Depressing Jobs

Providing aggressively bad service and being rude to everyone results in low job satisfaction.  The only thing that's surprising about that is that anyone is surprised.  You have to sympathize, I admit:  knowing that every day you are going to waste a huge amount of money and provide terrible service would make it hard to have much job satisfaction...

Jobs and depression

The Atlantic story

The actual study

Five Hipsters with a lot of time....

With a nod to the LMM...

Royals are Not Gluten Free

Raising awareness for those afflicted by Celiacs.  And a sense of sarcasm.

I Almost Forgot My Phone

(With apologies to CSN&Y, who sang "I almost cut my hair..."  And yes I know the comparison is infelicitous.  I often just leave my phone home.  But then I'm old... Hair was the symbol of revolution through connection through conformity in the late nineteen sixties.  Now phones are the symbol of conformity through connection through isolation in the early twenty tens.)

Democracy: C.S. Lewis

Wow.  A very cool post on C.S. Lewis and democracy.  An excerpt:

And in a letter to Dan Tucker of the Chicago American dated December 8, 1959, he has biting words on democracy, in general. 

"A hundred years ago we all thought that Democracy was it. Neither you nor I probably think so now. It neither allows the ordinary man to control legislation nor qualifies him to do so. The real questions are imaginary issues. And this is all the easier because democracy always in the end destroys education."

A nod to J.C.  Nice catch!

Rituals

Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries 

Michael Norton & Francesca Gino

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming

Abstract: Three experiments explored the impact of mourning rituals — after losses of loved ones, lovers, and lotteries — on mitigating grief. Participants who were directed to reflect on past rituals or who were assigned to complete novel rituals after experiencing losses reported lower levels of grief. Increased feelings of control after rituals mediated the link between use of rituals and reduced grief after losses, and the benefits of rituals accrued not only to individuals who professed a belief in rituals' effectiveness but also to those who did not. Although the specific rituals in which people engage after losses vary widely by culture and religion — and among our participants — our results suggest a common psychological mechanism underlying their effectiveness: regained feelings of control.

Hobo Down

Hobo is gone.  He was our sweet old dog friend.  Just an amazing friendly personality, quiet and calm.  A nobility.  He had trouble breathing, and we took him to the emergency (vet) hospital.  They took x-rays.  Poor guy had almost no lung function, cancer everywhere.

The YYM and I held him as his last breath, unlabored because they had him on oxygen, went out.  That's the third time I have seen a dog put down.  Something goes out of the world, something is gone.  Call it spirit, spark, electrical impulses, whatever you want.  But it's remarkable.

Two pix of Hobo when he was young.  Loved to nap in the sun, even then.  Note the stick in his mouth.  He was playing dead, waiting for me to try to grab the stick so he could run away.

And Hobo loved the YYM.  YYM called Hobo his "little brother."  Sweet.  Here they are in July, 2001, just  two months after we got him. (Hobo, not the YYM).  Hobo is having a little nip of ear.  Yum!

Hobo had been scheduled to be euthanized, at the pound, in early 2001. He was "aggressive," and nobody would take him.  But the lady who worked there said he was a great dog, and thought he was just scared because he was always being moved around.  So we took him home, because he had the most interesting and expressive eyes.

At the end Hobo just mostly napped in the warm sun.  And of course I was happy to join him.  His muzzle and the fur around his eyes had gone totally white, by the end.  We had him eleven years, and he was part of our family.  Goodbye, old friend.

UPDATE:  From comments....Oatmeal, and the paradox that is dog. 

Okay, so THIS is the Parody

Okay, so the original was just awful, not a parody.  Here is the parody.

Will Farrell as DB and John C. Reilly as BC.  That explains the resurgence of the original.

And, to be fair and to placate commenters, the original duet of the SONG was very, very nice.  Beautiful voices.  But the video is just creepy, even more so now that Jeff H informs me that it was not a joke.

John D. Lewis

An energetic and compelling speech by my friend John Lewis, on July 4, 2009, in Boston. If you get to give a speech in Boston for the Tea Party on July 4, you are pretty cool.



And he was pretty cool. But John Lewis died this morning at 7 am. Esophageal cancer hammered him, as brave as he was. And he was very, very brave.

This is not a good day. I'd rather think of him like he was, on that day in Boston.

UPDATE: Two more good memories.

1. JDL's terrific lecture this fall in my "Econ for Non-Majors" class. Excellent talk on Greek and Roman views of exchange. He could barely speak. And yet there he was, bustin' it for the kids.

2. JDL's also terrific HuffPo piece on the deficit (Thanks to Dan Green for the reminder)

Turn out the lights

Yikes! 10 year Italian government bond yields are now well over 7%!! That was the level that sent Ireland, Greece, & Portugal down the rabbit hole of "bailouts".

The party is indeed over.

First they came for the puppeteers.....

Man oh man oh man. Liberals are so funny. Check out this article from The Nation.

Here's the awesome beginning:

"A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school. The intervening years had been brutal to the city’s school budgets—down about 14 percent on average since 2007. A virtual hiring freeze has been in place since 2009 in most subject areas, arts included, and spending on art supplies in elementary schools crashed by 73 percent between 2006 and 2009. So even though Joe’s old principal was excited to have him back, she just couldn’t afford to hire a new full-time teacher. Instead, he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”; he writes his own curriculum, holds regular classes and does everything a normal teacher does. “But sub pay is about 50 percent of a full-time salaried position,” he says, “so I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”Like a lot of the young protesters who have flocked to Occupy Wall Street, Joe had thought that hard work and education would bring, if not class mobility, at least a measure of security (indeed, a master’s degree can boost a New York City teacher’s salary by $10,000 or more). But the past decade of stagnant wages for the 99 percent and million-dollar bonuses for the 1 percent has awakened the kids of the middle class to a national nightmare: the dream that coaxed their parents to meet the demands of work, school, mortgage payments and tuition bills is shattered. Down is the new up."

Yikes! Where to begin. First of all, Joe started the story as "a full time drama teacher" in an NYC elementary school. How can that be a job that taxpayers are paying for? Jeebus help us all. Then Joe, or as I like to call him, the luckiest man in the world, turned into Joe the stupidest man in the world by SPENDING 3 YEARS AND BORROWING $35,0000 TO GET A MASTERS DEGREE IN $%#$$ PUPPETRY!!!!

Now he seems stunned to find out that he has a much much worse job than before.

And the magazine is using his case as it's opening wedge to indict the American economic system.

People, I say the system was failing when this guy was an elementary school drama teacher. Right now the system is working exactly as it should. You take 3 years out of your career path to get an MFA in puppets, you become basically unemployable.

Obviously there are real people with real problems unemployed and struggling due to no fault or error of their own. A 9% unemployment rate with our current social safety net is just not acceptable.

But I have no sympathy for the folks who borrowed a lot of money to go and earn a dumb-ass graduate degree and now find they can't make big money.

If you decide to "pursue your passion" in an un-economic area, don't be surprised when the economic system doesn't value you highly, and don't think that the problem is the system; the problem is you.

Your Eurozone deathwatch update

1. The Greek government has replaced all the heads of their military branches with officers considered more friendly to the regime.

Wow! Given Greece's history, that is a stunner. The left fears a coup? This might get even uglier that I had imagined.

2. Italian bond yields are up to 6.4% and Berlusconi is coming to the G-20 Summit empty handed.

Italy's public debt is on the cusp of explosive dynamics, where the higher interest rate on new debt combined with a low economic growth rate causes the debt to GDP ratio to continually rise even if the Italian budget is in primary balance (spending net of interest payments = revenues).

People, the Euro as we know it is over. I say it's a coin flip to last until Christmas and maybe 15% to last until spring break.

Germany and France are asking Greece, "do you want to stay in or not?" and Greece is saying "what, are you guys deaf?".

I am not sure what Germany and France are up to. If Greece goes, Italy definitely goes and that's game, set & match.

If they want to keep the Euro together they need to take on Greek debt as their own and settle in for a long hard slog dealing with Italy.

"They are hoping that China will want to buy Europe"

I'd do anything for love but I won't do that

KPC friend David Tufte reports that his university (Southern Utah) is looking for faculty members willing to let students stay at their house for the rest of the semester!

I am not making this up.

Are there no navigable bodies of water nearby where the kids could stay on cruise ships for the semester like they are doing at St. Mary's college in Maryland?

I am not making that one up either.

Academics out there: what's the weirdest thing your university has asked you to do?

You say it's your birthday.....

This has got to be the best song ever with the words "4th of July" in it, and one of the best songs Dave Alvin ever wrote.