Avoid Delta and Atlanta

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:24:25 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Tchiowa writes:

That's because property can't commit a crime. But the civil forfeiture
is a result of the criminal conduct. And it all has to be approved by a
judge.

Criminal conduct is decided by a jury, not a judge.

You really shouldn't post on legal matters when you only know a
little about them; a little learning can be a dnagerous thing, to
coin a phrase.

In fact, many criminal trials are held before a judge without a
jury.

And civil
forfeiture occurs before anything is proved by anyone.

In civil matters "proof" is not a criterion.

Therefore, no due process.

Rubbish.

************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:41:54 +0100, The Reid
wrote:

Following up to Mxsmanic

The average European family has a home, car, computer, mobile phone,
cable-TV and whatever else the American family has, and has more time
to enjoy it together.

If only that were actually true.

I assume its largely true then, except for some trivial nitpick.
Why is *cable* TV important? I'm about to ditch mine.

Well, I've seen Finnish TV without cable, and trust me, cable is
important.

************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

Hatunen writes:

In civil matters "proof" is not a criterion.

In all matters depriving persons of property or liberty, due process
is a necessary prerequisite, according to the Constitution.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:34:59 -0400, "Sarah Banick"
wrote:


"Tchiowa" wrote in message
roups.com...

The Reid wrote:
Following up to Hatunen

So? What % of the annual budget of the average person goes to travel?
And Europeans do travel abroad more than Americans (just take a look at
how many Americans have a passport).

Europeans don't have as far to go to get abroad.

that of course doesn't make it untrue.

But it makes the original statement irrelevant.

A great many of
the foreign destinations for Americans don't require a passport
(so far, anyway).

what would be your guess on % of Americans who travel abroad and
who travel abroad beyond Mexico and Canada (a guess, I'm not
interested in a cites war). Are there a lot of countries US
doesn't need passports?

Your question is nonsensical. The fact that Europe is Balkanized means
that a trip in Europe that is "abroad" and requires a passport would be
a domestic trip in the US.

Instead try asking how many people in the US travel away from home and
how far the typical trip is and compare with Europe. You'll find that
Americans travel more.

Do you have actual numbers on this? I am really curious to see if that is
true. There are many Americans who have never been out of their state or
region, especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder.

I suspect the same claims can be made for Europeans of a lower
socioeconomic status.

In the USA even those of lower socioeconomic status sometimes go
to visit relatives several states away.

Their typical trip is to the nearest beach or amusement park.

That's true for almost everyone in the USA. Why wouldn't one go
to nearny attrqctions?

I still agree with the others. An American driving from say, Virginia to
California, may cover a lot of territory, but he's still in the same culture
(all California jokes aside), he's still watching the same television
programs, speaking the same language, and not using a passport or being
exposed to the many quirks (for lack of a better word) of international
travel.

True, but I think that's a different question.

************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

Hatunen wrote:

In civil matters "proof" is not a criterion.


Really? There is no need for evidence?

Interesting article on the value of vacation.
I've marked a few paragraphs (with ****) that explain the value of longer
vacations.

http://alternet.org/story/16611/



Vacation Starvation

Caught in a vise-grip of spiraling work hours and shrinking vacations,
employees across the country hardly have a chance to catch their breath or
enjoy the fruits of their labor.

By Joe Robinson, AlterNet. Posted August 18, 2003.



"How do Americans do it?" asked the stunned Australian. He had zinc oxide
and a twisted-up look of absolute bafflement on his face, as we spoke on a
remote Fijian shore. I'd seen that expression before, on German, Swiss and
British travelers. It was the kind of amazement that might greet someone who
had survived six months at sea in a rowboat.
The feat he was referring to is how Americans manage to live with the
stingiest vacations in the industrialized world -- 8.1 days after a year on
the job, 10.2 days after three years, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. The Aussie, who took every minute of his five weeks off each
year -- four of them guaranteed by law -- just couldn't fathom a ration of
only one or two weeks of freedom a year. "I'd have to check myself into the
loony bin," he declared.

Well, welcome to the cuckoo's nest, mate, otherwise known as the United
States. In this country, vacations are not only microscopic; they're also
shrinking faster than revenues on a corporate restatement. A survey by
Internet travel company Expedia.com has found that Americans will be taking
10 percent less vacation time this year -- too much work to get away, said
respondents. This continues a trend that has seen the standard U.S.
vacation, as measured by the travel industry, buzzsawed down to a long
weekend.

*****Some 13 percent of companies now provide no paid leave, up from 5
percent five years ago, according to the Alexandria-based Society for Human
Resource Management. In Washington state, a whopping 17 percent of workers
get no paid leave. Vacations are going the way of real bakeries and drive-in
theaters, fast becoming a quaint remnant of those pre-downsized days when we
didn't have to keep the CEO in art collections and mansions. The result is
unrelieved stress, burnout, absenteeism, rising medical costs, diminished
productivity, and the extinguishing of time for life and family.

Caught in a vise-grip of spiraling work hours and shrinking vacations,
employees across the country hardly have a chance to catch their breath or
enjoy the fruits of their labor. These are people like Nancy Jones, a nurse
in Southern California, who last year put in a vacation request in January
to attend her son's wedding in July. "They kept giving me the runaround,"
she recalled. "They tell you they don't know if you can have the time,
because they expect to be busy. It happens all the time." After her manager
ignored numerous requests, she wound up having to corner the director of the
company, just days before the wedding, to get the time off.

An aerospace worker from Seattle sent me an e-mail that sums up the growing
dilemma of vacations that are only on paper: "If you try to take a couple of
your vacation days, you get told no, so your only recourse is to call in
sick, and probably not get paid for it, and risk getting management mad and
becoming a potential candidate for termination. What happened to families
and the reason we go to work to begin with?"

In the early '90s, Juliet Schor first called attention to skyrocketing work
weeks and declining free time in her book, "The Overworked American." In the
decade since that groundbreaking work appeared, things not only haven't
gotten any better -- they've grown worse. We're now logging more hours on
the job than we have since the 1920s. Almost 40 percent of us work more than
50 hours a week. And just last month, before members of the House of
Representatives took off on their month-plus vacations, they decided to pile
more overtime on working Americans by approving the White House's scrapping
of 60 years of labor law with a wholesale rewrite of wage and hour
regulations, turning anyone who holds a "position of responsibility" into a
salaried employee who can be required to work unlimited overtime for no
extra pay.

Vacations are being downsized by the same forces that brought us soaring
work weeks: labor cutbacks, a sense of false urgency created by tech tools,
fear and guilt. Managers use the climate of job insecurity to stall, cancel
and abbreviate paid leave, while piling on guilt. The message, overt or
implied, is that it would be a burden on the company to take all your
vacation days -- or any. Employees get the hint: One out of five employees
say they feel guilty taking their vacation, reports Expedia's survey. A new
poll of 700 companies by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance
provider, found that 56 percent of workers would be postponing vacations
until business improved.

The whole neurotic vacation system is based on guilt, on the notion that you
are never worthy enough to take time off. The guilt works, because we are
programmed to believe that only productivity and tasks have value in life,
that free time is worthless, though it produces such trifles as family,
friends, passions -- and actual living.

But before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a
consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more
important goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to
three-month vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and
Republican platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a
week in the 1920s. The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that
found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations
had one, and recommended legislation.

But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the U.S. and
Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways.
Europe chose the route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the
other -- no statutory protection and voluntary paid leave. Now, we are the
only industrialized nation with no minimum paid-leave law. Europeans get
four or five weeks by law and can get another couple of weeks by agreement
with employers. The Japanese have two legal weeks, and even the Chinese get
three. Our vacations are solely at the discretion of employers. The lack of
legal standing is what makes vacations here feel so illegitimate -- and you
so guilty when you try to take one.

*******The evidence shows that time off is not the enemy of productivity; to
the contrary, it's the engine. U.S. companies that have implemented a
three-week vacation policy have seen their profits and productivity soar.
Profits have doubled at the H Group, a financial services firm in Salem,
Ore., since an across-the-board three-week vacation became the rule nine
years ago. They have risen 15 percent at Jancoa, a Cincinnati-based
janitorial services firm with 468 employees that also went to a three-week
policy a few years ago. The owners of both these companies told me they
believe the switch in vacation policy is directly responsible for the
improvement. Before the change, said the owner of Jancoa, the company had a
high turnover rate and chronic overtime; after the new vacation policy went
into effect, morale went sky-high, and so did productivity, which solved
both the turnover and overtime problems.

******This is not surprising -- rested workers perform better than zombies,
as fatigue studies have demonstrated since the 1920s. One study showed that
if you work seven 50-hour weeks in a row, you'll get no more done than if
you worked seven 40-hour weeks in a row. Yet we have made work style -- how
long, how torturously -- more important than how well we do the job, part of
a destructive bravado contest to see who can have less of a life than the
next person. My ulcer's bigger than yours.

I've heard so many poignant tales from the overworked-place, including that
of a 35-year-old victim of a heart attack whose doctor attributed 100
percent of his ailment to unrelieved job stress, or that of a 50-year-old
engineer who was downsized to a job that offered zero paid leave.

Overwork doesn't just cost employees. The tab paid by business for job
stress is $150 billion a year, according to one study. Yet vacations can
cure even the worst form of stress -- burnout -- by re-gathering crashed
emotional resources, say researchers. It takes two weeks for this process to
occur, however, which is why long weekends aren't vacations. An annual
vacation can also cut the risk of heart attack by 30 percent in men and 50
percent in women.

Walter Perkins, a finance VP for a large American engineering firm, told me
how he became a believer after running a Dutch firm acquired by his
employer. He presided over six-week holidays for his staff and says he saw
no loss of productivity.

"The Dutch work just as hard as their American counterparts," Perkins said,
"but they have that knowledge that they're going to get that one month or
more where they can really recharge the batteries. Guess what? Things don't
come to a halt." The stats back him up. Contrary to myth, a number of
European countries have caught the United States in productivity. In fact,
Europe had a higher productivity growth rate in 14 of the 19 years between
1981 and 2000, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. The Australians,
with their five-week vacations have also outperformed the U.S. in recent
years.

I find it strange that the land of the free should be so deficient in
vacation time, which is as free as you can get all year. In fact, the word
vacation comes from the Latin root vacatio, which means "freedom." A
vacation is our chance to get out there and discover, travel, savor and
connect with family and friends, to put one over on the survival game. But
fear is a specialist in strangling liberty. We're told that, with real
vacations, companies would fall apart and that the U.S. economy would
suddenly turn into Paraguay's.

*****This is why we need a minimum paid leave law that will put an end to
the bait and switch of vacation time, as well as leave that's being yanked
completely. Legalized paid leave would also end the loss of accrued vacation
time from downsized workers in their thirties, forties and fifties, who have
to start their paid leave banks over again, as if they were at their very
first job. We can do better than having to prove we're worthy of vacation
time until the day we retire.

I agree that time is money, just not in the way we think it is. Time itself
is the real precious currency, because our supply of it is very limited. We
need to pump our fists when we get vacation time, and not feel guilty.

This was brought home to me in a bizarre little church in the medieval city
of Evora, Portugal, whose walls, columns and ceiling are plastered with the
femurs, tibias and skulls of hundreds of 16th-century monks. The Chapel of
Bones was designed by a creative sort to aid in the contemplation of
mortality. I must admit it gave me a very good idea of where things are
headed, particularly the parting words inscribed over the doorway: "We the
bones already in here are just waiting for the arrival of yours."

Words to remember the next time someone wants to downsize your downtime into
a long weekend.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Hatunen writes:

In civil matters "proof" is not a criterion.

In all matters depriving persons of property or liberty, due process
is a necessary prerequisite, according to the Constitution.

The FRENCH Constitution?

JohnT

"mrtravel" wrote in message
m...
Sarah Banick wrote:

Do you have actual numbers on this? I am really curious to see if that is
true. There are many Americans who have never been out of their state or
region, especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder.
Their typical trip is to the nearest beach or amusement park.

Do you think the people in the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder in
OTHER countries spend a lot of time traveling?

No, but this is the comment I was responding to:

"Your question is nonsensical. The fact that Europe is Balkanized means
that a trip in Europe that is "abroad" and requires a passport would be
a domestic trip in the US.

Instead try asking how many people in the US travel away from home and
how far the typical trip is and compare with Europe. You'll find that
Americans travel more.

A trip from Amsterdam to Brussels means, what, a 2 hour train ride? And
you can call it "travelling abroad" while a trip from California to New
York by train takes several days and is equivalent to and Ireland to
Greece trip.)"

JohnT wrote:

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...

Hatunen writes:


In civil matters "proof" is not a criterion.

In all matters depriving persons of property or liberty, due process
is a necessary prerequisite, according to the Constitution.


The FRENCH Constitution?

Weren't we discussing US states that permit confiscation of property
used or gained from criminal activity?

JohnT writes:

The FRENCH Constitution?

The American Constitution.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.