"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw
Window into my world
1 month ago
How Pay-Pal Squeezes Merchants with Unfair and Likely Illegal Business Practices
PayPal takes advantage of its indispensability and its customers. Backed by finely crafted disclaimers, the “faster, safer” online transactions company seizes merchants’ funds and refuses to tell them why. On the basis of eBay’s 2010 Annual Report and statements from PayPal representatives, there is good reason to suspect that the company not only protects itself with that money, but also invests it for its own gain. And in the process, it may violate state laws.
1 month ago
God Wants You to Work Harder, and to Stop Complaining
The goals of the “workplace spirituality” movement dovetail with a conservative Christian corporate ethos
1 month ago
The Overjustification Effect
The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
2 months ago
Our insistence on equating "poor" with "black" has undermined the success of anti-poverty programs.
Our national conversations about poverty — so entangled with race in unspoken ways — have rendered the white poor invisible and the black poor pathological, and undermined our attempts to gain majority support for anti-poverty programs. Led to believe that the poor are “other people’s problems,” a significant portion of Americans have come to view social welfare programs designed to assist the poor as attempts at wealth redistribution — not just across class lines but across the unspoken, coded racial lines.
2 months ago
An interesting take on reforming the U.S. tax code to automatically compensate for inequality between the median household income and the income of the highest earners
“Congress should reform our tax law to put the brakes on further inequality. Specifically, we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.”
2 months ago
One teachers approach to preventing gender bullying in a classroom
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I had a child dealing with gender variance (defined as “behavior or gender expression that does not conform to dominant gender norms of male and female”) in my classroom that I realized how important it is to teach about gender and break down gender stereotypes. Why did I wait so long? I should have taken a hint from that kindergarten teacher years ago. As I thought about how to approach the topic, I realized that the lessons I was developing weren’t just for Allie. She had sparked my thinking, but all the children in my class needed to learn to think critically about gender stereotypes and gender nonconformity.”
