Office by Alex Penny
(Source: meme4u, via typicalwelshnonsense)
mrmosbyisgettingtiredofyourshit:
Post it notes from a stay-at-home dad
(part 1)
This is adorable.
(Source: mr--mosby, via typicalwelshnonsense)
“Deficit hawks” are getting what they say they want, but they’re unmoved by the facts.
The rapidly-falling deficit really isn’t anything to brag about.
Fight for 15: the people who are driving the new wave of fast food activism.
In Milwaukee, African American workers have a special connection to the fast food strikes.
Walmart refuses to sign on to other retailers’ Bangladesh supplier safety plans.
Sad but unsurprising: a diagnosis of cancer greatly increases your odds of bankruptcy.
Good news: Washington state officials “pleasantly surprised” by potential lower rates under Affordable Care Act.
Don’t believe the spin: Potential Obama housing nominee Watt pushed for policies that could have prevented the housing crisis.
The failure of the NLRB to function is a real concern for workers.
Labor Secretary nominee Perez deserves a vote, says Sen. Reid.
LA Times: Let’s get past the filibuster, because it’s time for a vote on labor nominees.
(via stfuconservatives)
The United States moves inexorably toward granting equality to the L.G.B., but in the process, while still pronouncing that satisfying final consonant, we often, in practice, drop the T. No federal law offers protection to transgender people from discrimination in the workplace; the population sees double the usual rate of unemployment, and ninety per cent of transgender individuals report harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination at work.
(Source: neutrois, via stfuconservatives)
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Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power (via sociophilia)(via stfuconservatives)
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The Atlantic’s Lindsay Abrams, reporting on the results of a recent study on the health effects of marijuana. In addition, regular pot smokers were skinnier than those who abstained, “even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels,” and had higher levels of HDL (“good cholesterol”). source (via shortformblog)
So, obviously I’m a huge fan of this, and not just because pot is great. In the United States, it is borderline impossible to do scientific research or testing on marijuana because it is a Schedule 1 drug. That means it’s considered one of the most dangerous substances and it has no possible medical benefits. (For reference, cocaine, opium and amphetamines are Schedule 2, and ketamine is Schedule 3 - in other words, they’re considered “less bad” than pot, and there are fewer federal requirements about studying them.)
Most people who study marijuana do it like this researcher: they test people who will admit to using pot presently or in the past. Findings like this are preliminary, but it opens up a lot of questions about how cannabis affects the human body. We need to study it more. We need to be getting lab subjects high with different amounts of THC and seeing how it affects them in real time. There is so much potential for good here.
More evidence that pot can be beneficial means more people trying to study it, which means more pressure to remove cannabis from Schedule 1, which means we can do more research and maybe find cures/preventions AND fewer people will be getting mandatory life sentences for it.
PREDICTION: Monsanto will patent a THC strain in the next decade.
(via stfuconservatives)(via stfuconservatives)
(Source: thenightmarefuel, via tinycyndaquil)
I lost with five aces. Fuck everything.
(Source: standupfordownthere, via stfuconservatives)
Republicans love free enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit — right up until they hate it.
Slate: From the state that brought you the nation’s first ban on climate science comes another legislative gem: a bill that would prohibit automakers from selling their cars in the state.
The proposal, which the Raleigh News & Observer reports was unanimously approved by the state’s Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, would apply to all car manufacturers, but the intended target is clear. It’s aimed at Tesla, the only U.S. automaker whose business model relies on selling cars directly to consumers, rather than through a network of third-party dealerships.
The bill is being pushed by the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association, a trade group representing the state’s franchised dealerships. Its sponsor is state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican from Henderson, who has said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between manufacturers and dealers. What makes it “unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old “competition”—something Republicans are typically inclined to favor—is not entirely clear. After all, North Carolina doesn’t seem to have a problem with Apple selling its computers online or via its own Apple Stores.
Still, it’s easy to understand why some car dealers might feel a little threatened: Tesla’s Model S outsold the Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8 last quarter without any help from them. If its business model were to catch on, consumers might find that they don’t need the middle-men as much as they thought.
According to the report, “Apodaca received $8,000 in campaign contributions from the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association last year, the maximum amount allowed by state law.” He has not responded to a request for comment.
Ironically, this sort of thing is almost exactly what Ayn Rand complained about in her novel Atlas Shrugged — a business group and the government were forcing an industrialist to share his process for producing a new alloy, using “unfair competition” as their reasoning. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to her that they could ban it for the same reason.
The GOP has taken to praising Rand in recent years — especially post-Tea Party. Like so much else Republicans say, that praise is obviously horseshit.
Free markets, amirite?
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Depression-era statute that serves as the bedrock of U.S. labor law, hourly workers must be paid time-and-a-half for every hour they work over 40 in a week — both to reward workers for their extra hours and to discourage employers from pushing workers too hard. The Republican measure would instead give employers and their workers the choice to use earned “comp” time instead of pay, an opportunity already afforded many public-sector employees.
According to Democrats, such an option would be ripe for abuse by employers, and in practice it might not be an option at all for some workers.
By lowering the cost of overtime for employers, labor advocates worry the measure would dilute the primary governor on the 40-hour week and pressure workers into taking comp time rather than pay, even if their choice is ostensibly protected by law. The bill would give workers the option to “cash out” their accrued comp time at a later date if they choose, but Democrats noted that such a situation would amount to an interest-free loan for employers. Labor unions and worker advocacy groups strongly opposed it.
In a sign of the union opposition to the bill, Chris Townsend, political director for the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America union, told HuffPost that such a measure could “liquidate the whole concept of paid leave.” Rather than giving workers the standard two weeks of vacation or a handful of sick days, Townsend argued, employers could invite workers to “earn” their time off by working overtime.
If you want to give workers the ability to commit time at home, advocate for mandatory paid sick leave and paid time off.
All this does is erode the 40-hour work week, which really does help families achieve balance, and cut costs for employers who work their employees in excess of 40 hours a week. Time-and-a-half is better than comp time because 1) an employer can arbitrarily decide when a worker can and can’t take their comp time, meaning it might not be flexible for employees at all, and 2) workers aren’t paid the extra dollar amount for working in excess of a standard work week. It will be a 1:1 payout situation instead of a 1.5:1 payout, and the point of making overtime more expensive is that working in excess of 40 hours a week is difficult for families and makes work-life balance almost impossible to achieve.
You might as well call this bill “Work Harder for Less Act.”
This is bullshit..
(via stfuconservatives)
These 2 Maps About Student Loans Explode One of the Biggest Myths About Student Loans
The media fixates on the overall size of student debt. But where you go to school, whether you graduate, and what kind of job you get later may matter much more.
Read more. [Images: FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel]
(via stfuconservatives)
