For­give­ness is hard. I’ve been talk­ing to some­one about that today and dug up these posts from around the blogosphere.

• A ser­mon from dad last weekend
• Some snip­pets from a Jew­ish woman who “for­gave Hitler”
• This one help­fully defines what for­give­ness is not
• Here’s one on When not to forgive
• An arti­cle on what our for­give­ness (not God’s) looks like.
• … a response to that post
• And another response to that post

I’d call any char­i­ta­ble work “anti­bono” because I think Bono gets too much free pub­lic­ity in social jus­tice spheres already.

I’m just saying.

Tur­tles are the best pets. They’re funny. Clean. And they do cool stuff. Like this. Most of the fun fin­ishes about halfway into this video. But it’s only 48 seconds.

There have been many arti­cles pop­ping up the last few weeks on gen­der pay inequal­ity, and I have noticed many con­tain the fol­low­ing analysis:

Women:

1. Get paid less.
2. Work fewer hours around the work office as they under­take more fam­ily related duties.
3. Gen­er­ally have less work-related expe­ri­ence com­pared with a man of the equiv­a­lent age, due to hav­ing a more dis­rupted career (due to fam­ily com­mit­ments).
4. Have less super at retire­ment, due to working/earning less.
5. Have dif­fi­culty get­ting into higher work posi­tions, some­times linked to the impact of fam­ily duties on work com­mit­ments or a dis­rupted career path.
6. Are worse off finan­cially, and do not have the same career progress as men.

Fur­ther, this can lead to second-degree prob­lems, such as women being finan­cially dis­ad­van­taged when involved in a rela­tion­ship break­down, due to los­ing the finan­cial secu­rity built into the fam­ily unit and hav­ing lower savings/lower future earn­ing capacity/less super­an­nu­a­tion than the male counterpart.

This is all fair enough. How­ever, I think it is impor­tant to recog­nise that the char­ac­ter­is­tics above are not nec­es­sar­ily evi­dence of dif­fer­ent earn­ing real­i­sa­tions due to pure gender-related pay dis­crim­i­na­tion. It seems that most of the argu­ments that stem from these points is mis­di­rected, often mis­tak­ing inequal­ity of oppor­tu­nity or pure wage dis­crim­i­na­tion based on gen­der with dif­fer­ent earn­ing capac­i­ties due to cir­cum­stance lead­ing to inequal­ity of out­comes. A true exam­ple of dis­crim­i­na­tory pay rates would be if, for the same inputs, there were dif­fer­ing out­puts, as in for the same fac­tors (includ­ing hours worked, qual­i­fi­ca­tions, expe­ri­ence), there was dif­fer­ing pay. and at present, with the recog­ni­tion of the above fac­tors, I think the evi­dence being spread doesn’t align with the sug­gested prob­lems, or required solu­tions, being touted.

How­ever, the main point I want to make is that cur­rently it seems that the pro-equality groups direct their anger at the businesses/employers for fail­ing to ignite gen­der equal­ity. Why is it the employer’s role to do this? Busi­nesses should not be required to ful­fil social wel­fare redis­trib­u­tive role. Employ­ers should be required to pay an employee what their work-related char­ac­ter­is­tics require. Employ­ers shouldn’t have to act on the idea that 10 years of life expe­ri­ence is equiv­a­lent to 10 years of on-the-job expe­ri­ence. If, as a soci­ety, we want to under­take wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion on what­ever grounds, there are bet­ter insti­tu­tions and bet­ter ways of doing this.

It is unclear exactly what the ulti­mate goal/solution of recog­ni­tion of gen­der wage inequal­ity will be. How­ever, I think it is impor­tant to recog­nise the above dis­tinc­tions, and most impor­tantly, be care­ful what solu­tions are imple­mented, and not use busi­ness enter­prises as a blunt weapon for attempt­ing to right the per­ceived wrongs in society.

My grand­fa­ther (aka Fafa aka Don­ald Howard) wrote a book. About preach­ing. I’m read­ing it. It has been help­ful. When I fin­ish read­ing it I’ll post a proper review. In the mean­time you should know that it did not win the 2009 Aus­tralian Chris­t­ian Book of the Year – but it was an equal joint sec­ond prize win­ner with two oth­ers. A lit­tle like Townsville’s Rachel Finch in the Miss Uni­verse competition…

It was self pub­lished. It fea­tures chap­ters from plenty of well known preach­ers. You can buy it here.

A while back I posted a bunch of nov­elty toi­let paper designs. You should check out that post — and these other fan­tas­tic bath­room fillers.

Some­times you just really have to go at night. And find­ing the light switch is hard. Glow in the dark toi­let paper is there in case of emergency.

Some peo­ple like to read while sit­ting on the toi­let. My mum always warned me about hem­or­rhoids that occur as a result. You can take that warn­ing, or leave it. If you leave it per­haps you’d like to have some brain­teasers at hand (which reminds me of the one about the con­sti­pated math­e­mati­cian — he worked it out with a pencil*).

Other peo­ple like to jot down thoughts and jour­nal ideas on notepads. Artist Michael Gondry turned his notepad doo­dlings into toi­let paper — I assume only the bad ideas made it.

*Not even my favourite toi­let humour joke — which is “a doc­tor was walk­ing the cor­ri­dors of the hos­pi­tal when a phar­ma­cist approached and said “doc­tor, doc­tor, there’s a sup­pos­i­tory behind you ear,” the doc­tor paused, checked his ear and said “oh no, some bum has got my pen.”

Polaroids are dead. Appar­ently. They’re no longer being made. Which is sad. Who doesn’t like a bor­dered photo that you have to shake?

Turns out lots of peo­ple do. So much that you can get an iPhone app that turns your iPhone into a polaroid cam­era — you even have to shake it for it to develop. It’s called ShakeIt.

Then, thanks to the magic of the inter­net and the exten­sive col­lec­tion of iPhone apps to cover every unimag­in­able pos­si­bil­ity — you can mail it to your­self as a post­card. Using ShootIt.

Fail­ing that you can jump onto Rol­lip — an online ser­vice that turns all of your pho­tos into elec­tronic polaroids. There are a few extra effects you can add…

I posted the pas­sive aggres­sive signs set on Flickr a few weeks back. Post­ing a sign doesn’t have to be an act of pas­sive aggres­sion. It can be down right aggressive…

From Bits and Pieces.

If you are wor­ried about the impend­ing zom­poca­lypse then per­haps the best thing you can do is get rid of your brain. The best way I can sug­gest to par­take in that kind of activ­ity short of a super lobot­omy is to play this pro­posed game… Gui­tar Hero for air gui­tarists… Head­bang Hero.

“You are awarded points for your per­sonal head­bang­ing chore­og­ra­phy… but you should be aware that your health is at risk! To stress this point Head­bang Hero also analy­ses how haz­ardous your per­for­mance is. Using a wire­less motion-sensing wig as game inter­face, any­one — regard­less of how much hair they have — can become a Head­bang Hero!”

This my friends is the Holy Grail of break­fast. A bacon and egg gob­let.

Now if only I could round up a group of knights to go a questing…