Saturday, December 21, 2013

Saturday grab-bag

● Esquire blogger (and epee fencer) Charlie Pierce's 10 best posts of the year


● The Salon article Poverty Nation references this Bloomberg Businessweek piece on government assistance to low-wage workers. The stats should certainly give one pause. One quarter of Americans with jobs are on some form of public assistance. Half of Americans in the fast-food industry are. And Bloomerg gives the lie to what I suspect remains a prevalent middle-class illusion; namely, that the typical McJobster is a callow teenager earning pocket money on top of a long-overdue introduction to the world of work discipline. Bloomberg: "68 percent of fast-food workers are single or married adults who aren’t in school—and 26 percent are raising children."

Video of the week: For Pope Francis, Time Magazine's Person of the Year:



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