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twoforjoy

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Everything posted by twoforjoy

  1. Yes, any updates? I'm guessing she's in labor. I think she'd have let us know if it turned out she'd just wet herself.
  2. Any suggestions for keeping the knots at bay? I usually give DD a bath every other night, and her hair gets conditioned then, and the knots combed out. In the mornings, I wet her hair down again, using lots of detangler, and then comb it out. But it is so knotty! Even if it was conditioned and combed out the night before, she's got tons of tangles in the morning, especially in the back, and they are tough to get out. It can be difficult to get her to sit patiently long enough to get her hair all combed out. Right now her hair isn't long enough to put into a bun or braid at night, which is what I do with my own hair to keep it from getting really tangled and knotty. Is the only option just wetting down and combing out her hair each morning, or are there ways to keep short curly hair from getting tangled at night that I'm not thinking of?
  3. I apologize if my answer seemed abrupt or snarky. Nobody is asking, as far as I know, for every worker to be paid the same wage. The issue is what constitutes a reasonable, fair wage, and how wealth gets distributed. We have seen, in the last 30 years, wealth distributed more and more unevenly. Rather than gains in productivity--which are the result of the labor of the average worker--being distributed even somewhat evenly across the population (which does NOT mean that everybody would get the same amount of money, just that, if a company saw a 10% income in profits, the income of the average worker would rise by 10% or so and the income of the CEO would also rise by 10% or so), we've seen gains go only to the wealthiest. The average worker's wages have stagnated over the last 30 years, even though corporate profits have continued to increase and CEOs have seen astronomical increases in their wealth. It wasn't always that way. Productivity gains used to be distributed somewhat evenly across the population. If a company made a huge profit, then everybody in that company saw their salary go up. That doesn't happen any more. We see companies making record profits while laying off workers at record rates and forcing people to take pay cuts. I think it's that situation that people are talking about. Somebody linked a few days ago to a blog post demonstrating how, while minimum wage has risen 35% since the 1970s, the cost of housing and higher education has risen by over 900%. We have allowed costs to get out of control without making sure that the minimum wage kept pace. We have allowed companies to pay workers far less than is necessary to make a decent life. Unless either costs drop dramatically or incomes rise by quite a bit, we're going to see fewer and fewer people able to even get by, much less be able to innovate, and that isn't good for society or for capitalism.
  4. I've never been, but my husband was there for a conference a couple of years ago, and he really enjoyed walking through Japantown.
  5. I don't see the wealthy headed for Somolia, which has no income tax. Certainly people ship jobs and businesses overseas, but that is not because we are taxing them too high here. It's because we reward them for doing so by still giving them tax breaks, and because they can pay people ridiculously low wages that no American could accept (I mean, literally could not accept because they couldn't buy a bag of apples for what they'd make from a day's labor). We've seen, since the 1980s, taxes being cut on the wealthiest so that, we've been told, they'll stay here and produce jobs. Yet the reality has been a steady stream of lost jobs and stagnating wages for those that remain. There are ways to keep U.S. corporations from going overseas, but lowering taxes does not appear to be one of them.
  6. I don't think I said that a worker bargains fairly for his labor. In an ideal situation, he should, but that's certainly not what happens in most situations today.
  7. No, it hasn't. We've seen greater job growth, productivity, and general prosperity at times, like the 1950s, when the wealthiest were taxed at much, much higher rates than they are today. There is simply no empirical evidence that suggests that higher rates of taxation inhibit job production. The idea that it does is based solely on theory, and not on actually looking at the data.
  8. Who has suggested that everybody be paid the same way? I'm most certainly NOT suggesting that. What I'm saying is that minimum wage should be raised to represent a true living wage (and, in our current circumstances, where these are the primary jobs being created and many people are stuck in them for life, perhaps a true family wage). But, certainly if somebody is working harder or better or longer or doing something deemed as worth more income, they should get more. If an employee is doing such a poor job at work that they don't deserve a wage that allows them to meet basic needs, then they can be fired. But to have a "minimum wage" that doesn't even come close to meeting the basic needs for even a single individual in many parts of the country is to make the minimum wage pointless.
  9. And the working poor ARE paying income tax, in the form of a regressive payroll tax, which is a flat tax on the first $100K of all income earned (and which high earners don't pay on any of their income after the first $100K).
  10. How many jobs has Mark Zuckerberg created with the enormous wealth he's generated? If you want to tax the money that the wealthiest are using to actually create jobs at a lower rate, go ahead. That's cool. But, to pretend that the wealthiest Americans are using most of their wealth to create jobs is to be lying. They aren't. We are seeing, right now, corporations bringing in record profits but wages stagnating and jobs being lost. If you were willing, I'd highly recommend checking out the charts here. There's about 40 of them, but they are well worth looking through. I'm not sure what you're asking here. The issue isn't whether we want capitalism or not; it's that the kind of unregulated capitalism with no government-funded safety net that many people seem to want is not working. Capitalism, as traditionally imagined, is failing, for a number of reasons. So we can either put regulations and safety nets in place, and try to keep capitalism going, or keep on the path we've been on and watch it implode. I'd love to hear the perspective of people living in Canada and Europe, where they have much tighter market regulations that we have, and a better safety net. I'd love to hear the perspective of people who lived through the 1940s and 1950s (you know, that heyday of educational and moral excellence and hard work that people here are always wishing we were still living in) when the highest marginal tax rate was over 90%, as opposed to today when our highest marginal tax rate is 35%.
  11. If those penguins need sweaters so badly, then they should learn to knit. It's not my problem that they lack opposable thumbs. Or fingers of any kind. If they get cold enough, maybe they'll get off their lazy penguin bottoms and come up with something. ;)
  12. As somebody who is and has been very much opposed to these conflicts (I was out there marching against the Iraq War back in the spring of 2003), I agree and disagree. I do think that people need to see the reality of the wars they support. But, I also think that the images don't need to be splashed across the front page of news sites. It's not something I want to see or that I want my children to see. That's not to say I don't think it should be out there, but I do think that you should at least have some warning about the images you are going to encounter. I don't know. I could be persuaded otherwise. But right now I'm just disturbed by the images and glad my son wasn't peeking over my shoulder.
  13. We've operated for a long time on the idea that an 8-hour day is a "full day" of work. I see no reason to change that. A worker can't bargain fairly, because the employer holds most if not all of the power. That's why we have unions, because it's recognized that individual workers cannot bargain in a fair or just way with an employer. But as power is taken away from unions and more and more of the jobs available are non-union jobs, then it becomes more and more difficult for an individual worker to negotiate fairly. A desperate person is not in any position to engage in fair, just negotiations, and is absolutely in a position to be exploited. The worker lacks the capital to start up their own business. They cannot afford to own the means of production. I teach at a university. If you look at what each of my students is charged, per credit hour, to take the class I teach, and what I'm paid per credit hour to teach it, very little of their tuition money is going into my paycheck. (My students pay about $300/credit hour. I teach a 4-credit course, so each student in my class is paying about $1200 to be there. I get paid about $2800 for each class I teach each term. I have 24 students. So, basically, the tuition of 2-1/4 of my students is going toward my salary, and the tuition of the other 21-3/4 is going back to the university to cover various costs.) I could, in theory, start my own university where I would charge students the same amount for my classes that they are paying now, but keep all of it, but I obviously lack the resources necessary to open up my own university. A silly example, but it's the case for most workers, in different ways. I love discussions where it's appropriate to say "means of production." Usually people just roll their eyes at me when I do. ;)
  14. I think what people will say is that people aren't supposed to keep minimum wage jobs forever. They're supposed to get more education/experience/training, and then they'll get a promotion to a better-paying job or be able to switch to a different, better-paying career track. In theory that sounds nice. In practice, as more and more of the jobs that we have left are service jobs, that's not reality. Many people will be working minimum-wage jobs (or just a bit more than that) their entire lives. My mother-in-law did factory work and retail jobs her entire working life, and never made more than a couple of dollars an hour over minimum wage, if that. I think we need a return to a family wage. One person working full-time at minimum wage should be bringing home enough money to provide the necessities for an average-size family. (And, personally, I'd have no problem with employers paying more to employees with more people to support, but I know that would be extremely controversial and very unlikely to happen.) Right now, we're nowhere close to that. Full-time work at minimum wage in the U.S. comes out to about $15K/year. You can barely get by as a single person on that--and in some parts of the country, you really can't. You certainly can't support a family. Having one person working two full-time minimum-wage jobs or two people both working full-time minimum-wage jobs would barely bring in enough to support an average-sized family in many parts of the country. Personally, I think we should consider that shameful. Part of the economic problem we're having right now is that more workers aren't needed. Companies do not need to hire more people. We could do with fewer people in the workforce. However, because wages are so low, many families need two people working full-time just to make ends meet. If jobs actually paid a decent family wage, then we wouldn't have so many people desperate for work, and an economic downturn like this wouldn't be as huge of a crisis. There's a very good chance that we are not going to see companies hiring many more workers any time in the near future, because they just are not needed, and I really think it's going to require a pretty radical readjustment, including a return to more one-income families, which will require either a significant drop in the cost of things (particularly housing, medical care, and higher ed) or a significant increase in income so that families can get by (and maybe even thrive) on one income.
  15. I'm sorry--Are you implying that stores in urban areas raise prices not because residents don't have access to other stores (which is often the case) but because those urban (let's face it: you mean black) folk are just stealing so much that the store owners are forced to do so? But stores in rural areas raise prices because it's inconvenient to travel to other stores, because certainly those good rural people would never steal anything?
  16. And what about the people who took the same risks, but ended up on the losing end? But, yeah, I can't imagine presuming that I have worked harder than most people and that the relatively modest financial success my husband and I have enjoyed over the last few years was largely a result of anything but good fortune. Don't get me wrong: I work hard, and he works hard. But, there are loads of people who work harder than we do who have been far less fortunate. And, I'm sure there are people who work less hard than we do who are better off than we are. So many factors go into financial success, and I really think that hard work is often pretty far down on the list.
  17. Taxes are different from buying a loaf of bread, though. I think of them more like a sliding fee scale for a school, which I not only have no problem with, but support. There's a private school here that we're considering maybe sending DS to next year, and it operates on a sliding fee scale. There are four income brackets and we'd be in the second highest one. That seems perfectly fair to me. The school needs a certain amount of money to operate. They could figure out how much they need to operate, divide it by the total number of students they think they'll have, and charge every family the same. But, that would make the school's tuition out of reach for many families. A sliding fee scale allows the broadest range of people to benefit from the school's services without burdening either the poorest or the richest beyond what they could bear. As to the bread issue, it's not like we pay a flat cost for bread. I live in an inner city, and we have a grocery store about half a mile from our house. We have a car, and so can drive to go shopping other places (usually the Aldi in the nearest suburb), but for our neighbors without cars, this is the only grocery store you can access without taking a bus. They charge significantly more for food there than they do at even more upscale suburban grocery stores (and WAY more than Aldi charges) because they know that many of the people living in the area have no other choice. We'll occasionally stop there if we need something on the spur of the moment and don't feel like driving, and it's not unusual for us to pay 50% more than we'd pay for the same item at the Meijer in the suburbs and twice what we'd pay at Aldi. I'm really not sure what that was related to. It's not really addressing your question. I do think it points to another one of the hidden costs of poverty, though. Stores in areas where people lack transportation will often jack up prices as high as they can because many of the residents have no other options.
  18. Have you been having any contractions? With the new baby, I had contractions on and off (like every hour or so) for a few days, then went to sleep for a few hours the night before he was born, and woke up a few hours later with strong contractions coming every few minutes. (And then my labor completely stalled out when I got to the hospital, but some walking around and bouncing on a birth ball got things going again.) In any case, I hope it's labor and not that you just peed yourself. ;)
  19. I was just thinking that it was about time for your baby to come! Hope this is it!
  20. So you are opposed to schools, doctors, and various services that operate on an income-based sliding fee scale?
  21. Not usually. I'll very, very occasionally toss it under something if it's a big bag, rather than lugging it in. But I'd always take my wallet in with me.
  22. This. I'd say that about both Silent Scream and 180. I do NOT think those are appropriate for minors. There is no way, if people didn't agree with the political point, that they'd want their children watching something with similar content. I'm not politically "pro-life," but I am morally opposed to abortion. I've found the work of Fredericka Mathewes-Green (some of her essays on the topic here, here, and here) very accessible and persuasive. If the idea is to defend pro-life ideas in a way that will actually resonate with people who are pro-choice, I would highly recommend looking at Mathewes-Green, who seems to understand more than any pro-life author I've encountered that people who are pro-choice are not evil monsters who just love the idea of killing babies but people who genuinely believe that their position is the better for women and children, and so knows how to discuss the issue in ways that are civil and rational. I very slowly came to the position that abortion is morally wrong, and Mathewes-Green's writings were a part of getting me there. I can say with certainty that something like the Silent Scream would not have persuaded me of anything except that the pro-life movement was just as bad as I'd thought. Rachel McNair is a pro-life Quaker who also has some good writing on the subject. She also comes from a position where she understands and doesn't demonize those she disagrees with. If you really want to challenge them, I'd consider Ron Sider's Completely Pro-Life.
  23. Perhaps more effort would have been a better way to put it. No more classwork is involved, but if you need to travel to campus to do any internet-related work, that does involve effort for most students, especially poorer students who are more likely to be working more hours, to have more family obligations, and to not own a car. It involves significantly more time and effort to do a task that a student who could access the internet from their home would have to put into it.
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