Headway

My Mobiler - view and control your WM Phone from your PC

2009-01-12T21:18:00.000-08:00

My Mobiler is an amazing piece of software that lets you view and control your Windows Mobile phone from your desktop PC, using the ActiveSync / USB connection. Installation is a snap : download the software to your PC, connect your phone, and run the application. It copies a .cab to the phone, and you're ready to go.

The really useful part of this software is the ability to capture screen shots and videos. But the cool and fun part is controlling the phone. Response is unbelievably snappy: you click on a button (using your desktop mouse), and the phone event just happens. Or you grab a scroll-bar, in mobile IE, say, and it scrolls! For some reason I'm absurdly impressed by this - but I think you will be, too, if you try it.

It has a number of other features, such as drag/drop files between the phone and the PC, that I haven't tried. But the features I have tried (screen capture, video capture, control) have worked flawlessly.

This is a must-have if you develop mobile applications, or if you want to demo your downloaded mobile software.

My experience with Spb Pocket Plus

2009-01-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago I downloaded and installed Spb Pocket Plus to my T-Mobile Wing running Windows Mobile 6.0. Spb Pocket Plus includes an amazing number of enhancements to the Windows user interface, including:

a tabbed icon interface for the today page
a much improved battery indicator
touch-scrolling in Internet Explorer, Contacts, and a few other applications
tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer
very nice widgets for displaying battery status, memory, storage, etc.
'plugins' for Windows Media Player, messaging, and more
additional customizable behavior for the hardware buttons - for example, you can add functions for press/hold on each of the buttons.

In all, this is a major improvement to the user interface experience. The today layout is completely customizable: you can select which tabs to show, where they should be displayed (top or side), their size, etc. You can add additional tabs. You can add applications to any tab, and drag/drop applications between tabs.

The tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer is a very handy feature, especially on the (relatively) slow GPRS/Edge network from T-Mobile. You can open tabs in the background while continuing to read the current tabbed page.

Touch scrolling is something else I've wanted for quite a while - ever since seeing the first iPhone. The Spb Pocket Plus implementation is intuitive and easy to use.

Sadly, I had to uninstall this from my phone after about 10 days. It was simply too unstable. I found that I needed to reboot the phone every day because it was out (or nearly out) of memory. Usually the first symptom was that touch scrolling would become erratic, then stop working altogether. Once, the phone would not reboot and I had to use the 'safe mode' thoughtfully provided by Spb. After 2 reboots in safe mode I was finally able to boot in normal mode. Then the next day the phone locked up. I had to hard-reset it, and when it rebooted, all the Spb tabs were gone! After about 15 minutes of trying to recreate them (using the easy-to-use configuration provided by Spb), I decided that it simply wasn't worth it.

I think Spb has an amazing set of products, and it's likely that Spb Pocket Plus works better on other phones. But for me, now, it's just not usable. Your mileage may vary.

2008-10-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

Tim O'Reilly posted a long, thoughtful endorsement of Barack Obama. His main points are that Obama is better equipped intellectually and temperamentally to deal with the huge problems we are facing: economic collapse, climate change, economic disparity, lack of governmental transparency, etc.

2008-09-26T07:22:00.001-07:00

Unbelievable! Now dems are fighting for the Bush/Paulson plan. Who stands up for the rest of us?

2008-09-24T20:43:00.001-07:00

Bernanke says credit crunch extends outside banking industry. But msoft et al are buying back stock with new debt. What gives?

2008-09-24T17:40:00.001-07:00

Biggest financial crisis _since_ the great depression? Lehman Brothers survived that one.

2008-09-24T17:36:00.001-07:00

Democrats have 48 hours to get out in front on the bailout debate. Talk of compromises ain't gonna cut it.

2008-09-24T07:51:00.001-07:00

If Naomi Klein had proposed the Paulson plan in 'Shock Doctrine' it would have seemed paranoid fantasy.

2008-09-23T08:16:00.001-07:00

wondering how quickly Congress will be stampeded into a 700 billion dollar giveaway to Wall Street.

2008-09-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, wrote a brief note recently that is wondrously confused, or deviously confusing.

He was writing in response to an article in Edge by Jonathan Haidt, entitled What Makes People Vote Republican . Haidt, a psychology professor at University of Virginia, asked why it is that rural and working-class Americans routinely vote against their class interest by voting for blatantly pro-corporate Republican candidates. The customary 'liberal' answer is that they are drawn to the authoritarian appeal of conservatism:

"... conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world."

Haidt believes that this 'diagnosis' is off the mark. He agrees that Republican voters are guided by moral reasoning, but argues that their morality and, historically, most moral systems are based on more dimensions than are recognized by liberals. Many of us think of morality as "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." Haidt argues that there are historical and empirical reasons to believe that there are additional moral dimensions. Specifically, the enlightenment / liberal view of morality encompasses two dimensions : harm-care, and fairness-reciprocity. Conservative and traditional (pre-enlightenment) morality add three more: ingroup-loyalty, authority-respect, and purity-sanctity. Haidt explores the evidence for this view, and its ramifications at some length.

Readers of Edge know that the general format is: medium-length article by an academic plus several brief commentaries by other academics. It's a Delphic model, not a forum. This usually leads to high quality and high content discussion. But, as we shall see, Michael Shermer is better at throwing sand in our eyes than he is at offering insight. His notes can be found as the third note in The Reality Club response page.

After a brief and transparently insincere acknowledgment of Haidt's position, Shermer tells us what he is exercised about : "The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water
through which the liberal fish swim—they don't even notice it." Already he has moved the discussion away from the question at hand to an entirely different question. This is intellectually dishonest, but it is the only recourse Shermer has. When he tries to address the issue at hand he fails miserably. He refers to the famous paper by Jost et al, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, and says "it is not the data of these scientists that I am challenging so much as it is the
characterizations on which the data were collected", then after a brief rant, says "once you
set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them." Really? What evidence does he have for that claim? This certainly isn't an obvious claim, yet he offers no evidence of any kind. Maybe he simply does not grasp the distinction between 'collecting data' and 'making stuff up'.

He moves directly from there to a set of irrelevant factoids. To 'rebut' the idea that 'conservatives win most elections because of their Machiavellian manipulation of voters' emotional brains' (an unattributed claim that, presumably, Shermer simply posits as a strawman), he cites a number of facts about the relative win-loss ratio of Democrats and Republicans from the mid-19th century to the present. What does he imagine that could possibly tell us about liberal versus conservative appeal? We have two possibilities here: either he believes that the readers of Edge are ignorant of US political history, or he is himself ignorant of US political history. Think about what you have to believe to think that 150 years of Democratic / Republican political races can tell us anything about conservative versus liberal appeal. You would have to believe that Republican = conservative, and Democrat = liberal; and that this has been true for the past 150 years. Moreover you would have to believe that candidates win or lose elections based primarily on their position on some liberal-conservative axis. Of course, the Democratic party was the party of slavery until the end of the Civil War, and remained the party of white southern racists in the south until 1972, at which point many southern Democrats left to become Republicans. And the Republican party really didn't exist as such in 1828 (where Shermer's presidential race factoid begins). From Lincoln until the early 20th century, Republicans represented what might be termed the 'liberal' wing of big business. I ask again: how could Shermer's dive into Wikipedia factoids possibly shed any light on the question of why people vote for conservatives?

It might be tempting to say that Haidt also falls for the Republican/conservative, Democat/liberal fallacy. But he is not making any claims about the history of the Republican party. He is clearly talking only about recent history. And it is simply the case that the Republican party has been a far-right party for the past 28 years, so it is legitimate to equate voting Republican with voting conservative (except where it's not, as in Vermont).

Shermer goes on to cite some survey data regarding the self-reported 'happiness' and 'mental health' of liberals and conservatives. The data says, unsurprisingly, that conservatives report themselves to be happier, and claim 'excellent' mental health at a significantly higher rate than do liberals. I regard this as unsurprising, because it fits with my observation that conservatives are self-satisfied, incurious, and impervious to any challenges to their own beliefs. So why wouldn't they report themselves as happy? He goes on to say that conservatives donate 30% more money than liberals. He doesn't provide a source for this statistic, or any context. He gives the game away, though, when he says "conservatives believe charity should be private (through religion) whereas liberals
believe charity should be public (through government)." Ignoring for a moment the fact that giving money to a church is not the same as giving money to a charity, we see that Shermer has accepted Haidt's view: the church is in fact the vehicle for the ingroup-loyalty, authority-respect, and purity-sanctity dimensions that Haidt posited.

Shermer then asks "why are academic social scientists so wrong about conservatives?", as if he has in fact demonstrated that they are wrong about conservatives. His answer is: because they're liberal! Wow. For someone who claims to be a skeptic, Shermer is not a very critical thinker.

Shermer's final paragraph is laughable:

Why do people vote Republican? Because they believe their lives—and the lives of all Americans—will be better for it. And as often as not they are right.

Right. We are now in the midst of the biggest financial collapse since the great depression. A collapse that is entirely due to the financial deregulation that conservatives have been pushing for the past 28 years. We have lost 4500 soldiers in Iraq, fighting a war of aggression that was begun by conservatives; a war that has cost $500 billion so far. We have lived through 40 years of conservative attacks on unions; attacks that have been so successful that few of us have unions as an option; and our wages reflect that, being essentially stagnant since the opening days of the Reagan administration. We are seeing the greatest disparity of wealth since the end of the 19th century. Shermer's claim that people are 'often right' to believe that their lives are better under Republicans is factually and provably incorrect. But then, so are most claims made by conservatives. It doesn't matter - they keep saying the same things over and over again, impervious to evidence, blind to relevant facts.

Inflation, Spin, Gas Prices

2008-05-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

"Inflation pressures eased a bit in April despite the biggest jump in food prices in 18 years."

So begins an AP article, citing the most recent inflation report from the Department of Labor. For those of us who have been to a grocery store in the past month, the part about 'biggest jump in food prices' is no surprise. But the article goes on:

"The unchanged reading for energy reflected a big 4.8 percent jump in natural gas prices, offset by a 2 percent decline in gasoline costs."

Now that's something I didn't expect. Gasoline costs declined 2 percent in April? Really?

"Since gasoline prices normally rise significantly in April, the 5.6 percent rise in prices for the month turned into a 2 percent drop after the government adjusted for normal seasonal changes."

Oh - I get it. Prices actually rose 5.6 percent for gasoline, but it normally rises by more than that, so there really wasn't any gasoline price inflation. . . . Yeah, OK.

But, I scooted over to Seattle Gas Prices just to confirm the 5.6 percent increase, and instead found this:

Now, I read that as being an increase in average gas price from $3.28 at the beginning of April to $3.62 at the end of the month. Hmmm, my calculator says that's a 10 percent increase, not 5.6 percent.

It could be that the Bush administration is simply arithmetic-challenged. They are, after all, the people who told us that the Iraq war would cost only (!) a couple tens of billions. They are the people who complain about tax-and-spend Democrats, apparently unable to see the difference between eliminating the budget deficit (Clinton) and increasing it to record levels (Bush I, Bush II). They talk about the tax-cut-induced job creation under this administration (the worst record on job creation since the Ford administration). Statistics, and reality, are not this administration's strong suit.

But really, should the labor department really be in the business of spin? Did they think we wouldn't notice?

A Gaff-Rigged Ketch on Puget Sound

2008-04-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Joanne saw this boat on the Sound the other day. She managed to catch
the entire sequence of the crew taking down the main sail. This photo
shows th sail halfway down.

Yuki and Mochi

2008-04-27T10:33:00.001-07:00

He's always interested in what I'm doing. She's always interested in what's
happening outside her yard.

Obama and Clinton - Take 2

2008-04-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

After thinking more about this, I've come to the same conclusion that I'm sure most liberals have come to: Hillary would not be my choice, she's not liberal, she has sold out to the very corporate interests that dominate the current administration, and I'll vote for her if she gets the Democratic nomination. To do anything else would be idiotic. I hope that she does not get the nomination. But if it comes to a choice between Clinton and McCain (and Nader and Gravel), what else can we do?

The one and only thing I've ever liked about Hillary Clinton is that she correctly perceived in the mid 90s that there was (and is) a 'vast right-wing conspiracy'. She was mocked and ridiculed for saying it (mocked and ridiculed by the media arm of that right-wing conspiracy, of course), but it was true; and we've seen the fruits of that conspiracy in the neo-con accession to power with the Bush administration.

But other than being hounded by the right-wing, her actual political views are based on neo-liberalism: constant attacks on the domestic labor force (think NAFTA, welfare 'reform', cuts in social security); imperialist foreign policy (her vote for the Iraq war, support for the draconian measures imposed on developing countries by the World Bank and IMF); support for corporate welfare (her insistence that health care should continue to be run by private health insurance companies). It sickens me to think of voting for her, but I will. I will, unless Obama gets the nomination.

Obama

2008-03-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Until yesterday I had planned to vote for the Democratic candidate for President, based on the premise that either Clinton or Obama would be better for our country than McCain. I wasn't excited by the prospect, and never believed that either candidate would do more than strengthen the status quo in ways that are marginally less harmful than the disastrous policies of the Bush administration. But after reading Obama's speech I've changed my mind: I am voting for Obama. Full stop. If I have to write his name on my ballot, then that's what I will do.

For the first time in my life a viable candidate for high office has spoken honestly about race in America. For the first time a candidate had the courage to say what we should all know by now: racism is a tool used by the wealthy and powerful to divide working people and the poor. Finally there is a candidate who says that white resentment against affirmative action would be better aimed at the corporations that are shipping our decent jobs overseas for 'nothing more than profit.' Finally a candidate who acknowledges that the gains we have made toward greater equality, better working conditions, and greater liberty have been made only after great struggle by large numbers of ordinary people.

Obama made only passing reference to the casual racism of the ruling class - the casual racism of Geraldine Ferraro, the comments by Bill Clinton in South Carolina. Obama rightly sees this as mere noise and a distraction. For 25 years, since the early days of the Reagan administration, we've been treated to a non-stop litany of complaints by right-wing commentators about affirmative action, about the 'special treatment' given to minority races and to women in America. These complaints have had the intended effect of convincing white Americans that they are somehow at a disadvantage, and that blacks and Latinos are to blame. And they've had the effect of diverting attention away from the deep problems that we face: health care for profit that fails to deliver adequate health care at an acceptable price; the massive loss of good jobs; the end of defined-benefit pension plans; the loss not only of factories but of the engineering base that would have allowed America to continue to lead the world in technology; and the ever increasing accumulation of wealth by the wealthy, by way of massive federal corporate welfare. I believe Obama is the candidate who would be willing to recognize these problems and lead the way towards solutions.

The media has made much of pastor Wright's 'God Damn America' speech. Ignoring the bombast for a moment, Wright made two claims that I believe should be uncontroversial: he stated that America was built on a foundation of racism, and he stated that 9/11 happened in response to US foreign policy. I honestly do not understand how either of those statements can be refuted. Howard Zinn devoted a significant portion of 'A People's History' to demonstrating the truth of the first statement. From the beginning of the colonial era to well into the 20th century racism was used as a tool to divide workers and to divert their attention from their own exploitation. Racism served to create a large bloc of poor and working class whites who would defend the status quo, with their lives if need be. Working against their own interest, working class whites often stood against the struggle to achieve a more just and prosperous society. It is painful to acknowledge past racism; and for many whites today it is difficult to recognize the fact of racism in contemporary America. Obama had the courage and the insight to describe the legacy of racism, but also to point out that we have made great progress, and that we can do more in the future.

As for the claim that we brought 9/11 on ourselves because of our foreign policy - what is there to object to? Chomsky has been very persuasively arguing the same thing since September 2001. What is the alternative theory? That they 'hate us for our freedom'? That slogan, and that way of thinking, is simply idiotic. We were attacked in 1994 and again in 2001 for exactly the reasons that the terrorists said they attacked us: the US forces in Saudi Arabia, our unwavering support for the racist and Zionist regime in Israel, and our military support for repressive regimes throughout the Muslim world.

(Of course, Wright seems to also believe that HIV was a government conspiracy against blacks. That's just crazy talk. Almost as crazy as believing that, for example, there's some kind of sky god that watches over everything we do and violates the laws of nature to punish us when we don't live up to its standards.)

Obama chose not to address the causes of 9/11 - I really don't see how he could have done so. The sound bites would have destroyed him, no matter how carefully he phrased his analysis. But everything else in his speech makes me believe that Obama will not be willing to pander to the neo-con idiocy that has driven our policies these past 7 years.

This is the most important presidential election since 1968. The difference this time is that we have a shot, just a shot, at a candidate who has the vision and the courage to be honest with the American people and who is willing to tackle the really big problems. He may be beaten down by a combination of right-wing media and the right-wing pandering of the Clinton campaign. But for now there is hope.

Sailboat Racing

2008-01-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

We saw what appeared to be a non-class sailboat race on Saturday, Jan. 5. Joanne thought it might be the Dumamish head race, but couldn't find enough details online to be sure.

Geese - Lots of Geese

2008-01-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

We drove out to La Conner, Washington on New Year's Day to see a small Japanese garden in the area. On the way we found a bird sanctuary with tens of thousands of geese, and more arriving in massed squadrons of interlocking V formations. I wasn't able to capture the incoming waves of birds, but I did get a few photos of the birds on the ground.

The pictures don't begin to show the vast number of birds.

Night Shots

2007-12-19T07:18:00.000-08:00

I tried the night-scene setting on my new camera the other day. The results were better than I expected, and definitely show some promise.

This was taken from the beach off Harbor Ave. about halfway between the West Seattle bridge and Alki point. It was the night of a new moon and the tide was unusually low. There were no waves on Elliott bay, just a few ripples.

The picture was taken at f/2.8, ISO 64, and 10 second (!) exposure.

Rendering sparklines in TWiki using the google charts api

2007-12-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

I've posted a tiny bit of perl code that lets you render sparklines in twiki using the newly released google charts api. It's on my twiki at

http://www.brayden.org/twiki/bin/view/Software/SparklinesGoogleChartsForTwiki

Chain Reading

2007-11-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

I recently ran across a nice little site for keeping track of the books I'm reading. It's called "Chain Reading", it's written in ruby/rails, and has a nice look to it. My biggest complaint is that it is awfully slow. The navigation sometimes seems just a bit off, as well. Overall, though, I quite like it.

So for now, I'm tracking my books both at Chain Reading and at my own books wiki.

New Camera

2007-10-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

We just bought a new camera from Amazon - a Kodak Z712 IS (7 megapixel, 12X optical zoom, image stabilization). We drove out to the Cascade foothills, thinking that it would be a good place to try out the camera, but didn't really get quite the hoped-for photo opportunities. But I did manage a few shots from our deck after we got back. Here's a couple of them.

This one was shot at about 10X zoom with fairly bright sunlight from the left side. The automatic exposure worked really well, I think.

This one shows the kind of color vibrancy that I like in Kodak cameras.

We have a house!

2007-09-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

We found a house in West Seattle - nice size, great view, fenced yard. We'll be renting for a year while we figure out where we really want to be in Seattle.

In Seattle, Finally

2007-09-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Minnesota exile is over - I'm in Seattle now, working for Amazon. I've actually been here for 3 weeks, in temporary housing downtown, 3 blocks from Pike Place Market.

I've never lived in Seattle before, but I've been visiting here so often that being here now already seems like coming home. Of course, living downtown is like being a tourist - I'm seeing the same sights every day that I would see on a weekend visit.

----------------
Now playing: Al di Meola - Short Tales of the Black Forest
via FoxyTunes

New Year 2006

2006-01-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

The new year is a time of celebration for many people. Ringing out the old, ringing in the new - party like it's 1999. People see the start of the new year as a time of renewal, fresh beginnings, new opportunities.

I suppose I share some of those sentiments, but I've always had a hard time seeing the cause for celebration. Let's ignore the obvious objection that the specific choice of January 1 as the 'new year' is an arbitrary, relatively recent, and by no means universal convention. It's not a bad choice, at least in the northern hemisphere. It is a time of stasis - the changing of the seasons is complete for a few months, nature has settled down for the winter, and life is hard but bearable for man, beast, and plant. Let's just say that since any choice would be arbitrary, January 1 is as good as any other.

Then - what are we celebrating? The completion of another year? Was the previous year so awful that we should celebrate its end? Was the past year so terrific that we must send it on its way with a grand party? Or are we really celebrating the new year, with all the hopes and fears that the future presents to us?

I incline to the latter view. It really is the 'new' and not the 'year' that we celebrate.

We make New Year's Resolutions in the hope that this time, this one time, we will remember those resolutions long enough for them to take root and, taking root, they will make our lives happier, better, longer, and more fulfilling. Never mind that nine out of ten resolutions never make it past the month of January. Never mind that most of us, at least once, have resolved not to make New Year's resolutions, and have failed even in that. Never mind that even the one-in-ten resolution that lasts for more than a month does not achieve its intended purpose - to make us happier. Keeping the resolution may make us thinner, harder-working, kinder, healthier, richer; but then we find that the way to happiness is elsewhere. Surprise!

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Is that it? Our resolutions are about changing behavior, but secretly we want to change ourselves? We lose 10 pounds and find out that it wasn't overweight that 'caused' our unhappiness? We go out of our way to be a better friend / spouse / neighbor and - nothing changed! There's always more that we could do, should do, might have done, might do. But something gnaws at us - the feeling that we can never be good enough or do well enough.

... We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

But isn't this another form of self-deception? The idea that there is some unchanging self, mostly independent of our actions? We certainly don't apply this idea to others - we judge people on their actions, not on their 'unchanging essence'. We are Sartrean existentialists when we assess other people, and Cartesians when we judge ourselves.

Ehyeh asher ehyeh.

That may have been good enough for Popeye and for Yahweh, Lord of Hosts, Creator of the Universe in Six Days, Smiter of the Enemies of Yisrael, but it just won't do for you and me. No - we are what we do, and that's why we continue making New Year's Resolutions. Our mistake is in conflating two largely unrelated concepts : success and happiness. We can succeed in every one of our resolutions, or I think so, though I have no direct experience of this. But this will not lead to happiness.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But it's not where we started.

You cannot step twice into the same river.

The end of all our exploring is a new world, a new place, a place transformed by the very act of exploring. We renew ourselves, and the world we inhabit, by striving, by acting on our dreams, by correcting our mistakes, by recognising and transcending our limitations, by seeking happiness, by seeking the happiness of others.

And so, once again, I resolve to be more organized, eat better, be kinder, more thoughtful, to procrastinate less, and focus more on what is important and less on what is easy.

And above all, I resolve to be happy and to help others be happy.

Labor Day, finally

2005-09-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

By pure chance my wife and I stumbled onto the Northwest Airlines mechanics union Labor Day celebration at Harriet Island in St. Paul. The crowd was friendly, though not as large as I would have hoped - maybe 300 people or so. It's been a long time since I've been around union people, and it was ... refreshing. There was entertainment, booths, food, beer, pamphlets, union buttons, bumper stickers, tee shirts (NWA UNFAIR TO LABOR, NWA WANTS TO BUST THE UNIONS). But above all, this was a Republican Free Zone.

Garrison Keillor was the featured speaker. Nothing earth-shattering, but he spoke of the indifference and ineptitude of the Bush administration in planning for and dealing with hurricane Katrina. And he spoke of the need for the United States to ensure that when we are 'spreading democracy' we do more than merely spread the freedom to be poor and exploited.

I wish that I could do something to support the mechanics union, but I really don't know what that would be. I'm afraid they're screwed, and another big chunk of labor rights along with them. NWA has done a pretty good job of keeping its unions divided from one another. People are frightened that their jobs will go away permanently, and don't want to hasten that day. I understand the feeling.

What is the answer? I really don't know.