A Clever Spell

Volunteering — building a community bond, and assisting the poor in the vicinity. But how much time does it take to arrange this? You’ll discover that it’s more straightforward to get involved when a professional has planned the event. Of course volunteering is more fun with your co-workers pitching in right along with you!

In response, firms have begun making themselves into points of organization to help their employees support the community through volunteer activities. A leader in this field is Adaptive Marketing LLC of Connecticut who developed financial benefits programs including Privacy Matters Identity (MVQ*PRIVACYMID). Company-supported charitable activity now goes beyond once-a-year donations to charity. To go back to our earlier example, Adaptive Marketing has provided its employees with chances to take part in everything from running shoe recycling efforts to local tree planting events. For these events, the locations, dates and times of the events were posted, making sure that employees knew what to expect, and how much time it might take precisely. Making sure volunteers have a say in which drives the company supports is important. Employees of Adaptive Marketing can choose from a great many local volunteer activities. Prior projects have seen improvements made in a wide variety of areas including aid and assistance for children and young adults, environmental programs, and events helping local artistic projects. The result is that Adaptive Marketing volunteers are presented with opportunities to use their time in meaningful, important ways and love getting involved.

When firms urge their staffers to think about volunteering at schools, it tends to be to help with a specific event or a regular, perhaps weekly or monthly project. Staff members may well say they have no time to give, though one would be surprised if they genuinely can’t find enough resources to lend a hand with an event taking up merely a single day.

It has always been a fairly common practice for companies to help to support the people living around their premises. The activities of those who work at companies such as Adaptive Marketing create precious good feeling in their hometown. The fact is, the benefits of volunteer work include feeling better about yourself — an upbeat feeling that leaves not just the volunteer but the whole firm in a better mood.

Many among us sail through our lives blissfully ignorant of the reason our web addresses start with the secret code “http//:” Increasingly we think it is superfluous because when we omit entering it into the address line of our browser, usually we arrive at our destination regardless.

I have even seen people dropping the “www.” part of the web address, and they sometimes connect anyway. What does it all mean?

Let’s start with http. It is an acronym for the tongue twister HyperText Transfer Protocol. When you type this into your web browser, you are telling it that you intend to interact with the internet according to a specific set of rules (protocols), and the internet will respond in return.

Your web browser, such as Internet Explorer(tm), is software which helps you communicate with the internet by sending your requests out and retrieving the files you are seeking. When you search the internet or type a URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or web address) into the address bar of your browser, you are in effect requesting to view files.

These files could be text and images. Your browser assembles and displays them according to more rules, this time the rules come from the language of the internet, HTML (”Hypertext Markup Language”).

When you navigate to a website, your browser looks for a file named index.htm. This file contains the basic structure of the overall site, and tells your browser what other files to look for and how to display them on your screen.

When you click on a link, your browser sends out another request, and either replaces the page you are viewing with a new page, or opens an entirely new page and displays the files.

The huge portion of the internet which uses http:// to find websites which in turn use HTML language for displaying files is called the World Wide Web. Thus the URL http://www.website.com is basically saying:

Ms. Browser, please use the HyperText Transfer Protocol to access the World Wide Web and obtain files from website.com. Then display them on my screen according to the rules written in the file index.htm, which is written in Hypertext Markup Language.

And the amazing thing is… it does!

About the author:

Mark Meshulam offers the Poingo Productivity Suite, a suite of simple software programs which make your work, easier and much more fun.

visit http://www.poingo.com

For nearly thirty years, Michigan’s Lake Superior State
University has released an annual List of Banished Words, a brief
inventory of the year’s most annoyingly popular expressions, with
the recommendation they be “banished from the Queen’s English for
mis-use, over-use and general uselessness.”

This year, the tiresome “metrosexual” and the insufferable “bling
bling” were deservedly condemned, as were several war-inspired
entrants such as “embedded journalist” and “smoking gun.” I was
disappointed that none of my three choices for this annual
dishonor made the cut, however. My nominees for banishment were:
“Guest worker program,” “Matching willing workers with willing
employers,” and the worst offender, “Work Americans won’t do,” as
in “our economy needs illegal immigrants because they do work
Americans won’t do.”

Combined, these three Orwellian phrases are calculated to convey
the impression that there are certain occupations so inherently
dangerous or otherwise disagreeable that we lazy, self-indulgent,
American crybabies must rely on hardy immigrant stock to roll up
their sleeves and get the job done for us. Tell that to a
Pennsylvania coal miner!

Although it’s true that less glamorous jobs are frequently filled
by illegal aliens, the jobs themselves are not intrinsically
unacceptable. Rather, the ready supply of illegal labor has
resulted in many perfectly satisfactory jobs becoming
unacceptable. In short, illegal aliens will work under unsanitary
and unsafe conditions for minimum wage or even less, thereby
lowering standards, and as long as employers can fill jobs by
exploiting illegals, there will simply be no incentive to improve
wages or working conditions.

A recent piece by Nancy L. Othn and Mike Clary in the South
Florida Sun-Sentinel illustrates this principle in action with
the story of Gregorio Ruiz Aviles and Lauro Marquez Hernandez,
two young Mexican illegal alien construction workers crushed to
death in the collapse of a three-story building on which they
were working. Five other men were injured in the accident. The
Florida company which employed them was fined $2.4 million for
having no workers’ compensation insurance, but according to Othn
and Clary, “five months after the deaths of Ruiz and Marquez, few
public officials, employers, workers and immigrant advocates
express much hope that change would come soon in an industry
where undocumented workers willingly take any job they can get.”

Worse still, employers who play by the rules are easily underbid
by their unscrupulous rivals, and the downward pressure on wages
and safety intensifies. And this phenomenon is certain to worsen
– not lessen — under any program which would legalize the
process. Why? Because a “documented” worker is easier to deport,
and will therefore be more likely to do “work Americans won’t do”
to avoid unemployment and ineligibility. A guest worker program
will therefore simply institutionalize the current gray market
for employees who will tolerate the intolerable.

It’s a tenuous doctrine, that American workers are so expensive
that even American companies can’t afford them, and the plan to
extricate ourselves from this invented predicament by pinning our
hopes on the newly legendary Mexican work ethic is flimsier
still. And yet, there is some evidence that muddleheaded
Americans are being persuaded by the hypnotic repetition of
immigration Newspeak issuing from the White House, the Congress,
and the major news media. A February 2004 Gallup Poll found that
46% of Americans support President Bush’s plan to legalize
Mexican nationals currently living here illegally, “as long as
they hold jobs that no U.S. citizen wanted to do.”

George Orwell famously observed that political speech is
“designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and
to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” What else can be
said of a phrase such as “undocumented worker” which presupposes
the subject is working, and transmutes the violation of our
borders into an apparent paperwork mixup? Will we now refer to a
bank robbery as an “unauthorized withdrawal?” And what shall we
call the children of undocumented workers? Undocumented students?

Orwell forewarned us more than fifty years ago that sloppy
language begets foolish thinking — and vice versa — and it’s as
true today as ever. Purposely misleading expressions such as
“work Americans won’t do” are solid proof that big lies still fit
neatly into short phrases.

It’s time we banished them.

About the Author

Mr. Salientian is a regular contributor to PHXnews.com. You can read more of his articles on politics, economics, trade and immigration at HotFrog.org.

I expect you know that donating your time as a volunteer lets you strengthen the bonds of your community as well as assisting people in need. But finding the room for this can be tricky, and before you know it you don’t have nearly as long left to actually do some good. It hardly needs pointing out, when volunteering becomes a team effort with co-workers, it will be far more fun.

For this reason companies like Adaptive Marketing LLC, a firm from Connecticut that developed shopping and financial benefits programs like Leisure Exclusives, are making themselves points of organization for volunteer activities and helping their employees make time for reaching out. Initiatives like these were always annual, limited events — in today’s world, so much more can be achieved. Looking at just one company, Adaptive Marketing has provided its staff with chances to participate in everything from athletic shoe recycling efforts to tree planting days. With the information — date, location, time, specifics of event, et cetera — announced it became very simple for staff to set aside the time for volunteering and what they’d be doing as they did so.

It’s essential to let volunteers support projects according to their own interests. Businesses involved in this like Adaptive Marketing, (who offer to the public programs like Leisure Exclusives) present their staff members with a wide variety of activities in the local area. You’ll soon see your employees promoting green initiatives etc. Adaptive Marketing’s staff members are sure to have a project they’ll enjoy participating in, ensuring they’ll enjoy the time they spend volunteering.

Normally, when companies recommend their staffers to consider volunteering at local schools, it is often to help with a single event or a regularly scheduled, ongoing task. Even those who say they don’t have the time to volunteer can usually commit to the public library’s sale of used books. Lending a helping hand is a practice with a long history at many companies. Goodwill is generated by the projects undertaken by Adaptive Marketing’s staff members over the course of these company-supported initiatives. Something that volunteer activities are sure to do is leave your staff feeling good about themselves, which creates a motivated corporate culture.