After a one-year hiatus, Café Verführen is returning to YaoiCon! I’ve reviewed their events before, and they’re always one of my favorite parts of the con. Their website has gone through a gorgeous update, and I’m sure their service has some new surprises waiting for us.
I’ve already made my reservations, so I’ll post a link to their RSVP page in case anyone is interested.
Moving means there are lots of new things to explore.
Special thanks to Ryuutsuki from Help_Japan!
Hi everyone (anyone?).
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I keep putting off the next update “just a little longer”. I’m sorry. I suck, I know. It’s been a disorienting year. Back when I had the YaoiCon Anthology to write for, I remember always having something to write about. By the time I got home from the convention I’d have a story already forming. I’d finish it by the time Anne actually announced the opening of submissions, start another one, and then dive in under the wire with that. The last time I posted, I was working on another Tybalt story, but I haven’t touched it in months.
Those of you who stay in touch should get on my case over this.
The world keeps changing under my feet. I moved (again), this time in-town. My day job continues to keep me from writing. I bought a nice condo, probably a few hundred square feet too big for a single guy, and I started grad school. I’ve been trying to do (or farm out) a serious, code-level site redesign, but everyone I talk to keeps falling out of contact. Part of me considers tearing the whole thing down and redoing it in Drupal. We’ll see.
I’ll try to tell you some catch-up stories just to get my momentum back.
Full disclosure: I am a McDonald’s shareholder.
About a month ago, on April 19, McDonald’s held its first-ever nationwide hiring day. They planned to hire 50,000 people on that one day, but they were so pleased with the turnout that they wound up hiring 62,000 instead. At first glance, this sounds fantastic. 62,000 people is a population roughly equal to the number of people on Chevron’s entire payroll. It’s an army, in a very nearly literal sense. Not counting contractors, it’s a collection of people larger than the number of US troops left in Iraq.
This is great news for the economy, right? Even if McDonald’s is not exactly a prestigious employer, honest work is honest work, and surely this is a sign that the economy of the past few years is getting back on its feet.
Well… not exactly.
First, consider the sheer number of applicants for those 62,000 positions. McDonald’s is not releasing specific numbers, but they admit that over a million people applied. A million Americans applied to work for McDonald’s, and McDonald’s got to cherry-pick the top 6% for their liking. Florida had over 100,000 applications for 4,337 positions – one location here in Tampa reported getting over 2,200 applications for just five jobs. This doesn’t mean that it was easier to get into Princeton, Brown, or Yale than to McDonald’s, as some comments suggested, only that they had a larger pool of applicants competing for each position; because McDonald’s was hiring mostly for low-skill sorts of jobs, there are vastly more people qualified to do them.
Still, a million Americans tried to get jobs at McDonald’s, and 940,000 of them didn’t make the cut.
Second, while McDonald’s is (again) not releasing specifics, many of those 62,000 positions are part-time. Most of those shiny new McJobs will reduce the official unemployment numbers, but how many of them will make it out of underemployment? The latest U6 numbers – the number of unemployed plus the number of people who would like more work but can’t get it – hovers near 17%. A back-calculation for the Great Depression suggests U6 numbers of 37.6%, so 17% isn’t exactly apocalyptic, but these are unpleasant times indeed.
Now consider this: in April, the United States economy added 244,000 private-sector jobs. Unemployment went up, because there of various cutbacks in government employees, but we added 244,000 private-sector jobs. The stock market rallied and pundits called it a clear sign that America was getting back to work. Take a look at that number, though, and then take a look back at the 62,000 jobs we’ve just discussed.
One in four of the new jobs in our “economic recovery” is literally at McDonalds.
Would you like fries with that?
Our hopes and support are with Japan, of course.
Salon.com has a pretty good collection of ways to donate, and it’s a good idea to stick with reputable charities. Scams crop up after every disaster, and some of them, like United Way, just stick around forever. For some reason this is not common knowledge, but United Way has a pretty horrible history of corruption, greed and questionable competence. United Way just takes a percentage off the top before distributing funds to its member charities; they add exactly nothing but overhead (and occasional corruption) to the equation. Cut out the middleman.
Personally, I really love seeing the different grassroots funding drives. For example, Dreamwidth and LiveJournal have various fan-related Help Japan communities, where people are auctioning off their talents and services (the dreamwidth community is open until Sunday and Livejournal’s is open until the 26th), and YaoiCon has their own auction of goodies, open until the 20th as well.
My favorite, though, comes from SomethingAwful. Someone made an idiot of himself, and after he failed his chance to redeem himself, one of the Goons decided that he had to donate $10 to the Red Cross or be banned (temporarily) from the board as punishment. After a little discussion, another Goon pledged another $10 if the rulebreaker had to choose between matching the donation or being banned forever. Wonderfully horrible people that they are, the Goons dogpiled onto this idea, kicking off a massive fundraiser for Japan. The poor guy now has to match all of the donations or be banned forever. If he does match, he gets all the perks and upgrades the forums have to offer, and major kudos.
So far the Goons have raised over $15000.
I think he’s getting banned.