I'm about to lose my fucking mind

Customer Disservice

It’s easier to list presently pleasant experiences.  You’ll have ample time to rattle them off while waiting eternally for your fries.  Being hungry for dinner by the time you get your lunch counts as fasting.

Customer service sucks if you’re lucky enough to locate something to buy.  Making you care less about purchases is just another way our times relieve you of burdens like possessing too many items to dust.

The goal of toiling as little as possible is as natural to humans as consuming more calories than are necessary.  But life’s cruelty is unavoidable.  You’ll only exacerbate welts if you try to dodge.  Seeing work not as a way to advance but as a method to get compensated for nothing shows government’s influence.  Boasting of an effort so slight that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would tell you to get to work is not leading to advancement for individuals or society.  Hunter Biden is this generation’s standard for exertion in the pursuit of fortune.  

Expecting payment shouldn’t be connected to anything like completed work responsibilities.  The president says you’re entitled to all the money you can stuff in your pockets while forking none of it over for anything you want.  Retailers who expect compensation in return for what they provide are the greedy ones.  A certain gang of politicians is always promising something in exchange for nothing.  The same mafia capos struggle to determine why the economy is poor.

Zombie movies are such a part of culture that you can reenact them by patronizing any restaurant.  Employing fewer workers than are necessary to address matters is a staffing decision made by politicians.  They told more help to arrive, which explains why getting someone to prepare a meal is presently as daunting as a DMV visit.

Minimum wage spikes are accompanied by encouragement to exert the minimum effort.  The only way to get more cash is to make it worthless, so thank Joe Biden for the cruel but necessary life lesson.  Blame businesses coping with preposterous incursions to pass the exam.

You’re totally not expected to comply with constantly getting asked to hand over more than the price.  You’ll just be shunned if you do.  Not contributing is going to cost you a dirty look.  Tipping is supposed to be a reward for service.  It’s now an expected custom from those who vilify anyone who makes more as materialistic.  Don’t you want baristas to make a living wage?  Prepare for a guilt trip to the waiting counter regardless of provided value or liberal beliefs in action hiking that very standard.

A gratuity to the ungrateful is compounded by extraneousness.  Leaving extra is for specific jobs whose pay structure is based on getting a little more.  The only other place to leave extra money is on Substack.  Other than that, the good and decent universal value of tipping bartenders differs entirely from the embodiment to entitlement seen in professional panhandling on every counter.

It’s uncanny how unhappy people seem after they get every last thing provided for them.  Government gave you enough to cover your bills then told you there’s no need to pay them, which should have made every American independently wealthy.  We’re just one executive order commanding groceries to be affordable short.  Bitching about focusing on finances as loafers attempt to evade the process of exchange has left everyone with nothing.

The internet enables instant communication where you can be treated rudely by a company that took your funds.  A rather popular communications medium resembles the way lies about Florida’s secret plan to re-establish slavery get spread instantaneously without verification.  The best and worst thing about social media is that people present themselves without a filter.  The way the indifferent service gets used is what’s important, which creates common ground for the First and Second Amendments.

Hearkening to days of yore comes naturally when days of now eat it hard.  It’s not to praise everything that happened before internet flowed through the ether.  But these glorious advanced days truly eat it thanks to deploying daft policies discredited in the olden times.

Scoffing at your choice between a bag of groceries or enough fuel to reach the outpost to acquire them is the sort of smug reply expected from Biden cultists who think working at some corporation is a menial task unworthy of their useless abilities.  You may have received better service before governmental protections made performing a job’s task.  That was in the golden time before butter was a luxury.

Refusing to give a damn is particularly unfortunate when every productive shift is respectable.  Moving past the days of mocking service workers is a victory for dignity.  A Full Monty reboot still based on the shame of working at a department store blessedly disappeared from public consciousness quickly, and not only because finding one open is as as tough as obtaining affordable food.

It’s a shame when shame seemed on its way out.  The culturally snotty attribute of decreeing oneself to be above certain tasks drags everyone below.  There’s precisely nothing wrong with working at Walmart in order to provide for a family or even just oneself.  Decent people mocked as rudely brain dead for running a fast food register is particularly rich from indebted art history majors who count as high as one useless degree.

Holding expectations without providing is the type of evasiveness that should be discouraged in first-graders.  A White House dedicated to paying people without working inspires surliness amongst those who technically show up.  It doesn’t seem like anyone in the executive branch is there until 5 p.m.  More important jobs remain understaffed, which is to say all of them.

i'm not american but i can tell you where i am it's not just corporate greed increasing prices. there's inflation, sure, but there's also increasing gas prices making transport and etc more pricey, longer wait for various components driving up the demand and so on. the suez canal blockage and problems with shipments from china (and e.g. truck driver shortage in some countries) during covid made everything more expensive too. last time i checked the price of steel was up by 700% compared to pre-covid times. people are still waiting for months to get car parts. the whole supply chain is suffering

oh ik i wasnt originally trying to pin ALL the blame on corperate greed but rather make the point that it is absolute more at fault than it's recieving credit for. That's why i stated at the beginning of those tags that i dont doubt the impact that covid has had, bc like, living thru it, have eyes, etc. but i also do think that in certain areas, covid is now being used as a scapegoat when it may not be the biggest continuous contributing factor in all cases.

it's always worth bringing up that things like gas prices and other resources going up in times of crisis are v much due to a lack of accessible alternatives--with gas prices especially and how oil companies lobby in governments to make sure it stays this way so that they are always making the most money they possibly can at whatever expense. It's corperate greed preventing funding being invested in better things or at least backups. It's also corperate greed responsible for monetising medical care and resulting in more people ultimately suffering from covid. And it's also corperate greed that forced many people either back into unsafe work places or never allowed them to leave.

additionally, very much across the board at basically all major retail companies, the heads of the companies have taken home massive pay increases since the beginning of the pandemic. Like im sorry but if u see a ceo taking home literally Millions more than the previous year, when we r apparently in the grips of an economic crisis, where poverty is going thru the roof, the realistic conclusion is that corperate greed is playing a huge ass role in The Crisis u know? It's not the only contributing factor but I am absolutely willing to not only argue it's making everything worse but also die on that hill.

In areas that there are inarguable labour or product shortages, such as in the building materials industry, or in certain areas of agricultural development, it begs the question of whether or not paying workers fair compensation for their time and effort would make a larger difference in the supply chain and economy. Like if workers could afford healthcare would the death rates in high risk industries be this high? Would more people be willing to work these jobs if they werent going to be worked into an early grave? Would there be more workers available if so many people haven't died as a result of businesses demanding people stay working through a deadly pandemic so their bottom lines weren't affected?

If ceos were taking pay cuts, or even making the same as a non-pandemic year, in order to contribute more to their workers' pay, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that inflation could at least be curbed. But on a very large scale everywhere, that isnt whats happening. like min wage has been stagnating for yrs, and in correllation w the cost of living for the respective area a particular min wage is for, it's basically always a poverty wage at this point. but "everyone" wants to just blame covid and its like is that rly Actually it.

Like thats my main point in saying all this im just kinda Done w "everyone" being all "we gotta open everything back up to save the economy!! Some of u may die but thats a sacrifice i'm willing to make" bc its like. Okay. And then more ppl find themselves in poverty and unable to afford basic needs, or they die, or become disabled, and then get blamed for "not wanting to work". Like now what lmao

And anyone whos Been poor for a while can vouch that its literally just a continuation of the capitalistic status quo of the rich getting richer and the working class getting sacrificed while also getting poorer and literally anything that can be blamed for it all getting blamed, except for those at the top

So yeah it is all traceable back to corperate greed and capitalism in one way or another. actually

Ultimate Ways To Make Real Sustainable Money Online.

Countless people dream of working remotely and making a living in the comfort of their homes. This is a reality that is achievable and accessible to anyone with the right tools, information, and the right mindset.With the Covid pandemic looming around and frequent lockdowns, working online can open doors to a successful career or a lucrative side hustle. The list below divides these online opportunities into four categories.- Career: These are proper jobs that require you to prepare a resume and cover letter. Just like any company, there is potential to grow, relocate, and have a fixed salary. - Top Tier: This includes jobs that have unlimited tapped potential. You can make as much money as you want and reach the level of success that you desire. It all boils down to your work ethic. - Mid Tier: These are jobs that require you to register with a platform or are extremely oversaturated and they might not have the same level of earning potential as Top tier jobs. - Low tier: These are low-paying jobs that can be easily considered side hustles. I wouldn't advise you to make a career or quit your job for low-tier jobs in this article. Please note: I absolutely hate Survey paying websites and any type of job that wastes precious time. Any job that pays unrealistic wages will not be included in this article. (There are too many websites that pay pennies or scam people.)

Become a Shopify Employee (Level-Career)

Shopify has grown to be one of the biggest players in the E-Commerce space. The company is featured as one of Canada's Top 100 Employers. It currently employs over 7000+ employees who mostly work remotely. In May 2020, Shopify transitioned to operating online permanently with all its employees.Shopify is one of the best tech companies to work for. Salaries range from $46,000-$210,000 depending on the position. Their lowest position, Customer Service pays around $46,000 which is way above the national average for a similar role. You'll also receive benefits such as $5000 to put towards your wellness/health account, retirement account, or charitable giving account. Other benefits include maternity and parental leave top-up payments; mental health practitioners benefit up to $2,500; stock options, and many more. This is a real job presenting the opportunity to make a career with a company that cares about its employees. And yes, they hire internationals too. Click the link below to check out their Job postings.

Start a blog (Level - Top tier)

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to make money online. There is no barrier to entry and the potential to make money is practically unlimited. Currently, the world has over 7.6 billion people and 65.6% of them have access to the internet. If you think blogging is a dead-end then you're in for a surprise. Like any other job, to be successful with blogging requires time and dedication. An updated article will be linked here to guide you on how to start a successful blog. In the meantime, these are ways you can monetize your blog.- Ads. You can run Google Ads or any other ads platform to showcase ads on your website. When people visit your website, view or click ads, revenue is generated. - Affiliate Marketing. Is a form of marketing that involves promoting a product and earning a commission when a sale is made. For example, you can join the Amazon Affiliate program, pick a product of interest and write an article about it. Amazon will provide you with a link that you can add to your blog. If a visitor clicks that link and makes a purchase, Amazon will pay you a commission. It's important to have useful good quality content to drive traffic to your website. - Sponsorship. A great way of boosting income on your website is to work with sponsors. A sponsored blog post is when a blogger gets paid to talk about a product or brand on their blog. The amount of money you get from sponsors will be determined by traffic and other factors. - Sell a product or service. You can sell e-books, online courses, merchandise, paid subscription service, or start a podcast.

Game development with Buildbox (Level-Mid Tier)

If you have a passion for making mobile games and you're lacking in the programming department, Buildbox allows you to make games in a drag and drop user interface. No coding knowledge is required to build amazing games that can take the internet by storm. Some of the best ranking games on Android and iOS were made with Buildbox. The platform is also extremely easy to use, even for beginners. Money can be made by selling games or monetizing with ads in the Appstore. Although game developers can easily make 6 to 7 figures a year, I classified this gig as "Mid-tier" because of oversaturation within the mobile gaming industry. To be successful, you'll need a good idea, a well-designed game with different levels, and SEO marketing skills(Note: There is alternative software like Unity, Unreal, Gamemaker, and many more that can be used to make mobile games.)

Amazon Mturk (Level-Low Tier)

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing website for businesses and individuals to hire remotely located "crowd workers" to perform on-demand tasks. The amount you earn is proportional to how fast you can complete a task. Mturk is a great platform for making extra cash. I easily make $25-40 USD a day in my spare time.As a new Turker, you might not qualify for high-paying HITs. However, the more HITs you complete, the more work you'll qualify for. In addition, installing plugins and scripts such as Mturk Suite, Pandacrazy and others will massively boost your income. It's a must-have feature.Overall, Mturk doesn't offer the level of growth and the potential to earn is not up to par with other jobs on this list. Regardless, you can earn some extra cash.

Youtube (Level-Top Tier)

Youtube is one of those jobs that seem bizarre and unattainable. Similar to blogging, Youtube requires a lot of hard work, consistency, and dedication. However, the potential to earn is limitless.A lot of people fail with Youtube because they don't respect it as a job. Other people overcomplicate it and they fail to start. If you love creating content and you have a niche of interest, use your phone and just start.You can monetize your Youtube channel with ads, sponsored content, and affiliate marketing. Additionally, you can recycle articles if you have a blog and turn them into youtube videos. It's like feeding two birds with one scone.

Appen "Search Engine Evaluator" (Mid-tier)

Apply as a search engine evaluator at Appen. The job pays around $13/hr. A Search Engine Evaluator analyzes search results to ensure they are accurate and relevant. The job is fairly straightforward. (Note: Positions for this job might be full, so try to check out for any other open positions.)

Lionsbridge "Social Media Evaluator" (Level - Mid Tier)

Similar to Appen, Lionsbridge is a company that provides translations and localization solutions. A Social Media Evaluator's job is to ensure that a social network's newsfeed is relevant and accurate based on a given assignment. Wages range from $12-$15/hr. Lionsbridge also has other job openings that might be of interest.

Open an online business (Level-Top tier)

Many advantages come with running an online business. Depending on the nature of the business, there is more control, and operating costs will be lower than a conventional brick-and-mortar business. Check out these cool ideas on how to open an online business.

Dropshipping

Is a clever way of selling products that you don't own at a higher price. You won't have to store inventory or any products in physical form because when a customer buys from your store, their payment will automatically buy the product from a third-party store. Entrepreneurs usually pick and add products from Alibaba.com or any wholesaler of choice to their website. The next step is to set a reasonable price and drive traffic to your site. When a customer eventually buys a product from you, they're technically buying it from Alibaba or any wholesaler that you're working with.Countless people have made fortunes with this method, however, the market is extremely saturated now. Shipping costs, quality control, and low-profit margins are also factors to consider when launching a dropshipping website. The most important thing is to research a product that is in high demand but has low competition. That is the formula for dropshipping.

E-commerce website

Start an e-commerce business and sell practically anything. From clothes to furniture, anything can be sold online. You can also sell digital products such as software, music beats, or even services. There are many tools out there that you can use such as Shopify, WordPress Woocommerce, Squarespace, and many more.Choosing a niche is the most important step when building an E-commerce site. Your website will look professional and tailored to specific products. You don't want your website to compete with the likes of Amazon and eBay. Customers will rather use those instead. Specialize in something!

Affiliate marketing

Although this form of business is already mentioned, it deserves a segment of its own. Affiliate Marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns commission when they market a company's product.There are many affiliate networks that you can join with the most famous being Amazon Affiliates. Bluehost also has a great affiliate program that pays $65USD per sale. Shopify's affiliate program pays $58-$2000 per sale and Fiver pays up to $150 per new customer. This is just the tip of the iceberg as there are many affiliate programs that you can join. (Note: You don't need to have a website or a Youtube channel to drive traffic to your links, however, I would advise against that)

Amazon Arbitrage

Also known as retail arbitrage, is a method of buying items from different retailers and selling them on Amazon at a higher price. You can also buy items from Amazon and list them on eBay at a higher price. This Business method requires research and a good understanding of the product demand.

Start an agency.

- You can start a social media marketing agency where you help clients grow their businesses and reach more people.  - If you know how to build websites or mobile apps, you can easily start an agency that provides those services to other businesses. - A travel agency can also be lucrative, especially if you know how to use social media effectively.

Fiverr

Is one of the best freelance marketplaces. The potential to earn is limitless. If you have any skills that can offer a service, customers will connect with you directly and pay you accordingly. Fiver also has a robust user interface that is easy to navigate and understand. It's definitely a great way to utilize your skills.

Amazon to FBA

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In Focus: Investing in Q4

Q4 2020

Typically investors and analysts have a lot to look forward to in the fourth quarter of the year. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas all force consumers to buy and buy a lot. The figures reported back from retailers during a typical fourth quarter plays a big part in determining the financial health of the U.S. consumer, which sets off a bullish or bearish analysis for the following year.

But What Can Investors Expect in Q4 2020?

It's a difficult call in Q4 2020, more difficult than it's been in recent years. The stock markets recovery off of the March 2020 lows following the nationwide shelter in place orders has some investors believing the economy is back. Other investors point to the tough economic conditions outside of Wall Street that could cause this massive stock market rally to collapse or at least fall in line with what's happening with the rest of the economy.

If we look to the past for answers, we'll find that the S&P 500 has put in modest gains during the past five Q4s with one major drop. In 2019 the S&P capped an already impressive year with an ~8.2% gain in the fourth quarter. In 2018 the markets suffered a massive selloff and lost ~14.3% in the fourth quarter. In 2017 the S&P 500 registered a ~6% gain during the fourth quarter, Bitcoin registered a 209% gain during the same timeframe. In 2016 the S&P 500 gained ~4.0% and in 2015 the market gained ~6.4%.

The trend of the past five years points to the markets logging a few more points of gains to close out 2020, and so far the markets have moved up in October following the selloff in September.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Q4 has kicked off with several events that investors had been waiting on, Amazon's (AMZN) Prime Day and the announcement of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 12 with 5G.

Prime Day, which usually occurs during the summer was pushed out due to issues related to the coronavirus pandemic. Taking place on October 13 and 14, Amazon reported that small and medium sized businesses hauled in over $3.5 billion in sales during the Prime Days, nearly a 60% increase year-over-year. This was a big win for investors and analysts who believe the economy is back and the economic recovery is strong.

Apple announced its iPhone 12 with 5G. The company accurately read the room and announced 5G models of the iPhone in a variety of price ranges. The rally in the Apple stock price that dates back to 2019 was heavily influenced by the company's anticipated 5G offering. But when the pandemic hit and job losses soared a few investors questioned will consumers make a $1,000 cell phone purchase a priority?

Bullish analysts are banking on consumers rushing to the Apple store to buy their new iPhone 12 as well as consumers continuing to ring the cash register at Amazon, actions that would justify Apple's over valued stock price and the overvalued stock market as a whole.

I've stated since the summer that things are not good, and that investors shouldn't let the rising market lull them into a feeling that the economy is back.

The market's rally off of it's 2020 lows were heavily assisted by stimulus, and the back half of the rally was based on anticipation of future stimulus. We're a few weeks away from the election and there is no new stimulus in sight.

The airlines are letting go of their employees after doing their best during the pandemic to cut expenses and save jobs, but the rubber has met the road and there isn't much they can do without more welfare from Washington.

Small businesses that can't digitize their services continue to struggle amid the stock markets recovery. According to Small Business Statistics, small business employs 47% of the private labor force in the U.S,. and data from Opportunity Insights reveals that small business revenue is down 23% from where it was in January 2020.

Opportunity Insights also points to data that indicates the recession has ended for high wage earners, those making over $60,000 per year, but for workers making less than $27,000 a year, employment is still down 18% from where it was in February.

These aren't good signs, but this isn't what Wall Street looks at. 30 minutes spent watching CNBC and what you'll find is analysts speaking about their peers, as if their peers, Wall Street execs and big tech employees are the economy. It's likely that an analyst for a big bank, secure in their job and bringing in $80,000 a year will drop $1,000 on the new iPhone, and rack up on Cyber Monday but that isn't everyone.

Oftentimes, analysts and those people that predict a robust economic recovery think all Americans work for a FAANG company or Zoom (ZM). They often forget about the young adults in the early stages of their work lives like the waiters and waitresses, the fast-food workers, and grocery store employees. COVID-19, and how we handle it or mishandle it has a huge impact on the lives of these workers and their employers. These workers can't use Zoom to get business done or log in from anywhere. The stock markets recovery from March has taken place without consideration for these lower wage workers and the small businesses that employ them.

Proceed with Caution

Billionaire investor and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Howard Marks gave a grim outlook for the economy. "...This down-cycle cannot be fully cured merely through the application of economic stimulus, rather, the root cause has to be repaired, and that means the disease has to be brought under control."

Marks' statement comes as coronavirus cases are on the rise again in the U.S. and across the globe. Some places in Europe are back to putting restrictions in place to slow the spread of the virus.

How Q4 2020 shakes out will be an interesting moment in economic history. Will consumers treat 2020 like any other year and go all out for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas or will we see less spending by consumers trying to financially maneuver the pandemic until we get a vaccine?

Investors should proceed with caution in Q4. The markets have been resilient, but a conservative consumer in Q4 could be what kicks off a market sell off and a re-evaluation of company valuations to the downside.

Headlines

Three Hours Longer, the Pandemic Workday Has Obliterated Work-Life Balance (Bloomberg) Six weeks into a nationwide work-from-home experiment with no end in sight, whatever boundaries remained between work and life have almost entirely disappeared. With many living a few steps from their offices, America’s always-on work culture has reached new heights. The 9-to-5 workday, or any semblance of it, seems like a relic of a bygone era. Long gone are the regretful formalities for calling or emailing at inappropriate times. Burnt-out employees feel like they have even less free time than when they wasted hours commuting. People are overworked, stressed, and eager to get back to the office. In the U.S., homebound employees are logging three hours more per day on the job than before city and state-wide lockdowns, according to data from NordVPN, which tracks when users connect and disconnect from its service. Out of all countries that NordVPN tracks, U.S. workers had tacked on the most hours. In France, Spain, and the U.K. the day has stretched an additional two hours, NordVPN’s data found. Italy saw no change at all.

Coronavirus relief pushing US deficits to staggering heights (AP) Spend what it takes, Washington said as it confronted the coronavirus. Well over $2 trillion later, it’s unclear where that spending will end. One of the lasting legacies of the coronavirus pandemic will be staggering debts and deficits on the U.S. balance sheet, with shortfalls hitting levels that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. It’s a fiscal clamp that is likely to persist for a generation, or even into perpetuity, with debt levels having passed the point of easy return in a capital where lawmakers are increasingly incapable, or unwilling, to constrain them. The latest, and dire, projection from the Congressional Budget Office, released Friday, states the U.S. deficits will mushroom to $3.7 trillion in 2020, fueled by the four coronavirus relief bills signed into law by President Donald Trump. A fifth bill is already in the works, and will be “expensive,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Trump says he will block coronavirus aid for U.S. Postal Service if it doesn’t hike prices immediately (Washington Post) President Trump on Friday threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole. “The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. To obtain a $10 billion line of credit Congress approved this month, “The post office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” he said. Trump for years has alleged the Postal Service has charged too little for packages and personally pushed the head of the agency to charge far more to ship goods for big online retailers. Several administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump’s criticism of Postal Service rates is rooted in a desire to hurt Amazon in particular. They have said that he fumes publicly and privately at Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, for news coverage that Trump believes is unfair.

Turmoil in Brazil: Bolsonaro Fires Police Chief and Justice Minister Quits (NYT) Brazil’s justice minister, Sergio Moro, a former federal judge who became the face of a powerful anti-corruption crackdown that swept Latin America, resigned Friday after accusing President Jair Bolsonaro of seeking to assert improper control of the federal police for political gain. Mr. Moro’s acrimonious departure was a volatile and unexpected development in Brazil, where the rapid spread of the coronavirus has overwhelmed hospitals and roiled the political establishment. Mr. Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the gravity of the virus, last week fired his health minister after the two clashed over strict quarantine measures to slow the contagion. Mr. Moro was the eighth minister to leave Mr. Bolsonaro’s cabinet during the 15 months he has been in office.

Spain’s kids prepare for taste of freedom after six-week lockdown (Reuters) Spain released guidelines on Saturday allowing children to go outside after six weeks living under one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns, as figures confirmed a daily coronavirus death toll running well below the peak seen early this month. Children were trying out their masks in anticipation of their first taste of fresh air since Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declared a state of emergency on March 14. The government said under 14s will from Sunday be allowed up to one hour of supervised outdoor activity per day between 9am and 9pm, staying within one kilometre of their home.

Pakistani prime minister sidelined on coronavirus (Financial Times)​​ Imran Khan has been sidelined by Pakistan’s powerful military after failing to act decisively on the coronavirus crisis or impose a lockdown in an attempt to curb the spread of cases. On March 22, the prime minister told the nation that his government would not institute a sweeping lockdown, arguing it would put millions out of work and leave families struggling to find enough food to eat. But less than 24 hours later, military spokesman Major General Babar Iftikhar announced that the army would oversee a shutdown to halt the spread of infections in the world’s fifth most populous country of more than 200​ million ​people.​

India reopens stores, speeding easing of virus lockdowns (AP) A tentative easing around the world of coronavirus lockdowns gathered pace Saturday with the reopening in India of neighborhood stores that many of the country’s 1.3 billion people rely on for everything from cold drinks to mobile phone data cards. The relaxation of the super-strict Indian lockdown came with major caveats. It did not apply to hundreds of quarantined towns and other hotspots that have been hit hardest by the outbreak that has killed at least 775 people in India. Last week, India also allowed manufacturing and farming activities to resume in rural areas to ease the economic plight of millions of daily wage-earners left without work by the country’s lockdown imposed March 24. India’s stay-home restrictions have allowed people out of their homes only to buy food, medicine or other essentials.

In Japan, children of nurses face discrimination, exclusion over virus fears (AP) Children of Japanese medical professions face discrimination or even exclusion from day-care centers over fears they might have the novel coronavirus, increasing the stresses on front-line workers as the country’s health-care system nears collapse, according to media reports. Although most schools and day-care centers around the country are closed, some remain open. Bloomberg reported that children of medical workers were being excluded or asked to prove they didn’t have the virus. Kyodo News reported that some medical professionals had been forced to quit their jobs because of the discrimination against their family members, deepening the crisis in a profession where staff are already under massive pressure and working round-the-clock. “There’s growing prejudice and discrimination against people in the medical field,” said Shigeru Omi, the deputy head of the government’s advisory panel on the virus, according to Bloomberg. “It’s even extending to their families.”

Gaza factories roar back to life to make protective wear (AP) For the first time in years, sewing factories in the Gaza Strip are back to working at full capacity—producing masks, gloves and protective gowns, some of which are bound for Israel. It’s a rare economic lifeline in the coastal territory, which has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since the Hamas militant group seized power from rival Palestinian forces in the strip in 2007. The blockade, and three wars between Hamas and Israel, have devastated the local economy, with unemployment hovering around 50%. Rizq al-Madhoun, owner of the Bahaa garment company, said he has produced more than 1 million masks in the past three weeks, “all for the Israeli market.” Gaza may not have the advanced machinery seen in other places, but he said residents’ sewing skills are unmatched. “Gaza workers are distinguished in handiwork and they are better than workers in China or Turkey,” he said.

Ghana’s dancing pallbearers (Washington Post) You may have seen them on the Internet: six men in black suits, sunglasses and patent leather shoes grooving to a techno beat while carrying a coffin. They are Ghana’s dancing pallbearers, a crew of funeral performers who have long sought to make mourners grin through grief. But as the coronavirus pandemic rages, they’ve become the accidental faces of a stay-at-home movement—comedic grim reapers edited into footage of risky behavior as a warning. Reopening a mall when cases are mounting? Cue the dancing pallbearers. Protesting a lockdown in a covid-19 hot spot? Cue the dancing pallbearers. Forget to wash your hands before eating? Cue the dancing pallbearers. People in China, Brazil and the United States have shared video after video since the outbreak began, garnering millions of clicks and an international fan base for the group. Benjamin Aidoo, who leads the group, isn’t sure how it happened. He woke up one March morning and saw his signature moves everywhere. “It’s a bit scary, but it’s funny, too,” said Aidoo, 32, who lives in Accra, the capital of Ghana. “People are saying, ‘I’d rather stay home than have these guys bury me.’ ”

Sanders: I Will Do a Better Job ‘Explaining What We Mean by Socialism – Democratic Socialism’

“I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism — democratic socialism. Obviously, my right-wing colleagues here want to paint that as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.

“What I mean by democratic socialism is that I want a vibrant democracy. I find it interesting that people who criticize me are busy actively involved in voter suppression trying to keep people of color or low-income people from voting, because they don’t want a vibrant democracy. I do.

“Second of all, what it means, Rachel, is that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world we can provide a decent standard of living for all about people. That’s just the reality. That’s not Utopian dreaming; that is a reality. Health care for all can be done and we can save money in doing it. We can have a minimum wage which is a living wage, and I’m delighted to see that you know, right now, five states already passed fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage. The House of Representatives is gonna do it. We have got to do that.”

The problem with “democratic” Socialism is something the Left in this country should be able to intuit–but sadly don’t: sometimes you’re the party who wins the argument. And sometimes the other folks vote in President Donald Trump.

So when economic institutions are run by consensus rather than economic institutions being forced to cater to fickle customers–there will always be a large minority of customers who are as unhappy as the Left is today with our Democratically elected President.

It also never ceases to amaze me how someone on the Left who is a Bernie Supporter or who supports “Socialism” will then post endless diatribes againstthe Government for doing something stupid. Like cops arresting the wrong man. Like a local zoning commission leveling a bunch of homes for a Foxconn factory. Like the government taking cash from an innocent couple.

Our government is already “democratic”–yet this doesn’t stop our government from doing incredibly stupid things. And we’re supposed to turn over the entire economy to this same government?

The reason why Socialism fails is not because it’s not sufficiently “democratic” enough. Socialism fails because it creates a single point of failure: centralized command and control of the economy.

Through a free market, price signaling (which is a way of signaling what customers want) allows multiple suppliers to make individual decisions about the products they plan to offer and how they plan to make those products. But when decision making is pushed up to a central authority–such as a government oversight bureau–price signaling falls to the wayside. Instead of giving customers what they want, governments tell corporations what to give to customers. And like the Left who is unhappy about the 2016 Presidential Elections, some customers don’t get what they want.

Instead they get what the government tells them the should have.

If you don’t think this description–that the Government should tell us what we can consume, rather than having corporations guess what we want by providing a variety of products–doesn’t apply to Bernie Sanders, remember his famous, but rather telling quote:

You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.

But there is a rather natural result of companies (made up of and employing thousands of people) competing for your dollars.

And when they do: when companies are forced to compete for your dollars, by appealing to your desires and to your convenience, this is the natural result:

The thing is, though, one of the attacks against Capitalism by “Democratic Socialists” of all breeds, is this very excess. What many of us see as a feature, Socialists see as a bug: all that bread, just sitting there, waiting to be consumed, is somehow “proof” of either Capitalism’s waste, the excesses which are destroying our planet, or it’s proof of Capitalism’s “excesses”–the fact that the bread just sits there, when there are people who are going hungry.

These arguments was just used by an editoralist in the Guardian to argue we must end capitalism:

We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital.

The sad part, however, is that for most socialists, while they see the excess bread waiting at the store for someone to buy it as a sign of failure–they can’t envision a world where they themselves don’t have access to such a large selection of bread.

Which is what the Party leaders of the former Soviet Union did: they created two classes of stores–one for themselves and other Party leaders where there were plentiful supplies for the Party elite, and one where there were constant shortages as various 5 year plans were being “tweaked” to properly account for supply and demand constraints whose signals had been destroyed by decades of central planning.

Of course, Socialists of all stripes believe “fixing” the problem of oversupply (but perhaps limiting oversupply to an important few, ‘natch) will help the planet. Because we don’t need 23 different brands of underarm deodorant and 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are going hungry and the planet is on the brink of collapse, right?

And if a few people wind up with a temporary shortage–well, next year, with computers, we’ll somehow do better…

I remarked once elsewhere that I believed that people who call themselves “Socailists” are stupid and they hate people.

This was not just a vapid ad-hominem attack.

I believe self-described “Socialists” of all striped are willfully ignorant because they deny all this reality: they deny that the fundamental problem with “Socialism” is that it centralizes decision-making power to a handful of people who make production decisions through political, rather than economic, decision making tools. And by denying economic signals, they ultimately destroy the feedback loops that make the economy stable.

This is why things failed in Venezuela, by the way. Not because Venezuela was authoritarian (though it takes a degree of authoritarianism to tell farmers what to grow and at what price to sell their goods, and it takes a degree of authoritarianism to tell store keepers what price to charge and how much to stock).

But because Venezuela made it impossible for farmers and store keepers to do their job in an efficient manner.

And had Venezuela been run by a strongman dictator, a central committee of economists, an democratically elected board of governors, or by an on-line nation-wide plebiscite where everyone got to participate and vote–the results would have been exactly the same. Because the decision making process in all of those cases was removed from the economic forces which should motivate those decisions.

As an aside, if you’ve been following along, the smarter of you should be saying “yeah, but doesn’t this happen with large corporations?”

And you’d be exactly right. Large corporations often become inefficient because a central suite of corporate leaders decide what products to produce and at what price point to sell them at. Corporate leaders then can become fixated on providing the same products in the same way–even when market tastes or market forces demand they change–as Circuit City did, denying the rise of on-line retail of electronics, right up to the point of bankruptcy when hundreds of stores closed nation-wide.

Which is why it’s imperative that corporations which become inefficient be allowed to go bankrupt rather than limping along on government life support, such as Obama’s bailing out of General Motors. The resources General Motors would have lost in a bankruptcy hearing don’t get burned to the ground; they get purchased by other corporations who may be able to put them to better use.

Imagine the world today if Tesla had picked up a couple of functioning GM car factory plants back in 2008. It’s not unreasonable to assume we’d be farther along towards the all-electric utopia the Left keep asking for, had a Leftist President not interfered with the economy.

For a free market to function, you need two things: things governments often try to prevent. You need robust competition, such as the rise of Amazon destroying Circuit City’s business model. And you need to allow old, outdated companies to fail.

The answer to a rich billionaire is a thousand entrepreneurs pecking away at that billionaire’s business.

I also said that Socialist “hate people.”

The reason for that goes right to the heart of the “you don’t need 23 different kinds of deodorant and 18 different kinds of sneakers” remark, without considering why these things exist.

Each of these different products are, in a sense, like the bread waiting for customers: each brand, each variation, are all attempts to constantly figure out what consumers want. And we don’t all want the same thing. Me: I want a roll-on deodorant (rather than an aerosol), because my armpits don’t get that sweaty. And I want an unscented brand, because I’m sensitive to perfumes.

But if we were to decide by some sort of central committee the one brand that is allowed to be in the marketplace–because supposedly all that time and effort thousands of workers are engaged in trying to come up with a different brand that may appeal to consumers is better spent elsewhere–which brand should we have? Bernie Sander’s favorite brand? Will it be an aerosol antiperspirant which can dry out my arm pits, leading them to hurt? Will it be an “Old Spice” scented deodorant which can make me physically nauseous?

You may not want any one of the other 22 brands of deodorant in the store. But someone does. And when you eliminate them, aren’t you taking away someone else’s choice?

Are you ignoring their desires?

Isn’t that a little hateful?

So go ahead, Bernie Sanders.

Let’s have a conversation about Socialism.

Let’s allow you to get frustrated because you think–as policy makers in the past have thought countless times before–that the reason why the American public is rejecting your ideas is because somehow we’re stupid and we need those policy decisions explained to us in simpler words. Convince yourselves that Conservatives are genetically inferior, more susceptible in believing lies, and are just outright stupid. Never mind that conservatives actually do better on an ideological ‘Touring test’, meaning conservatives (and not liberals) are better at discussing oppositional beliefs without exaggerating them or resorting to negative stereotypes.

And never mind that conservatives actually understand liberal ideology better than liberals understand conservative ideology. Which is a trivially obvious conclusion, when you realize that left-wing ideology is taught in our schools and parroted on our television shows and news programs, in a country where “Das Kapital” is more likely to be read in college than “The Conservative Mind.” For most thoughtful conservatives (really, classical liberals subscribing to a brand of liberalism before “progressives” stole the term), we had to find our own way out of the weeds, guided by some references to Adam Smith and John Locke half-remembered in passing from a class on American History in high school.

I’d love to have that honest debate about socialism, not a one-way “conversation” where we are lectured to by our betters, and told by those with an agenda how their definition of “Socialism” has never been tried before because of some slippery definition that is full of double-speak and gobbledygook.

Let’s have that honest discussion, with people who know the difference between Milton Friedman and John Keynes, who understand what David Hume was trying to do and why Adam Smith’s “The Welfare of Nations” is more a book about morality than it is a primer on economics. Let’s talk about John Mill’s ideas about the use of forceable action against others.

And let’s have an honest debate over if economic decisions are better made by economic forces or by political forces.

Let’s have this discussion, as Phil Donahue did with Milton Friedman, several times.

But don’t be surprised if voters reject your ideas.

It’s not that we don’t understand them.

It’s that we understand them extremely well.

=====================

Monday, 5 August 2019

CONTENT WARNING: long post, murder, economics, death by capitalism, traumatic memories

When my firstborn was still an infant, I got a job with American Protective Services as a security guard, a "rent-a-cop." Why? Because I couldn't find a steady job at that time. Though my co-parent and I had the same work experience prior to this point, she was able to get office jobs at more than minimum wage and I wasn't. Even temp agencies weren't doing it for me. We needed to survive, so I applied at the guard agency that patrolled the complex where we lived at the time.

For the most part, I was assigned to industrial sites: biotech companies in Redwood Shores and Foster City. I was assigned to Tanforan Mall in San Bruno, CA, once, but there were post orders I refused to follow as they were inherently ageist. I was never assigned to retail security again after that, for which I'm grateful.

One night, a coworker at another industrial site was murdered. A fence* had hired 4 guys to steal home electronics from a warehouse in Hayward, CA. My coworker approached the men to inquire what they were doing on the site after hours, and he was shot without warning. He actually survived the initial shotgun blast to his chest. The second shot to his head as he lay bleeding was fatal, though.

He was never given a chance. He was simply shot to death for working. He was a husband and father of two. And because of capitalism--both his need for his family's survival and the fence's desire to exploit the system--he was shot to death.

This wasn't a mall rent-a-cop, chasing kids and homeless people out of a food court. This was a man of color who had been trying to provide for his family by working after hours security at an industrial site. But because he was a rent-a-cop, his life was ended.

I tried to find a way out of security as quickly as I could at that point. Many, though not all, folks who work as rent-a-cops are financially marginalized. "Retirees" who only retired because they were laid off. POC who can't find work elsewhere because of racism. What are people supposed to do when they need to provide for themselves and their families and they're denied work routinely? Should my coworker and I both have chosen to be deadbeat dads for the sake of principles?

I have a Facebook connection who recently posted, "Fuck rent-a-cops," and this post is not meant as an attack against them. Rather, this post is due to trauma resurfaced as what to my mind seemed like a disregard for the entire group of workers in this field. An interesting fact is that most of the higher ups were white, whereas most of my guard coworkers were not. I had clerical experience but could not get a clerical a job. My coworker was literally killed for being a rent-a-cop, and he's not the only one I can think of who was. He's just the one whose memory is most traumatic for me as it was so close to home.

I just had to get this out. The last couple of weeks have been trips down traumatic memory lane for me.

_____________

* For those unaware of the term, a “fence” in this case is a person who sells stolen property.

The Face of Tomorrow

Sitting, eyes red and head drooping, foot almost glued to the pedal, feeding the coarse material through the needle.  At last, she moved her foot away and let her head fall. Another piece finished.  Twenty shirts, all exactly the same, already today.

But before Ode could take a few moments to rest her arms and have a sip of water the foreman arrived to snatch away the finished shirt, saying ‘Atta girl, plenty more where that came from’, and pushed a sewing pattern down in front of her tired eyes. This was quickly followed by ‘Here you go then, next piece’ as he thrust a pile of cut-outs on to the heavily scratched beech wood of her small work desk.  The new pieces were in a dazzling shade of almost iridescent blue with a subtle pattern of thin black lines running through them. Ode sat up and stared, mesmerised. The foreman couldn’t understand it. ‘It’s the same shirt dear, just different material’ he explained slowly, as if Ode was some kind of simpleton.

Since leaving school Ode had spent long hours working in the dilapidated red brick building only the boss calls the Golden Garment Company factory.  Her fellow workers called it the workshop. Her old school friends called it the sweatshop. Long hours and poor pay, but ‘it’s a job’. And without qualifications Ode felt lucky to be employed at all.  She knew it was only because her mother had taught her the basic skills required – through making her sew and mend from a very young age, - that she’d got the job in the first place.  In her own family, new clothes were a rare and almost unheard of luxury. It had been that way since they had fled to escape the fighting, arriving in Britain from Nigeria when Ode was a small child.  

She had never owned the kind of on-trend fashionable clothes that she’d seen on some of the city’s girls. And she knew anyway that she was plain and unattractive. Fancy clothes wouldn’t hide that. People had never been backward in coming forward to tell her so.  

Once, she’d gone with her friend to try on expensive clothes in a posh shop – it was what they did, try them on, admire themselves in the mirrors, and then return the clothes to the rails.  Sometimes Ode took even longer as she examined the textiles, the way a particular fabric had been cut, sewn, pleated. It was much more valuable to examine the actual clothes, see exactly how they had been treated, cut on the bias or whatever, than to read about them in the odd fashion magazine that came her way. She could understand why her behaviour could irritate the woman in charge of the changing rooms and how she might get annoyed.  When Ode emerged wearing a floor length sequined gown the woman had carped ‘You don’t really fit the modelling mould, do you love? Not got the required features: not thin enough, not tall enough, and your legs are too short.’ It cut Ode to the bone, but still she couldn’t shake the obsession.

In fact she became quite acclimatised to cruel humiliation. ‘Your cheekbones are too low, nose is too big, your mouth is too wide, the shape and colour of your eyes is all wrong.’ In a way it made her more resilient. ‘You can’t squeeze into that dress my girl, even the bust’s not right.  In fact, your whole build is all wrong for those kinds of dresses. To be honest I can’t see even spending a fortune on make-up and cosmetics making much difference.’ Even when it left her almost in tears Ode found she could cope. That was just how her life was and since it was likely to stay that way she better get used to it.  

Somehow she just couldn’t help herself.  She inevitably found herself starting conversations with workmates, family, and sometimes even strangers at the bus stop by commenting on their clothes. She offered them her ideas on what might suit them better.  But what she considered sensible suggestions were often received as rudeness; unwarranted intrusions, impolite, offensive, insulting. On the odd occasions when she had ventured to make such suggestions to her friends they had either laughed out loud, asked what on earth she was thinking, or stared at her as if they thought he was going mad.  

But at least the meagre wages she was earning allowed her the very occasional luxury purchase. The unusual blue cloth triggered her desire.  At the end of the day she noticed the scrag end of a roll abandoned on the cutting room floor. She picked it up and approached the foreman.

‘Could I take this home with me?’ she asked

The foreman knew there was not enough material for another garment and that it would only be swept up and put in the refuse with the rest of the rubbish. He barked back ‘Of course not, it belongs to the company,’

‘I could pay for it,’ Ode answered timidly.

‘How much?’

‘I have six pounds saved,’ said Ode, rummaging in her pocket then stretching out her hand showing him the money.

The foreman cast his eyes furtively around the now empty room. ‘Sold’, he muttered, quickly grabbing the cash from Ode’s hand.

With the dress-making skills her mother had somewhat forcefully bequeathed to her Ode intended to cut the material into embellishments for her existing clothes.  But then she struck on the idea of unpicking the stitching of her own dress and using her own quirky ideas to remake it in a wholly new style, one she imagined would show off the blue material properly. The dress she created was highly unusual, a peculiar variation on the traditional dress of her ancestors, a new take on the sort of clothes her mother wore as if she still walked the Nigerian countryside every day. A matching gele, or headdress, completed the effect.

At first her best friend, Uma, impulsive and beautiful, with big eyes and an impish smile, was the only one she would allow to see her new ‘African’ dress. Then one day Uma said ‘Is real neat, yah. But what you gonna do wit it though – just sit at home wearin it, starin at youself in the mirror like you famous?  Shu, no girl like you ever gonna wear that kinda thing on the street.’

But maybe that was just the challenge Ode had been waiting for.  The very next Saturday she wore her highly original new dress while accompanying Uma to Harlesden market, shopping for yams, plantain, and cooking bananas.  She drew admiring glances from other girls, saying ‘Stunna, innit’ and ‘You got an ankara buba now Ode?’.  Even some of the boys approached her, passing comments like ‘That’s a wicked colour’, and ‘Cool dress’.  A white boy mentioned her ‘Impressive kaftan.’

Ode’s girlfriends were quick to convert to a full appreciation of the new style. They found themselves re-thinking the fashion advice Ode had tried to give them, which they’d previously rejected as ridiculously outlandish. It didn’t take long before they were asking her advice on materials, and arranging for Ode to run up clothes for them at home after they brought her the lengths of cloth they’d bought.

One Saturday afternoon Ode and Uma passed the unimposing little shopfront of a professional photographer.  They paused outside for a moment before Uma, on the spur of the moment, marched in, her friend trailing behind, and asked him to take photos of her. ‘For a fashion model portfolio?’ the photographer had joked, and Uma surprised herself when, the idea having been put in her head, she replied ‘Well yes.’ When she asked him for the names and addresses of modelling agencies her Ode’s laughter became uncontrollable. But still, he’d gamely suggested a few names while keeping his grin in check.

Uma collected the big glossy photos the next weekend and posted them off to New Vision Models, one of the names she’d remembered.  Surprisingly, the agency, under pressure to demonstrate greater ‘diversity’, invited her for an interview. But when Uma arrived to speak to Zelda it was quickly clear that she wasn’t really interested. Uma was glad she’d gone alone and that her friend wasn’t there to hear Zelda’s casual, acerbic comments on her height, weight, and the size of her feet.

Zelda’s phone rang.  It was an urgent request.  One of their clients had put together a mail order catalogue that had to go to print next day and they’d only just realized all the models they’d used were white. They couldn’t afford to be depicted as racially biased and they couldn’t afford to re-schedule the printing job.  In fact, business was so bad because of all the new online retailers that unless the catalogue brought in a lot of sales they knew the company was going to collapse anyway.  As a matter of fact they couldn’t even afford to pay the usual going rate for models but they desperately needed someone within the hour.

So for a minimal fee, from which Uma would earn only ‘experience’, the agency sent her to wear cheap clothes for some quickfire photographs which would be included in a mail order women’s clothes catalogue that would be printed in great haste on cheap paper. In their hurry a shot was taken of Uma wearing the dress in which she’d arrived, a dress designed and stitched together by Ode. The photo was included along with an arbitrary price the catalogue editor had made up on the spot.

Inevitably, the catalogue’s readers hated the clothes and bought very little.  But even while the company was folding, comments proliferated across the social media about one of the models, how she was so different to the usual mannequin-like catalogue clothes-horses and actually looked like a ‘normal lively girl’ for a change. As attention was directed towards Uma, more readers also commented that the only item of clothing in the catalogue that was worth buying was one that she modelled – a sort of esoteric take on traditional West African dress. Unusually, the dress was in bright pink rather than the usual primary colours and its pattern was picked out in subtle, swirling crimson and gold.  Surprisingly, the cut was for a casual dress style, a chiseled cut and only knee-length, with a rectangular neckline. Equally surprisingly, the dress was still somehow unmistakeably African.

While casually flicking through Instagram discussions a young man linked it to a message he sent to the husband of Phoebe, a young aspiring clothes designer. ‘People are saying there’s someone, something out there, that is “different” ‘.

When the husband brought it to her attention Phoebe investigated.  She checked Instagram. The nape of her neck prickled. She tracked down a copy of the printed catalogue.  She phoned the catalogue company, then the modelling agency, and then Uma herself. When she discovered who had made the catalogue’s one outstanding clothes item her sense of excitement went into overdrive. She ran out of her office in Jermyn Street and was soon on the Bakerloo Line heading north to Harlesden.  When she found the flat in the high-rise she confused Ode’s mother by asking to talk to the girl with the perfect eye.

The social media hubbub also reached Zelda.  She was quickly back in contact with Uma, offering her more work, and insisting the company could live up to its name of New Vision.

Ode handed in her notice at the sweatshop. The foreman told her to stay, warned her she’d regret leaving, since his own pay was linked to production and he knew how hard Ode worked. But Ode began working with Phoebe.  With Ode’s ideas and Phoebe’s business contacts it wasn’t long before they were selling vast numbers of new garments, not only throughout the UK but to the near two hundred million Nigerians and to other parts of West Africa.

Within a year Uma’s cheerful face was on billboards and the cover of Cosmopolitan. She was following in the footsteps of Iman and Naomi Campbell.

But Ode’s face, despite the cheekbones being too low, nose too big, mouth too wide, and shape and colour of the eyes all wrong, was the real face of tomorrow. It was already to be found on the inside pages of Business Today as well as StyleWatch, Glamour, and West Africa Now.  The world had moved on. The face of Britain was multicultural and not only was the West African market online, but the whole face of Africa was changing fast. Given the respect accorded a top class designer, business couldn’t be better.

GOP Sees Inflation as New Weapon to Bludgeon Biden, Democrats | The Report

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/economy/gop-sees-inflation-as-new-weapon-to-bludgeon-biden-democrats-the-report/

GOP Sees Inflation as New Weapon to Bludgeon Biden, Democrats | The Report

The Republican Party may have found an issue with which to clobber Democrats as it gears up for what is likely to be a very close midterm election cycle: inflation.

The message was delivered loud and clear Tuesday in House Republican Whip Steve Scalise’s opening statement before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus, where Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was testifying.

“The Biden inflation agenda of too much money chasing too few goods is causing major harm to hard-working American families,” ranking member Scalise said after running down a laundry list of pet peeves that included the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March that included $300-a-week enhanced unemployment benefits, and another $4 trillion in proposed spending on infrastructure, child care, education and family-oriented programs.

Scalise ran down a list of common items that have risen sharply in price over the past year or so, with a chart on an easel behind him showing milk up 5%, bacon up 13%, gas up 56%, used cars up 30% and transportation up 16%.

Some of those comparisons may be exaggerated because of the time frame over which they are calculated. Take gas, which in 2020 hit its lowest average price just below $2 as people stayed home during the pandemic. If the price is measured from March, 2020 when the coronavirus was first deemed a pandemic, the increase is a little more than 21%. But that largely gets lost in the conversation, especially when the purpose is to make a political point.

Referring to the consumer price index showing inflation running at a 5% annual rate in May, Scalise asked Powell, “Is 5% inflation acceptable to you?”

Political Cartoons

Powell’s answer: “No, certainly not.”

“What is Scalise’s argument,” asks prominent Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, president, NDN and the New Policy Institute. “Is he saying we should have a slower economy and fewer jobs?”

Powell and many economists believe the spike in inflation is temporary, the result of year-over-year comparisons to a period when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the economy and prices plummeted for many items. The Fed has indicated it believes inflation will subside later this year, although its forecast for 2021 annual inflation is still well above its stated goal of 2%.

Prices for certain items have been distorted by global shipping conditions, which were thrown into disarray by the pandemic. As shippers reduced container capacity rather than lose money going to sea half empty, supply chains became congested, resulting in a shortage of critical parts like semiconductors. That led to a scarcity of new cars, which then drove up the price of used vehicles.

“Many Gen Xers and Baby Boomers remember the days of crazy inflation in the late 1970s and worry that that could happen again.”

But this is not really an economic argument. This is about politics and control of the House in 2022.

In May, the Republican Study Group sent a memo from its chairman, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, outlining the message to be delivered.

“Of course, they’re trying to spin the media and explain that it has nothing to do with their big-spending policies,” the memo, first reported by Axios, said. “Which we know is simply false. That’s why we need to tie inflation to the Biden economy.”

The Republican message is that the economy was roaring before the pandemic, with unemployment at historic lows, the stock market humming and that were it not for a virus that they blame on China, everything would be hunky dory.

Andrew Romeo, spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, says that the GOP has a good message when it comes to the economy. He notes that 25 states, all with Republican governors, have either curtailed or plan to curtail the $300-a-week additional unemployment benefit. And recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 16 of the top 20 states that have recovered the most jobs lost during the pandemic, measured on a percentage basis, are red states.

“State Republican leaders have a really strong case as to how they are handling the economy,” Romeo says. “If you elect Democrats, they are going to pursue a tax and spending agenda that is hurting the American people.”

The message was on display this week in Virginia, where Republicans started running ads in state races that begin with the statement: “Here’s what we get with Democrats controlling Washington: rising inflation and higher taxes.”

Democratic strategist Rosenberg says Democrats need to combat the GOP messaging by reiterating how the American Rescue Plan and other moves by the Biden administration to speed up vaccinations have improved lives for average Americans and helped the economy recover and grow.

“We have to more consciously understand we are in a real economic debate with the Republicans,” Rosenberg says, “regardless of the merits of their arguments. We haven’t finished the job yet. We have to win this first-stage argument.”

By many measures, the economy is roaring: The nation’s gross domestic product rose at an annual rate of 6.4% in the first quarter and may surpass that this quarter, the stock market continues to be at record-high levels, the housing market is on fire and there are more than 9 million open jobs, although companies say it is difficult to hire workers.

“The first problem is that Jerome Powell was appointed chairman by Donald Trump,” says Scott Lilly, who spent three decades on Capitol Hill serving as staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, executive director of the House Democratic Study Group and executive director of the Joint Economic Committee. “Their complaint is more about monetary policy than fiscal policy.”

Lilly says the inflation of the moment is unlike that of the post-1970s and early 1980s, when former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker successfully broke the back of inflation with interest rates that reached 20% and led to a brutal recession and an unemployment rate that topped 10%.

In the years after that, production of goods ramped up in Europe and Asia, in particular, creating a global supply system that exists today – and was sharply disrupted by the pandemic. Continued tight money policies by Alan Greenspan, who served five terms as chairman, kept the Fed’s priorities more on fighting inflation than on employment. Indeed, toward the end of his term the nation saw the “jobless recovery.”

Like many economic observers, Lilly says the recent spike in inflation is more a result of the country coming out of a period of lockdown than it is underlying fundamentals.

“There’s no shortage of timber in the U.S. but there is a shortage of lumber because we shut the sawmills down,” he says. That shortage drove lumber prices to record levels in the past year, although they have recently subsided somewhat.

Powell, in contrast to Volcker and Greenspan, has placed a much greater emphasis on reaching maximum employment and addressing inequalities in the labor market that have resulted in higher rates of unemployment for minorities and lower-wage workers. At its essence, the debate over inflation is about how the pie is divided and who gets the larger slice.

“This is a policy opportunity for the unscrupulous who would try to exploit it,” Lilly says. “I do think people can be swayed.”

But there is no doubt consumers are seeing higher prices for many commonly purchased products and inflation has caught the eye of Americans, whether they work on Wall Street or shop on Main Street.

“I do think inflation is an issue that could resonate with voters,” says David Cohen, professor of political science at the University of Akron. “Many Gen Xers and Baby Boomers remember the days of crazy inflation in the late 1970s and worry that that could happen again.”

Cohen adds that while Americans are more optimistic about the economy and direction of the country than they have been, “There is an underlying concern that inflation could derail the economy, and the cost of everything from housing to food to automobiles could skyrocket. President Jimmy Carter was a victim of inflation and a sour economy in 1980, and a struggling economy is always a problem for an incumbent president and their party.”

A national Fox News poll, released Wednesday, found that inflation was the leading economic concern for voters, with 83% saying so, ahead of taxes and unemployment. The split among party affiliation was 88% among Republicans, but also an overwhelming majority of Democrats, at 80%. Overall, the poll of 1,001 voters found 51% approving of how Biden is handling the economy, with 47% disapproving.

The poll also found 53% saying the enhanced unemployment benefits were hurting the economy, a sharp difference from the 62% who said they felt they were a necessary lifeline during the pandemic.

“From a policy perspective, this is something voters care about,” Romeo says.

Other indicators of consumer concern have emerged recently. Economic sentiment fell for the fourth straight reading over the last two weeks in the latest HPS-CivicScience Economic Sentiment Index, falling 1.6 points to 46.3. While the index saw a new record for confidence in the job market, declines in confidence in making a major purchase and in the housing market outweighed the jobs index.

“Consumers find themselves in an economy featuring record high numbers of open jobs but also historically expensive homes and rising inflation fears,” according to the ESI release.

And consumer buying practices are shifting as people get back to their pre-pandemic lives, which further complicates the inflation picture. At TD Bank, which provides retailers and others with private-label credit cards, the rate of purchases of “pandemic darlings” like home fitness gear, furniture and the like have slowed, says Mike Rittler, head of retail card services. Now, the emphasis is on clothing, gasoline and restaurants, he says.

Rittler notes that credit has become much more available compared to a year ago, when the nation was facing massive unemployment.

“Customer liquidity is at an all-time high, there’s a lot of capacity to spend,” he says. “The spike (in inflation) may last a little bit longer than we hope, but I don’t think it’s anything systematic or long term.”

That’s not likely to matter to the GOP’s argument.

“If you look at just the two mandates of the Federal Reserve – maximum employment and stable prices – right now we don’t have either, ” Scalise told Powell, “and it’s because of policy decisions, policy decisions primarily by the Biden administration.”

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Minimum wage

THE GOOD

It prevents workers from being exploited by employers, beginning in 1938

In theory, this wage is enough to live on, meaning one can afford sufficient food, shelter, clothing.

Many states and cities have their own, higher minimum wage. Check out your state’s minimum wage here.

THE BAD

It hasn’t kept up with inflation. Workers who earn today’s minimum wage earn 27% less than their counterparts of 50 years ago.

Young workers and women are more likely to earn minimum wage: 40% of minimum wage earners are under age 25.

THE UGLY

Currently minimum wage is $7.25/hour (as it has been since 2009)

So $7.25/hr * 40hr/wk * 52 wk = $15,080/yr - is this really enough to live on?? Side note: at least it keeps you above the federal poverty line ($12,880 for individuals but woe to you if you’re not a single person trying to live on that since poverty level is $17,420 for 2 people; I am digressing but #realtalk let’s remember what rent in most cities costs if you’re trying for something livable and hygienic)

The biggest sector using minimum wage is the restaurant and food service industry but also includes retail salespeople, construction, and educators [Pew].

In 2019, approximately 1.6 million workers earned wages at or below the minimum wage of $7.25. 

THE HISTORY

Minimum wage was established as part of Roosevelt’s 1938 New Deal package, designed to protect American workers during the Great Depression since wages had dropped to pennies a day. The first minimum wage was set at $0.25/hour (equal to $4.64/hr in 2021) and the New Deal also capped the workweek at 44 hours and eliminated child labor (some kids had been working 60 hours a week prior to this change).

SUPPORT FOR MINIMUM WAGE

Worker productivity is higher since they have better morale and standard of living.

Income inequality is reduced.

It is an incentive to work and can be a more powerful alternative to universal basic income or support and welfare programs.

Economic growth is enhanced since workers have more money to send.

Employee retention can be improved since workers are less likely to leave for higher-paying work. This advantages businesses. 

CONCERNS ABOUT MINIMUM WAGE

It will prove too expensive for small businesses and will drive them out of business by raising labor costs.

It penalizes labor-intensive industries (e.g. education, farming) rather than capital-intensive industries (e.g. auto manufacturing, telecommunications).

It increases outsourcing (to better understand the phenomenon of outsourcing, read up on globalization).

Increases the cost of living: you’re making more money so landlords can raise rents which causes inflation; rinse and repeat.

EXEMPTIONS TO MINIMUM WAGE

Not everyone is required to pay or earn a minimum wage. Here are some examples.

Small businesses - businesses making under $500,000/year can pay less than minimum wage if they are not engaged in interstate commerce. Not sure how this applies to situations like small Etsy shops based in Ohio but shipping around the country.

Hiring students - businesses hiring students to work in schools/universities, agriculture, and retail or service stores can receive a Department of Labor exemption allowing them to pay a student 85% of minimum wage. By that logic, then, high school and college students get to pay just 85% of rent prices and goods’ prices??

Tipped jobs - tipped employees can be paid $2.13/hr so long as their tips make up the difference to reach the hourly $7.25. If the tips don’t make the difference, the employer must pay the difference. This can put workers in uncomfortable and/or compromising situations, both with customers and with their employers: is it worth a battle over wearing a mask in case they lose the tip? If they didn’t make minimum wage in tips tonight but made $300 in tips last night, is it worth making a fuss to make sure their employer pays?

People with disabilities - employers can pay people with disabilities a special minimum wage if the disability is perceived to lower the worker’s productivity. This is criminal and sickening. Learn about Goodwill Industries and its use of this loophole.

Prison labor - enough said. This is a modern-day form of slavery since companies or state entities can hire the labor of incarcerated individuals for pennies per hour (if they’re even being paid), with some prisons requiring incarcerated individuals to purchase necessities like socks and soap at the prison’s overpriced commissary. In this way, prisons profit from housing incarcerated individuals, hiring out their labor and then compensating them at less than $1/hr (or perhaps for nothing at all, in places like Texas and Florida!), and then charging incarcerated individuals high prices at the commissary. This is a modern sharecropping system.

SOURCES

TheBalance: “Minimum Wage with Its Purpose, Pros, Cons, and History”

The Economic Policy Institute: “Minimum Wage Tracker”

The Economic Policy Institute: “Federal Poverty Level Guidelines and Chart”

Anti Racism Daily: “Raise the Minimum Wage.”

Anti Racism Daily: “Abolish prison labor.”

THE NEWS & RELEVANCY

Proponents of minimum wage increases (@ BernieSanders et al) requested a $15/hr federal minimum wage in the most recent behemoth COVID relief bill (& it was removed before passing)

There is a lot of chatter in the news lately about minimum wage increases, due to discussions about frontline/essential workers in the COVID health crisis, entrenched racism, and a wacky economic situation, domestically and globally.

THE EXTRA & THE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

Joseph Dean via Medium: “The Racist History of the Minimum Wage”

Chris Calton via The Liberty Conservative: “The Racist History of Minimum Wage Laws”

Should we experiment with Basic Income? This idea was brought more into the mainstream with Andrew Yang’s 2020 Presidential run (he is now running for NYC mayor and still has a basic income as part of his platform)

Annie Lowrey via The Atlantic: “Stockton’s Basic-Income Experiment Pays Off”

MKorostoff produced this powerful wealth visual

Fight for $15 Campaign

How has COVID impacted the numbers of people earning minimum wage? It seems many of those minimum wage jobs (in restaurants, hospitality, travel, etc.) disappeared and have not yet returned.

I just read this fascinating paper about clientelization for my class: Ronald Dore's Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism (1983), which talks about how some submarkets in Japan tend to consist of entities that deal with each other on a personal and recurring basis, far more than other developed economies (at the time). Dore talks about a dynamic he calls relational contracting: economic relationships that are treated as personal relationships (even between large entities), where 'someone else is cheaper' is not an acceptable reason to cut an ongoing relation but 'you're not dealing with me sincerely/with goodwill' is, where prices/orders tend to flexible and favorable towards the party who has a market disadvantage (e.g. only has a few major customers), where biannual gifts are an expected part of the business relationship.

The paper is really interesting and I quoted a lot of it below, but Dore is not a very good writer, and I've taken slightly more than minimal liberties in typing this out, for clarity and relevance. Below: some quotes about zaibatsu, national loyalty and astonishing resistance to imports when domestic producers are struggling, a hypothesis that more personal / trust-based business relations appear in affluent economies where consumers care more about quality than price. Caveat: paper is several decades old, and I don’t know enough about econ to judge whether any of this is obviously bullshit.

On zaibatsu:

Competition between Japanese firms is intense, but only in markets which are (a) consumer markets and (b) expanding. ... What does concern us here are markets in producers' goods, in intermediates. And for many such commodities markets can hardly be said to exist. Take steel, for instance, and one of its major uses for automobiles. The seven car firms buy their steel through trading companies, each from two or three of the major steel companies, in proportions which vary little from year to year. Prices, in this market, are set by the annual contract between the champions.

It is the concentration of such relationships which is the dominant characteristic of the famous large enterprise groups, known [to foreigners] as zaibatsu. These groups are quite distinct from the hierarchical groupings of affiliates and subsidiaries around some of the giant individual firms like Hitachi. The Mitsubishi group, for example, has no clear hierarchical structure. In its core membership of 28 firms, there is a certain amount of intra-group share ownership – on average about 26% of total equity widely dispersed throughout the group in 3~4% shares. There is a tiny amount of interlocking directorships – about 3% in all directors' seats. And most of the firms have the group bank as their lead bank, and bank of last pleading resort, but that bank provides on average less than 20% of all loan finance to group firms. The only thing which formally defines the identity of the group is the lunch on the last Friday of the month when the Presidents of every company in the group get together, often to listen to a lecture on, say, the oil market in the 1990s, to discuss matters like political party contributions, sometimes to hear news of, or give blessings to, some new joint venture...

The main raison d'etre of these groups is as networks of preferential, stable, obligated, bilateral trading relationships, networks of relational contracting. They are not conglomerates because they have no central board or holding company. They are not cartels because they are all in diverse lines of business. Each group has a bank and a trading company, a steel firm, an automobile firm, a major chemical firm, a shipbuilding and plant engineering firm, and so on... Hence, trade in producer goods within the group can be brisk.

A statistic that demonstrates how dominant exchange/trade across continuing relations are:

The starting point of this discussion of relational contracting was the search for reasons to explain why it made sense for the [Japanese] spinning firms to coordinate production neither through hierarchy (integration of economic entities into one firm), nor through the market (in the normal sense of continuously pursuing the best buy), but through 'relational contracting'. It was, I said, because such arrangements could be relied on in Japan more than in most other economies. There is one striking statistic that illustrates the extent to which it is relied on. The volume of wholesale transactions in Japan is no less than four times as great as the volume of retail transactions. For France, the multiple is 1.2; for Britain, West Germany and the USA the figure is between 1.6 and 1.9.

On loyalty and nationalism:

The Japanese economy is riddled with misallocation. Take the market for steel which I mentioned earlier. Brazil and Korea can now land some kinds of steel in Japan more cheaply than Japanese producers can supply it. But very little of it is sold. Japan can remain as pure as the driven snow in GATT terms – no trigger prices, minimal tariffs, no quotas – and still have a kind of natural immunity to steel imports. None of the major trading companies would touch Brazilian or Korean steel, especially now that things are going so badly for their customers, the Japanese steel companies. Small importers are willing to handle modest lots. But they will insist on their being landed at backwater warehouses away from where any domestic steel is going out, so that the incoming steel is not seen by a steel company employee. If that happens, the lorries taking the steel out might be followed to their destination. And the purchaser, if he turned out to be a disloyal customer, would be marked down for less than friendly treatment next time a boom brings a seller's market.

On how the kind of personal obligations that drive relational contracting can be beneficial to an economy:

– The Japanese system of relational contracting has merits which, I suggest, more than compensate for its price-distorting consequences. The compensatory advantages which go with the disadvantage of inflexible wage costs are reasonably well known. In a career employment system people accept that they have to be learning new jobs; it makes more sense for firms to invest in training... If a firm's market is declining, it is less likely to respond simply by cutting costs to keep profits up, more likely to search desperately for new product lines to keep busy the workers it is committed to employing anyway. Hence a strong growth dynamism.

– The relative security of such relations encourages investment in supplying firms. The spread of robots has been especially rapid in Japan's engineering subcontracting firms in recent years.

– The relationships of trust and mutual dependency make for a more rapid flow of information.

– A by-product of the system is a general emphasis on quality. What holds the relation together is the sense of mutual obligation. If one side fails to live up to his obligations, the other side is released from his. According to the relational contract ethic, it maybe difficult to ditch a supplier because, for circumstances beyond his control, he is not giving you the best buy. It is perfectly proper to ditch him if he is not giving the best buy and not even trying to match the best buy. A supplier who consistently fails to meet quality requirements is in danger of losing even an established relational contract.

A hypothesis that relational contracting arises in affluent economies, and that we ought to see less neoclassical profit-maximizing behavior in firms and individuals in well-off societies:

In the British textile trade, Marks and Spencers is well known for its relational contracting, squeezing suppliers a bit in times of trouble but not ditching them as long as they are maintaining quality standards. In the supermarket world, Sainsbury's have the same reputation, supposedly very different from that of Tesco's, which believes that frequent switching of supplies encourages others to keep the price down.

Try adding together the following thoughts.

– Marks and Spencers is well known for one thing besides relational contracting, namely that it bases its appeal on product quality more than on price.

– There is an apparent relation between a quality emphasis and relational contracting in Japan.

– Sainsburys is up-market compared to Tesco, which is for keen pricers.

– Japan's consumer markets are generally reckoned to be more middle-class, more quality sensitive, and less price-sensitive than Britains. Textile people have given me rough estimates that if one divides the clothing market crudely into two groups, one that is fastidious about quality and not too conscious of price, and one that looks at price rather than neatness of stitching, in Britain the proportions are 25:75, in Japan 60:40.

– Japan of the 1920s, and again in the postwar period, was much more of a cut-throat jungle than it is today. Not the ethics of relational contracting nor the emphasis on product quality nor the lifetime employment system, seem to have been characteristic of earlier periods of Japanese industrialization.

Add all these fragments together an an obvious hypothesis emerges that relational contracting is a phenomenon of affluence. It is when people become better off and the market-stall haggle gives way to [a world where] best buys are defined more by quality than by price, that relational contracting comes into its own.

It does so for two reasons: first because quality assurance has to depend more on trust. You always know whether the butcher is charging you sixpence or sevenpence. But if you don't know the difference between sirloin and rump, and you think your guests might, then you have to trust your butcher. Also, I suspect, when affluence reduces price pressures, any tendencies to prefer a relationship of friendly stability to the poker-game pleasures of adversarial bargaining – tendencies which might have been formerly suppressed by the anxious concerns not to lose a penny – are able to assert themselves.

Applying this hypothesis to explain the shift in employment contracts in the West:

(...) The fragmentary evidence about relational contracting in interfirm trading relations in Britain is complemented by evidence of its growth in the labour market. Not only Britain, but Europe in general – even the USA to a lesser extent – are no longer countries where employers hire and fire without compunction. In industries like steel, job tenures are valued at well over a year's wage. More generally, labour mobility has been falling for 15 years. More attention to career promotion within the firm and managerial doctrines about 'work involvement' in the enterprise exemplify the transformation of the employment contract into a more long-term, more diffuse commitment.

PANTA RHEI KAI OUDEN MENEI

Picture: Rwanda - Akagera National Park - Crocodile

Reflections on development in economics and society

The title of this essay is a quotation of Socrates in Plato’s book Cratylus, in which the famous Greek philosopher announced: "Heraclitus says that everything moves and nothing is stable". He referred hereby to the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. The expression "Panta rhei" synthesizes for him the thought of a world in perpetual motion. [1]

Development does not always go in the right direction

We can apply this paradigm to our own society. Since 1968 we have been living in a period of transition. There is nowadays great technological progress that disturbs balances. [2]  It is not my intention to build up a political discourse. I would, however, like to dwell on a number of phenomena in the economy of which the public begins to realize that they are not improving the quality of life.

First of all there have been the disruptive technology companies that have made a steep rise on the stock exchange but whose added value is being questioned worldwide: AirBnB, Amazon and Uber.

In the past years, almost 10,000 families have been driven out of their homes throughout the city of Lisbon. In the meantime, Lisbon has more Airbnb accommodations per inhabitant than any other city in Europe, including Paris, London and Brussels. The exploding prices for housing mean that families who have to live on one minimum wage can no longer pay rented accommodation. Some are forced to move into abandoned buildings, where they (survive) live in extremely difficult circumstances.[3]

In retail, Amazon accounts for 53 percent of all e-commerce sales growth. This has been devastating already. Twice as many stores closed in 2017, or 8,600, as the year before. Department store jobs have plummeted from 1.782 million in June 2001 to 1.27 million by November 2017. Of course, success and efficiency are not crimes, nor is bigness, unless it prevents anyone else from competing. [4]

The world’s largest ride-hailing company Uber, operating in many cities throughout the world, and still not making profit, received a blow recently. Indeed the London transport regulator has decided that the taxi app can no longer operate in the British capital. The Achilles heel of the company are its drivers, the way they are selected and also the way they are paid. Next to New York, San Francisco and Sai Paolo, London is Uber’s largest market with 3.5 million customers and the 45,000 drivers. [5]

Where is the Panta Rhei aspect in all this?

From Athens and Amsterdam to Paris and Berlin, Airbnb is facing all the more obstacles since it first entered the market a decade ago, as authorities try to restrict the expansion of the home-sharing practice that has taken popular destinations by storm.

Amazon, just like Google and Facebook, is targeted by Democratic presidential candidates because of their monopoly situation. US Senator Elisabeth Warren goes the furthest and advocates breaking up the companies into regional parts, just as was done for Standard Oil and Bell in the early twentieth century. The logic behind this is that extreme market dominance leads to monopoly power and abuses, eventually sweeping away workers, competitors, and potential competitors, while bullying suppliers and stifling innovation. Such aggressive “vertical integration” is precisely why Standard Oil had to be busted up. Like Amazon, Standard Oil controlled all its marketplaces and forced all its competitors out of business or to become captive buyers and sellers of its goods and services.[6]

Everywhere Uber turns, a conveyor belt of new antagonists keeps emerging around the globe. In India, Uber is battling a service called Ola. In Brazil, it is dueling Didi Chuxing, a Chinese company that bought the local ride-hailing operator 99 last year. (Uber owns a stake in Didi.) And newfangled transportation companies, such as electric scooter providers, have popped up.

Bolt, an Estonian start-up, is an example of a troublesome trend for Uber. Bolt is now planning to confront Uber in one of its most lucrative cities: London. The smaller firm is reapplying for a taxi license to operate in the British capital after regulators there rebuffed it in 2017.[7] Of Bolt is known that they can have their programming carried out at a third of the cost for Uber in Eastern Europe. And above all: that they cooperate with existing taxi companies as an increase in their turnover and not as a competitor.

In addition to the disruptive technology companies, there are a number of trends that raise more and more questions. It is striking that most of these stories originated in the United States. This is of course primarily due to the fact that the US is a country with very little legislation that regulates the lives of citizens and directs trade. Moreover, everyone is responsible for his social security. That leaves the coast clear for cowboys who want to get rich quickly.

Even internet domain names for non-profit organizations are no longer safe for money makers. ICANN, the organization that manages the global system of internet domain names, decided recently to lift price restrictions for all types of internet suffixes. The owner of the .org suffixes, destined to non-profit organisations, Internet Society (Isoc) suddenly announced in November 2019 that the management of the .org suffix had been resold to Ethos Capital. From now on, it will operate the domain as a commercial activity. Ethos Capital can now increase the rental price of the approximately 10 million existing .org domain names, approximately 10 dollars a year, as desired, potentially generating billions of dollars. At the expense of non-profits.[8]

Two crashes with the brand new aircraft Boeing 737 MAX recently cost the lives of 346 people. The causes are poor design, too much faith in software and lax supervisors. The device is structurally unsafe, Boeing should never have launched it. The original 737 had small jet engines under its wings. When a new version came in 1980, it already posed problems. That is the great danger of old concepts that are being built on: they look more modern, but they have not really evolved. But a completely new design costs a huge amount. It must pass expensive regulator tests and validations, and customers must retrain their pilots. That is why the so-called “grandfather clause” is used in the US as much as possible: if the aircraft does not deviate much from the original type, it will receive approval via a quick counter at the regulator and pilot retraining will not be necessary. In the late 1980s, Airbus became a real competitor for Boeing. The 737 was the most important weapon in that battle. The pressure to make a better version pushed Boeing over the edge of the allowable. Larger engines had to be fitted, but the old trick that was used before was not enough. It was decided to mount the engines much further to the front to maintain enough ground space. But that made the device inherently unstable, especially when taking off.[9]

Venice’s population has been shrinking for decades. Today, there are just one-third as many Venetians as 50 years ago. But that decline is merely a symptom of a rapidly worsening disease: the reckless promotion of large-scale tourism and lack of investment in human capital. in 2017, the city of 260,000 received more than 36 million foreign tourists. As Venetians have fled the hordes, Venice’s civil society has deteriorated and political torpor has become entrenched. Municipal leaders prefer to complain about the city’s weaknesses, rather than taking effective action to address them. [10]  They have been working on a flood barrier project since 1984, called Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE). It is still not finished and has already cost 5.5 billion euros. This is due to incompetence, dawdling, but also the influence of the Mafia. Venice moaned under the numerous floods this year. There is finally reason to make up the backlog.

Is there a Panta Rhei aspect in these three examples?

The website of ICANN mentions the following: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) helps coordinate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions, which are key technical services critical to the continued operations of the Internet's underlying address book, the Domain Name System (DNS). ICANN's inclusive approach treats the public sector, the private sector, and technical experts as peers. In the ICANN community, you'll find registries, registrars, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), intellectual property advocates, commercial and business interests, non-commercial and non-profit interests, representation from more than 100 governments, and a global array of individual Internet users. All points of view receive consideration on their own merits. ICANN's fundamental belief is that all users of the Internet deserve a say in how it is run.[11] These are very beautiful principles. It is clear that such an organization can be put under pressure to introduce or curb neo-liberal principles.

What are the lessons of the 737 MAX debacle for the rest of the economy? One: company and regulator must not be too much "two hands on one stomach". Two: bad hardware cannot be fixed with software. Three: artificial intelligence (AI) makes people blind to "garbage in, garbage out" Four: an oligopoly does not encourage real innovation. Five: people are not machines, and machines are not always smarter than people.[12]

As for the Venetian problem, the solutions Carlo Ratti, professor at the Massachussets Institute of Technology proposes are radical, but are not without precedent. In the mid-fourteenth century, Venice’s population plummeted by 60%, owing to outbreaks of bubonic plague. The city opened itself up to foreigners, offering citizenship to anyone who planned to remain for the long term. Newcomers needed only to embrace the key characteristics of “Venetianness,” including the desire to work. There is no reason why a similar strategy cannot work today.[13]

Can we tackle the period of uncertainty?

In America you have a number of large metropolises, such as New York and Los Angeles. In between, in the so-called flyover states, the invisible majority live. The majority of that group is formed by people who are vulnerable. They know they have a problem if they lose their job. On the other hand they cannot move to cities such as Paris, New York, London or Milan. These bastions have become unaffordable for them. The working class lives there on the periphery and they lick their wounds. They have been made culturally invisible. That has led to a lot of resentment. People have stagnated or even deteriorated. 

We live in an economic system that continues to record growth rates, but at the same time puts large groups of the population aside. The middle class is disappearing before our eyes. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the middle class, and certainly the working class, has disappeared much earlier. It is to say: those people are still there, but they are no longer "integrated". They no longer count. The first victims were the workers some 30 years ago. Now you see that many other categories - such as the farmers or the wage earners - are getting harder.[14]

One sees all too often that people are voting against their own economic interest. They are being chased away with ideological issues such as abortion or gay marriage to go against their own economic interest. People who already feel insecure cannot accept that others who are even lower on the ladder, would receive help and they cannot. Homogeneous populations are rarely against the government. Sweden is a good example: there was always strong support for a strong government, until immigration waves arrived. Immediately, Social Democracy also came under fire in Sweden.[15]

Paul Krugman in his interview gave an indication of what should be done in order to tackle this period of uncertainty: "The rich are now getting rid of it easily. America must also make health insurance cheaper and accessible to all, help the poor better and restore the power of the trade unions. The trade union in America is needed.[16]“ The same type of statement was made by Flemish entrepreneurs after the Belgian elections. They plead for a tax system without loopholes. Tax optimization can no longer be tolerated. They also argue for a greening of taxation, including through a plane tax and higher taxes on fossil fuels. That should make lower labor costs possible.[17]

The position of the "Gafas" (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) is increasingly under pressure in the US and Europe. Google has been convicted several times for abuse of its dominant position. Amazon promotes some of its own products on its platform at the expense of other retailers. Facebook moans under privacy scandals. Apple lost a lawsuit (Apple Inc. v. Pepper) before the US Supreme Court for commercial practices on the App Store.[18]

On the other hand, the impact of Gafas and other technological players on GDP cannot always be calculated using traditional methods. Today productivity growth in the US can be found with a magnifying glass if we calculate them with the traditional methods. Search engines such as Google, the GPS, the use of a private car such as Uber-taxi and even Facebook - nowhere in the traditional economic concepts is the profit they generate for companies and consumers taken into account.[19] Some economists are zooming in on methods to simply calculate GDP differently. MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson[20], for example, who, together with two colleagues, published a large-scale study / survey in which he tried to measure what the internet and other modern technologies are "worth" for the average consumer. In that case, Facebook alone would yield 0.05 to 0.11 percentage points of additional economic growth for the US, the MIT economist calculated. It is therefore important not to throw the child out with the bathwater when appropriate measures are taken.

Why is the regional level so important in this perspective ?

In the solutions that Carlo Ratti proposes to save Venice from ruin, the first suggestion is to take Venice out of the care of the Italian state and to provide sufficient resources and authority to make the decisions it deems necessary: “The first step is to remove Venice from the jurisdiction of the Italian government, whose consistent failures have driven the city’s decline in recent decades.(…) It is a call for a new type of outward-looking political construct: an “open city” that welcomes anyone who genuinely wants to settle there as a full-fledged citizen, not as participants in what the American novelist Don DeLillo[21] called tourism’s “march of stupidity.”[22]

The Russian search engine Yandex, is a regional competitor of Google. He does not have the ambition to go worldwide like Google, it limits itself to the former USSR. Much like its Silicon Valley counterpart, the ‘Russian Google’ is more than just a search engine.[23]

In the interview with the French geographist Christophe Guilluy he told the story of the former AOL CEO (American on Line, an internet provider from the 90ties), Steve Case. He finances start-ups in the flyover states. A symbolic gesture, but important. That way you say to all those people in the periphery: you don't have to move to Los Angeles or New York, you can stay where you live now.[24]

The same applies to the approach to global warming, in which the US federal government has denounced the Paris treaty, but where US states and cities play a pioneering role, because the smoke from the forest fires or from the industrial smog is at their fingertips.

Europe promotes the role of local and regional authorities in economic and social development. They can more easily work together, provided there is a willingness to do so and not to fight politically between regions for ideological reasons.[25]  Regionalization or decentralization are new concepts of which countries start to see the usefulness, even if they do not have a diverse populations. In Ukraine for example, the decentralisation of power in Ukraine began in 2014. To date 4,277 communities have been merged into 924 amalgamated hromadas (AHs). The total number of AH residents is 10 million (28.3% of Ukraine’s population). Own revenues of local budgets in 2019: 375 billion UAH. AHs need to systematically provide the necessary infrastructure and services to enable businesses to start and develop as well as to secure the public's need for employment and social services. In Romania the regionalization does not go further than the creation of 8 statistical Implementation Units uniting the 40 judeţi  (provinces)[26]. These can takes additional initiatives, but do not receive funds for it from Bucharest. There might be a change with the new government and the next EU commission, but until now there is no plan to become political regions. Exception on the rule was Statistical Implementation Unit Nord-East Romania, that created a Regional innovation board in which commodities such as water and energy and waste have been discussed and initiatives taken. A Water cluster has been created, integrating all players for waste, sewages, water and energy. In Albania the country has been reorganized into  63 merged municipalities within 8 regions. In the Vlorë region in the south, the municipalities focused on practical development of their areas and left strategic development and the acquisition of funds for those purposes to the regional council. The 7 new municipalities of the region chose therefore to concentrate on the touristic development of the region, focusing on the historical and natural assets of the region and trying to attract tourist also in other periods than summertime. The other priority was urban development, preparing the county for the 21st century.[27]

Is everything moving?

The neo-liberal notion of a globalized economy has suffered from so many blows in recent years that talking about it is nowadays already considered a strategic mistake. And although many still believe in large scale development, that principle has also been hit hard.

Multinationals are under pressure. In the first place because they do everything they can to pay as little taxes as possible to anyone. Secondly, because they still exploit workers and employees by producing in places with very little labor protection and extremely low wages. Thirdly, because they do not respect their clients: they affect their health seriously or they produce crap. And if they bring all their production back to the vicinity of their customers, this production is so automated that very few jobs remain.

Retailers, whose activity consists of buying and selling, are not innocent either. They twist the arm of their suppliers in such a way that they can no longer make a profit. Win-win is a concept for a long-term relationship between equal forces. The attitude is large retail companies is the following: I am big and have a lot of power, and you are small and you will stay that way.

Yet this trend is reversing. Technology allows suppliers to come into contact with the end customer. This last one strives for health and quality at an affordable price. Health is almost the same as small-scale or at least contradictory to large-scale. Quality is also equivalent to smaller batches manufactured by expert and motivated workers. Exploited workers are by definition not motivated.

Automation leads to standardization and not to customization. And let it be that which appeals to modern middle-class consumers: being able to make their own choices. Artificial intelligence will enable to handle customization on the long run. And that at all levels: carrying out surgical operations, calculating and drawing structures, developing new products, medical diagnosis, remote sensing etc. Unfortunately, the priorities for the development of artificial intelligence lie elsewhere. In China it is used to spy on every individual, both own citizens and foreign guests.[28] In the US to shoot down drones, aim tank guns, coordinate resupply, plan artillery barrages, and blend sensor feeds.[29] But also to guide individual consumers in their purchases in such a way that they are convinced that they have made the decision themselves. And this same principle is then used in the US and in Europe to influence voter behavior so that they "choose the right one". This latter principle was used by both the far right and the far left. Unfortunately, there is also the “deep fake” application, a program which animates the face of a target person, transposing the facial expressions of an exterior source.[30]

But "Panta rhei"… The public also becomes aware of these "hidden persuaders". Those who only pursue power to maintain the status quo will ultimately be disappointed. The key problems in the world have become too urgent to be spared: growing inequality and climate change.

They do not require a status quo but political courage. They do not require steps but giant leaps. They do not require undemocratic democracy, but a fully-fledged and efficient democracy.

Louis Delcart, board member EAR-AER  www.ear-aer.eu

 1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panta_rhei

[2] Filip Rogiers, Wouter Woussen: Er zal gevochten moeten worden voor de democratie. (There will have to be a fight for democracy ) Interview met  Ico Maly -, De Standaard - 3 August 2019

[3] Gonçalo Fonseca: Slachtoffers van het succes (Victims of the success, November 21, 2019 De Standaard

[4] Diane Francis: The New Monopoly - The Dangers of Amazon’s Dominance in: The American Interest, Volume 13, Number 5 , February 20, 2018 https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/02/20/dangers-amazons-dominance/, retrieved on 26-11-2019

[5] Bas Van der Hout : Uber tuimelt na verlies Londense taxivergunning (Uber tumbles after losing London taxi license) in: De Tijd 21-11-2019

[6] Diane Francis: The New Monopoly - The Dangers of Amazon’s Dominance in: The American Interest, Volume 13, Number 5 , February 20, 2018 https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/02/20/dangers-amazons-dominance/ retrieved on 26-11-2019

[7] Adam Satariano: This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side – IN: New York Times, April 23, 2019

[8] Dominique Deckmyn: Internetdomein ‘.org’ is nu allesbehalve non-profit (Internet domain ".org" is nowadays anything but non-profit) in: De Standaard - November 22, 2019

[9] Geert Noels, Leer uit de fouten met de Boeing 737 MAX, (Learn from the mistakes with the Boeing 737 MAX), in De Tijd, April 26, 2019

[10] Carlo Ratti: Reversing the Death of Venice, in: Project syndicate Nov 19, 2019 

[11] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/welcome-2012-02-25-en, retrieved on 21-11-2019

[12] Geert Noels, Leer uit de fouten met de Boeing 737 MAX, (Learn from the mistakes with the Boeing 737 MAX), in De Tijd, April 26, 2019

[13] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/reversing-death-of-venice-by-carlo-ratti-2019-11, retrieved on 26-11-2019

[14] Interview with Christophe Guilluy, French geographer: Je kunt geen samenleving bouwen als je het volk beledigt – (One cannot build a society if you insult the people) - De Standaard 6-7-2019

[15] Bjorn Soenens: Interview met econoom Paul Krugman: Neem ontslag, president Trump, u heeft problemen die groter zijn dan de economie (Resign, President Trump, you have problems that are greater than the economy), VRT - 26-11-2019

[16] Bjorn Soenens: Interview met econoom Paul Krugman: Neem ontslag, president Trump, u heeft problemen die groter zijn dan de economie (Resign, President Trump, you have problems that are greater than the economy), VRT - 26-11-2019

[17] Emmanuel Vanbrussel: Vlaamse bedrijfsleiders pleiten voor fiscale ommezwaai, ( Flemish business leaders argue for a tax change), in: De Tijd, 20 August 2019

[18] Olivier Braet en Karen Donders - Zijn de techreuzen te groot geworden? (Have the tech giants become too big?) in: De Standaard, 17 juni 2019

[19] Nico Tanghe, Een jaar zonder Google? Dat is 17.000 dollar waard (A year without Google? That's worth $ 17,000) ,in: De Standaard, 29-11-2019

[20] Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, Felix Eggers, Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being, PNAS (Proceedings of the Nation al Academy of Science of the United States of America), April 9, 2019

[21] Don De Lillo, The names, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1982,

[22]  Carlo Ratti: Reversing the Death of Venice, in: Project syndicate Nov 19, 2019 

[23] Anastasia Zyrianova: The IT behemoth that you might never have heard of in: BBC Future , 14th September 2018

[24] ‘Je kunt geen samenleving bouwen als je het volk beledigt’ (One cannot build a society if you insult the people)- Interview with Christophe Guilluy, French geographer - De Standaard 6-7-2019

[25] Louis Delcart, Regions and Cities as Stimulators Towards Green and Digital Economy, in: International Journal of Innovation in the Digital Economy (IJDE), sept 2018

[26] + the capital Bucharest

[27] Louis Delcart, EAR-AER creates European Academy of the Regions with CRLDS, in LinkedIn Pulse, 1 november 2016 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ear-aer-creates-european-academy-regions-albania-crlds-louis-delcart/ retrieved on 26-11-2019

[28] Lukas Vanacker: Massale hackeraanvallen op Belgische handelsmissie in China (Mass hacker attacks on Belgian trade mission in China) in De Tijd, 23 november 2019

[29] John Keller: Army to test artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to detect hidden targets in 2020 war game, in: Military & Aerospace Electronics, Oct 23rd, 2019. https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/14069203/artificial-intelligence-ai-machine-learning-military-applications retrieved 26-11-2019

[30] The technology has been demonstrated animating the lips of people including Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_artificial_intelligence retrieved on 26-11-2019

'Women are just better at this stuff': is emotional labor feminism's next frontier?

From remembering birthdays to offering service with a smile, life has a layer of daily responsibility that is hardly discussed – one which falls disproportionately on women. Finally confronting it could be a revolutionary step Well. If, perhaps, we tried something as shocking as raising men from the cradle to be more involved and responsible, we might have a more equal balance on the emotion and responsibility front. Rather, as I've seen time and time again, and had people complain to me time and time again, boys are not made as responsible for the home, the things in the home, nor the people in the home. They aren't taught as much as females are, to nurture the home or care for it. Also, if we stopped raising men to believe that being emotional is wrong, or that it means they're gay ('cause, that's a terror, right?), we might have - again - a more balanced emotional thing going on. As I once said to a friend; if we made men as responsible as we make women, we might have to marry fewer of them through their mommy issues. I was once told by an acquaintance that I should not make emotional statements in job interviews or meetings, particularly not with men; that I would get more leverage by being as void of attachment as possible. Being detached was the coin of the day. I never put much thought to the veracity of that comment until that very moment; and it occurred to me what a complete load of hooey it was. It speaks to a roboticism we impose on the male population, and that they impose on themselves for fear of negative judgement. There's no such thing as impartiality except as some kind of twisted Platonic ideal, so why do we keep hampering ourselves with it? We are emotional creatures, and if we spend more time actually attuning to that fact, we'd be far more capable than most seem to be, of using those emotions to our advantage. Being emotional is damned as a failing by those who believe that everything in the business world must be handled in a purely cerebral fashion. This same acquaintance then told me, several months later near her wedding day, that the board members at her workplace had put a collection together and gifted her with a sum of money as a wedding present. For this they are labelled "good guys", despite the fact that they are endlessly rude, dismissive, and abusive of her and other female staff. For that five seconds of telling me about this money, she forgot the endless abuse, rudeness, and dismissiveness these same men heaped on her and other female staff. So, she and other staff are expected to do the emotional work as a matter of course, but the men get a doggie treat if they do something that should be 'normal', or 'usual', or that a woman would do without a second thought. On top of that, the man is never held accountable for bad behaviours. I read something recently that I sadly can't find the link for, that discussed male loathing towards women; and I seem to recall that there was something in that article that suggested part of this loathing was rooted in female expectations of male emotion. Men are bred to believe that overt emotion is wrong, yet every woman demands it of them, and therefore they turn that hatred towards the women for trying to turn them into something society tells them is bad. "Think of your morning Starbucks barista, who drew a smiley face on your cardboard cup of coffee this morning. Did she really want to go the extra mile today, or was it just part of the job expectation?" Which is the pitfall of customer service. The emotional labour of the worker, which is never, ever balanced out by any concept of personal responsibility on the part of the customer; and this gets worse, and worse with every passing generation, as companies scramble to keep and increase revenues with increasing levels of competition - they think the only way through it is "improving" their customer service, which then evolves into a sort of slave-state where we must "roll out the red carpet" for people who treat the staff like trash, who swear at them, who abuse them, who insult them, and the staff is supposed to sit there and lap it up along with a minimum wage paycheque. This is grotesquely unbalanced, and creates hordes of stressed out people who have nothing left for their own lives at the end of the day. Most customers don't deserve that much out of me, but I could be fired for not being a carpet. "The way I think of emotional labor goes as follows: there are certain jobs where it's a requirement, where there is no training provided, and where there's a positive bias towards certain people - women - doing it. It's also the kind of work that is denigrated by society at large. Research suggests that cumulatively, ongoing emotion work is exhausting but rarely acknowledged as a legitimate strain - and as such, is not reflected in wages." I don't need research to 'suggest' that to me. I live it every day. This culture has no respect for the people who do things for it that they're too lazy to do for themselves; nor does this culture teach people to take responsibility for themselves and to acknowledge that they are complicit in the retail transaction situation. This culture has no respect for its environment, for its global good, for anything that isn't solely fixated on the immediate needs of the individual. Maybe it's time we started doing what Japanese schools do, and make our kids responsible for the tidiness and maintenance of their classrooms, for the serving of the meal at lunch and the cleaning up of it afterwards. This breeds in people the idea that they are part of a collective, and that their actions affect the environment in which they live, and that they are responsible for the environments in which they live. In the end, if you really do think that women are "better at it", it's not because we're inherently better at it; it's because we've spent a longer time doing it.

Saturday, May 8, 2021

Govcoins (The Economist) Government digital currencies, or “govcoins”, are a new incarnation of money. They promise to make finance work better but also to shift power from individuals to the state, alter geopolitics and change how capital is allocated. Instead of holding an account with a retail bank, you would hold one directly with a central bank, through an interface resembling apps such as Alipay or Venmo. Rather than writing cheques or paying online with a card, you could use the central bank’s cheap plumbing. And your money would be guaranteed by the full faith of the state, not a fallible bank. Over 50 monetary authorities, in America, the EU, Britain and elsewhere, are exploring digital currencies. China is experimenting and the Bahamas has already issued its own. Governments and financial firms need to prepare for a shift in how money works that is as momentous as the leap to metallic coins or payment cards—a shift that promises a vast spectrum of opportunities, but also real dangers.

Health Advocate or Big Brother? Companies Weigh Requiring Vaccines. (NYT) As American companies prepare to bring large numbers of workers back to the office in the coming months, executives are facing one of their most delicate pandemic-related decisions: Should they require employees to be vaccinated? For the country’s largest companies, mandatory vaccinations would protect service workers and lower the anxiety for returning office employees. That includes those who have been vaccinated but may be reluctant to return without knowing whether their colleagues have as well. And there is a public service element: The goal of herd immunity has slipped as the pace of vaccinations has slowed. But making vaccinations mandatory could risk a backlash, and perhaps even litigation, from those who view it as an invasion of privacy and a Big Brother-like move to control the lives of employees. “While legally in the United States, employers can mandate vaccines while providing accommodations for religious and for health reasons, socially, in terms of the social acceptability of these decisions, it’s much more tenuous,” said Laura Boudreau, a professor of public policy at Columbia University. “And so the reputational risks to these companies of getting this wrong are really high.”

Biden plans to add $600 billion to the U.S. ‘care economy’ (Reuters) President Joe Biden’s $4 trillion plan to rebuild the U.S. economy aims a flood of cash at something millions of women in America do for low pay or no pay at all: taking care of other people. Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” would boost an existing government program with $400 billion more over a decade, to give more elderly and disabled people basic care they need, while his “American Families Plan” creates free universal ‘pre-Kindergarten’ and adds other childcare to the tune of $200 billion. The White House’s team of economists and economic advisers, many of them women, argue that this influx of government cash is essential to fix and grow the U.S. economy. It will get women back into the workforce who left because of the coronavirus, allow other stay-at-home caregivers to take jobs, and pay the people who do care-giving work as a job a more livable wage. The entire premise, though, is proving to be one of the most controversial parts of Biden’s plans. Republicans and some Democrats question why taking care of children, the elderly and disabled should be counted as infrastructure, should be funded by the government, or whether women want this aid at all.

Battlefield Colombia (Foreign Policy) Clashes between protesters and security forces paralyzed Colombia this week, leaving at least 23 protesters and one police officer dead. Another 87 people were reported missing. These are dramatically high totals for a democracy, and they point to skyrocketing discontent with President Iván Duque’s government. They also offer a warning to other Latin American nations: Passing the bulk of pandemic debt bills onto the poor and middle class could lead to significant pushback in the streets. Colombia’s more than eight days of on-and-off protest originally focused on a proposal to hike taxes on utilities while introducing new income taxes for both lower and higher earners, among other measures. Duque said the changes would allow the government to continue offering financial support to those affected by the pandemic, but 80 percent of Colombians opposed them. When Duque had introduced an earlier tax hike in late 2019, it became one of many sparks for mass protests that November and December. Protests this week, too, featured a mix of grievances. As news spread of security forces firing live ammunition at protesters, the outcry increasingly focused on police and military abuse in the country.

Chernobyl smolders (Sciencemag.org) Thirty-five years after the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded in the world’s worst nuclear accident, fission reactions are smoldering again in uranium fuel masses buried deep inside a mangled reactor hall. “It’s like the embers in a barbecue pit,” says Neil Hyatt, a nuclear materials chemist at the University of Sheffield. Now, Ukrainian scientists are scrambling to determine whether the reactions will wink out on their own—or require extraordinary interventions to avert another accident. Sensors are tracking a rising number of neutrons, a signal of fission, streaming from one inaccessible room, Anatolii Doroshenko of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv, Ukraine, reported last week during discussions about dismantling the reactor. “There are many uncertainties,” says ISPNPP’s Maxim Saveliev. “But we can’t rule out the possibility of [an] accident.” The neutron counts are rising slowly, Saveliev says, suggesting managers still have a few years to figure out how to stifle the threat.

Afghans Fleeing Home Are Filling the Lowliest Jobs in Istanbul (NYT) In a derelict house in one of the oldest quarters of Istanbul, a group of Afghan migrants were welcoming new arrivals—two teenagers who had survived the perilous two-month journey on the migrant trail from Afghanistan. They said they had just arrived overnight in Istanbul after a 60-hour trek over the mountains from Iran into Turkey. The number of Afghans arriving in Turkey has soared over the last seven years as the United States and NATO forces have wound down their military presence. More than 200,000 Afghans were caught entering Turkey illegally in 2019, many of whom were deported back to Afghanistan. But despite a reduction of overall numbers in the last year because of the pandemic, Afghans still represent by far the largest migrant group making the dangerous crossing by sea or land to Greece. And their numbers are set to grow as the Taliban take control back home.

India’s disaster hangs over countries facing COVID-19 surges (AP) Countries worldwide wrestling with new coronavirus surges are trying to ensure they aren’t hit by an India-style disaster. They face many of the same risks, including large populations and fragile health systems shaken under the strain. In a province along the Nile in southern Egypt, hospitals have been flooded with COVID-19 patients, a main hot spot in a third spike swelling across the country. Doctors in Sohag province warn the health system there could collapse, even as the government rushes in new supplies. “My estimate is that there is no family in Sohag that does not have a corona case,” said Dr. Mahmoud Fahmy Mansour, head of the province’s doctors’ union. “We lost five physicians in one week.” Egypt isn’t alone in seeing mounting new infections. Worldwide, more cases have been reported in the past two weeks than in the entire first six months of the pandemic, World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom said. India and Brazil accounted for a large part of that, “but there are many other countries all over the world that face a very fragile situation,” he said.

China trade surges as global demand recovers from pandemic (AP) China’s trade with the United States and the rest of the world surged by double digits in April as consumer demand recovered, but growth appeared to be slowing. Global exports rose 32.3% over a year ago to $263.9 billion, in line with March but down from the explosive 60.6% rise in the first two months of 2021, customs data showed Friday. China’s trade gains look especially dramatic due to comparison with a year ago, when global economies shut down to fight the coronavirus. Despite the jump in April’s headline figures, exports are leveling off. The trade outlook is overshadowed by a tariff war with Washington. President Joe Biden has yet to say what he might do about reviving talks aimed at ending the trade war.

Hong Kong’s Continuing Crackdown (The Guardian) On Wednesday, a Hong Kong district court judge convicted three 20-something activists on riot charges and sentenced them to lengthy jail terms. The judge said even though there was no evidence the trio were involved in any rioting, their presence at the rally in October 2019 encouraged other protesters. The harsh sentences were required as a deterrent, he said, and under the “joint enterprise” principle, the accused must face the same punishment as those who broke the law. In a separate case, democracy activist Joshua Wong, who has been arrested and jailed numerous times, was sentenced to an additional 10 months incarceration, this time for breaching Covid restrictions by participating in an unauthorized vigil on June 4, 2020 that commemorated the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Well over 50 pro-democracy activists, former legislators, social workers, and academics have been arrested on subversion and other charges under the National Security Law, effectively quashing any pro-Beijing opposition.

Three Months After Coup, Myanmar Returns to the ‘Bad Old Days’ (NYT) Every night at 8, the stern-faced newscaster on Myanmar military TV announces the day’s hunted. The mug shots of those charged with political crimes appear onscreen. Among them are doctors, students, beauty queens, actors, reporters, even a pair of makeup bloggers. Some of the faces look puffy and bruised, the likely result of interrogations. As the midnight insects trill, the hunt intensifies. Military censors sever the internet across most of Myanmar, matching the darkness outside with an information blackout. Soldiers sweep through the cities, arresting, abducting and assaulting with slingshots and rifles. The nightly banging on doors, as arbitrary as it is dreaded, galvanizes a frenzy of self-preservation. Residents delete their Facebook accounts, destroy incriminating mobile phone cards and erase traces of support for Myanmar’s elected government. As sleep proves elusive, it’s as if much of the nation is suffering a collective insomnia. Little more than a decade ago, the most innocuous of infractions—owning a photograph of pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or an unregistered cellphone or a single note of foreign currency—could mean a prison sentence. For the better part of 60 years, the military’s rule over Myanmar was animated not by grand ideology but by fear. Today, with much of the population determined to resist the coup-makers, a new junta is consolidating its grip by resorting, yet again, to a reign of terror. “Myanmar is going back to the bad old days when people were so scared that their neighbors would inform on them and they could get arrested for no reason at all,” said Ko Moe Yan Naing, a former police officer who is now in hiding after opposing the coup.

Locked down during Cambodia’s virus outbreak, people are running out of food (Washington Post) Thea is worried that he will go hungry. He hasn’t left his home in Phnom Penh since April 15, when Cambodia’s government imposed a citywide lockdown. As Western countries gradually conquer the virus through mass vaccination, the pandemic is flaring up again in some poorer regions of the world, including Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, which had avoided the worst of the pandemic, a surge in cases has led authorities to resort to an extreme lockdown that some residents say has pushed them toward eviction or starvation. On Friday, officials announced 558 new cases, bringing the total to 18,179 with 114 deaths. While the government eased restrictions in some places this week, high-risk areas remain under lockdown. The most draconian measures apply to neighborhoods deemed “red zones,” where no one is permitted to leave home, not even to buy food. Officers patrol the streets at all hours and are authorized to fine or arrest anyone moving around without a permit. In some cases, police officers have beaten people with sticks for violating the rules—punishment the government considers “necessary” to enforce stay-at-home orders, according to Phay Siphan, a government spokesman.

European powers tell Israel to stop settlement expansion amid tension in Jerusalem (Reuters) France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain urged Israel on Thursday to halt settlement-building in the occupied West Bank. The joint statement came as tensions mounted in East Jerusalem ahead of a hearing that could see Palestinian families evicted from Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood where Jewish settlers backed by an Israeli court have taken over some homes. “We urge the government of Israel to reverse its decision to advance the construction of 540 settlement units in the Har Homa E area of the occupied West Bank, and to cease its policy of settlement expansion across the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” the European nations said. If implemented, the decision to advance settlements in Har Homa, between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, will cause further damage to the prospects for a viable Palestinian State.” Jerusalem, which contains sites sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

twitter & unlatch.

i guess it's time to get a gun permit & gun, then buy some bullets & shoot myself in the head.

this job robs me of all life juice, but it's the only thing i thought i was good at. & now life shows me that the branch becomes futureless. 

it's all about profit & the people who suffer most under the economical cuts are the working ones. mental & physical health are affected.

the pay is lousy in comparison to what u are performing & still u try to make ends meet even tho u are running on lowest battery life.

& then the managers come to u & tell u you have to make more cuts, moremoremore, & there u are, dieing inside, cause there's no other option.

u know in other companies it's the same, there is no exception anymore, & no 1 values ur knowledge & education. all they want is low wage.

meanwhile the last 1s standing are working their asses off, loose every bit of mental stability & break down their bodies for nothin'.

& u wonder, when's ur turn, when will u be 2 expensive for them, & what are u gonna do when u are the 1 without a job. i personally never...

want 2 work in retail ever again, but it's all i know & perform well enough in. i don't have no escape plan. i can't start a new path...

2 much liabilities & commitments are on my plate. when i think of all the pressure happening in the future. i don't work well under stress.

so i guess it'd be better to just end all of this... just freedom awaits me after my death, no consciousness  - a blissful thought...

/////

i am just so tired of it all, trying to find a compromise, trying to find something i’m good at which would help me find a new job. but all i come up with is this fucking job, i don’t have any other options, except change to the same job at an equally awful company or generally the sales branch. i don’t want to serve others anymore, there’s a lack of humanity that’s increasing every year, & customers are awful, HUMANS are awful, but there’s no job in which you don’t have to deal with them. 

i just want to work at a place where the work you are providing is still honoured adequately, where you don’t have to fear employee cuts & other stressors, where customers are understanding, not difficult as fuck and lashing out their own inscurities onto the ‘minor sales clerks’. i want to not be under continual stress anymore, wondering about how you will possibly manage all the work, not ever doing any breaks. wondering if you will have to do all the work all on your own soon, as your colleagues either have to go or just simply are so fed up with everything they decide to give up and move on.

i would do that, too, but i KNOW, i just KNOW, that no matter where i go, the same problem is EVERYWHERE, and it won’t get better. there’s no new blood coming, no one wants to work in an underpaid environment, where pressure’s put on you constantly, everyone wants to earn money without having to get their hands dirty & their backs strained & having to endure the constant nagging demands of customers & bosses. people want to study easy things, want to make art, want to live off of their brain content, they want to sit down & do as little as possible for a high wage.

i’m so sick of it. but i’m trapped.

i have to pay off a new fucking car ( i was almost done with my old one until it broke down ), i have to pay insurances, i have to pay food and a roof above my head, and i can’t just simply quit my job, and risk an unstable one at a different company. but i also cannot stay where i am now. i’m going to loose my mind sooner or later. and there is no way i could do something totally different, as i am a saleswoman, & only good in this profession, nothing else. i do not have a talent or special thing that could warrant to try myself out in a completely different field. i cannot afford starting a new educational path, apprenticeships don’t pay my rent & all the stuff i have to pay for. academic studies don’t pay that either.

i really am at a loss of what to do. i want to go so badly, i want to leave it behind, but i see no solution.

and then i get that sense of freedom when i think about death, and not having to worry anymore, because, duh, there are no feelings, everything is inexistent. it feels like a very appealing thought. but what kind of person am i then, especially to the people who brought me into this world, or the very few people that i call friends, even though i am a terrible one. should i leave them behind just like that? what sorrow would i bring upon them, if i killed myself.

i just know 1 thing. i feel helpless. i feel terribly alone. i have no idea anymore how to continue without losing my nerves & mind completely, while trying to complete my work with less & less support, but more requirements from ‘above’. i don’t want to end up on the street either, and who knows how long my current employer will be a pawn in the game of retail chess, until they finally tell us, hey, it’s been okay, but we are out of the game, we cannot sustain anybody anymore, buh-bye.

because it is starting. the signs are clear. people are being removed.

and above all, the hypocrisy of it all makes me want to throw up. don’t you tell people you are a company who wants to be a fair player in the corporate world, and then be unfair to your employees. don’t you DARE telling people, you want a green world, a world without deceits & more sustainability, but then go a whole different path in your company culture. fucking liars.

and i look at all companies in this country. they are all not very different from each other. 

see, it is a problem for me, to ‘just go and apply for something different’. it’s a hurdle for me. because all i have to offer is the education & experience i have, but i lost all faith in the branch i work in. everything. and seeing the bigger picture, oh lord, it isn’t that far off either.

so. what am i supposed to do? give up and giving in to sweet inexistence, or fight, but still coming out incredibly bruised & battered & wary of the world, not trusting a single soul out there? what life is that, i ask you? a life in which you are made even smaller than you already are?

there’s nothing, really, there’s nothing else i can hold on to. i don’t want to underperform, it’s against my own pride & ego. but inherently, this will be what i’m going to do, because i cannot & don’t want to work myself to death. i’d rather kill myself than do this. i’ve had enough. i don’t want to show them anymore what a good worker i am. i am fed up with their nasty schemings. i am fed up with people treating you as some kind of inferior stupid sales person who has to serve them gold & silver on a plate, and if you don’t do that, you are THE persona non grata forever and always.

i am fed up with this society.

fed up with myself, as i also can’t seem to attract any blessings into my life... fed up with myself for not giving in & accepting my life as it is, being thankful for the things that i have ( which is not very much, when i think about it, even though it might be enough for others ). fed up with myself for wanting more & less at the same time, for being a ‘privileged white person’ with first world problems, that at the same time are problems i cannot find a solution for.

i want to scream. and never stop. and die while doing so. i feel like i need to go berserk, run amok, or just end my life quietly.