Goldman Sachs CEO on Income Inequality

Worth checking out what Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs says about the growing income inequality:

Income inequality is destabilizing and "responsible for the divisions in the country," CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein said on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday.
"The divisions could get wider," Blankfein said. "If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems. [If] you can't deal with problems, you can't drive growth and you can't drive the success of the country. It's a very big issue and something that has to be dealt with."
He said one way to deal with it would be to "make the pie grow."
"Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people," he said.

He also hints at the need to look at how the pie is divided, by the way.  Because the pie has been growing; it's just that it has been eaten by fewer people.  So the growth policy isn't really working, right?

The story goes on explaining how hard it is to figure out the reasons for the growing income inequality.  Though I respectfully want to point out that several of the reasons are quite easily determined, because they are the consequences of specific policies:  Increase the regression of income taxes, favor capital over labor in who pays the most taxes,  encourage the off-shoring of good jobs, do your utmost to tear up all safety nets (which the rich don't need, duh).

Blankfein's reference to politics is that "if you can't legislate" comment.  But the problem of American politics is that they are money-driven, that they are beginning to mirror the needs and desires of the one percent and become less and less reflective of the more general needs or desires.

Indeed, the same appears to be true on international level, too.  Trade policies are often crafted to comply with the interests of corporations, not with the interests of workers or consumers.

Thank You

For your kind donations and for reading here.  I now have enough for a new computer, with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen!   Big hugs and mwah.

The negative side is that I won't put myself out to pasture as early as I planned. 

Women Are Hard To Animate. Thoughts on Representation of Women in Movies, Television and Games

That "women are hard to animate" comes from today's Funny Files.  The excuse for not having female characters in the next game of a series called Assassin's Creed is that to have them would have doubled the workload of the animators.

That's polite shorthand for meaning that the customers of the game are viewed as being mostly male, so having female characters just isn't cost-effective (well, except perhaps for the tit-value), but it's also a lot like the old "but then we need toilets for women" argument which was made when some colleges had to turn coed.

Others found that defense funny, too.  Still, there's something deeper I can dig for you in this quote:

“Assassin’s Creed: Unity,” which takes place during the French Revolution through the Napoleonic wars, is a four-player co-0p, explained by Amancio here. Players can customize their gear, but always see themselves as the main character, Arno Dorian.
“Because of that, the common denominator was Arno,” Amancio explained. “It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar.”

That "deeper" has to do with the initial focus.  If the focus is on a guy called Arno Dorian and his adventures during Napoleonic wars, well, it IS a bit hard to put female heroes into the story. A realistic portrayal of women would be as a few sisters, wives and mothers, as victims of rape and other war violence and as prostitutes, right?  From the guy point of view (which we all can assume, I believe).  We don't know a whole lot about how women "played" war in history.  You could add something about trying to steal enough potatoes between the army lines to stay alive without getting caught, perhaps, to make the game more realistic.

That wasn't very clear.  My point is that these stories are picked from a certain angle, an angle of traditionally male heroism, and even when that is not the case most of us are lulled into believing that a handful of women in a large list of participants is a mixed gender setting in a movie or television series.  Just think of the Noah's Ark (which also consisted of all white characters).  Probably a fifty-fifty distribution of men and women in some movie reads as a chick flick to many viewers.

One reason for all this is that we tend to see women portray womanhood in their roles, not play roles of individuals who have different temperaments, characters and so on.  That's why having a handful of women in a movie looks like inclusion, even if they all play the role "women," because that role might be subconsciously compared to the number of dentists or gamblers or whatever in the same movie, never mind that most of the rest of that list are played by men.

A similar thinking applies to roles played by people of color (so women of color get a double dose here).  The only solution I can see is to increase the numbers of those groups closer to their actual population proportions.  Once a certain critical coalition size has been reached in jobs, say, women (or any other less represented group) stop being seen as representatives of their group and start being seen as individuals.  We are getting there but we are not there yet.

ISIS

Isn't it sarcastic that the acronym ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is also the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess?  Because the ISIS, this time, is certainly not about a revered goddess but about creating a modern Islamic caliphate, a country stretching from Syria to Iraq and beyond, where the role of women would not have anything to do with potential divinity.

Never mind.  Given the current violence and population displacement, those concerns are not the foremost.  Stopping the violence would be, if anyone in the whole world just could figure out a way to do that, either in Syria or in Iraq.  That doesn't seem feasible.

Then the recriminations.  It's certainly true that the American invasion (to punish Saudi suicide bombers in 911 the US had to attack an unrelated country,  Iraq, though it was really about oil)  precipitated the current situation.  For instance,

While not as big as what it had been prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq's military under Saddam Hussein boasted an estimated 430,000 soldiers and another 400,000 personnel in paramilitary units and security services when U.S.-led troops invaded in spring 2003.
Still, the Iraqis proved no match for coalition forces.
After the military was overrun, it was dissolved -- along with Iraq's defense and information ministries -- by Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq.
That left hundreds of thousands of troops suddenly out of work. Those with ranks of colonel and above -- who knew the most about strategy, tactics and more -- were hit even harder, as they weren't entitled to severance packages and couldn't work for the new Iraqi government.
Then they had to go somewhere.
According to Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled officers of Saddam Hussein's ... joined ISIS."

This is an example, one of many, of the lack of proper thinking before and during the US invasion of Iraq.

It is also true that the state of Iraq was patched together by the British, once upon a time, and doesn't lend itself to be a natural state, and the West's constant thirst for oil and the associated colonial history has played a major role in preparing the ground for the current events.

But we shouldn't  assume that the area would be a peaceful Eden in the absence of any Western influence.  The current violence in Iraq has to do with the Sunnis and the Shias and the Kurds, and the current violence in Syria is also religiously motivated.  The ISIS group appears to support an extreme form of an Islamist state in Raqqa, Syria,  where Sharia laws are rigidly applied, in their original medieval forms, and so on.  At the same time, their tactics in Iraq rely more on the support of Sunnis and the unhappiness with the current Iraqi leadership, because that works out better in the Iraqi context:

In the Syrian city of Raqqa, their strict brand of Islamic law holds sway. Activists and residents say music has been banned, Christians have to pay an Islamic tax for protection and people are executed in the main square.
In the Iraqi city of Fallujah, however, residents say the group has so far taken a more moderate approach, choosing to overlook some practices it considers forbidden.
The makeup of its forces also varies to a degree. In Syria, foreigners play a larger role than in Iraq, where locals tend to dominate.
The group has been able to do this, in part, because of the simmering anger in Iraq’s Sunni minority community toward Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They accuse al-Maliki of treating them as second-class citizens.

None of what I write here is based on any kind of expertise.  These are my amateur thoughts.

I'm not sure how democracy is historically developed, but I fear it begins with at least some bloodshed, and far too many countries appear to exist at that stage right now.  That's my more optimistic interpretation of what might be happening.  The pessimistic one is about a world divided by money and religion and sinking ever deeper into absolutes which cannot be questioned.

Though ISIS is unlikely to be strong enough on its own to create a permanent Islamic emirate or caliphate.  Ironically, should it succeed in that the outcomes would be bad for its future residents. The extremist Islamic model is a very poor fit for modern needs of economic and social development.

You've Been Bradwilcoxed. Washington Post on How Women Can Stay Safe.

I'm singularly blessed by my warped sense of humor.  It lets me enjoy the most recent Washington Post opinion piece on women, after the George Will one (about being a victim of sexual violence as a coveted status), partly because it reminds me of this opinion piece in 2008, about us wimminfolk:

We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?

Imagine something like that published in WaPo about any other large demographic groups!

Anyway, today's piece is quite wonderful.  It suggests that all men should get married and have children, because that way they stop being violent towards women!

How We Should Cover Mass Murders

Yesterday I began a post with this:

It might be time not to give any publicity for the killers in these mass shooting events, because of the copycat criminals and the very real possibility that what the killers want is posthumous fame or notoriety.

I didn't finish the post.  But it wouldn't have made any difference in terms of what is clearly taking place right now.  Journalists should seriously think about how to report on mass murders, to keep the focus on the victims, what was lost by their deaths, what good things they did while alive, how great the grief is for those left behind.  The perpetrator should not be the focus, if at all possible, and when it is not, the treatment should take care to avoid the type of coverage which copycat killers would wish to read about themselves.

Being A Victim: A Coveted Status. Or So Writes George Will.

George Will is a conservative writer whom Charlie Pierce once compared to a vinegar decanter.   That was funny because it is apt.  Now George has decided to write about the crisis of sexual violence on US college campuses.

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

Bolds are mine.

Will's message is that there is no crisis, that "males" get unfairly accused, that "females" are encouraged to see pity f**ks or similar as rapes.  If you are not quite convinced, George Will also tells us (he will tell us!) that  progressives want trigger warnings on all university reading materials, too:

Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a “safe,” “supportive,” “unthreatening” environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.
It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.

Hmm.  Now I want marshmallows.   Then I want to stab them hard.

George commits three common not-so-nice crimes in his piece. 

First, he picks a story about sexual violence which is as marginal as possible (from his point of view).  By picking that story and ignoring all the other stories he manages to suggest that sexual violence on campuses is pretty much nonexistent, and if it does exist, it's due to "the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults."

Second, he picks something which indeed has happened but which is both uncommon and avidly debated among progressives as indicative of the coddling culture on all campuses:  the demand for trigger warnings in college courses.  By implying that all progressives are for such warnings Will is being dishonest, and by not actually studying how common such trigger warnings are in reality he is being sorta lazy. 

Third, he argues that "males" have been denied due process:

Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.

This glides over the fact that many "females" argue that they have been denied due process or justice.

These are not viewed as real crimes because Will is writing an opinion piece, not reporting on the issues.  But crimes they are from my point of view, because they aim at distorting the way the readers would interpret the events after consuming his story.

Bang! POw@#! Guns

I have not followed the nuts-and-bolts gun politics in the US well enough to know what real changes have taken place in the recent decades, but it looks to me as if guns have more and more rights in some states, even while they enable more efficient mass killings, more gun accidents at home (many involving children), more instant-rage-turned-to-life-long-grief-and-regret, more successful suicides.

While skimming some recent gun news I saw a comment which argued that cars kill more people than guns and should be banned first.  The comment was intended to show how inane anti-gun people are, I guess.  But thinking about cars and guns can be useful in this context.

For example, we accept the idea that cars can be dangerous, that one needs to pass a driving test before being allowed to drive one, that one needs insurance for the car, that the license to drive can be taken away, that one shouldn't text-and-drive, that one shouldn't drive drunk or on drugs and so on.  As far as I can tell, getting a permit for a gun doesn't require a shooting test or a written test about the rules which apply to gun use. 

Then there's the fact that the initial argument doesn't standardize for the number of cars vs. guns or the total amount of their use and doesn't even ask the basic question about the utility of cars vs. guns for most people or note that killing something very efficiently isn't the main idea behind cars but pretty much is the main idea behind guns.

I was also struck (pun not intended) by this Twitter picture which has to do with the lack of cultural rules about how to carry a gun if one wishes to do it openly, about how to predict who it is who might be planning a killing spree and who just wants to come across as an asshat in public.

The man on the left is Justin Bourque who allegedly killed three police officers in Canada and was apprehended yesterday.  I have no idea who the man on the right might be, but most people would react to the two in identical manner.  That's because seeing someone with a gun leads one to expect that it will be shortly used. Well, a "one" who has not grown up in a gun culture, that "one" would not wish to share the street or the store with people carrying rifles like that, and the reason is that anyone doing it looks like Justin Bourque.

The whole field is screaming, begging and pleading for a lot of difficult-but-crucial studies:  What happens to gun deaths in a state when the regulations are eased/tightened and when guns are more/less easily available?  What is the number of deaths avoided by someone using a gun defensively?  What is the number of deaths caused by someone using a gun defensively in error?  How many accidents resulting in deaths can be blamed on guns?

But we also need a conversation about the rights of others, those who are now expected to share the world with someone armed-to-the-teeth-just-in-case.  There are real psychological costs from having to shop next to someone carrying a gun (where are the exist if something happens, what could I crouch behind, how is this person feeling about others right now?) 

I'm not terribly optimistic about that conversation taking place in the US, because of the misuse of the second amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That "well regulated Militia" fell down the memory hole, never to reappear.  I wonder what the "Founding Fathers" would say about the current interpretation of that right...

Guilt and Threats. Final Fund-Raising Plea

Guilt


I only remember afterwards how much writing about something like the Santa Barbara butcher takes out of me.  While the writing flows I just channel it, feeling cool, calm and collected (though the research before that stage is another story).  But when it's all over, the price must be paid.  Thank goddess for migraine medications.

Similar problems attach themselves to any painful writing.  I have a lot of thoughts about the term "rape culture," some even helpful thoughts.  But when I try to write about them my head becomes verrry heavy and I need a nap first.  And first and first.

The point -- if there is one -- is that different types of emotional energy can fuel one's writing but they are not all equally costly or cheap.  Others' pain and suffering demand rapid payment, and that payment is high.

That's self-pitying stuff and of no importance, but I snuck it in because someone might be bent towards donating money by that whine.  (And snuck is a word, I swear.)

Don't let me press your guilt buttons.  Mostly I love what I do here.  It beats window-washing and toilet cleaning and many other jobs for which nobody pays me, and the writing on the blog stays while the windows and toilet bowls just ask for more cleaning.

Threats

If guilt doesn't affect you much, how about threats?  I might do an Elizabeth Wurtzel and write about myself All. The. Time.  I might decide that a pope who never had children is right about children being the point of all existence, that nothing is worse than old age without children.  Francis should know, after all, given that celibacy thing.

I might write how our whole existence (as determined by "science") is just as vehicles for our genes to reproduce themselves.  I might go one better on Wurtzel and friends, and decide that the point of our lives is to be an environment for our stomach bacteria to thrive so that they can pass their genetic information on, that the point in having children is to guarantee future environments for those stomach bacteria. -- Come to think of it, I would probably make a lot more money if I chose those paths of the writing life or the paths the Ann Coulters of this world are busily plowing.

Duh. I'm not very good at threats.

Thank You

My deepest thanks to all of you who have sent me money or encouragement (with vague future promises of money).  I adore all of my readers, because you are smart, kind and eloquent.

Silly Posting: Quolls, Vultures And Vladimir Putin

This is quoll, an endangered Australian animal.

The cuteness hides a major carnivore (thanks to Richard_Thunderbay for the hint):

There's a lesson in all this.  I like to think of it as the Defense Of The Seemingly Cute And Little...


K Street in Washington, D.C., now has real vultures.   Which is funny, because K Street is where all the political lobbyists have their perches.

Vladimir Putin has commented on a statement by Hillary Clinton, about Putin's recent acts looking a bit like what Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s.  Most of that exchange is what politicians do to each other, but this is worth commenting a bit more:

“It’s better not to argue with women,” Putin said, taking specific aim at Clinton’s gender. “But Ms. Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements.”

So our Vlad poked at our gender.  Which means that his forefinger was in my ribs and in the ribs of all womenfolk all over the world. And of course what he said is trivial and based on that 1950s code of wimminz-who-can-understand-them-just-say-yesdear-to-your-wife-always, and it doesn't truly hurt, that poke.




But it's still worth pointing out.  If you can't argue with women, then women in the public sphere will either rule the roost, totally, or will be utterly and completely pedestaled and then ignored.  Vlad put some distance between rational people and women in that comment, though he later added that women should be strong and that means not criticizing him:

“When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak,” he added. “But maybe weakness is not the quality for a woman.”

I need to take some pictures of me on a pony.

Speed-Blogging, 6/4/14: Girly Hurricanes, Writing While Female, Learning To Be A Man And Other Stories

Why do hurricanes with girly names result in more deaths?  Lingering sexism as the main author of the study suggests?  Perhaps.  But I'd still want to double-check while thinking about this explanation:

For a start, they analysed hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time. “It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,” says Lazo.

The study author argues that those facts don't matter, but surely the much smaller sample size of hurricanes called Chuck or Bob affects the comparisons.  So might the very large death tolls of the early hurricanes, though, once again, the author states that this is not the case.  I haven't looked at the study, what with being tired after traveling and also emotional as is the wont of female goddesses.

Just kidding there.  #NotAllGoddesses are emotional basket-cases (though Hera is).  I plan a long post on the #NotAllMen and #NotAllWhites Twitter hashtags, by the way.  Very very long it will be, and complicated.

This is an interesting piece about how to review literature written by women.  I partly agree, partly need more thinking on all that (i.e., asking myself if male writers are held to the same standards or not).

And this series of pictures teaches you how to be a man.  It's tongue-in-cheek, and right away made me imagine similar series of pictures about how to be a woman (walking on corkscrews under your heels, the prison of bras etc.).  Why does performing a gender have to be so much work?

An interesting story about the real estate market in London, England.  It suggests that the reasons why some invest in housing have nothing to do with wanting a place to live in.  That's obvious, of course, but what happens when a plurality of buyers act on those kinds of incentives?

Finally, I really really want to be a fly on the wall in one of the Bilderberg meetings, to learn what our overlords (and a few token overladies) are planning for this planet.


  

I Need This Necklace

This one.

Reading unmoderated comments on major websites is extremely painful.  Doing it on a permanent basis turns the brain into a Waldorf salad, kills all hope about humanity and maximizes the profits of antacid producers and therapists.

The Third Fund-Raising Post

Because it's nearly impossible to gauge readership*, these days, one aspect of this fund-raising drive is to stand as a proxy for it.  If you can't contribute right now but are a regular reader, you could let me know in the comments to this post.





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*Given that anyone subscribing to the RSS feed is invisible to me.

Men's Wallets And Their Partner's Orgasms. The Life of A Study from Pre-Birth Popularization to Silent Death.

 Here is a story about the life-cycle of one 2009 evolutionary psychology study and its popularization.  The study had a simple conclusion:  Women are created by evolution to be gold-diggers.   Too bad that this simple conclusion turned out to be wrong.  Too bad that very few people even today know that it turned out to be wrong.

This is because the early publicity of the initial study (most of which took place before critics could get hold of the paper) offered the popularizers something they might dream about:  A study which seemed to show that women had more frequent orgasms the higher their male partner's income was!  Talk about click-bait!  The story has sex in it, the story has the perfidy of women in it, the story has science which proves the perfidy of women.

The Second Fund-Raising Post

A sad horse story with a happy ending:

A mare gave birth a few nights ago to a healthy foal, but the mare died from complications of the birth.  The breeder whose mare this was noted the sadness in social media, and was soon matched with a different horse breeder (of a different horse breed) who also had had a birth at the farm, but this time the foal was born dead.  A horse-trailer and some goodwill, and the orphan foal was transported to the bereaved mother mare.  The foal was rubbed with the new mother's blanket, the mare promptly accepted the new baby, the baby drank enough milk to create a new round foal-breed and then the new mother-child pair nuzzled each other.


A cat picture:

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Howard Kurtz to Hillary Clinton: Press Mean To Women? Deal With It!

Via Digby (who gets the main problem with Kurtz's advice), Howard Kurtz had this to say:

My take is this: Let's say Hillary's people are right and that the press is petty, sensationalist, often unfair and sometimes mean to women? Deal with it. It's like complaining about bad weather. Every candidate has to cope with an adversarial media, and Democrats usually get a break at least on social issues.

Because I have such smart readers, I bet you can tell the flaw in that assertion already.  Yes, it's the fact that being "mean to women" is an aspect of this treatment which doesn't affect "every candidate" equally.  Only some candidates get attacked because of the demographic group they belong to.  That would mostly be women and minorities, and the total sum of all meanness aimed at a candidate is not constant. What that last bit means is this:  Someone who gets racist or sexist criticism will also get other types of mean criticism.

But the real flaw in the argument is in the reversal that it hides:  Should women deal with the fact that they are attacked when Hillary Clinton is attacked for her gender?  Because that's what those slurs effect.  They attack a whole gender as collateral damage for being "mean" to a politician.  They also reveal quite a bit about the values of the attacker, of course.

If This Is True It's Bad

According to one site, the April police check of Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara butcher, was because of the videos he had posted, but the police never watched those videos:

Santa Barbara Sheriff's deputies checking on Elliot Rodger weeks before he killed six college students were aware of but didn't view disturbing videos that prompted calls about his well-being.

That is not good policing, right?  Those videos are the evidence which made Rodger's family concerned.

Worth Reading, 5/29/2014: Measles. Misogyny.

1.  Measles have returned as an infectious disease in the US.  The main reason has to do with the anti-vaccination movement.  The fewer the people are who get vaccinated, the lower the herd immunity is.  Whether to get a vaccination or not is one of those cases where the benefits and costs of the decision fall partly on the rest of the society, but where the individual's decision-making does not properly take those into account.  Because, duh, other people.

Similar thinking applies to the overuse of antibiotics in that the effects of that overuse on the rest of the society may not enter the private calculus.



2.  I was surprised by some of the debate about what motivated the Santa Barbara massacre:  the insistence that the causes must be found in only one aspect of the horrors.  Either it's mental illness, or it's gun or it's misogyny, and because  misogyny isn't that rare in the US society (or any of the other societies I know about), it can't be misogyny!  Because most misogynists don't go on a rampage!  But then neither do most gun-owners or most people who use mental health services. 

The lack of proper gun control in the US is a major factor, possibly the main reason why the rates of mass killings in this country are so high, and the holes in the mental health network have played a role in many of the earlier killings.  But that these two factors are important doesn't mean that the reasons the Santa Barbara killer gave us or evidence from prior mass killings should be ignored.

This 2013 NYT article provides some tentative support for the way mental illness and social trends might interact.  Put in a simple way:  Perhaps the talk in the society influences the talk inside someone's head, perhaps the tone of conversations in a  PUA group (not comfortable reading) influences the tone of someone's already-dangerous thinking.  Then there's the entitlement-to-sex thinking, as discussed in this article.

Maya Angelou, RIP

Maya Angelou has died.

 Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,

rocks on distant hills shudder,

lions hunker down,

in tall grasses,

and even elephants

lumber after safety.

When great trees fall

in forests,

small things recoil in silence,

their senses

eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with 

a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words

unsaid,

promised walks

never taken.

Great souls die and

our reality, bound to

them, takes leave of us.

Our souls,

dependent upon their

nurture,

now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed

and informed by their

radiance,

fall away.

We are now so much maddened

as reduced to the unutterable ignorance

of dark, cold

caves.

And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly.  Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed.  They existed.

We can be.  Be and be

better. For they existed.

My Annual Begging Week Starts

Time to pay the piper.  That would be me.  I need a new computer and it needs to be ergonomic and have an enormous screen.  So I hope all my imaginary readers will pay for it!  And cover my chocolate budget and the migraine medications I need after writing posts such as the one right below.  And all the fees I've paid to get hold of studies which I then tear apart here.

I'm not asking you to pay for my labor though that would be utterly wonderful and also just, given that my hourly wage rate on this blog is about one cent right now.

If you have no money, don't worry.  You can always send me some later when your ship comes home.

Instructions on how to finance this blog with PayPal are in the left column.  Lump-sum payments turn out to work better than a monthly subscription, though either is perfectly fine with me.

Whether you can contribute or not, thanks for your custom, for your wisdom and for your kindness.

Love

Echidne