Fauxciologist

Because real sociologists go to grad school.

[heathersquire]

[heathersquire]

Going to reach into my Polish Catholic roots (those that remained hidden until my Mom Mom was long passed) this Easter and make a Paska. How to know this is a good recipe: "To test the temperature of the milk mixture, Mom puts her little finger in the liquid. When she can hold it for 10 seconds, "with out your finger burning off", then the milk is at the right temperature to proceed. If you put your yeast in the scalding hot milk, you will kill your yeast! Normal people can also use a thermometer. The milk should be lukewarm or between 80-100 degrees."

[heathersquire]

...if young people are given the choice between unbelief and a faith that puts a light God gloss on the same consumerism and materialism that everybody else lives with, then who can blame young people for rejecting it?

Rod Dreher in "Making Christianity Weird Again" http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/weird-christianity/

[heathersquire]

Celebrating St. Teresa of Avila's 500th birthday.

[heathersquire]

The 1960s movements were born out of excess, a generation with too much time and certainty; our era, by contrast, is defined by scarcity, how unlikely it is that we’ll come close to achieving those handed-down dreams in the first place. Better, probably, to start reaching elsewhere—if we don’t, we too might win only similar cultural victories, and find instead of a more sustainable adult life only a shallow, push-button version of the sharing economy, a version dictated by some of the only people left in America who don’t even have these problems.

Molly Osberg in Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslice/these-nine-people-gave-up-middle-class-dream-for-collective-living-was-it-worth-it

[heathersquire]

I did not get into grad school again and I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[heathersquire]

Nobody saw this coming.

[heathersquire]

[thesociologicalcinema]

A nun and a national guardsman listen to Martin Luther King Junior as the march ends in Montgomery. Photo credit: James “Spider” Martin / Briscoe Center for American History — in Selma, Alabama.

[heathersquire]

Love is the only impetus that is sufficiently overwhelming to force us to leave the comfortable shelter of our well-armed individuality, shed the impregnable shell of self-sufficiency, and crawl out nakedly into the danger zone beyond, the melting pot where individuality is purified into personhood.

Mark Patrick Hederman OSB in Manikon Eros: Mad Crazy Love

[heathersquire]

This is a fascinating account of what seems like a real-time experiment in engineering a libertarian marketplace (and by extension society).

"Yet order in actual markets depends on threats of violence – whether the penalties embedded in the laws of the state, or the bloody interventions of mob bosses. In the absence of such arrangements, predators move in. The Silk Road’s business model worked only if genuinely ruthless people didn’t notice its critical vulnerabilities. As soon as it began to attract attention – and earn enormous amounts of money – its course was set."

[heathersquire]

Like it or not, employment in the United States looks different than it did 50 years ago--at least 30% of the workforce are independent contractors, the ratio of part-time workers to full-time workers is still higher than before the recession, and there are 2.87 million temporary workers, a record number.

Sarah Kessler for Fast Company, 2/19/15 http://m.fastcompany.com/3042081/what-does-a-union-look-like-in-the-gig-economy

[heathersquire]

This rising legal retribution is a huge threat to the gig economy. Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy.

THE GIG ECONOMY WON’T LAST BECAUSE IT’S BEING SUED TO DEATH by Sarah Kessler http://m.fastcompany.com/3042248/the-gig-economy-wont-last-because-its-being-sued-to-death

[heathersquire]

The rise of these “nerds,” who don’t commute to an office but earn $100 to $150 an hour from companies such as Microsoft and American Apparel, tells an important story about where the labor market and the economy are headed. For one, companies can now bypass costs associated with hiring full-time employees or paying the overhead of big consulting firms, says John Shegerian, president of the recycling giant Electronic Recyclers, which used HourlyNerd to find a Harvard MBA to write a business plan for a new project.

Shelly Banjo for Quartz http://qz.com/340434/its-cheaper-and-easier-to-rent-an-mba-than-to-hire-one/?utm_content=bufferccdea&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[heathersquire]

Interesting to see conservatives lamenting the collapse of decent middle-class jobs and NOT blaming it on Obama for once.

[heathersquire]

It was there, in the occupied rotunda, that Americans would catch their first, fleeting glimpse of the intergenerational alliance that the 99 Percent Movement convened: older, unionized workers side by side downwardly mobile Millennials. In the age of austerity, both social strata were being asked to bear the cost of a crisis they had had no hand in creating. And both strata were facing the prospect of losing the social rights and living standards that earlier generations had taken for granted.

From The Occupiers by by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, excerpted in Jacobin Magazine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/occupy-wall-street-wisconsin

[heathersquire]