There are some products on the market that make it impossible for traffic cameras to take a clear picture of your license plates. (A word of caution: Clicking on the link above sends you to a site that automatically plays a video clip. You might want to turn your computer speakers down or put your headphones on.)
A couple of them are films that you can stick on your plates and another is a spray that makes your plate highly reflective. They do not look different to the naked eye, but the camera sees the plates as overexposed and unreadable. See this TV story. Here are some others. Minneapolis-St. Paul’s KARE-11 did the story in May. KOMO-TV in Seattle put the products to the test, too.
Some jurisdictions have laws against anything that makes a license plate unreadable — but there may be a question about whether this product does that, since only cameras have a problem reading the plate.
A 2005 Los Angeles Times story said that cops are not happy about these products, but can’t do much about them:
Motorists who oppose red-light-camera enforcement view it as intrusive. They often point to cases where drivers have been wrongly ticketed because of equipment malfunctions or human errors. Critics of red-light cameras contend cities install the cameras primarily to generate revenues.
“It’s all about the revenues, not safety,” [Joe] Scott, [marketing director at PhantomPlate Inc.,] says. “Law-abiding citizens are being ticketed unjustly.”
But the LAPD’s Jack Richter says he’s appalled that a product would allow people to run red lights without being punished. People who are spending money on a spray to hide their license plate numbers “are going through a lot of effort to break the law. Why don’t they save themselves the money and drive safely?”
Meanwhile, Scott says sales of Photoblocker skyrocketed during the holiday season.
“It’s the perfect gift. It’s permanent. It will last a lifetime,” he says.
Of course, if you’re in the habit of running red lights, your life expectancy may not be all that long.
The Great Bailout
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution probed the government’s crop subsidy program and looked at how your tax dollars prop up big growers and squeeze the little guy.
Farmers from Georgia to California planted millions of acres of cotton last spring knowing their crop will probably sell at a loss this fall.
But they planted anyway, confident that American taxpayers would bail them out with billions of dollars in subsidies. Just as they did last year, and the years before that.
U.S. subsidies for cotton and selected other crops, born in the Great Depression to protect against the occasional bad year, have become a multibillion-dollar entitlement. The program undermines free trade and props up big farmers at the expense of small growers both here and abroad.
At least 30 types of subsidies insulate many of the nation’s 2.1 million farms from loss or disaster, a degree of government protection unsurpassed in private industry.
Last year the subsidies cost $23 billion, almost all from taxes. Of that, cotton growers collected $3.4 billion.
The government pays if farmers grow too much, or nothing at all. It pays when it rains too much or too little. It pays much of a farmer’s insurance premium and then, acting as the insurer, helps pay off losses.
By guaranteeing growers a minimum price, subsidies encourage them to plant what Washington will pay for, not what would earn a profit on the free market.
“We’re just playing a game,” said Stephen Houston Sr., a Miller County cotton farmer. “[Market] prices don’t have anything to do with what we’re doing. We’re just looking at the government payments.”
It’s called “farming the subsidy,” and it has turned many farmers — once symbols of self-reliance — into government dependents.
A study by the Environmental Working Group, a frequent critic of the subsidy program, said that, while the vast majority of the 2 million farmers and ranchers who have received disaster aid over the past 21 years have received it infrequently, 21,000 recipients collected disaster aid more than 11 years out of the 21, amounting to $2.8 billion, or more than 10 percent of the total payments.
The EWG said “these chronic beneficiaries received an average of $118,000 in disaster aid over the period, and collected aid checks on average for 12 of the 21 years.”
What is the EWG and how is it funded? Check here.
Get local. You can find out how much people in any ZIP code take in from crop subsidies by going to this Web site. Just pop in a ZIP code (really any ZIP code, including Beverly Hills, 90210) and you will see that people who are a long way from hands on the plow still take in crop subsidy dollars.
I didn’t know until I started playing on the database that we actually have a subsidy for sunflowers.
“Off-Ramp” for Working Women
ABC News took note of a trend:
The exodus of working women is now occurring in numbers too large for employers to ignore. According to the Harvard Business Review, 43 percent of professional women with children step off the fast track at some point. On average, they stay off for 2.2 years.
But while 93 percent of these high-powered professionals want to return to work, only 40 percent find an “on-ramp” to meaningful employment.
“You’re suspected of having lost your edge. You’re not a player anymore,” said Sylvia Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy.
Faced with this giant leak in the talent pipeline, more employers have begun actively recruiting off-rampers, or trying to ensure they never leave.
A Pepperdine University business school study noted:
“According to Pepperdine Graziadio School’s market research, we estimate that in Southern California, more than 500,000 women with bachelor’s degrees who have families have left the workforce,” said Linda Livingstone, dean of the Graziadio School of Business and Management. “This large number combined with the survey results generates several questions. What happens to women when they return to work? Why are only half of executives concerned about women leaving the workforce? Is it because they don’t view it as a problem or that the topic simply isn’t an issue to them? Well, we’re learning more and more that leading executives should be concerned about women leaving the workplace and that women face significant challenges if they want to return to work.”
“Many talented, committed women take off-ramps, but an overwhelming majority can’t wait to get back in,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an author of a Harvard Business Review study based on women on- and off-ramping (“Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success,” Harvard Business Review, March 2005). According to the survey, “Off-ramping is an important phenomenon. Thirty-seven percent of highly qualified women voluntarily leave their careers for a period of time — i.e., they off-ramp. Women who’ve taken time off typically find re-entry into the workforce enormously difficult. Ninety-three percent of women who off-ramp want to get back to work, yet only 74 percent succeed in obtaining jobs and only 40 percent return to full-time jobs.”
The Harvard Business Review study that was conducted also found, “Off-ramping among highly qualified women is often triggered by family responsibilities. However, despite the brevity of their time out, women lose an average of 18 percent of their earning power when they off-ramp. This figure rises to a staggering 37 percent when women leave for three or more years.”
Prisoner Organs for Sale in China
Watch this astonishing video from the BBC. (You can watch the video by clicking the link to the right of the story’s headline.) A reporter went undercover to a Chinese hospital to hear, firsthand, from a surgeon and then an agent for the hospital, that the hospital had plenty of organs for sale and that the organs were from prisoners who had been executed.
The hospital’s agent says the prisoners donate the organs as a way to repay society for their crimes.
A Wonderful Waste of Time
So there’s something keeping you from attending a Poynter seminar and walking the sandy beaches of St. Pete? Take a virtual walk in the sand anyway. I needed something to get my mind off that sickening story of the guy who killed the Amish children.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor’s Note: Al’s Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.