I almost posted this in ~news but wasn't really sure so feel free to move the post if I got it wrong.

The new jobs report is out:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

I consistently feel like the media just runs with the unemployment rate and ignores the other very important numbers. I think that the economy isn't really "booming" for ordinary Americans and I think that the numbers in the job report that aren't widely talked about are eye-opening.

These numbers used to be talked about a LOT more immediately after the 2008 recessions and during the OWS protests.

To be clear, I'm happy the stock market is up but I don't think it's "trickling" down all that much.

Some examples:

Long-term unemployed are not finding work:

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 1.4 million over the month; these individuals accounted for 22.9 percent of the unemployed. (See table A-12.)

There are ~4.5 million people who are working part-time who want to work full time, and that number is rapidly growing with ~250,000 added since last quarter:

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 263,000 to 4.6 million in September. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)

More than 1.5 million American's gave up looking for work:

In September, 1.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (Data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

cool to see i'm not the only person writing poetry on here anymore. shoutout to @precise and @zoec for sharing their works recently. def looking forward to more in the future.

bishop.

do you think i'm pretty?
do you think of me at all?
i've been laying here and shrinking
oh my god i'm feeling small
every bit of stock that i had
in myself, i auctioned off
invested it in you, hoping
you'd return my calls.

mama i just need a hug
baby need a little love
miss how every day you'd tell me
"baby you look cute as fuck"
now you're gone i'm feeling rough
wonder if i'm good enough
used to be so confident
now i'm into hella drugs
every time i look into the mirror
i start pouring up
yeah she was your better half
you're the worse, and quartered up.
your nose is too big, hair thin
need a tummy tuck
need someone to show you love
warm kisses and tummy rubs

you were my rock and now i sniff rocks.
we had a ball, and now i pop bars.
suicidal thoughts, and crashed cars.
i'm not good enough for any heart.
catch a bag, catch a nose job.
dark eyes, need to nod off.
5'6 never get tall.
take my brain with a sawed-off.

god i wish somebody told me
that the world was gonna roll me
up into a piece of paper
light my ass on fire - smoking.
laying in the dark and dosing
tryna keep my eyes from closing
took you to my favorite cities
love was in St. Louis, growing.
boy you're getting kinda fat,
acne's bad, already know it.
chipped a tooth back in the crash
people cannot help but notice
looking down at my whole world eroded
can't seem to control it
guess this is the life i've chosen
getting high and never coping

mama i just need a hug
baby need a little love
girl what happened to the old
days of us not giving up
you gave me euphoria
fuck, i never needed drugs
i know we had some hard times
i guess i didn't love enough
i know that we would argue, we
would yell, and i would wanna cry
but at least i had someone
to hold and didn't wanna die
hope you have a better life,
peacing out for now cus i'm
gonna take a couple drugs and
pray to god i die tonight

The Most Votes/Most Comments/Newest are self explanatory, but what does "activity" mean? I looked at the FAQ and Mechanics blog posts and I didn't see anything explaining it. Is it similar to Reddit's "Hot" view? I'm especially curious because it appears to be the default.

Hi, I'm filling in again at the request of @Whom!

Welcome to week 16! Here we've got this week's user-voted record: *Body, Mind & Spirit * by Black Renaissance!

Taken from @arghdos' pitch:

What we have here is a masterpiece of a spiritual jazz album from Henry Whittaker (who is most-well known for his work with Roy Ayer's Ubiquity). Combining call and response styles of Sun Ra (or RRK), modal jazz of Coltrane, and some Herbie space jams into a funky, sinuous groove.

Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with Body, Mind & Spirit. Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!

If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on most platforms here.

I just joined this website today and I like it quite a bit already. Several of the design choices seem to be really well thought out and the community seems pretty open to discussion, etc. While reading the initial email you receive when signing up, the creator talks about how this place isn't going to be a bastion of free speech and certain types of content (hate speech, etc) won't be tolerated and I understand where he is coming from.

I'm sure many people are aware of Voat and how it was a response to Reddit censoring several subreddits (/r/the_donald, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc) and if you go there now, it's pretty much exactly the type of demographic you would expect to occupy those subreddits originally.

But while I can see where the creator is coming from with his approach, I guess I'm just curious where you guys would draw the line? Because making a place that caters to people that you could say are on the opposite side of the Voat spectrum seems like a great breeding ground for another echo chamber. And I guess I've become a bit disillusioned with the idea that I can get "balanced" opinions on controversial topics on content-aggregate websites. Maybe that's not even possible with this format. Either way, I'm wondering if anyone feels the same.

https://usefathom.com/
https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Fathom is a new no nosense analytics platform that is thereby fully GDPR compliant and stores no identifiable user information. It's fully open source, with self-hostable and paid options, and shows great overviews of page views and top referrers.

They have a live demo running the stats for their main site available at https://stats.usefathom.com/#!last-7-days

I've been thinking about this for a while; working conditions in the U.S.A., stagnant wages, the growing power of the corporation, and the waning power of the worker. It seems to me that to speak of unionizing in the workplace is so taboo, so fraught with risk of retaliation from the employer, that we need to do something different.

What if we took an active role in speaking about, supporting, and encouraging people of a completely different industry to our own to unionize? If the employers come down on the leaders, well hey, they don't work in that field.

So, what do you think?

I'm a teacher, and two years ago I had a student come out to me as trans. He recommended the book The Other Boy by M.G. Hennessey to me, saying that it was the first book he'd read that was about someone like himself. The same goes for another student with John Green & David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Another student this year shared a similar sentiment about Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake.

I don't know how well-known this is outside of educators, but there has been a recent explosion of books for middle grade and young adult audiences that have openly queer characters and themes. When I was growing up we pretty much had only Annie on My Mind, and even then there was a good chance it wasn't stocked in the library. Now there are hundreds of books published each year and available in school libraries across the country.

This is great for two reasons:

1. I've had many students who have been able to read about characters that they can directly identify with.

2. I've had many students who do not identify as queer (to the best of my knowledge) read and empathize with these characters.

I can't say whether it's because of the books or if the books are simply an indicator of changing social norms, but I've watched acceptance of queer individuals of all types increase over my years in the profession.

Last week was Banned Books Week, and our librarian gave a small presentation to the students about why books get challenged or banned and gave some prominent examples. When she brought up Drama by Raina Telgemeier and mentioned that one of the reasons it was challenged was for "including LGBT characters," my class's response was audible shock. Ten years ago, the response would have been laughter or derision.

Students self-select books from the library for free reading, and I'm always checking in with them to see what they've picked. Right now, I have a student reading Alex Gino's George, one reading the aforementioned The Other Boy, and another reading The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater. I have no idea how these students identify, but honestly, it doesn't matter. The fact that they were able to check those books out and read them is pretty powerful to me. The fact that they chose them on their own is also pretty awesome. Nobody is making students read books about queer characters. They're choosing to!

In fact, one of my favorite things to hear from students about books like those is that they were "boring." Why? Well, because that's pretty much the default adolescent response to any book these days (let's be honest: it's hard for reading to compete with Fortnite), but mostly because it means the student is reading the story free from any prejudice. The book is not seen as inflammatory or controversial or even brave. It's just a story about any regular person--the kind that many kids often find, in this day and age, boring.

And, for someone who's spent a lot of his life having his identity made by others to be A Significant Issue, it turns out boring is a pretty cool thing to be.