As the father of a precocious first grader I can relate somewhat to the children and parents of Newtown. My son Fallon goes to a school with no interior hallways, all exterior doorways, and literally no way to deny access to anyone with a weapon. Making this beautiful school defensible would logically begin with tearing it down. But the school design is more a nod to good weather than it is to bad defensive planning. The best such planning begins not with designing schools as fortresses or filling them with police. It doesn’t start with banning assault weapons, either, though I’m not opposed to that. The best defensive planning starts with identifying people in the […]
Reagan and Newtown
Dr. Al explains the so-called “so-called fiscal cliff”
Most of us have had mentors and when it came to becoming a writer three of mine were the late Bill Rivers at Stanford who taught me to think and not just report, legendary book editor Bob Loomis at Random House who felt I might be able to stack enough of those thoughts together to fill a book, and a guy most of you know as Adam Smith, who let me copy his style.
Smith, named after the English economist and writer, helped start both New York and Institutional Investor magazines while at the same time punching out books like The Money Game and Paper Money — huge best sellers that taught regular people how the financial […]
JOBS Act crowdfunding is unlikely to help most startups
Earlier this year I wrote a series of columns about crowdfunding and the JOBS Act, which was signed into law last April with several goals, one of which was to help startups raise money from ordinary investors. Those columns were about the promise of crowdfunding and the JOBS Act while this one is about what progress has been made so far toward that end. For startups, alas, the news is not entirely good. Crowdfunding looks like it may not be available at all for the smaller, needier companies the law was supposedly designed to serve.
It’s one thing to pass a law and quite another to write rules to carry out that law. Title 3 […]
What Americans don’t know about H-1B visas could hurt us all
The H-1B visa program was created in 1990 to allow companies to bring skilled technical workers into the USA. It’s a non-immigrant visa and so has nothing at all to do with staying in the USA, becoming a citizen, or starting a business. Big tech employers are constantly lobbying for increases in H-1B quotas citing their inability to find qualified U.S. job applicants. Bill Gates and other leaders from the IT industry have testified about this before Congress. Both major political parties embrace the H-1B program with varying levels of enthusiasm. But Bill Gates is wrong. What he said to Congress may have been right for Microsoft but was wrong for America and can only […]
So sue us! Why big companies like IBM aren’t afraid of H-1B lawsuits
I’ve been away. We had a death in the family (my brother-in-law) which turned me into a single parent for a few days — a paralyzing experience for an old man with three small boys and two large dogs. You never know how much your spouse does until it all falls for awhile on your shoulders. I am both humbled and a bit more wrinkled for the experience.
While I was being a domestic god a reader passed to me this blog post by John Miano, a former software developer, founder of The Programmers Guild, now turned lawyer who works on immigrant worker issues as a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) a supposedly nonpartisan think tank in Washington, […]
