Fore! (or, On The Links)

~~~~~~~ants~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cop shoots dog like it’s a black man.  When’s the last time we said F the police?  Exactly why they are biased tho.  (Spoiler alert:  it’s systemic racism.)

Clinton says shut up and listen, you fcukers.  More of Scalzi’s political writing (on point).

Even more.

Irony, or something

You should call Drumpf for advice about your period or anything period-related.  Really.

#2 can’t stop sending me links about Drumpf.

Why does Russia want Drumpf to win? http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/how-putin-weaponized-wikileaks-influence-election-american-president/130163/

~~~~~~~~~stop ants~~~~~~~~~~~

 Ok, this is kind of awesome.

Three little kids review dinner, Yelp style.

Argh.

Here’s a cool organization that you can donate to:  Every Library.  Speaking of libraries, here’s two women kicking butt!

Kanye West is good at his job!

Got any good kitten videos, Grumpeteers?   Stay cool out there!

Ask the grumpies: Favorite cracker for enjoying with cheese

Leah asks:

 What is your preferred cracker with cheese? I only like certain crackers and will shun my non-preferred brand; are you similar?

#1: I’m not sure I have a favorite cracker. I will eat lots of different kinds, especially with cheese. I have to say, crackers are not an area where I have deep conversational depths. But if I have to say something, I like crackers with herbs in them.

#2:  I have passed through life (since beginning to ttc) with so many obnoxious food restrictions that I have thought much more about the subject of crackers.  (Though I have *never* liked Ritz crackers.  Yuck.  Well maybe when I was a really little kid I did, but I also liked cheeze wiz back then.)

These ak mak sesame crackers are really good with lemon quark.

These La Panzanella crackers are not good for me glycemically but they are really really tasty, especially the rosemary version.  They pair well with sharp cheeses.

I mainly like wheaty crackers and triscuits because they don’t make me feel like crap later (except when I was allergic to wheat and I couldn’t eat them).  I used to like kashi but now they’re too sweet.  Not a huge fan of oat biscuits.  I like dipping wheat thins into pub cheese or queso.  Wasa wafers are pretty good in pub cheese and queso too.  I like rice cakes with cream cheese.

So I guess I like a lot of different crackers, but mostly obscure brands other than like triscuits and wheat thins.

What happened when I complained about my low salary

And by low, I mean low compared to similar and some worse-published (men) in my department and field. (I am making more than the non-research active people in my dept).  I am still incredibly privileged and my salary still leaves me a little shocked.

Still, even if I’m making more money than I ever dreamed of as a child, I should still be paid fairly.

And I wasn’t.  So I complained up and down in my annual review.  I talked about my cv and the work I do for the dept and the fact that although I have never gone on the market, people ask me to apply to schools.  I complained about how my (male) colleague who used to have the same salary that I did whose cv is similar to mine (but not quite as good) is making quite a bit more than I am despite his never having gotten an outside offer.  I mentioned the fact that I’m making less than our new hires straight out of grad school, even though all the male associate profs are making quite a bit more.

So my chair and dean talked and they agreed.  They noted that although I didn’t have the lowest salary in the dept, I’m in the bottom 20%, and I noted that of the people making less than me, none of them are research active.

They can’t give more than 10% raises a year without something extraordinary happening.  So they said I get 10% this year and if I complain again they will do their best to give me 10% next year.  If I want more I would need to go on the market because they are allowed to match outside offers.  He also mentioned that I was one of two women in the dept with this complaint and she would also be getting the same deal (pretty sure the other one makes just a little more than I do and also has an obviously better cv than the above-mentioned guy).

So where does this put me?  After the first raise I’ll *still* be making about 7K less than the male colleague mentioned above is making this year.  Presumably he’ll get a raise this year as well.  So I’ll still be behind.  But 10% is better than 3% (is better than 2% is better than 0%).

I probably should go on the market, but I’d prefer not to.  Still, I’ll probably actually look at the listings this year even though I usually don’t.

So… is there a moral?  Well, sometimes complaining works.  If it doesn’t work, then it might not be a place worth staying.

link love

One of us was gone this week, the other will be MIA next week (hopefully she’ll get to tune into the convention!).  But we’ll be back to usual come August.

His only demands were, “don’t shoot me or my unarmed client”  ICYMI.   I can’t even with the police.

These racist narratives MAKE NO SENSE.

On African American women’s voices and bodies

Why yes, I am sick and tired of it.  I’m also getting really sick of comedians and their lame and tired sexist narrative.  C’mon guys, stop being lazy.  (Here is Jimmy Kimmel not being lazy!  Kudos to Kimmel!)  There’s humor in the Clinton campaign that doesn’t rely on sexist tropes about powerful women.  Seriously.  That goes for you too, MSM.  Stop with the false equivalences and double standards.

Yes there is a difference.  We are better than Trump.

My jaw dropped a lot this past week.  Here was one of the first times.  Just… how… wha?

Leslie Jones twitter abuse.

Track whether or not men are talking too much.

This is also my story.  Next time they call I’m going to affect an accent and tell them they have the wrong number and I’m voting for Trump.  We will see if that works better than just asking them to take me off their damn list.  DO NOT give any political organizations your phone number EVER.

The choice is clear.

Historiann on menses and other wimmin things.   Also I’ve been debating calling up Pence‘s campaign to ask about whether it’s more immoral for me to use birth control or to allow fetuses to die given my higher chance of miscarriage.  Or you know, to just update him on the state of my cycle.

Thankfully my doctor knew what to do about granulation, but with my first baby I definitely did not mention it as early as I should have.

Personal finance tips from Ghostbusters

If you’re starting to phase out of itemizing and have 25K that you plan on spreading out in donations in the future (for however many years) apparently you can easily start your own charitable foundation with Vanguard for tax purposes.  This is AWESOME.  And we might do it next fiscal year when our tax situation will have settled and we’ll be back at full salary and no longer have any mortgage interest.

This was exactly what my DH said was the plot too!

The secret apartments of ny libraries.

Congratulations to evolving pf!

Baby sloth pictures.

 

Ask the grumpies: Favorite class outside your major?

Leah asks:

What was your favorite class outside of your major and why?

#1  German, choral conducting, maybe that one English class where we read mystery novels.

#2  History, probably the British monarchs class because the prof for that one was especially awesome. (I would have been a history major, except the prof that I had for the required freshman seminar was a total a@#$@# and he taught a bunch of required classes, so screw that, and thus I ended up on a more potentially lucrative path.)

How about the rest of Grumpy Nation?

Income/wealth inflection points

On a previous post I note that it’s easier to spend money on things when you’re making say, 300K per year compared to 100K per year, not that I would know about the 300K from personal experience.

In the comments this got into a discussion of how life would be different at different levels of income.  And something I said was that although I have a good idea of how our lives would change were we making 250K/year, I don’t actually have any idea how life would be different between 250K and 300K.  Based on our current income, I can’t really fathom how life would change past like 250K.

Of course, in graduate school, I couldn’t fathom a joint income of 100K/year or more.  At like 90K, all our money would be accounted for and we’d have no worries.  Anything higher than that just didn’t register.  But within a few years after getting real jobs (and a house and kids) it became pretty obvious what more we would do if we were making a combined say, 200K/year.  These days I can understand 250K/year (even if we’re not making it), but I’m not sure how much more than that we would need to make for our lives to change.

Obviously at some point we’d have enough to buy a house in Paradise and we might move there.  (In fact, with 250K/year, we’d be able to buy a house in paradise so long as we either had job security or savings after we sold our current place.)  At some point we could have a highly paid personal assistant to just deal with life details.  And at some point we’d have so much it would be irresponsible not to set up a charitable foundation.  But when does that happen?  At what income?  At what wealth level?

Completely unfathomable to me.  I get upper middle class now.  But I don’t get “rich”.  (But I’m willing to accept funding to try it out!)

What’s the infimum in the set of money that’s more than you understand?  (Or do I mean maximum in the set of money that you do understand?  Help me miser-mom! … I think they’re the same.)  That is to say, what’s the inflection point in money where you’re like, well, I know how my life would change with $X, but how would $X + Y be different from just X, I have no idea.  Or more concretely, what’s the number for you that you would say, well I know how my life would change if I were making $250K, but I don’t have any idea how $300K is different from $250K.  Do you have multiple of these inflection points or are you short sighted like I am?  Are they based on income or wealth or both?

Link Love

Quote for the week:  “The real world is just a crappy game. The ideal world can only be found in a game. Such was my belief. But if an ideal can be found within a crappy game, there may be an ideal route in the real world for me to discover.” — The World God Only Knows (Season 2, ep 12)

Marching with BLM.

Yes there is racial bias in police shootings.

Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz also used private email servers.

Don’t click on this unless you’re ok with your childhood memories of calvin and hobbes being destroyed.

If BLM isn’t a hate group, then why does this writer keep saying they are?

These members of congress used campaign funds to buy guns.

If the media wrote on Theresa May’s husband like they did about Samantha Cameron.

An expert comment on Brexit.

google scholar?

Harsh truths from baby animals.

Why I quit my job to travel the world.

An excellent response to MMM’s latest (even if it was written a couple months before)

Chief mouser to the cabinet office.

Ask the grumpies: Writing an external tenure letter

Tenured economist asks:

I was asked to write an external letter for a tenure case. Do you have any advice to share? We don’t use these in our tenure cases so I have never even seen an example! How long/detailed are they usually?

The following is based on external letters we’ve gotten in the tenure cases I’ve sat on so far.  We’d love to hear from the Grumpy Nation for people with more extensive experience and with experience in different fields.

There’s a lot of variation in these letters even from economists.

Usually they’re 1-3 pages long (single spaced with extra spaces between paragraphs, 12 point font, TNR, etc. give or take). Here’s what I’ve seen generally:

You don’t have to give a recommendation yes/no if you don’t want to. If you do, it can either be based on, “They would get tenure at [my university]” or “They should get tenure at their university”

You start by saying if you’re aware of the person’s work if you are aware of it, and if so whether or not you know the person personally and in what context. If you’re not aware of the person’s work you can choose to say that or to not say that.

Then you talk about the different strands of literature and put them in context for the committee. Talk about their quality and how they fit into the broader literature.

If there’s other items they ask you to address like teaching or service, then address those as well. We specifically ask for it to be focused on research and fit within the broader community (so potentially service to the profession if they have any) because we’re an R1.  SLACs, policy schools, and business schools might have different things they care about so if there’s something that the specific type of institution cares about you might address that.  Ex. teaching, media visibility, etc.  If there are potential things you might think would be concerning, like lack of single authored papers, you can talk about that as well and why that may or may not be a concern in this specific case.

That’s really about all there is to it.  The hard part is reading through the articles and figuring out their worthiness, especially you don’t have a helpful overview letter written by the applicant that puts it into perspective for you.

Growing up (a money post)

So here’s another post started in 2011.

I was struck by a comment by “brokeprofessionals” (they used to have a blog, but sold it many years back!) on an old get rich slowly post (remember when that blog was worth reading?  Man, we need to clear out our drafts from 2011.).  The commenter said, and I quote, “for most of us, growing up we never saw our parents or our parents [sic] friends struggling.”

He makes the argument that in general we were born after our parents were settled financially and we didn’t see them just starting out.

That, of course, does not mesh with my personal experience, nor probably with the experiences of the bulk of Americans.  My parents struggled financially when we were growing up.  That’s part of why my sister and I chose jobs that pay well and have saved a ton.  We don’t *want* to have to worry about the rent or be insanely frugal or have to worry about small over-charges or larger emergencies.  So much of our childhood was spent worrying about money.  That tends to leave a mark.

And actually, our parents were doing better before I was born and were doing much better before my sister was born.  For a while they got to live in the same city and were both employed.  After my sister was born things were less stable because of jobs in separate parts of the country, spells of unemployment, etc., etc., etc.  But hey, at least we still had the nice couches and the stereo system and the VW bug (man I loved that car) from before I was born.  Those lasted through high school.  My parents still have the couches.

My DH lived in a trailer in the woods when he was a little kid and his dad broke his back and had to retrain from being a carpenter to being an accountant while his mom was getting her RN.

Children are expensive.  Starting jobs don’t always lead to stable careers.  Families can interfere with flexibility.

And, of course, much of America is struggling and has been.  Inequality has been widening since Reagan, and was wider before Johnson.  Families struggle, especially those with children.  Not everybody has the blessing of being upper-middle class.  Most people don’t.

How about you?  Did your parents struggle financially when you were growing up?

Link Love

What you can do right now about police brutality

Salute to Dallas mayor.  I don’t know why, but after this horrific week, this is the one that caused the tears to start falling.

We can fix the 70% if we get rid of the bottom 15%.

There is no law and order.

More patriarchy

Strict TX anti-abortion laws lead to more second-trimester abortions.  Duh.

Gun control ads from the 1960s.

In case you missed it, Trump is also anti-Semitic.

Irony

This is nifty.

New evidence on Hillary Clinton scandal

Part of why Samantha Bee is awesome.

Awwww

More Patreon! Elizabeth Bear: https://www.patreon.com/matociquala The hilarious Ursula Vernon: https://www.patreon.com/ursulavoooh, you can support Gunnerkrigg Court and a possible side project of extended scenes, side stories, etc.: https://www.patreon.com/gunnerkrigg

How to use a paper towel

How God created specific animals

Update on browser the cat

Pup picked a friend at the shelter

Some weeks you just need to look at hot dudes with kittens

Fake animal facts