“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
Can we figure out a way to do this to student loan debt.
I would read Ayn Rand to pay down my student loans
Our library ran the expenses and realized we spent about 3,000$ MORE than what we got back in trying to collect late fees. So? We dropped them completely. No late fees. Period.
If you keep a book, it auto renews two times. Then it comes up as overdue. If your overdue items exceed a certain amount, your account freezes. You can’t use any of the local libraries anymore until you return the items or claim them lost and pay for them. If someone else is waiting for the book, you can’t renew. Its that simple.
And guess what. Not only did we save money, but we /got more materials back/. More materials were turned in than declared lost as compared to before. There was no stigma to it. If you had already paid for the item, the money was credited back to you.
Because the people late fees actually affected were children and elderly adults – people unable to regularly get to the library. And the stigma of late items was dropped. Attitude and mindset are important.
we still have no late fees. And we are considered to be one of the top public systems in our state. People from out of state PAY to get library cards for a year because our online Overdrive system is amazing, and we have a ton of partnerships and interlibrary loan systems in place. AND we suffer less losses of both materials and patrons due to our “no late fee” policy.
Minimum Wage should be indexed to 2% of a city’s median rent.
And here’s why:
Housing costs are the single biggest financial burden facing Americans today.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development define being cost-burdened as spending more than a third of your income on rent. By that definition, over half of the households in this country are cost-burdened. Source
If we want people to be able to afford to live in cities and not get priced out, we have to make a two pronged approach. One is to build houses towards all incomes and price ranges, not just luxury condos. And the other is a robust wage floor so people can actually afford to live.
Fight for 15 is doing an amazing job and I love them, but we have to realize that is quite a few places, $15/hr still isn’t enough to live on.
Which is where the 2% comes in. It allows a minimum wage that is flexible with regards to the costs of living.
And it wasn’t plucked out of thin air either:
Rent should be a third of a persons income, or to restate the equation: income should be three times a person’s rent.
And since a full time job is 8 hrs a day / 40 hrs a week / 160 hrs a month.
So when you do the math, the ideal hourly minimum wage as a percentage of rent works out to around 1.875%, which for ease of calculation is 2%.
Example minimum wages under a 2% rent rule:
San Francisco: $67.40/hr
New York City: $56/hr
Boston: $55.94/hr
Los Angeles: $27/hr
Houston: $21.38/hr
St. Louis: $18.22/hr
Billings, MT: $17.16/hr
I. That puts San Fran’s cost-of-living issue into perspective.
During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.
Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse – one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.
I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.
When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.
So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat – maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.
poor people deserve things they want, too. it is unfair to expect poor people to only buy things they “need”.
also a comfort item IS A NEED!
When I was homeless, someone actually got in to a massive argument with me because I bought myself hair dye and a 24 ounce can of awful cheap beer.
I was feeling awful about myself and wanted to find some normalcy. So I wanted to dye my hair and drink a beer while I did it. This, to me, made me feel normal. I didn’t even have gloves so my hands were dyed for weeks. But it felt so damn good to do something that was normal to me. It gave me a boost that lasted for weeks because every time I saw my hair in my relflection it gave me a little more pep in my step.
Even now, I have my own place. I support family members. I barely have any extra money for ice cream after a hard day. But I still find time for little things like this because sometimes a little bit of your normalcy is what’s really needed to get you through those hard times.
I have some additions, if I may, that arise from the Worst economic time in our country’s history.
When the Depression hit, no one really thought about the reason much, why a sock should have an orange in it, come Christmas, This tradition, brought across to America by immigrants, had acquired its own sort of identity. It begins with the folktale of Old St Nicholas throwing gold down a chimney that landed in a sock and melted into an orb. But there were no gold orbs to be had. Oranges were the poor man’s orb, but they were not cheap, especially if you couldn’t afford food at all. The orange became the only thing many children ever saw at Christmas time. One single piece of fruit, to sustain them for a year.
One orange. The sweetest orange.
They would pop a few handfuls of corn and use a needle and thread to make garlands for their fireplaces. Strips cut from the Sears catalogue to make paper chains. The 5 and dime had inexpensive glue and thread and fabric, and from that and an old shirt now turned into a tea towel, a pair of button eyes would find a new doll. Chunks of mealy potato dried out and painted, strung like gemstones. Paper mache wall art made from newsprint. Haphazard quilts as thin and heavy as a sheet of lead but as bright and colorful as a circus, assembled from table cloths and worn out sheets and things culled from the rubbish. Rag rugs, knitted out of refuse, but joyful and soft underfoot.
The patterned cotton dress began when the flour companies noticed that people were using the sacks to make anything they needed, and decided that even though it might increase cost slightly, they would purchase patterned fabrics. Buying a sack of flour became a simultaneous way to give your child something new. Or finally put some curtains on that old, cracked window. The fabrics were all very simple, but cheerful, from pink gingham to cyan check, purple paisley and polka dots. Pretty things.
And now people pay hundreds for soft patterned cotton dresses not one tenth as velveteen on the skin.
Metal tubs suspended in trees, hung with burlap curtains, a valve installed at the base for primitive showers in rainwater heated by the sun. Cotton puffs turned to delicate little birds using an old envelop and tiny sticks.
Comfort and art from garbage.
I have a ring in my collection. It is a thick, shiny man’s ring. It was a wedding band. Silver? You’d think so, looking at its wide circumference and its solid square head. You’d say it was machine beveled because it is so precise, and that the man who wore it was of means.
It was a piece of steel pipe. He and his fiancé were poor. They were cleaners for a factory and they wore out their hands and knees to start a life together. They could not afford rings for their ceremony, but the man would have none of it. By damn, his beautiful bride in her flour sack dress was going to have a ring. And so he cut two tiny pieces of pipe from a junk heap and spent hours filing, chiseling, burnishing, polishing, with two files and some sand. He made a matched set. Hers went to the grave with her. His found its way to me.
They were married almost 60 years.
Extreme poverty is an oubliette. One falls into it and the longer one is immersed, the less one recalls the time before. One tiny expenditure becomes a shameful regret. Illness becomes a burden. Hope is eliminated through deterioration of the mind that is meant to remember and find the way back out. And worse yet, no stranger notices you are there but you, and if they do, they look away, because “there but by the grace of the almighty dollar, go I”.
Those jailers who ridicule you, see you when they bother to look in. They don’t live in that darkness with you.
These tiny luxuries you give yourself are not sins as dictated from on high by some divine economist who decided you must earn your freedom through oppressive sorrow. These luxuries are the handholds you need to climb out of that pit, to have stamina, to keep focus, to remember that there is another type of life. It can be had, and by you too.
In this economy, I fear things will only get worse for many, so even if you cannot afford a treasure, then make one. Craft that token that will keep you strong and grounded.
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
-advances in robotics
-advances in miniature robotics
-advances in flight technology
-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
-fucking robot bees, my friend
-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable. Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”
The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets.
I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in
Evidence-based statements
Publicly-funded science
Critical examination of the media
Affection and investment for the natural world
And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.
And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.
We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?
Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.
I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.
every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp.
which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.
my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)
anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW.
not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)
“anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda”
OP turns out to be a Russian propagandist
nice call
Ha! Figures. But seriously, we may need these sooner than later if we want to have fruits like blueberries which aren’t great for honeybees health but which require pollinators.
It’s almost as if schools push and ideology that benefits schools.
Bruh, trades are in high fucking demand right now too. Between now and 2020 there are suppose to be 300,000 more jobs and that’s just for welder.
Shit, they’ll pay for you to learn how to do it.
I just finished high school and got a untility job in a factory and I have almost no experience. They’re gonna train me for everything plus it has full health benefits.
Trades are fucking great.
My husband is a welder, and is very very good at it. He got hired by a locksmith company pretty much just by walking in and going “Yes I can weld.”
All of the other guys there were great at locksmithing, but none of them were trained welders, and they needed someone who could build custom doors and frames.
They trained him to do lock stuff too, so now he can weld AND pick locks.
The owner of the company, when he handed out Christmas bonuses, looked at him and went “Dude we literally cannot fire you because we’d be screwed so here’s your bonus and also we’re giving you a raise.”
Welders are in desperate demand.
Blows kisses to this post.
Anyway, learn a trade, unionize, wear your PPE, memorize OSHA’s phone number.
French workers have shut down the country! March 22, 2018
Tens of thousands of Parisian students, rail workers, air traffic controllers and public sector workers have flooded the streets, while workers all over France block traffic and train and air services, in protest of a series of controversial reforms pushed forward by president Emmanuel Macron.
Macron´s reforms include ending job stability and early retirement for national rail workers of the National Society of French Railways (SNCF), to “prepare” France’s railways for foreign competition, arguing that Macron is governing for the rich.
“The only thing we have had from governments in recent years is cuts. They don’t have any other solution than cutting staff and we can’t agree with that,” a spokesperson for Force Ouvriere’s Veyrier explained.
wupacing 