09.30.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:20 am by Mina
Love your pets? Want to know what they’re thinking, or if they’re watching you in spirit form after they’ve died — pardon me, “passed?” Well, you’re in luck! Just pay this crazy lady three hundred dollars and she’ll spend half an hour talking to your pets, alive or dead, with her mind. Without fail, she’ll tell you that your live pets love you and are very happy (though they may want more treats!) and your dead pets are always with you and want you not to be sad. Remarkably predictable, those animals are.
This scam would disgust me if she wasn’t so bad at it. I listened to an hour or so of the radio show last night, where you can get a snippet of advice or clairvoyance for free. Now, I realize the people who are inclined to call in to such a show are already predisposed to believe in Ms. Fitzpatrick’s “psychic powers,” but wouldn’t you think getting every single thing wrong in one call would be a little bit of a tipoff? Maybe the third time the psychic says she’s sensing a certain person telling her something and you say “Oh no, that must be this other person we haven’t talked about yet” and she says “Yes! That’s who it is!” after you’ve fricking told her who it is you might start to get some inkling that she’s just making this shit up? Maybe?
I dunno. I realize that even the most hardcore cynic is susceptible to being fooled sometimes, but if you’re going to be fooled, at least endeavor not to do so at the hands of someone who is so transparently bad at her job.
For bonus points, when Ms. Fitzpatrick is not talking to dead animals she’s busy extolling the virtues of homeopathic medicine. Apparently she missed the newsflash that pretending plain old water is medicine is bullshit. (The reader responses at the bottom there are comedy gold, too.)
Sadly, what I was listening to was a re-airing and so I could not call in to ask her what Tickler was thinking.
Permalink
09.25.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:20 pm by Mina
Come on, even if you don’t think Michael Moore is an inveterate boob, you have to find this amusing.
Just goes to show you should never trust anyone who can’t even manage to play along on Space Ghost.
Addendum: 50 DKP minus, though, for declaring some of Moore’s criticisms justified — such as of bailouts and central banks, which are indeed Very Bad Things — but failing to point out that those things do not in fact have anything to do with free-market capitalism.
Permalink
09.22.09
Posted in Umm... what? at 12:09 am by Mina
I was in Boston today for a rehearsal of what will be my last BSO concert for the foreseeable future (more on that later this week) and discovered a new feature on the subway cars: signs every few feet that say “Your taxes pay to keep this car clean. Please do your part by taking all of your belongings with you.” Now, I’ve never left stuff, trash or otherwise, on a subway car, and I don’t plan to start any time soon. But isn’t it just a little bit ridiculous to put up a sign that says “The government takes your money and gives it to us to clean this car, but you had better clean it up first!”
Maybe I’m a crazy person, but I just don’t see the logic in paying other people to do a job for me if they’re just going to tell me to do it my own damn self.
Permalink
09.19.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:37 am by Mina
Once you’re in power, it’s totally okay to change laws to keep yourself in power, right?
Afterall, it’s for the noble cause of making government bigger and taxes higher and freedoms fewer, and who can argue against that?
Permalink
09.17.09
Posted in Politics at 12:28 pm by Mina
Tonight this guy will be presenting his let’s-all-be-socialists movie at GCC. Sadly, I have to work, so I cannot follow through with my original plan to heckle and/or pass out literature that points out all the flaws in Mr. Wolff’s reasoning. Which is probably okay, because I’m sure no one in charge of organizing the presentation, least of all Wolff himself, is interested in actual informed debate taking place; it’s just one more little piece of the indoctrination that is the public school system.
The main trouble with Wolff’s criticism of capitalism is that it rests entirely on two easily debunked fallacies, the first being the supposed stagnation of wages in the 1970′s. In fact, no such stagnation occurred; Wolff (and many other socialist economists) do not factor in the value of non-cash compensation to employees, which began to increase greatly in the seventies. Here, here, and here are some facts regarding the myth of wage stagnation.
Wolff uses that initial fallacy, in conjunction with the fact that corporate profits have continued to rise over the last thirty years (this one is actually true!) to argue that employees are not seeing any benefit from the increased profits and are therefore being exploited by their employers. This is demonstrably false: just look around you. It’s impossible not to notice the increase in the standard of living for the average American over the past thirty years. I’m not a particularly well-off person, but I have more luxuries just in this room than I can count. When your average worker has a cell phone, refrigerator, microwave, TV, and computer, well, that’s a pretty good indicator that his actual compensation is sufficient. How exactly could our average standard of living have improved so much if not because we’ve received increased compensation in relation to our increased production?
The second fallacy is that an ever increasing gap between corporate profits and employee wages is a necessary result of a capitalist system, but Wolff provides absolutely no evidence for this claim. In fact, a true free-market system, by its very nature, will always result in increasing wages, as companies compete for the best workers in order to be more successful. The only way to keep wages lower than employee production warrants is through — you guessed it — regulation! While companies in a particular industry may mutually decide to keep wages artificially low, the only way to enforce such a decision is with the help of the government. Without such enforcement, the first smart businessperson to come along will see a great opportunity to snap up all the best employees by offering a higher wage. Any such wage stagnation, if it were to exist, would therefore be a result of the interference with the free-market system, not the system itself.
Okay, so the wage stagnation never happened, and even if it had it wasn’t caused by the capitalist system. But just for kicks, let’s take a look at Wolff’s proposed solution for this inevitable failure of capitalism that did not and could not happen.
What we have to do, see, is all be both owners *and* employees of our places of work. That way we’ll just have to split up all those growing profits evenly! Hey, it worked for some tech guys in California, so it has to work everywhere, right? Wrong. It should be pretty self-evident, first of all, that not everyone is good at or interested in making business decisions. Some people, like maybe music students who are waitressing to pay the bills while they go to school, would much rather go to work, get paid, and spend their free time thinking about things they actually enjoy, like, say, music and video games.
But just for argument’s sake let’s pretend that every worker ever wants to spend time deciding how his company should be run. When are the decisions made? Well, in Wolff’s example, said tech guys did work Monday through Thursday, and spent Friday making business decisions. Okay, but that means no work got done on Friday. Or it means that Friday’s work got smooshed into Monday through Thursday. And don’t even start thinking about the headache of finding time for an all-emplowner meeting when you’re the type of business that actually has to be open for customers in order to make any money.
Wolff’s proposal seems to forget one of the most basic principles of civilization: division of labour. Let the people who are good at making decisions make the decisions, and let the people who are good at making widgets, or who only want to flip burgers, make widgets and flip burgers. We are not little worker-drones who are all exactly the same, and we maximize our production, efficiency, and compensation by realizing and working with that rather than denying it.
In conclusion: Richard Wolff’s “Capitalism Hits the Fan” offers a solution that could not work for a problem that does not exist. I sure do hope *somebody* at that lecture tonight has the brains to call him on it, but I’m not holding my breath.
Permalink
09.15.09
Posted in Fluffy Musings, Politics at 11:41 am by Mina
I know it’s trendy to be all “omg those dirty greedy capitalists” these days, but I gotta say, I love it. Not that I’ve ever particularly been in doubt, but this was just brought home to me last night as I looked for sheet music for a piece I’m considering for this semester’s recital. Since there are apparently no sheet music stores in this half of the state, the intarweb is my sheet music resource, and that’s been kind of rough in the past: not very many years ago, my best hope of finding music on the intarweb was if by some chance someone had scanned in the pages in image format. They would be terrible quality, large files, really hard to find, and even harder to legitimately purchase if I wanted to be all legal and stuff. If I *could* manage to find it to purchase, it meant paying a shipping fee and waiting some two weeks before I actually had the music in my hands.
Now, a 2-minute search gets me professionally-prepared sheet music, instantly transposed into whatever key I want, downloaded to my computer so I can print it right away, for a couple bucks. Oh, and if I want an accompaniment track to go with it?I can burn that onto a CD in minutes for only a few dollars more.
I can think of about eighteen billion ways in which capitalism makes my life better, and not a single way in which I or anybody else is worse off for it. Why exactly do we need the government getting in the way of it again?
Permalink
09.02.09
Posted in Gamer Nerd, Musics, World of Warcraft at 8:15 am by Mina
My crazy little brain made an interesting parallel today: directing my church choir is pretty much exactly the same as leading a World of Warcraft raid team.
I’ve been doing both for some weeks now, and I’m actually rather surprised I haven’t thought of it before. Each week I have to figure out who’s going to be around. Each week I plan something that the people I have available to me are capable of doing. Each week something invariably happens that I did not plan, and it’s up to me to deal with it somehow.
So then I start to think about why I find the choir so much less frustrating and more rewarding. I can come up with two reasons easily: I don’t have to figure out each week what days to hold choir on, and I don’t have to worry that we’ll be unable to accomplish anything at all if the whole choir doesn’t show. The days are set, and we do something with whoever we have. More chaotic, perhaps, but far less stressful.
If Muffin Hunter raiding starts up again, and I’m hoping it will, I think this will be a very useful lesson to keep in mind.
Permalink
10.08.08
Posted in Restaurant Etiquette 101 at 10:17 am by Mina
I worked this past weekend at a new restaurant that the owner of the other restaurant I work at has just opened up. It’s an adorable little place, literally the only thing other than the town hall in town, and the clientele so far has been, unsurprisingly in the sticks of western Massachusetts, a lot of hippies. One of them came up to me during my shift on Saturday and said “Excuse me waitron, could we add something to our order?” To which I naturally replied, laughing, “Waitron? Heh, I’m a robot!” and went off to get the thing she needed.
I looked it up when I got home and discovered that “waitron” is a term coined in the eighties to refer to a non-gender-specific waiter or waitress, and is often, but not always, considered derogatory. Now, I take no offense from that lady calling me waitron. In fact, I found it quite amusing. But seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Wasn’t Voltron from the eighties? Didn’t the term-coiners think that maybe that would be the association? And furthermore, am I supposed to be hiding the fact that I am a female wait-person? Cause, I’ve never really been ashamed of that.
Waitron. Good gravy.
Permalink
10.05.08
Posted in Stuff at 7:16 pm by Mina
Also in the suckage category is people you thought were your friends believing the worst of you on the say-so of someone who has very transparently never liked you much, without so much as a single attempt to contact you directly to clarify and resolve a misunderstanding.
Oh, and crying over a video game? Suck. But friends are friends, internet or not, and losing them hurts. Especially when it’s over and done with before you even knew what hit you.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »