I don't have a story worth sharing—other than one that will totally doxx me!, so I'm just sitting here with some popcorn!

France has great unemployment benefits, job training if you're "economically downsized"—that can apply to a consequential loss of hours or losing your job. It'll be unpleasant, but not the same as losing your job in the states (case in point—my husband was laid off during the worst of the crisis, he was paid two…

GOOD. As someone who lives and works in France, I can only hope that the courts keep on handing down decisions like these.

I feel terrible giving that a star—but it's so true that abusers can totally take advantage of the church's emphasis on "waiting" so that they can, in turn, wait to show their true selves... :( There's a woman I know in my church who took years to get away from a similar man because of "what people would think of her"…

Ha, I'm your diametric opposite! If I don't eat something in the morning almost immediately, I will throw up and/or faint. If that doesn't happen immediately, it'll happen at some point in the morning.

Clearly you've never lived in an actual city. I work in a big city, and I refuse to commute in for one hour every morning plus one hour every evening just to live in a house. That would be far more wasteful and time consuming than just buying an economical little 60m2 apartment for 300,000 euros (around 450,000…

Where I live (France), penalizing employees for being sick is illegal and would get an employer sued almost immediately, not to mention protested into oblivion. Universal healthcare also means that you get part or all of your wage paid to you even when you're sick (some regions from the first day, some from the third…

I started to feel ill just reading this. I've always been pro-union for fast food and retail workers, having experienced similar incidents during my high school stint at a McDo and other food chain jobs. I can only hope that, with the bottom falling out of the economy and increasing numbers of underemployed people…

Hi CaptainShar,

Oh wow, I'm blushing! :)

Yes, THIS. Sounds very similar to what my church does, for the most part. After building a relationship with people in the community, we'll ask if they want to know about what we believe/if they'd like to have a conversation about beliefs or if they'd prefer not to. If they say no, we'll say, "Okay, let's talk about…

I'm really glad that that's something you stress. My church does background checks, has floating monitors for Sunday school classrooms, the whole shebang. Our new pastor said to all of the Sunday school teachers last year when we were doing a policy update, "The disturbing thing about schools and private orgs having…

If I could give you more stars for this, I would! Seriously, though, it would have been much easier to go into a field that primarily uses exams for grading. Most people at the university level have become really freaking good at memorizing random stuff and vomiting it onto an exam, even though they bitch and moan…

I did quite a bit of research on fillers for a pedagogical language usage class, and another interesting study I found suggested that certain topics lend themselves to more fillers. One particular study focused on university professors and university students in different fields to examine their filler usage. Example:…

BUT (and I say this having just read the entire thing cover to cover) she also provides a recipe for tortillas where the estimated cost is .07 cents/tortilla. I thought that those comments were helpful reminders, useful for if you have a little of this or that left over from other meals, amounting to: if you happen to…

I'd be up for doing a translation of the "The End of Topless at the Beach" article, and/or an article!

Reposting this from above:

Reposting from above:

It's a REALLY great article, actually. The gist of the article is that toplessness might fade to extinction, due to the rise in popularity of bikinis with les coques (cups/push-up cups) to give all women a "perfect" bust, the rise of the one-piece, and an unusual pudeur (prudishness) of young women (due to unrealistic…

This is somewhat similar to how it works in France. When you get married, the woman basically has an additional optional name. You have three options for how to use it: