Category: rePosts

People who do not want to legalize gambling are either the moralizers or the people who benefit from it (drug and gambling lords, politicians and other government officials who extort from the gambling and drug lords).  It is in some sense an unholy alliance.  Legalization Now!!

Portugal’s drug experimentation
In 2000, Portugal passed a law decriminalizing the possession of drugs, continued to vigorously pursue drug traffickers and distributors, and improved access to treatment. What happened?
But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized — indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.
via Portugal’s drug experimentation.

To make employees happy
Back when his staff first started to increase, Yamamoto was focusing solely on profit and efficiency, which lead to people quitting, health problems and a general lack of energy.
Since he didn’t have a background in management, he decided to meet with 1,000 different CEOs with a wide range of management styles. What he discovered was that businesses that put a lot of importance on their personnel were the ones that did well.
“The customers interact with the employees, and they need to be happy employees. If they are, then the customers will be happy. Of course, the employees themselves want to take care of the customers. That’s what they are here for, but the management is here to take care of the employee,” Yamamoto explains.
“When there is a conflict between an employee and a customer and the management has to decide which one they are going to protect, it should be the employee,” he continues.
via Life inside the happiest company in Japan | CNNGo.com.

Only religious thugs love blasphemy lawsBlasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy  If the circumstances were not so hideous, the successful attempt by Pakistan to persuade the UN Human Rights Council to condemn blasphemers who defame religion would have been a black comedy. Every word its diplomats used in 2009 to protest against Islamophobia turned out to be a precise description of the prejudices the Pakistani state was appeasing at home.They told the UN it must approve a universal blasphemy law to protect religious minorities from “intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence”. If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan’s religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.Taseer did not go so far as to assert that the Qur’an, like the Talmud and the Bible, was the work of men, not God, or criticise the teachings of Muhammad. His crime was to stand up against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, a subject that the media of the supposedly warmongering, culturally imperialist “crusaders” of the west barely mention for fear of causing “offence”. He denounced the treatment of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five. She had argued with Muslim women who refused to drink water she had carried because she was impure and therefore the drink she carried was contaminated. They told the local cleric she had taken Muhammad’s name in vain.That was enough for the judge to order that she be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Not much respect shown for her minority rights, then. Nor for the rights of Salmaan Taseer, whose last sight on earth was of Constable Mumtaz Qadri firing 26 bullets into his body, while other members of his bodyguard stood by and let him do it.”Defamation of religion is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” thundered the Pakistani officials to the UN in 2009.Mutatis mutandis, Pakistan has become a country so scared of the inciters of religious violence that liberals stay silent for fear the assassins will come for them; a land so benighted Jamaat-e-Islami and other mobster theocrats can get away with blaming Taseer for his own death and treating his killer as a hero for enforcing the will of god.”RIP Pakistan,” sighed Salman Rushdie after Taseer’s murder. “What should one say of a country in which an assassin is showered with rose petals while a decent man lies dead?” Despair is a reasonable response to a failed state. When Islamists have penetrated the bodyguards of leading politicians and threaten one day to capture nuclear weapons, it may be the only response. But the relativism which asserts that human rights are all well and good for us but not for the peoples of the poor world is no response at all.
via Only religious thugs love blasphemy laws | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer.

It’s people like Craig Newark , Yunus and Norman Borlaug. People who give so much that multitudes benefit.

He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem, sometimes it seemed to take half an hour to get spammers dealt with. He was totally engrossed in his work, looking up IP addresses, answering questions best he could, and doing the kind of thankless work I’d never seen anyone else do with so much enthusiasm.
—
Matt Haughey explains where he learned to love customer service. [via AD]
via Quote: [Sitting next to Craig Newmark while waiting… – (37signals).