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One of my brother’s friends is applying for a job as an animal care technician. I asked her if that meant she would be inventing new cyborg animals, like a helifrog or a pelicanoceros. Sadly, it does not.

The Los Angeles Times has another excellent article about Wal-Mart and the harms it inflicts on American workers. (Use “pinchydotorg” as the login and password.)

All Wal-Mart, all the time: That’s the pinchy dot org promise!

Fast Company has a great article about how Wal-Mart’s relentless push to lower its prices has forced its suppliers to move even more manufacturing jobs overseas. The whole article is worth reading, but there are a couple of paragraphs that absolutely nail the biggest problem with the way Wal-Mart does business, and with American capitalism in general:

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to “Buy American,” has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That’s nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

Oh, and it gets worse: Even Chinese companies are neglecting safety and reducing wages to keep prices low. (To read that last article, use “pinchydotorg” as the login and password.)

Global warming—or “climate change,” as it is now euphemistically known—may wipe out the world’s monarch butterflies within 50 years. Monarchs need a relatively dry habitat during the winter, and according to current climate models, the forests where they spend each winter are likely to get a lot wetter.

Would people be as willing to ignore global warming if they believed that it would wipe out such a universally adored creature as the monarch butterfly? Is there a way to help people understand this stuff without making them stick their fingers in their ears and say “LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING”? Hey, George Lakoff: a little help?

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, on the difficulty of creating something interesting:

Basically, anything that anyone makes… It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a fucking act of will. Anyone who makes something for a living, or even not for a living, if they’re really excited about it… You just have to exert so much will into something for it to be good.