A group of professionals decide to start a business. There are three partners, three skilled assistants, and three low-skilled staff members. Being a group of progressives, the partners decide that all pay will be based on position in those three categories with no individual pay negotiations or bonuses. For the sake of easy math, let's say the partners get $20/hr, assistants get $10/hr, and staff gets $5/hour. No sexism there, right?

Well, two of the three partners are male. The same is true with the assistants. For the staff, all three are female. Well, since all positions are paid the same no matter the sex of the employee, that's equal pay, right?

However, if you take all the men and their pay and compare it to the women, the math goes like this:

Two male partners and two male assistants equals $60/hr going to men. One female partner, one female assistant, and the three staff only get $45/hr. Then, let's break it down a bit more and the 4 men earning $60/hr averages at the men in the company earning $15/hour. And that $45/hr divided by the five women equals $9/hr. But I thought the men were being paid the same amount as the women?

Sadly, the statistic about women in America making about 77-80 cents for each dollar men make is based on this last kind of math - adding up all the pay, adding up all the males/females, and making a sex-based average (the low end is when you put the entire population into the math and the higher end is when the numbers are broken down into general industries - software, manufacturing, law). But when studies put forth the effort to get statistics on men and women in the same jobs (not merely the same industry or career field) with the same level of education and experience, the gender pay gap is actually closer to women earning 88-96 cents for the male dollar.

At this time, men dominate the CEO and other C-level positions in America while women are the majority of the "low-skill" or entry-level workforce. That is why I made my example business set up with men dominating the top of the pay bracket and women filling the lower range.

So, while things aren't as bad as the 77 cent situation, obviously there is still more room for improvement when looking at the apples-to-apples comparisons. Essentially, much of the discrimination is on the jobs men and women go into (can get a job in) and not quite so much how much the employer pays the males vs. females. My hope is that we are in the midst of change. Women now outnumber men in colleges. It is only a matter of time for more of these college-educated women to stay in their careers and ascend the corporate ladder. As they ascend, the sexists shaving benefits and being more firm in negotiations with women will decrease. Also, more women are choosing child-free lives and more "high-risk" jobs (such as frontline soldiers getting combat pay, truck drivers, and oil riggers) that pay much more are opening up for women.

These factors should lead to Equal Pay Day moving earlier in the year.

Some resources:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/ComparableWorth.html

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/21/barack-obama/barack-obama-ad-says-women-are-paid-77-cents-dolla/

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/09/are_young_women_earning_more_than_their_boyfriends.html

http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap

God gave us certain rights and the US Constitution specifically protects certain rights, but people not being responsible with their rights is what gives politicians the leverage needed to take away more and more of our liberties.

From Lesley Aileen Wells (friend of a friend):

Between the Newtown NRA heckler and the San Francisco urologist who was fatally shot in clinic, maybe it's time for us gun people to rein in our crazy. I know most of us are Southern and we like to put our crazy in its Sunday finest out on the front porch for the world to see, but there was a man in Georgia who shot a Hispanic person for turning around in his driveway. Why was he in the driveway? He was lost. We need to jerk the crazy back in the house, give it a whipping, a stern talking to, and stand it in the corner to think long and hard about what it's doing for us. Otherwise, nobody is gonna get to go the barbecue anymore and we certainly won't have fresh venison or hog to enjoy.

Whether discussing gun rights, abortion, or any other divisive political issue, the most common tactic nowadays to attack a position is to find the stupidest person supporting that position and use that person as a personification of everyone with that position. Alas, the supply of stupid people is more than enough to provide ammunition for attacking every issue.

Last Wednesday morning I was up early because the weather radio was sending out alerts like crazy overnight and throughout the day. Things were seemingly going well. None of the tornadoes seemed aimed for the south side of town. They were all going to the north of us or really far south.

But you don't have to get hit directly to be affected. Around 5:20pm last Wednesday, a storm/tornado finally made a big, wide-reaching impact. The line of external power to the local nuclear plant and the three main lines that run from the plant to the various cities of North Alabama were knocked out. As in...the HUGE metal towers were now scrap. Essentially power between Florence (in NW AL) all the way across the northern portion of the state to the Georgia border was knocked out. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) would have to completely rebuild the towers for those three feed lines before anyone in the north portion of the state could get power.

There was one exception to this. A town just north of the plant (for some reason) has a direct power link to the plant and their electricity was still flowing. Come Thursday, Athens, Alabama was the hub of emergency commerce. It was the only city that citizens of Huntsville, Decatur, and their surrounding metro areas could go for gas and other supplies.

On Thursday, JD and I weren't certain how long the power was going to be off. What we learned via FB and the radio was it would be somewhere between 2 and 7 days before TVA could build replacement towers to send power to the cities and then have the power restored to our house. We decided to go ahead and trash all of the food that we didn't think we could keep cool or wouldn't otherwise use in the next 3 days. We threw as much of the meat and other frozen items we could into a cooler, packed up suitcases with 4 or 5 days worth of clothes, and headed to JD's parents' house. They didn't have power, but they have a gas stove and a propane grill. Thursday was spent making that move and doing our best to make certain nothing was on or going to spoil or stink if we were out of our house for 3+ days.

My fil and I were already scheduled to attend a learning conference in Nashville on Saturday. I had planned on staying Friday night with my brother. With the power outage, my fil decided that he was willing to pay for two hotel rooms for a couple of nights so we could all go to Nashville. On Friday morning, a couple of nearby gas stations got generators and were pumping gas...for those willing to wait 45+ minutes in line. I ensured I had enough gas to get into TN and returned home to pack up the family.

We spent Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon in Nashville. Shortlegs got to see us for a few hours each day we were there. While I and my fil were at the conference on Saturday, JD and my mil took the kids to the zoo. On Sunday, we visited the kids science center. We returned to Huntsville just before sunset on Sunday. News was that power from TVA was starting to flow and that it should be available to residences some time Tuesday afternoon.

However...around 9pm, the power came on at my in-law's house. Yeah, it was quite a surprise and we kept expecting the power to go back off. But it didn't. As I lay on the floor browsing the internet Sunday night, I started to see little announcements that the president was planning on addressing America on TV. It didn't take long for word that it was an announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death to get out. I walked to the steps, saw my in-laws were in bed reading and let them know of the situation. My fil came downstairs and joined me in waiting for and then watching the president's announcement. Sunday was quite an adventure.

On Monday morning, we packed everything up of ours and headed for the house. After dealing with a faulty outlet that kept the circuit for both the kitchen fridge and the computers/modem in the "dining room," things started to slip into a minor task of putting away everything we brought back and doing some minor straightening.

Utilities and the city have been asking for folks to conserve water and energy as everything gets running again, so I have yet to do laundry, but otherwise have the house back to normal. One thing that happened during the power outage was that I pulled out the Settlers of Catan game I got for Christmas. JD bought it for me after reading about it via some of her friends. Thankfully, the boys were interested in playing and then completely got into the game. The only caveat being that the boys don't have the attention span for a full game yet, so they end up taking turns playing one player every few minutes. But I got to play the game 3 or 4 times in a couple of days.

I got lots of love for Huntsville's most famous celebrity right now - Antoine Dodson. Something I could always count on when screening calls for the radio show was that people will get passionate about what they would do if someone raped/injured/killed a family member. Antoine's original interview so well encapsulated that emotion. His and his sister's comments about the perpetrator's stupidity is classic!

Here is an update on Antoine since finding internet fame this past week:

There seems to be a lot of hubbub about Obama not attending the Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington is ONE of 146 national cemeteries for deceased veterans. The fact that Obama will be attending a ceremony at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery actually seems like a better idea to me than his attending the ceremony at Arlington.

When veterans returned from various wars this past century, not all of them were welcomed home with open arms and praised. Many came home and just did the best they could to get back to "normal." Then, when they died, they weren't all buried in the prestigious Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of deceased veterans lie buried in the cemeteries that are spread across our great country. Why are they less worthy of a visit by the president on Memorial Day? Millions of people (from families to curious tourists to international dignitaries) visit the gravestones at Arlington each year, but who visits the other cemeteries to give respect to those without the connections or luck to go to Arlington?

A lot of people like to label Obama an "elitist." But isn't only visiting Arlington and not going to other national cemeteries elitist? Why is it wrong for the president to take this opportunity to visit a different national cemetery to thank the veterans for what they did in service of our country and to help spotlight that you don't have to go to Washington D.C. to see acres upon acres of veterans' headstones?

thanks to valiskeogh for passing this along

I've been cobbling this post together for a few weeks now and it is here to share, if you are so inclined.

( Political disclaimer )

( Quick History of Health Care )

( Personal Medical Overview )

( Anecdote illustrating a philosophical and practical problem I have )

( What features I want to see in health care reform )

Study confirms most people are idiots.



And still half clicked Yes?