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What is a Living Wage?

A living wage is whatever minimum income is necessary for a working person to meet basic needs. These are things such as food, housing, electric and other bills, and clothing. I was honestly shocked to learn that minimum wage and living wage were not synonymous and that it’s generally accepted as “okay” for a full time working person to not possibly meet that. While researching this I realized that the living wage changes depending on where you are, how many people are in your household, and how many are working.  I was curious and looked up what the living wage to live here in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The living wage for one adult is $11.20, spending $2,994 on food, 6,936 on housing, and $3,656 in annual taxes. The living wage for 2 working adults and 2 children is $15.66 spending $8,822 on food, $9,852 on housing, and 10,541 on annual taxes. The minimum wage in Kentucky in 2019 is only $7.25... which is absolutely ridiculous. As someone in college I know people will mention “I get paid $2 over minimum wage!” and it is celebrated as an incentive when I know very few entry position jobs that pay over this. With college being almost required to make a decent living, and college prices have been skyrocketing for 30+ years its inhumane to keep this low of a minimum wage. There is no “working your way through college” unless you get a scholarship or have rich parents you WILL be in debt. Then when you finally graduate you have years and years of debt to pay off preventing someone from buying a home, having a family, or even just putting a little money back. This way of holding young people with their financial backs against the wall is barbaric and we have to find a way to end this. The U.S. minimum wage has gone up to $2 an hour since 1970, while college, for a year at Yale in 1970 was $2,550 and today it is $42,100. The rise of minimum wage and the rise of tuition and overall cost of living doesn't add up, and to avoid getting deeper and deeper into the student debt crisis and make the lives of our working better, or even just manageable, we need to take another look at this. Not just giving companies like Amazon that make $1,084 a second (more than 2 weeks of work for me) a pat on the back for paying their employees a well-deserved raise. It should be a requirement for companies to pay their employees well.  

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Importance of Local Adoption

  Over the past year, I adopted 2 lovely cats from the Kentucky Humane Society. Walking in each time knowing I can only (responsibly) take home one has been hard. Thinking of each individual animal with an individual story breaks my heart which is why this subject means so much to me. 6.5 Million animals enter the U.S. animal shelters each year, which is alarming but this number has gone down from 7.2 million in 2011. While support is constantly surrounding the animal shelters in our country, there is still a huge puppy mill problem all over the world. Many people, primarily the upper class, feel they need a very specific breed or an animal with a “notable” family tree which doesn't make any logical or financial sense. Each year over 1.5 million animals are euthanized meaning there is absolutely no reason to bring any more animals into the world just to sell to some spoiled rich people. Any animal can go to training to become whatever your dream animal is if you just find one with the right personality. Which has almost nothing to do with where the dog came from. Shelters always offer advice in which breeds and specific animals, especially dogs, would work best for a particular case. On the bright side of things, over 3.2 million shelter animals are adopted each year. With 44% of U.S. households having a dog and 35% having a cat. 

  I quite honestly didn’t know where shelters made their money so I read an article that states every year is a struggle. They make their money through grants from the government, business sponsors, and lots and lots of donations. The amount they charge to adopt an animal will barely cover the cost they previously paid to get the animal shots and check-ups, not to mention food and supplies. I know I have spent a lot of money the past year on my 2 cats I cant imagine how much work and money taking care of up to hundreds of animals. For example, I learned my cat has a sensitive stomach so now I have to buy him special food that is about $35 a bag. But I buy it because he’s so special to me. In conclusion, it breaks my heart that there are animals that will spend their whole lives not knowing what it means to be spoiled and loved. It makes no sense they struggle to get by with all of the public love they seem to get. 

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Notre Dame

A week before the fire at Notre Dam started I got the opportunity to see it for the first time. I was overwhelmed by the size and beauty of this 850-year-old building. After getting tons of pictures of the unbelievable architecture we moved on to more hundred-year-old buildings that line the streets of Paris. This raises the probability that these gorgeous buildings that were built without the guidance of fire marshals or even basic fire safety are ticking time bombs. The Notre Dame church was under construction when it caught fire so there was an effort to upgrade the church making it safer and extending its already long life. One tiny mistake could cause something like this devastating fire. While exactly what happened is still under investigation and will be for the next few months so far investigators think a computer glitch causing a short circuit and eventually the fire. 

What can they do?

As I stated Paris is full of old beautiful buildings, so what can be done to prevent further devastation to this town? After reading an article the main causes of fires in buildings as old as these are the materials such as finishes, paints, stains, and raw wood used. Another problem is the way they are built. For example, it is estimated the fire began in the attic of the church and spread throughout the roof causing the most damage to the top of the church. Not only was the attic filled with paperwork, pieces of art, and built out of wood, the way the roof is built makes it very difficult for air flow to get in and for firefighters to get water at the root of the fire. While maintaining the original everything is so important and adds to the authenticity and experience, it's not worth losing everything. Something that could be done is to ensure that proper airflow can get into those closed spaces where a fire wouldn't be noticed until its too late. It is also important to ensure there are lots of fire detectors to be able to catch the fire as soon as it sparks. With a building of that age and reputation, every minute counts. 

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Who is responsible for protecting the user?

As a millennial, I spend a lot of time on the internet. From the beginning of my journey online there has always been blatant and hidden sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, the list goes on, from every front. This raises the question, whose job is it to make sure those things aren’t happening online? Or is it anyone's? To be more specific is it a social media company's job to make sure blatant hate and bullying gets combed through and deleted, is it the user's job to report it or is it just a part of society, therefore the internet, we need to get over? I’m going to start out with Twitter, a pretty Liberal platform that is almost 50/50 male to female (Statista: 2017). 

Twitter Today 

Twitter is a popular “micro-blogging” site that started in San Francisco in March of 2005 (Nations: 2018). The site has grown to be one of the most popular social media sites ever created. Which means it goes without saying that there's going to be many conflicting opinions on the platform. According to the Twitter terms of service, while they hold the right to delete any tweet that “violates terms of service” they also say they are not responsible for what their users present. The average user can block others for any or no reason at all and also holds the right to report a tweet where Twitter employees will examine the tweet and see if it violates the terms. Reading through the Terms of the website its a lot of checking off the boxes to avoid a lawsuit instead of protecting the user from hate, lies, etc. So whose job is it to delete a tweet, according to Twitter. Well after doing some digging it seems the average person with not a lot of followers can get away with a lot more than a page with a lot of foot traffic. For example, Kevin Hart tweeted “u should ask the question like this, how many “gay” men sweat when they wear dress shirts because real men don't lmao p.s fag”. He now has 35 Million followers, even though this was years ago it was deleted within an hour. If even only 100 of his followers saw and reported the tweet it’s going to bring twitters attention to it much quicker than an average person with only a few followers therefore way fewer people who may or may not report it. While this is a pretty simple concept we do hold celebrities to a higher standard so when they say something completely out of grey area horrible its seen as much worse. For example, we expect the white entitled frat boy to say something horrible but when someone we only know through news articles and their fan base steps out of line its a much bigger deal. 

Facebook Fiasco 

Facebook is a social media network that started out of California in 2005 (Rouse: 2016). Facebooks terms of conditions seem to be more involved in the user's experience than Twitter. They claim to have teams of employees around the world looking for keywords and taking necessary steps to combat misuse of the platform. Facebook claims “

People will only build community on Facebook if they feel safe. We employ dedicated teams around the world and develop advanced technical systems to detect misuse of our Products, harmful conduct towards others, and situations where we may be able to help support or protect our community” (Facebook: 2018)

One thing I found interesting about the terms of service is that they state if they detect misconduct they contact other facebook companies. This means if you break terms of conditions to a certain extent they hold the right to change or delete items on your other Facebook affiliated accounts. If you have an account on Whatsapp, Friendfeed, or other less popular platforms owned by Facebook they have the right to those as well even if you did nothing wrong on another platform. I think the main thing that has affected the huge difference between the two terms of service is the use of each platform. Even though Facebook is seen as an older platform they are the same age and Facebook has over a Billion more monthly users. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bghTL5gU6fs

In conclusion, I think Facebook has more of a hold over there users than Twitter does and that's not a bad thing. From the video, we watched a while back in class and separate research I’ve learned facebook is more than a social media platform to many people. It has started revolutions and been a gateway to the world of social media to so many people. Whether their location, age, or wealth people get on Facebook and feel a sense of community and the people at the company realize that and maintain that. Social media will probably never be perfect and that's one of the great things about it. As users, it's our job to determine what should and should not be on the platform, and determine if we simply disagree or this is hateful and needs to be dealt with. The world today would be much less connected and less fun without social media. I don’t think it's going anywhere and I’m okay with that. 

Refrences: 

Statisa. 2017. Distribution of Twitter users in the United States as of January 2017, by gender

Nations, Daniel. 2018. What is Twitter, and Why is it so Popular?

2018 Facebook Terms of Service 

2017 Twitter Terms of Service