I’m in an interesting predicament at work. You see, a couple years ago (not that many) I took over as the head of the production department for the publishing company I’m working for. There was a bit of politics involved, people pulling favors for me, but in the end, I ended up with a job that I was, at the time, only qualified for in theory. It’s worked out fantastically so far.

Since I’ve run the department, productivity between myself and my one assistant has been astronomical. What would normally take a week is completed in a day, if not within hours. So much to the point that I have time to maintain this site, as well as keep an unhealthy dose of various flash games online. When complaints are brought to me, I respond always “give us more work, and I’ll do more work.”

As you may or may not be aware, the economy isn’t all that spiffy-keen right now. If you aren’t aware of that, I find myself curious how you’re connected enough to read this and still be out of the loop of the “ZOMG THE WORLD IS GOING TO END” vibe floating around. I would also direct you to previous posts on that subject. At any rate, companies everywhere have been needing to make cuts. So about six months ago my boss offers me the chance to have two days a week off to continue my education.

The catch is, they’re unpaid. Mostly unpaid, at least. There’s a state program called “Work Sharing” designed to deal with just this sort of situation, but it was a 40% reduction in my salary from them, about half of which is made up by the state. But this isn’t a conversation about the state. I have enough of those, I think.

I fought tooth and nail to keep my full time employment. After all, I was looking into buying a house. Later on, I got myself married as well. All in all, I found myself rather desiring to keep my good paycheck. But my boss asked me one damning question. “I’ve heard a lot about why you need to stay on full time, but you haven’t said anything about what you would do while you’re here. You spend most your time playing games online. What would you do to benefit the company?”

He’s right, and that’s why I eventually agreed to it. That, and the fact that I don’t care to be looking for a job as jobless numbers keep creeping ever upward. “Only 6.2 million new jobless claims in June! That’s the lowest rate of growth in the past several months!” When the happiest thing we can say about the job market is that fewer people are being laid off, but that they’re still being laid off in the millions, you keep whatever you can get.

The entire situation was caused because I took an inefficient department and turned it into a well-oiled publishing machine. The savings alone in overtime costs for those hourly employees involved (previous inefficiencies caused them to refuse to consider my position as hourly) has saved them significantly. We’ve even been able to absorb a new publication which will net between 80 and 100k each year. All because the department is so fantastically efficient. As far as they’re concerned, we work miracles back here.

Yet when it comes time to discuss salary, I’m told there’s no money in the budget. He’s right, unfortunately. Our revenue is dependent on advertising. Advertising budgets are based on last quarters performance at best. Second quarter of 2009 saw GDP decline of ~1% (and for all of you out there who keep waiting on pins and needles for when this will be resolved, I direct you to the Bloomberg article I linked back in february which has been incredibly accurate. Third quarter will see growth, fourth quarter will be as much a return to normal as we’ll ever get) which means people still aren’t willing to shell out money on advertising.

Funny thing, when business turns sour, the first thing to get cut is their principle method of drumming up new business. I find it ironic.

So our ad revenues are still down. They most likely will remain down until the begining of next year, when everyone can look at the past quarter and smile. So, yeah, there isn’t money in the budget for it presently.

Which leads me to wonder “Why did I put in all the work that I did? Why did I make this company capable of performing at easily 500% of it’s previous capacity?”

Hopefully, Christmas bonuses and next July’s salary negotiations will show me why. But for everyone else out there, take a lesson here. If you aren’t willing to experience pain in the short term for the sake of a possible long term gain, or if you aren’t in your business because you like what you do, think long and hard about how hard you work.

Is it better to be well paid for mediocrity, or to work yourself out of a job with efficiency?

I hope you all choose the latter.

It has been said by some that the root of California’s budget problems comes from the way in which the state ballot system works. Here, we are able to place whatever measure we want on a ballot, and if it gets enough votes, it can become law without the involvement (or at least with very little involvement) of our elected legislators. The one I hear most particularly brought up on this is a previous California measure that requires a certain percentage of the state general fund goes towards funding education. There are other similar measures out there. We decide we like something, and a referendum is put out there to get it funding without considering such silly things as “Well, how does this new fiscal requirement interact with out previous ones?”

Sure, a fiscal impact assessment has to be done for every measure, but how many of us *really* read those? How many of us actually bother to read the text of ballot measures for upcoming elections? Mostly, we like to rely on summaries, which is really a terrible way to go about these things.

The City of Oakland yesterday approved a ballot measure (in a vote-by-mail election. Take note, people, you’ll get more response from these than you will convincing me to take time off work to go to the polls. Get even better responses if you make ballot day a legal holiday as well. But I digress) that dramatically increased the business tax rate of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city. By dramatically, I mean from the standard $1.20/$1000 revenue to $18/1000 revenue. Medical marijuana dispensaries will now be taxed at a rate 15 times higher than standard business rates. What may surprise more people is that the ballot measure was proposed by those same dispensaries. It’s estimated that in 2010 alone, this measure will generate nearly an additional $300,000.

The idea has be tossed around for some time now. I do believe I’ve heard talk of medical marijuana taxation at the federal level as well, recently. But so far, we’ve only managed to get one city to really take this talk seriously. Of course, it’d be a city with a well developed pot culture (check out Oaksterdamn some time.) The dispensaries are still going to make significant profits even at the much higher tax rate. What they’re doing here is giving themselves a bit more legitimacy in the public eyes. Were something like this to be passed state wide, it would pull the wind out of the sales of some medical marijuana detractors. Especially during this “Budget Crisis” period.

Of course, our state legislators would never enact such a policy. That’d require them to agree on something, and if they could do that, we wouldn’t have the budget problems we do. So I come back to the idea of referendum. Maybe, if we take advantage of our state’s ability to railroad laws through with limited involvement from professional lawmakers, we could come up with ways to fix the problem we’ve created for ourselves.

Think how much the state would make if the Oakland tax rate was applied across the board. Think think as to how much more would be made if the legalization was expanded from medical to recreational. If observations of my peer group is any example, marijuana was legalized across the board, and taxed at $18 for every $1000 in receipts, then I’m pretty sure we could fund every project we’ve ever wanted to off that tax alone.

It’s been nearly a month since there was any activity on this site. It always bothers me when things that I’m a part of seem to “fall behind” of their regular or expected performance; in this instance, it’s only myself I’ve got to blame — and maybe a bit at Cerias, as the only other current author, but mostly myself. We’re a fickle sort, the Attention-Deficit-addled internet generation, and when things capture our attention, we have a tendency to focus on them in short bursts, our interest in any given site or project lasting as long as it takes the next shiny distraction to come and whisk us away to the newer and, if perception is to be believed, hotter New Hotness, where we’ll while away a few fanciful hours, days, or weeks waiting for another hit trend to sweep us away into the ever-expanding digital ocean that is the internet. We flit from place to place like small snippets caught in the ebb and flow of Twitter-sized bits of information that determine what’s “hip” and “cool” in a constant flux-state of rapidly accelerating entropic glory. We are the crafters and victims of a sort of prison in reverse, confined by our freedom to explore things at the speed of data flowing as pulses of electric joy screaming through the wires and airwaves to grip our indecisive natures and fling all caution to the blue beyond, ourselves becoming transmissions in a world that, for all its snow and noise, refuses to be anything we can call “static”.

It becomes increasingly difficult to keep any solid ground under your feet when you’re part of the flow of that information, decidedly playing the role of assistant to the chaos as it unfurls from site to site, shredding all precepts of concrete thought and dedication to the core of what that information should truly represent; the seed for thought, for discussion — even when that’s the stated goal of the platform through which the information is spread, the individual tidbits get lost in the mire as they drift backwards through the archived posts, never to be read again until a new reader comes along with the grit and wherewithal to pore through each miniature essay that predates their arrival to the station, snipping comments here and there to speak their mind on issues long since having passed from our own eyes and thoughts and dreams. In that brief moment, we see the true beauty of the fictionalized digital world we shape with our daily online interactions; that even though this ineffable, unquestioned mutability permeates each aspect of our existence, there’s still a sense of concrete absolute in the relative permanence of any given aspect. As easily as the last thought parts from our mind, likely never to be examined again, we craft it into a object which, for so long as the pulse keeps flowing and barring technical issues, attaches itself to a specific date-time and refuses to let go of that moment, emblazoning itself upon the collective brow of all the forgone posts and musings of yesterdays we can scarce recall aside from the anchors those moments create. We establish order through the flux by way of securing each individual moment as a particular clip in the web, and from there, it expands ever outward as it inspires thought or action from others, who in turn inspire those they know, and eventually we net the result of something like the “butterfly effect” except that it may be the storm which causes the insect to flap its wings across the globe, or it may be the insects movements which spur the disaster relief teams scrambling to pick up the pieces of a city once revered.

I sometimes wonder if this is all for nothing. If techonology, as we know it, ceases to be, what will become of these archived moments, of these accumulated diatribes on daily life in the form of 140-character blurbs or lengthy blog posts or offhand comments attached to either of the above; not just in a doomsday scenario, which I oft can’t be bothered to buy into, but in the event that our transcendent nature leads us to abandon this sure-to-be-antiquated platform altogether, leaving its treasures in the same dusts which cover the forgotten writings and speeches of the Greek agoras and Roman forums, erstwhile communications often thought best left to the historians to concern themselves with.

When the internet is only a chapter in a high school course, I wonder — whose names will be etched on the plaques at libraries and museums seeking to sear our legacy into the disaffected youth?