Increasingly, Men Seek Success in Jobs Dominated by Women - NYTimes.com
A male dental assistant, Mr. Alquicira is in the minority. But he is also part of a distinctive, if little noticed, shift in workplace gender patterns. Over the last decade, men have begun flocking to fields long the province of women.
Mr. Alquicira, 21, graduated from high school in a desolate job market, one in which the traditional opportunities, like construction and manufacturing, for young men without a college degree had dried up. After career counselors told him that medical fields were growing, he borrowed money for an eight-month training course. Since then, he has had no trouble finding jobs that pay $12 or $13 an hour.
He gave little thought to the fact that more than 90 percent of dental assistants and hygienists are women. But then, young men like Mr. Alquicira have come of age in a world of inverted expectations, where women far outpace men in earning degrees and tend to hold jobs that have turned out to be, by and large, more stable, more difficult to outsource, and more likely to grow.
“The way I look at it,” Mr. Alquicira explained, without a hint of awareness that he was turning the tables on a time-honored feminist creed, “is that anything, basically, that a woman can do, a guy can do.”
(via World Leaders Hang Out And Watch Sports Together, Too)
As Chelsea triumphs over Bayern Munich…
Source: BuzzFeed
The Other Facebook Founder - WSJ.com
Last one, then I’m out. Most broad in its coverage of the different issues at play: how Saverin compares to the rest of the founders, what exactly his investments have been, locals hoping for star sightings, etc.
IPO will keep Eduardo Saverin’s party going in Singapore | Techi.com
The Social Network portrayed jilted Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin as a victim. His character portrayed by The Amazing Spiderman‘s Andrew Garfield was trying his best to implement profitable strategies at the startup while Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake‘s Sean Parker partied their way to not-so-accidental success. Now, with 2% of the company heading into an IPO that could be valued near $100 million, Saverin is about to have enough money to maintain his partying ways in Singapore.
While Zuckerberg is often spotted walking his dog or driving his Acura, Saverin is a Singapore playboy, Bentley and all. Since 2009 when he moved to Singapore full time as an investor, the man portrayed as somewhat shy and clearly business-oriented has been best known for running up tens of thousands of dollars in bar tabs at clubs. His entry into the city-state had been seen as an avenue to jumpstart the tech startup goals that have been floundering for a decade.
“Eduardo doesn’t invest in much. He doesn’t invest in Singapore companies,” grouses John Fearon, CEO of Singapore start-ups dropmysite.com and dropmyemail.com. “He doesn’t set up his stall and say, ‘come to me’ for investment.”
The other component of his notoriety in the area is a penchant for skipping out on speaking obligations at the last minute. He was scheduled to judge startup pitches at Echelon 2011 but sent a text message hours before he was supposed to be on stage. It’s not the only report of cancellations at the 11th hour.
He has been relatively aloof with the media over the years which may be one of the reasons he went to tabloid-unfriendly Singapore in the first place.
And I was so charmed by Garfield in The Social Network. (Full disclosure, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher are formidable.) Posing the question, once again, on the influence of films on the perception of real-life people and events. TSN also didn’t mention that Parker’s more recent claim to fame is his aggressive philanthropy tactics.
Who’s the real (empty) party boy?
And is everything really “good guys vs. bad guys” anyway?
And so, ironically, we come back to the last lines of TSN:
You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.
End of story. Maybe. Not really.
Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Renounces US Citizenship - The Hollywood Reporter
The Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg, Saverin helped provide the financing for the initial founding of Facebook. With the social network giant set to go public, Saverin, who was born in Brazil and moved to the United States in 1992, will become a citizen of Singapore — where he currently resides — and avoid full taxation on the massive windfall he is set to receive from the IPO.
…what?!
Anyone seen this guy walking around? Say, “Hello, nice to meet you—hope you’re enjoying that Welcome to Singapore package.” Tax breaks are, apparently, our thing (read: “ow-err ting”).
Africans shocked by uncivilized antics of European savages
A warning about explicit language, and general European-bashing—which I try to stay away from, because I’d just be a hypocrite, looking at how much I love Europe and have wonderful European friends—but the observation/sentiment is pretty on the money.
Nils: Be proud of me. I’m digging funny AND offensive.
Africans say they have little hope that Europe will ever become civilized, after a week in which Spain’s King Carlos went on an elephant-killing spree and the Swedish Culture Minister was entertained by a racially offensive cake. “You can take the European out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the European,” sighed one resident of Kinshasa.
August Mwanasa, of Libreville in Gabon, said the latest atrocities didn’t surprise him as Europeans were still “savages”.
“I don’t want to sound racist, and some of my best friend are white, but let’s be honest: violence is hard-wired into their DNA,” said Mwanasa. “I mean, Europeans killed over 20 million other Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s barbarism on a scale unprecedented in history.”
Jenkins Odumbe, a Nairobi milliner, bemoaned ingrained attitudes of entitlement in Europe.
“If they’re not going on the dole they’re asking for bail-outs,” he said. “Why can’t they just get up earlier and work harder, that’s what I want to know?”
Liberte Aidoo, a Ghanaian travel agent, said she had been “shocked and disgusted” by what she found on her first trip to Spain.
“The brochures promise sea and sun, but they’re still incredibly backward in Spain,” she recalled. “Basically they all live in mud huts called haciendas, and they sleep for two hours in the middle of the day. In Europe they call it a ‘siesta’. In Ghana we call it ‘being fucking lazy’.”
But, she added, this kind of “depressing inertia” was to be expected in a country with more debt than most of Africa combined.
Meanwhile, most Africans have dismissed calls for Swedish Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth to resign following the debacle in which she was photographed eating a cake designed to look like a racist caricature of an African woman.
“The only people calling for her to resign are European liberals hiding behind a thin veneer of civilization,” explained Burundian sociologist, Descarte Tugiramahoro. “We Africans are not shocked in the slightest.
“All she’s doing is engaging in two ancient European rituals: giggling at people who look different, and symbolic cannibalism, as introduced by the Catholic Church. It’s all completely normal.”
lol i love this
Source: magiclasso
I. Have to. Reblog. This message.
Only caveat: really don’t appreciate the dig at Tim Tebow. :P
::drops mic::
Slow Jam The News with President Barack Obama!
Source: latenightjimmy
This is such an important read. Reminds me of what I was trying to express in this.
White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in the Hunger Games
On Tuesday, February 28th, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian male fan of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult trilogy, “The Hunger Games,” logged onto the popular blogging platform Tumblr for the first time and created a site he called Hunger Games Tweets. The young man, whom I’ll call Adam, had been tracking a disturbing trend among Hunger Games enthusiasts: readers who could not believe—or accept—that Rue and Thresh, two of the most prominent and beloved characters in the book, were black, had been posting vulgar racial remarks.
Adam, who read and fell in love with the trilogy last year, initially encountered these sorts of sentiments in the summer of 2011, when he began visiting Web sites, forums, and message boards frequented by the series’s fans, who were abuzz with news about the film version of the book. (The movie, released a week ago today, made a staggering $152.5 million during its first three days of release.) After an argument broke out in the comments section of an Entertainment Weekly post that suggested the young black actress Willow Smith be cast as the character of Rue, he realized that racially insensitive remarks by “Hunger Games” fans were features, not bugs. He soon began poking around on Twitter, looking at tweets that incorporated hashtags—#hungergames—used by the book’s devotees. Like the conversations found on message boards, some of the opinions were vitriolic, if not blatantly racist; unlike the postings on fan forums, however, the Twitter comments were usually attached to real identities.
“Naturally Thresh would be a black man,” tweeted someone who called herself @lovelyplease.
“I was pumped about the Hunger Games. Until I learned that a black girl was playing Rue,” wrote @JohnnyKnoxIV.
“Why is Rue a little black girl?” @FrankeeFresh demanded to know. (she appended her tweet with the hashtag admonishment #sticktothebookDUDE.)
Adam says that the pivotal moment in the evolution of Hunger Games Tweets came on or around March 23rd, after he posted a tweet by someone named Alana Paul, a petite brunette who went by the handle @sw4q. Alana’s tweet was not the most offensive or nakedly racist of the bunch (that award could go to Cliff Kigar, who dropped the N-bomb, or to @GagasAlexander, who complained of “some ugly little girl with nappy…hair.”) but perhaps the most telling. “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture,” she wrote. She cc’ed a friend on the tweet, @EganMcCoy.
“That tweet was very telling, in terms of a mentality that is probably very widespread,” says Adam, speaking softly from his office high above Toronto’s downtown financial district. He doesn’t sound angry, but he also isn’t amused. The phrases “some black girl” and “little blonde innocent girl” are ringing in my head as he talks, as are thoughts about how the heroes in our imaginations are white until proven otherwise, a variation on the principle of innocent until proven guilty that, for so many minorities, is routinely upended.
Adam tells me that, on the post featuring a screenshot of Alana’s tweet, he added, “Remember that word innocent? This is why Trayvon Martin is dead.” As he says it, I am thinking the same thing: of our culture’s association of whiteness with innocence, of a child described without an accompanying adjective, of a child rendered insignificant and therefore invisible because of his or her particular shade of skin. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” explains the protagonist in another famous work of fiction, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” which was published sixty years ago this month. “Invisible” can mean unseen, but just as often it speaks to others’ inability to see beyond something, or someone. The renaming of Rue as “some black girl” is a version of this, as is the pursuit and murder of the seventeen-year-old Martin, who, by some accounts, was shot dead by the self-professed neighborhood watchman of an Orlando-area community because all George Zimmerman could see was that he was young, male, and black.
- Anna Holmes writes about the “Hunger Games Tweets” Tumblr:http://nyr.kr/HWuhZo
Source: newyorker.com
An apt summary of the paradox that exists in the USA’s main party of the right. Somehow, it encompasses two conflicting manifestations of political right-ness: libertarianism and authoritarianism. The best way I can square this is that they really consider themselves first and foremost to be the Conservative party, the party of preservation and the maintenance of the status quo. The ideological principles merely follow from that objective, are whichever ones serve that goal.
Paradoxes exist within the Democratic party as well, but ideologically, US Liberalism is more intuitively coherent for me personally. Left of center is my current professed political stance, but again, I really can’t realistically say that that’ll never change.
Comment: The Republicans’ Lost Privacy
And that is what makes Romney and Santorum’s criticism of Griswold so troubling. Over the years the modern Republican Party has reflected both libertarian and authoritarian tendencies. Both survive, in a way. When it comes to taxes and regulation, the libertarian side of the party is ascendant. Even the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism has faded from view. But with regard to civil liberties, the G.O.P. has embraced state power with a vengeance. Whether it’s the rights of wartime detainees, or abortion rights, or the rights of gay people to marry (or to be free from discrimination), contemporary Republican leaders reflect clear moral disapproval. (Even Ron Paul, who is often described as a libertarian, is a fierce opponent of a woman’s right to choose abortion. And Rick Perry recently announced that he’s against a right to abortion even in cases of rape or incest.) Privacy is often described as “the right to be left alone,” but that’s not a value that seems terribly important in the G.O.P. right now.
Source: newyorker.com
Recalled this moment, after reading the tragic news about Private Danny Chen.
Look at the faces; listen to the voices. What I saw and heard in that room: proud Americans of the United States. Enough said.
