My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.
Again it's an honour to be drawing one of my favourite short stories ever. Thank you so much for the original authors for creating this story; and for everyone who bought a copy and donated to the above non-profits.
It's Maclura pomifera, commonly known as the osage orange or hedge apple. It is known to be native only to a small area of Texas and the edge of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Before the invention of barbed wire, it was pruned repeatedly and shaped to make dense impenetrable hedges to contain animals.
The fruits are inedible—not poison, they're just hard and taste bad.
The wood is super-strong, burns hotter than any other wood, and is ideal for making bows!
Actually I like this idea, we should do that. Here's my fun fact contribution; actual old English, what one could call Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to, for example, Shakespearean English, which a lot of people call old English but is actually antiquated modern English), is a Germanic language, and modern English shares a lot of roots with German because of that. It was also, at one point, written with runes.
What's up guys, atlatls were weapons used by upper paleolithic hunters and Native Americans! They are throwing sticks which are essentially used as an extra joint+arm section in order to throw spears (called darts when you're talking about atlatls) farther and with more force. Mexican people used them to fight the conquistadors because they were better at piercing armour than arrows. Darts are usually 5-7 feet long and the atlatl stick itself 1-2 feet. (1.5-2.1 meters and 0.3-0.6 meters. idk how y'all like it but I'm american) Done properly atlatl darts can be thrown up to 200 feet! I whittled one once and it was super cool.
You can use the North Star to approximate your latitude!
To find Polaris, you can use the last two stars in The Big Dipper aka the Pointer Stars to point directly to Polaris. Polaris itself isn’t super bright but the Big Dipper is and that’s normally enough to get you going.
Once you’ve found Polaris, you’re gonna take your hand, stretch your arm out all the way, and measure. Due to the proportions of the human body compared to the sky, when your arm is straight out and you extend your thumb and pinky fingers all the way, the distance from the top of your thumb to the tip of your pinky is equal to about 20 degrees of sky altitude. A closed fist is 10~ degrees and one finger is 2~ degrees.
Stack your hands in whatever configuration works best to get from the horizon to the North Star and add the various partial altitudes. This gives you the altitude of Polaris (or any star you want to check) from your location. And although you can check the altitude of any star, the altitude of Polaris is always equal to your latitude on earth as the observer!
the tobacco mosaic virus which is like a really virulent plant pathogen- it can survive around a year in dead tissue which is fucking incredible tbh and can also survive and spread if infected tobacco is burned. It has a huge fucking host range. It is really economically important. It is also rendered incapable of spreading or causing harm by milk
rusts have up to 5 distinct reproductive stages. they are of huge economic importance, and one of them is partially responsible for the price of coffee (coffee rust which is incredibly destructive on arabica coffee but not so much on robusta) many rusts have alternate hosts. they can’t be cultured in labs.
It’s likely that many biological processes use quantum mechanics to work as well as they do. Enzymes such as catalase use quantum tunnelling (hydrogen ions basically teleport through otherwise solid structures of the enzyme).
In photosynthesis the collection of photons in the accessory pigments of chloroplast are impossibly efficient, and there’s evidence this is done by quantum superposition (ie the photons take every possible route simultaneously and then at the end say ‘what are you talking about, I took the fastest route all along’).
European robins navigate using magnetic fields of the Earth affecting two entangled particles in their brain - different amounts of magnetism is ‘sensed’ by the different particles and that gives the birds directionality (a bit like binocular vision does).
It’s possible (but not evidenced unlike the others) that consciousness works using quantum mechanics too (check out Life On The Edge by Jim AlKhalili and Jonjoe McFadden, I think I’ve spelled their names right)
Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”.
There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.
best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere
During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well
Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.
Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.
So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).
I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hook’s mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went “YOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!” in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)
My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and she’d get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com “zombie Juliet” and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.
i attended my county’s performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so it’s not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actor’s workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show.
my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.
in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.
so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-
During a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, where I was assistant costumer and assistant prop master, our director decided that we needed to spice up Gaston’s introduction. You know: in the movie, when Lefou runs in trying to catch the duck/goose that Gaston has just shot out of the sky?
Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.
The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.
Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ™, I’d finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.
Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didn’t drop the it. Lefou’s actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gaston’s head. Cue laughter.
Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.
Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from it’s place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefou’s conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stage…from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gaston’s gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.
Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. He’s so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.
Sunday Night: Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise - apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.
Monday Elementary School Show: Lefou walks on stage with the bird. Accidentally drops the prop during conversation with Gaston. Gaston doesn’t notice the dropped prop and steps on it. Cue depressingly sad squeaky toy noise. Cue ten years olds laughing.
I was in Twelfth Night during high school and we were lucky enough to have identical twin girls playing Viola and Sebastian. Due to the blocking in the first half of the play, their characters didn’t appear on stage together but rather almost consecutively one after the other for a majority of the first act.
It was awesome because when people saw the play and didn’t know the girls were identical twins, it literally looked like it was one actor doing multiple, uber fast costume changes.
One of our first performances was for our peers and it was a big school so lots of people didn’t know the twins. This - for some reason - was also the performance they chose to record.
Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes “OH WHAT THE FUCK” so loudly it drowned out everything else.
The best thing? That was the copy of the play that was made available for purchase by family and parents. Haha.
Oh my god. I went to one of the Spiderman shows where he flew out above the audience and then got stuck and had to awkwardly hang there for about 10 minutes, but these stories are brilliant.
okay so, my senior year of high school and I’m part of the stage crew for Peter Pan. There’s a scene where Hook and Smee are searching for Peter and the Lost Boys. Now the theater department at my high school isn’t very well funded (in the southern USA, football is king), so the sets we managed to make were pretty kickass for the money we had. We had a structure painted like a big tree stump for the entrance to the Lost Boys’ hideout. You could climb to the top of it, but also go inside it through a trap door that we kept locked up during most of the play.
It’s like our third show and everything has been going surprisingly well. Hook and Smee climb to the top of the “tree trunk”, supposedly looking for Peter and not knowing they’re standing above his hiding spot the whole time.
Turns out someone didn’t close the trapdoor properly, because the second Hook steps on it, he plunges through the thing. He’s able to catch himself, but he’s got his ass and one leg dangling through this hole where it’s like a ten foot drop to the ground. All of us stage crew are literally two feet away from him offstage, just gaping at him because???? Y'all this fall looked BAD. Looked like my dude did the splits in mid air. The whiplash caused his fucking wig to come off. The audience is dead silent, all of us backstage are dead silent, the director is like already looking up how to treat a broken groin.
The kid who was playing Hook was like a fuckin sophomore and he KILLED it. He gave himself a second to catch his breath, never broke character, just looked up at his castmate and growled “Smee, you fool, help me up!”. He ended up playing off the wig thing as an embarrassing comedic bit for Hook, and the play went on. He was completely fine. It was the best thing I’d ever seen.
There was an infamous performance of the opera Don Giovanni where in the last act Giovanni was suppose to be dragged into hell via trapdoor but the overweight actor got stuck, leading someone from the audience to shout: “Hey everyone, Hell’s full!!”
I was a costumer on a stage version of Titanic, and in the scene where the women and children are getting in the lifeboats, one of the men (who was supposed to be saying goodbye to his wife he knows he will never see again because his is about to die), realized his fake mustache was falling off and instead of playing it cool… he rips it off his face, and hands it to his wife with the line “Something to remember me by”…it was the funniest thing that I have ever seen in my 8 years in theatre, the entire cast lost their shit laughing at the most dramatic moment possible
My high school did Dirty Rotten Scoundrels one year and still one of the best bits, especially on opening night, was some museum bit.
Lights come up on the stage and there’s a statue dead center of the stage that two characters are circling around while flirting. The whole scene goes down without a hitch.
Well, because we couldn’t get a statue prop, the staue was actually one of my friends in just some really good makeup, a perfectly still pose, and plaster in her hair that really sold it.
So then the characters walk off stage and the lights don’t go down. So she waits. She waits. Then she just shrugs with a big, dramatic sigh and storms off stage in a comedic fashion and everyone died laughing in the audience so we rolled with it every night after that.
I was in the pit playing clarinet for our production of Urinetown, and since this was a high school production, our director didn’t want any swears on stage. Therefore, since Urinetown is about conserving water by any means possible, all of the swears were going to be replaced by water-related words. Examples like “Thank Poseidon!” or “By Neptune!” were used pretty regularly.
However, in the climax of the first act, our villain, Mr. Cladwell couldn’t think of any one of those water-related words that weren’t used recently by one of the others in the cast.
You know what he stammers out?
“Thank SpongeBob you’re safe.”
The teen audience howled with laughter. He kept that gag in for every performance following that, it was incredible.
Critical Resistance, working to dismantle the prison industrial complex and abolish the police
The Queer Detainee Empowerment Project
National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, working to end violence against indigenous women and children and provide resources for the MMIW campaign
Sunrise Movement, a youth-led political campaign pushing the Green New Deal and climate legislation
Industrial Workers of the World. Unions.
And of course it’s always a good day to venmo, paypal, or cashapp black, indigenous and other POC in your community, or donate to your community mutual aid fund.
That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.
This guy inspired me to repair my own macbook. First of all, you should know that I am not… like, I have to look up HOW to look up what my computer specifications are. Tech, that ware either soft or hard, is not a subject in which I experience comfort or competence.
But my puppy peed on my keyboard, and I asked the apple store, or the fucking mac cafe, or the godsdamn Computer House Chill Zone or whatever cute ass name they have for their bullshit store, and they said it would be TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS TO REPLACE MY KEYBOARD. I’m not even exaggerating.
So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.
So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.
These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.
anyway, this guy is also fueled by spite, and doing holy work, and I have mad respect
I mean lets be honest if everyone else is gassing theirs up like no tomorrow and you’re being as honest as you can who th are the recruitment team going to be more interested in
the point I’m trying to make here is if you’ve handled finances for a company you’re now what i would call a treasurer my g, if you’ve done admin work you are now a secretary (or as I’ve put Management secretary)
you help some kid with his homework? you’re a private tutor.
keep your bullets points for the job role as concise and important sounding as possible AND ALWAYS EMPHASIS THAT YOURE A TEAM PLAYER IF YOURE GOING TO WORK IN A TEAM.
go into that interview room and get your story straight the night before and remember that interviews are two way conversatons yes they might be grilling you but at the end of it make sure to grill them BACK. do you have any hesitations about my qualifications? my suitability for the job? any feedback on my cv? how long have you been working at this company? do you like it here? whats the work environment like?
I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS GET THE SAME FEEDBACK WHEN THEY GET BACK IN TOUCH WITH ME
“ive never been asked those questions before” / “you were one of the strongest candidates”
throughout the interview emphasise that youre about progression, that you want more responsibilities than you did at your previous job, tell them the hours here are more suitable for me than my last ones were, AND WHEN IT COMES TO SALARY NEGOTIATION its all about continuity. tell them again that it boils down to progression. make up a reasonable figure for how much you were paid in your last role (do your research for how much the industry youre applying to or the role youre applying for pays, base it on that) tell them you expect more than you were previously paid. do not give them a figure. progression is your primary focus, tell them if youre progressing youre happy. leave it at that.
I had an interview yesterday, at the place I’ve been temping, where I busted out the “is there anything about my skills or background that makes you concerned about my fit for this job” question for the first time.
Neither of my supervisors had never gotten it before either. They had to think for a while, and then it turned into them telling me how great I am and what they love about me.
This stuff is real. I would also say: none of it is lying. This is taking experience that you normally downplay and write off, and putting it in accurate words they’ll understand.
It’s hacking the capitalist system. Why ISN’T helping a kid with homework “tutoring”, when the only thing missing is a paycheck?
It’s especially important for anyone who isn’t a cis white man, because many of us are so thoroughly trained to feel like we are not good enough.
Privilege tells people they can fake it, and that they’re good enough just as people and can learn the skills on the job. Abuse and oppression tell people they aren’t good enough as people and that even their high skills are probably below average, and that unless they had the specific job title or were using certain skills officially, nobody will think it counts.
The goal is to at least fake the confidence of a privileged person, to give the employer a chance at seeing the skills that you’ve been trained to undervalue.
I would also say to answer any query of “Have you done [X small task] before?” with “I have, but it’s been a while.” Or, “I have, but it was a slightly different program.”
100% THEY WILL GLADLY WALK YOU THROUGH EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW, and I stress ‘gladly’ because claiming prior knowledge boosts their confidence in your abilities and any slips you make are already covered by your caveat.
blackstoic may have deactivated their account but this advice is fucking gold and all y’all looking for jobs or who think you might one day need to look for a new job PRINT THIS SHIT OUT AND STAPLE IT TO THE WALL.
the Lebanese red cross is a charity that many Lebanese citizens endorse and are asking for others to donate to. As of right now (11:30 EST on the fifth), it’s the most up-to-date info I can find.
If you don’t know what’s up, Beirut suffered a chemical explosion the size of a small nuke (which is still fucking huge.) They have a host of other serious and deadly crises (humanitarian/political/social) going on right now, too, and the explosion destroyed their main port, where a lot of their trade and necessary supplies (such as medical supplies) come in.
Please, if you can, help Lebanon recover from this blow and tackle the rest of their problems. They need help.
This is very important, please do not ignore this.
Watch the video till the very end please (the end is when the explosion goes off.)
I live in Lebanon and the fiercest explosion went off in the midst of Beirut today, killing off an ungodly amount of human beings (more and more people are dying as I write this) and injuring up to 5000 people whose cases are immensely critical. Today,, at approximately 6 pm, hospitals were completely torn to shreds, people have been buried underneath fallen buildings, fires have been ignited almost everywhere, blood staining the streets in an excruciating manner, in addition to people that flew and fell to the sea due to the impact of the explosion. And it is certainly worth mentioning the millions upon millions' worth of damages what with buildings and cars and stores. Plenty of people are missing, it's an overall mess that is quite frankly very traumatizing.
What Lebanese people have been undergoing in recent times:
Lebanon has been going through a major economical decline that grows worse and worse by the day. The prices have heightened and the salaries remain the same, scarcely anyone has the capacity of affording basic needs anymore. There has been an unfolding revolution the past year, and the lebanese society has been protesting against the humiliation thrust upon our lives due to our miserable excuse for a government, and though the streets bled with thrashing, screaming citizens fighting for their utmost basic human rights, that caused mere to no change in the way things go around here, in fact, it only made it worse. We're being provided with, metaphorically, a droplet's worth of water and nearly no electricity, a pregnant woman has even passed away recently due to a heat stroke (as there were no means of cooling off)
What caused the setting off of this explosion?
The ignorance, heartlessness, and overall brutality of the government and the people in control.
A critical amount of chemicals (2700 tons of ammonium and other nitrates) were left inside a ship along the port of Beirut, and though the people in charge of this transaction were warned that heat and perspiration have the capability of destroying the whole of Lebanon in ode to a massive explosion, they refused to do anything about it and left the chemicals in there for years on end.
Up until, surprise surprise, the explosion went off and devestated Lebanon almost entirely.
I don't have much followers, and I know that this post isn't going to magically heal what is unfolding in this, priorly gorgeous, magnificent country, but I truly hope with all my heart that you find it within yours to spread awareness on this topic so that it would be more widespread,, so that Lebanon gets the aiding it deserves and the people from outer places slap the 'big bosses' awake, or at least pressure them into resigning, whatever it takes to make this place sufferable, tolerable, somewhere you can picture yourself residing in.
Lebanon is a place of infinite traditions, diversity, creativity, joy, and love. Most of the people here are open-hearted and wholesome. We all deserve far better.
My heart aches for the people that have passed away today, and I shall pray for the ones stuck in hellish suffering.
You may have heard of what happened in Lebanon today and if not, basically, there was a big explosion in Beirut that affected many cities, destroyed shops, homes, cars, caused many injuries and deaths. The cause is uncertain.
As a fellow lebanese myself (that also lives there), today was absolutely terrifying, probably the scariest moments of my life. We heard a deafening sound as the floors were shaking. Some of us thought it was an attack, others thought it was an earthquake. As soon as it ended many expected a second one, which luckily never happened.
Here's a video of what happened that was sent to me, there are also many others that you can find online.
Windows were broken, doors wrecked, cars flipped over, buildings collapsed, people hit by flying or falling objects, and unfortunately, many didn't make it out alive.
We were one of the lucky ones, our families and friends were all safe and our homes were fine.
Some people couldn't even get out of the crumbling builings, so we saw corpses being pulled out, although some people survived the crash. But wherever we looked, there was blood, poeple were half covered in it, their shirts, pants, hair, everything. And that sight was traumatizing.
We watched the news with elders severely injured, children with blood-spattered shirts and people in pain that couldn't get in the hospitals because they were full.
Some people are missing. Just try to imagine the pain and fear their families and friends are feeling.
Articles about what happened, there are a lot more
Officials expect death toll to rise after huge blast rips through Lebanon's capital.
The explosion took place at the port shortly before 19:00 local time (18:00 CET) with a large cloud of smoke billowing over the city. Eyewit
Not only are we in the middle of a pandemic, but Lebanon is also going through a very serious economical crisis. To give you an example, before, $1 equaled 1 500 lebanese pounds. Nowadays, $1 equals more than 7 000 lebanese pounds. Not to mention that we obviously don't have any dollars at disposition, so yeah we're fucked.
People are hungry, homeless, unemployed. And even if they are getting paid, it'll be useless since the prices of everything went up because they were affected by the economical fiasco.
Important additional information
Today, I heard my 7 year old cousins scream in fear that they were going to die. I saw my aunt shaking, worried that her children won't survive. I saw my dad freak out while trying to reassure us when we both knew that we were uncertain about the next minutes of our lives. I heard the panic in the trembling voices of my family and friends as they couldn't believe what had just happened. I thought my loved ones and I were going to die in the next seconds.
I'm never forgetting those moments and feelings.
I don't think signing petitions will help, i don't even know if the following links will help either, I just know Lebanon and it's people are desperate for anything because the future of this country is extremely uncertain.
https://helplebanonnow.carrd.co/
How can you help?
https://lebanoncrisis.carrd.co/
Lebanon Needs You More Than Ever. Know more about the crisis in Lebanon, sign petitions, donate or explore volunteering opportunities.
Help families, domestic workers, and refugees in Lebanon with food and other basic needs during this economic and public health crisis
I think donating to the red cross would be the most helpful, so if you are considering it, it'd be great.
There are so many great threads on twitter about what you can do to help, just search help lebanon or something to find them. Also if you can, please donate, and as I said, the lebanese pound is pretty much worthless currently so USD is way more useful to us.
As a matter of fact, if your employer fires you for anything relating to forming a union, that's retalition, and it's illegal under federal law. If this happens to you, vontact the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
my biology professor has such a chaotic energy about him, last week i went to his office hours and somehow we ended up on the topic of gay marriage:
he said that when he lived in texas they changed the law to define marriage as “between a man and a woman in a house of religious worship with the intention to have children” so he filed his taxes as single and when they called him up like “you filed married last year” he was like “you changed the law, i was married by a judge in a courthouse and i have no intention of having kids” and they told him “you know who that law was for” and i guess he hung up on them and did not, in fact, pay taxes as a married man that year
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
A forty hour work week is considered full time.
It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
This does not follow at all and is actually insane. The value of work is not determined by the needs of the worker. The value of the work is determined by the value of the work.
What work?
We pay money for work because it creates value. You go in to McJobald’s, you work the register, creating value for them because now they have a person through which to exchange other people’s money for their hammed borgers. So they give you some of the value you create as wages. They don’t give you all the money you take at the register, because they are also paying the sandwich-wrights, the suppliers, the truckers, the rent, the health insurance on everyone, etc. You’re only providing a percentage of the value, you are only providing so much value, so you only get so much money. They pay you as little as they can get away with, just like they pay everyone else in the chain as little as they can get away with, because if they paid everyone more than they needed their costs would be too high and they would fail. The great thing about capitalism is that it doesn’t require people to have selfless intentions to create good outcomes, and it can create good outcomes for people who are being paid as little as their employer can get away with because of how the market defines “as little as their employer can get away with”.
If you have an incurable disease that requires a hundred thousand dollars of medicine per day to prevent you from melting into a puddle of fluid and thus your cost of living is much much much higher, this does not increase the value generated by your work. McJobald’s is not robbing the sick guy of his labor because the profit value of his labor obviously, trivially obviously, how the fuck do even Communists fall for this shit, has nothing to do with the cost to keep him alive.
Wages are not a moral issue. Prices and costs are not a moral issue. Supply and demand is not a moral issue. Capitalism is resilient because it can use these things to function without moralizing, without relying on selfless intentions from the people involved. Supply and demand isn’t a law like some kind of evil council decreed it; it’s a law like gravity is a law because we observed this is how the world works.
Your entire argument is fucking incoherent and meaningless because it hinges entirely on equivocating two things that are obviously not the same thing at all.
When you pass a minimum wage law, you are not saying “Evil immoral capital-holders must now act morally by giving more money to workers, because they could have done that to begin with.” You are saying “You cannot employ people if their labor does not create at least this much value for you per hour”. Because that is how incentives work. “Capital” is not a mystical pile of infinite money that they only refuse to share because they are so evil. Increased costs have a cost.
Getting morally outraged at how much things cost and forcing people to pay what you think they should cost does not work. For one, the morally outraged always have less information and are stricken by bias, so their judgment of what things like labor and housing and etc “should” cost is usually just fucking wrong by any metric. They also can’t conceive of any step in any process that a solution could be found at other than “yell at the person I can see to make it cost something different.”
Motherfucker, the problem is usually solved somewhere other than where you’re looking! Remember Wal-Mart, the evil omnicorporation you hate and think just loves to be evil and exploit people and hurt the poor? They run on a profit margin of one half of one percent (meaning they are not greedily robbing value from the poor and hoarding it), and they make all that money by catering to poor people and providing value to poor people. Providing value to poor people is actually very lucrative because there’s a lot more of them than rich people – if you’re allowed to do it!
But people in California, for example, can’t afford places to live on the wages they have, because the government is actively preventing people from fulfilling their needs and prohibiting them from building housing poor people can afford. Because of the same people who say this shit, poor people can’t afford to meet their needs, because people who would be able to meet their needs are being stopped from doing so. And those moralizers look at the situation they created, and they cannot think of how any problem might have any steps to it other than “the people paying wages have not been yelled at enough”, and then they make it worse by making it prohibitively expensive to employ people for low-skilled low-value jobs.
Fucking Communists. Christ. It never ends with you people. You always get to just keep doing it. Everyone has to accept your bullshit by default, because it’s a inherent right Communists have.
The Waltons, who own Wal-Mart, make $70,000 a minute. The average American makes $46,644 a YEAR. Your sob story about Wal-Mart’s meager profit margins obviously doesn’t mean the owners are scraping by. They have canned food drives for their employees, but make 1.5x the average American salary PER HOUR.
You treat capitalist exploitation as some unknowable, unchangeable force for good from above, like some sort of sociopathic god. You are a pathetic bootlicker devoid of empathy, and you’re even more pathetic because I assume you’re not one of the billionaires you’re caping for.
Everything that you responded to in that post was something you created.
The fact that you think a factual statement about Wal-Mart’s profit margins is a “sob story” is insane. So is the fact that you think “Look at this family and how many resources they have! That’s TOO MANY RESOURCES! Obviously they have to have resources taken away from them by me, who should decide how many resources people are allowed to have!” is a convincing argument.
A good, salient response to “costs and wages are not moral issues” is not “I AM SO MORALLY OUTRAGED!” Because your moral outrage is the only reason to bring up how much the Waltons make, it has no relevance to anything. If you murdered all of the Waltons, and you murdered everyone in the entire executive hierarchy, and you confiscated all of the compensation they get from being a part of Wal-Mart for a year, and the fact that you murdered all these people didn’t decrease the value of their compensation, and if we assume that their compensation is in large sacks of evil money (which it ISN’T YOU FUCKING IDIOT COMMUNIST IT’S THE VALUE OF THE CORPORATION THEY OWN SHARES OF, REFLECTING THE VALUE IT CREATES, YOU FUCKING IDIOT COMMUNIST), and you redistributed all of the resources you confiscated to the workers of Wal-Mart…
You would give each of those workers fifty dollars. For the entire year. And you would destroy the entire entity that generated all that value.
The fact that you think an counterargument to “prices and wages are not moral issues” is “LOOK AT HOW MUCH MONEY THE OWNERS MAKE! I AM SO OUTRAGED! YOU BOOTLICKER! HOW DARE YOU NOT BE MY EMOTIONS!” when the total compensation of the owners and executives doesn’t make a dent in those wages is our sign that you don’t care about helping, you don’t care about making things better, you want to have power for the sake of power.
You are calling me a bootlicker because I don’t want to actively give you the authority to dictate how people are allowed to behave. Because you’re an idiot Communist, the concept of people doing things for any reason other than top-down directives is incomprehensible to you. You become illiterate when someone presents you with the words “Your plan is based on incomprehension of reality and it doesn’t work and will only cause damage”, and you assume that those words you can’t read are “I am on Team Evil instead of being on Team Good like you!” You don’t care about facts, reality, consequences of your actions, learning from the past, or making anytyhing work. All you care about is screaming and moralizing. All you want to do is grab anyone you can, shake them, and shout “WHY AREN’T YOU MY FEELINGS? YOU SHOULD BE MY FEELINGS!”
And you’ll never stop. And you’ll never have to stop. You will create nothing but abuse and misery while shrieking your righteousness, never interacting with a single fact. You will go through life hating the fact that other people can do things for reasons you didn’t give them, and convince yourself any time anyone isn’t the same as your feelings, it’s capitalist brainwashing into false consciousness. And you will be surrounded by people who fellate you because Communism gives you the inherent right to be a complete piece of human shit and be praised for it.
Suicide is the only answer. Suicide is the only answer because of you. All words will die and be usurped by noises forever because of you. Facts will wither into nothingness and all of human civilization will become endless shrieking social power games because of you. We will lose the concept of being effective or competent at actions forevermore because of you. And you will feel so smug and righteous and be praised by everyone around you for how virtuous you are, as you trample away everything that allows life to be even remotely tolerable. Suicide is the answer. You are the question.
I’m glad someone answered, because the tl;dr to OPs question is,
“A lot of people think working 40 hours a week at McDonald’s is not, in fact, valuable”
That said, @brazenautomaton I don’t really find your argument that convincing either;
“Companies pay workers for the value they generate” and “Companies pay workers as little as they can get away with” are, uh, not actually the same and you might want to think about what makes you think that they are.
Walmart already has to pay existing minimum wage. Walmart can do so without going bankrupt, which means, at least as you’ve outlined things, that current minimum wage is somewhat less than the value that the employees generate for the company.
It is, at least potentially, significantly less then the value they generate.
What would happen if, tomorrow, a law passed halving the minimum wage? It’s clear that this would not change the value of a given worker’s work.
So would Walmart keep paying workers their current wages (Because those wages are consonant with the value they generate for the company)?
Or would they slash wages (because companies try to pay as little as they can get away with)?
1. The Waltons are horrible people, even if you don’t think that rich people are by definition horrible people. Like, habitual drunk driver who killed a man drunk driving sort of horrible people. Like would have done prison time if it was you or I sort of horrible people. Doesn’t give a shit about other people’s lives in a concrete sense of a shitty nextdoor neighbor kind of doesn’t give a shit about other people’s lives, not just the rich capitalist pig kind of doesn’t give a shit about other people’s lives kind of horrible people.
2. Walmart has slashed payroll over and over and over again because payroll is the only thing left to cut. Have you NOT noticed how fewer cashiers there are now and how many more self check-outs?! Payroll being that tight is a major part of why Walmart sucks so hard as an employer now. Also, Walmart as a megacorp hasn’t gone bankrupt, but they have been known to close stores that weren’t making enough money.
3. Walmart is the size of a midsized COUNTRY in dollars, and has more employees in the US that there are people living in Hawaii. $70k a minute doesn’t go very far spread over more people than the population of a decent number of US states.
4. Companies pay workers as little as they can get away with, but that amount CANNOT be more than the amount of value the employees collectively generate. If payroll exceeds gross profit minus stuff like rent and utilities, the company goes bankrupt and nobody makes anything working for them anymore because they’re all unemployed now.
5. If minimum wage went down, companies in labor markets where they have to pay above minimum wage to attract and retain suitable employees wouldn’t do a thing differently. Companies that currently hire a number of people at minimum wage would most likely start trying to hire at a lower rate, but might also hire more workers total than they had previously. Similarly, companies would find automation and other labor saving costs to be unjustified and continue to eg. hire cashiers rather than pay to replace them with self-checkouts.
6. The idea that 40 hours of work is the maximum amount an employee should be required to work per society is so completely bogus that it brings into question if there is any reason to take OP seriously on the topic of work and labor regulations. It has been legally declared in court cases that mandatory overtime is completely legal, and the idea that just showing up for 40 hours should be sufficient to keep even the lowest quality of employees in the style that is framed as “surviving” deserves it’s own point.
7. “Surviving” is doing some real heavy lifting here and the goal posts are almost immediately moved to “basic necessities”. By the very basic definition of “they’re still alive as they haven’t yet died of starvation or exposure” anyone who is working is surviving because they’re not dead yet. How fine a style is “surviving”? Is it a one bedroom apartment by yourself? Is it shopping at Whole Foods? Like, this is ridiculous bullshit. The reason that people sneak into the United States to work under the table for less than minimum wage is because that’s a profitable thing for them to do vs their other options.
The thing that really animates my politics right now is a kind of individualism.
I’ve noticed more than one person say that if minimum wage was cut, the company would hire more people for less pay. I suppose that’s brought up just as a fact, but I wonder what the relevance is.
It’s not obvious to me that hiring two people at $10,000 a year is as good or better than hiring one at $20,000, especially if I’m in the position of the guy who used to be able to get that $20,000 salary but now has to work twice as hard just to stay where I was.
Especially because, if I’m that guy, I’m going to be wondering if, from my personal perspective, any of the long term economic benefits (assuming there are any) will actually benefit me without being swamped by the immediate drawbacks.
Okay so I ran out of my meds like a week ago nd my clinic is doing everything by phone but won't return my calls so I'm trying this new thing called "leave a troubling voicemail so when I finally lose it, the court will at least be entertained"
Hi it's me again, number 555-5555- I was told to expect a call back in half an hour, and it's Tuesday, so that was (pause) 46 hours ago,, I HAVE run out of my (stumbling, broken glass, swearing) sorry- run out of my prescription, just a ~leetle~ concerned about withdrawal symptoms- no biggie, if you could just- (cat sound) FUCK- if you could call me back at you earliest... If you could give me a call back, I'd appreciate it. Thank you, have a lovely day! (Tripping into door.mp3) FUCK (line cuts out)
My court-appointed legal defense, clicking 'stop' on a CCTV recording of me singing all parts of "I Am The Monarch Of The Sea" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "H.M.S. Pinafore" by myself while repeatedly driving into, reversing, and again driving into the front doors of the clinic in a stolen golf cart, wearing only a 'Hawaiian' shirt and silver aviators, in the throes of the most *delicious* manic depressive episode of my life: As you can see your honor, he did his best
Today's message: Yooooo its ya boi at 555-5555 again, calling one more time to check in on that there callback. Hate to rush y'all, but it do appear to be day six sans mé-di-cat-síon and I'll be honest, getting a wee bit sucky on this end, my dudes. Feel free to give me a ring. Peace out, girl scout. Kerchaw
Day 7: Hello, This is [My Full Legal Name], number 555-5555- I Have Called Seven Days Ago, Four Days Ago, And Yesterday In Regards To A Refill On My Prescription. As I Have Not Been Contacted Back, I Can Only Assume That Your Phone Lines Are Down, And Will Be Coming Down In Person Tomorrow Morning. Thank You.
