To the unavoidable death and taxes, add airline fees

        Are you serious? Continental Airlines charges a $50 service fee to refund a deceased person's ticket. First you will need to contact the airline's refund department, then provide a death certificate, and finally give a credit card number. Is America becoming too greedy and ignoring people's feelings? I know that some people will try and create schemes to make money off the airlines and that is why airlines need to be careful, but a fee for a dead person, that is a little extreme. Airlines are charging a fee wherever they can to make a profit in these hard economic times.
        Mitch Lipka is a caring writer who sympathizes with this concerned reader who first complained about the fee. He supports this person who is clearing going through a tough time in their life. Lipka's sarcastic view of the airlines is apparent in the quote, "A lot of businesses, the airlines certainly among them, are much better at taking money than giving it back". I support Lipka, airlines can fee for overweight bags and changing your seat, but not for a death.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2011/10/15/unavoidable-death-and-taxes-add-airline-fees/SlbKIvPQ6I3hs9Qba10mlL/story.html

Why Europe matters to Mass

        As if we didn't have enough to worry about, now we have to worry about Europe's economy too. Massachusetts and Europe's has various economic ties one of them being, "Heat Trace Products LLC, a Leominster manufacturer of cables for heating and cooling, weathered the 2008 recession by finding international markets for its products. Today, Europe accounts for more than one-third of its sales", that would be a huge loss if Europe's economy fell, impacting many towns close to our own. Europe also invests a lot of their money into Massachusetts mainly in tourism, "European tourists account for nearly half of all spending by international visitors to the state." Even if Europe's economy shifts slightly the people of Massachusetts might feel the crunch on our own economy. Even though our local news stations might only focus on the declining economy here in America, we should also pay attention to the international economies that could impact us in a big way. We would be foolish to care only about our own economy.
        Author Megan Woolhouse is not foolish. She knows that our own hometown economy is very important, but to also look at the big picture and not be as close minded. With the whole world in a recession, we need to focus on how to help everyone because every countries economy impacts another. Woolhouse is an informative writer who wants to change the minds of people who only care about America. The world is like an ecosystem, if one country fails, we all fail.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2011/10/15/mass-feels-repercussions-europe-falters/giIZZkdjl3EUwuLZeYOhZL/story.html

States Adding Drug Test as Hurdle for Welfare

           America is in a bad economic state right now and we need to take precautions to make sure that our money is going towards people that really need it and not to people who spend it on illegal drugs. A supporter of this new idea that the government should drug test people that collect aid says, “Working people today work very hard to make ends meet, and it just doesn’t seem fair to them that their tax dollars go to support illegal things", and as someone who has money taken out every week from my paycheck I want my money to be spent wisely. At times America was naive to think that no one collecting money used it to buy illegal drugs, but as the budget got tighter the government needed to make sure that the taxpayers money was not being wasted. The largest debate was, "Money has also been an issue — the sides dispute whether the savings in unpaid benefits will eclipse the spending on administration, including the cost of testing." and that is a valid point. The government should look into the annual cost of testing to see if it will actually cut down on costs or just add on to the growing deficit.
     Writer, A.G. Sulzberger, is a very informative writer that presents both sides of the story. He wrote this article to inform Americans that their money would not be given to drug addicts in this recession. Many say that this new bill is stereotyping low-income families, but they should not take offense to this if they have nothing to hide. Sulzberger uses many facts, numbers, statistics, and dates to inform his readers. Towards the end of the article, Sulzberger points out that not everyone admits to recent drug use on forms that they fill out for the government so we could never get an accurate account of how much money the government would save. Sulzberger does not know if the bill will pass in Congress, but for right now it is just a heated debate.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/us/states-adding-drug-test-as-hurdle-for-welfare.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.jsonp

My Mother Never Worked

          "Do you believe that a homemaker who has never been a wage earner should be entitled to a Social Security death benefit for her survivor's?" I do believe that parents who stay at home should receive a death benefit because they are up in the morning getting the children ready for school and then they get to work on all of the housework. Their day starts early and ends far beyond five o'clock like any other average American worker. They are the ones stuck at home with a never ending list of things to accomplish. These stay at home parents raise the children, teaching them their first words and showing them how to make a bed. This is much more important than being a car salesman. Mothers and some fathers across the nation are raising the next generation of hard working Americans, that is a lot of pressure. My mother does much more in a day than an accountant. She wakes up at six to feed the dogs, horses, and cats and then gets to work on cleaning stalls, grooming the horses, walking the dogs, going to the grocery store, doing loads upon loads of laundry, and then on top of all of that she also has to drive all around town picking up and dropping off her three daughters at various after school activities. To add onto that her husband is a merchant marine and gone for six months of the year. She is a single parent for six months of the year and has to balance a lot and the government is telling her that she won't receive a death benefit? Ridiculous. Welcome to America.

Hiring Locally for Farm Work Is No Cure-All

     All day, every day you hear about the recession and unemployment rate that will not seem to go down, but when American workers are offered a job on a farm most of them quit by their lunch break. Many said that the work was too hard for only earning $10.50 an hour. To me this is pathetic. Colorado onion farmer, John Harold, thought that instead of hiring foreign farmers to harvest the crops this summer he would hire some locals that were out of work. He and many other farms who decided to help out the local economy made a bad business move. These American workers were complaining that they were unemployed and when a summer job presented itself they took it, only to quit six hours into it. Are Americans becoming that wimpy? Many politicians are complaining that we are sending jobs overseas, if they want to fix the problem they might need to talk to their states residents to tell them that work is not suppose to be easy, that is why it is called WORK.
      Author, Kirk Johnson, is very upset with America's work ethic. He believes that Americans are lazy and complain all the time and I have to agree with him. He said, "Still, Mr. Mattics said, he can’t help feeling that people have gotten soft. " and Johnson supports this viewpoint. Johnson's audience is most likely unemployed Americans and he wants to make the point that you might need to get a minimum wage paying job now and just deal with it until a better opportunities arises. Johnson also brings up the immigration debate because John Harold does hire Mexicans for the summer through a government run program. The American government is allowing Mexicans into America for six months to work on farms and do all of the jobs that American's laugh at, this is wrong. What happened to the days when Americans were proud to grow the food that they eat because it looks like it is long gone and no one seems to care.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html?_r=2

Busted On Brooklyn Bridge

          Would you ever join a protest? Thousands of people did last Saturday on the Brooklyn Bridge, protesting against bank bailouts. The protests have been going on since September 17th and are most likely to continue on until elected officials acknowledge the problem. The group of protesters are marching up and down Wall Street trying to get their point across. The protests are gaining a lot of media attention, " I saw at least a couple dozen camera crews, reporters and photographers"( Page 1), which helps the protesters get their point across to even a larger audience. I am with the protesters, Why should banks be bailed out when the nation has a 9.1% unemployment rate (google public data explorer)? One protester said, " If the cops arrest 100 people, it’s the best thing they could do for us" because he knows that the more attention that is received, the better the chance of getting what he wants.
          Justin Elliott, a writer for Salon.com, is on the protester's side. He is not afraid to go on the protester's journey from Wall Street all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge. Elliot's language is simple and easy to read, flowing from sentence to sentence. His audience is mainly people on their way to work, reading on the bus or subway, in his attempt to keep his fellow New Yorkers in the loop about what is going on right outside their doorstep. Elliott used the cover of this week's Wall Street Journal to back up his thesis. I don't believe in violence over simple things, but these people have been forgotten by their elected representatives and it was time that they stood up for themselves.

http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/02/occupy_wall_st_saturday/

For Hackers, the Next Lock to Pick

          Before the Internet it was not necessary to protect your computer form viruses and before the invention of the smart phone nobody needed to protect their flip phones from hackers, but times have changed. Many people that own a smartphone have apps that can pay their bills or set the alarm on their house, but what would happen if a hacker got that information? The new money maker in the world of the smartphone is protection. McAfee is taking control and I don't blame them."One in two Americans will have a smart phone by Christmas 2011" *  and this means a larger profit for anti-virus giants like McAfee and if I were them I would defiantly invest in it too. Everywhere you look there are advertisements for a new smartphone and they are becoming a lot more popular. Personally, I do not have a smartphone, but I would like to have one. It has the ability to do amazing things and most people are willing to take the risk of being hacked.  


          Author, Claire Cain Miller, seems to be a very technologically savvy person. She knew all of the correct technical terms and uses them to her advantage. This article is used to warn the smart phone owners of the world and to inform others before they make the choice to buy the newest and most impressive technology. Miller is a data oriented writer, using many numbers to defend her thesis. An example of this is, " It automatically tracks 700,000 mobile apps and updates Lookout whenever it finds a threat" (Page 1). Miller's approach to explaining the growing problem simplifies it for non-tech savvy people which allows a larger audience to understand her work.


*http://gigaom.com/2010/03/26/1-in-2-americans-will-have-a-smartphone-by-christmas-2011/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/technology/companies-see-opportunity-in-stopping-cellphone-hackers.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&hp&adxnnlx=1317587410-b7YNzH8Eq oHVffVsqJD3Q