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On Okay Fine You Can Pee At Work But We're Not Paying For It
I personally think that people should be allowed to pee even if they're not pregnant. Some of us just have small bladders! But yeah, no sympathy for T-Mobile. If your business model cannot accommodate the fact that your workers are people with bodies and bodily needs, then you need a new business model.
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On I Couldn't Help But Wonder Where All The Low-Skilled Poor Folk Were
Wow, ok, based on the pull quotes alone I have concluded that I won't be able to read that article without losing my lunch.
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On College Prestige vs. College Affordability
@notpollyanna I work at a fairly non-selective, not-super-prestigious state school, and I truly believe that any student can be challenged here. They might have to seek out tough classes, but it can be done. If you're willing to put in the effort, you can get as good an education here as anywhere. What you might not get, especially if you're planning to move out of state, is prestige, name recognition, and the same kind of alumni network that you might find at a fancier school.
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On Cupcakes, Over
@highjump Out here in the hinterlands, our local cupcake emporium sells mini cupcakes for $1 a pop. I don't go to the cupcake place very often, but that seems fairly reasonable, both in size and cost, for a treat. I'm pretty unoffended by the cupcake trend, but I don't live in a place where there's a cupcake shop on every block.
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On The Y Generation's "Culture of Transparency"
I work for a public university, so my salary is public record. Every year the local newspaper runs a special salary edition, in which they publish a list of all university and government employees' salaries. It's searchable online for the rest of the year. Everyone in my office knows exactly what everyone else makes. It's not super helpful, though, because there's not a ton of room for salary negotiation at my job.
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On Racism and Retail
Link is here. That's really interesting. I lived in a middle-class, racially-mixed area for years, and we had a really hard time attracting the kind of retail that residents wanted. I know that people in the neighborhood desperately lobbied Trader Joe's to open a store, and they were told that the demographics were wrong. (This wasn't overtly racial: I think the issue was that we didn't have a high enough percentage of college graduates in the surrounding area.) I would like to think that this problem is also an opportunity for entrepreneurship, but of course there's also racial bias involved in who can and can't get a small business loan. The same biases might make it hard to get financing to start a business in a middle-class black neighborhood.
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On Sorry, But Financial Literacy Doesn't Make College More Affordable
I work with college students, and I teach a "College 101" class to first-year students. I pretty strongly support financial literacy education for my students, mostly because they really, really want it. They're actually pretty desperate for it. I did a really simple unit on finances in my class this year: we read a little article on debt and how interest works, we talked about student debt and whether it was worth it to take out a lot of debt to go to college, we read a little thing about interest and credit and debated the merits of getting a credit card in college, and then I had them track their spending for a week. Every single evaluation I got back said that it was the most helpful unit of the class, and it wasn't even a very good unit. I'm not really qualified to teach financial literacy. Outside of that class, students ask me all the time about resources to help them manage their finances. It stupid and incredibly insulting to offer "financial literacy" as a solution to the problem of college debt. And in my dream world, any financial education would focus not just on individual choices, but also on how government and corporate policies affect the choices that individuals can make. But I do support financial education, mostly because I trust my students enough to believe that when they think they need something, they're probably right.
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On Ordering Something for the Kitchen
Yeah, count me with the people who get exhausted figuring out who to tip and how much. Plus, were it me, I wouldn't want a six-pack at work. What do they do about recovering alcoholics or Muslims other people who don't drink? Pay me decently and then I can decide whether I want to spend it on beer or something else.
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On Fried Dough Snobbery
@polka dots vs stripes I think that everyone boils the bagels before baking them. That's definitional of a bagel. If you don't boil them, they're just a round roll with a hole in the middle.
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On Undecided/Undeclared
It fills my heart with glee that you wrote a 100-page thesis on feminist film theory. I think that part of the problem on my campus is that there's a pretty clear pipeline for STEM students to get involved in research, because faculty need worker bees to work in their labs. It's harder for students in the humanities to figure out how to do substantial research projects, and it may be that faculty members have fewer incentives to work with undergrads on research. Some humanities departments here are definitely working pretty hard to help undergrads figure out how to get real-world skills, though, because they perceive themselves to be losing students to majors that seem more practical.