Tuesday, February 20, 2007

I Guess I'll Have to Go Linux, AFT edition

by Ken Houghton

Paul the Spud at Shakespeare's Sister notes Sean Hannity and Neil Boortz's latest entry in the "Worse than Al Qaeda" derby.
BOORTZ: Right. Look, Al Qaeda, they could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people with a well-placed nuke somewhere. Ok. We would recover from that. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers unions in this country can destroy a generation.

HANNITY: They are.

BOORTZ: Well, they are destroying a generation.

HANNITY: They are ruining our school system.

What Paul doesn't note is that Steve Jobs agrees with them:
"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. [Michael] Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.

But when he spoke, he Spoke Truth to Power:
Dell responded that unions were created because "the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.

"So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed."

Dell also blamed problems in public schools on the lack of a competitive job market for principals.

Tell me about it. There's nothing like living in a city with a bloated, capricious Administration that decides teachers shouldn't have a contract and students should suffer for their incompetence to remind you that the contract-negotiating AFT is the sole check on abusive management.

So Dell scores well there. Has he also learned the other reality (via /.)?

The top six requests at Dell's new Customer Service website (number 1 is by a WIDE margin; see link above):
  1. Pre-Installed Linux | Ubuntu | Fedora | OpenSUSE | Multi-Boot
  2. Pre-Installed OpenOffice | alternative to MS Works & MS Office
  3. NO EXTRA SOFTWARE OPTION
  4. linux laptop
  5. No OS Preloaded
  6. Have Firefox pre-installed as default browser

Apparently, the power of the "free" market has been tethered for quite a while by the power of the monopoly. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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