Costco CEO Craig Jelinek supports raising the minimum wage.
Costco announced record profits today, averaging $10,000 in profit per employee compared to $7,400 at Walmart.
The secret to Costco’s success is paying employees well, providing benefits, and giving them an opportunity to unionize.So large corporations’ excuses that treating & paying workers well would damage profits are all a crock of shit.
(Source: facebook.com, via panasonicyouth)
Do you ever think about the fact that the US has created and legitimized a system of institutionalized inequality by funding schools through property taxes? That basically a child’s education is only as good as the value of the property in their neighborhood. Funny how education is so often viewed as an equalizing factor when there is nothing equal about it.
(via nutopiancitizen)
Silverblatt: I’m reminded, talking about “off season” and its bleak and metaphorical usage, that Day of the Locust begins with the phrase, around quitting time. He’s describing people going home from the studios—but locating the moment somehow, where things feel more than usually made of cardboard, and there’s something ugly about the sky, seems to be a special ability that only certain writers have. Can you, I don’t know, it’s a hard thing to do—but speculate about an affinity for that moment. I know that Joy Williams, for instance, has it. It’s a kind of grim, holy displeasure in the state of things.
Johnson: Well, I think, you know, it emerges out of a dissatisfaction with the things that are presented to us as beautiful. I mean they’re always made cheap. Things that—and particularly in our lives, with the movies, where brilliant people are brought together to create really powerful cinematic images in the service of nothing. You know, I mean, they’re just—all they want to do is sell popcorn to children. And so we see, you know, wonderful photography of a fire in the night, and all they want to do is jerk our tears a little bit. They don’t really want us to live with that fire, or to have it be part of a story that, you know, really makes sense in our lives. And gradually, I think, as we look at these things, and then we look at the real thing—a real fire burning in the night—we start to feel really lonely because what was supposed to be beautiful has been cheapened. And I think it’s only natural to look at a thing that’s supposed to be ugly; the subway cars covered with graffity, and to start putting them in our paintings and our poems, or whatever, and realizing that they are—you know, everything is just glowing if we just look at it. So in a way, you know, we have the movies and so on to thank for turning our eyes elsewhere.
— Henry David Thoreau, Excursions
(Source: marlkarx, via nutopiancitizen)
“It must have seemed funnier still to hear the unconscious discussed as if it were a sort of individual with secret, dark designs and an unfortunate habit of wanting and thinking in direct opposition to the conscious. For the unconscious is not an individual; it is simply that about himself which man does not know.”
— Alan Watts, Become What You Are, 1995.
(Source: coryalh, via nutopiancitizen)
“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
(Source: buteuavineyard, via nutopiancitizen)
— Trofimov, The Cherry Orchard
(Source: makeyoubald, via russkayaliteratura)
