Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

How the U.S. Can Balance the Budget and Reduce Unemployment

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The answer is simple.

In their never-ending search for ways to cut costs, U.S. businesses have turned to outsourcing to offshore companies to reduce labor costs. As a result, more and more jobs are being shipped overseas and more and more customer/technical service phones are being answered in by comparatively low-paid labor forces in India and other Asian countries. The U.S. workers who had these jobs are given pink slips and sent on their way. Jobless, they can no longer afford anything beyond the essentials, thus reducing the demand for products and services their former employers offered.

This, I believe, is the irony of outsourcing.

The U.S. government can help balance the budget and create new jobs easily. Just levy a tax on every job sent overseas. Fire 10 people in New York and replace them with 15 people in India? Well, that’ll cost you $5,000 per person or $50,000 a year. Or maybe it should work based on a hefty percentage of the salary no longer paid. 25%? Replace a $50K employee with an Indian? That’ll cost you $12,500. Do that with 100 employees? Write that check for $1,250,000. So not only will you alienate your customers by supporting them with foreigners reading off scripts, but you won’t save all that much money in the process.

After all, extended unemployment benefits, food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, and other benefits for unemployed people should be paid by the people who caused the unemployment, no?

Think of all the tax money the country is losing by not having these U.S. employees. Think of all the Social Security tax money not being paid — that alone is 15% of a person’s income (up to certain limits, of course). By greedy companies sending jobs overseas, they’re screwing our country out of important tax revenues we’ll need to maintain our standard of living — and get retirement benefits under Social Security and Medicare. Why are companies being allowed to do this?

And while they’re at it, why not levy higher tariffs on imports? The other day, I bought a perfectly good, 100% cotton polo shirt at a Walmart for $8. The only reason it was so cheap is because it was made in Pakistan. Meanwhile, towns across the United States are slipping into local depressions because fabric mills and clothing factories are closing down. People are losing jobs they’ve held for their entire adult lives. Why? Because companies can have these things made cheaper in China or Taiwan or Pakistan. Do they do.

Don’t you see it? Our drive to buy the cheapest of everything is causing people to lose jobs, This, in turn, is fueling this recession and requiring more and more of our tax dollars to help support the people who can’t get work.

Our greed and cheapness is screwing up our economy.

Why not make these companies pay for it? Yes, it’ll trickle down to us, but in the long term, wouldn’t you rather have a strong economy than a cheap polo shirt?

Freelancers Don’t Get Sick Pay

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We actually work for a living.

It occurred to me the other day that there’s a huge difference between employees and freelancers. I don’t mean to say that I suddenly saw the light — I didn’t. I’ve known the differences for a long time. But the other day, I actually stopped for a moment to think about them. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here, laid out in a simple table to make comparison easier.

EmployeesFreelancers
Employees can stop looking for work once they get a job. The only times they need to look for work again is if they want to change jobs, they get fired, or they need a second job.Freelancers are always looking for work, even when they’re working. The ability to earn a living depends on having the next job lined up.
Employees seldom have to worry about losing their jobs to someone who claims he can do it cheaper.Freelancers are constantly competing for work with others who claim they can do the same job for less money.
Employees usual do one job at a time, although that job might entail several concurrent projects for the same employer.Freelancers often work on several jobs for several clients concurrently.
Employees are usually given all of the tools and equipment they need to perform their jobs. These tools are usually purchased, maintained, and updated by their employers.Freelancers usually have to buy, maintain, and update all of the tools and equipment they need to perform their jobs.
Employees often spend part of their workday socializing with coworkers around the water cooler, coffee room, offices/cubicles, cafeteria, etc.Freelancers often work alone. Most time spent socializing is not time they’re being paid for.
Employees often get benefits that include paid vacations, paid holidays, paid sick days, health care, pension contributions, profit sharing, and bonuses. There are holiday parties, company picnics, and sometimes even birthday cakes.Freelancers don’t get benefits. If they can’t work because of illness, they don’t make money. In the U.S. (and some other countries), they have to pay for their own health care, often at extremely high rates. There are no holiday parties, company picnics, or birthday cakes.
Employees have a predetermined workday, such as 9 to 5. They also get scheduled days off, like weekends and holidays. If they don’t feel like coming into work, they can take a paid sick or personal day off. The flip side of this is that an employee has a limited amount of time off.Freelancers work as long as they need to to get the job done. If that means 12 hour days and lost weekends, so be it. If they don’t feel like working in the middle of a job, that’s too darn bad; the job needs to get done on time. The flip side of this is that a freelancer can have as much time off as he wants, as long as he works enough to earn enough money to survive.
Employees are usually not bothered by their bosses outside their normally scheduled workday.Freelancers can be bothered by clients any time the client wants to make contact (although most clients keep contact within their working hours).
Employees can have annoying or even stupid bosses.Freelancers can have annoying or even stupid clients.
As long as an employee performs his job to some level of satisfaction, he’ll likely remain employed.A freelancer needs to perform high quality work for every job to set himself apart from the competition, with the hope that the client will either give him future work or recommend him to others.
Employees get paychecks. The government ensures that they get paid.Freelancers issue invoices and spend time following up on accounts receivable. They sometimes have to remind, nag, and then possibly sue clients to get paid.
Employees have payroll taxes taken from their pay and remitted to the government. In the U.S., their employers pay 50% of their social security tax liability.Freelancers don’t usually have taxes taken from their pay and remitted to the government. They are required to submit taxes quarterly, along with the related paperwork. If they don’t submit on time, they could be penalized. In the U.S., they are personally responsible for 100% of their social security tax liability.

What did I leave out? Employees and freelancers, use the Comments link or form to fill us in.

Suicide

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Some thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about suicide.

No, not me. I’m perfectly happy living my life until something else — preferably something quick and painless that occurs years and years from now — ends it.

It’s others.

Writing about Suicide

Here’s the situation.

I’m working on a memoir and one of the things that falls into the scope of the book is a suicide that touched my life in an unusual way. I need to write about it because it’s part of the story of that part of my life, but it’s difficult. The event was very dramatic to the point of being sensationalist. I don’t want to give readers the idea that what happened should be copied by any other sad sack who can’t cope. I want readers to understand the impact of this suicide on me and others. I want them to understand that what happened was wrong.

I refuse to refer to a person who died by suicide as a “suicide victim.” The victim is not the person who ended his own life. The victims are the people left behind, the ones tortured by memories of something they had no choice about witnessing. The victims are the people left to wonder, for the rest of their lives, why it happened or whether they could have prevented it. These are the victims of suicide.

So I’ve been thinking about it, trying to come up with a way to write about it.

I know what I want to say: that suicide is for selfish cowards.

Strong words, but when you’ve seen what witnessing a suicide can do to people, you can’t help but recognize the selfishness of the person committing suicide. A suicide doesn’t think about the people who see him cut his life short, often by violent means. He doesn’t think about the people — perhaps even a spouse or child — who find him dead, often in a grizzly state. He doesn’t think about the effect his suicide has on others — emotionally, financially, socially. Not thinking about others is the definition of selfishness.

Coward is a little tougher. The suicide that touched my life was a troubled man with diagnosed psychological problems. He’d tried once before. He was off his meds. Maybe he wasn’t a coward. Maybe his head was so fucked up that he just didn’t know any better. I try to think of him that way. It makes it a little easier to bear.

But it doesn’t do anything for the resentment I feel about being dragged into his final act.

The Others

I was lucky. The artist who committed suicide in the apartment building I owned wasn’t discovered hanging from the light fixture by me. It was his ex-wife. And the police kindly cleaned up after they took away his body, leaving only the smell of disinfectant and his oil paints.

And that woman I rented an apartment to the following year? She killed herself before moving in. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get her deposit back to someone.

Today

Today, I learned that a friend of mine from 20+ years ago committed suicide at work on Friday. We hadn’t seen each other in at least 20 years, but we kept in touch, on and off, on Facebook and Twitter. His Facebook picture shows him at a ball game, smiling up at the camera. He used to tweet about sports like it was a driving force in his life.

A mutual friend I spoke to today agreed that he was always cheerful and never seemed to be unhappy. Neither of us can figure out why he might have taken his own life. We’ll likely never know. We’re not close enough to the family to make contact and ask. So we’re left to wonder.

And I think about my choice of words to generalize all suicides: selfish coward.

And I hate to apply those words to my old friend.

But what else can I think? He did the deed at work — for Pete’s sake! — in the middle of a weekday. The company has brought in grief counsellors to deal with coworkers. He left behind a wife and four daughters. One of the girls was starting college this semester. Didn’t he think of all these people as he prepared to end it all? Couldn’t he imagine how they would feel? Didn’t he care?

And what could possibly be so bad that a 46-year-old man with a job and home and wife and family would kill himself over? Whatever it was, couldn’t he face it? Couldn’t he deal with it, with the support of his family and friends, to move past the difficulties and get on with his life?

Selfish coward. I hate to think of him that way.

Help Me Understand

I don’t want to think about suicide. I want to think about flying and eating cherries and doing a photo shoot at Lake Powell. I want to worry a little about my dog, who needs some surgery, and my sister, who moved back in with my Mom last November. I want to finish up this big pile of work on my desk so I can write some invoices and take a few days off. I want to look forward to my husband’s brief visit next week, which will be the first time I’ve seen him since May. I want to go out to eat something I’ve never eaten before.

I don’t want to think about how I can write about a suicide that touched me while thinking about the suicide of an old friend.

Can someone help me understand?

I don’t want pity. I just want to understand why it happens and how I can write about it without offending the real victims: the people left behind.

Blood-Sucking Leeches

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Another parasite.

Interested in my thoughts on Groupon? You need to read this instead.

Earlier this year, I wrote about one of the many parasitic organizations that earn revenues solely by selling services provided by other people. I call them the parasites of the tour industry because they live off our hard work and require us to compete against ourselves.

The BillToday I was contacted by a similar organization. This one, which I refuse to publicize with a company name or link, gets businesses to offer special deals on goods and services on the organization’s Web site. They sell the deal and then take a “commission for the use of the platform.”

The commission? 40%!

Of course, I didn’t get that information from the caller. She assured me that the service was free. She said she’d send me a link so I could check it out. She said she looked forward to having a conversation with me about it. I wondered: aren’t we having a conversation now?

I had to visit the site, poke around, and discover the commission fine print. Then I called her back. She was surprised — she hadn’t given me her phone number. But I have caller ID, so it wasn’t tough to call back. I asked point blank what the rate was and she said they do a 60/40 split. I’d get 60%.

Let’s do the math. Today’s special offer is 50% off on rock climbing for a Phoenix-area rock climbing “gym.” The price: $8. So the original price must be $16, right? But what are the rock climbing people getting? $4.80 on something they’d normally get $16 for. That’s a 70% discount. Those folks must be pretty desperate for business.

I don’t even need to do the math to know that I can’t work with these people. My margins are far less than 40%. That means that even without a special discount for buyers, I’d lose money on every sale just by paying the commission. I told her not to bother calling me again; I wasn’t interested.

The next time you find a Web site that offers smoking deals on goods and services, take a minute to consider the struggling small business owner on the other end. When you take advantage of one of these offers, you’re not buying directly from the business owner. You’re buying from a middle man who’s taking a piece of the pie. 40% is a huge piece. What’s that business owner going to wind up with?

The crumbs left behind by a blood-sucking leech.

What’s More Important: Your Beliefs or Your Follower Count?

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Should you really be worried about losing followers for voicing your opinion on blogs and social networks?

About two weeks ago, I linked to a story on NPR.org titled “Redefining Empathy in Light of web’s Long Memory.” The basis of the story is the sad fact that people have been losing their jobs or having old personal information resurface publicly because of information posted on the Web. This information isn’t usually damaging when looked at objectively, but when taken out of context or examined through magnifying glasses wielded by small-minded people, they can be embarrassing — or in one instance covered in the story, ruin someone’s life.

I linked to the story on Twitter because a very close Twitter friend, who is new to social networking, had been making foolish comments on Twitter and Facebook — comments far more likely to get her in trouble than the examples in the story. But it was another Twitter friend who replied:

That article is a good reason for not posting politics or religious views online. I’ve had followers drop me for posting religious

The tweet was cut off by Twitter’s 140-character minimum, but you can end it with the word “views” or “articles” and you’ll get the gist of what he was saying.

Indeed, I know exactly what he means. Although he and I share general religious views — that is, we’re non-believers — he had a tendency to link to the more radically inspired content online, content that could be seen as seriously offensive by believers. (Hell, some of it even offended me to the point that I stopped following his links.) While it’s one thing to read and link to logic-based arguments against religion by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, it’s quite another to read and link to “radical atheist” content. It’s one thing to say, “I don’t believe and here’s why;” it’s another to say “You’re a moron for believing.”

I did notice that he’d stopped tweeting so many of those links, but it wasn’t until his response above that I realized why.

And this got me thinking about something else: why we blog or participate in social networks.

Does Follower Count Matter?

Follower count is never something that concerned me — especially on Twitter. The vast majority of people on Twitter don’t actively participate. How can they when some of them are following hundreds or thousands of people? Twitter would become a full-time job if you actually read the tweets of more than 100-200 people.

(This, by the way, is one of the reasons I’ve never followed more than 140 people at a time and am constantly dropping noisemakers in favor of thought-provokers. I actually read the tweets in my timeline. You can read more about my thoughts on the follower count game in “Twitter is NOT a Popularity Contest.”)

So if so few followers actually read and respond to what you say, the overall value of followers is diminished. You’re not networking when the communication is ignored. That leaves me to wonder why people should actually care about how many followers they have.

After all, it’s not the quantity of your followers, it’s the quality. I’d rather have just 10 followers who interact with me daily than 5,000 followers who seem to ignore everything I say. It’s the networking aspect of Twitter that attracts me.

Should Your Social Networking Activities be a Lie?

So that brings up the more serious ramifications of my Twitter friend’s tweet: changing what he tweets to preserve follower count. Even though he reads radical atheist content and obviously feels strongly about it — strong enough to share it, anyway — he stopped sharing it because he doesn’t want to lose followers.

“…a good reason for not posting politics or religious views online…” are his exact words. But I’ll argue this: if your political or religious views are important to you, why should you hide them? They are part of your personal makeup — they’re what make you who you are. To pretend that they’re not is akin to lying about who you are.

To omit them from your social networking activities will prevent you from finding other people who share the same views you have. And isn’t that why we participate in social networks? To meet and interact with people who share similar views?

The Special Case of Bloggers

Bloggers, of course, face this dilemma in a much more magnified way. Our blog posts aren’t limited to 140 characters a pop. We can go on and on about any topic we like, linking to content, quoting content, opining on the values of that content. We can make complex arguments for or against anything we like. Or we can simply share a link and let our readers do their own homework, forming their own opinions about a topic without help from us.

Either way, the blog post is out there and it stays out there. It’s not 140 characters that flit through the Twitter timelines of the people who follow us, disappearing almost as quickly as they appeared. It’s out there, archived, accessible, searchable. There are comments associated with it, RSS feeds that direct to it, other blogs (and even feed-scraped sploggs) that link to it.

Should bloggers be concerned about sharing their opinions on controversial topics such as politics and religion?

It all depends on what they’re trying to achieve with their blogs. If their blogs exist to voice opinions on these topics, being shy would defeat their purpose. If their blogs exist as a personal journal of what’s going on in their lives and minds (like mine does for me), hiding their thoughts about these things — especially when these things are important to them — would be akin to putting up a false front to their readers — and betraying themselves. But if their blogs are intended to showcase a product or service or way of life, adding their opinions on non-related controversial topics is probably not a good idea.

The Importance of Being True to Yourself

And then there are people like me: people who have non-mainstream opinions but, because of their work, should probably present a mainstream face to the public. I’m sure there are a lot of us out there, but it was only recently that I found someone with a situation so similar to mine that I took great comfort in his blog’s existence. (I’m referring to Ted Landau‘s Slanted Viewpoint.)

While I don’t consider my opinions extreme, I know they’re not mainstream. They are shared by quite a few people, but usually not the outspoken ones you see on television. (It’s ironic to me that the “conservatives” are the loudest, most outspoken Americans; what’s that about?) Still, when I write a blog post voicing my opinions about something like religion or politics, I get a lot of nasty, hateful feedback from readers who seem to have gone out of their way to visit my blog and blast me. The most obvious example, which amazes me to this day, is the outrage of “Christians” over my post, “The Bible in the Refrigerator.” These people got so abusive in comments that I had to shut the comments down. (And don’t bother entering a comment about that post here; it won’t appear.)

So what do I do? Betray myself by pretending not to be outraged by the stupidity and ignorance I see in today’s world — just to make the mainstream happy? Pretend that I’m not offended by having someone else’s religion thrust on me every day of my life? Pretend that I’m content with a political system rendered ineffective by partisanship bullshit?

Does the world really need yet another middle-of-the road blogger? I don’t think so.

But what’s more important is this: Do I pretend I’m someone I’m not just to maximize the appeal of my blog to readers? Do I sell myself out just to give all the “fans” of my books a warm and cuddly feeling about me?

The answer, of course, is no. Because just like Twitter follower count, the number of blog readers or subscribers is meaningless to me. What matters is the quality of the readers, not the quantity. I want my blog read by people who are smart, people who can think, people who can comment with their opinions — whether they agree or disagree — in a clear, unoffensive way that furthers the discussion and makes me — and other readers — think.

So I’ll put that question to everyone who participates in social networking: What’s more important, your beliefs or your follower count?