DISQUS

I wish this was true. I hope it is true.

However, as you hinted at, most Americans are not educated and don't really care about the future of this country. And even after watching this interview I'd be surprised if most of the people were as shocked as you and I are. I'm sure the majority of the country doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is, and has no experience with foreign policy, or any interest in foreign policy, so I don't think even something like this will affect their vote.

I wish and hope that you are right about this being the end of the Republican campaign, but I fear you are not.

I have no comment about the iPhone or the Blackberry, I have never used an iPhone. But I also use PhoneTag or Simulscribe or whatever they are calling it these days and I absolutely love it.

At first I didn't really like it but at this point I haven't actually listened to a voice message in months. I have it set to notify me via SMS and then email the message to me, and that works great.

I can't say enough good things about PhoneTag/Simulscribe.

I started using Simulscribe a few months ago. I did the free 30 day trial. At first I found it somewhat useful but not all that great. Now I can't live without it. Sometimes I don't check my voicemail at all for weeks.

My one complaint is when I had it set to send me the messages as SMS each message would come in as 4-8 SMS's and that started burning up the SMS's I am allowed and they would usually come in in the wrong order anyway.

So now I get them as email, which I can check from my phone. I have it set to SMS me a notification of a new message, then I wait a few minutes and check my email and bam! It is great!

I am not sleeping at night, and the sinking stock market does make me feel nauseous, but personally for me that is all eclipsed by another situation in which I lost a lot of money on paper. That amount was far more than I ever had invested in the stock market.

However if the market was doing well that would still give me some possible upside, which would make me feel better as opposed to the current situation which doesn't help at all. The economy does scare me and if I weren't occupied with this other situation it probably would keep me up at night.

I have never worked in California, but my wife grew up there. She told me that once an employee had been working for x number of days they couldn't be fired without "cause." She said that there was no at will employment. She was talking about lower level retail and service jobs where there is likely no contract or agreement.

I might be wrong. This is second hand information. Doing some quick research it appears that I am wrong about that.

When my contract is up for negotiation in a few months I may try to do something with the non-compete. Probably not worth making a big fuss over since there are some other things I definitely want to make a big fuss over.

All of your points above are correct. I signed my non-compete clause in my contract because it wasn't worth my time or money to try to get the employer's large law firm to change it or take it out.

I expected it to be enforced when I signed it, but afterwards I heard that they are difficult to enforce. However the only way I will lose my job is if my company goes bankrupt, in which case I would not expect it to be enforced.

As for employees in California, as an employer I much prefer New York. California has way too many rules and regulations about how and when you can fire people, etc. If our company was in CA we would be out of business because we wouldn't have been able to downsize when we needed to without paying huge legal fees or having to pay the employees large settlements.

I am not a lawyer so I may not completely understand California law, but that is my general sense of it from what I have heard.

As an employee, I do agree that non-competes are ridiculous, however if I was the employer, or if any of my employees had contracts, I would very likely feel differently.