My tweets

• Mon, 13:37: Pinkie: "Who's up for a singalong?" Rarity: "afk" Oh, snap. #TwitterPonies
• Mon, 14:52: I had some damns. I gave them all away.
• Mon, 15:12: I wouldn't want to waste your damns, but thanks for offering! // RT @LadyRowyn: I think I've got some left if you wanna borrow 'em.
• Mon, 15:17: RT @Stepto: Discovery channel has gone the way of the History channel. RIP the last of the good stations. http://t.co/yZiVQlFbJb
• Mon, 15:21: I like to retweet @wilw because I'm pretty sure there must be somebody out there who doesn't follow him but follows me. *nods sagely*
• Mon, 15:58: RT @netbard: @the_gneech @muskrat_john @discovery stopped caring about truth and lies years ago. I'm looking at you, Amish Mafia - http://t…
• Mon, 16:11: RT @thinkgeek: Do you live your life behind a camera & love taking product action shots? We're now hiring a Photography Intern! http://t.co…
• Mon, 16:15: It totally should. Ouch! /RT @Inkblitzer: Okay, seeing a Borders sticker on the back of one of my books shouldn't give me bad feels still.
• Mon, 16:47: Okay, time to hit the road! *blap!* Ow. -.-
• Mon, 16:53: RT @nprmonkeysee: I realize it makes me kind of a homer, but public television is like an ice pack of smarts on my achy head right now. #tc…

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The Pay Is Too Damn Low

The New Yorker: The Pay Is Too Damn Low (Hames Surowiecki)

Still, the reason this has become a big political issue is not that the jobs have changed; it’s that the people doing the jobs have. Historically, low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That’s because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage. That’s why, as a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones has shown, low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever. More important, more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families. Forty years ago, there was no expectation that fast-food or discount-retail jobs would provide a living wage, because these were not jobs that, in the main, adult heads of household did. Today, low-wage workers provide forty-six per cent of their family’s income.

In other words, we've got an entire nation trying to make a living on what was never intended to be a living wage. It's not now, nor has it ever been, that "the poor aren't working hard enough." They're knocking themselves out and not deriving any benefit from it.

-The Gneech