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Since I frequently include my blog in outside discussions, I figure it’s about time to include an outside discussion in my blog. Just because it’s interesting, here’s a bit of conversation from a work discussion about Walmart closing down a store because it threatened to become unionized:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/09/news/international/walmart_canada/

Walmart is the embodiment of every abuse and error associated with the term “corporation.”

Walmart is quickly becoming notorious for its civil rights abuses. The corporation is facing a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1.6 million female workers for its corporate condoned policies of discriminating against women and advancing male workers over more qualified female employees. Forbes points out that “U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins found that attorneys for the six named class representatives, in a case that started three years ago, “present largely uncontested, descriptive statistics which show that women working in Wal-Mart stores are paid less than men in every region, that pay disparities exist in most job categories, that the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time, that women take longer to enter into management positions, and that the higher one looks in the organization, the lower the percentage of women.’”

Additionally, Walmart has come under pressure for hiring illegal immigrants and then refusing to pay them minimum wage due to their non-citizen status (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20041107-9999-8n7jobs.html). Their control over their employees rights is almost unprecedented– no other chain has so thoroughly rebutted attempts at unionization, and it’s doubtful that many have invested more money into countering laws that would require fair and equitable treatment of its employees.

Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman provide a compelling example:

In California, in November, the company was able to stave off by a 51-to 49 percent margin a proposition that would have required every large and medium employer in the state to provide decent healthcare coverage for their workers, with the employer contribution set at a minimum of 80 percent of costs.

Wal-Mart dumped a half million dollars into the anti-Proposition 72 campaign just a week before the vote.

“As one of California’s leading employers, we care about the health of our 60,000 employees here,” said Wal-Mart spokesperson Cynthia Lin, in celebrating the defeat of Proposition 72. “That’s why we provide our employees with affordable, quality health care coverage.”

“Prop. 72 was never about Wal-Mart,” she claimed. “It was about allowing businesses to operate without unreasonable government mandates, it was about the survival of small businesses and it was about consumer choice in healthcare benefits.”[/quote]
An earlier portion of the same article notes that [quote=”Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman”]A February 2004 report issued by Representative George Miller, D-California, encapsulated the ways that Wal-Mart squeezes and cheats its employees, among them: blocking union organizing efforts, paying employees an average $8.23 an hour (as compared to more than $10 for an average supermarket worker), allegedly extracting off-the-clock work, and providing inadequate and unaffordable healthcare packages for employees.

[quote=”JadeRobbins”]This further increases the wage gap because the people who are educated are getting paid well, but the people who aren’t think they should get paid more, so they don’t work.[/quote]
Walmart is clears over $218 billion dollars a year in sales, and yet its average employee makes only $11,000, well below the national average.

[quote=”Anthony”]and if you thinnk about the 200 people that are “working poor” at a Wal-Mart, think about the thousadns of people who benefit from having a wal-mart near thir homes. The presence of a wal-mart will raise the standard of living for the comunity as a whole, not the undereducated employees of said wal-mart.[/quote]
Try 1,300,000 people who are employed by Walmart across its nearly 3,000 stores. Additionally, they still pay for it, just in other ways. When you factor Ben’s cited $420,000 per year per 200 employee store across California’s 44,000 Walmart employees, one finds a net cost of almost $10,000,000 of California taxpayer money to provide for public assistance programs for Walmart employees. Granted, the use of public assistance programs isn’t unique to Walmart, but according to an August 2004 report issued by Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs, “the families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated 38 percent more in other (non-health care) public assistance programs (such as food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized school lunches, and subsidized housing) than the average for families of all large retail employees.” The same report notes that “If other large California retailers adopted Wal-Mart’s wage and benefits standards, it would cost taxpayers an additional $410 million a year in public assistance to employees.”

I’d better stop. I’ve already invested WAY too much valuable homework time into this post already…

So here’s the challenge: for my T&C class everyone was given a short story, and instructed to write the ending. The real ending had been cut off. So we’ll bring our endings in and put them in a pile (along with the real ending) and read them aloud, and then we’ll try to figure out which is the real ending. So I’m going to do the same here. I’ll paste the story, minus the end, and then I’ll put my ending and the real ending in the comments. So take a guess at which is the real ending, or post your own ending. If you’re going to post your own ending, write it before reading the others and make it between 150 and 300 words (also– make sure that you’re not logged in and you don’t put anything in the “username” field so that your post is anonymous). Lets see where this goes:

I Planned For This
By M. Stanley Bubien

“I planned for this!” I cried toward the locked door. My words echoed off the metal—four inches thick and secured to cement walls—the reverberation masking my wavering inflection.

“You can’t stay in there forever!” a voice cracked through the wall-speaker. Jones it was, head of security, flanked, no doubt, by a contingent of badged police officers. “You’re only making it worse,” he cried. So cliche, this Jones, like playing cops-and-robbers in a ’50s B-movie.

“Sorry, but you’ll have to do it the hard way.” A perfectly in-character, premeditated response that—premeditation, my forte. Typically.

I frowned and clenched my fist at my temples.

“We have a warrant.”

I grinned, but only briefly. “Back to work,” I mumbled. Double-checking my lock algorithm, I calculated about an hour of decryption before Jones succeeded “the hard way.” I grasped the wrench, a clumsy instrument, especially for our Device, but time—ah, the irony!—often required such sacrifices.

A patch of red?

My hand convulsed, and the wrench clattered upon the tiling. Merton’s task this, I realized (irony upon irony!), bending to retrieve the tool—shining as if brand new, the bloodstain having been an illusion.

Jones switched tactics. “We know you did it!” he blared.

What could I expect? As a young man, I had mapped out our television B-movie schedule every Sunday. The “Sci-Fi” films tempted us into the science that eventually became our time machine—Merton and I, best friends, always analyzing the feasibility of even the most inane premise. Ours the noblest of endeavors: the search for knowledge, for ultimate truth.

“Brilliant deduction on your part,” I mouthed to Jones as I applied the wrench. Though a delicate operation, my awkward grasp required both hands for steadiness.

“And how feasible is God?”

I froze. Merton?

Yes, yes, I breathed, of course, a memory.

“Look,” Merton had continued, “we weigh the probability of things like UFOs, ghosts, time travel.” He flicked the black locks from his eyes for emphasis. “It’s Sunday! And we haven’t once considered God.”

The catalyst!

“To prove God,” I replied, “We would need to go back, visit some Biblical era.” But which one? And how? The first question, we answered in a week. The second, well, that required meticulous planning.

“Here,” I presented Merton with the sheet. “Four years, mathematics focus. Four more, physics.”

“We’ll need biology,” Merton stated, returning our coursework schedule, which I revised appropriately. Time travel is most serious—and exceedingly difficult—business, but we pursued my curriculum precisely.

Precisely, that is, until one week ago.

“I give up,” Merton had said in customarily simple—though somewhat matured—terms.

“Let me try,” I misinterpreted, relieving Merton of his wrench and brushing him aside to gain access to the Device.

“No, no.” He intervened. “It won’t work. I’ve been going over our figures. We’ve at least three bad assumptions.”

“That’s all?” I asked facetiously. “Without my notebook, I can still cite more unprovable postulates than we have fingers and toes.”

“I’m not talking unprovable. I mean dead wrong!”

I stood slack, the shining, crescent-shaped metal dangling from my fingers. “We concisely projected the outcome.”

He drew his palm over his lips. “Well, the board members disagree.”

“You went to the board?” I blurted.

“Tomorrow. I wanted to tell you first.”

“But they’ve never believed! They’ll cancel the project!”

“Yep.” Not one to mince words, he.

“You can’t!” I cried. “We’re so close!”

Merton shook his head and refused conversation, even as I pressed him. He met each protest with silence, which enraged me further—to the point of hefting the solid, icy form and swinging—

It was all so damnably unexpected.

“You killed him!” boomed Jones’ voice again from the intercom. I lowered the wrench, overcome by the bitterly irrational thought that a director stood nearby, poised beside his cameraman, motivating us by barking the names of false emotions through a bullhorn.

“You must be close now,” I replied, and considered mixing in a bit of the crazed laughter that mad scientists have become so famous for, but there is such a thing as too cliche.

Instead, I began the sequence of toggles to engage the Device—an awkward term that. But considering the full title from our PhD Thesis read “Modulating Temporal Field Displacement Device,” I never begrudged the truncation. Another of Merton’s ideas.

The final switch snapped off as I threw it. Damn him! I needed to stop with such thoughts. The hair on my arm stood on-end. “Damn—” I cut off mid-sentence, for it was not Merton’s specter, but the Field itself producing this anomaly.

Working? And upon the first try!

“You couldn’t stop me!” I cried toward the intercom and leapt headlong into the Field.

Lies, I realize, are highly pragmatic. This realization came during a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which the main character, Billy, is a PTSD victim who survives many of the hardships in his life by creating a fanciful world that he escapes to. Although this is an extreme case, it’s illustrative of so many aspects of modern life as a whole.

From birth we’re taught so many lies. Society teaches them. Parents inculcate them. Priests impress them. Teachers reiterate them. I’m sure you’ve heard all of them, at one point or another: you’re special. You’re valuable. You’re unique. You can have a positive impact on the world. You can make a difference. Jesus loves you. You have a purpose. There’s a reason for everything. Everything works out in the end.

All lies. But not malicious lies, but rather pragmatic lies. Lies essential to the happiness of individuals and the function of society. If one were to come to terms with one’s helplessness and insignificance… if one were to realize that “free will” is just a bullshit Western idea designed to give us some sense of purpose, when in truth, our choices are null: we all start at point a and all end at point b, regardless of our actions in life. A hundred despairing realizations– more– all stopped by societal lies.

Douglas Adams invents a brilliant form of capital punishment for his Hitchhiker’s Guide‘s universe. It’s simple: it just shows one’s position, relative to the whole of the universe. The realization of one’s infinite smallness invariable destroys the victim. And it makes sense.

So we tell ourselves we’re in control: we guard ourselves against apathy. We tell ourselves that something matters: it gets us out of bed in the morning. They tell us Jesus loves us: it brings coins to church coiffeurs and contentment to church-goers. We’re told we can be unique: it keeps alternative clothing manufactures in business. The lies go on and on. And thank god for them.

It’s interesting to reflect that Palahniuk seems to try to strip away all these comfort-lies. Rather than perpetuating these lies, he counters that: “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. Jesus doesn’t love you. There’s no reason to keep going. Give up. Give in. Abandon everything.” And yet with this he creates another lie. He tells us that, when we abandon and destroy all, then we become. Then we have meaning. Then…. He replaces our lies with his lies. But who can blame him? Who would believe him if he encouraged us to simply shrug off all the societal deceptions, so we can realize how meaningless everything is. How stupid everything is. How meaningless we are. Etc. Few would believe. After all, who would willingly choose to be depressed?

So in a way, we’re all PTSD victims. We’re unable to cope with the reality of our place in the universe, so we create these grand delusions of meaning and value. We dupe ourselves into caring, into hoping, into loving… It’s either that or kill ourselves.

Come, Muse, and sing the song of journey.

Sing ye of bright-eyed Odysseus,
Man of Pain, setting sail for yonder Troy,
Of Private Numeral, auspicious, would-be
Father, setting sail for our desTroy.
Glory and Pride of the Nation.

Sing ye of new beginning: the breaking
Sun on that yonder horizon where all
Is new, is bright, unknown! Integrity.
Displacing the shadows of incorrigible night.
Bearing the banner of promise and of hope.

Damned fools! These are not for you!
What avails you for all your sailing? For
Vaunted dedication, love, and passion?
How find you your horizon yonder? And
Who, (perhaps two) will bring a glad report?

Now you return, Odysseus, Man of Pain. Your
beloved home at last! But we dared not go.
No!– Stayed-we. Watched-we. Waited for your
report. Silhouettes against your setting sun.
But now surely we will know:

Would you go again?
Will we go tomorrow?
But what of those who do not return?

Good heavens. I guess I learn something new every day. Today’s lesson: credit card companies are nasty things.

So here was my mistake: in December, I paid off my tuition with my credit card, effectively maxing my card out at five grand or so. Over winter break I was thoroughly financially irresponsible (aside from $900 worth of car expenses, $500 of which was unexpected), and so when it came time to pay off my credit card in January, I left ~$750 of outstanding balance.

Well, today I received my January statement, and discovered a ~$50 finance charge for December. Being confused, I called BankOne, and asked what was going on. This was my discovery:

If, at the beginning of the month, I charge $5,000 on my card, and at the end of the month, I pay $4,999, I will be charged a finance fee for $5,000. The only way to avoid this is to pay off the entire statement.

Fortunately, as a courtesy, the customer service rep took off the finance charge for last month. I guess I’ll know for next time…

So I guess the moral of the story is this: beware of the man. He’s very very sneaky, and he’s out for your money. Don’t be stupid like me. Pay off your credit cards, or do away the idea all together.

If only I could take my own advice. =)

Ah. What a weekend.

Million Dollar Baby / Car fiasco / MSU Basketball game / Kill Bill 2 / Superbowl / Homework and now… sleep.

I’m ready for tomorrow. I’m very behind on my corespondence, but that side:

My coffee pot is clean / I’m caught up on my reading / My laundry is done and I’m in bed before 3:00.

So it’s 1:31AM in the morning, and I’m leaning back in my chair with my head on another chair, staring at the ceiling.

Josh walks out of his room. In inform him that he’s two and a half hours early for his 4:00AM bathroom trip. Having informed him, I return my attention to the ceiling, flap my arms and say “I’m being PRODUCTIVE!!!”

I’ve recently developed a certain affininty for cream in my coffee. I find this quite disconcerting, since I like to consider myself a “coffee purist,” which the notions of cream and sugar stand in opposition to.

Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of coffee that I consume. Variety is good. Whatever the case may be, my drink of choice at present is an americano with room for cream. How odd.

Hailey passed something rather clever on to me today at lunch:

A student once remarked, “I knew MSU was the school for me when I skipped class because the slopes opened up and ran in to my professor at the ski-lodge.”

Photos from my hike on Saturday are available here:
http://www.eateggs.com/photos/05.01.29.baldy/