Dilbert visits the park. Photo by Ol.v!er [H2vPk].Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, is a weird dude. No surprise to anyone familiar with the comic strip. I just finished reading Adams’ autobiographical self-help bookHow to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I don’t agree with all of his advice — do I really need to state that caveat? — but some of Adams’ concepts are interesting and even spot-on.
For instance, Adams asserts that systems are superior to goals. What he means is that it’s smarter, for example, to always be looking for a better job instead of following a five-year plan to attain a certain position. He lays out a bunch of principles along these lines that in his view should lead to success. His through-line is the idea that you should optimize yourself to take advantage of luck when it strikes.
The book is certainly interesting, and I think particularly useful to people starting their professional lives. Here are the two quotes I liked enough to write down:
“Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. [After realizing that] I concentrated on ideas I could execute.”
“Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.”
I particularly agree with the second suggestion, that you should shape your paradigm to be productive rather than accurate. (This is basically what my therapist wants me to do.) If I dwell on the rottenness and chaos of the world, my realistic perception harms me; I become miserable and can’t get anything done. Far more effective to be an optimist without justification than a pessimist with plenty of proof.
(I like to call myself a cynical optimist. Is that annoying? It’s such a good phrase, and a decent representation of my personality.)
Being a person whose appearance is perceived as feminine means being accosted on the street wherever you go. Usually the men who yell stuff at you fall into the “nothing left to lose” category. They’re homeless or broke or drunk in the morning — none of which is inherently bad, but those conditions give a person little reason to conform to standard social norms. Combine that with typical male entitlement, and you have guys shouting obscenities as you walk by.
But socioeconomic desperation and/or mental illness don’t explain everything. Twice in October I was literally followed by a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Both of these guys seemed “normal” when judged by exterior alone — they looked like they probably had jobs and houses. Both times I had to turn around, hold my palms up in front of my body, and say, “I need you to stop.” Both times this worked, thank goodness. Both times I was terrified.
Afterward I fantasized about responding violently, about retaliating the instant I was spoken to. Pepper spray in the face. Knee to the testicles. Heel of the palm against the nose so hard that it breaks the bridge and pushes bone shards into the brain. I wanted the power of fear and destruction — the power men possess that prevents me from responding the way I imagine. When I’m scared, I can’t muster the fierceness. It probably wouldn’t have made me feel better anyway.
Making a perzine is cheap. You write everything yourself, you use crappy paper, and you mail out copies in flimsy envelopes. Making a zine more along the lines of a chapbook is expensive, especially if you want to pay contributors a decent amount. I learned this while editing four issues of my now-defunct lit zine Balm Digest, even though I stuck with low-end materials, and I’m learning it again with User-Friendly Urbanism.
I launched Tradeoffs Press with an editorial vision, but also with the purpose of making money in order to facilitate my creative endeavors. (I’m aware that this might doom the whole thing — pleasing customers should be the foremost concern of any new business. And yet.) My goal is to earn enough to compensate myself for the time I spend as well as to earn back the cost of materials. I hope that I can do so while being open about money — I like being open about money. Please don’t resent the dollar of per-unit profit. Anyway, without further ado…
User-Friendly Urbanism Costs
$20 for Big Cartel (covers October and November)
$215 for Divya Persaud*
$250 for Nicole Dieker*
$200 for Loretta Carr*
$50 for bubble mailers
$70 for paper
$25 for card stock
$115 for ink (I sprang for the name-brand stuff because it really does print slightly better)
$1.42 postage per zine — $142 for 100
*Divya, Nicole, and Loretta each contributed an 800-ish-word essay, but the final lengths were slightly different.
When I added up the expenses, I had slight sticker shock:
$1,087 total for 100 zines → $10.87 each
$1,489 total** for 200 zines → $7.45 each
$1,891 total** for 300 zines → $6.30 each
**Doubled and tripled the material costs accordingly.
$10.87 / $7.45 / $6.30 are production costs, not retail prices. I calculated that if I print 300 copies and sell 250 of them for $7.50 each ($7.27 after processing fees), I’ll make $0.97 per zine, AKA $242.50 total, which leaves me just $72.50 short on overall production costs. Selling the ebook for $3.99 → $2.79 profit, so if I manage to sell 100, I’ll make $279 and end up in the black for this whole project to the tune of $206.50. If I don’t sell as much of either format as I’ve guessed, then I’ll lose money. Which is okay — I wouldn’t undertake this gamble if I couldn’t afford it.
Should I have gone with lower-end paper and stuck with flimsy envelopes? Should I have offered to pay $0.10/word instead of $0.25/word? Yeah, maybe. CreateSpace or some other print-on-demand service might have been cheaper.
Granted, either way I can write off the expenses on my taxes! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This blog post is very similar to the newsletter I just sent out. If you subscribe, no need to read the paragraphs below. If you don’t subscribe, perhaps start now?
Cities are struggling to satisfy their residents. The officials, elected or not, scramble to make good on their promises. Rents keep rising while incomes stagnate. At times the metropolis plays host to socioeconomic conflicts that feel apocalyptic.
In this atmosphere, urbanists should borrow a term from tech, and consider how to create a user-friendly city. Such a city is not only walkable and smogless. Macro conditions matter as well. User-friendly cities are shaped by policies that nurture the residents and local businesses. Broadly, user-friendly urbanism prioritizes human beings rather than the dead matter of the built environment they occupy.
I commissioned three awesome writers, one of whom you might be familiar with from Balm Digest, and interviewed two others. I also wrote several essays personally, about economics and angst (it wouldn’t be me without the angst). The end product is 38 pages; 5.5″ x 8.5″. It costs $7.50 and shipping is free in the United States. Recommended for those who have feelings about gentrification! Especially if you live somewhere with a crazy housing market like New York City or San Francisco.
There’s a cheaper ebook if you’re into that. Reviews would be much appreciated!
This zine is part of Tradeoffs Press, the small press and prospective zine distro that I started earlier this month. (Will it work out? Who knows. But I paid $12 for a custom URL, so you know I’m serious.) It’d be awesome if you liked the Facebook page so I can pop up in your feed like, “Hey! I bet you haven’t bought a zine today!”
Sorry to ask you for so many things! Feel free to ask me for favors right back! I can’t guarantee that I’ll say yes, but it’s worth a shot, right?
Are you afraid to talk about your salary? Serious question. Imagine telling the person who sits next to you at work how much you make. Comparing your stock options and benefits packages. Does the idea of that conversation make you nervous?
Women pressers on strike for higher wages. Best sign: “We have been Santa Claus long enough.” Photo via the Kheel Center.
American culture stigmatizes open discussions of compensation, in the workplace as well as social settings. This harms laborers. Just look at Erica Baker’s experiment with salary transparency at Google. The company’s reaction was almost certainly illegal, but the only repercussion was moderately bad press. On the other hand, the employees who were discouraged from evaluating whether their salaries were equitable will be impacted for decades, if not for the rest of their careers. (I recommend Kara Swisher’s interview of Baker.)
“The fact is, companies are doing everything they can to increase their bottom line, and as such, they are actively trying to pay you as little as possible, with the understanding that if they underpay you too much, they will lose talent.” — Lauren Voswinkel in Model View Culture
People get uncomfortable when you choose to disclose the actual number of your salary. Those who share are judged as rude or feckless. I believe this is because salary disparities reveal unspoken power disparities — employees who get paid more are generally quite market-competitive, often because they have scarce skills. That means they have more power — they’re more valuable to the company in a very literal way, and they have more professional options outside of the organization. Having their place in the hierarchy revealed can make people squirm.
I have broadly decided to be transparent about my pay and financial situation because I don’t believe in keeping secrets for their own sake. Because having access to more information gives people more power, and redistributing information helps to redistribute power. I don’t believe that anyone is obligated to reveal these personal details if they don’t want to, but I do want to, and the information is mine to disclose.
Here’s an example of how salary-sharing can be useful: If you know that coworkers with comparable duties are being paid more (or less), you can go to your boss to find out why. You have more evidentiary material should you decide to advocate for changes, whether personal or systemic. It is illegal for employers to discourage this — either explicitly or implicitly. They often do it anyway because the consequence is a slap on the wrist.
“No employer may do any of the following:
(a) Require, as a condition of employment, that an employee refrain from disclosing the amount of his or her wages.
(b) Require an employee to sign a waiver or other document that purports to deny the employee the right to disclose the amount of his or her wages.
(c) Discharge, formally discipline, or otherwise discriminate against an employee who discloses the amount of his or her wages.”
Like most labor rights, these can’t be waived by signing a contract or an NDA. (Similarly, you can’t forgo overtime if you’re a non-exempt employee.) The National Labor Relations Act extends anti-pay-secrecy rights federally [PDF] to all non-supervisory employees who wish to discuss compensation information with their colleagues.
This is an essential labor protection, whether or not you want to unionize. The fact that management so often opposes pay transparency demonstrates that it gives employees an advantage — otherwise, why would bosses bother trying to squash those conversations? Cultural arguments fall flat; I have friends who definitely make more money than me, and it’s not an obstacle.
“A company’s secret information about its ‘pricing, profit margins, costs of production, pricing concessions, promotional discounts, advertising allowances, volume rebates, marketing concessions, payment terms and rebate incentives … has independent economic value because [it] would be valuable to a competitor to set prices which meet or undercut’ their own.”1
Further reading for those who are interested: articles on NPR and The Atlantic.
“Somebody talked!” Poster by Canada’s Wartime Information Board circa 1940s. Image via the Toronto Public Library.
1 Page 14 of the PDF. In the quote I pulled, Exeter and Park are citing Whyte v. Schlage Lock Co., 101 Cal.App.4th 1443, 1455 (2002). The white paper is distributed and copyrighted circa 2003 by Farella Braun + Martel LLP and Vaughan & Fleming LLP. Douglas Exeter is associated with the former firm and Valerie Park with the latter.
I am a member of the Amazon Associates program. If you click on an Amazon link from this site and subsequently buy something, I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you).
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