Friday, December 23, 2005

Last Minute Gifts

I usually don't start Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. My shopping habits don't fit well with Internet Christmas shopping cycle as it takes several days for items to ship. Fortunately, since my family limits the number of presents to a secret santa, I have only one gift left to buy. Since the person on my list is an avid outdoorsman, I was thinking of a subscription to Trails.com.

I also really like the idea of giving iTunes gift certificates.

Anyway, my final stab for profit this Christmas shopping season is a Last Minute Gifts page. The page lists gift certificates and subscription services that you can order online.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Phallocentrism

BTW, I larned me a new word today. The system where women stay at home with the kids and do things like charity work or start little crafty businesses like scrapbooking, tarot card reading or other such silliness is called "phallocentricism.

This little system where women sit at home and working on little cookie baking businesses, run little restaurants, or do outright foolish things like create knitting patterns is not freedom. It is infact a system of violence against women.

Women should be working in salt mines, labor camps, toiling in the field. Women should be playing the position of line guard in the NFL ... positions that can bring out their manhood ... and not doing all of the things that they keep chosing to do when they are allowed freedom.

Yes, when I was thinking of creating a calendar updater person. I was really imagining the position filled by a female. In other words, I was imagining myself engaged in the practice of "superexploitation" of a subordinate gender class in the prevailing "gender regime." I was imagining myself dipping into that "archipeligo" of homeworking labor that is easily hirable and firable.

While my calendar updater person would be thinking that she was helping people learn about the different events taking place in the community, what is really happening at the metaphysical layer is that I would be using capitalism to articulate male domination and female suburdination.

Two great examples of how capitalism subordinates women are Martha Stewart and Oprah. Martha Stewart spends her days making doilies, and Oprah ekes out a living with her televised social hour.

My calendar updater person wouldn't just be a poor young thing caught in a web of a patriarchy. Creating a homeworking position that updates calendars would infact be forcing someone into a subproletarianized dominated female.

The large number of women who are flocking to work at home options like the Jet Blue Call Center (which is in reality a bunch of housewives working from home) are not people chosing to order their lives in the way that they desire. They are in fact victims of phallocentrism who've been subdued to "male sexual predation." Yep, Jet Blue is not a company that is using communication technology to provide work at home positions. They are a corruption of the world spirit that uses violence inherent in the capitalism system to do institutionalized violence to women in the form of phallocentrism. Have you ever noticed how jet airplanes are long and cyllindrical? See, it is all about sexual power politics.

Anyway, the primary reason I would hire a calendar updater person is that I think having a calendar updated with all the charitable events in town would improve the overall appeal of the directories. Translation is that I am trying to establish a neopatriarchy based on capitalistic violence to women.

Anyway, I need to wait and find out what happens with the minimum wage before creating the position. I am not part of the neopatriarchy yet, but I might get there someday.

BTW, if you are reading this, and haven't finished in the bourgeoisie task of holiday shopping. Might I suggest stopping in at Ten Thousand Villages. I love these stores. Ten Thousand Villages is a shop by the Mennonites. Ten Thousand Villages is a multinational capitalistic venture that helps perpetuate the phallocentric society by exploiting the cheap labor of indigenous groups to create traditional craft artifacts.

I've found that buying traditional craft items from native cultures is an ideal way to help tribal societies maintain a patrimony of male domination and female subordination. The artisans page on Ten Thousands Villiages show a few of the faces who are being exploited by this of work at home craft jobs that are created by the system of multinational capitalistic exploitation.

Minimum Wage

I was thinking of creating a minimum wage job. I was thinking about hiring someone to maintain the calendar on my community sites. My plan was to create the position early next year (after upgrading the server). The job would really be more of community service type job than a career. The calendar updater would interface with all of the charitable organizations in town to make sure all of the non-profit, fundraiser events, etc., were listed.

I think the job would be ideal for a mom with toddlers, a senior who wants to stay active or a student who is intensely interested in the community. This soft job would take just a few hours a month and would have zero pretense about being a career.

This job really is only tenable at a low wage.

Anyway, the paper says that a Utah politician, Ed Maynes, wants to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.00. I am upset, my hope for creating this soft job is now untenable. There goes another hope.

BTW, I wish contemptable little snits like Ed Maynes would look at economic data before making their little iconoclastic stands. According to the BLS, wages have been increasing at a nice steady pace (chart). Raising the minimum wage would be a non-issue for most because they are above $7.00. There might be a burst of wage inflation. The main thing the legislation does is eliminate all of the soft-jobs ... like calendar updater. Historically, raising the minimum wage has done little except increase unemployment.

What a low minimum wage does is creates the opening for soft jobs ... like the calendar updating position. Raising the minimum wage will wipe out a large number of those silly little marginal scrapbooking jobs and other little initiatives that Utah seems to produce in abundance.

The calendar updating position is barely workable at 5.15 an hour. It is impossible at $7. I know, I could outsource the job to India. However, my sites are about the local community. Companies like call centers will have better luck outsourcing jobs ... that is until our politicians have successfully marginalized our nation to the point where our per capita income is on par with India.

BTW, We have a horrible problem in the United States. The price of rent and items based on scarce resources (such as food) has been going up.

For example, in places like Salt Lake City -- where the zoning regulations are so tight that the number of new rental units has not kept pace with the growth in population, rent is out of reach of many families.

This problem is 100% the result of the tight zoning regulations. Salt Lake City proper has regulated people out of the city. Most houses in Salt Lake are zoned single family residentional. Only a few politically connected people are able to convert their property into duplexes, or fourplexes. If it were not for the aggressive zoning, we would see city streets lined with housing units stack four stories high (as was the common pattern in cities before the tight zoning regulations of the 60s and 70s.) Instead, the city is filled with aging single family housing on land that is too expensive for people to afford.

The population of Salt Lake City proper has shrunk in the last several decades ... Our politicians have created a climate that is so hostile to landowners that the amount of housing in the city has shrunk. The result is rents that are beyond the means of large segments of our population. If it were legal for property owners to develop their land, we wouldn't have this absurd rental market.

There has been substantial tax inflation. The amount of money that each Utah must pay in property taxes has well outstripped increases in wages.

It is possible that a spat of wage inflation might help counter some of the problems with the rent inflation caused by zoning. Though I doubt. Politician created inflation generally just creates a stagnant economy where wages chase their tail.

What I think we should do is get the government out of setting wages. Instead we should have a published indexed called a livable wage based on prices in a region. The livable wage would end up serving as a stigma. Companies might have jobs paying under the livable wage ... however, it would not stop the creation of margin jobs like calendar updater, or old person visitor, or street picker upper and all of the non-jobs that do not exist because of a high minimum wage.

Despite the fact that minimum wage has not been adjusted by the government, there has been a steady rise in wages and income reported by the BLS. The main result of raising the minimum is either inflation or a reduced number of jobs. My fear is that, with technology and outsourcing, Ed Mayne's minimum wage increase will result in a loss of jobs.

Friday, December 02, 2005

November Totals

The November totals are in ... and they are dismal. In November I sent 7080 hits to my advertisers and received 652.15 in commissions (details). This is compared to 8286 hits for $777.51 commissions in 2004. The sites are going backwards. I receive about 90% of the commissions reported.

Actual hits on the site seem to be up...I think that is because the Inktomi search bot has been going beserk.

I suspect that this drop in revenue is systemic. I need to be prepared for the revenue in 2006 to be around $500 a month. Grumble, grumble.

I think a big part of the problem is that I waste too much time on the ecommerce portion of life and I waste too much time on time wasting activities like reading blogs.