Compensation

Today, the Supreme Court of the Great State of South Carolina ruled that a company must pay workers compensation to an illegal alien in 26409 - Curiel v. Environmental Management Services. The final ruling of the court seem in line with the statute:

"Every person engaged in an employment . . . including aliens and also including minors, whether lawfully or unlawfully employed."

Not to mention the opinion in the ruling carries a certain amount of common sense:

"Further, allowing benefits to injured illegal alien workers does not conflict with the IRCA’s policy against hiring them. To the contrary, disallowing benefits would mean unscrupulous employers could hire undocumented workers without the burden of insuring them, a consequence that would encourage rather than discourage the hiring of illegal workers."

Even though the court made a ruling in line with the statute the divisive politicians and talking heads decided this court ruling must be some sort of tragedy that the state General Assembly must fix immediately. One of the first state senators to chime in on this was Glenn McConnell.

Senator McConnell seemed to indicate that this ruling would cheat citizens out of money they put into the state disability insurance fund. He failed to mention the money that so-called illegal immigrants put into the system when they work. Any law to change this statute would result in illegal immigrants putting money into a system that insures everyone except them. The ultimate result would be correspond to the opinion quoted above. Things like this get lost in the propaganda of the times.

The real solution, which is almost always the solution to immigration questions, it for employers to do better due diligence. Instead, people attempt to be as divisive, abusive, and polarizing about this as they can.

Say, "what," again!

I double-dare the airline to change my departure gate again!

On This Date in Caralina Negro History

On or about this date in 1896 my great-grandfather, Black James William, mortgaged his land--formerly belonging to his wife, my great-grandmother-- to buy a horse/mule or two. This story has been a part of the family legacy for over 100 years mainly because James William died sometime between signing the promissory note in September of 1896 and my grandfather's birth in 1897. This led to my great-grandmother having to work not only to raise three children-- aged two, four, and six according to the 1900 census-- but also to pay James William's debt.

Now I have no knowledge of what led to James William's demise after the mortgage was signed, but I have often speculated. I imagine someone incensed in that James William-- a Negro not even 30 years old, in rural South Carolina in the fall or 1896-- had a "mare about 4 years old" and a note on which he had signed his own name. This was less than twenty years after Rutherford B. Hayes brought an end to reconstruction; A Negro who could read and cipher was perceived as a treat; a Negro who had more property or assets that a white man was considered an affront to common decency: Men were lynched for doing less.

Speculation aside, I need to do more research and see if there is a death certificate in the state archives. The family narative requires clarification.

Ticks & Leeches

One of my tasks as a System/LAN/Windows Administrator is putting together performance graphs of various systems I administer. Among these systems is an e-mail content scanner that performs content and virus scanning of incoming e-mail before it reaches the back-end storage server. Like most applications, this e-mail content scanner works fairly well once it is properly configured and the annoyances are beaten out of it. To properly beat the annoyances out of an e-mail gateway, it helps to have current and historical information about its performance in an easy to read web interface-- and 9 out of 10 IT managers love it. To this end, I use MRTG.

My method, while involved, is rather straight forward: Install a configurable SNMP provider on the host(Windows); create custom MIB/OIDs that use the NT Performance Counters provided by the application; populate an MRTG configuration file with these custom OIDs as targets. As long as the performance counters I want to query exist, this works like a charm.

Let me tell you why I am mad: Between major version releases the good folks from whom I purchase e-mail content scanning software decided to replace a counter I considered integral to monitoring the performance of the software: "messages queued for processing." They chose to include a counter of the time difference between the receipt of a message and its processing. While the latter is quite useful, it is no replacement for the former. Who would not want to know how many messages are piled up on the server awaiting an available processing thread? My only conclusion to the rationale for this is they, the software manufacturer, want to sell a plugin (pronounced: custom dll) for the SNMP agent/provider of their choosing.

The workaround: I will write a quick and dirty script to count the files the queues on the content scanning server; make this an extension in my configurable SNMP provider with its own MIB/OID that calls this script; and configure an MRTG target with this OID. Subsequently, I shall prepare myself a sandwich.