Four years after the launch of the trashcan shaped MacPro, Apple has finally, slyly, announced a new MacPro. The news comes via John Gruber of Daring Fireball:
Driving in a circle to improve traffic flow may seem a weird, European concept for the uninitiated, so Michigan police are encouraging motorists to get on board and understand how to tackle them.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. Today, NASA will announce the details regarding its Cassini spacecraft’s Grand Finale—a resplendent ending to its 20-year-long adventure in space, which will begin later this month. From late April to September 15th, Cassini will perform 22 dramatic dives between Saturn and…
If you ever get stuck in a messy car accident, one thing that will help as an expert witness to what happened is a dash cam. This one, the High Definition Dash Cam, is on sale now for just $24 (USD).
This HD dash cam is easily mounted to your car and will become your extra set of eyes on the road. With 4x digital zoom and infrared night vision, this dash cam records everywhere your car goes. If there’s ever a he-said-she-said situation in a car accident, this dash cam can provide proof as to what really happened. If you’re on a particularly scenic drive and want to record the beauty of it, the dash cam can do that for you, too.
Get 1080p video recordings that will not only keep you safer, but also record memorable drives. The High Definition Dash Cam belongs in your car, and you can get it now for only $24 in the Technabob Shop.
These days you can pay for things in all kinds of electronic ways, but if you still find yourself with a bunch of coins, here is a fun way to sort them.
The Q channel shows us how to make a coin sorting machine using just cardboard, a knife, a metal ruler, and some glue. That’s it. Just build this thing, slide your coins inside and get them all sorted. This DIY tutorial video will show you how. As long as your country’s coins have different sizes, this will work perfectly.
Then you can take your sorted coins and put them away so they collect dust again. Or you know, spend them.
[via Laughing Squid]
Don’t tell Microsoft Surface Studio owners, but Apple still doesn’t think touch has any place on computers targeting pro users. The Cupertino firm confirmed today that it’s working on new iMac all-in-ones that will specifically target the high-performance requirements of professional users. However, the machines still won’t cede any ground on Apple’s long-standing refusal to countenance touch displays in anything … Continue reading
The promise of smartphones and tablets with foldable displays is one that’s been around for a while, but so far, we haven’t really seen these displays take center stage. That could all change relatively soon, with Samsung Display signaling today that it might be ready to roll out foldable displays on a large scale by 2019. We’ve seen a number … Continue reading
Today is Equal Pay Day – the day that marks how far into 2017 women have had to work to be paid the same amount men were paid in 2016. It’s a stunning indication that something is seriously wrong, and a time to ask what we’re doing as a nation to fix the problem. Have we strengthened protections against pay and pregnancy discrimination? Raised wages and safeguarded workers’ time through overtime and scheduling protections? Advanced policies that enable people to manage job and family, such as paid family and medical leave and paid sick days?
So far this year, the painful answer to each of these questions is “no,” despite clear public support for these actions and evidence that they would help our country in significant ways. Gender wage gaps persist in all 50 states and at least 94 percent of the country’s congressional districts. And the damaging consequences continue to ripple throughout our workplaces, families, communities and the economy, causing great, lasting harm.
Overall, women in the United States today are paid just 80 cents for every dollar paid to men – an annual loss of nearly $10,500. Compared to white, non-Hispanic men, Black women are paid 63 cents, Latinas 54 cents, Asian women 85 cents and white women 75 cents for every dollar. And even though mothers are breadwinners in half of families with children under 18, they are paid just 70 cents for every dollar paid to fathers.
According to a new analysis conducted by the National Partnership for Women & Families, if the overall gender wage gap were closed, a typical woman who holds a full-time, year-round job would have enough money for 1.5 more years of food, seven more months of mortgage and utilities payments, 11 more months of rent, 15 more months of child care, 1.2 additional years of tuition and fees at a four-year public university, the full cost of tuition and fees for a two-year community college, or up to 8.7 additional years of birth control every year.
These are staggering losses, especially for the more than 15 million U.S. households headed by women, 29 percent of which live in poverty. Women’s wages are essential to their families and our economy, and yet they are constantly depressed due to biases and stereotypes about women as workers, a lack of family friendly workplace standards and outright discrimination. And lawmakers have not done nearly enough to help.
To be sure, champions for women and working families in Congress are introducing the Paycheck Fairness Act today, which would help break harmful patterns of pay discrimination. They have also already introduced the Family And Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, which would create a comprehensive national paid family and medical leave program, and the Healthy Families Act, which would establish a paid sick days standard. And measures that would raise the minimum wage, strengthen pregnant worker protections, promote fair scheduling and more are on the horizon.
Some states are taking the issue seriously too. This year alone, lawmakers in at least 37 states have introduced legislation to promote equal pay, protections for pregnant workers, paid family and medical leave or paid sick days, and 28 of those states have two or more such bills. These states are in every region, and are small and large, red and blue. At least 24 states are considering equal pay bills, and at least 18 states have bills that would create paid leave programs like those already in place in California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and, soon, New York and the District of Columbia.
Still, change is not happening nearly fast enough and the overall gap between women’s and men’s wages isn’t projected to close until 2059. America’s women and families cannot afford to wait. The gender wage gap is a clear symptom of our failure to enact the policies needed to promote equality in our workplaces and fair pay for all, to make a real commitment to rooting out bias and discrimination, and to position families, businesses and our economy to thrive. Lawmakers have the power to change that, and Equal Pay Day should be a wake-up call for them to take action.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
“There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us,” Hannah Lillith Assadi writes in her debut novel, Sonora. “Between the two, we are crushed.”
The story, fittingly, moves in waves between past and present. While visiting her father in the hospital ― he’s being treated for pain induced by sciatica ― the narrator, Ahlam, reflects on the beginnings of her friendship with her best friend, Laura.
The two met when Ahlam, who went by Ariel when she was with everyone but her family, was a young girl living in the Arizona desert. Her father was a Palestinian taxi driver, her mother an Israeli woman who kept two jobs, at Denny’s and a dentist’s office.
Assadi writes poetically about the Southwest ― the spacious, moneyed homes, the high school football stadium that looms over her hometown. “I remember the signs for new housing developments, one after the other, advertising larger and larger pools, and three instead of two-car garages,” she writes.
But the fast-developing landscape is also thick with an air of threatening mystery; coyotes lurk in the distance, rain comes on suddenly, and flickering lights can be seen from mountaintops. Ahlam’s father calls his taxi his Battlestar Galactica, thinking of himself as a cosmonaut, uprooted and left to drift far from the place he loves.
Ahlam is similarly adrift when she meets Laura, a girl she’s noticed walking in front of her to school, and who she continues to follow through their teenage and young adult years, to parties and eventually to New York City, where they move in with an entrepreneurial spirit, Dylan, and focus on dancing and singing.
Before that, though, Ahlam relates her startling sexual awakening, a pair of encounters laced with tenderness and violence, eventually contributing to her relative abstinence for years to come.
Ahlam and Laura take their superstitious sensibilities with them to New York, where they talk of bad luck and curses, and seek out spacious places ― the abandoned buildings of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the high knolls of the Greenwood Cemetery ― between half-hearted attempts to pursue their respective passions.
Together they slide into a habit of drinking all day, and Laura gets addicted to blow. Her relationship with Dylan swerves into emotionally abusive territory, and the scintillating language Assadi used to describe the mysteries of the desert dips into the quick-and-dirty syntax of drug memoirs. Like such memoirists, Assadi sometimes relies too heavily on the book’s seductive subject matter in the story’s second half, quickly relating scenes from parties and fights and drug trips, as though the meaning and feeling behind these experiences were self-evident.
Still, when she returns to the desert, her story about a heartbreaking friendship once again becomes sorrowful and singular, a mesmerizing take on tripping blindly into adulthood.
The bottom line:
A poetic story about friendship, loss and the fractured ways in which we assemble an identity, and a home.
Who wrote it:
This is Hannah Lillith Assadi’s debut novel. She lives in Brooklyn, and has her MFA in fiction from Columbia University.
Who will read it:
Anyone interested in coming-of-age stories, or stories set in the American Southwest.
What other reviews think:
Publisher’s Weekly: “The structure, moving back and forth in time and space, adds a sense of the magical to a sometimes tragic but always beautiful coming-of-age story.”
Kirkus: “Lyrical, raw, and moving.”
Opening lines:
“I have always missed watching the sun fall down into the desert. It is always so slow. There are no windows in the waiting room. The florescence blares on despite the romance of the hour.”
Notable passage:
“By morning, everything way grey swept, the prickly brush swathed in rain. Inhaling the fumes of the storm, the greened soil, the sage, I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss. I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.”
Sonora
By Hannah Lillith Assadi
Soho Press, $16.00
March 28, 2017
The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related… + articlesList=58d43067e4b03692bea3da5e,58b744bfe4b019d36d1074e2,58b483eee4b060480e0adfac,58a78e0ae4b045cd34c1da7e,5898dde2e4b09bd304bcf195,58948f74e4b0406131364c52,588675b5e4b070d8cad4c8e7,587f97dde4b0cf0ae8811f04,586ffef4e4b043ad97e368be,586aeaefe4b0eb58648a3ccf
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
New York City could soon pass a bill that would ban employers from asking about a job applicant’s salary history, joining a small but growing number of cities and states using the strategy to fight the gender pay gap. The bill is expected to pass this week, coinciding with Equal Pay Day, which draws attention to how much longer women must work to make as much as men earned in the previous year.
While the bill would apply to all employers and employees, it is aimed specifically at leveling the playing field, earnings-wise, between women and men and for people of color.
“Being underpaid once should not condemn you to a lifetime of inequity,” New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, who introduced the bill last summer, said in a roundtable discussion about the wage gap last week, The Cut reports.
Women in the United States are paid roughly 80 percent of what men earn on average, and women of color are paid even less. That gap starts out in entry-level positions ― even after controlling for the fact that women are more likely to go into lower-paying fields and may work fewer hours ― and increases the longer women are in the workforce. One reason why those pay differences compound over time is because many employers set salaries based on previous earnings.
The goal of the New York City regulation is to disrupt that pattern and give women a chance to catch up.
“If you are making less in your current job because you’re a woman ― which definitely happens ― and you go to a different job, the employer shouldn’t be paying you less because you were discriminated against in your old job,” Emily Martin, general counsel and vice president for workplace justice with the National Women’s Law Center, the advocacy and research group, told The Huffington Post.
Raises are often based on a percentage of an employee’s salary, Martin added, which can make it even harder for women to catch up after they start out earning less.
Of course, even if the bill passes, it still won’t necessarily be easy for a woman going through job interviews to push back if she is asked about her previous earnings.
“Certainly it’s always a difficult thing to assert your legal rights when you’re looking for a job,” Martin said. “It’s difficult to say, ‘Hey, that’s illegal.’ But that’s one reason why the publicity this measure is getting is so important. It makes it more likely that employers know this is the law.”
And New York City, which recently passed a similar ban for city employers and employees, is not the only place considering a ban on employers asking about salary history. Massachusetts was the first state to make it illegal for prospective employers to ask about previous salary, and cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans have recently passed similar city-wide bans.
Martin believes the bans have captured public imagination in part because being asked about previous salary is something many people have experienced in the course of job hunting, which makes it relatable.
“People can get it, they can relate it to their own lives,” she said, sharing her own experience of being paid less than a male colleague when she was clerking for a judge because she had previously held a public interest job and he’d come from a private law firm where salaries were higher.
But there is still a long way to go.
The gender pay gap in the United States is not expected to close until at least 2059, or even closer to 2152.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
