RA>Right, and often 'downsizing' is in reality another word for 'let's fire
  >all the older workers so we can hire new, younger ones at half the
Regretfully, I think that's true.  I've heard that the person most apt
to be *downsized* out of a job is a middle management person in his or
her fifties.
  >salary'.  One of the reasons I chose a state civil service job was
  >relative job security (another is that the state here is really big on
  >affirmative action).  Even if one's job is eliminated such as happened to
  >a number of employees when the Department of Revenue took over the
  >State Lottery Board a year and a half ago, one is pretty much guaranteed
  >another state job at the same pay range.
They also have wonderful pension plans, and lots of vacation times -- or
at least they do in New Jersey.
RA>I think English is a better bet than Esperanto as a 'universal' language
  >since it is so widely spoken in the world already (thanks to British
  >imperialism in the past).  Esperanto is probably easier to learn for
  >somebody who speaks a Romance language, but other than the fact that it's
  >an artificial construct, it is based primarily in the Romance languages.
  >That leaves out a lot of languages.  Of course, one might say that
  >English leaves out more and is one of the harder language to learn, but
  >it already is widely spoken, which gives it an advantage.
English is already the business language of the world, so most
capitalists know it quite well.  It is also the international air
control language.
And it really isn't that hard to learn to speak.  I was talking with a
linguist a while ago, who said English is actually one of the easier
languages to learn to speak, because it has only two true tenses for the
verbs, doesn't conjugate nouns at all, and has a very limited number of
sounds (I think it was 44 sounds, but I'm not sure of that number). But
it is a difficult language to learn to read and write, principally
because English is a hybrid language, and takes its spelling rules from
a multitude of other tongues.  It's about the only language in the world
where "ou" can have any one of seven sounds (or was that nine?)  And
where else would "said" rhyme with "head?"  Or "height" rhyme with
"mite?"
                 Sondra
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 þ SLMR 2.1a þ Flowers grow out of dark moments.   Corita Kent
--- Opus-CBCS 1.7x via O_QWKer 1.7 
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