Sorry Local Buissness

I'm not a good person but I do random little things that help me pretend that I am. One of those things is today I tried to support my local used books stores. There are two of them near me, one right on the way to the other and so I was excited at the prospect of being able to pick up some books I wanted to read cheaply and quickly. Instead I was bitterly let down.

BITTERLY!

I wanted a copy of The Road. I loved what I read of Blood Meridian and sasha loved The Road so I figgue I should pick it up, and I should do it for cheaper than 15 bucks, which is the price of a new book now and days. What the fuck is all that about? Both of the books stores, were, well they were just a plain old disapointment. They were both really small, and amazingly they both had an almost identical selection of books. It was creepy. I noticed something else about the both of them, they were both closed on mondays, and they both closed up at 5.

I've talked about it before and I will do it again. Small businesses can survive. They can survive things like walmart and amazon. However, they have to want it. Wanting it doesn't mean closing at 5. II mean come on I am their target customer, a crap job working ninja badass who doesn't shoplift but still hates paying 15 bucks for a book. They need to be open later if they are going to be able to cater to people like me. Subterranian books had the right idea but its gone now.

Oh well. So it looks like I am back to ordering used books off of amazon. I mean these used books come from small buisnesses so I don't feel that bad about it. And I mean nothing stops these local folks from listing on Amazon and Half.com.

See the thing is I do like sifting through stacks of books, and I do like hanging around stores and stuff. Sadly though, these stores just aren't cutting it. My eccentric needs aside, they just don't have what I need/want/desire and the interent does at the same price. I hope they wisen up enough to offload some of their stock on the interwebs. One store who is run by a little old lady will not. The other store who is run by some guy just might. I hope so. Best of luck to you kids.

In a strange side note today I was reminded of vacationing in the outerbanks with my Dad and step mom. The outer banks is an area that is almost compleatly tourist driven, and that place had more used book stores per capita than anywhere else in the world. Okay that may not be true but it certainly seemed like it. They were everywhere and they all had this dizzying collection of stuff. To be fair though there wasn't much to do on that island other than read, swim, and minature golf. I don't think most of the houses had tv and if they did there was no cable. So there were books everywhere. Out there is where I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amtiville Horror, and the Excorcist. The first two books actually changed my life they were absolutly fantastic reads. The Exorcist was kind of lame actually.

Anyway, we would spend hours scouring these stores looking for things to read and I would find all sorts of stuff that interested me, but I never picked up. Like this crazy series about one man's adventure in a post apocalyptic wasteland. It was pure 70s grindhouse pulp, it was a series that went on forever, there must of been over 20 books, and they all looked terrible. I wanted them so much but I was afraid my parents would say no. They aren't around now though so I'm thinking it is time to go looking for them.

Not Phantasy Star Zero

Yeah right now I really really want to be playing that game cause it is frigging awesome. However, I'm starting to suspect that it is becoming a bit of a problem so off to blogger land instead! I'm on the home stretch for my novel, if all goes right I'll hit 50k by friday! Then I'll be back to my normal blogging schedual including a nice big indepth blog on the whole ups and downs of the novel writting process.

What I am instead going to talk about is why do Americans work the way they do. It's interesting really. If you don't know, go look up the amount of vacation time you'd get in England or France. The rest of europe follows suit. On top of that they are expected to stay home when sick, they get holidays off, and all sorts of other crazy things.

I don't want to focus to much on that though. Even if Europe doesn't excist the average worker is pretty crazy here in the USA. White Collar wise they work 40 hours minimum. They are oftentimes expected to take their work home if it isn't done by the end of the day, come in on weekends, and all with no additional financial benefit. That's the fucked up thing about salaried empolyment, you get fuck all in terms of over time compensation and you end up working a lot of it. It is kind of insane. The worst insident of this I've ever seen with my own eyes happened back when I was working help desk a place called Supra Telecom. They were doing major upgrades to the network. So they had a team of contractors come in over night to do the job. My boss, the network administrator, gets to work at about 7am or so. He works the whole day, stays over night to help out with the crew doing the upgrades, and then he works until 12 the next day when he finnally decides that he is going mother fucking home. To give you a little history 5 years ago this guy was fresh off the boat from Greece of all places and working in a warehouse. He's a man who took the time to educate himself so that he could make a better life for him and his family. He deserves better.

Leaving white collar and IT behind minimum wage jobs, and blue collare employers are actually even worse about abusing their employees. I'm talking unpaid over time, unsafe working conditions, or skirting the bare edges of the employment laws to squeeze the most out of each and every person until there is nothing left. This all isn't from person experience either. Nor is this an unfocused rant. I... okay well I lost the link that has all the numbers. Wait no I found one! I am doing this at lunch so my time is somewhat limited. It has european numbers too! Woop!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samuel-h-williamson/why-do-americans-work-so_b_362111.html

Anyway. They ask why do we work so hard. It's an article with an open question that I will attempt to answer now that the whole framing part of the blog is done. The answer is two fold, American employers are dicks, and there is absolutely nothing from stopping them from being dicks. Historically speaking America has always had a large influx of immigrant population to make things happen. In the north around the civil war time we had the irish. Lots of irish who were fleeing a potato famine. There was no hope back home, work here, and as the maxim goes there are more where you came from so you will put up with whatever horrors we inflict upon you otherwise we will just do it to someone else. In the south we had slavery which is basicly the same thing as the irish except we paid their life time salary up front to someone else. I'm half joking put the damn rocks down. We made the chinese build our rail roads, cause you know they came over here and, well they might as well. The list doesn't go on much further though, unless you want to count the Mexicans doing every shit job ever, which you should.

With the miners we saw the first organized reisitance which coincides with some of the most apalling working conditions ever seen and easy access to dynamite. I don't think people really understand that in order to get mine owners to not be such massive collective mother fucking ass holes they literally had to engage in terrorist actions to make them stop. They blew up bridges, mine shafts, rail lines, all sorts of things. Of course back then they were called Anarchists, but in order to wrest back some basic human rights that should be a part of our consititution, lots of people had to die.

We also had to go to war with ourselves to make ourselves stop using slavery. I really do hate the whole states rights part of the civil war thing. Blah blah blah federal government this and that. NO motherfucker you can not use black people as disposable labor and going neener neerer not part of your country anymore isn't going to save you. Put your rebel flag down.

Rants aside. Blue collars, thanks to the anarchists have unions to hell and back as a result most of the blue collar work went overseas. Its funny, why wait for immigration to happen when we can just go to them? Its cheaper and their countries have less laws. Or we started abusing our white collar workers.

I think I am going to make this a two parter.

Anyway! So yeah employers are dicks. Why is it better in europe? Well they had royalty. They had empires, and they understand that it is important to treat your population with care and respect, not only that but to make sure that other people treat them with care and respect. That is kind of how that works. I mean saying a blanket statment about europe is retarded because there is so much to it and so many diffrent overriding factors. But this is one that paticularly stands out. One thing that makes them very diffrent than us. I do think it is one paticularly critical diffrence between them and us. There is also the historical idea that many of our ancestors came over here to get away from monarchy.

I'm not saying europe is perfect. They had all the same human rights violations we did. THey had them worse in some cases. But they also didn't go to war over stopping with the slavery, and they don't ride their empolyees like we do here now. So something is certainly diffrent.

Good Riddence News Papers

For awhile there has been doom and gloom surrounding the future of city news papers. Well recently it just happened. No seriously it did. Ann Arbor Mitchigan is the first decently sized city to loose their news paper.

I think there is supposed to be some sort of reaction about this. Something akin to shock, horror, the tut tuting of anti intellectualism, and blah blah blah. But fuck all that shit. I don't know about many local news papers but I know that if it is ANYTHING like the pensacola news journal that it is time that it dies the death it so richly deserves. There was a time where news papers used to be worth something. There is also no reason why the current news paper couldn't be worth something. People are switching more to alternative news sources, people like Rush, Beck, O'Reilley are getting more coverage than they ever have in the past and it isn't because of their media stunts. NO it is because there is a huge, HUGE segment of society that want to know more. They want to understand the world around them and hey lets face it murders and bullshit aren't doing it anymore.

Murderers and bullshit. Man that is what the news paper mostly is now. See here is the thing. There are 3 major 24 hour news networks. These networks get by on anything from 6 to 4 hours worth of programming. They also fail to go in depth in any real meaningful way on any topic. This is a void that news papers could be filling. They could also be dispencing, you know actual information. Instead of taking each murder one at a time they could compile weekly statistics showing where danger areas are and how to avoid them. There are tons and tons of things that can be done.

Instead of doing any of these things news papers are clinging to outdated ideas of what people want to read, and the way it needs to be presented to them. As a result they are in a bind. Not because tv is doing a better job, or because bloggers are taking over. No fuck that. It is because they failed utterly at moving with the times.

I got into this argument once with my journalism teacher in highschool. It wasn't that I couldn't get the inverted pyramid right it was that she and I disagreed on what contituted an important fact. She liked me, she realized I was a good writter and that I wasn't afraid to stand up to her at all. But damn did we disagree on execution. Did we ever. Now her way is failing. Human interest stories aren't that interesting and blood is no longer selling. So oh well your papers are dying? Adapt or perish.

This goes back to something I said regarding the fate of small locally owned stores vs Mega marts. Small local store owners, lock up at 5pm clean up, are home by 6, and they complain mercilessly about how walmart is eating their business up. Well news flash assholes no one likes shopping at walmart. NO ONE. They do it out of nessesity because all the little locally owned stores close at 5 when we are getting off work.