I recently had the pleasure of attending an event at a friend’s house in Old Town.
Out of privacy, I won’t reveal the exact location, but the house is in fact two houses, both circa the 1880s, that are connected by a passageway in the center.
What is really interesting is that these two houses have actually been “connected” since the 1950s.
As the story goes, there were two men, secretly a same-sex couple, who bought the homes around 1951 and built a subterranean passageway so they could carry on their relationship in private. They lived together, yet separately, into the late 1980s, before one of the men died, his partner then selling the homes to two different families. It wasn’t until my friend purchased the homes a few years ago that the story was unearthed and then confirmed with researching sale/purchase records and speaking with relatives of the two men who lived there for decades.
I have to commend my friend and his family for not demolishing the two vintage buildings to make room for a larger one, as many have done in the neighborhood. But more importantly, for honoring the clandestine couple and keeping the memory alive.
(via calumet412)
I made a summary of last night’s debate
(via bekstek)
Notable Snubs from the Fox News GOP Debate
- Rick Perry (Why did Trump even bother making fun of him then??)
- Mark Everson (sane person, which is obviously a dealbreaker)
- George Bailey (I hate-watched his CPAC speech and I think we’re all better off this way)
- Skip Andrews (understandable, he sounds like the ghost of a sexual predator)
- Lindsey Graham (I actually don’t get this one)
- Carly Fiorina (organizers fear Trump won’t enter a room with her, for fear of getting failure on his new suit)
- YouTube video of Buckley calling Gore Vidal a queer (honestly, I think it would get pretty solid traction with that audience)
- Constantly burning effigy of ACA text (I guess it would just be redundant)
All Pizza
(via wernerhertzaftig)
Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 Would Hurt Millions of Vulnerable People »
No, wait, really, not a right-wing screed. Interesting analysis about different labor markets abilities to absorb a sudden jump, and a call for better education to make up for decreasing on-the-job training.
Not that I’m totally sold on the $15 mark, but this article misses a lot of the political aspects of the movement and focuses exclusively on the economics. The $3.10 min wage in 1980 would translate to roughly $9 now, even less if you start earlier ($1 in the 1961 act = ~$8 now – inflation was pretty flat in the 60s).
The problem is that production in every sector has skyrocketed and the profits were very narrowly distributed. GDP per capita has gone up 450% in that same timeframe (vs ~250% increase in min wage) but even middle class wages have been stagnant at best.
Those resources, once in the hands of the capital owners, were used to dismantle labor unions, cut social programs, and generally exacerbate wealth concentration. So the point is that this is in some sense punitive. Of course like all economic sanctions, the effects will, in all likelihood, not be felt by the people they’re targeting.
My thing is this: automation is probably going to be replacing a lot of low wage workers in the service industry, much like it has in every other industry, but the incentives for investing in that technology are stunted by an artificially low labor cost. A massive spike in unemployment when you decide to pay people working full time a livable wage doesn’t mean you are now paying people too much, it means your system isn’t supplying enough jobs.
Unemployment has been a boogeyman for suppressing labor rights for decades - hence the push to hamstring the ability of the government to offer income or work guarantees. If people knew they could get a job on a big public works project with on the job training, they wouldn’t engage in perpetually driving down the value of their own labor.
