This year has blown away the annual average for deadly tornadoes in the U.S. (28) with a barrage that numbers 50 and counting. This April was the worst tornado month on record, and storms throughout the year have ripped through Alabama, Massachusetts, Missouri and elsewhere. And now, as tornado season winds down, the late-summer hurricane season is about to begin.
Ernst Kiesling, professor of civil engineering at Texas Tech University, says there's not much you could do if a tornado scoring a 5 on the EF (enhanced Fujita) scale bears down on your home (and in the case of tornadoes, with their smaller path of destruction, many people would rather gamble with fate than invest in armoring their homes with costly technologies). But if you want to try to brace your home against the howling winds of twisters or hurricanes, there is a spectrum of technologies available, from roof clips and window shutters at the more inexpensive end to reinforcements for doors and walls at the high end. And if you do nothing to safeguard your home, Kiesling says, at the very least, protect your family with an in-home safe room or underground shelter.
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?The tech industry is, frankly, being greedy. They are going back and asking for changes to language they helped write and blatantly trying to roll back requirements that give high-skilled American workers a fair shot at getting a job,” said AFL-CIO legislative Representative Andrea Zuniga DiBitetto about new proposals to ease the hiring of high-skilled foreign workers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly called Senator Orin Hatch to push more tech-friendly changes to the comprehensive immigration reform bill. Among Hatch’s most contentious suggestions is an end to a 90-day wait period before companies can solicit applicants with a foreign work visa. According to Reuters, under Hatch’s amendment, employers would only have to make a good-faith effort to hire Americans. While, conceptually, comprehensive immigration reform has strong bi-partisan support, its passage is far from certain. Reuters could not report whether unions would support the bill, should Hatch’s changes go through. Many unions have been long-time opponents of high-skilled immigration reform. Most recently, the union-backed Economic Policy Institute?published (and criticized) a study on why the need for high-skilled immigrants was a myth. Should the unions lose this latest battle in the Senate, it will demonstrate their decline relative to the tech industry.
