Thoughts from the Mountain Top

My friends list is shrinking today.  One of the first casualties was someone I became friends with in the work I do in the addiction awareness community.  He posted that "all of these women coming out of the woodwork 30 years down the road to ruin a man's career is bullshit!"  I have to say, many of the women we both know who have have addiction issues jumped right on him.  Some told him their rape or sexual harassment was what directly led to their addiction issues and dealing with it is part of their recovery.  Some stated they did tell, and the way they were treated by family, friends, and law enforcement afterwards was a factor in their substance abuse. 30 years ago the world was a different environment.  I can remember at 18 having a man rub up against me in the crowded subway car when I was going to training for my new job and being frozen in fear.  I said something to one of the women at the training and she brushed it off with "that stuff hap...

My hobby of geocaching largely works because of volunteers.   There is a staff at Geocaching headquarters in Seattle, but the caches that are put out for us to find are put there by “cache owners” – people who just enjoy hiding the containers for people to find.   When submitted to be listed on the site, they are approved by other volunteers – “reviewers” who make sure they are placed according to the rules. A recent discussion reminded me of my days at Epinions.   We had a great community there, too, for quite some time.   There was some compensation involved but whether you were a “Top Reviewer” providing considerable content to the site or an “Advisor” who read what was written and rated it, trying to keep the better reviews near the top of the search engine findings, it amounted to pennies per hour for the amount of time put into the site. You can see there’s a similar structure between the two.   Epinions doesn’t exist anymore, though.   ...