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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (180582)	1/15/2004 11:23:25 PM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1575181

RE: "The fact remains that California's budget is out of control and sacrifices have to be made." Very true, but they should also pay attention to PR. Otherwise it creates a backlash. They've got the PR side wrong on this and it's creating problems. On Saturday, I saw about 6 cop cars separately in one area on Hwy 280 pulling speeders over, except 2 of the cars were driving with dangerous anger for absolutely no valid reason at all. When I saw the first 3 cop cars, I thought, "oh good, they are finally clamping down on the speeders." Then I wondered, "why now all of a sudden?" Then it dawned on me, the budget cuts announced on Friday have appropriately motivated them to clamp down on speeders to generate revenue and apparently commission per speeder. So I thought, this is a good thing since it means they are going to clamp down on speeders now. But all of a sudden, a mile further down, over a stretch of three miles, there were two more cop cars (driving about 3 miles separate from each other and unrelated to each other) but they were both driving with visible anger - you know how an angry driver is very visible to others on the road. It's one thing if a cop car is driving fast straight ahead, but it's another thing if they are threateningly driving at multiple cars on their right or left with anger. (I was behind watching. A cop car would drive at an angle to the flow of traffic, and veer towards a conservative slow looking SUV, probably scary the crap out of the driver. And then he went after the next car, and did the same thing, and so on. And it wasn't like he was trying to get close to look inside the cars. It appeared like he was playing some dangerous revengeful game. ) I've never seen such dangerous driving out of cop cars, for no valid reason other than they appeared to be venting their anger over the budgets. So, on one hand the budget cut means some of them will be doing their jobs in a better way (say 66% of them, getting more speeders) while there could be say 2 out of 6 cops that are going to be conducting poor behavior, in dangerous ways. That puts us on the level of a developing country. Perception is so important when keeping people happy - and yet our State government made such a huge mistake by not increasing taxes a smidgeon (even a small tad) on us, so it's making things look like this is all falling on the backs of police officers. It has the appearances of being a classist divide between rich and poor. I hope this blows over. RE: "You don't want the handicapped to have to sacrifice, but someone else doesn't want the children to sacrifice, and someone else doesn't want the poor to sacrifice, and someone else doesn't want the aged to sacrifice. " Agree. The line item I pointed out, is the only one that seems to cover all of the ones you mentioned. It's not a strategic cut, certainly not from a PR standpoint. Today, an employee (who is a solid worker, polite, trustworthy, drives safely and never goes above the speed limit) told me something quite unusual and concerning. A cop was at a gym for 20 minutes where one he was working out. As he left the gym, he made eye contact with the officer. The officer followed him out, drove behind him for one short block, got to a light and stopped, drove not even one short block and the cop pulled him over and gave him a ticket for speeding and asked him to take a drunk driving test (which of course he passed.) I mean, this is completely off the wall and uncalled for. The employee asked the officer why would he think he's drunk when they both saw each other at teh gym and why did he think he was speeding when he was only driving 35 mph according to his speedometer! And I know his speedometer works because he drives slower than molasses and that prompted me to look at his speedometer. (The cop claimed he was going 45mph, when he wasn't. And of course, the cop didn't even use radar.) One of our engineers wants to go over to that part of town (San Carlos) and take a GPS device with time stamp and prove that this other employee's car can't even accelerate to 45 mph in that short period of time. They have fortunately decided not to do that. I think the only thing he is guilty of, is looking like a hightech worker during the week of police budget cuts --- never mind the fact that hightech folks have had wage freezes across the board for two years, at least at our startup. This employee is an ethical employee and fortunately has a bigger perspective in life to realize that something undue is happening to the police officer. I give the employee credit, he looked beyond himself and asked with concern, is this an indicator of the future conduct of police officers? It's not good if the police are so angry. Simple PR with even teh tiniest tax increase would have avoided this. Now we've got some police targeting innocent hightech workers with an unusual amount of hostility. I told the employee to draft a letter to the judge with the facts of the matter - stalking an honest hightech worker out of a gym and making a false accusation is extremely inappropriate. He's never had a ticket in his life, simply because he never speeds. I always operated under the assumption the police were always honest, but there is unfortunately the occasional bad apple. Regards, Amy J