Well hey, thanks for showing them to us! Always good to know where folks come from. You seem to always have had a sense of volume, dood. And a good one to boot!

Volume, convincing mass, has increasingly obsessed me and I feel like it's something I've been losing, so if you think otherwise, that makes me hopeful. (I used to Live by the Marker. Looking at these pieces of ancient history makes me want to pick 'em up again.) Thank you for commenting, sir. :D

You're making me want to find my markers D=.

Do you have any pictures of the residents in your gallery, by chance? If not, I'd love to see them sometime.

I do! The old versions, at least, were "Dragosaurs" like my fursona: dino-like fantasy beasts who have pelts of fur like teddy bears, generally of a color contrasting with that of their skin, so shaving patterns into the fur is the order of the day. Sort of like wearing where you're from, what you're like and so on, right on your body, in the form of shaved tattoos. If you sift through my gallery for "Head and Heart", "the Priestess", and any of my Berb sketches, that's roughly what I had in mind back in '96. These days I'm thinking of a thorough re-design with more fantasy and less furry (murry) in mind, but I might flake out too.

Break out them markers and show 'em what's what!! :D

Do you suppose the Who's would enjoy it? I think it's in their architectural style of choice. :)

There were some serious Who issues some decades ago, since they were willing to work for below minimum wage. They got unionized, though, so things have been better recently. :D

hehehe. Although I'm dubious about the current incarnation of unions making things better.

It's unlikely they will, since they've been effectively crushed over the past 30 years. And the folks who don't want unions (namely corporations) have done a great job demonizing 'em. It doesn't help that some unions have gotten really corrupt. But the concept of unions has been given short shrift. There's a lot we wouldn't have (the 40 hour work week, minimum wage laws, OSHA laws, ergonomics rules, etc) were it not for unions. People literally died to get us these things.

The concept of the unions is great!!! I just wish they'd WORK for the WORKERS... not the jerks running them, and against the rest of the workers who aren't in them. Indeed, in the past they've done their duty... but I'm still dubious about them... kinda like wondering if I aught to drive an ancient model t to get from Maine to New Jersey on today's highways. They need a overhaul I think.

If you want to make things better, you're aiming too low. I submit that the SEIU does, indeed, do a lot for its workers. Hollywood's unions? I wouldn't mind seeing them overhauled at all, but not eliminated. Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controller's union in the eighties ("They're making too much money!! They're too inefficient! They're adding to the expense of traveling!") and what happened? It went from a career path with decent earnings to a model more in line with McDonald's: hire 'em cheap with just enough training, and make 'em work even longer hours with fewer people on-site. The result? More airplane accidents. Big surprise.

There's a really good reason for busting unions. They're expensive. Without unions you don't have to cover worker's retirement, you don't have them playing watchdog on the factory floor, and most importantly you've removed the worker's ability to exercise collective bargaining. Profits go way up. So do injuries and the number of working poor, but hey, you're getting cheap eats! And all the shareholders get bigger dividend checks. All that wealth that made our Middle Class grow gets soaked up instead by a smaller and smaller pool of super-wealthy folks.

Yes, SOME unions...not all, probably not even the majority...have corruption problems. Compare their impact to the malfeasance of Bechtel, BP, Blackwater, Haliburton, and the impact of union corruption on our economy is as a ditch is to the Grand Canyon.

I admit I'm pro-union. Yes, they can be corrupt, but so can any institution; weighed against the good they do, I'm willing to tolerate a little corruption. Do they treat non-union people badly? Sometimes. More often it's the union people who are demonized when the corporate dogs are busy pitting union and non-union against each other. Unless you live in a rabidly anti-union state like West Virginia. Then you get disasters like the Massy coal-mine tragedy from a few weeks ago. Would a union made a difference there? I bet it would.

Sorry. This kind of stuff gets my blood up.

I don't care for the stock market either, or any get rich quick schemes. My retirement will be based on CD's in IRAs. Let the bank take the hit for stupid choices.

I don't follow unions close enough to say 'that's a good one'/'that's a bad one'. I really really wish someone would set one up and force factories and places like wal mart to treat their workers better. Unilever had very bad habits that upset me. They would hire hispanic workers, pay them relatively little, three months or so into their job they'd be laid off for a few weeks then rehired. This way the company got out of needing to give the people health insurance. I'm told wal mart has similar tactics- they hire people just under full time so they aren't elligable for health insurance.

I was looking for internships with newspapers and magazines and was turned down on my nose many times because the paper was unionized. I've talked to union employees who have been unemployed three times as long as they would have been if they were willing to lose the pension because the union wasn't permitting them to take work until the choice employment the union wanted was hiring again- but what if the company goes belly up? That person just lost years of wages waiting and now they lose their pension anyhow. It's hard to choose between now and the needs of the future sometimes.

Things like that really rub me. Most of the time unions are helping people like teachers- but often their overreaching as well. When people could have had cooperation with a school system years earlier the union is still turning the school system down because of the teachers' form of the 403 usually. which is HUGE in many cases. That's why their wages are frequently lower- a LOT goes into their pensions when I've seen the figures. It's perfectly possible there's something about those plans that I'm not aware of.

I have a lot to learn in regards to unions. I don't think they should be eradicated, just rebuilt (with corporations and other big business keeping out of it).

There was a time when our country was a lot more worker-friendly. :P The forces on the other side (corporations and banks, primarily) have been fighting ever since the New Deal to overturn or otherwise change the climate back to something more corporate-friendly, and in the past 30 years they've accomplished most of their goals. Reagan opened the door by advancing deregulation and union-busting (it didn't help that the AFL-CIO was seriously corrupt in some places on the East Coast, particularly Boston). The Elder Bush continued the trend and Clinton, especially in his second term, made things even easier by encouraging the removal of the Glass-Stegell Act, a law that dated from the New Deal and---get ready!--was a lock preventing big banks from playing shenannigans with their funds! Since the crap that got us into the Great Depression was pretty similar to what got us into THIS mess: turning public utilities into tradeable commodities, permitting banks to gamble with hedge (and other) funds, and a grossly overinflated real estate bubble. But all that's as maybe.

I've heard the argument before that union members could be working if only they gave up their pensions. Every once in a blue moon it's true that a company's pension setup is too generous for the company to maintain and there are examples where unions have assisted in their own demise. However, I submit that what this argument is typically used for has a different goal in mind. Usually the company is on the market. The workers are rarely in on the secret. The execs are hoping to sell and know that by eliminating the union pension plan they're giving the potential buyer a huge incentive to purchase them. (More often than not it's the executive-level pension plans that bust companies, not the common workers'. There's a great article in either the Chicago Sun Times or the Boston Globe, I think, on the bait-and-switch GM pulled on its workers around 06. The upper management insisted the pensions had to go because they were all in the red. Turns out that the pension plan for all the workers was fine. Even if everyone left the company all at once, they'd have been able to pay everyone's pensions. It was the golden parachutes of the execs that was in the red, and by eliminating the worker's pension they made their own pension solvent. Cute.)

I wish I knew more about this stuff, too. The good thing is it's not so complex that we can't get some kind of handle on it, enough to tell when we're being bullshitted by our representatives or *sigh* the lobbyists that represent their controlling interests. We've got WAY too much money in our political system.

I recall learning briefly about the new deal just a little while back. never got terribly far into it. I've since asked another friend to help enlighten me so far on unions. He established that there were many more than I supposed and probably only 10% of unions are the bad ones and that companies count on young worker apathy to get away with crap.
I've never been a fan of the some of the free market stuff :-/ it's by name anyhow easily confused with fair trade DX I've always disagreed with necessities being commodies (i.e. gasoline/oil) and even wrote the senator about it once... only to get a form letter back.
Maybe when I'm done learning "Certified Educator in Personal Finance" which is nearly as large as stockstadt I'll find a book on unions and what not. Hell, I'll turn it into a CEU! WHY NOT?!!!! YEAH FOR GETTING WORKING CREDITS FOR THINGS I WANT TO LEARN!

People have increasingly become unplugged. Some have done it for lack of money--when you have to run three jobs you don't have much free time--others from bad education and so on. But that apathy has to be partly exhaustion and partly lack of curiosity. Seems that's one of the key targets of our educational system. Find the curiosity and cut that sucker out.

"Free market" is kind of a joke, anyway. Friedman economics excises humanity from economics, as if the market could correct for greed and amorality, as if it was a self-regulating entity. It's never been that in any circumstance in history, not that I'm aware of (though I'm more than willing to be enlightened if someone can show me an example of a true Free Market somewhere). Give sharks and inch and they'll take your whole damn leg. Free Market my ass. Talk to the Nigerians and ask how free-market economics has helped their country.

Man, I wish we could get credits for all the things we want to learn, and get paid to learn it, to boot. Why hasn't someone come up with that yet??

It just doesn't work that way :) No pay for being a student sorry.

POOP

Hey this looks interesting. How is it inside?

Nerf-like! And very good with lemon butter.