night reader's blog

Shame on Southern California Edison

What would you think if a company fired hundreds of employees to bring in temporary guest workers to do their jobs, at a lower salary?

That's exactly what's been happening at our neighbors at Southern California Edison. There's a huge guest worker program called H1B, and it's being used to replace American IT workers with foreign IT workers.

Mainland Chinese Moving to El Monte

The LA Times recently had a story about Chinese moving into El Monte.

They didn't get into the specifics of which Chinese, but it's the Mainland Chinese, not the Taiwanese who flocked to Arcadia, or Hong Kongers in MPK.

Curly Howard, RIP

Everyone in SSG knows the Convalescent Home across the street from Potrero Heights, but did you know that "Curly" Howard of the Three Stooges ended his days there?

Black Friday Protests at Wal Mart Planned

I got word a month ago that the OUR Walmart organization is planning protests for "Black Friday" which is the Friday after Thanksgiving.

I'm not sure where they will be, but there will probably be something significant in Los Angeles.

La Merced Neighborhood, Montebello, website

Found this on a web search:

La Merced, Montebello.

It's a short, fun read.

The Coming Ring City Effect

The Death and Life of Chicago

We're not totally headed in this direction, but we are seeing a trend of an expensive downtown, and people with money moving away from the suburbs, leaving the overall economic situation in suburbs more precarious.

New Verification Questions

We recently had a terrible flood of registrations from spammers, and just blew it on approving users, because so few of them are legit. To combat this, I changed the "CAPTCHA" feature for registering an account. We now ask some Rosemead-specific questions that should be pretty easy for any locals, and not too hard for anyone in the surrounding communities. You can look it up on the web.

They might be tough for someone from out of the area, or another country.

Here are the questions. Tell me if any of them are too hard.

Wal Mart Fined $81 Million for Dumping Hazardous Waste

HuffPo reports that WM plead guilty to charges of violating the clean water act and other laws by dumping fertilizer and other hazardous waste into sewers.