(Pickles)
This cartoon that appeared this past week illustrates a phenomenon that we have likely all experienced at some point and that is called the ‘doorway effect’. I wrote about it five years ago, where I pointed to research suggesting that it is due to our short term memories being at least partially cleared when we go from one environment to another, such as by walking through a door.
I woke up this morning having slept through the night without getting up even once and I said to myself “Yes, I did it!”
On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver describes what is going on in the truck driving industry. Trucks provide a vital service in the transportation of goods but the working conditions of drivers have been steadily declining over the years, as trucking company owners put the squeeze on them, and has resulted in a shortage of drivers as more and more people leave their jobs. He says that the turnover rate is an astounding 300%, which means that every year, an average of three people are rotating through one job. He says that the actual take home pay is much less than the the nominally high salaries that are quoted.
On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver urged the adoption of harm reduction attitudes and policies when it comes to dealing with drug addiction, viewing it as an illness that needs treatment rather than a moral failing that requires punitive measures for deterrence.
On The Daily Show, Desi Lydic explores the ‘raw water’ fad.
This is a classic ‘first world’ issue. Many millions of people around the world suffer terribly from the lack of easy availability of clean water and yet people in the US, fortunate to have water freely and plentifully available at the turn of a faucet, are willing to spend good money to spurn this luxury and buy water from springs in which all manner of disease-causing parasites may lurk. I was already astounded that people actually buy bottled water but this takes that absurdity to a whole new level.
It seems like all you have to do is throw around words like ‘natural’ to make people think it is better and words like ‘probiotics’ to make them think you have science on your side. And a big bonus is if you wear robes and act like some mystic guru because we all know that such people have access to divine truths, right?
You can read more about the raw water fad where you will learn that Mukhande Singh’s birth name is Christopher Sanborn.
Currently we are are experiencing a rare period when employers are finding it hard to fill positions, especially in the lower-wage service sector. But it is telling how differently the media covers this to how they cover the times when unemployment levels are high. The common thread is that in each case, they present the point of view of the employers, not the workers.
Cartoonist Ted Rall accurately captures the differences in the way that the media and the pundit class cover a labor surplus versus a labor shortage.
When jobs are scarce, workers are told to make big changes in their lives to adjust to reality. Now that workers are scarce, however, whiny employers are offered sympathy rather than given advice to change their obsolete business models.
In this age of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Stephen Colbert imagines what the next blockbuster heist film is going to be about.
Here is a clip of police in Los Angeles chasing down a suspect.
It. reminded me of those old black and white slapstick comedies of the silent film era with the bungling Keystone Cops, with them running all over the place.
I have noticed that a large number of comic strips feature non-human animals. Some of these animals behave as one expects them to do, in that they express themselves in the way that animals do by using their bodies, wagging their tails and so on. In the case of others, the animals are anthropomorphized to various degrees. At one end, the creators put in thought bubbles to indicate what they are thinking, though they cannot talk. This clearly appeals to pet caregivers who have often wished they could know what their pets are thinking. Other comic strips have animals and pets seemingly living and working together and able to converse with each other. And then there is the other extreme in strips where only animals appear and they live just like humans do.
[Read more…]
