Just a little (link) love: panda petting edition
September 22, 2016
CAREER + MONEY THINGS
Where employers get creepier with the aid of a start-up: tracking employees’ job hunting related activities to see if they’re looking to leave? They claim it’s to pinpoint troubled areas so they can address them and I call that lazy and bullpucky. There are so many other things you could do to achieve this goal. How about being actively engaged with them? How about paying them competitively and managing well?
The economics of living in the Bay Area make it incredibly hard to be a single income family. “…for a lower-mid-range worker, sometimes your dream job can’t make up for the cost of living in the Bay Area.” We could possibly manage it on one income but we are also impacted by supporting 2 families, having an aggressive savings plan, wanting to travel and enjoy life. Plus neither one of us is suited to being the primary stay at home caretaker in addition to being the money person who squeezes every penny out of the dimes we bring home. Each of us could manage one or the other but not both, and I think you’d need your stay at home parent to be both.
Speaking of salaries, Penny’s pursuing her passion knowing that it won’t buy her an early retirement and still thinks it’s worth it. I once pursued mine and deeply regretted the poor pay, but had to be mainly because of the family debt. Had it just been me, free and clear, I probably wouldn’t have felt such pressure and ingratitude for the ability to make a living at something that I thought I’d enjoy. Now? I don’t know. We need people who can afford to do what Penny does – teaching is a hugely important profession. But even if I could be any good at teaching (highly doubtful), in my own life, I also need to be able to keep my family housed and fed, and that costs quite a bit.
FUN THINGS
September 24th is Free Museum Day!
INTERESTING THINGS
Oneika’s blog is a new discovery and it’s awesome! All her reasons for traveling alone are my reasons for making sure that PiC and I continue to enjoy our individual pursuits without each other even though we COULD do them together, probably.
We have a presidential candidate whose entire platform is that America isn’t good enough right now, and meanwhile the Santa Clara PD thought it was a good idea to threaten to boycott doing their actual jobs because they didn’t like a football player’s quiet personal protest of police not doing their jobs of protecting the citizenry without bias, thereby proving Kaepernick’s point that the police pick and choose how and when to do their jobs. The only thing that surprises me is that they finally rescinded that idiotic boycott threat. By the way, I think it’s telling that people will boycott the NFL for someone not standing during the anthem but not for having rapists, abusers, and woman-beaters on the roster. That’s all ok, right?
Commentary on the Philly Inquirer article about a family “taking a chance” on a public school. Ugh.
Hesperia is aggressively, and I suspect unconstitutionally so, trying to make it impossible for non-violent felons to live in halfway houses intended to help them reintegrate into society. If someone has been to prison and done their time for their crimes, how are they justifying saying they don’t have the right to help or support in adjusting back into normal society? What, do a crime and be punished for the rest of your life, by never being allowed to move on from that moment, and therefore have to turn to crime to survive? How does that make sense? Hesperia is utterly shameless, referring to people as “roaches”.
This is heartbreaking. WHY are we locking girls up for not making their beds, breaking curfew, or running away? These aren’t the answers for minor transgressions that any kid would commit in the course of being a kid and growing up!
Ugh. Juvenile detention is the worst system. And the whole “aggressive girl” thing is so racially charged. It makes my blood boil thinking how routinely poorly our public services accommodate children.
Our local PDs have been all “we want to carry bigger guns! stop hanging blm banners from city hall!” Luckily the mayors have been shutting that nonsense down hard.
So infuriating.
Poor squeaky panda. He needed hugs. š
I can oblige!