More than 300 criminal cases in the Southwestern may be dismissed beacuse of the Flex Squad scandal.
It's alleged that Mathaddues Rozier, 25, shot a 15-year-old boy and then his 79-year-old father. And then there's some guy named Gerald Reed involved. I don't know, it's confusing.
The skeletal remains found in Jessup appear to have been homicided.
Robert C. Griffin, 71, is scheduled for a hearing at 2 p.m. today before Circuit Judge Gale E. Rasin. Griffin was found guilty in 1986 of stabbing and strangling 20-year-old Annie Cruse behind the Reptile House in Druid Hill Park. This past November, Judge Raisin granted a motion for new trial due to the results from a recent DNA test.
How retarded: documents from the NSA detail how agents, via a unit of the Baltimore Police, spied on people who were taking children (maybe even disabled children, 4800 York rd is BARC) to Washington DC for the 4th of July. The probable cause: "advised protestors would be demonstrating with 'against the war' signs."
Police Blotter: "a sampling of crimes."
Things got un-bucolic in Carroll County when police shot 23-year-old Jason Woodward.. oh wait, oh wait, no, they didn't... as he pressed a knife into the throat of a 21-year-old woman he'd dragged behind the route 140 Hess station. Or not. Seriously, what is going on at JZ?
Soon, entry-level prison guards may make more than Daily Record reporters.
Aleksandr Dzhanasvili of Pikesville got arrested for posing as a doctor and trying to steal a morphine patch from a patient at Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center.
SSQ mall shooting suspect Brian Keith Rose, 21, had also been convicted of stealing a police car.
Maryland's new bill requiring employers with <10k employees to spend 8 percent of payrolls on health insurance has made national news, as has our governor's blatant canoodling with a certain naughty corporation. Next on the liberal agenda: gay wedding reception packages at the Marriott Waterfront and health insurance for everybody.
5 comments:
A basic problem with the health care bill for Wal-Mart:
MD proposes a $6.15 minimum wage.
The healthcare tax raises that cost to 6.65, of which $6.15 is spendable cash.
Suppose an ex-offender is going to need a certain amount of supervision, costing $1.00 per hour per employee, and that statistically (but perhaps not individually) employees steal/damage $1 of merchandise each hour, a lowball estimate.
Then the total cost of hiring this person (excluding personnel procurement costs) per hour is $8.65, of which the employee receives $6.15 plus the pawned value of anything stolen. If his work isn't worth maybe $9.00 or more, he's unemployed. If his work is worth $9.00 and he's only getting $6.15 cash, he'd better start stealing, which means he'll be out of work again.
You gotta let the market work, people. Walmart provides low-skill entry-level jobs, which are the only thing many Baltimoreans will be any good for. Now, after passage of the bill, Walmart probably won't open its distribution center in MD, so more of those entry jobs are gone.
I just want to say that a blog that can bring people from all over the political, sociological, etc. spectrums to focus on a single issue is doing something right. Thanks.
I am not sure what the above calculations have to do with the new health care bill. Wouldn't the gap between the cash a worker takes home and the value of that employee (in monetary terms) for the employer always be $2.00 apart according to this formula? The dilemma described above is inescapable then, and all employees should always steal in order to earn back their worth.
It may be that the argument rests on the claim that with the new health care bill and proposed wage hike that workers must provide at least $9.00 worth of work to be valuable, which is too high for a company such as Wal-Mart to accept. This is a dubious claim I think, but in any case it is not supported by the reasoning above.
I am also skeptical of this thing called "the market." There are very few sectors where things are left to just run their course, although this is the myth to which many people cling. Regulation, control, lobbying, politics, global shifts, interference, etc. are ever-present economic factors, and it strikes me as odd when someone says that we should let things run their course. That sounds to me like sitting back and letting corporations skeet skeet all over the Maryland voting public.
IF Wal-Mart does not open the center on the shore (and I doubt that Wal-Mart pulls out when all is said and done), and if there are widespread problems associated with these new bills, then it is up to Marylanders and elected officials to provide solutions. But I'll take rational planning over corporate bullying any day.
It would also be great if we could get some sort of rational approach toward crime from the PD. The floodlights as bright as the sun and the little "blue light specials" don't seem to be cutting it.
The lights are at best emergency management. Ultimately, a local government must take charge of its miscreants. They can be incapacitated through incarceration, or you can place them on community supervision and pay cops to babysit them. If you elect the latter, you must provide a number of cops proportionate to your ill-behaved population, which is a tall order in Baltimore, which has more hoods than most states. Without than number of babysitters, the lights stay on.
As to the gap between the value of a worker's labor and the total (including external) costs of employing him, ordinarily it's a positive number, called producer's marginal gain to employment. It's why an employer might bother dealing with workers, rather than simply automating a process. If the number is negative, it is the marginal burden (or loss) associated with employment. Sometimes, contrary to popular legend, firms will actually incur a modicum of such loss, if the outcome is socially valuable.
Consider hiring disadvantaged minorities under affirmative action. Because they were disadvantaged to start, they WERE less productive than competing workers, but this was simply an historical accident. Given equal training and utilization (ceteris paribus), these will equalize value across backgrounds.
In this case, though, ceteris is not paribus, as these employees will continue to exhibit behavioral problems through the duration of their association with a firm, statistically speaking.
You say an employee should steal to earn back their worth, from my analysis. No. You've misread. I never asserted that the employee was worth all that the State of Maryland forces the employer to pay for the privilege of having staff. What he steals is the extent of value he creates which the State diverted away from his paycheck, by fiat. The money the State stole and handed to someone (perhaps even the employee) is like a pie, the relative sizes of the two wedges to be apportioned between employee and employer. But the employer can avoid the burden of its share by simply not hiring. That's the point. They don't have to hire anybody. They might choose to, however, if the worker exhibits POSITIVE marginal gain to employment. Therefore, the burden of the State's action will not be visited upon the firm's engineers, MBA's, and senior staff. The burden of the new law will be suffered by those most marginal (that's why we call it that) potential employees. That's going to mean the ones who already have problems.
Don't hire people with a record.
Don't hire people with substance abuse issues.
Don't hire people with behavioral problems.
Don't hire people with handicaps (*see your lawyer first).
Don't hire people with complex personal lives.
Wal-mart would be crazy to build that Distribution Center, unless it's already broken groung and incurred irreversible costs. MD has just boosted its labor cost by 8%. The cross-locational elasticity of supply is sufficient to move this site across the border into Delaware for an 8% reduction in labor costs.
The way to tell whether the law will reduce employment/investment is this: send all employees a pink slip indicating an 8% cash pay cut with healthcare benefits accordingly. Those who resign because of the pay cut have been marginalized by the State and will go get a job at McDonald's.
The only possibility not involving employment/investment reductions would be for Walmart to outsource its distribution to a local firm with fewer than 10,000 employees. In fact, I bet it will do just that. Take that, House Dems.
BTW, I agree about people from diverse political perspectives coming together on crime.
News Flash: shooting at Curtin @ Aiken in E. Balto.-Midway
Much ado about nothing. An article in the Sun shows how little impact the Walmart bill will have. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/politics/bal-te.bz.impact14jan14,1,2619391.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
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