Don't Talk About Money, because You're Probably Getting Screwed

Anyone who has ever worked has likely run afoul of the "Don't talk about money" rule. Nearly every place that hires people has a rule like this. Ostensibly it's to not make people jealous that others make more than they do, and that is theoretically a sound idea. Unfortunately, when two people who do the same job, same title and everything, discuss pay, they may discover that one of them gets paid more for the same job.

It's possible that one may have got raises over time due to performance. The case I'm thinking of does not have that excuse. When the company someone works for outright does not give pay raises, and two people with the same position make different amounts, the question becomes: Why?

If nobody gets raises, there's no reason for multiple pay levels without differing titles. A pay scale usually has a ziggurat structure, with a store manager at the top. Below that you have the assistant manager, any subsequent managers such as department managers, then supervisors or key-holders, and regular employees at the bottom. But when supervisor one gets paid $10.75/hour and supervisor two gets $11.50/hour, one must wonder why that is. It makes even less sense when supervisor one became a supervisor before supervisor two.

This brings me back to the "don't talk about money" rule. The only way people can find out if they're being paid differently for the same job is to ask each other. If you ask each other and you find out you're being paid less than your co-worker, you aren't supposed to be able to bring this up because you shouldn't know how much other people get paid, and theoretically you can get in trouble. But why? Why do you get in trouble for asking, or being told, how much a co-worker gets paid? 

I would welcome any ideas, but the only option I can think of is it helps companies not have to pay people more. When I was hired at one of my previous workplaces (previous because it's not like everyone's current employer doesn't read all their online stuff, right?) I was hired at $8.50/hour, which I only got because I worked in the state of Illinois, where minimum wage is $8.25. A few months later I transferred to a store in Indiana because it was closer to home and I couldn't really afford all that fuel to get to and from the Illinois store, plus with only one car it would be in no way convenient for my wife and I to have to commute to two different places. When I got to the new store I was still paid my $8.50/hour while some of my co-workers were paid only $8/hour. If they had known about my wages being higher despite not outranking them and doing the same work, they would not have been happy. They might have asked for raises. And I would have supported them, because even my $8.50/hour didn't cover all my expenses.

I left that company for another employer, also not the one I am currently with. I took a pay cut to work there but it was even more close to home and less stressful, so I thought it balanced. My pay cut brought me to $8/hour, while many of my new co-workers were still only making $7.50/hour. Some of them had been with the company for two to three years, and were really beginning to feel the impossibility of coping with such low pay. One of them asked me my wages, and, feeling no need to keep secrets, I told them my wages and why it was higher than I thought others' might be (working in another state previously). What exactly happened after that, I do not know, but I do know the employee in question did receive a pay raise. Why was this such a hassle for the company? The company is a multi-million dollar corporation with locations around the country. Would an extra half dollar per hour for tens of thousands of employees put such a dent in their profits that they would have to close down stores, raise prices, or even fold altogether?

The obvious answer is of course no. No company currently operating in such ways cannot afford to pay its workers such a small amount more. This is part of why the President's push to raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hour is so simple. It is such a small amount that no company that is already succeeding cannot afford it. It is also not enough to life off of, but that is a separate discussion. The nature of capitalism causes most companies to fight against paying their workers more in nearly every circumstance, for no other reason than that it would lower profits from astronomically high to merely ludicrously high.

You'll forgive me if I don't weep for the shareholders.

A love letter to early adopters

Dear early adopters: I love you dumb bastards.

You know who you are.

• If you paid $600 for an iPhone, and gladly, back in 2007;
• if you have a five-year-old Blu-Ray player
• (if you also have an HDDVD player come to that);
• if you jizzed in your pants over the iPad despite having multiple computers and a Kindle already (Yes, Adam, I'm sort of picking on you here)
• if you ever stood in line for the release of a console, game, or new piece of tech;
• if you bought Avatar on Blu-Ray or DVD yesterday (although probably Blu-Ray).

If you did any of those things, you absolutely fit the definition of "early-adopter." You're the kind of person who can't be without New Stuff. Now, don't get me wrong, this is a very good position in society. But god dammit do you guys haemorrhage money.

I don't know where I'd be without all the early adopters in the world. Early adopters are the ones who tell their friends (or in the case of tech journalists, their readers) whether this hunk of plastic and silicon is worth the, um, plastic and silicon used to make it. They are the ones who tell us all the cool stuff that New Stuff can do. You lot are the ones who drive the tech sector of the economy of the First World, not just by buying these things but also by making others want these things more.

But my favourite purpose of the early adopters is this: you buy up the first several batches. You drive the makers to make better ones. And absolutely most importantly, you drive the fucking price down.

I remember when I got my first iPod (it was called an iPod Video if that helps). Two weeks later, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. My reaction was along the lines of "God DAMMIT." Then I learnt it was to be $600 with a 2-year contract with AT&T. My reaction was along the lines of "Holy FUCK that's a bad deal." But, as always, the early adopters bought the iPhones up. About a year later, halfway through that contract, Apple dropped the price to about $200 - still not a great price, but infinitely better than it was - and refunded the early adopters $100. More than one tech writer likened it to an angry john throwing a $100 note at a whore after he finished.

Now, the iPhone is down to $100 for the cheapest 3G model, or $50 for a refurbished one. The top-of-the-line model (3GS) is still $200. Meanwhile, the iPad came out and the cheapest version ... is $600. And the early adopters have jumped all over that shit.

Keep buying, early adopters! Your money spent makes that product more affordable for me.

Businesses = idiots who want my money

Businesses must be, as a rule, run by retarded people.

Liz and I opened a joint bank account the other day. This has caused no end of problems, not one of which was our fucking fault. First, her direct deposit tried to go into her old bank account, which being closed, would not accept it. This is a similar situation to what happened with my direct deposit fuckup except slightly better except not, because the bank account in question 1) existed at some point and 2) belonged to the person who was getting the money.

The bank people claimed she would be able to access our account via her existing online banking username and password. We would have appreciated it if the bank people had been so kind as to inform us at that time that they were lying to us. She is currently only able to access the account using my password and name. This is not a problem apart from the fact that the bank people are dirty god damned liars who lie to people and don't tell the truth when they do it. Also, her debit card doesn't work, which we kind of figured would happen and we never even bothered to ask about.

Today, and this is where the complaint against dumbasses running businesses comes in, we sat down to figure out why our account had got so low. We looked at our online ledger which showed us no fewer than fifteen pending transactions. When we removed from consideration the deposits, there were thirteen pending transactions. Many of these transactions are from Thursday, when we went to Indianapolis, or Friday, when we were in town, or the weekend. Now I certainly know that banks don't do a god damn thing on the weekends, and they had, for some inexplicable reason, President's Day off. But the fact that since Thursday none of our transactions have gone through is not the fault of the banks.

This indeed has happened once before - to Liz when she was closing her personal bank account. She had a pending four dollar transaction on her card, which was at Chik-Fil-A, the famous mall crappy chicken "fast" "food" "restaurant". She hadn't used the card since the first day of that week, and the day we closed the account was either a Wednesday or a Thursday. Either way, they'd had three days to take their money. Apparently businesses aren't in any hurry to be paid for things, which is odd, because if you actually try the Wimpy approach ("I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," from Popeye cartoons) they will laugh in your face and probably spit at you and call the police because there is a crazy person in their place of business and they don't have to put up with that.

And I thought debit cards removed the money from your account instantly, and credit cards chalked up a running tally for you to pay later. Maybe I need to redefine. Or they do.

----------------
Now playing: Daft Punk - Face to face [Cosmo Vitelli rmx]
via FoxyTunes

Idiotic Adverts

I'm watching the Rangers-Penguins game because it's the first time in a very long time I've seen hockey on TV, and it's in HD to boot. It's the first interval now, and I'm seeing some adverts I've wondered about for some time.

I'm sure nearly everyone has seen the poker website ads. There's one where a bunch of cards are trying to get on board a bus but they can't because there's already a hand on board. There's another similar one with the cards in a bar. There's still another where a guy is talking about how you're playing everyone until there's one left, implying he's playing himself (I think).

The thing these ads have in common is the website they're for. I don't know if it's literally the same website, but every one of the sites is "not a gambling website". How do you have a poker website that isn't gambling? What's the point? If I want to play poker Senate Rules, I'll download a freeware game. Apparently it's a learning website. Really? It's a "learning" to gamble website. I don't think that qualifies as "not a gambling website".

Another ad that utterly fails to convince me of the quality of the product is for My Bloody Valentine 3D. They're advertising it as a movie full of sex and violence. I'm actually in favour of advertising that, because that's what's IN the damn movie. I don't see it as a bad thing because it's a MOVIE. Anyway, in the adverts, there's a blond girl having sex, looking up into a mirror on the ceiling, and saying, "I'm SO hot." Nobody told me Paris Hilton was in this film!

Seriously, the girl is much more physically appealling than Hilton, but that makes her just appealing enough to be murdered in a horror movie. The part that makes the ad even more unsexy is when she's being chased by the murderer through what looks like a rural motel car park ... still bare-ass naked. Is there a rule now that says horror movies have to have a Tara Reid lookalike running about naked? I can understand why many view that as a good thing, but I would hate to see nothing but Tara Reid clones in horror movies. For one thing, Tara (and very probably her clones) cannot act for SHIT. Her most convincing line ever was in The Big Lebowski - where she said to The Dude, "I'll suck your cock for $1000." Best delivery she's ever done.

Naturally, the ad ends with Naked-Tara-Double hiding under the bed (still naked). Maybe I'm weird but I don't find naked blondes running in sheer terror through a parking lot to be sexy. I don't even find it necessary for a horror film - not even a cheap slasher flick like this is obviously intended to be (let's be honest, nothing says "cheap slasher flick" like 3D glasses). When a film has a naked blonde running for her life, it makes me think her performance was so bad but they already had her under contract, so they decided to throw in a nude scene so they didn't feel bad for casting her.

Don't get me wrong; I have no problem with gratuitous screen nudity. But sometimes it actually takes away from the film. I greatly prefer when gratuitous nudity is in a film as a BONUS feature (not on the DVD, I mean you go to the movie to see the movie and SURPRISE! tits). If your movie needs to advertise gratuitous nudity (in 3D or not) to sell the god damn movie, you are doing something wrong.