Unsought Input

ZOMG!!!11!!

There is a lot of talk lately in this election about Barack Obama having “socialist views” and being “a socialist.” For some – especially those who grew up during the Cold War – this evokes an image of radical Socialism as practiced in Soviet Russia and Mao’s China. Or is that Communism? What is the difference anyway?

The idea of Socialism has been around for a long time – longer than German philosopher Karl Marx (who wrote The Communist Manifesto). Socialism is a set of ideals and not a type of government. Examples of types of government are Representative Democracy & Constitutional Republic (United States), Parliamentary Democracy & Constitutional Monarchy (United Kingdom, Canada), Direct Democracy & Parliamentary Republic (Switzerland) and Socialist Republic (Cuba) … among many others.

Having “socialism” written down as a set of ideals came out of Europe where people had been struggling with class for centuries. Industrial revolutions made the worker more valuable but also the CEOs of the time much richer. Common people wanted to be recognized as a more important part of society and given more rights and better compensation for their work.

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Earlier we wrote about all the great job salary and pay data you can get at indeed.com. I noticed the cool web2.0 widget features they have so I thought I would add to the list, now with exciting graphs!

Where does he get those wonderful toys?

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I did a search to see how much Batman makes in Gotham City. It’s a good thing he’s got a trust fund, because $38K hardly puts spinners on the Batmobile and grills on the Boy Wonder.

Obviously waiting for his performance bonus

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I looked to see what the President makes in Washington, DC. Really this job is about the perks. Bush made much more money running oil companies into the ground and running baseball teams away from the pennant. But could he ignore the Geneva Conventions or invade a county for no particular reason? Nope.

But the cost of living is low, so…

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Did you know that Osama bin Laden is making about $32,000 in Northern Pakistan? That’s my best guess for where he’s employed, anyway – I also searched for him in Afghanistan and came up with the same number. You might think that’s a fairly low income for someone so famous, but keep in mind that prices are so much lower in tribal regions. At that wage he can afford a half-dozen posh caves and apparently evade the world’s only remaining superpower.

That’s not what she said last night

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Last but not least, here’s final proof that all those elementary-school insults were more than just childish taunts. According to the most scientific data available, your mom makes $41,000 per year working the street corner.

I recently stumbled on this site that tells you the average pay rates for jobs depending on where you live. Useful, right? Unfortunately for those who are taking the internet seriously, this site has been rendered useless. You might be asking your self how this is possible, the internet is infallible. I know, it’s a shock to us all. Let me just give you some average job salaries.

customer service in Ohio

$31,000

pizza delivery professional in Ohio

$33,000

pizza boy in Ohio

$86,000

First off, I don’t know anyone working at the local big box retail store that makes 31,000 a year. And second, let’s look the difference in title. Obviously that means a lot to your employers. I mean, if you are a pizza delivery professional you only make 33,000 a year but if you just shorten it to pizza boy you make more than twice that much. It must be sex appeal. You definitely sound sexier as a pizza boy.

Let’s keep going:

dracula in Ohio

$84,000

frankenstein in Ohio

$97,000 (more…)

I have to laugh at Brendan I. Koerner’s recent article over on Slate arguing that manually shifted transmissions are better for the environment than automatic transmissions. While in a sense, he answered the question correctly (though not completely, as Martin Schwoerer argues over at The Truth About Cars: Koerner completely disregarded the fuel efficiency of a spate of new transmission technologies – CVTs, DSGs and automatic clutches among them – that have cropped up in new cars over the last several years), he missed the entire point.

Sure, buying a manual trans car may be better for the environment, but what’s best for the environment is not buying a car at all, and if you do have to buy a car, it’s still best not to buy a new car. Regardless, Koerner’s suggestions seem to come back to buying a brand-new car. Only once does he seem to say otherwise:

This calculation, however, doesn’t include some less obvious benefits of manual transmissions. The brake pads on stick-shift cars, for example, tend to wear out less rapidly than those on automatics. And manual transmissions are relatively cheap to fix and replace, so you can wait longer to buy a new vehicle. Manufacturing auto parts is energy-intensive, so anything that can be done to curb their production has to be a plus.

Bingo. Study after study shows that just as many pollutants go into the atmosphere during the manufacture of a vehicle as during the vehicle’s lifespan once it leaves the factory. But at no point do we hear Koerner or any of the greenies advocate buying a used car. Instead, in marketing-fueled America, the message is to buy green – whether it’s Toyota’s emphasis on hybrids, Chevrolet’s emphasis on E85-powered cars or any number of consumer products (shrink-wrapped in plastic and entirely non-biodegradeable) that claim to be better for the environment.

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So, what would you do if you were put into one of those classic situations where you find money that isn’t yours? I will give you three different scenarios.

Scenario 1: You find twenty dollars on the sidewalk. No one is around.

-Basically the answer to this seems pretty easy. It is impossible to determine who the $20 belongs to, so the money is now yours. If you feel guilty about it, then feel free to donate it to the Children’s Hospital or the Humane Society or whatever your choice of charity would happen to be. If no guilty, spend it on a special whatever for yourself for being so lucky. I guarantee that the person who lost it will be kicking themselves but oh well, that’s just how things go I’m told.

So, that was easy, let’s move on to scenario 2: You find a wallet. It has money in it, also some cards and a state ID. So, this time you still found money, but now you know to whom the money belongs. So, basically you have three options. A: take the money, leave the wallet where you found it, maybe the person who lost it will come back and find it and anyway, it’s finders keepers, right? B: Try to contact the person to give the wallet back unmolested by your filthy money grubbing hands or give it over to the proper authorities and hope they do the right thing as well. C: Take the entire wallet and do what you will with it. (more…)