Hey, American businesses! Good news from the Supreme Court! It turns out that it’s totally okay for you to use discriminatory pay practices — that means you can feel free to pay female workers less than their male counterparts, just for being female!
There are a few things to keep in mind, however: you could be on the hook for up to SIX MONTHS of the accuser’s pay differential. Still, considering how small this amount is compared to your business’s other expensive, we don’t expect that risk to be much of a deterrent.
If you’re still concerned about having to pay out such a small amount, don’t worry; you only have to pay if you get caught. See, an employee is only likely to make a claim if they actually know that they’re being paid less than other collegues with the same seniority and job responsibilities. Thanks to various “right-to-work” laws in various states, the odds are good that you can lay down policies that stop employees from comparing salaries. That way, if somebody complains about a co-worker’s salary, you can fire the complainer for breaching the policy!
In fact, you may already have such standing gag-order at your company in order to prevent workers from negotiating their pay from a knowledgable position. So, it’s win-win; you can use the anti-communist practices already in place to keep your discrimination against female employees a total secret!
Just don’t the the union find out what you’re doing, or they’ll — hmmph… HA AH HA HA AHAHHHAA!
As we rush headlong into the sticky-season, we can observe the inevitable flowering of the Summer Book List. There’s lists for the literati, lists for fans of genre fiction, lists of lists for people having trouble settling on a list.
We envy the people who can read so quickly, and have read so widely, that they don’t already have a mental inbox stuffed to the brim with books that they’ve been meaning to get to. Ourselves, we’ve got a stack of such towering magnitude that, any day now, we expect to wake up and find all of our housemates speaking in different, impenetrable languages.
The only summer reading list to which we paid any attention (not a lot of attention, though) were the summer reading lists we were given in school. Those were unpleasant, and we’re thankful for the back-log if it means not having to relive those months of our lives where we felt that Ethan Frome was smothering us as much as the weather.
But congratulations to those that still require the Summer Reading List in order to figure out where their literary journies should go next. We wish we could be you.
Then again, there are those that question the whole Summer reading phenomenon altogether.
Spotted this link over at the Blog of a Bookslut, in which various writers proclaim their passion for particular typefaces. I know that part of being a writer is an interest in things that other people may find dull. After all, while the results might be enthralling, the actual work of writing something can be quite dull, if some poor reader were to watch the process in action.
But, for the writer, it helps if the process is interesting. Even if this means developing an interest in subject matter that is of little concern to people of other professions.
Frankly, I think it’s kind of a miracle that books get written at all, and it’s no wonder that lots of writers have their particular props and fetishes. (Surely you’ve heard of all the stories regarding nudity’s effect on writing, or the sitting vs. standing debate.)
The problem is when people that want to write pay too much attention to those who that actually write, when they talk about their props. The aspirant, who may desperately want to write something, but just cannot bring him or herself to sit down and do it, often looks for something to break through that minor inhibition.
At least, that’s how is was for me. I tried everything; mood lighting, switching to a typewriter — and, changing my fonts around. I must have gone through a million of those virus-encrusted, hard-drive deadening, $5.00 font packs that they sell in the less reputable part of the local office supply store. I obsessed over fonts, studied them, dreamt about them — but no; I still could not get any actual writing done.
As it turned out, all I needed to get going was The Clash’s London Calling, and half a pack of cigarettes. So all of that time spent working with typefaces was basically wasted.
Then again, I have no trouble writing, but I am not yet published because what I write is total crap. Maybe if I switch to Courier though…
I’m a little too young to remember the golden age of libraries (assuming there ever was one), but I sure do care about them now. Hence, a link to this story about some upset librarians in Sacramento (my old home town).
Sacramento library staffers are circulating a petition of no-confidence in management, decrying what they view as a departure from amassing a rich research collection to pandering to the whims of the YouTube generation.
Librarians question administrators’ selection of materials, which include six copies of Paris Hilton’s “Confessions of an Heiress” autobiography and 10 copies of the film “Jackass 2.”
I admit, the selection seems a little surprising — at first. Think about it, though, and it makes perfect sense.
The sorts of people that would tend to read Hilton’s autobiography would probably have to keep renewing it, as they aren’t likely to be strong readers, and will need some extra time; therefore, should somebody else want to take a crack at it, they’ll need to have second, third, and etc. copies available.
And, as for the 10 copies of Jackass 2, surely they’ll all be stolen within a week — a month, at the outside.
I really don’t know what the Library should do, here. It’s the same dilemma I have about dictionaries: should the descriptive or proscriptive? I haven’t a clue.
What I do know is that popular books with questionable literary merit have been finding their ways into libraries for a while now. I recall very clearly seeing dreck like Chariots of the Gods? and countless books about trancendental meditation, homeopathy, and any other 70’s fad you could name sitting on shelves in various libraries. How could their inclusion be considered anything other than pandering?
On the other hand, if libraries are supposed to serve the interests of their communities, shouldn’t they be allowed to circulate dreck if that’s what their communities are interested in? A library can be a very empty place when schools out; why risk alienating the people that do occasionally drop in, by refusing to carry things they care about?
In a way, I’m shocked that the librarians are complaining so much; shouldn’t they be happy that someone is still sending them books? Whenever I go to a library these days, it seems that half of the people sitting around reading books are just waiting for one of the computers to become available. Do you suppose all of those click-happy kids are sitting there reading the e-book version of War and Peace?
It’s also possible that this line of discussion completely misses the point; who cares if people aren’t attracted to the library? I know it’s a sin for me to say what I’m about to say (St. Adam Smith’s ghost is rearing back to spirit-punch me in the throat, I’ll bet), but: Not everything in the world exists to generate profit. Sometimes you dump money into services that seem to have no material benefit because they can enrich the community in non-financial ways. Stop trying to turn the library system into a Barnes & Noble. (Ow.)
That’s me as an idealist. However, I recognize that whether or not a library gets one of those sweet bond measures passed often depends on whether or not the community feels well-served. So let the damn kids have there boring books and gross-out movies. They’ll have their day on the shelves until they are withdrawn and sold at a friends of the library function to somebody who should know better.
It’s the circulation of life.
Link via Maud Newton’s Blog
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