A*, whose mass is about 4 million times that of the sun.
"We think most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they are too far away for us to study how matter flows near it," said Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who led of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. "Sgr A* is one of very few black holes close enough for us to actually witness this process."
The researchers found that the Chandra data from Sgr A* did not support theoretical models in which the X-rays are emitted from a concentration of smaller stars around the black hole. Instead, the X-ray data show the gas near the black hole likely originates from winds produced by a disk-shaped distribution of young massive stars.
"This new Chandra image is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen," said co-author Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "We're watching Sgr A* capture hot gas ejected by nearby stars, and funnel it in towards its event horizon." To plunge over the event horizon, material captured by a black hole must lose heat and momentum. The ejection of matter allows this to occur.
"Most of the gas must be thrown out so that a small amount can reach the black hole", said Feng Yuan of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, the study's co-author. "Contrary to what some people think, black holes do not actually devour everything that’s pulled towards them. Sgr A* is apparently finding much of its food hard to swallow."
The gas available to Sgr A* is very diffuse and super-hot, so it is hard for the black hole to capture and swallow it. The gluttonous black holes that power quasars and produce huge amounts of radiation have gas reservoirs much cooler and denser than that of Sgr A*.
The event horizon of Sgr A* casts a shadow against the glowing matter surrounding the black hole. This research could aid efforts using radio telescopes to observe and understand the shadow. It also will be useful for understanding the effect orbiting stars and gas clouds may have on matter flowing toward and away from the black hole.
New Chandra images of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, indicate that less than 1 percent of the gas initially within Sgr A*'s gravitational grasp ever reaches the point of no return, also called the event horizon. Instead, much of the gas is ejected before it gets near the event horizon and has a chance to brighten, leading to feeble X-ray emissions.
These new findings are the result of one of the longest observation campaigns ever performed with Chandra. The spacecraft collected five weeks' worth of data on Sgr A* in 2012. The researchers used this observation period to capture unusually detailed and sensitive X-ray images and energy signatures of super-heated gas swirling around Sgr A*, whose mass is about 4 million times that of the sun.
"We think most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they are too far away for us to study how matter flows near it," said Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who led of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. "Sgr A* is one of very few black holes close enough for us to actually witness this process."
The researchers found that the Chandra data from Sgr A* did not support theoretical models in which the X-rays are emitted from a concentration of smaller stars around the black hole. Instead, the X-ray data show the gas near the black hole likely originates from winds produced by a disk-shaped distribution of young massive stars.
"This new Chandra image is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen," said co-author Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "We're watching Sgr A* capture hot gas ejected by nearby stars, and funnel it in towards its event horizon." To plunge over the event horizon, material captured by a black hole must lose heat and momentum. The ejection of matter allows this to occur.
"Most of the gas must be thrown out so that a small amount can reach the black hole", said Feng Yuan of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, the study's co-author. "Contrary to what some people think, black holes do not actually devour everything that’s pulled towards them. Sgr A* is apparently finding much of its food hard to swallow."
The gas available to Sgr A* is very diffuse and super-hot, so it is hard for the black hole to capture and swallow it. The gluttonous black holes that power quasars and produce huge amounts of radiation have gas reservoirs much cooler and denser than that of Sgr A*.
The event horizon of Sgr A* casts a shadow against the glowing matter surrounding the black hole. This research could aid efforts using radio telescopes to observe and understand the shadow. It also will be useful for understanding the effect orbiting stars and gas clouds may have on matter flowing toward and away from the black hole.
Make time for Sagittarius
These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559 (also known as Simeis 188), is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane.
All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant. The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.
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| Simeis 188 or NGC 6559 |
August 29, 2013
NuSTAR data out now...
Light from the stellar explosion that created Cassiopeia A is thought to have reached Earth about 300 years ago, after traveling 11,000 years to get here. While the star is long dead, its remains are still bursting with action. The outer blue ring is where the shock wave from the supernova blast is slamming into surrounding material, whipping particles up to within a fraction of a percent of the speed of light. NuSTAR observations should help solve the riddle of how these particles are accelerated to such high energies
X-ray light with energies between 10 and 20 kiloelectron volts are blue; X-rays of 8 to 10 kiloelectron volts are green; and X-rays of 4.5 to 5.5 kiloelectron volts are red.
One year ago...
One year ago a very close friend finished a long course of radiation treatments for Breast Cancer. Today I am happy to know that the treatment worked and she is still cancer free. If you have ever had a friend, relative or yourself gone through this, you will understand the pain and anguish that you feel watching a person you care for go through so much. Radiation treatments do not cause the out-ward physical changes that Chemotherapy cause. No loss of hair, though there are changes, not extreme loss in weight, but the radiation takes a heavy toil in any case. I have never felt so helpless in watching my best friend go through such a hard treatment. There was so much at stake, more for her than me, but I was so scared to loss her. It has been a year since she told me the cancer was gone, I hope I never hear it has returned...
Cassini Data: Saturn Moon May Have Rigid Ice Shell
An analysis of gravity and topography data from the Saturnian moon Titan obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggests there could be something unexpected about the moon's outer ice shell. The findings, published on Aug. 28 in the journal Nature, suggest that Titan's ice shell could be rigid, and that relatively small topographic features on the surface could be associated with large ice "roots" extending into the underlying ocean.
The study was led by planetary scientists Douglas Hemingway and Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who used data from Cassini. The researchers were surprised to find a counterintuitive relationship between gravity and topography.
"Normally, if you fly over a mountain, you expect to see an increase in gravity due to the extra mass of the mountain," said Nimmo, a Cassini participating scientist. "On Titan, when you fly over a mountain, the gravity gets lower. That's a very odd observation."
One potential explanation is that each bump in the topography on the surface of Titan is offset by a deeper "root" that is big enough to overwhelm the gravitational effect of the bump on the surface. The root could act like an iceberg extending below the ice shell into the ocean underneath it. In this model, Cassini would detect less gravity wherever there is a big chunk of ice rather than water because ice is less dense than water.
"It's like a big beach ball under the ice sheet pushing up on it, and the only way to keep it submerged is if the ice sheet is strong," said Hemingway, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team associate. "If large roots under the ice shell are the explanation, this means that Titan's ice shell must have a very thick rigid layer."
If these findings are correct, a thick rigid ice shell makes it very difficult to have ice volcanoes, which some scientists have proposed to explain other features seen on the surface. They also suggest that convection or plate tectonics are not recycling Titan's ice shell, as they do with Earth's geologically active crust.
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| Titan's surface as scene by the European Space Agency's Huygens Probe |
The study was led by planetary scientists Douglas Hemingway and Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who used data from Cassini. The researchers were surprised to find a counterintuitive relationship between gravity and topography.
"Normally, if you fly over a mountain, you expect to see an increase in gravity due to the extra mass of the mountain," said Nimmo, a Cassini participating scientist. "On Titan, when you fly over a mountain, the gravity gets lower. That's a very odd observation."
One potential explanation is that each bump in the topography on the surface of Titan is offset by a deeper "root" that is big enough to overwhelm the gravitational effect of the bump on the surface. The root could act like an iceberg extending below the ice shell into the ocean underneath it. In this model, Cassini would detect less gravity wherever there is a big chunk of ice rather than water because ice is less dense than water.
"It's like a big beach ball under the ice sheet pushing up on it, and the only way to keep it submerged is if the ice sheet is strong," said Hemingway, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team associate. "If large roots under the ice shell are the explanation, this means that Titan's ice shell must have a very thick rigid layer."
If these findings are correct, a thick rigid ice shell makes it very difficult to have ice volcanoes, which some scientists have proposed to explain other features seen on the surface. They also suggest that convection or plate tectonics are not recycling Titan's ice shell, as they do with Earth's geologically active crust.
Oracle and the America’s Cup
As Gary Jobson sees it, the Kiwis are like “a well-choreographed Broadway show” and the Oracle sailors are “still auditioning.” He also thinks the Emirates Team New Zealand crew might have an edge in motivation. Unlike the Oracle guys, they’re sailing for their country. As Nathan Outteridge sees it, Oracle has a slight speed edge upwind. The key will be not just getting to the first mark first but leading at the bottom, or second mark. “That’s probably going to determine the race,” he said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jaDBCJ27R8&feature=player_embedded#t=69
Jobson and Outteridge are expert commentators on the TV coverage of the America’s Cup regatta, the experienced Jobson handling the in-race analysis and the newcomer Outteridge providing postrace commentary.
Both say it’s difficult to predict the outcome of the finals – a welcome case after the tedious predictability of the first seven weeks of the regatta. “I’ve been saying for months the winning team is going to lose three races,” Jobson said.
That is, something weird will happen to cause a team to lose. It will jump the start or have a mechanical problem.
Both men dearly hope the finals are dramatic and close because they have a vested interest. Beyond that, they share an obvious passion for their sport and an ability to explain its complicated aspects in ways a landlubber can understand.
Jobson, 63, won the America’s Cup as a tactician with Ted Turner in 1977. Jobson’s handiwork is all over the sport. A former president of US Sailing, he’s a lecturer, author and active cruising sailor as well as a broadcaster.
Outteridge, a 27-year-old Australian, hasn’t been on TV long, but he has a knack for it. Unfortunately for TV viewers, he has probably two more decades to go as a competitor before he might make a career switch. He won a gold medal at the London Olympics and was the helmsman for Artemis Racing in the Louis Vuitton Cup semifinals two weeks ago.
“The New Zealand team looks to me like a well-choreographed Broadway show with all the actors in exactly the right position at the right time, making all the right movements,” Jobson said. He has watched Jimmy Spithill’s Oracle Team USA boat 14 times during in-house races against Ben Ainslie. In contrast with the Kiwis’ Broadway-worthy numbers, the Oracle people are “still auditioning,” he said. “There’s a lot of unevenness in their crews, and the boat doesn’t seem quite as steady.”
During the 12-day layoff before the America’s Cup finals begin Sept. 7, he said, the engineers and designers for both teams are going to want more time with the boats in the shed, and the sailors are going to want more time in the water. Jobson predicts that the team spending more time in the water will win the Cup. “When you’re in the shed,” he said, “sometimes you take two steps forward and one step back.” From his observations of Oracle during the defender-access periods, Outteridge said its boat speed is really close to Team New Zealand’s both upwind and downwind. “The question is how fast each team is developing the foiling upwind and doing the foiling tacks,” he said.
He thinks Oracle should have a slight speed advantage upwind because of a superior aerodynamic package. In terms of maneuvers, the Kiwis are extremely polished, but Oracle should be, too. Unlike the previous races in the regatta, there could be passes on the downwind second leg, Outteridge said. “Whoever leads around Mark 1 can do the bear-away (turn) whenever they want to, and they have a better chance of leading around the bottom mark,” he said. New Zealand skipper Dean Barker has had his way in the prestart. That might not be the case in the finals, Outteridge said.
Barker has a great sense of what his boat can do, and he can accelerate in the prestart zone when necessary, Outteridge said, thanks to what sailors call a mental clock of “time and distance.”
Spithill and Ainslie have probably had more “combat starts,” the equivalent of basketball players jockeying for position for a rebound.
“They’re not being too concerned with making errors,” Outteridge said. “I’d expect Jimmy to be quite aggressive in the starts and really try to push it to Dean.”
In strong winds, the Kiwis would have the edge, he thinks, because their boat is “a little safer” and easier to sail than Oracle’s. “They can get away with making errors, and the buoyancy of their boat helps them through,” he said. “We saw them nosedive the other day, and the boat didn’t look like there were any issues at all.”
Oracle’s crew might not be as capable of righting the boat in the same situation, he said. “Oracle’s boat, to me, seems like a faster boat – with a better chance to get top speeds, but it’s a harder boat to sail. Team New Zealand’s boat seems to be a tiny bit slower, but they can push it to 100 percent.”
In milder winds, the edge would shift to Oracle, Outteridge said. “They designed their boats for September, when the winds are typically lighter.”
There’s another factor at hand that has nothing to do with boat speed, crew work or engineering. It’s who wants it more. Jobson, for one, thinks the Kiwis do. “There’s a big difference when you’re sailing for your country and just about every member of your crew is from your country,” he said. “It’s a mission.”
He said it’s different for Oracle, which has sailors from all over the world. “They’re all probably getting good paychecks, but they’re sailing for themselves as a job, versus a group that’s sailing for their country.” Jobson poses the question this way: “Can the mission of sailing for your country overcome a gigantic machine?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jaDBCJ27R8&feature=player_embedded#t=69
Jobson and Outteridge are expert commentators on the TV coverage of the America’s Cup regatta, the experienced Jobson handling the in-race analysis and the newcomer Outteridge providing postrace commentary.
Both say it’s difficult to predict the outcome of the finals – a welcome case after the tedious predictability of the first seven weeks of the regatta. “I’ve been saying for months the winning team is going to lose three races,” Jobson said.
That is, something weird will happen to cause a team to lose. It will jump the start or have a mechanical problem.
Both men dearly hope the finals are dramatic and close because they have a vested interest. Beyond that, they share an obvious passion for their sport and an ability to explain its complicated aspects in ways a landlubber can understand.
Jobson, 63, won the America’s Cup as a tactician with Ted Turner in 1977. Jobson’s handiwork is all over the sport. A former president of US Sailing, he’s a lecturer, author and active cruising sailor as well as a broadcaster.
Outteridge, a 27-year-old Australian, hasn’t been on TV long, but he has a knack for it. Unfortunately for TV viewers, he has probably two more decades to go as a competitor before he might make a career switch. He won a gold medal at the London Olympics and was the helmsman for Artemis Racing in the Louis Vuitton Cup semifinals two weeks ago.
“The New Zealand team looks to me like a well-choreographed Broadway show with all the actors in exactly the right position at the right time, making all the right movements,” Jobson said. He has watched Jimmy Spithill’s Oracle Team USA boat 14 times during in-house races against Ben Ainslie. In contrast with the Kiwis’ Broadway-worthy numbers, the Oracle people are “still auditioning,” he said. “There’s a lot of unevenness in their crews, and the boat doesn’t seem quite as steady.”
During the 12-day layoff before the America’s Cup finals begin Sept. 7, he said, the engineers and designers for both teams are going to want more time with the boats in the shed, and the sailors are going to want more time in the water. Jobson predicts that the team spending more time in the water will win the Cup. “When you’re in the shed,” he said, “sometimes you take two steps forward and one step back.” From his observations of Oracle during the defender-access periods, Outteridge said its boat speed is really close to Team New Zealand’s both upwind and downwind. “The question is how fast each team is developing the foiling upwind and doing the foiling tacks,” he said.
He thinks Oracle should have a slight speed advantage upwind because of a superior aerodynamic package. In terms of maneuvers, the Kiwis are extremely polished, but Oracle should be, too. Unlike the previous races in the regatta, there could be passes on the downwind second leg, Outteridge said. “Whoever leads around Mark 1 can do the bear-away (turn) whenever they want to, and they have a better chance of leading around the bottom mark,” he said. New Zealand skipper Dean Barker has had his way in the prestart. That might not be the case in the finals, Outteridge said.
Barker has a great sense of what his boat can do, and he can accelerate in the prestart zone when necessary, Outteridge said, thanks to what sailors call a mental clock of “time and distance.”
Spithill and Ainslie have probably had more “combat starts,” the equivalent of basketball players jockeying for position for a rebound.
“They’re not being too concerned with making errors,” Outteridge said. “I’d expect Jimmy to be quite aggressive in the starts and really try to push it to Dean.”
In strong winds, the Kiwis would have the edge, he thinks, because their boat is “a little safer” and easier to sail than Oracle’s. “They can get away with making errors, and the buoyancy of their boat helps them through,” he said. “We saw them nosedive the other day, and the boat didn’t look like there were any issues at all.”
Oracle’s crew might not be as capable of righting the boat in the same situation, he said. “Oracle’s boat, to me, seems like a faster boat – with a better chance to get top speeds, but it’s a harder boat to sail. Team New Zealand’s boat seems to be a tiny bit slower, but they can push it to 100 percent.”
In milder winds, the edge would shift to Oracle, Outteridge said. “They designed their boats for September, when the winds are typically lighter.”
There’s another factor at hand that has nothing to do with boat speed, crew work or engineering. It’s who wants it more. Jobson, for one, thinks the Kiwis do. “There’s a big difference when you’re sailing for your country and just about every member of your crew is from your country,” he said. “It’s a mission.”
He said it’s different for Oracle, which has sailors from all over the world. “They’re all probably getting good paychecks, but they’re sailing for themselves as a job, versus a group that’s sailing for their country.” Jobson poses the question this way: “Can the mission of sailing for your country overcome a gigantic machine?”
On the AC and the weight issue...
The international jury investigating illegal weight placements by Oracle Team USA during the America’s Cup World Series said it won’t announce a decision until early next week.
On the America’s Cup website, the jury also announced it delayed a hearing for the Oracle team management from Thursday to Friday, apparently because its interviews took so long.
Two members of the five-person jury have spent the last three days investigating the case and interviewing 16 members of the team and five members of America’s Cup Race Management.
Depending on how severely the jury of the International Sailing Federation decides to punish Oracle, the defending champion could be forced to forfeit races in the best-of-17 finals against Emirates Team New Zealand beginning Sept. 7.
On the America’s Cup website, the jury also announced it delayed a hearing for the Oracle team management from Thursday to Friday, apparently because its interviews took so long.
Two members of the five-person jury have spent the last three days investigating the case and interviewing 16 members of the team and five members of America’s Cup Race Management.
Depending on how severely the jury of the International Sailing Federation decides to punish Oracle, the defending champion could be forced to forfeit races in the best-of-17 finals against Emirates Team New Zealand beginning Sept. 7.
Finally... The new San Francisco / Oakland Bridge will open this weekend...
Transbay travelers may want to avoid their cars in the coming days, as the Bay Bridge will be shut down at 8 p.m. Wednesday and remain closed over the Labor Day weekend. The bridge is scheduled to reopen before the morning commute Tuesday, after the new eastern span is connected to the existing toll plaza to the east and Yerba Buena Island to the west. 
It's the fourth time since 2006 that the bridge has been shut down over Labor Day weekend, and the other closures went smoothly. The Bay Area, he added "also has a great overlapping transit system," including BART and the ferry systems. For most of the closure, BART will run limited 24-hour train service at 14 stations, including to the San Francisco and Oakland international airports.
The transit agency will also run longer trains and increase the frequency of service during the numerous events scheduled for the holiday weekend, including A's baseball and Cal Bears football games in the East Bay and the America's Cup races in San Francisco. On Monday, BART will operate on a Saturday schedule; the agency will not run trains between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. Tuesday. Now for the bridge itself...
As mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown wanted an "icon" to replace the seismically challenged eastern span of the Bay Bridge and to highlight the "splendor" of the East Bay. "It's unfortunate that pencil-pushers, bureaucrats and political yahoos don't understand quality and try to block quality to save a few bucks," observed the Oracle of Oakland.
Influential civil engineer Tung-Yen Lin had a different take when a panel approved the signature design favored by local pols. Lin predicted it would become "a monument to stupidity."
On Labor Day weekend, transportation officials will open the self-anchored suspension span, 24 years after a chunk of the old span collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake, six years after the signature span was supposed to be completed and more than $5 billion over budget. Brown, now governor, will be conspicuously absent, attending his wife's family reunion in Michigan. We are sure his absence has nothing to do with the fact that the replacement span isn't open for traffic yet - and already it needs a retrofit.
In March, 32 of 96 key galvanized steel rods cracked after they were tightened. They cannot be replaced because they've been encased in concrete for years. Engineers have come up with a plan to put steel "saddles" around the bad bolts at an expected cost of $23 million. UC Berkeley structural engineering Professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl thinks the new span is not safe. The single-anchor design is flawed, he warned, and the brittle bolts cannot withstand an earthquake.
Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, has assured us that he wouldn't approve opening the new span if he didn't think it was safe. God help us, we believe him. When the transit wonks talk about redundancies in the system that can accommodate the saddles doing the work of the cracked rods, we want to believe.
We are making the leap of faith even though we know Heminger didn't know about the potential "brittle failure" until the rods snapped. Worse, his experts didn't see the problem coming. we want to believe because it's too painful to think that after spending $6.4 billion and squandering 24 years, the Bay Area is going to get a shiny new toy that could fold like a cheap lawn chair during the next big temblor.
Will anyone pay for these costly, potentially fatal mistakes? "I don't know the answer to that," MTC spokesman Randy Rentschler told me. It hasn't happened yet.
The bad design was decided 15 years ago and by committee. The bad bolt decisions were made a decade ago. So what can the bridge suits do - yank some retired bureaucrat out of mothballs and frog-march him into the drink?
If there is going to be any accountability, it has to come from the top. Good luck with that. When a reporter asked Brown about the bridge in May, Dao Gov answered, "S- happens."
Brown expects Californians to trust him to launch the construction of a 350-mile, $68 billion high-speed rail project. And he put the former head of Caltrans, Jeffrey Morales, in charge of the High-Speed Rail Authority.
He doesn't have to rethink his infrastructure plans just because Caltrans demonstrated it can't build a 2.2-mile bridge with no (one hopes) moving parts on budget, on time and with intact bolts. So trust Brown with high-speed rail, but don't blame him if stuff happens.
Phobos' eclipse
This set of three images shows views three seconds apart as the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, passed directly in front of the sun as seen by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Curiosity photographed this annular, or ring, eclipse with the telephoto-lens camera of the rover's Mast Camera pair (right Mastcam) on Aug. 17, 2013, the 369th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars.
Curiosity paused during its drive that sol for a set of observations that the camera team carefully calculated to record this celestial event. The rover's observations of Phobos help make researchers' knowledge of the moon's orbit even more precise. Because this eclipse occurred near mid-day at Curiosity's location on Mars, Phobos was nearly overhead, closer to the rover than it would have been earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon. This timing made Phobos' silhouette larger against the sun -- as close to a total eclipse of the sun as is possible from Mars.
Curiosity paused during its drive that sol for a set of observations that the camera team carefully calculated to record this celestial event. The rover's observations of Phobos help make researchers' knowledge of the moon's orbit even more precise. Because this eclipse occurred near mid-day at Curiosity's location on Mars, Phobos was nearly overhead, closer to the rover than it would have been earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon. This timing made Phobos' silhouette larger against the sun -- as close to a total eclipse of the sun as is possible from Mars.
Everyone seems to be doing it.... Foiling that is...
The new Hydros C Class cat
sailing for the first time before they sail in the International
C-Class Championshipsin Falmouth this September. It sure is a slippery
looking rocket. This ought to be one hell of a regatta!
August 28, 2013
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity... Next drive
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has used autonomous navigation for the first time, a capability that lets the rover decide for itself how to drive safely on Mars.
This latest addition to Curiosity's array of capabilities will help the rover cover the remaining ground en route to Mount Sharp, where geological layers hold information about environmental changes on ancient Mars. The capability uses software that engineers adapted to this larger and more complex vehicle from a similar capability used by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which is also currently active on Mars.
Using autonomous navigation, or autonav, Curiosity can analyze images it takes during a drive to calculate a safe driving path. This enables it to proceed safely even beyond the area that the human rover drivers on Earth can evaluate ahead of time.
On Tuesday, Aug. 27, Curiosity successfully used autonomous navigation to drive onto ground that could not be confirmed safe before the start of the drive. This was a first for Curiosity. In a preparatory test last week, Curiosity plotted part of a drive for itself, but kept within an area that operators had identified in advance as safe.
"Curiosity takes several sets of stereo pairs of images, and the rover's computer processes that information to map any geometric hazard or rough terrain," said Mark Maimone, rover mobility engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The rover considers all the paths it could take to get to the designated endpoint for the drive and chooses the best one."
The drive on Tuesday, the mission's 376th Martian day, or "sol," took Curiosity across a depression where ground-surface details had not been visible from the location where the previous drive ended. The drive included about 33 feet (10 meters) of autonomous navigation across hidden ground as part of a day's total drive of about 141 feet (43 meters).
Using autonomous navigation, or autonav, Curiosity can analyze images it takes during a drive to calculate a safe driving path. This enables it to proceed safely even beyond the area that the human rover drivers on Earth can evaluate ahead of time.
On Tuesday, Aug. 27, Curiosity successfully used autonomous navigation to drive onto ground that could not be confirmed safe before the start of the drive. This was a first for Curiosity. In a preparatory test last week, Curiosity plotted part of a drive for itself, but kept within an area that operators had identified in advance as safe.
"Curiosity takes several sets of stereo pairs of images, and the rover's computer processes that information to map any geometric hazard or rough terrain," said Mark Maimone, rover mobility engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The rover considers all the paths it could take to get to the designated endpoint for the drive and chooses the best one."
The drive on Tuesday, the mission's 376th Martian day, or "sol," took Curiosity across a depression where ground-surface details had not been visible from the location where the previous drive ended. The drive included about 33 feet (10 meters) of autonomous navigation across hidden ground as part of a day's total drive of about 141 feet (43 meters).
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr "I Have a Dream"...........
As we reflect on the 50 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, "Everything has changed, and nothing has changed."
Everything has changed in that on Wednesday an African American president will offer his reflections on King's speech and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Now, there are African American members of Congress, CEOs, doctors, lawyers, police officers and firefighters when there were few, if any, in King's time. The high school graduation rate of African Americans and Caucasians is significantly closer than it was then, and the percentage of African Americans who voted in 2012 was higher than Caucasian.
But nothing has changed in that, much like 50 years ago, African Americans earn about half as much as Caucasian people, and their unemployment rate is twice as high. Now, as then, many African Americans are worried about their ability to vote after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that key portions of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional.
Only 32 percent of African Americans feel that "a lot" of progress toward racial equality has been made since King's speech, according to a Pew Research survey released last week, while 48 percent of Caucasians thought a lot has been made.
More than a quarter of African Americans say little or no progress has occurred.
"We're able to go into the front door now," said Yolanda Lewis, CEO and president of the Black Economic Council in Oakland. "But we're often not able to do business once we get inside."
Only 1 percent of African American-owned firms reported more than $1 million in receipts in 2007, according to census figures, compared with 5 percent for all U.S. firms. While the number of African American-owned firms is increasing rapidly, the vast majority of them report less than $50,000 in receipts and employ fewer than 1 percent of all workers.
As King said half a century ago: "One-hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One-hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land."
Sitting in the front room of their home in the Maxwell Park neighborhood of Oakland this week were four generations of an African American family led by 93-year-old patriarch Erwin Breaux, a former member of the Buffalo Soldiers, an African American military unit that existed before the armed forces were integrated.
They have lived in the home for 45 years and were joined by Alteresa Thomas, who has lived on the same block for 49 years, and other friends and relatives they've known for decades.
And while African Americans now can attend the same schools as Caucasians, "it's not the same education," said Shante Wilson, Mary Washington's 37-year-old niece, who attended schools in California. The schools in black neighborhoods are generally not of the same quality as the ones in white neighborhoods, the group agreed.
A half-century later, King's speech resonates with everyone in the room, in different ways. For Wilson, it's a reminder that President Obama's election shows young African Americans that they can dream to grow up to be president.
For Thomas, it recalls "all the struggling that our forefathers went through. When you see photos of people being hosed down, you wonder, 'Why would anyone do that to another human being?' "
Everything has changed in that on Wednesday an African American president will offer his reflections on King's speech and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Now, there are African American members of Congress, CEOs, doctors, lawyers, police officers and firefighters when there were few, if any, in King's time. The high school graduation rate of African Americans and Caucasians is significantly closer than it was then, and the percentage of African Americans who voted in 2012 was higher than Caucasian.
But nothing has changed in that, much like 50 years ago, African Americans earn about half as much as Caucasian people, and their unemployment rate is twice as high. Now, as then, many African Americans are worried about their ability to vote after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that key portions of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional.
Only 32 percent of African Americans feel that "a lot" of progress toward racial equality has been made since King's speech, according to a Pew Research survey released last week, while 48 percent of Caucasians thought a lot has been made.
More than a quarter of African Americans say little or no progress has occurred.
"We're able to go into the front door now," said Yolanda Lewis, CEO and president of the Black Economic Council in Oakland. "But we're often not able to do business once we get inside."
Only 1 percent of African American-owned firms reported more than $1 million in receipts in 2007, according to census figures, compared with 5 percent for all U.S. firms. While the number of African American-owned firms is increasing rapidly, the vast majority of them report less than $50,000 in receipts and employ fewer than 1 percent of all workers.
As King said half a century ago: "One-hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One-hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land."
Sitting in the front room of their home in the Maxwell Park neighborhood of Oakland this week were four generations of an African American family led by 93-year-old patriarch Erwin Breaux, a former member of the Buffalo Soldiers, an African American military unit that existed before the armed forces were integrated.
They have lived in the home for 45 years and were joined by Alteresa Thomas, who has lived on the same block for 49 years, and other friends and relatives they've known for decades.
And while African Americans now can attend the same schools as Caucasians, "it's not the same education," said Shante Wilson, Mary Washington's 37-year-old niece, who attended schools in California. The schools in black neighborhoods are generally not of the same quality as the ones in white neighborhoods, the group agreed.
A half-century later, King's speech resonates with everyone in the room, in different ways. For Wilson, it's a reminder that President Obama's election shows young African Americans that they can dream to grow up to be president.
For Thomas, it recalls "all the struggling that our forefathers went through. When you see photos of people being hosed down, you wonder, 'Why would anyone do that to another human being?' "
PGC 16389
By chance, these galaxies appear to be aligned from our point of view. In the foreground, the irregular dwarf galaxy PGC 16389 — seen here as a cloud of stars — covers its neighboring galaxy APMBGC 252+125-117, which appears edge-on as a streak. This wide-field image also captures many other more distant galaxies, including a quite prominent face-on spiral towards the right of the picture.
A new Sailrocket????
About the SR2 that set a 59 knot speed record. Not your average boat....
Our boats are based around a concept where there are no overturning forces. The opposing forces of wind and water are in alignment. It’s like someone trying to push you over by pushing at the soles of your shoes. They could push you sideways, but not over. This allows us to handle a lot more power without tipping over like 99% of other sailing craft.
We are able to generate a huge amount of power by using the speed of the boat itself to make more wind. We start off stationary with a nice stiff wind at 90 degrees to our course and as we accelerate, we start adding the wind generated by the boat speed to that natural ‘true’ wind. To the boat, the wind feels like it is not only moving forward of 90 degrees but is also increasing in speed. When the boat is travelling at 50 knots, we will have turned a 20 knot breeze into a 50 knot gale. This is what the wing-sail feels. The faster it goes, the more power it gets... and the faster it goes. The only way for it to escape is to go faster until all the drag equals all the power.
The foils we have all been using so far have relied on the water passing over both of their sides just like air on the wing of an aircraft. On one side there is high pressure creating lift and on the other side there is low pressure which is actually sucking the wing up (or foil sideways). Underwater, it is typically when this suction becomes too great that we experience cavitation. The foil loses grip on the water. The pressure side of the foil now has to do all the work so the foil skids sideways until it is at double the angle (to do double the work). The trouble is that this now also doubles the drag. Imagine going for a speed record in your car and right when you are approaching maximum speed, you open all the doors wide open and pop the bonnet! You now need double the power to go any faster. This can also lead to a big loss of control.
If you design foils specifically for confronting cavitation, you step away from traditional tear drop profiles, as one whole side of the foil is now travelling in a vapour ‘bubble’. The shapes are more like sharp wedges where you are only using one surface at a greater angle. There are many high speed power boats that use propellers with this profile... but it has never been done effectively on a sailing boat.
With VSR2 we have made a package that has a huge amount of power on a very efficient, low drag platform. It is designed to be always seeking stability like a well-built model airplane. At high speed the pilot should be able to take his hands off the controls. This was possible on the first boat. VSR2 is designed to have enough power and efficiency to be able to drag a truly horrible plough-like cavitating foil through the water at over 60 knots. Anything better than ‘truly horrible’ will result in either higher speeds or greater efficiency in lighter winds.
Righto, let’s try and explain a little bit more about this wing so those of you who are interested know what I am referring to.
The wing was designed by the Sailrocket team but was largely the responsibility of Chris Hornzee Jones and Wag Feng at AEROTROPE. Chris designed our first wing. It is a much more powerful, efficient and complex beast that the first wing. We also expect it to be much more mildly mannered. Whilst the overall area is 22 sq/meters, the actual driving area is only 18sq/m i.e. only 2 sq/m larger than our first wing. It does however have a number of features which make it much more efficient and more stable. It is thinner than our first wing and has a ‘reflexed’ trailing edge which basically means the trailing edge has a slight return ‘ramp’ right at the back which stops the wing from going into a negative lift mode when it is sheeted out.
The main spar is a tapered, filament wound spar supplied by COMPOTECH. The ribs are carbon on 38kg Styrofoam (basically standard under floor insulation... buy it cheap by the pallet). The leading edges are 80gm glass on 5mm foam core or 200gm SP GURIT carbon at ±45 degrees on a 5mm foam core depending on what section they are. The all up weight is around 65-70kg. The wing is inclined at 30 degrees to match the inclination of the foil it opposes on the other side of the boat.
As we only need to sail in one direction, the wing is asymmetrical. It is set up for a starboard tack to suit Walvis Bay.
Some of the basic criteria for the wing are that it obviously needs to be powerful and efficient enough to drag our boat down the course at speeds over 60 knots. It also needs to be able to fit inside a 40’ shipping container. It needs to be practical to use and handle in a number of situations relating to on the course and simply getting back to the top of the course.
We endeavoured to make a wing that will allow us to tow the whole boat back to the top of the course without having to stop and lower it. This is in an effort to be able to get more runs in quickly and remove a process which is often risky in its own right.
Without going into a full thesis here, I will simply explain the wing elements and what their functions are.
WING FILLET... This is the 'elbow' in the wing where the wing effectively is joined to the end of the beam via a large, high-tensile ball joint. It's also the structural junction for all the other bits. There is a 600mm stub that sticks out the top with a steel ball on it. The main mast sleeves over this and has a cup in it. This is where the component on which the main wing rotates. The wing fillet also has a female sleeve which the horizontal WING EXTENSION fits in. The wing fillet is fixed off to the beam at a pre-set angle of 10 degrees to the wind. It is not sheeted whilst sailing but rather used as a sheeting point to control the angle of the LOWER WING which is immediately above it.
LOWER WING... This is the 7 meters of area immediately above the wing fillet. It is limited in its ability to rotate by the strut which holds the wing up in compression. It can rotate around ±45 degrees which is plenty. It can be manually linked to the MIDDLE WING for raising/lowering/transporting/storage purposes. It can also be sheeted independently from the cockpit via a small mainsheet which is linked to the WING FILLET. The LOWER WING isn't connected to the main carbon COMPOTECH spar. The spar passes through all the ribs so that they are free to float around it. This way it can spin independent of the upper wing elements and can be removed to fit in the container.
As the Wing Fillet is fixed in relation to the boat, the COSWORTH wing angle sensor uses a laser to measure the difference in angle between the bottom rib of the lower wing and the top rib of the wing fillet.
MIDDLE WING... This is the largest component of the wing. All these ribs are bonded onto the COMPOTECH spar so when the mast rotates, this whole section of wing rotates. This section of wing can rotate through 360 degrees as it is not interfered by any shrouds or supporting struts. When we get towed back up the course it can therefore fully backwind/depower. It is sheeted via a bridle which also pulls in the LOWER WING at the same rate i.e. they come in together when the mainsheet is pulled. For towing, the whole wing can be locked together using sliding pins between the sections.
TRIM FLAP... This is the small flap on the TE (Trailing Edge) of the MIDDLE WING. When removed it reduces the chord of the wing so that it fits in the 40' container. It is also adjustable to alter the 'feathering'/de-powering properties of this key section of wing. It is a slightly lighter construction.
UPPER WING/WINGTIP... This small tip section of the wing cannot rotate through 360 degrees due to its proximity to the shrouds which attach to the top of the COMPOTECH spar. For this reason it is separate. It is sheeted via a bungee that will stretch if the WINGTIP does interfere with the shrouds... but have enough strength to sheet in the small section otherwise.
WING EXTENSION... This is an interesting part of the wing that adds greatly to its overall efficiency. Previously the outboard end of the boat was flown by generating lift from the beam. This was pretty inefficient as the pressure areas from the beam and the wing were cancelling each other out. Chris and Wang at AEROTROPE who did all the structural design work and performance analysis for the wing which shaped the overall package came up with this solution. I didn't welcome the complexity it added but the performance benefits were undeniable so we went with it. Basically it does the following...
- creates a more effective lifting lever for the outboard end of the boat. This is what makes the outboard end of the boat fly.
- compliments the pressure distribution along the wing which makes the wing feel much higher aspect ratio than it is whilst maintaining a low centre of effort.
- Works in 'ground effect' due to its proximity to the water. This reduces the amount of spillage of pressure from one side of the wing to the other (induced drag)
WING LIFT FLAP... This is an active component that adds or reduces the lift of the WING EXTENSION. It will be used to actively control the flying height of the outboard/leeward end of the boat. It will most likely become fully effective at around 50 knots and be controlled by as simple a system as possible. It can't be fixed as the faster we go, the higher the beam will fly and we will lose a lot of performance. It only needs to 'just' fly the float. I don't want to be controlling it during a run. We have a number of viable options for controlling it from a surface sensing wand as seen in hydrofoiling moths to a simple means of mass balancing it so that it only generates just enough lift to fly the pod in ground effect as per VSR1. We will start with this option.
As mentioned, the wing extension combined with full wing lift flap deployment can only lift the weight of the wing and beam at around 50 knots. If we see the leeward pod flying before this... as we have at around 38 knots in initial trials... it means that the whole wing is over inclined and needs to be stood more upright.
August 27, 2013
Hubble Ultra Deep Field
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PDMp8a-YNe0
What would it look like to fly through the distant universe? To find out, a team
of astronomers estimated the relative distances to over 5,000 galaxies in one of
the most distant fields of galaxies ever imaged: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). Because
it takes light a long time to cross the universe, most galaxies visible in the
above video are seen
when the universe was only a fraction of its current age, were still
forming, and have unusual shapes when compared to modern galaxies. No mature
looking spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way or the
Andromeda galaxy yet exist. Toward the end of the
video the virtual observer flies past the furthest
galaxies in the HUDF field, recorded to have a redshift past 8. This early class of low luminosity galaxies
likely contained energetic stars emitting light that
transformed
much of the remaining normal matter in the universe
from a cold gas to a hot ionized plasma.
What would it look like to fly through the distant universe? To find out, a team
of astronomers estimated the relative distances to over 5,000 galaxies in one of
the most distant fields of galaxies ever imaged: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). Because
it takes light a long time to cross the universe, most galaxies visible in the
above video are seen
when the universe was only a fraction of its current age, were still
forming, and have unusual shapes when compared to modern galaxies. No mature
looking spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way or the
Andromeda galaxy yet exist. Toward the end of the
video the virtual observer flies past the furthest
galaxies in the HUDF field, recorded to have a redshift past 8. This early class of low luminosity galaxies
likely contained energetic stars emitting light that
transformed
much of the remaining normal matter in the universe
from a cold gas to a hot ionized plasma.
LADEE Friday, Sept. 6 launch
In an attempt to answer prevailing questions about our moon, NASA is making final preparations to launch a probe at 11:27 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 6, 2013, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.
The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky. A thorough understanding of these characteristics of our nearest celestial neighbor will help researchers understand other bodies in the solar system, such as large asteroids, Mercury, and the moons of outer planets.
In this photo, engineers as NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia encapsule the LADEE spacecraft into the fairing of the Minotaur V launch vehicle nose-cone. LADEE is the first spacecraft designed, developed, built, integrated and tested at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky. A thorough understanding of these characteristics of our nearest celestial neighbor will help researchers understand other bodies in the solar system, such as large asteroids, Mercury, and the moons of outer planets.In this photo, engineers as NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia encapsule the LADEE spacecraft into the fairing of the Minotaur V launch vehicle nose-cone. LADEE is the first spacecraft designed, developed, built, integrated and tested at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
A report on the Windsurfing in San Francisco over the weekend.
We waited until Italy’s Luna Rossa and Emirates Team New Zealand finished their first race before launching from Crissy Field and sailing down to the start off last chance beach in front of the AC Village on the marina green. The shores were packed with sailing fans on grandstands set up along the water front but he 2nd of 2 races between Italy & NZ was cancelled as they reached their maximum safety limit where the organization and teams agreed it was not safe to race- a meer 24 knots of breeze and a 4k flood tide. Your typical summer San Francisco day.
Too windy for America’s cup? Enter the formula windsurfer!
Things were about to get fun. If you’re going to race on the San Francisco Bay- you better have the proper equipment or chances are you won’t be coming back anytime soon. Same applies with the AC boats.
The windsurfing fleet here has been pushing the limit of the equipment and evolving the sport for the past 30 years. We’re extremely lucky to have a world class board builder and fin makers within our community. It’s all about experience and this fleet has it. The average sailors age this weekend was 50 years old and most have been racing some type of board for at last 20+ years. Anyone in the top 10 was capable of winning a race.
I chose my smaller Mikes Lab 89 cm wide board, 61cm Kashy fin and 10.0 Avanti rig for maximum power and control. Conditions looked brutal with a steep chop and 20-25 knots of westerly breeze coming through the golden gate. If you knew what you were doing it was manageable. If not it was hell. I’d been sailing on this course for the better of 10+ years. It’s my backyard, my playground.
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