No Brainer

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who took over the job from Gray Davis via a recall, is the 38th Governor of California. Schwarzenegger is a Republican in a state predominantly Liberal. Running a predominantly liberal state has got to be difficult.

One are where Governor Schwarzenegger is currently having a difficult time is with the California unions…mostly recently the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (Union). Because Governor Schwarzenegger ordered a pay cut for its members amid the state’s protracted budget deadlock.

While I am not a prison guard and do not fully understand their plight, I do understand why Governor Schwarzenegger chose to cut their pay.

By 1996 there were more than l40,000 prisoners in California. The average salary for California prison guards is $44,000 per year (well over $50,000 with benefits)-$ l 0,000 more than the average teacher’s salary. Prison guards require only a high school education and a six week training course. Most teaching jobs require at least an undergraduate degree in education. In 1993 California spent a greater portion of its state budget on prisons than it did for education for the first time (compared to as recently as fiscal year 1983/84 when California spent 3.9 percent of its budget on its prison system, and 10 percent on higher education). The state corrections budget in 1994 was $3 billion. The demise of the Cold War meant the decline of defense jobs. According to the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament, a non-profit Washington D.C. group, there has been a decline of over 750,000 defense related jobs in the last five years alone-most of them in California. But as the military-industrial complex is waning in California, the prison-industrial complex is mushrooming. In this way California’s wealth now comes not only from perpetuating the misery of millions of people around the world, but also from the rigidly enforced misery of thousands of its own citizens. Between 1984 and 1994 California added a whopping 25,900 prison employees, substantially more than were added to all other state departments combined (16,000). By one estimate, hiring for prisons has accounted for 45 percent of the growth in all California jobs in that ten year period.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, headed by Chief of Governmental Affairs Lance, is now trying to use their power to get a recall vote on Governor Schwarzenegger claiming, “This is a governor that has been a complete failure.”

Mr. Corcoran is a past President of the California Employees Chapter of Corrections USA; a member of the Correctional Peace Officers Foundation, the Association of Black Correctional Workers, the Chicano Correctional Workers Association, and the California Crime Victims Coalition; and serves as an advisory board member of the Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau.

For Mr. Corcoran to say Governor Schwarzenegger has been a complete failure sounds more like emotions coming from his wallet! After looking into his background, his income seems to come from years of moving up the union ladder, a ladder that Governor Schwarzenegger has just taken down a few pegs.

I feel sorry for those whose pay has been cut, and hope that they can find ways to continue on in life with the current pay cuts and learn to get by.

After downloading and using Google Chrome for a few days of intense browsing, I have found only one problem with it.

The browser is nice and fast. It opens faster than most, if not all the opponents. It loads pages very quickly and is easy to use because there are less bells and whistles.

One of the nicest features I’ve found is the ability to add Bookmarks. When I add a bookmark, I’m given the option to place it in the bar just above the browser page area as a Quick Link. Opera and other browsers also offer this, but they don’t offer it like Google. Google gives the option to make a folder, thanks to the help of Mozilla, and places the folder in the bar and where links can reside under it and can be easily accessed with one click. This feature saves time and headaches searching through a huge list of other bookmarks.

Another nice feature is the fact that Google remembers the latest pages browsed for the next session. Mozilla does the same thing by opening those pages up when you reopen the browser, Google’s only remembers them as an icon. If you don’t click to save them when you exit in Mozilla though, you’ll have to go into History to get them. Google automatically saves the most recent pages used.

Because I have very little time this morning on the computer, I’ll quickly jump to the bad…

The only bad thing I’ve noticed, as did my wife, is that the Chrome browser bogs down. I’m not sure why it does, but I have a feeling that it’s because Flash is using up so much memory. The browser sometimes freezes after a long period of usage in conjunction to having several pages opened running flash. The Google browser itself seems to run on quite a bit of Flash, but that is only my opinion. I don’t really know much of how the browser was created. Do you?