WHAT YOU NEED NOW - CONTENT UPDATED THROUGH THE DAY
Nov. 28, 2005
THUMBS L: California Weenie Parents Can’t Take Asian-American Competition;
Amtrak Budget Saves Rail Passenger Service – for Now, at Least; Shopping and
Dropping; I Say No to Black Friday
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
Hinton, WV (HNN) –This is the 50th installment (wow!!) of a column
expressing approval or disapproval of recent news events, commentaries, etc.
Thumbs Up for approval; Thumbs Down for disapproval. This is your column
as much as mine; I welcome contributions, which will be credited in the
item. The contributions can come from within the HNN family or from our
readers – I welcome them all. Contact me at davidkinchen@hotmail.com.
 |
| Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, CA |
At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the student body in a town that is about evenly divided between Anglos and Asians. At nearby Lynbrook High School, an equally highly rated high school in a state where many of the public schools have fallen on hard times academically speaking, whites make up only about a quarter of the student population, Hwang writes.
Kudos to the white parents quoted in the article who keep their kids in academically high-ranking Monta Vista and Lynbrook and who “fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations parents are shortchanging their own children, giving them the idea that they can’t compete with Asian children,” Hwang writes. Kids who think school is tough have a rude awakening when they enter the fiercely competitive job market.
All this reminds me of my latest book review, a look at Jerome Karabel’s “The Chosen,” about admission practices at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (check out the book review archives). Today’s Asian-Americans occupy the position striving – even driven – eastern European Jewish students and their parents did 80 or so years ago. They want their kids to succeed at demanding professions – about the only kind left in the U.S. as we’ve outsourced virtually all our manufacturing as well as much of our research and development. Lawyers, accountants and journalists are just a few of the professionals who face outsourcing in the future. A few days later, the Wall Street Journal had a story about how Google, based a few miles from Monta Vista and Lynbrook high schools, is driving up the ante in its search for software engineers and other high-tech hires. Google and other potential employers want people who can do the job. I’m sure they appreciate ballet lessons or athletic skills, but when you’re in that cubicle, you’re paid well to produce.
Just as Jews fought the stereotype of bookworms by turning out excellent boxers and basketball players (yes, it was a Jewish game before it was a black one), as well as baseball greats like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax so do more established Asians resent the stereotype that they’re the “model minority,” with their noses in books or staring 24/7 at computer screens.
To view this excellent article in its entirety Google Monta Vista High School or Suein Hwang.
THUMBS UP – To Congress for being, as the New York Times puts it: “fairly generous with Amtrak in the transportation budget it passed just before it went home for Thanksgiving.” The Times notes that the measure, awaiting President Bush’s signature, “is designed to keep Amtrak in the business of hauling freight cars, which it wants to quit, and the budget, as passed, could threaten Amtrak's ability to serve meals to passengers.”
I detect an anti-Amtrak bias in the story, which calls federal funding for an essential element of any nation’s transportation mix a “$1.31 billion subsidy.” Everybody’s getting subsidized these days, so why shouldn’t Amtrak? This is chump change compared to what we’re spending in nation-building in the Middle East. As a devoted, even fanatic supporter and customer of Amtrak, I’d rather see the money go to improving rail passenger service than to give it to Israel or Egypt – each of which has the potential to be a truly wealthy country (based on all economic indicators, Israel, a leader in technology and pharmaceuticals, already is.).
The Times story adds that the measure, approved Nov. 18, “would give the transportation secretary the power to raise the price Amtrak charges commuter railroads, like New Jersey Transit, for their use of the Northeast Corridor tracks, which Amtrak owns. And it seeks to limit Amtrak's ability to discount tickets and reduce the airline-style pricing that the railroad has been using.”
This latter measure – limiting discount pricing – really sucks. I was the beneficiary of this pricing on my last round-trip on The Cardinal to Chicago; the trip cost $90 – a real bargain for someone, like me and just about everybody I know, on a tight budget. Why shouldn’t something pioneered by the airlines – discount pricing – be used to boost ridership at Amtrak? The Times: “Amtrak, for example, was charging $120 for a ride from New York to Washington on its regular ‘regional’ trains over the Thanksgiving period, but offering tickets on the same route for as low as $84 on weekends in January.”
What’s wrong with that? January, after the holidays, is a slow period, and Amtrak – like the airlines – wants to put paying butts in those comfortable coach seats. The Times notes that “Ross Capon, the executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, said Congress was reacting to the idea that Amtrak was trying to buy market share by cutting its fares, thus losing more money. In fact, he said, Amtrak's revenue per passenger mile was rising, even as the airlines' was falling.”
Capon told The Times that “like the airlines, Amtrak wants to get something for every seat. Transportation is a perishable commodity. Every seat that goes empty because Amtrak was prohibited from doing innovative specials is less revenue for the company."
Bush is expected to sign the bill, The Times story notes, adding that he hasn’t vetoed any all year. I wish he would fire David Laney of the Amtrak Board of Directors and rehire David Gunn to head Amtrak. Laney, a Texas crony lawyer buddy of Bush, recently fired veteran railroader Gunn after three years of sterling service by the 68-year-old Gunn.
In an example of Congressional death of a thousand cuts, the measure also seeks to cut Amtrak's losses on food and beverage service, where a recent government study “found that the railroad had $2 in expenses for each $1 in revenue,” the story noted, adding that “Amtrak is renegotiating its contract with its commissary supplier, which it acknowledges it has not managed well, but argues that passengers will not ride trains if food is not available.” Speaking for myself, I’ll take a bag of sandwiches and a beverage or three along with me, as I usually do anyway. Amtrak’s coffee isn’t bad; it’s at least as good as the black liquid served on airplanes.
 |
| Black Friday shopping and wrestling |
Michael Barbaro of The New York Times wrote immediately after Black Friday that employees at the CompUSA on 57th Street in Manhattan – a store I visited on my last trip to the Big Apple – “laid down some ground rules: no more pushing and no more grabbing deeply discounted merchandise out of the hands of other customers.”
Barbaro notes that “Across the country, millions of Americans mobbed discount stores, raced into suburban malls and swarmed downtown shopping districts in a retail ritual that appeared to set a record for sleep deprivation.” The CompUSA store in Manhattan, for example, opened a minute after midnight on Friday, Nov. 25.
Barbaro writes that “stores are putting a greater emphasis on the day after Thanksgiving because they find it strongly influences decisions about where to shop for the rest of the holiday season. Deep discounts, in particular, they say, create the impression that a retailer is offering better values than competitors. ‘If we don't have the right doorbusters we don't have a good Christmas,’ said Ron Gregory, district manager for Sears in Chicago.” OK, OK, already, but include me out!
