Can we PLEASE remove the stigma for blue collar work in America?
“You don’t wanna be a garbage collector when you grow up, do you?”
$34,000 a year, no college needed?
God forbid you take an honest job $7,000 above Michigan’s average cost of living line.
“You don’t wanna be a ditch digger.”
Bitch, I was making $15 an hour, post tax, doing exactly that, the fuck is wrong with it? (Other than it was physically exhausting.)
We need to help America, as a whole, understand that college is not, and should not be he only option, and that there is NO SHAME in trade school or even getting a career right out of high school.
I, personally, know plumbers making $80,000+ a year. Better than most 4 year degree workers.
We need plumbers, janitors, truck-drivers, garbage collectors, machinists, to keep this nation running smoothly. And they deserve respect for what they do.
Miss me with your classist bullshit.
“You cannot demand services and then degrade those who provide those services.”
Not sure who said that it but it has always stuck with me because hell it is so true.
What 16 trillion dollar debt? I have no idea how my free stuff is going to appear. I just know I want it.
He’s raising taxes on the rich
He’s planning on stealing more from people… ok that makes sense. Just because *They* are rich doesn’t mean those people deserve to have more of their wealth stolen from them.
Yes because the wealthy billionaires that steal and undervalue labor, and companies that scapegoat paying taxes are really hurting
why even bring up the national debt if you don’t want people to pay taxes
I’m on the phone half asleep, but yeah, Thank you for real
I don’t think OP understands what rich people are. Like they literally won’t even notice the taxes. It will make no impact on the wealthy at all. You could take literally 50% of the income of the top 10% and they would have to make zero changes to their lifestyle.
Money to them is just a high score. They whinge when you take them down a bit but it makes literally no difference because they’re still winning the fucking game.
They do actually 100% deserve to have their money taken. People are starving to death because we think disability payments shouldn’t be enough to live on and minimum wage should be half of what you need to survive so yeah, I think millionaires and billionaires deserve to have a tiny fucking fraction of the money they could never spend in a fucking lifetime so I can fucking EAT AT ALL.
I also don’t think people understand actually how much a billion dollars is. Like. it’s such an enormous number.
We think of numbers that big like a set of stairs, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million, a hundred million, a billion.
With each jump just being another step on the staircase and not realising HOW FUCKING HUGE each step is, and how vast the gap is between each of them.
Aside from the fact that even a million dollars is far more than you need, a billion is disgusting excess. There is no conceivable way one person could justify needing a billion dollars when you know HOW MUCH that is.
To put it in perspective: a million seconds is 11 and a half days a billion seconds is 31 years and 9 months.
Another example would be Warren Buffett: He made $US12.7 billion in 2013. That was his yearly income, not his total worth. Just his income for 2013.
That’s $37 million per day; $1.54 million per hour; $25,694 per minute
How much do you get per hour? Is it enough to live on? the minimum wage in america is $15,080per year That man makes more money per minute just for being alive, even in his sleep than most of you do in an entire year.
also, just using seconds for reference again
15,080 seconds is just over 4 hours. 12.7 billion seconds is 402 years and 4 months.
Can someone please make a staircase graph with dollar amounts?
I have discalcula and have a hard time conceptualizing numbers. I feel like that’s a great analogy and would help me.
Ok so I tried and the number differences broke the weird little graphing thing I was using.
so here we have one thousand (1,000) not showing one million (1,000,000) at one pixel
and one billlion (100,000,000) is the big pilon there.
I added fifty million in to show because that graph goes in increments of 50 million.
So how much is 50 million compared to a million though, it’s only one pixel?
so smol. But still we’re trying to get down to a thousand, (which is ten hundred-dollar-bills.)
So what does a million look like compared to a thousand?
oh. We broke it again. It will only go in 50 thousands. So we got to look at how big 50k is compared to our wad of hunjies.
ok.
This is why i like using the seconds instead of graphs… But I won’t give up here.
the reason it’s so so hard to process is because a BILLION is an enormous number. there comes a point with numbers where we can’t actually process them and its just like…a lot. And more than “a lot” is still “a lot”.
So we need visual representation. Lets use pennies (thanks megapenny)
Imagine a penny. Just one.
Ok, you get a thousand pennies a week, and you end up with 52 thousand in a year. If they were dollars that’s a nice paying wage.
with me?
now this is a thousand pennies.
this is 50 thousand pennies (1 square foot solid of pennies! COOOOL) It’s roughly how many pennies you would have in a year if you got a thousand pennies a week.
This is a million pennies
And this is a billion pennies
(Which is 5 schoolbuss sized blocks of solid pennies.)
that is so many.
.
The problem with numbers is that we see them written like this
1 100 1000 1000000 1000000000
And we kind of subconciously go “well… it’s only increasing a little at a time, like a staircase. When the progression is more like
And so on. which is not a staircase I want to climb because it starts off reasonable and then jumps to building size, then mountain size.
We ‘add a zero’ which is confusing because it’s timesing (x) not adding (+).
to make ten thousand dots, I would copy all the dots in my thousand pile, and paste them ten times. to make a hundred thousand, I would copy all the dots in my ten-thousand-dot pile and paste them ten times. thats what “times by ten” means.
That’s what adding a zero is, it’s multiplying (x) the last number we had by ten. (i also say timesing: as in copy and pasting it ten times) try it with a word document and see how many pages it takes to get you a billion dots, and how many it takes for 15 thousand (minimum wage anual)
hopefully this was at least somewhat useful.
Anyway, the point is that if we imagine them as dollar coins, and one square block is established as good enough to live by a year, there’s no reason one individual deserves 5 bus-worths.
Omg this is excellent! Thank you so much, that does really help! The pennies in particular
Check out this awesome visual representation of how messed up our society is, everyone!
I literally was about to google a visual representation of this and then THERE IT WAS IN THE POST
Seriously. It’s time for people to wake the fuck up. I’m sick of the godsdamned wilful blindness.
We had this conversation in my sociology class.
If you dont understand the wealth distribution in america, here you go
This is what OP and America thinks it is
What it actually is. Evaluate your life. Evaluate your income. This is why we need to take from the 1%
The 1% makes so much money its off the grid.
If you stack the 1% money next to eachother it would be like this
That 0% is your college students and people working fast food. Its below the poverty line. So taxing the 1% wont do shit to him.
This post got so incredibly awesome I’m almost glad OP posted it in the first place-almost
This is so helpful omg
I’ve written about a lot of these points separately, so it’s nice to see them together – especially with nice visualizations!
From 2008- 2009, ABC aired a short lived show called Eli Stone, starring Jonny Lee Miller. Eli was a lawyer who started having hallucinations caused by an aneurysm, and realized those hallucinations might actually be visions.
Many of Eli’s visions revolved around George Michael (and all of the Season 1 episodes shared their titles with his songs). However, when he appeared in Episode 9, titled “I Want Your Sex”, he wasn’t just a vision anymore.
George hired Eli to represent a teen girl who played one of his songs, the titular I Want Your Sex, during an abstinence only rally at her school. During her trial, she used both facts and personal stories to explain why abstinence only education is more dangerous than safe sex education. When the lawyer for the high school claimed that the song she chose promoted sexual promiscuity, George Michael was called to explain the true meaning behind the song.
Wethersby: Mr. Michael, tell me, what inspired your song I Want Your
Sex? A song, by the way, which rose to number one on the world charts, a song
that helped you win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year.
George Michael: Well, it was inspired by a relationship. Like most of my
work, it was autobiographical.
Wethersby: You heard Principal Ackerman describe the song as
encouraging promiscuity.
George Michael: But it’s just the opposite. Ironically enough, I wrote the
song about abstinence, and I was very much in love with someone at the time.
Wethersby: So how do you feel about your song being used to protest an abstinence only sex education program.
George Michael: Well I applaud it, obviously. When I wrote it, we were in
year six of the AIDS crisis, a crisis that Ronald Reagan did not even address publicly
until there were over 21,000 people dead. And what the government is doing
right now, funding federal programs that tell children that condoms don’t work,
is killing people all over again.
I have seen a lot of posts discussing how we lost such an important member of the LGBT community. This scene has always stuck with me, and I’m sure most people would not have had a chance to see it. Though it is through a fictional lens, George Michael is reminding us that there have been times where misinformation and government inaction made it seem wrong to have even monogamous sex with someone that you love, and that stigmatizing sex, and gay sex in particular, is dangerous.
Beautiful #Ramadan tradition in the old city of #jerusalem. The callers who go from house to house in the early hours of the morning waking up each family by name for Qiyam and s7oor. They do so in a poetic form. Imagine being woken up daily in this beautiful way. This tradition has continued from generation to generation. Bless them #palestine
i reblog this every year, but this time i need to stress that this tradition, like many others in palestine, is now under threat. these callers are currently facing harassment, fines and detainment by israeli police who say the callers are no longer allowed to practice this tradition because “settlers living in the neighbourhood had complained about the noise”, even though these callers operate in predominantly palestinian muslim neighbourhoods.
you’re allowed to tell people not to hug you, not to hold your hand, not to kiss your cheek, not to play with your hair, not to put their hands on you in any way without your permission. you’re allowed to be uncomfortable with these kinds of touching, to tell people that, and to have those boundaries respected. just because a touch isn’t sexual doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to have a problem with it.
you’re allowed to create boundaries about what happens with your body and what other people do with it, regardless of those people’s motivations or their relationship to you. it isn’t only sexual touching people need your consent for and it isn’t only sexual touching that you’re allowed to revoke your consent for. people should not be touching you when you don’t want them to no matter what kind of touching it is.
on a similar thread, this is also what people mean when we talk about teaching children about consent. We dont mean teaching children too young to know about or understand sex, about sexual consent and the nuances of it. We mean teaching them these same things above.
They can refuse hugs. They can refuse any touching they dont want from anyone, and so can other people. This, as well as teaching them to tell adults about touches they dont like, and to never keep secrets about their bodies (such as someone touching them inappropriately but telling them they have to keep it secret) from grown ups they trust, helps protect them from sexual abuse and plants the seeds of recognizing and respecting boundaries, and demanding their own boundaries be respected, early on.
“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.”
As a teacher, I give girls what I hope is a lot of attention. I don’t know if I give girls their fair share, but I aspire to, especially after noticing that boys are willing to use their greater share of teachers’ attention to get girls who they feel aren’t being quiet and docile enough punished. I have therefore acquired a reputation for “caring more about the girls.” This has had two marked results: Some straight boys have gotten more hostile toward me, and most girls have gotten more confident around me. This makes me think I’m doing something right.
Longer thoughts on how this phenomenon relates to sexual harassment in classrooms, if you’re interested: The girls figured out I won’t report them if they hit boys who are sexually harassing them, I’ll only report the boys. This led to an increase in how often girls got the last word and boys got smacked in my classes, and, also, to a DECREASE IN HOW OFTEN GIRLS GOT SEXUALLY HARASSED. The sexual harassers seem to have been depending on the sort of “equal blame” and “retaliation is never warranted” and “don’t hurt others’ feelings” perspectives so many schools try to instill in kids; the sexual harassers were usually the ones bringing me into the situation by saying, “Miss, she hit me! You should write her up!” Once they figured out I was only ever going to respond, “If you don’t treat girls like that, they won’t hit you,” the girls got more confident and the sexual harassers largely shut the fuck up.
In schools, fighting against sexual harassment is often punished exactly the same as, or more severely than, sexual harassment — a lot of discipline codes make no distinction between violence and violence in self-defence, and violence is ALWAYS the highest level of disciplinary infraction, whereas verbal sexual harassment rarely is. Sexual harassers, at least in the schools I’ve been in, rely heavily on GETTING GIRLS IN TROUBLE WITH HIGHER AUTHORITIES as a strategy of harassment — creating an external punishment that penalises girls for and therefore discourages girls from fighting back. Sexual harassers are willing to use their greater share of floorspace to ask to get girls who won’t date them punished. By and large, teachers do punish those girls when they swear or hit. Schools condition girls to ignore sexual harassment by punishing them when they speak up or fight back instead.
Once the sexual harassers in my classes understood that girls wouldn’t be punished for rejecting them, they backed off around me. And there started to be a flip in what conversations I get called into — girls are telling me when boys are being nasty (too loud and dominant), instead of boys telling me when girls are being uncooperative (louder and more dominant than boys think they should be).
As a girl who would not be shut up and would not tolerate teasing or abuse from boys in my class and was several times sent to such higher authorities for it, reading this is extremely, extremely vindicating. I was lucky, though, because being a particularly bright, advanced student for those grades, they generally took my side and I never got into any severe or lasting trouble. Again ,this was luck, and shouldn’t be the rule.
Scientific fact, actually. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarbrough found that White people’s neuron system fired less when viewing people of color performing actions, which indicates that they have an emotional disconnect when thinking about people of color; in essence they really don’t connect with us on a basic level of human empathy. (Source) The same people tested scored higher on a subtle racism test, as well.
Jesus
Reason why I don’t trust or fuck with white people proven by science.
There was actually a study done (if better science Tumblr wanna link the source that would be awesome) where they showed a Black person’s hand being tortured and a purple hand being tortured and measured the empathetic response and ppl actually had more empathy and a higher emotional response for a purple ass alien hand being tortured than a Black person’s hand smh
Neuroscience student here. While all of the above statements are true in context, the whole point of the purple hand study is to show that racism based on differences in skin color is not an inherent biological trait in the brain. (There’s hope for humanity!) Quick summary:
When racist white people watch someone who isn’t white experience pain, their brains activate less in areas associated with feeling empathy. The less racist you are (as measured by tests of racial bias), the more these areas activate, while the more racist you are, the less these areas activate. In other words, science confirms the obvious: racism makes you less empathetic to people who aren’t white.
But here’s the super important thing! When the same person watches someone with bright purple skin experience pain, these areas activate as strongly as they do when they’re watching another white person. This shows that the lack of empathy that racist white people feel for people of different skin color is learned, rather than an intrinsic biological trait. If a white person’s ability to feel empathy were intrinsically limited to people with the same skin color, these people wouldn’t feel empathy for a purple hand.
The fact that racist white people still feel empathy for a purple hand shows that this brain activity is the result of cultural learning, rather than differences in skin color blocking our ability to feel empathy. As the authors write, “… Cultural conditioning (e.g., racial stereotyping), rather than biological or structural factors (e.g., somatic similarity), may shape embodied resonance with others.” Again, this is the whole point of the study, and it’s the only reason they included a purple hand.
In summary: humanity isn’t biologically doomed to feel less empathy for people with different skin color. If we can feel empathy for someone whose skin is bright purple, it’s not the difference in skin color itself that’s blocking empathy. What we’re seeing is the product of culture: many white people grow up in a culture that teaches them to see those with more melanin as being “Different”, “Other”, or members of an out-group. Since this in-group/out-group effect is where the lack of empathy comes from, we can prevent these changes in the brain just by teaching little kids to include everyone in their in-group, whether or not their skin color is the same.
Also, as a side note, the concept of race is scientifically controversial. Quote from a paper: “The use of biological concepts of race in human genetic research […] is problematic at best and harmful at worst. … Racial classifications do not make sense in terms of genetics.” Even without getting into details, on average there’s more genetic variation between two random members of the same “race” than between two different “races” as a whole. (Obviously race is real in its consequences, but it’s still a social construct).
In other words, being white does not make you racist. Learning and retaining a chosen lack of empathy from other racists and societal bias makes you racist. Racism is learned, and once learned, becomes a choice. A committed choice.
I work with kids. These kids are at my program before and after school, and then some of them have sports/dance/music sometimes all of the above before they finally go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat everyday, and games and more classes on the weekend, etc.
I’m all for extracurriculars, but this turns into the teen who is not only in the school play, but they’re on the newspaper, the football team, and seven different clubs. In college they take double the courseloads, and then once they graduate…what?
They work themselves raw because they arent used to downtime. They’ve been told they can always be doing something, and they don’t know how to relax. This turns into the adult that has anxiety because there’s nothing left to clean, the adult that desperately wants to watch that TV show but can’t force themselves to sit long enough for it.
Then they turn into the moms and dads who spend all their free time ferrying their kids to extracurriculars.
Like, these kids don’t know what downtime is? I told a kid I did nothing last weekend, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He asked what I was doing this weekend and I said “Probably sleeping, mostly,” and he actually gasped. Then he rattled off a bunch of things I could do, to which I had to stop him.
“No, you don’t understand. I plan on sleeping. I’m booked.”
“But you could–”
“Nah. I’m just gonna rest.”
It was as if I had said a bad word or something. I asked what he does when he gets sick, and he says he goes to practice anyway. I asked him what he does if he doesn’t feel like going, and he said he goes anyway. I asked when he takes time to rest, and he said when he sleeps at night.
Bring back lazy Sundays. Bring back Saturday morning cartoons. Bring back the idea of relaxing and soaking in your day before moving into the next thing. Bring back the right to breathe, the right to rest.
Bring back mental health days, and taking a break. Bring back taking a walk or watching a show or setting a timer to remind yourself to stop cleaning and relax.
If you’re running at 100% all the time with no time to recharge, then your battery is going to die spectacularly, and probably at the worst possible time.