Does anyone else remember a few weeks ago when Vonage & friends got screwed in Minnesota over taxes? The courts in Minn. ruled that VOIP's could be taxed & fee'd the same way that phones are.
So there's your answer to why Qwest waited until now, and why they're doing it in Minnesota.
All about the dollars, yo.
-wd
Live shows. Do you have any conceivable idea how much artists make on a show? In my experience (I've worked for major labels, indie labels, magazines, all that crap), the artist gets a tour budget, which usually comes out of his/her marketing budget (which is part of the recoupable blah blah)...
BUT...Any charting artists you see on MTV are banking fat rolls at live shows. We did a show with Eminem several years ago (just after his first Interscope release), and we got a discount due to it being a student function. He still got paid over $30,000 for that one show. And that didn't include the costs that went into paying the Roots and other bands that performed.
And that was just after his major label debut. Imagine what he commands nowadays.
Artists bank major cash on shows. Even your well-known indie hip-hop/underground artist gets paid fairly decent (see, $1,000 for a club show + hotel + food + transportation). Multiply that by, say, sparingly, 100 shows per year. That's $100,000 with virtually no marketing campaign to pay back.
Being that it's an indie artist, royalties (or, profit if they paid for it themselves) skyrocket percentage-wise. Like others have said here, making $7 an album because you paid for it yourself, and then selling 30,000 (a paltry sum), just netted you $210,000. Many popular indie artists have banked from being indie. If you know hip-hop, think Company Flow (El-P/Big Juss/Mr. Len) or Hieroglyphics (Del/Casual/Souls of Mischief/etc.). Both groups sold over 100,000 copies of their first, indie-released albums.
Not to mention all the other sources of income that an artist has (guest appearances, show appearances, advertising, sponsorship, etc.)
I work for a company now that sponsors about a dozen (mostly independent) hip-hop artists. They get free clothing from us (we're a clothing company). We're new so they don't get paid (yet), but we have a history together and they wear our stuff. However, that's free clothing and free bags.
Imagine not having to spend money on food, clothing, transportation, etc., during the course of one year.
Show promoters pay for all kinds of stuff. I've been a part of dozens upon dozens of shows. The only thing the artist ever paid for was...um, absolutely nothing.
Now do that for 60 or 100 or, in a lot of cases, 200+ dates per year.
Cha-ching.
Why do you think artists like J-Live and Defari (Alkaholiks) finally quit teaching in the classroom to focus on being artists?
It's easy to figure that most artists make the majority of their money from live shows, etc. (Unless, of course, you count the divas and consistent 10 million + selling artists).
It wasn't THAT much money. It's not like I'm going under from this. When I buy product from China, we always use T/T. This is some jackass in Pennsylvania that apparently didn't know who he was selling to, and didn't figure that we were serious.
Now his credit report gets dinged at least once a month. Lucky him. I can tell you that sending our merch or refunding our money would cost him 5000% less than this is going to. And that kind of makes me laugh when I put it into perspective.
A few months ago, I purchased quite a bit of money in CD's from an Internet site. It's a business, but it's a proprietorship run by one person. I never received the CD's and the guy stopped returning my emails. I had paid him via PayPal, and the ridiculously short PayPal complaint/insurance period had run out, so I couldn't get my funds back.
The guy has no contact information other than an email on his site. (And don't play me for idiot...This is a big music site and I've successfully purchased there before.)
So...I wanted to send him to a collection agency. Several warnings to him went unheeded, so I went about trying to track down his personal information.
And I ended up on netsol. It referred me to GKG.net, another registration company. I went on the WHOIS and the guy had NO information whatsoever. Every field said nothing.
So I emailed GKG.net and told them that when collection proceedings began, we would be asking them for this guy's info. They emailed me back that it's their policy to have updated and correct information in the WHOIS database. They emailed the guy and gave him 48 hours to provide it, with the threat that his site would be shut down.
A day later, all of his information was up. I had a name/phone/address. I sent him to a collection agency based on the only place I was somewhat easily able to obtain information.
Damn good reason to keep WHOIS info open. If people don't want to give out their home addresses, then they should rent a P.O. box for $20/year. If they don't want their names public, then I can only imagine either a) unwarranted paranoia or b) that the person shouldn't have on the web whatever it is that they have on there.
WHOIS helped, and the guy went to a collection agency.
-SD
Most of you guys are completely missing the point
on
No Americans Need Apply
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Who cares about the last part of the clip, everyone knows that it's a pain in the ass to get a job in another country, unless your an executive or you live in the EU. (My personal experience alone with this is endless.)
The point is the first part. And I don't want to collectively diss the/. population, but if you guys would read BusinessWeek, The Economist, etc., in addition to all your damn computer magazines, then you'd be enlightened already about how the H1 visa problem is growing so fast in the States.
There are countless stories at countless firms about people who've been forced to train their outsourced replacements. It is a really big problem in this country.
I really don't give a f*ck if you want to outsource a job to India. But all that bullsh*t with Tata is a gross exploitation of a labor-law loophole. Generally, the law states that you can't lay someone off and replace that exact position within "X" amount of time (it varies by State, I believe, here in Illinois it's 1 year). So companies get around it by creating whole new departments and positions for companies like Tata to come in and rape your office space, replacing you with an H1-er.
Start reading other magazines, and you guys might actually be motivated to care about this instead of giving supposedly righteous comments about how obvious it is that it's difficult to obtain work visas in other countries.
Focus on the important stuff. Like the BEGINNING of the clip.
"All techies should be forced to take at least 12 credits of business in college."
I saw that several people noted yesterday how Fox News was the only major outlet offering news about this girl's situation. However, you can always rely on the Cafferty File, eh?
Jack Cafferty spent a few minutes on CNN this morning lambasting the RIAA and record companies for suing a 12-year-old girl, and, I quote, "Maybe they'd sell more CD's if they'd stop putting out so much crummy music."
Bold statement from someone whose paychecks come courtesy of AOL Time Warner.
Sidenote: I'd really like to see Cary Sherman on the Daily Show; that'd be damn funny.
I'm ridiculousliy pissed off about this settlement. My girlfriend didn't seem so agitated, but when I said, "Well, wait until they come after you, then complain," the argument was over.
I used to support the catch-all "F**K THE RIAA, BUY INDEPENDENT," but for all of you who think that you're buying independent, you'd better do your research.
I listen mostly to hip-hop (underground and whatnot). Over the past few years, fans like me have been fortunate enough to see good, indie hip-hop get signed on and distributed by Caroline.
Now, Caroline Distribution (caroline.com) is a HUGE independent-music distributor. But, what most people do NOT know, is that they are now owned by EMI. And because of this, all music distributed by them is now wrapped up in the wonderful world of the RIAA.
Therefore, if you plan on "only buy[ing] independent music from now on," you'd better do your research and be prepared to buy that music from very, very limited and hard-to-find resources. There are at least a dozen Caroline-type companies out there now, so keep those peepers open.
I still say "F**K THE RIAA," regardless. And shame on the lawyers that most certainly bullied Brianna & her mom to settle this case in like 24 hours. If they'd have given it a week, carloads of defense lawyers would be in front of their housing project.
Oh, and here's a link to the member list for the RIAA. A lot longer than you thought, eh?
That's about as unethical as you can get. And it hurts the company anyway because you then have to pay for unemployment on top of the extra salary that you countered.
There are generally two ways in which an employer looks at an employee...
1) As a commodity, a service that the business owns and can milk for any and all skills that the person has at whatever rate they feel like paying. In this case, pay is based on "get the most you can for the cheapest price." These are generally the bargain-basement companies that have nasty reputations in the industry, high turnover rates, etc. They often let people go without a counteroffer, knowing that they can replace this person with a newbie for $15,000 less per year. This type of company does not focus on training and rarely technology, and often thinks of its shareholders and profit margins first, prone to layoffs and a low stock price, no matter what "changes" are made to "better" the company.
2) As a business, another organization with skills and brains to help take the company to a new level. The company is hiring this organization (you) in order to increase productivity, efficiency, profit, growth, etc. The company respects the employee as a valuable part of a team, and the employee could certainly be called a "business partner." These companies usually give large raises and bonuses based on performance, leave doors open and inform staff of newly developing opportunities for partner growth. Their benefits are usually better because they are quite aware of how each employee is an integral member of the team that makes the company tick properly.
Those are the basic two kinds of employers. When being counter-offered, companies often can only go so high due to budgeting and pay scales. In the case of pay-scale limits, it is always appropriate for you, as an employee, to work with the employer to create a "new" position or title in order to be paid what the market (or your skills) say you are worth.
Often times, this is called a "variance request."
Today, I am actually meeting with my SVP (in 2 hours) to propose a variance request for my position. Not only am I underpaid per the market or in general, but I have taken on more duties that are not associated with my original job description. In this case, if the SVP does not want to or cannot provide me with ample compensation, I will propose a change of title/position. Many people feel that coworkers will be offended, e.g., but in reality, there is nothing wrong with keeping the new title and/or position a private matter, just as long as it is approved and on the company's books.
I view my employer as the type #1 above. Today, we will find out how much they are willing to transition to a type #2 company.
The SVP has been bantering about employee retention, so I'm going to test his true feelings on the matter.
Remember, though, sometimes when you go job shopping and then go in to tell your boss, they are counter-offering you because they had no idea that you were leaving, or they might have made a mistake in overlooking a superstar employee. A counter-offer is their last chance to keep someone that could truly be an asset to the company.
As I move along in life, I'm coming into the theory that most of us are manic depressive, spending our money on a bunch of crap we don't and never will need, just to make ourselves feel better for a little while.
If we're all manic depressive, that'd mean that manic depression is merely a theory to...bla bla. The point is that the extremes are the cases you see, and the rest of us are either a) also manic depressive, or b) it doesn't exist at all and that's just how people are by nature.
And most of us have ADD as well (in theory), the successful people being the ones that can force focus long enough to make it to the top.
As we should all know, "poverty" is relative, as most of you mentioned. One of you (or more) was talking about how much your money is really worth and relating it to what a dollar can buy.
Take the family in Fargo, ND. If they make $54,400/year, they need to make the following amounts in those cities to have the SAME standard of living:
Chicago: $98,840 Manhattan: $103,367 St. Louis: $67,984
On scale, the average cost of living in the U.S. is 100. Manhattan is 261 and Chicago is 173. Burlington, VT, is 110 and St. Louis, Missouri, is 85.
[All numeric data is from homefair.com]
For those of you who apparently didn't catch it, that was the point of David Brooks's article.
As far as the Fargo, ND, farming family is concerned, they don't give the most important data in order to judge this family's true income and "worth". It says he makes that $54,400/year. Some of you were talking about the $400,000 loans and the $25,000 tractor payments. I highly doubt that this is out of his $54k income. Farms are generally run as a business, and since i'm Mr. Assumption, I'll assume that they bring in much more than $54,400 on a gross-income level, and $54k is what they have slated for themselves. The business costs taken out of that gross (post-tax) income would be the loan payments, etc.
Farming is a very, very difficult business, regardless.
The thing that annoys me with these articles, like it does with the people who surround me every day, is how much these folks spend on car payments. $750 and $800/month? Are they insane? For those cars?
I have friends that pay $700 for Monteros and coworkers who pay $350 and $400 for an average car (Monte Carlo, etc.).
I bought a 2003 TL in April and I pay $336/month. It's amazing how badly people get ripped off when they buy cars. My dad pays like $400/month for an Accord and was pretty damn mad when I got payments of $336/month. People don't do the research and are happy being ripped off.
On a personal level, I often feel that the excess is ridiculous, but don't pass up dropping $4 on Starbucks or spending $100 at the grocery store, and then the next day wondering what there is to eat in the house.
I keep telling myself that feng shui saying, "Cluttered House Equals Cluttered Mind." But then I look at my 8 drawers of wires and plugs and adapters and two closets of clothes I never wear, and convince myself that I'll need that 18th 4'-long telephone cable ever again in my life. And then I go buy more cables and clothes.
I have a 3-bedroom apartment and it's FULL of crap. And it's just me and my dog and half the days, my girlfriend. What single man needs a 3-bedroom and still needs to use basement storage? That's f*cking sad.
I've promised myself that if I ever lose my apartment (I pay $800 for a 3-bedroom in a city [Chicago] that has an average 2-bedroom cost of $1795), I'll move into a 1-bedroom and get rid of all my crap. Of course, promises are nearly always broken. I'll probably go to Ikea and buy more sh*t and never throw anything away and keep 16 boxes of cereal in the cupboard for no apparent reason.
Regardless of all that, though, "poverty" on a global scale is relative. Everyone talks about "go to Africa and see how bad it is," but to be rich there is a different story. Poor here is poor here, and it's not going to make a poor person in Alabama satisfied with his/her life just because you tell him/her that 80% of the people in Malawi have HIV [quote].
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else remember a few weeks ago when Vonage & friends got screwed in Minnesota over taxes? The courts in Minn. ruled that VOIP's could be taxed & fee'd the same way that phones are. So there's your answer to why Qwest waited until now, and why they're doing it in Minnesota. All about the dollars, yo. -wd
If you're going to go all out, why not bankrupt your employer at the same time?!
Get this "VIP" a Gulfstream G5. Look, the thing only costs $30-40 million. And I'm sure they'd throw in EVERY gadget on here for free.
Or, you can just lease one for the VIP for the paltry sum of a mere $243,864 a month.
Gulfstream G5
-SD
BUT...Any charting artists you see on MTV are banking fat rolls at live shows. We did a show with Eminem several years ago (just after his first Interscope release), and we got a discount due to it being a student function. He still got paid over $30,000 for that one show. And that didn't include the costs that went into paying the Roots and other bands that performed.
And that was just after his major label debut. Imagine what he commands nowadays.
Artists bank major cash on shows. Even your well-known indie hip-hop/underground artist gets paid fairly decent (see, $1,000 for a club show + hotel + food + transportation). Multiply that by, say, sparingly, 100 shows per year. That's $100,000 with virtually no marketing campaign to pay back.
Being that it's an indie artist, royalties (or, profit if they paid for it themselves) skyrocket percentage-wise. Like others have said here, making $7 an album because you paid for it yourself, and then selling 30,000 (a paltry sum), just netted you $210,000. Many popular indie artists have banked from being indie. If you know hip-hop, think Company Flow (El-P/Big Juss/Mr. Len) or Hieroglyphics (Del/Casual/Souls of Mischief/etc.). Both groups sold over 100,000 copies of their first, indie-released albums.
Not to mention all the other sources of income that an artist has (guest appearances, show appearances, advertising, sponsorship, etc.)
I work for a company now that sponsors about a dozen (mostly independent) hip-hop artists. They get free clothing from us (we're a clothing company). We're new so they don't get paid (yet), but we have a history together and they wear our stuff. However, that's free clothing and free bags.
Imagine not having to spend money on food, clothing, transportation, etc., during the course of one year.
Show promoters pay for all kinds of stuff. I've been a part of dozens upon dozens of shows. The only thing the artist ever paid for was...um, absolutely nothing.
Now do that for 60 or 100 or, in a lot of cases, 200+ dates per year.
Cha-ching.
Why do you think artists like J-Live and Defari (Alkaholiks) finally quit teaching in the classroom to focus on being artists?
It's easy to figure that most artists make the majority of their money from live shows, etc. (Unless, of course, you count the divas and consistent 10 million + selling artists).
My .02
-SD/WAXDADDY
Now his credit report gets dinged at least once a month. Lucky him. I can tell you that sending our merch or refunding our money would cost him 5000% less than this is going to. And that kind of makes me laugh when I put it into perspective.
-SD
Need the WHOIS info, and here's why...
A few months ago, I purchased quite a bit of money in CD's from an Internet site. It's a business, but it's a proprietorship run by one person. I never received the CD's and the guy stopped returning my emails. I had paid him via PayPal, and the ridiculously short PayPal complaint/insurance period had run out, so I couldn't get my funds back.
The guy has no contact information other than an email on his site. (And don't play me for idiot...This is a big music site and I've successfully purchased there before.)
So...I wanted to send him to a collection agency. Several warnings to him went unheeded, so I went about trying to track down his personal information.
And I ended up on netsol. It referred me to GKG.net, another registration company. I went on the WHOIS and the guy had NO information whatsoever. Every field said nothing.
So I emailed GKG.net and told them that when collection proceedings began, we would be asking them for this guy's info. They emailed me back that it's their policy to have updated and correct information in the WHOIS database. They emailed the guy and gave him 48 hours to provide it, with the threat that his site would be shut down.
A day later, all of his information was up. I had a name/phone/address. I sent him to a collection agency based on the only place I was somewhat easily able to obtain information.
Damn good reason to keep WHOIS info open. If people don't want to give out their home addresses, then they should rent a P.O. box for $20/year. If they don't want their names public, then I can only imagine either a) unwarranted paranoia or b) that the person shouldn't have on the web whatever it is that they have on there.
WHOIS helped, and the guy went to a collection agency.
-SD
Who cares about the last part of the clip, everyone knows that it's a pain in the ass to get a job in another country, unless your an executive or you live in the EU. (My personal experience alone with this is endless.)
The point is the first part. And I don't want to collectively diss the /. population, but if you guys would read BusinessWeek, The Economist, etc., in addition to all your damn computer magazines, then you'd be enlightened already about how the H1 visa problem is growing so fast in the States.
There are countless stories at countless firms about people who've been forced to train their outsourced replacements. It is a really big problem in this country.
I really don't give a f*ck if you want to outsource a job to India. But all that bullsh*t with Tata is a gross exploitation of a labor-law loophole. Generally, the law states that you can't lay someone off and replace that exact position within "X" amount of time (it varies by State, I believe, here in Illinois it's 1 year). So companies get around it by creating whole new departments and positions for companies like Tata to come in and rape your office space, replacing you with an H1-er.
Start reading other magazines, and you guys might actually be motivated to care about this instead of giving supposedly righteous comments about how obvious it is that it's difficult to obtain work visas in other countries.
Focus on the important stuff. Like the BEGINNING of the clip.
"All techies should be forced to take at least 12 credits of business in college."
-SD
I saw that several people noted yesterday how Fox News was the only major outlet offering news about this girl's situation. However, you can always rely on the Cafferty File, eh?
Jack Cafferty spent a few minutes on CNN this morning lambasting the RIAA and record companies for suing a 12-year-old girl, and, I quote, "Maybe they'd sell more CD's if they'd stop putting out so much crummy music."
Bold statement from someone whose paychecks come courtesy of AOL Time Warner.
Sidenote: I'd really like to see Cary Sherman on the Daily Show; that'd be damn funny.
-waxdaddy
I used to support the catch-all "F**K THE RIAA, BUY INDEPENDENT," but for all of you who think that you're buying independent, you'd better do your research.
I listen mostly to hip-hop (underground and whatnot). Over the past few years, fans like me have been fortunate enough to see good, indie hip-hop get signed on and distributed by Caroline.
Now, Caroline Distribution (caroline.com) is a HUGE independent-music distributor. But, what most people do NOT know, is that they are now owned by EMI. And because of this, all music distributed by them is now wrapped up in the wonderful world of the RIAA.
Therefore, if you plan on "only buy[ing] independent music from now on," you'd better do your research and be prepared to buy that music from very, very limited and hard-to-find resources. There are at least a dozen Caroline-type companies out there now, so keep those peepers open.
I still say "F**K THE RIAA," regardless. And shame on the lawyers that most certainly bullied Brianna & her mom to settle this case in like 24 hours. If they'd have given it a week, carloads of defense lawyers would be in front of their housing project.
Oh, and here's a link to the member list for the RIAA. A lot longer than you thought, eh?
http://www.riaa.com/about/members/default.asp
-waxdaddy
That's about as unethical as you can get. And it hurts the company anyway because you then have to pay for unemployment on top of the extra salary that you countered.
Bad idea.
-RH
There are generally two ways in which an employer looks at an employee...
1) As a commodity, a service that the business owns and can milk for any and all skills that the person has at whatever rate they feel like paying. In this case, pay is based on "get the most you can for the cheapest price." These are generally the bargain-basement companies that have nasty reputations in the industry, high turnover rates, etc. They often let people go without a counteroffer, knowing that they can replace this person with a newbie for $15,000 less per year. This type of company does not focus on training and rarely technology, and often thinks of its shareholders and profit margins first, prone to layoffs and a low stock price, no matter what "changes" are made to "better" the company.
2) As a business, another organization with skills and brains to help take the company to a new level. The company is hiring this organization (you) in order to increase productivity, efficiency, profit, growth, etc. The company respects the employee as a valuable part of a team, and the employee could certainly be called a "business partner." These companies usually give large raises and bonuses based on performance, leave doors open and inform staff of newly developing opportunities for partner growth. Their benefits are usually better because they are quite aware of how each employee is an integral member of the team that makes the company tick properly.
Those are the basic two kinds of employers. When being counter-offered, companies often can only go so high due to budgeting and pay scales. In the case of pay-scale limits, it is always appropriate for you, as an employee, to work with the employer to create a "new" position or title in order to be paid what the market (or your skills) say you are worth.
Often times, this is called a "variance request."
Today, I am actually meeting with my SVP (in 2 hours) to propose a variance request for my position. Not only am I underpaid per the market or in general, but I have taken on more duties that are not associated with my original job description. In this case, if the SVP does not want to or cannot provide me with ample compensation, I will propose a change of title/position. Many people feel that coworkers will be offended, e.g., but in reality, there is nothing wrong with keeping the new title and/or position a private matter, just as long as it is approved and on the company's books.
I view my employer as the type #1 above. Today, we will find out how much they are willing to transition to a type #2 company.
The SVP has been bantering about employee retention, so I'm going to test his true feelings on the matter.
Remember, though, sometimes when you go job shopping and then go in to tell your boss, they are counter-offering you because they had no idea that you were leaving, or they might have made a mistake in overlooking a superstar employee. A counter-offer is their last chance to keep someone that could truly be an asset to the company.
My $0.02, to be tested at 4pm CST today.
-RH
As I move along in life, I'm coming into the theory that most of us are manic depressive, spending our money on a bunch of crap we don't and never will need, just to make ourselves feel better for a little while.
If we're all manic depressive, that'd mean that manic depression is merely a theory to...bla bla. The point is that the extremes are the cases you see, and the rest of us are either a) also manic depressive, or b) it doesn't exist at all and that's just how people are by nature.
And most of us have ADD as well (in theory), the successful people being the ones that can force focus long enough to make it to the top.
As we should all know, "poverty" is relative, as most of you mentioned. One of you (or more) was talking about how much your money is really worth and relating it to what a dollar can buy.
Take the family in Fargo, ND. If they make $54,400/year, they need to make the following amounts in those cities to have the SAME standard of living:
Chicago: $98,840
Manhattan: $103,367
St. Louis: $67,984
On scale, the average cost of living in the U.S. is 100. Manhattan is 261 and Chicago is 173. Burlington, VT, is 110 and St. Louis, Missouri, is 85.
[All numeric data is from homefair.com]
For those of you who apparently didn't catch it, that was the point of David Brooks's article.
As far as the Fargo, ND, farming family is concerned, they don't give the most important data in order to judge this family's true income and "worth". It says he makes that $54,400/year. Some of you were talking about the $400,000 loans and the $25,000 tractor payments. I highly doubt that this is out of his $54k income. Farms are generally run as a business, and since i'm Mr. Assumption, I'll assume that they bring in much more than $54,400 on a gross-income level, and $54k is what they have slated for themselves. The business costs taken out of that gross (post-tax) income would be the loan payments, etc.
Farming is a very, very difficult business, regardless.
The thing that annoys me with these articles, like it does with the people who surround me every day, is how much these folks spend on car payments. $750 and $800/month? Are they insane? For those cars?
I have friends that pay $700 for Monteros and coworkers who pay $350 and $400 for an average car (Monte Carlo, etc.).
I bought a 2003 TL in April and I pay $336/month. It's amazing how badly people get ripped off when they buy cars. My dad pays like $400/month for an Accord and was pretty damn mad when I got payments of $336/month. People don't do the research and are happy being ripped off.
On a personal level, I often feel that the excess is ridiculous, but don't pass up dropping $4 on Starbucks or spending $100 at the grocery store, and then the next day wondering what there is to eat in the house.
I keep telling myself that feng shui saying, "Cluttered House Equals Cluttered Mind." But then I look at my 8 drawers of wires and plugs and adapters and two closets of clothes I never wear, and convince myself that I'll need that 18th 4'-long telephone cable ever again in my life. And then I go buy more cables and clothes.
I have a 3-bedroom apartment and it's FULL of crap. And it's just me and my dog and half the days, my girlfriend. What single man needs a 3-bedroom and still needs to use basement storage? That's f*cking sad.
I've promised myself that if I ever lose my apartment (I pay $800 for a 3-bedroom in a city [Chicago] that has an average 2-bedroom cost of $1795), I'll move into a 1-bedroom and get rid of all my crap. Of course, promises are nearly always broken. I'll probably go to Ikea and buy more sh*t and never throw anything away and keep 16 boxes of cereal in the cupboard for no apparent reason.
Regardless of all that, though, "poverty" on a global scale is relative. Everyone talks about "go to Africa and see how bad it is," but to be rich there is a different story. Poor here is poor here, and it's not going to make a poor person in Alabama satisfied with his/her life just because you tell him/her that 80% of the people in Malawi have HIV [quote].
Just my $.02 of rambling during the daily grind.
-RH