I have a coldframe I cobbled together last fall. Later I saw one for sale for $25. I thought it an unusual price so I ordered it. I'll replace my own with it since it is deeper and angled. If anybody is interested, you can get one from Harborfreight.com
What is a coldframe?
Here is what they look like and what they are used for.
Here is the one I bought. Pretty simple.
If it's made where most of Harbor Freight's stuff is made......support your local dictator!
The New York Times December 31, 2005 Rule by Law In Worker's Death, View of China's Harsh Justice By JIM YARDLEY
YUJIAGOU, China - From the prison cell where he contemplated an executioner's bullet, a migrant worker named Wang Binyu gave an anguished account of his wasted life. Unexpectedly, it rippled across China like a primal scream.
For three weeks, the brutal murders Mr. Wang committed after failing to collect unpaid wages were weighed on the Internet and in Chinese newspapers against the brutal treatment he had endured as a migrant worker. Public opinion shouted for mercy; lawyers debated the fairness of his death sentence. Others saw the case as a bloody symptom of the harsh inequities of Chinese life.
But then, in late September, the furor disappeared as suddenly as it had begun. Online discussion was censored and news media coverage was almost completely banned. Mr. Wang's final appeal was rushed to court. His father, never notified, learned about the hearing only by accident. His chosen defense lawyer was forbidden from participating.
"All of you are on the same side," Mr. Wang, 28, shouted during the hearing, his father said in an interview here in the family's home village in northern Gansu Province. "If you want to kill me, just kill me."
On Oct. 19, they did. Mr. Wang was executed so quickly, and quietly, that it took weeks for the word to fully trickle out that he was dead.
China executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined. By some estimates, the number of executions is more than 10,000 a year. The government's relentless death penalty machine has long been its harshest tool for maintaining political control and curbing crime and corruption.
But it has now become a glaring uncertainty about China's commitment to the rule of law. There is widespread suspicion, even within the government, that too many innocent people are sentenced to death. This year, a raft of cases came to light in which wrongful convictions had led to death sentences, or, in one well-publicized case, the execution of an innocent man.
Reforming capital punishment has become a priority within the Communist Party-controlled legal system, partly because of international pressure to reduce abuses. Within the party-run legislative system, there is a broader debate about how to improve criminal law.
But achieving those reforms is hardly certain. Hard-liners are loath to restrict the power of the police and the courts to take a tough line. Death penalty reforms announced by the People's Supreme Court - and broadly trumpeted in the state news media - are mostly just a return to the status quo of 1980.
The case of Wang Binyu lacked the moral clarity of an innocent man wrongly convicted. He killed four people in a rampage after a final dispute over wages. But his saga of abuse and disdain from his bosses resonated deeply with a public disgusted with corruption and inequality and resentful of a legal system perceived as favoring the wealthy and well connected.
"Wang was forced to fight against those who exploit and tread on the poor," one person wrote at a Chinese Web site. "Why is the law always tough on the poor?"
Mr. Wang's case also illustrates how a system built for convictions has few safeguards or protections for a defendant facing death. Officials in the High Court of Ningxia Autonomous Region, the area in western China where the case was heard, refused several requests for interviews. But Wu Shaozhi, the Beijing lawyer who tried to represent Mr. Wang, said the Ningxia courts obviously wanted fast results.
Before the appeal, the Wang family signed power of attorney to Mr. Wu. But Mr. Wu said court officials had initially lied, telling him the appeal was over. Then they refused to let him enter the case. Instead, Mr. Wang was represented by a lawyer approved by the court.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wu noted, the same judges who heard the appeal also concurrently handled a mandatory final review of the case. It meant that judges were reviewing their own ruling - a practice that legal experts said is not uncommon and provided little real check and balance on the use of the death penalty.
"An unjust procedure will undoubtedly lead to unjust results," Mr. Wu said.
China is wary enough about its death penalty system that it has long designated its number of executions as a state secret. A hint at the number came last year when a high-level delegate to the National People's Congress publicly estimated that it was "nearly 10,000." In 2004, Amnesty International documented at least 3,400 executions - out of 3,797 worldwide that year - but cautioned that China's number was probably far higher. Outside scholars have put the annual number as high as 15,000.
In late October, the People's Supreme Court announced that it would reverse a decision from the early 1980's that ceded the final review on many death penalty cases to provincial high courts. Legal analysts say Deng Xiaoping, then the paramount leader, ordered the move out of anger that courts were moving too slowly to crack down on crime. The shift meant that provincial courts could often operate without any oversight.
Under the new policy, the People's Supreme Court will reclaim responsibility for reviewing all capital cases. The state news media have estimated that executions could drop by as much as 30 percent - an estimate that could not be proved but that implied deep flaws within the current system.
"They feel that mistakes were made in so many cases," said Yi Yanyou, an associate professor at Tsinghua University Law School, in explaining the motive for the change. Mr. Yi said the new changes would be meaningful, but did not represent reform, because they merely re-established central control. One idea for a change that he offered was to require unanimous consent among judicial panels making final reviews.
He Weifang, a liberal constitutional scholar at Beijing University, said the new changes should improve the review process, but argued that only deeper constitutional reform, to establish a more independent judiciary, could remove the political pressures that can seep into many high-profile death cases.
Out in the arid hills of southern Gansu where farmers scratch a living from soil that seems as fertile as chalk, Mr. Wang's family is unaware of such legal debates. At age 15, Mr. Wang left home for migrant work after a childhood marred by poverty and tragedy. When he was a young child, his mother died after an infection from a botched sterilization. Family planning officials had ordered the procedure after she gave birth to Mr. Wang's younger brother. The family sued, without success.
Mr. Wang worked at a succession of migrant jobs until he took a job three years ago wrapping steel pipes in the power plant of a factory in Ningxia. His younger brother, Binyin, who also worked at the factory, described the bosses as brutal men who beat Binyu and later mocked him when he became sick with ulcers.
The bosses also withheld Binyu's salary for two years, a problem common to migrant workers. This spring, his father called to say he urgently needed surgery for a leg fracture. The brothers decided to quit and return home. But first they needed to collect more than $1,000 in unpaid wages.
For weeks, Wang Binyu approached the bosses to collect the money. At one point, Wu Hua, a foreman, promised to pay the brothers if they would work a few more weeks. They did so, but still were not paid. "Once, my brother went to the bosses and began crying and begging them to pay him," Wang Binyin said.
Finally this May, the factory boss, Chen Jiwei, relented and paid the 2004 salary, but only after making large deductions for fees and boarding expenses. He then refused to pay the 2005 wages until next year.
Frustrated, Wang Binyu sought help from the local labor bureau, but was told it had no jurisdiction. He went to the courts, but was told a legal case would take months. He then returned to the labor bureau, where a senior official agreed to intervene and persuaded a boss, Wu Xinguo, to pay the back wages within five days. It seemed like a victory.
But after leaving the labor bureau, Wu Xinguo barred the brothers from their dormitory. Later that night, locked out of their room, the brothers began beating on Wu Xinguo's door to demand payment. Wu Hua, the foreman, and others soon arrived and tried to run off the Wang brothers. The group began pushing and slapping Wang Binyu until a fight broke out. Wang Binyu, who was carrying a fruit knife, exploded in a rage that would end with four people dead and one injured.
Wang Binyin said he tried to pull his older brother away. He recalls saying: "You can't do this. We still have an old father at home. What am I going to do?" When the rampage ended, Wang Binyu tossed his knife in the Yellow River and turned himself in at a local police station. As it turned out, the two top bosses - Mr. Chen and Wu Xinguo - escaped harm.
Mr. Wang's initial trial, on June 29, ended with a death sentence. His family was not notified of the trial date and did not attend. He seemed destined to be one of the thousands of people executed each year with little public notice. But on Sept. 4, the New China News Agency, the government's news service, published a jailhouse interview with Mr. Wang that was astonishing for its content and for the mere fact that it was printed.
"I want to die," Mr. Wang said. "When I am dead, nobody can exploit me anymore. Right?"
Of his crime, Mr. Wang said, "I just could not take it any longer. I had taken enough from them." But, he later added, "I should not have killed the other people. I did not mean to let it happen."
Finally, he offered a lament for his fellow migrant workers. "My life is a small thing," he said. "I hope that society will pay attention and respect us."
Chinese journalists say the authors of the article picked the case because they thought it dovetailed with a campaign by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to help peasants. Newspapers, assuming the interview signaled official approval, jumped on the story.
Interviews with legal scholars followed, with some arguing that the system should be nimble enough to give Mr. Wang a more lenient sentence. Internet discussion boards were filled with indignation.
But the coverage was put to a sudden stop. Internet search engines were ordered to censor Wang Binyu's name, and newspapers were told to drop the story before the appeal was heard in late September. Most likely, the public outrage had alarmed central government officials who did not want to see a death sentence so openly questioned. From his jail cell, Wang Binyu told his younger brother that he thought local officials were eager to execute him, because a reversal of the death sentence could harm their careers.
The appeal was held in secret. Mr. Wang's father, Wang Liding, happened to bring his son a pair of shoes a day earlier. Otherwise, he would not have known. At one point, the father said that he shouted out during the proceeding because prosecutors said his son's wages had been fully paid. The elder Mr. Wang was briefly removed after the outburst.
Now, the family has still not collected the unpaid wages owed the dead son. Donations have helped them build a new room on their crumbling house. The father has wrapped the green booklet certifying his son's cremation in folded paper. It is his last record of his son.
In October, before the execution, court officials in Ningxia called the father with what he thought was good news. He was told he could come collect his son's unpaid salary. He traveled for more than a day to Ningxia from Gansu. But when he arrived, he found that the lure of wages had been a lie. Officials wanted him to sign his son's execution warrant.
Illiterate, the father could only smudge the paper with his thumb.
"It was wrong of him to kill people," the father said. "But there was a cause."
If you want to examine the circumstances for fairness surrounding every consumer item , you will most likely starve.
The globalisation concept benefits the consumer, provides economic benefit to third world countries and others wanting to improve their trade. That's why the outsourcing takes place. It's been happening ever since the end of the civil war. The problem is that the American worker takes it on the chin and is left to hs own devices for a different living. That's not pretty either but it's the way things work these days.
The NY Times and some of the other media love these "misery" stories and present them much like they did from the ghetto misery stories of 40 years ago.
Very few Chinese citizens benefit significantly from the factories which make the goods that end up here.
"Forbid" is a mild word for it. Suggest "union" and it's likely you'll find yourself in jail by the end of the day.
If prices on Chinese goods rose significantly due to wages becoming more like ours, there would be financial catastrophe here. The Wal Mart economy supports small towns which would've otherwise vanished for lack of jobs.
You've mixed a lot of apples and oranges there. Every Chinese citizen has benefitted from China's improved economy in one way or another. Every new road, every communication improvement, every project in some way benefits the Chinese. You apparently think there should be a classless society but there are always the privileged. I don't know what any of what you said has to do with coal mining accidents. China is still a socialist country and they do it any way they want but I doubt pulling the plug on trade with China would be any kind of good thing. I don't know of any communist governments that allowed unions.
As to junk products, you need to do some homework. Would you buy a pair of pliers made in the USA for $12 or would you buy the same pliers with the same exact specifications from China for $3. Hint. They won't make those pliers in the USA for very much longer. The fact is simple. Business goes where labor is cheaper in order to lower the price to the consumer. That is the nature of the beast of outsourcing.
China can take care of their own social structure without any help but the west still pushes for better human rights as they should. The fact that it is changing at all can only be good for them IMO. The government will change in time but don't look for any classless society. Socialism has demonstrated that it's no utopian system.
How come? It would mean less outsourcing to China and business would start looking elsewhere.
Hmm. Where? You don't simply up & move your t-shirt operation to another country in a week.
I think it's handy to be able to discount what a lousy place China is in terms of human rights, because it enables people to pretend everything's fine. Then, they can get back to doing whatever it is they prefer to thinking. Nose picking, watching Oprah, etc.
optimistic)
I'm sorry Doug. I just think your business acumen is lacking a bit, but I really don't understand the hostility toward a country making progress in many areas.
Progress in one area does not cure horrors in other areas, such as human rights, working conditions and environmental problems, all of which the Chinese government brushes off like these things were nobody else's business. It's simply wrong to support a system like that. If you worked for a company that treated its workers like trash, you'd be looking elsewhere for work, and in the meantime, you'd be telling any who'd listen that they shouldn't send business to the company.
[...]
Hah! Well said!
What's REALLY interesting is how mainline American churches, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, maybe others by now, vote to boycott trading with Israel because of what they perceive as its human rights violations [1]. One of their targets is the Caterpillar Corporation.
The Church of England, a state religion, also just jumped on the "boycott Israel" bandwagon.
Not a peep out of these chuches re: China, the world's major human rights violator, nor the 22 Arab countries, all dictatorships, all repressive regimes that consistently violate human rights.
[1] Awful stuff! Keeping murders from infiltrating their borders and blowing up innocent civilians! Tracking and arresting where possible, killing where not possible, the instigators of the so-called "suicide bombers", who hide behind civilians, including young children. Poor naive Israel, maintaining in the face of daily horrors, an open society where Israeli Arabs have the same civil rights as the Jews; where newspapers, radio and TV can and do sharply criticize the government; where Arab children, e.g. get kidney transplants in the excellent Israeli hospitals in the same ratio as Jews. The Israelis are just not as sophisticated as the Arab world in terms of spinning and propaganda. They actually think that the truth will prevail.Sounds like what the U.S. used to be like before the Bushies started suppressing dissent.
Persephone
"James" wrote in message >
Did I say anywhere that I hoped for a classless society? I said that only societies in which the middle class representated the majority of the people could be termed healthy societies, since, as the majority, they can then begin to wield some political power. ANYTHING else goes by another term - oligarchy. (I'm not sure that word appears in your economic textbook, but it means "rule by a favored few"). Often it takes the form of plutocracy "Rule by the rich". It seems to me that EVERY single action, political and economic, by the Chinese government, is dedicated towards creating and sustaining an oligarchy. I'm fascinated by the sentence above: "China can take care of their own social structure without any help". Well, by golly, Tianamen Square proved that correct, didn't it? Since when did authoritarian crackdown on all dissent, and using government forces to prevent people from agitating for higher wages and better work standards (referencing my coal mining accident sentence which so discombobulated you) translate into "taking care of their own social structure"? I would translate those actions as "dictating their own social strucure". Did the millions of people displaced by the building of the three gorges dam benefit from it? Does the building of a railroad to service slave-wage factories somewhere benefit the workers? You made a sweeping pie-in-the-sky statement about how improved trade benefits every Chinese person. Where's your evidence? I don't deny that it COULD....I'm just saying that pretty definitively, it's NOT.
everything's
I find the discussion being completely off topic and very sophomoric. If you feel it's your lot in life to point out the ills of the world with some well worn phrases on the inhumanity of others, then you have issues that can't be solved here.
pie-in-the-sky
definitively,
See above reply to Persephone. You should take your thoughts to a political newsgroup.
James, I think you owe it to yourself and your children to have some grownup newspapers delivered to the house at least once a week. You made a comment earlier: "The NY Times and some of the other media love these "misery" stories and present them much like they did from the ghetto misery stories of 40 years ago". The fact is that nasty things happen. You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend they don't. More important, you can't pretend that your dollars are not directly funding evil.
Here's another example of China taking care of its own social structure:
An article we can read here, about our political system. You could google for it, or go directly to the web site.
By itself, the picture hardly seems worthy of the White House's efforts to keep it out of the public eye. Mr. Abramoff, a leading Republican fund-raiser who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to corrupt public officials, is little more than a blurry, bearded figure in the background at a gathering of about two dozen people.
But it provides a window, albeit an opaque one, into Mr. Abramoff's efforts to sell himself to Indian tribes as a man of influence who could open the most secure doors in Washington to them. And it leaves unanswered questions about how Mr. Abramoff and the tribal leader, whom he was trying to sign as a client, gained access to a meeting with the president on the White House grounds that was ostensibly for a group of state legislators who were supporting Mr. Bush's 2001 tax cut plan.
================
And, here's how China "manages" its social structure - by censorship:
So Long, Dalai Lama: Google Adapts to China By JOSEPH KAHN BEIJING
SO what does the Dalai Lama look like, anyway?
Chinese Tibetans or other Buddhists who might be curious could try finding images of the spiritual leader on Google.cn, a new search engine that Google tailored for China and is now, two weeks after its unveiling, on full display to local Web users.
Is he that guy with puffy cheeks wearing a Western suit? No, that's Liu Jianchao, China's foreign ministry spokesman, demanding that the Dalai Lama stop trying to split the motherland. What about that balding man leading a big delegation? No, that's Chen Yi, a late Chinese vice prime minister, offering grain to the Tibetan people.
Only one of the 161 images produced by searching in Chinese for the Dalai Lama on Google.cn shows the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet since 1940. He is pictured as a young man meeting senior Chinese officials. That was before 1959, when China's People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled into exile.
For people outside China, or Chinese who can circumvent the Internet firewall, the 2,030 images on unfiltered Google.com favor the Dalai Lama of today. He is the genial-looking guy in the burgundy and saffron robe, here meeting President Bush, there speaking to 40,000 people in New Jersey.
Several of the biggest media and technology companies have come under attack for helping the Chinese government police the Web. Yahoo provided information about its users' e-mail accounts that helped the authorities convict dissidents in 2003 and 2005, Chinese lawyers say. Microsoft closed a popular blog it hosted that offended Chinese censors. Cisco has sold equipment that helps Beijing restrict access to Web sites it considers subversive.
Are you feeling suppressed, Persephone?
Swyck
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.