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Damn, what a topic. That could be anything, the climate, the economy, our economic system, our political system, that cheap meat thermometer I ordered online or the expensive gadget that I studies and pondered and sweated over before choosing, which, nonetheless, quickly went terminal. Digression/Explanation first - I get a ton of stuff sent to me, by magazines, by news media, by NGOs, even by people I know, and now by pocket. This is good because I do two OTs per week which is 104 per annum and I need topics. (I skate by on Monday by throwing some history against the wall interspersed with snide references and remarks and associated music, but that only carries one so far. (I could emulate the justly famous JS by swapping out the history and instead inserting today's news, but I'm too frequently afoot and afield to stay current, and I really lack his truly encyclopedic now ledge of things musical, damn.)) So I got myself a pocket. I can stash things there that will be used on these essays, or things that might be, or shit that I can't get to right now, or things that I need to read at least one more time, but its temporary, short-term, not like maybe evernote, dropbox, keep, or drive. It came, when I got it with some newbie freebies, including e-mails of the most frequently pocketed stuff, which has a surprisingly high (for a cynic) ratio of what I consider to be content to what I consider to be fluff. So, when hard up for a topic, I check my pocket and see what's there.
So, I'm a puzzle type of guy, ya know; "what structure having but one edge and one surface can, nonetheless, exist on only 3 or more dimensions?" "How is a Raven like a Writing Desk?" So, here I bring forth two articles -- Why Nothing Works Anymore (The Atlantic, February 23, 2017, by Ian Bogost; https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-nothing-works-anymore ) and Boeing's travails show what's wrong with modern capitalism, Matt Stoller, the Guardian, (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/11/boeing-capitalism-deregulation ). They are related, I assure you, but how? Mr. Bogost discusses an assortment of modern, updated, everyday devices that, upon reflection, are disasters. Self flushing toilets that flush prematurely and seemingly at random, disconcerting if nothing else, and prone to waste a lot of water. Pseudo-automatic paper towel dispensers, that proffer insufficient quantities of product, requiring the patron to go for seconds and thirds and eventually more than needed, wasting paper. Need we discuss "auto-correct" or those telephone menus suggesting that you press one for this, two for that, and on and on and on. These things all, to some extent, blow up, and inure us to the expectation that such things do and should be expected to blow up. He explains that this is because these things are not intended to serve the users, but to serve other purposes, all in the form of reducing the need for human labor and/or intervention.
The author introduced the term precarity, which was new to me, and, thankfully, defined it.
“Precarity” has become a popular way to refer to economic and labor conditions that force people—and particularly low-income service workers—into uncertainty. Temporary labor and flexwork offer examples. That includes hourly service work in which schedules are adjusted ad-hoc and just-in-time, so that workers don’t know when or how often they might be working. For low-wage food service and retail workers, for instance, that uncertainty makes budgeting and time-management difficult. Arranging for transit and childcare is difficult, and even more costly, for people who don’t know when—or if—they’ll be working.And this, really, is what these products are about. They save labor costs by eliminating given quantities of labor hours, but also by creating a situation where people will wind up working for less and less as they scramble and scuffle for ever fewer jobs. Much more, including the self feeding of the world of borked things by the rush to fix or supplant them by introducing yet more technology based on the false goal of electro-mechanical self-sufficiency. I cannot do it justice (legally) and highly recommend that you read it for yourselves, it isn't that long and presents a lot of ideas. All that's missing is some Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;-
And that, my friends, is an invisible segue into the next article. The subhead Deregulation means a company once run by engineers is now in the thrall of financiers and its stock remains high even as its planes fall from the sky in conjunction with the opening paragraph damn near says it all, so, on to said topic paragraph:
The plight of Boeing shows the perils of modern capitalism. The corporation is a wounded giant. Much of its productive capacity has been mothballed following two crashes in six months of the 737 Max, the firm’s flagship product: the result of safety problems Boeing hid from regulators.The article is, nonetheless, worth a read and even a close read. The author, Matt Stoller, quotes journalist Jerry Useem regarding the fact that “Boeing has always been less a business than an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” and then chronicles its decline into a soulless profits driven body that really has trouble designing and building aircraft, let alone delivering them on time. In doing so, he uses Boeing as a metaphor for so many other corporations, such as GE, now largely reduced to distributing Chinese light bulbs and money lending, and the US economy as a whole. Key problems are highlighted, such as consolidations and monopolies (thanks, Bill), and the sloth and corruption that result. Politics and politicization, also a product of monopolies, especially for Boeing, a major defense contractor, parasitically gorging itself at the public trough. The concern for profits regardless of products and production. The elimination of skilled production oriented employees (and their replacement by mba toting gofers and toadies).Deregulation (thanks again, Bill), and, of course vulture capitalists private equity firms, pirates and looters all who asset strip their prey in order to pay obscene bonuses to insiders and indulge in stock buy backs to enhance their power and distributive shares and who are quite ready to bequeath the rest of us the eventual useless, empty, abandoned and bankrupt husk a la Radio Shack, K-Mart, and oh so many others.
-And there, in the modern financialized corporation, in the finance and financier driven economy that no longer does or even can deliver products that work and work properly, we find the answer to the question that Yeats so presciently posed in his second verse:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?-
Help me out here, did not somebody once warn or assert that the internal contradictions inherent in capitalism, the ugly soulless drive to reward capital and it alone with all excess value created by extraction and production, would someday bring it crashing down? Did that really happen and did we ignore it, or am I imagining things?
-Hola campesinos! Quelle hombre dice da kine esos?
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-Title Image is borked, a public domain image modified by enhydra lutris and is hereby made public domain if not already by law
-It's an open thread, Jim, so have at it. The floor is yours .
- -Cross posted from caucus99percent.com
