Discover Top Posts Tagged with #hell freezing over

It’s not supposed to get that cool.

Available in over 20 print-on-demand products, including stickers, tee shirts, other apparel, blankets, phone cases, wall art, and more.

#typography #digital art #design #hell freezing over #weather reports from hell #pessimistic #pessimism #anxiety #redbubble #print on demand

US inauguration moving indoors because it’s going to be cold in Washington on Monday… There’s a « Hell Freezing Over » joke in there somewhere…

#us inauguration #hell freezing over #definitely not my president

Snowballs in Hell

I can't vouch for what's going on in Hell at the moment, but I can verify the fact that the Detroit Lions did, indeed, win a playoff game last Sunday because I watched every play.

I can also say that all of my relatives in Detroit - as well as those of us who were born and reared there - are tickled pink over it.

It's been a long drought. Before Sunday's 24-23 win over the Rams of Los Angeles, the Lions hadn't won a playoff game since Jan. 5, 1992. And who could forget the 2008 season, when they lost all 16 of their games ...?

This Sunday the Lions will face the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Detroit's Ford Field on their way to Feb. 11 Super Bowl.

#John Schneide #Detroit Lions #first playoff win since 1992 #Hell freezing over

At least 36 dead, scores injured as trains collide in Greece

#hell freezing over

Uniting the country, one PR disaster at a time

Hat tip to my old pal Hank for catching this interesting little nugget. Even amid the Manichean political divisions, gridlock, and paralysis that have been gripping US society in recent years, seems there’s at least one no-no that unites all sides of the American ideological spectrum in outrage and revulsion. The New York Times recently put up a much-shared investigative reporting piece by Julia Preston on the heavily criticized practice of replacing American workers with overseas imports on the H-1B visa by many American companies, adding insult to injury by requiring the laid-off workers to train their replacements. (Disney was highlighted though Southern California Edison, several tech and banking firms and Fossil, a Texas watchmaker, are also giving their PR managers ulcers right now.) The H-1B was designed to bring in overseas workers to fill mission-critical positions for which there clearly weren’t Americans with the training and skills to meet essential needs. Ah, but roads to hell, good intentions and whatnot... As the article (and many other media reports, based on what was on the car radio last night) made clear, the visa program has been leading to abuses of the cheap labor variety, with loopholes used to oust and supplant American workers in favor of cheaper hires from abroad. Needless to say, not the original idea with the visa.

Even needlesser to say (someday that’ll be an actual idiom, goshdarnit), it’s raised the ire of just about everyone. And as my eagle-eyed pal Hank took note, Hell seems to be freezing over, since sites strongly associated with (what’s identified as) the American Left -- Daily Kos (and the NYT comments page itself) among them -- as well as the American Right -- Free Republic, Breitbart, American Thinker among others -- have joined forces to thrash the associated companies and call for boycotts. My oh my, methinks when you can get both DKos and Breitbart to agree on, well, just about anything, that’s a sign you’ve really stepped in it. Based on the radio report last night, seems like just about every non-ideological, non-partisan group is also pretty ticked off about this, including immigrant advocacy groups who are livid at the exploitation and abuse of imported workers (often from India) on the H-1B -- which is held by the employer rather than the immigrant -- for low wages and often grueling conditions.

Maybe the most amusing aspect of this brouhaha for the more cynically-minded is the hoisted-on-their-own-petard element for whatever managers and execs thought this was a good idea. This is light-years beyond the “penny wise and pound foolish” meme -- this has the whiff of “karma’s just nabbed some awfully big fish.” The companies involved (maybe) shaved a small chunk of their labor costs by axing the American workers from their payrolls and replacing with overseas recruits. (And apparently -- no expertise claimed here, just what the radio-quoted experts were saying -- even this is debatable, since any cost savings are often eaten up by accumulated technical errors and security breaches due to the loss of the experienced American workforce.) Yet in return, they’ve been met with what can only be called an epic public relations disaster. Particularly in discretionary industries like entertainment, the angry public responses and calls to boycott (apparently repeated ad infinitum on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, here on Tumblr and across social media) have real teeth. So in saving what amounts to pennies with the H-1B replacements, the respective departments in these firms have probably cost their companies potentially billions in lost revenue, not to mention permanent damage from the loss of public trust, brand cachet, and respect. An object lesson, I suppose one could say, in bean-counting short-term expenses while ignoring (or downplaying) the human element and basic dignity of the workers: Karma really can have a wicked sense of humor sometimes.