All is Well! All is Well!

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Microsoft to Lay Off 10,000 Workers as It Looks to Trim Costs — msn.com

Google to lay off 12,000 employees, the latest tech giant to cut thousands of jobs — usatoday.com

Regal Cinemas is closing 39 more movie theaters. See the list — cnn.com

Another day, another round of layoffs and closures, another sunshine up the butthole economic report from the Biden administration: We’re not in a recession! Employment numbers are great!

Someone is lying to me and I don’t think it’s Microsoft, Google and Regal Cinemas.

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Climate Change: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

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The recent rainstorms here in California are “proof that the climate crisis is real and we have to take it seriously,” according to our governor, Gavin Newsom.

Because we never in history had rainstorms until very recently.

He’s not very smart. If we got no rain this winter, he would have blamed that on “climate change” too.

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Fast Food Robots

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There’s not really a fast food labor shortage. It’s created by the fact that unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies can total up to $120,000 per year for a family of four.

Not bad! If you can make six figures for doing nothing, you wanna go be a fry cook?

The robots address the fact that the absurdly high numbers that people want to make for minimum-wage work is well beyond the value that minimum-wage workers add to the bottom line.

The real minimum wage is always zero.

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The Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again

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Well, the Law of Unintended Consequences has already kicked in on this one. I feel like if I know this, someone at BLM should know it.

In the aftermath of George Floyd and Defund the Police, cops — the ones who were still funded — didn’t engage with Black citizens because, you know, if that’s the way you feel about cops, go ahead and do whatever you want.

One result, as you can see in the chart, is a spike in traffic fatalities for both Black men and women.

Traffic fatalities graph

The same unintended consequence affected the murder rate:

Murder rate graph

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A Time For Choosing

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That depends. Is aggregating state and corporate power to censor the internet democracy or autocracy? Is it community? Is it love?

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No Child Knows They Are Trans

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Does Money Buy Happiness?

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Does money buy happiness? I’ve never seen any evidence of this but the girl cutting my hair today said it does.

money, finance, mortgage

“It allows my husband and I to have a house so it gives us freedom.”

I should have delved into this a little bit more for a couple of reasons.

  1. When I’ve owned a house, I’ve found that it gave me less freedom. If I’m renting a place, even a house, and I decide that I don’t want to be there anymore, I can just leave, which I can’t do if I own a house. Of course, there would still be the issue of moving all of my possessions. Owning things is problematic. Do I own my stuff or does my stuff own me? I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really want to own anything: houses, cars, furniture. That would be real freedom.
  2. That still leaves the question of money. Because you can own a house and still not have any money. You can still live paycheck to paycheck. Any neighborhood I’ve ever driven through that had nice, expensive-looking houses also contained a surprising number of very ordinary looking cars. Residents have enough to afford the house but not enough left over for other things, like cars. Again, the freedom question. Do you own the house or does the house own you?

The idea that having a lot of money would make you happy and solve all your problems is certainly pervasive in America, even though I don’t believe it myself. I notice every time I’m in a convenience store, there’s at least one customer buying lottery tickets. And I couldn’t possibly count the number of people I’ve heard say something to the effect of “I wish I had the money to just quit my stupid job and do whatever I want to.”

I also notice that there are a lot of people who have all the money they could ever need and they still don’t seem very happy. Rich people in rehab, rich people in serial dysfunctional relationships, rich people dying young, followed by an alarming toxicology report, rich people ending their own lives.

 

Lisa Marie Presley died this week after going into cardiac arrest at the age of 54, which is not even close to a normal human lifespan. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions: 1) She was financially well off; 2) Her toxicology report will be illuminating.

Her dad was fabulously well-to-do and effectively killed himself in his early 40s. With Elvis, I’ve always thought that it must have been very hard to be loved as much as he was — and no one was ever loved more than Elvis — and then to get old (40 must have seemed very old to him) and lose that. All the money was not enough to live through it.

 

Singers and musical groups never seem to retire no matter how much money they have. I saw Randy Newman not too long ago at the Hollywood Bowl and he addressed that.

“People ask me why am I still doing this at my age. I tell them that I like it, and nobody’s applauding at home.”

Now I think we’re getting closer to the truth, that what makes people happy is a sense that they have a purpose, a reason for being alive. Even if carrying out that purpose brings in a lot of money, it’s not the money that makes them happy, it’s the purpose.

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Unemployment Stays Unbelievably Low

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The company is closing about 150 stores overall, plus layoffs in corporate and supply chain.

You can swap new company names (Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, etc.) into these layoffs and closing stores stories every day and still get sunny government economic reports based on nothing I can see except unbelievably low unemployment numbers.

And when I say “unbelievably low,” I mean literally not believable (see here and here).

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When Empires Start to Collapse

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Yeah, I think if you look at history, it’s really interesting when empires start to collapse, when you start to get such a breach between how the elite lives and how the rest of the country lives. There are usually two options: you can either start to placate and appease the vast majority of the country who are living in deprivation — some symbolic gestures of social programs just enough to keep them mollified so they don’t go out into the streets — or you can decide, “You know what, we don’t really care how angry the citizenry gets. What we’re going to do instead is ‘paramilitarize’ the country, we’ll put them under a massive surveillance system.

“We’ll keep a really close eye on everything they’re doing, we’ll listen to their communications and we’ll crush, first by demonizing and then, criminalizing and, then, censoring any form of dissent so that they have absolutely nowhere to turn. So, they can get as angry as they want. We’ll just make ourselves so powerful and so opaque, no one will know what we’re doing — but we can see everything they’re doing, that there’s nothing they can do about it anyway”. Amazingly, it is the American left who has become the main ally in imposing that.

— Glenn Greenwald

The only part of this I take issue with is that I don’t think there’s any need to “placate and appease” anyone to keep them from taking to the streets. In America, this is done with mindless entertainment and gadgetry, i.e., “I’d like to revolt against the government but I’d have to miss my TV programs.”

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The Difference Between Television and Movies

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The thing about TV series that I don’t understand and I think is hard for both of us to get our minds around is, you know, feature films have a beginning, a middle and an end. But open-ended stories have a beginning and a middle — and then they’re beaten to death until they’re exhausted and die. They don’t actually have an end. And thinking about that in the context of a story is rather alien to the way we imagine these things.

Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it. That’s how a lot of long-form television works, so it’s a hard thing to get your head around.

— Joel Coen

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Another Explanation for Low Unemployment Numbers

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People who are not employed but not looking for employment are not considered unemployed and are not included in calculating the unemployment rate.

I’ve theorized that one reason for the artificially low unemployment rate is people dropping out of the workforce, although I couldn’t explain why so many people were dropping out of the workforce.

But now I think I can explain it.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, an economist-founded nonprofit, analyzed how unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies in each state stacked up against employed people’s compensation. The writers of the report found that these two benefits alone could total up to $120,000 per year for a family of four.

In 14 states — including North Dakota, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, and Minnesota — unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies were found to be the equivalent to a head of household earning $80,000 in salary.

In other words, a spouse would have to earn more than $80,000 a year from a 40-hour a week job to have the same after-tax income as certain families with two unemployed spouses receiving government benefits.

The three states with the largest benefits were Washington, at nearly $123,000; Massachusetts at $117,000; and New Jersey at nearly $109,000 for the year.

This would affect different people in different ways. If you’re one of the software engineers recently let go at Facebook, the prospect of making $80,000 for not working is probably not appealing, but there are a lot of jobs where that would not apply.

For example, when I go to a restaurant or a convenience store, most of them have Help Wanted signs posted, and if I had a choice between washing dishes for whatever a dishwasher gets paid vs. getting paid $80,000 to not wash dishes, I’m taking the $80,000, dropping out of the workforce, and I would not be considered unemployed.

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Lying Your Way to the Top

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For more than a decade, I have been saying in all kinds of venues, in my written journalism, in speeches, and in interviews, that the most bizarre and surreal aspect of American journalism is that getting caught lying is no barrier to advancement and success. Specifically, I’ve long said, as long as you lie for the right people and causes mainly to advance the interest of neo-liberal global economic institutions, or do the bidding of the U.S. security state, then, I said, you can lie for as much as you want and it will not have any impact whatsoever on your career in corporate journalism.

But that formulation that I’ve long endorsed is far too generous to the point of being misleading. Indeed, it’s actually untrue to say that getting caught blatantly lying has no effect on one’s career in corporate journalism. I was wrong about that. It does have an effect, a very big effect. Namely, the more you lie on behalf of power centers, the more advancement, promotion, and success you will be guaranteed in the world of corporate journalism. Indeed, even that amended formulation still does not go far enough. It is really not hyperbole to say that if you really want to rise to the top of the heap of corporate journalism, lying on behalf of power centers is a requirement. Conversely, if you’re unwilling to lie for those power centers, then success in corporate journalism is all but impossible. It’s a requirement for the job. It’s really astonishing because it’s literally true, the journalists who lie most frequently, casually, and aggressively on behalf of government and economic power centers, are the ones who shoot at the top of the corporate journalism ladder

— Glenn Greenwald (emphasis added)

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More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Gender-Affirming

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“Gender-affirming” can be used in a couple of ways. One is just generically by itself, suggesting that a male announces he’s a female or a female announces she’s a male, and someone with no qualifications at all to diagnose or treat gender dysphoria, e.g., a school teacher, takes the announcement at face value and encourages the person to “be who they are,” or some such thing.

“Gender-affirming” can also be used in a phrase, often “gender-affirming therapy.” Is that really the job of a therapist, to “affirm” whatever self-diagnosis a patient presents with, perhaps accompanied by a little pat on the head? I thought the job of a therapist was to get to the root of whatever is causing a problem in a patient’s life and to work with them in a way that enables them to move forward.

And the root of the problem may not be what the patient says it is.

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My Boyhood Sports Icons Are Dying: Pelé

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Pelé is the the only man to win the World Cup three times, winning with Brazil in the 1958, 1962 and 1970 tournaments. At the time of his first World Cup competition, Pelé was 17 years old and the youngest player to ever participate.

In 1999, the International Olympic Committee gave him the honor of Athlete of the Century.

RIP Pelé

Pele

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Individuals Have Rights

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Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group can do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are those rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. . . .

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

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