This morning, the Washington Post home page had a story titled “Are benefits still temporary?” with a subhead that read, “Unemployed say extensions help tide them over, but critics fear program may discourage work.”
The answer to the question in the title is, of course, yes – benefits are most certainly temporary. The critics turn out to be Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Jon Kyl of Arizona, both Republicans (surprise!). And after considering the issue, one reaches the inevitable conclusion that Bunning and Kyl are morons.
"If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said. "I am sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue it is a job enhancer."
Have you ever been on unemployment? I have. When I was laid off a few years ago, my Virginia unemployment benefit – paid for out of money that my employers had been contributing – was, after taxes, a bit less than $200/month. (I was getting the maximum possible benefit, based on my salary history.) This wasn’t enough to even cover the rent.
It helped, of course. Every little bit helps. But the idea that I was sitting around saying, “Aha! Unemployment! Now, instead of looking for a job, I can sit back, eat bon bons, and watch my stories!” is so insanely stupid that you’d have to be… well… you’d have to be Jim Bunning to believe it.
And as for today’s job hunter, out looking for work in the fabulous economy of the United States in 2010, clearly it’s that juicy unemployment check that’s keeping her from getting back to work, right?
Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Center, says there’s a good reason people are out of work for so long. There are six unemployed Americans for every available job, he said.
"The primary reason people are out of work so long is a lack of jobs," Stettner said.
The 14.9 million jobless Americans have been out of work an average of 29.7 weeks, just below January’s 30.2-week average. Those levels are the highest since the government began keeping those records in the 1950s, according to Stettner.
What kind of person looks at the current economic situation, and the masses of unemployed people out there, and concludes that the real problem is that they get unemployment benefits? It seems to me that you’d have to be someone who simply does not care about people who lose their jobs through no fault of their own and are struggling to keep a roof over their family’s heads and food on the table – someone who can view the real misery that a situation like that causes, and think, “Let them eat cake!”
In other words – a Republican senator.
I have had a busy week.
Last weekend I got a new coffee table. It’s kind of like a big chest with lots of storage inside. Teddy approves, as it’s suitable for lying next to while chewing on a bone.
Then, I went to northern California. First was the business part of the trip in Santa Clara, a conference, so it was three days in two buildings and mostly I saw a parking lot:
But then I went to San Francisco for a short visit with my sister and nephew. I also had a little time to wander off and ride the Muni and get my hair cut and just have a nice afternoon in the city.
Waiting for the train near my sister’s house…
… and waiting to catch it back there…
MWK sent me lots of Teddy photos so I could see what he was up to while I was away.
And now I am home!
But that’s why I have not blogged about anything at all.
As long as people have been arguing for the equal treatment of GLBT citizens, there have been others who immediately think of public bathrooms. And now that a gay man is running for mayor of Gainesville, Florida, they’re making posters!
(A side note: this poster is the most fabulous thing I’ve seen all month. Amazing typefaces! Gratuitous quotation marks! Seriously, it looks like something the prop department for a John Waters movie came up with, to be carried around by a group of chubby drag queens playing members of the Charm City Morality Committee holding a demonstration outside of Baltimore’s city hall. I can tell you, with no sarcasm, that I want one to hang up in my home office, so if you live in Gainesville, get me one and I will send you something nice in return!)
Why bathrooms? Who knows? What do laws about bathrooms have to do with who a mayoral candidate whose platform does not include turning public bathrooms into city-subsidized sex clubs? Who knows?
But it does make me wonder what goes in the bathrooms when the Concerned Christian Citizens for Gainesville is holding their convention. Most public bathrooms I’ve ever used are surprisingly private, and even at the urinals you’d have to really crane your neck to get a glimpse of your neighbor’s genitals. So I can’t help but get a vision of the conservative Christian restroom: a place where men swing from light fixtures waving their penises around, and where matronly toilet monitors make everyone hike up her sensible skirt upon entry to verify that there’s no tube snake nesting in the secret garden.
The “idea” expressed in the poster seems to be that if a gay guy is mayor, before long female-identified transgendered people will be haunting the ladies rooms of Gainesville, seeking an opportunity to molest young girls, and the precious flower of Florida womanhood will be despoiled forever. Now, the universe being a large and interesting place, I am sure that there are female-identified sexual predators who prefer restrooms as their hunting grounds. I’ll bet there are at least eight or nine in the Sunshine State, ready to pack up and move to Gainesville when the new mayor is elected.
And, no doubt, they’re currently lingering longingly outside of those bathrooms, thinking, “If only the mayor was gay! Then I could go in there and find myself a sweet young thing! But the mayor’s not gay, so I’ll just sit on this bench out here and feel sad.”
I know, I know, I’m trying to logically figure out the thinking of people for whom logic is a nasty psychosis to be driven out through prayer and typeface abuse. I can’t help it; it’s just my nature. And there are no laws for the protection of logic-users in our society.
14 February 2010, 8:55 pm
Today, out of the blue, someone on Facebook wrote on my Wall. (For those of you not sucked into the world of Facebook, your “Wall” is basically an inbox that the whole world can see. This leads to some amusement when someone doesn’t realize it’s public and leaves something on someone’s Wall like “Did that lotion take care of your crabs?” But I suppose it’s just antiquated notions about privacy that make that amusing.)
The person was a very casual acquaintance – so casual that if we saw one another at a restaurant, it’s likely we’d both just think, “Gosh, he looks familiar.”
What was on my wall? It was actually a picture of some roses, with text that said something like, “Here is your special Valentine’s Day greeting. I picked it out just for you!”
How odd, I thought. Then I noticed that on my main Facebook page, I could see that the same person had sent the exact same greeting to a number of other people. Each got their own special (identical) Valentine’s picture, with the announcement, “I picked it out just for you!”
No doubt the application that creates this picture has an option to send it to everyone in your address book (while accessing all of their address books, too).
Now, I don’t want to be a jerk; I’m sure his intentions were to just send something nice to everybody he knows. There is nothing really wrong with that.
But am I really a jerk for finding a mass electronic Valentine’s greeting from someone I hardly know with the words, “I picked this out just for you!” kind of strange and a little tragic?
This is what annoys me about social media. Before, I heard much less from a lot of people. Now I hear a lot more from them. And sometimes – not just occasionally, but enough to keep me participating – it’s really nice and I enjoy it.
It’s just the noise level of dumb stuff that makes me always wonder if there’s a downside to this. Getting a random greeting from a casual contact is fine; otherwise, I’d have heard nothing at all from him and never thought about it. But I wonder how many people I might actually have that real conversation with a couple of times a year are becoming people I see an endless stream of Facebook updates from but will never actually talk to in any meaningful way.
That bothers me.
There’s nothing about these social media contacts that prevents more real interactions. It’s just that with a constant stream of low-grade “updates” and “statuses,” the need for contact gets satisfied for a short time, and the will to make an effort for real interactions fades a bit. And so I worry that we’re anaesthetizing ourselves to one another.
And then there’s the other part: I got a special Valentine’s greeting from someone… but, I am reasonably sure that in the process of sending it, my name never even crossed his mind. I was just another entry in an address book automatically getting sent a picture by some Facebook application.
So maybe I’m a jerk and can’t appreciate a nice greeting, but frankly, it just feels like a dose of alienation.
Perhaps I just need to move to a mountain and start writing letters with a fountain pen while listening to the Victrola. But this brave new world of technologically-mediated social interactions feels increasingly like a rather lonely place.
