Billion Dollar Shave

A note on wet shaving... with a brush and double-edge blade … from an expert:

The primary question from men considering the traditional shave with brush, shaving soap, and safety razor is, “Why bother?” Or, as a friend put it, why put aside all the modern technology of pressurized cans of formulated shaving foams and gels and the modern multi-blade razor cartridge that allows you to shave while still half asleep?

The answer varies by person, but for me it is the sheer pleasure that the morning shave now affords. Shaving has moved from a routine at best, a chore more often, to a wonderful ritual from which I emerge feeling truly pampered. I now look forward to shaving each day, and that feeling more than repays the little bit of equipment required. The daily shave: a daily pleasure. How many guys can say that?

The reason many men are choosing to shave with a safety razor, however, is much more down-to-earth: the multiblade cartridge uses a tug-and-cut approach that, for many, causes ingrown whiskers, razor bumps, and skin irritation. These men turn to the double-edged blade and safety razor for the comfort they achieve once they learn how to use the instruments, which might take a week.

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The Marijuana Gateway

This article originally appeared at OtherWords.org

Like nearly all Americans of a certain age, I was told in school that tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana are gateway drugs — and that is why marijuana should remain illegal. 

First of all, even if you accept that these three substances are “gateways” to something worse, why is it that adults can use alcohol and tobacco legally, but not marijuana?  

This is particularly outrageous given that, unlike alcohol and cigarettes, marijuana has a wide range of medical applications. 

Other than prescription opioids, marijuana is the only drug that relieves my chronic migraines. I like that it doesn’t come with the addiction or overdose risks that opioids do, and I want to use it legally and under a doctor’s supervision.

Unfortunately, I live in Wisconsin, where even medical uses are illegal.

For me, marijuana is a gateway to relief from headaches, not a gateway to harder drugs. Legal medical marijuana allows me to decrease my use of opioids.

Senator Kamala Harris recently reframed the gateway idea in another way. The war on drugs approach of criminalizing marijuana, she said, “is the gateway to America’s problem with mass incarceration.” As a former prosecutor and drug warrior who now supports decriminalization, she would know.

While I was sitting through D.A.R.E. classes in school, others were being criminalized and locked up for nonviolent drug offenses.

These harsh drug laws and strict sentencing guidelines were not enforced equally, either. Although blacks and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates (white people actually use drugs a bit more), black people are 6.5 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.

In part this is because law enforcement spends more time looking for drugs in communities of color than in white communities. They could have found plenty of drugs and underage drinking among the rich kids in the dorms and frat houses of the mostly white, elite private school where I went to college, but they weren’t looking.

After the arrest, racial disparities continue, disadvantaging low income people and people of color at every stage of the judicial process. The racial disparities continue even after someone has paid their debt to society. A black person with a felony record faces more employment discrimination than an equally qualified white person with a felony record.

It seems like the war on drugs is on its way out, although not quickly enough. The tide is turning toward medical usage of marijuana and even some psychedelics, legalized recreational marijuana in some states, and handling addiction with treatment instead of prison.

Yet marijuana is still fully criminalized at the federal level and in many states (I’m looking at you, Wisconsin).

Many jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana have also expunged the criminal records of anyone convicted of nonviolent, low-level marijuana offenses. But there’s no way to give them back the years of their lives they spent locked up for pot.

Why are we still paying taxpayer dollars to incarcerate cannabis users, taking them away from their jobs and their families? Our current path is a gateway to misery. Let’s choose another.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

A liar, a con artist, and a snitch..

Yeah, it's the same guy. More from ProPublica:

When Detective John Halliday paid a visit to the Pinellas County Jail on Dec. 4, 1986, his highest-profile murder case was in trouble. Halliday, who was 35 and investigated homicides for the local sheriff’s office, had spent more than a decade policing Pinellas County, a peninsula edged by white-sugar-sand beaches on Florida’s Gulf Coast, west of Tampa. It is a place that outpaces virtually all other counties in the nation

in the number of defendants it has sentenced to death. Prosecutors who pursued the biggest cases there in the 1980s relied on Halliday, who embodied the county’s law-and-order ethos. Powerfully built and 6-foot-4, with a mane of dirty blond hair and a tan mustache, he was skilled at marshaling the facts that prosecutors needed to win convictions.

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Making the Case for Paid Family Leave

This article originally appeared at OtherWords.org

Ten years ago, my husband and I opened a specialty oil and vinegar shop. Early on, we learned that our store would be only as good as the people who work in it. To invest in our employees is to invest in our business.

Now we employ five people. One of our most valued long-term employees, Linda, worked at the phone company for 27 years before coming to us. She left the phone company as a retiree but didn’t have enough money from her pension to retire.

When Linda fell and broke both of her arms last year, my husband and I told her to take the time she needed to recover. When payroll came around, I went to her apartment with her paycheck. She was sitting with the TV tray in front of her, deciding how to figure out rent with her leasing agent, what food to cut, and whether to sell her car.

I gave her a full check, including pay for the time she’d been out recovering. She was incredibly relieved, and my husband and I were honored to be able to cover her time, which we continued to do through her recovery.

But this took a toll on our family, our finances, and our business. I have three children and scrambled to pay for child care to cover my employee’s shifts. My husband and I missed a mortgage payment on our house, and we were late on a commercial rent payment.

Our business is thriving, but when it comes to paid family and medical leave, we just can’t do it alone. Many small business owners like me desperately want to offer leave but simply can’t afford it.

In February, I traveled to Washington, D.C. to share my experience with members of Congress at a special briefing on paid family and medical leave hosted by Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

I told them the same thing I’ve told lawmakers in my home state of Minnesota: To give small business a fighting chance, we need to level the playing field and adopt a strong paid family and medical leave program.

Whether we’re business owners or employees, we all should be able to take time away from work when a loved one is sick, or we have health problems of our own. In our current economic climate, that’s a real financial struggle for all of us, and it shouldn’t be.

Paid family and medical leave laws create a system where everyone pays in a little, spreading the costs so everyone can benefit. This is the kind of solution that small businesses are clamoring for.

A recent survey of 1,500 small businesses by Main Street Alliance found overwhelming support for national and state paid leave policies. Sixty-four percent of small business owners — including 76 percent of women and people of color — support paid leave.

Linda is now recuperating from hip replacement surgery now, and will also need knee replacement. We have another employee who will likely need time off to assist his mother, who has early onset dementia.

Meanwhile, we’re trying to open another store, which would provide needed jobs in a small town. Yet the dollars we need for the store are being diverted to paid leave.

Nearly every other country in the world has figured out that a low-cost, pooled insurance program is a sound investment in economic and family health.

I’m encouraged that our national lawmakers are willing to listen, but we don’t have time to waste. While Congress discusses paid leave, state lawmakers around the country, including my state of Minnesota, should lead on this issue. Let’s send a clear message to Washington that the time for paid family and medical leave is now.

Sarah Piepenburg, is the owner of Vinaigrette with locations in Excelsior and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a member of Main Street Alliance, a national network of small businesses. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Not Backing Down on Medicare for All

Robert Borosage reports on Elizabeth Warren's focus on Medicare for All:

When Elizabeth Warren was criticized for not detailing how she would pay for Medicare for All, most pundits assumed she would duck and cover. M4A is Bernie Sanders’s signature legislation, but the establishment dismisses him as a movement candidate. Warren, on the other hand, is seen as a “serious, in the weeds” policy wonk who wants to win. Warren has since issued a detailed plan on what Medicare for All would cover, and how she would pay for it without raising taxes on working people. She summarized the compelling human benefits of making health care a right, not a privilege rationed by cost. She outlined the massive savings that would result from eliminating the insurance company profits and exorbitant administrative fees of the current system.  Workers could pocket the savings on co-pays and premiums, in what would effectively amount, she noted, to the largest middle-class tax cut in history. The political establishment was aghast. The Washington Post unleashed a blizzard of articles decrying Warren’s audacity, picking apart her assumptions, her math, and her political judgement. Despite the carping, one thing is clear: Warren has joined Sanders in forceful support of Medicare for All. As with the Green New Deal, two of the three leading candidates in the Democratic presidential primaries will argue the case. The others will have to put up, or shut up — Warren’s gauntlet will force discussion of the spiraling costs, and human toll of the current system. The debate over Medicare for All illustrates the fundamental choice that Democrats will make in the coming primaries. Are they satisfied with a candidate who promises restoration, or do they want a champion of fundamental change?

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Using Twitter to Promote Your Blog

Twitter is a great tool for promoting writing -- but, how do you use it effectively? This post offers some great suggestions:

Twitter can be especially challenging. News is always breaking on Twitter, and people love to discover new ideas there. But it can feel fast-paced, clipped, highly technical, a little like shouting into the vacuum — unless you know a few tips to make your tweets interesting.

Twitter is actually perfect for promoting blog posts because blog posts are samples of your writing that are short, digestible, and available with the click of a link. Here are a few suggestions on how to use Twitter to promote writing on your blog in a compelling way.

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The War on Science

This article originally appeared at OtherWords.org

The Trump EPA wants to introduce a new rule: Its scientists can only use studies that make all of their data public.

The new proposal is crafted to sound like a win for transparency, which is supposed to be a good thing. In reality, the rule will significantly harm public health — and loosen the reins on polluters. 

And that, of course, is the idea.

Let me explain. I am a graduate student in sociology, a social science. I study people, which means I collect some kind of data about them. For any scientist who studies people, transparency is important — but so is confidentiality.

Any basic research ethics class includes famous cases of unethical research on people that occurred in the not too distant past. So now, our institutions carefully review each study on people to ensure they are ethical.

Ethical research requires providing participants with enough information that they can give informed consent to participate. It means not taking advantage of vulnerable populations (like prison inmates or mental health patients), minimizing any risk of harm that might come to the people you are studying as much as possible, and disclosing any risk before they agree to participate.

In my case, that means that in any study I’ve done, I’ve promised my participants confidentiality. 

With their permission, I might quote them in a publication using a fake name, but only if I can do so in a way that won’t allow anyone to identify them. I don’t want anything they tell me to be used to harm them back in their communities.

In the case of the new EPA rules, the information collected in public health studies can be even more intimate. When scientists study the effects of pollution on people’s health, they may confidentially review people’s private medical records. Obviously, these records should not be made public.

When a researcher cannot promise confidentiality, the quality of their research suffers. Fewer people may be willing to participate, which might harm the reliability of the results. Those who do will be less open. 

How can we trust studies in which all of the data is not made public? Often, some of the data is made public, or at least made available to others in certain circumstances (such as by request). 

Additionally, science is not an individual endeavor. Communities of scientists in each field work together to advance the knowledge within that field. Any new study will be picked apart by everyone who reads it, because that’s what we do to each other. Others will try to replicate your findings — and if they can’t, your conclusions will be called into question.

It’s rough on the ego, but it’s good for science. 

Dismissing any study that does not make its data public, on the other hand — particularly when that data has a good reason to remain confidential, like medical data — serves to harm science, not help it. 

And when you can’t do good science, you can’t base your public health regulations — your pesticide bans, your pollution controls, your clean water rules, and whatever else — on good science.

Given the track record of the Trump administration on the environment so far, it’s far more plausible that this proposal is intended to eliminate necessary public health regulations, not to promote transparency.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Distributed by OtherWords.org.