Wading In

Thursday, July 26, 2012 CA Public Retirement is (371) Grand By Kelvin Wade I don’t hate wealthy people. I grew up reading Richie Rich comic books and marveling at his ginormous house, robot maid Irona and butler Cadbury. On TV, I watched Jed Clampett strike it rich and move his kinfolk to Beverly Hills, saw George (RIP, Sherman Hemsley) and Weezy Jefferson move on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky and saw white Park Avenue millionaire Phillip Drummond adopt two black kids from Harlem. It’s not the American way to hate the rich because it’s the American way to aspire to “make it.” Still, when certain news stories are brought to your attention, it can’t help but tweak your sense of economic justice. Last week, the Orange County Register reported that a new person had landed atop the list of highest-paid retirees in what they call the California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s $100,000 Club. These are public employees who have retired making more than $100,000 a yea...

Thursday, July 12, 2012 Does anyone like CAPTCHAs? By Kelvin Wade | I’m all for computer security, but I can’t stand CAPTCHAs. What’s a CAPTCHA? It stands for the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It’s a little test you usually encounter when logging into a website or posting a comment on a website. The test usually has the user copy a word that is either behind crisscrossed lines or the word is distorted. It is to make sure the responder is a human and not a computer program trying to access the site. Evidently, computers have difficulty with CAPTCHAs. What makes them think that anyone has any experience in deciphering words that look like someone wrote them during an earthquake? I feel like in order to practice deciphering CAPTCHAs I should try to read a book while hammered. Sometimes they’ll overlap the letters to make it more difficult. This usually results in me making several attempts to get it right. If the CAPTCHA is too difficult, y...

Immigrants make a great birthday present Fairfield Daily Republic | July 05, 2012 By Kelvin Wade President Obama’s recent decision to grant temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants brought here as children raised condemnation from his usual right-wing critics but a new Bloomberg poll finds 64 percent of likely voters approve of the policy shift. Illegal immigration has always been a hot-button issue, but it’s more so now, given the unprecedented changes going on in this country. I’ve long suspected that when some people shout about “taking their country back” and “real America,” what they’re really referring to is the changing demographics. America elected a half African-American president with less than half of the white vote. Earlier this year, for the first time ever, whites made up less than half of all births. It’s the latest reminder that before the middle of this century, the U.S. will be majority-minority. Just like California. Just like Fairfield, for that matter. A...