#capitalism is bad and being a business major has only radicalized me more in the opposite direction

[elitheradguy]

I love graph :)

the universal college experience, no matter your major, is learning how remarkably fucked everything is. except business majors theyre having a great time learning to do basic arithmetic and and staring at that one supply and demand graph where the line goes up

[polishtamales]

It Started with the Hawkeye Initiative & Ended with Safespace & Snowflake: GAME OVER

This is how the comic book industry dies. Or is it a dawn of self-publishing?

If it wasn’t for years of horrific ad sales, it was definitely insulting the vast majority of it’s consumer base. Or more specifically for Marvel’s case, CATERING AN ENTIRE MARKET THAT DOESN’T BUY COMICS IN THE FIRST PLACE. Regardless of intentions, YOU CANNOT MAINTAIN A BUSINESS OF CONSTANTLY FLIPPING OFF YOUR FANS AND EXPECT THEM TO PAY YOU FOR YOUR VIRTUE SIGNALING.

There’s a difference between being progressive with fiction and being a radical activist for the sake of retweets and likes, followed by a selfie for more self-esteem boosts. In a society where there’s no turning back from capitalism, money is your God, whether it’s right or wrong. You could suddenly be hit with a car and you better damn respect that the more money you have, the more likely everything will be fine afterwards. It pays the bills, it puts food on the table, and you better understand, it’s not going to change, outside of an act of God or Aliens simply invading our planet and enslaving humanity. Your pick.

It’s no secret that working in comics sucks, regardless of country. The pay is bad, the deadlines are killer and it has always been the least practical way of storytelling for a mass market, especially in America. Case in point, you don’t really need a colorist, a letterer or anything else, outside of a distributor (RIP DIAMOND). Anyone with a graphic design degree knows, you can easily be a one-man publisher without the need of an entire crew of mouths to feed. Not saying it wouldn’t be helpful, but given the future economy, it will be the norm.

See, the old buzz word of digital publishing really is a big deal, especially when it comes to the incoming job market change. No longer can you simply “specialize” in just one area of expertise, but you will be expected to fill in multiple roles to be successful. Even if time is against you in certain projects, it is entirely possible to save more money by just doing everything yourself. Here are the major hurdles and solutions to creating a new comic in the new landscape of comics next year:

1. STORY - This is where EVERYONE gets it wrong. Do not follow the trend of  IDW publishing by planning out an ENTIRE world building graphic novel that will span DECADES.

Stick to what exactly you’re good at telling. Tell a short story. Polish every line of dialog. Make it shorter. Polish every line of dialog, make it shorter.

Third and most important advice is leave politics out of your story, unless it is about politics. Most older women buy trashy romance novels to escape their shitty sex life. Most middle-aged men by comics for the tits and ass and possibly the articles? Again, all ways of escape reality, yet you have Marvel comics for years that kept interjecting real world politics and views in their titles. Trust me when I say this, less than 10% of the United States is on Twitter. That means most people could give two fucks and a shit about Trump, Biden or Bearnie, BELIEVE OR NOT. So when most of America retreats after a long day of work and not TWITTER, they are spending money on things to make their lives tolerable. Being told Orange Man Bad is not one of those things, nor is bringing up Obama, again and again. Don’t make market assessments based on social media, leave politics out of your comic. Additionally, learn about basic story telling and especially learn from other mediums outside of comics. Films and actual books will teach you a lot about pacing. You can learn basic writing skills by taking a community college course or higher. The goal and mindset should be to be humbled and not a place to be bitter when you get criticism.

2. ART - KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. If you’re catering towards a WOKE AS FUCK CROWD OF TRUMP HATING LIBERALS, make sure you book will actually sell and not retweeted... Simply collecting a check and going unemployed for months on end is not an actual goal in life, much less beg your followers for coffee money. Example, see the animation industry.

Art is your mode of presentation, the book cover (not literally), the point of sale. If you want to cater towards a crowd of people of color, who happen to be gay, trans, and dealing with PTSD, etc, then make fucking sure your art matches with the story. You cannot have “tumblr” artists doing action intensive comics, where they spend more time creating people of color of diverse identity politics, than learning to draw a simple choreographed action sequence. You can’t have an action comic with ONLY 2 small panels of action to sell your comic. Again, no shame or secret to point out that the VAST majority of comic sales are made off of issue #1s and tits and ass. Disposable income of middle-aged men cannot be underestimated, regardless of what cherry pick data you want to argue with. The older you get, the less progressive and liberal most Americans become as well. That’s called “reality” of real politics. So my advice, if you’re into action comics, learn to draw action, learn about the demography that buys those titles and don’t interject your politics in it, especially if you want to put food on the table. I’m not telling anyone to suddenly put Trump as the “good guy” president, but I am telling you that you shouldn’t include real world politics in your comic. You’re not offending either side of the political spectrum, IE, you’re not insulting your customers.

If you want to make a rom-com comic like Archie, sure those years of learning tutorials off of tumblr might pay off, but again, know your audience. Archie continues to sell steadily with a profit from the boomer generation, white women (vast majority), Christians, etc. Don’t expect your rom-com comic of a gender-less trans-protagonist that may or may not want to be dependent relationship with another person of color. You see where I’m getting with that? You’re welcomed to write and draw a book like that, but don’t expect anyone to buy it. Getting your book retweeted by your favorite SJW, doesn’t mean sales, it just spells virtue signaling for them.

My advice in the art category is DIVERSIFY your portfolio. Don’t just learn off tumblr. That boat has sailed and failed, as seen with every sale of tumblr picked artists at Marvel. Go out there (when the virus gets under controlled) and learn to draw from life. Don’t worry about gender, people of color, none of that stuff. Draw stuff that you actually care about and not for political points with your peers. If you wanna draw short men struggling to open a can of coke, then draw. If you wanna draw hot women, draw hot women. You wanna draw a cute tennis player with short shorts and looks like Swedish male model, then pack some sun screen. You’re not looking to be judged, you’re not looking for internet points of how woke you are. You are simply expanding on things that interest you and how it will indirectly help you grow.

Think Mr. Miyagi, but do it 80,000 times. You’ll master drawing short men struggling to open cans of soda!

When creating the art, DO NOT THINK ABOUT COLORING. It is way more profitable to create BW comics than color. Not only do you save money printing, but the amount of time you free up helps you to micromanage yourself better.

3. DIGITAL PUBLISHING - You don’t need anyone else if you have a computer and some basic digital programs. Once you understand how to write a short story, present marketable characters, then you’re set. The only enemy is time.

Learn Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for art. Learn Adobe Indesign for lettering, page layouts, etc. A few talks with a local printer and you can independently self-publish any book.

So to sum things up, learn to self-publish, respect your readers and the politics/baggage that industry houses and understand that things revolve around money. If you want to be a stereotypical far-left wing tumblr artist that wants to create a superhero of a trans-black girl/binary that may or may not want to be involved in a relationship with another binary/trans person, which could be their sister/brother/internet gas, then by all means make that comic. It won’t be profitable nor will it sell compared to other titles, but I guess you can’t claim victim-hood without a self-afflicting handicap and an arrow to the kneecap.

After all, Marvel’s done it for years without profitability and look where the industry is headed towards... This was all pre-Covid-19 mind you. The virus, if anything, is just the nail on the coffin after Diamond distributors quit. The comic industry might be dead, but books as a medium will never die.

[kontextmaschine]

Roseburg

Okay, Roseburg. It’s the capital of the southern Oregon timber industry, which fell hard with the end of harvesting on federal lands in the early ‘90s.

It’s got a population of 20,000, in a town center at a bend in the river and several residential neighborhoods, with more modern retail north of the city center around I-5. Several thousand more live in outlying areas, and Roseburg is seat of Douglas County stretching to the coast counting 110,000 population in total.

The airport offers no scheduled passenger service. Flights to major mountain west cities are available 83 miles to the north or 90 to the south; equivalent service is available 15 miles from Bend.

The only college in the area is a community college.

The town center, oriented around a “couplet” (parallel one-way streets) for a Main Street in Oregon tradition, has government buildings and a roughly five square block downtown. The downtown is early-20th century in character, solid frontages of storefronts with 1-2 stories of residential above, with churches, banks, and apartment buildings on the periphery.

The downtown is not pedestrianized, but has been designed for cars to park on the periphery. One block of storefronts is block-through, with entrances on each of two opposing sides. Many storefronts are empty. Several bars and restaurants are active, with a few (plus a co-working space) that look to have opened recently. Other stores remain looking a little out-of-time, and several storefronts have been occupied by nonprofits, street-level offices, or enterprises that look to create low returns while occupying high spatial volume. A gym occupies one sizeable space, two large markets stand empty. Despite this emptiness, only the markets look truly dilapidated; others have intact windows and clean interiors and reasonably fresh paint and facades. Scattered throughout are several civic monuments and monumental-looking fraternal lodges.

Sloping away from this downtown, the town center contains more stores, warehouses, restaurants, and bars. On the I-5 corridor, several hotels and travel-oriented businesses serve the freeway, mostly north of the town center.

- - -

So, in some ways this is kind of what I’d been expecting to like - a resource extraction town for a collapsed industry, leaving a fully built-out but intact infrastructure ripe for use. With poor flight connections to finance centers and a local economy still tapering off as the legacy population drifts away, an obvious hope is to market the small-town experience to internet workers or others who generate resources in a way that doesn’t require an existing resource base in physical proximity, while in the interim, the courthouse, the remaining private-lands timber industry, and the highway services support a basic level of services.

The maintained facades, the nonprofit offices occupying storefronts, and the general effort to keep downtown looking active suggest a level of coordination by local elites in support of the city’s viability.

- - -

And it’s… Cascadia. It’s green but at the same time younger than the east coast or rust belt - the wilderness hasn’t been carved into as much, the people not guarded, exhibit the good down-home parts of “country” without much “narrow-minded bumpkin”.

Many stores and bars have signs at the doors saying to take hoodies off, no backpacks, no tweekers, this site recorded on camera. There are at many points one to three people who are obviously homeless or on drugs in view. A Greyhound bus stopped in front of one dilapidated market and disgorged 7 vagrant-looking people. Every day the city police log lists like 6 arrests. On sites where these mugshots are compiled and shared around you see these are usually about heroin, meth, thefts to buy heroin or meth, or parole violations by people with convictions about heroin or meth. Even among apparently functional people working behind counters and bars, there are more facial scabs than you expect.

There is, frankly, an absurd level of pro-military sentiment. Signs in all sorts of windows, military discounts everywhere, banners from some past event benefiting some charity for military families. A veteranarian’s office is painted with the American flag, silhouettes of dogs and soldiers saluting or wearing helmets. I wondered if there had been a military base closed nearby because even after a week traveling through much more “red”-than-Portland country I had seen more of that stuff but nothing near that level. I never saw any murdered-out trucks or Punisher skulls or Black Rifle Coffee or 5.11 or any other military-adjacent aesthetic, though. Wearing Chinese-replica BDU pants, I was sporting more of a tactical look than anyone I saw.

Douglas County gave 64% of its vote to Trump in 2016.

- - -

The clear signs of people coming together to keep downtown appealing, all the monuments, the particular aesthetic of the places catering to a downtown crowd (and of that crowd itself), the legacy of what you’d expect from timber barons and their clerks… I was like “oh I get this, there’s a strong country-club Republican strain.”

Knowing that the region’s forest workers were pretty radical (that’s an important thing about Oregon, its normative rural experience isn’t of yeoman farmers but forest workers) I was wondering when I was going to get a sign of that, eventually I realized the yay-military stuff was the expression of class solidarity I was looking for.

Knowing both of those I turned to the addicts and fuckups and was like “ohh, you’re the third player in this drama, the unvirtuous poor that the virtuous poor and white collar types can bond over identifying against”.

A good deal of the nonprofits taking up space downtown seem to be the prison-industrial-complex type, the therapy or treatment you get sentenced to, designed to employ the first group turning the third into the second.

- - -

Seeing Roseburg makes some things about Portland make sense. That, say, when timber collapsed some of the “worker” types or their kids moved to, or stayed in Portland and brought the ethic to food service.

Traditional Oregon is weirdly exclusive, had an anti-Californian sentiment in particular but I’ve heard stores from Washingtonians about getting their cars pelted with rocks in the 80s, the state’s most famous statement of boosterism included a direct request not to move here.

There’s very much a sense that Portland has become swollen with non-Oregonians who seek to impose themselves on traditional, rural, Oregon, I could see a distaste towards any idea of making Roseburg more Portlandish.  

When I walked in to look at the co-working space (it’s really just a period office building with individual offices) I overheard a guy saying that he could accept if they just made up a list of the guns it was okay to buy…

And the thing about a strong local elite invested in the future of your town is the town is under the control of a strong local elite with an interest in its future, presumably wanting to keep or develop it as its own playground.

At the same time, whoever owns all those buildings would very much like to see them filled at competitive rates  I’m sure, and property owners are the backbone of any local elite. (I do not know the in-town landholders’ relationship to the woodland barons.)

- - -

So. Promising. It’s a charming Portland-in-miniature, houses are still available in the $100s and apartments at $500/br/mo. Between empty and underused space there’s maybe 10 years of solid expansion before all the slack has been taken up, and by all appearances the local system would love to see it happen and has no better pitch than quality-of-life-experience, being what Portland was in the 90s.

(Even the class system isn’t terribly off, a lot of the “Portlandia” years were about importing a middle class to fit between the old money in the West Hills and the retreating border of “Felony Flats” across the river to the east.)

That said it’s not abandoned just waiting for my guiding hand, there are preexisting power structures and culture to accommodate or challenge. And if undermining the local culture is the last thing I want - it’s what appeals to me, and the loss of which I’m mourning in Portland – I’m already thinking “okay that’s honestly too Republican, but that’s the only way to end up with a tolerable culture after it floods with creatives so hey”.

This is assuming it does take off, which I honestly think is a good assumption, as the big west coast cities fill up and cascade down (in the interim, look at Olympia, Visalia, Sacramento, Eugene, and Fresno) but isn’t inevitable. Oregon environmental laws and declining influence of Republican state legislators could further undermine the rural economy. Things could just keep declining past the point of being able to keep up appearances - the VA hospital just closed its emergency room, and there are two more in the area but the reasoning was the difficulty of recruiting and maintaining specialized staff, and that’s a bad sign.

Maybe I’m just psyched to see an authentically Cascadian town again and I should check out some others before getting swept away, in Oregon alone I’m still virgin on Albany, McMinnville, Forest Grove, and Coos Bay.

Still, I dunno. Might be a site for a good life.

[reactionaryhater]

Watch Innuendo Studios’ video “There is Always a Bigger Fish” and give us your thoughts on it.

Sounds interesting enough.  I’m busy this week, but I’ll give it a look tonight and more or less stop to jot down my thoughts as they come.  Warning:  This will be LONG and RAMBLING.

The topic of the video, as Innuendo Studios (IS) claims, is “the core ideology of conservatism.”  I should start by saying I’m not a conservative, in fact I’m ideologically at odds with much of what our Republican party does. Additionally, I’ve never really understood conservatism as a general concept.  Like, if you bring up liberalism, or socialism, or progressivism, or whatever you call the Democratic party, I know some basic markers that distinguish these from other political beliefs.  Conservatism, I’m not so sure.  There’s the idea of small government and traditional values, but these are both relative to our society.  And when they come at odds, which does the ideological conservative choose?  So on that note evaluating this video might be difficult.

“Say for the sake of argument, you’ve got this friend.”

Oh boy, here comes a self insert fic.  I’d like to call this a strawman, but I can’t have it both ways now.  I will say arguing politics by private message sounds a bit pathological to me.……cough…Okay will this bickering be on the test?

“Republican thought.”

Okay, we’re not talking about core ideological conservatism here, we’re talking about Republicans.  Good to keep in mind.

“If you didn’t believe your friend shared these assumptions, you’d basically be calling him a fascist or a sadist.”

That says quite a bit about the breadth the word “fascism” has for IS.  Anyone who doesn’t believe “Do unto others” and isn’t clinically disordered is a fascist.

“And you conclude that, if you believe in democracy, you must believe in equality, and, if you believe in equality, you must believe in equal access to education, and must conclude that governments should help pay tuition.”

This is a chain argument, or to put it another way, a train of association.  IS makes three logical steps which he outlines, from one thought to another.  In principle, they look good and sound.  In reality, many assumptions are made and many possible alternatives ignored, each step of the way.  That means the more steps he makes, the more distant he gets from the starting point by an exponential factor.

Let’s start with the first conclusion: Democracy means everyone is equal.  He suggests democracy doesn’t work unless everyone is equal (such as in education).  I think the people who started the practices of democracy were much smarter than that.  Even when all voters had to own land, they would have known not everyone was equally educated, equally virtuous, and equally informed.  That was never the point.  Democracy doesn’t assume everyone is equal, it assumes the majority of active citizens have the best interests of their society in mind.

I’d also like to point out how he ought to be explaining his belief that everyone is “equal but not equal.”  Remember that meme about the fence?  Different heights.  If anything it’s the conservatives and the “privilege deniers” who believe in the most present equality.  Now in an ideal world, if everyone is equal, they can surely educate themselves.  But they’re not equal.  But they SHOULD be equal.  So they need assistance to become equal.  Who’s going to MAKE us equal?  He assumes the government in the third conclusion.  But when did the government gain a monopoly on the power to enact change?

“He is often misinformed, but what if that isn’t the problem? What if he… actually believes something else?”

Uh oh, question begging incoming.

“A liberal is someone who tends to think democratically, and a conservative is someone who tends to think like a capitalist.”

I don’t accept this definition for ideological roots or for the parties as a whole, but I accept it for certain segments of the US political sphere. Those segments may not be equally represented or influential.  They’re there, though, so that’s a start.

“It’s an egalitarian mindset; people gain power by…”

HAHAHAHAHAHA.  I’m sorry, I just can’t.  I can’t help myself. I must meme.

I get that he goes on to give the “People have the power” line, but that is a bit different.  We the people ordained the Constitution, which grants power according to rules, and so on.  We are not a direct democracy, nor, do I think, anyone today would believe our elected officials are mere employees.

“This is the idea of democracy, with the history of democracy being riddled with failures to live up to this ideal”

Not even IS, and as I said, pure egalitarianism is not by design in the US.  I want to be clear I’m not saying egalitarianism is bad, nor am I saying that people should not be treated with equal degrees of respect –  this is a very different discussion.  I’m just addressing his claims about our political foundations here.

I agree with his description of capitalism.

I disagree that conservatives believe hierarchy is man’s natural state.  Many many conservatives are devout Christians, and in Christian tradition, everyone in theory is equal under God. Many conservatives also believe capitalism is a means toward increasing the quality of life for all people.

“Power has to be earned.”

You mean *cough* by garnering votes?  I mark this point as where he inserts the straw man that conservatives all want black people to be under Jim Crow again, which sure is a talking point of the far left, isn’t it, and yet not a talking point of the Republican party.

“All citizens are equal…is a legal fiction.”

So I wrote about how he cannot believe in equality before hearing this point, and honestly now.  Someone who believes all people are equal does not advocate for money for the poor, because there are no poor.  This sounds silly for me to say, but until he either defines equality in concrete terms or concedes that his equality is an “ought” not an “is” (bringing himself about halfway to this capitalist conservative) we won’t be able to go any further.

“Of any issue, simply ask: does this distribute power, or consolidate it?”

Does IS desire a more powerful central government, or a less powerful central government?

“If you’re in the middle, then you serve the king. Valar dohaeris. But, to everyone beneath you, you are the king.”

Ah, the privilege argument rears its ugly head at last.  IS apparently thinks we live in, and the honest to God best analogy I can make here is, Soviet Russia at the height of corruption.  Peons lick the boots of paper pushers.  IS is right when he says he and conservatives can’t communicate, because the world he perceives is not the United States or just about any other developed nation.  Here, paper pushers are treated like crap just as much, in fact, usually treated like crap by two sides.  By the same token, a poor person’s vote is equal to a middle class vote (but only the rich have enough money to buy power, or a seat in college, or have the connections to get the job).

“And getting pissed at those above implies that those below have a right to be pissed at you.”

Just to hammer it home, this statement necessitates that middle management has real power to enact their own will, and everything I’ve heard from and about people in middle management suggests otherwise.  Analogize to the mythical power of merely being white / male or white / male passing.

“A slight on them is a slight on all of us.”

All republicans are racist hillbillies stereotype.I notice how he just slipped this in without even a logical progression.  In his grand argument, it’s actually a new premise.

[Analogy to Kingdom Hearts]

I don’t even.

“Savvy viewers may be remembering another political philosophy that is hierarchical, undemocratic, built on nostalgia, and that likes to cloak its policies in progressive camouflage”

Ooo, ooo, it’s the one I was just talking about, Soviet Russia.  Oh, nope, I apologize, he has a single word that makes this answer slightly less than ideal, “nostalgia.”  With that word, the answer is

“Fascism.”

Who knew nostalgia was of such moral consequence.

“If you don’t like what a business is doing, you don’t regulate it, you take your money elsewhere. You should favor the capitalist solution, not the democratic one.”

Is the collective action of masses to speak their mind not democratic?  I understand if his intention is to claim the business will survive despite protest, but he doesn’t claim that.  This implies an unusually limited definition of “democratic”: it must compel the operation of government.  Whereas fascism and capitalism are defined broadly enough to describe associated, sometimes partial associated, values.  I’m not sure what he’s trying to accomplish with this difference of definition, but it’s worth noticing.

“They will never be onboard with aiding the poor in any systemic way, and will, instead, champion charity and crowdfunding, because minnows getting to eat should always be framed as a gift rather than a right.”

Two things.  First, charity is systemic. Crowdfunding is systemic, though maybe short-lived.  I guess “systemic” now shares the same anemia of definition that “democratic does” in it must only apply to government action.  (Unless it’s systemic racism…)  Second, conservatives cannot believe both that minnows work for their own food (“How resourceful were you? How well did you play?”) and minnows only survive by being given food.

“But as long as you are trying to meet this mentality in the middle, you are leaving the door open for fascists.”

Did I predict that he hates moderates? Darn, I don’t think I wrote that one down.  Well, another day, another radical.

“I recommend this one, because egalitarian thinking is one thing Nazis are bad at infiltrating.”

But people like Pol Pot are good at infiltrating it and, like, shooting a fifth of the population in a field.

Again, I don’t dislike egalitarianism, but that’s a pretty shallow argument in its favor.

I guess the sum of this video is to claim that conservatism is somehow the worship of capitalism, and then that conservatism is like fascism, and fascism shares a “hierarchical mindset” with capitalism.  But he can’t bring himself to claim fascism is an extension of capitalism, because that would have us all wondering why Adolf Hitler went around decrying, “plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominate the masses.“

So again we get an argument from looks-a-little-like.  Fascism looks-a-little-like hierarchy, and so does capitalism.  Nevermind so do state-based communism, socialism, regulatory agencies, even labor unions, and any organization that claims to be [inter]national.  And our Democrats sure haven’t slowed down the hierarchy of our government.

On a final note, I kept getting confused thinking “bigger fish” was about the phrase “bigger fish to fry” until I went through the whole video and realize, no, it’s supposed to be “big fish in a small pond.”  You know, like that Coldplay song.  “Lost!”

Probably should have cleared things up and titled the video, “Lost!”

[thelittlepalmtree]

@markkzuccerberg and everyone else who blindly follows capitalism. Let’s have a little chit chat about small government. 

When I said small government was bad and cited Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman I was citing two of the most influential members of the modern conservative party. Milton Friedman’s philosophies Barry Goldwater which was basically the first Trump (the only reason he didn’t win the nomination was because the parties were not quite as democratic in the 70s). Now let’s take these concepts out of the historical context which reveals them to be blatantly anti progress and social justice and examine them as ideas. 

The modern conservative (let’s say libertarian as Rand was pro-union and pro-abortion and Friedman called himself a neo-liberal) believes that small-government is best because when government gets involved it messes things up. Rand would often say something about how it was wrong to force the majority onto the individual (I actually have a lot of complicated feelings for Ayn because her books really did influence me a lot as a writer). What this concept fails to understand is that without regulation there cannot be true competition. 

There’s a good documentary on netflix that explains this called Saving capitalism but I’ll give a brief summary of what I’m talking about. Right now we live in a world where a company cannot outright lie to you, and has to disclose any issues that might arise with their product. But without regulation you’d have companies constantly cutting corners and not telling you about it. “Well we could research our products” someone might argue. The thing is that without government agencies actually doing the research there wouldn’t really be any reliable information to go off of. What we’d have instead would be very similar to the Gilded Age when people were constantly sold faulty products with no accountability. 

I remember when I first read Atlas Shrugged Dagny (the main character) decides to build a transcontinental railroad after her brother and CEO kicked the only competing company out of Colorado. She decides to make it out of this special medal created by her friend and future lover Hank Rearden. People are concerned about the metal which is untested and Dagny says something along the lines of “If you don’t think it’s safe don’t ride our trains.” Even back when I loved those books that bothered the shit out of me. People didn’t have a choice, the Taggart company had kicked out the competition! Of course people were upset! 

Too often a similar situation happens with corporations in our world. Companies like Walmart will use underhanded means of keeping prices low. If you make $11 an hour you can’t be the ethical consumer you want to be (I’ve literally been there). You may be saying “well why were you only making $11 an hour why couldn’t you find a better job there must be something wrong with YOU” actually no, I was getting my degree and literally all the jobs open to me without a degree offered me less than $15/hr and I was looking for a job in child care specifically. I couldn’t find a single place that would hire me and pay more than $12/hr. For watching children. Do you want the person caring for, educating, feeding, and entertaining your child to be paid $12/hr (especially considering tuition at that daycare was $330 a week)? Regardless of your answer, I had no choice but to take a job that did not value the amount of work I was doing. Literally every job in the area was going to pay at the same rate. 

And here’s where I quote Karl Marx who (contrary to popular belief) was not some radical revolutionary but rather an economist who was merely reporting back based on his expertise. This quote is from Wage Labor and Capital. 

But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man – i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.

Marx, Karl. Wage Labour and Capital (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 312-315). LeoPard Books India. Kindle Edition.

Capitalism was seen as a tool of feudal liberation. No longer did individuals belong to a noble lord. The reality was that nothing really had changed. True it is rare these days that someone can say “I belong to that person who lives in the nice house on the hill.” But the entire lower class does belong to the entire upper class. We may be able to choose who to work for but we can’t choose not to work. 

What does this really mean? It means that people with severe physical or mental disabilities will often live in poverty because they cannot work and cannot support themselves. It means that a woman who is being abused will stay with her abuser because she will be homeless otherwise. It means a child may stay in an abusive household because they will be homeless otherwise. It means people forgo taking their medicine because it has side effects that keep them from being able to work. It means people being stuck with medical bills because they took a job that gave them cancer because they had no other options. It means your kid getting the flu because my coworker couldn’t afford not to come into work. 

But the government does other things too. We think of capitalism as a merit-based system but how can it be that way if the government does not even the playing field? Things like copyright (which, to be fair, Ayn Rand did believe was the job of the government), and intellectual property laws keep people like writers, musicians, artists, etc in business. Regulations on every industry not only protect the consumer but protects people who do try to run ethical businesses and keep shoddy work from being passed off as the real deal (there’s a great episode of Rotten on Netflix about Chinese companies importing some sort of food product that was sub-par and hurting the industry in America) Without government assistance we wouldn’t have things like Railroads which were subsidized by the government. In the great depression agriculture was subsidized by the government in order to preserve the infrastructure (both physical and non-physical) that would develop into our current ability to produce food at an amazing rate. 

I am not saying capitalism is evil. It has given us a lot of great stuff, but it never existed in a laissez faire world. Small government is great when it means the King doesn’t have the right to take your pee for gunpowder (yes this did happen). But it’s not so great when it means Walmart can pay people so little that the town it’s in goes bankrupt because of all the assistance its employees needed. We need to balance government with capitalism. That doesn’t mean seizing the means of production, it means taxing the DeVoss family so we can all have the right to life (aka universal or single payer health insurance). 

I get that this was long and I didn’t cover everything I wanted to, but I urge you to read Wage Labor and Capital by Karl Marx, Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, and The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Another great one is  The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist is another great one about Slavery and Capitalism in America. I also urge you to read or watch Freakonomics or listen to their podcast (freakonomics raido). Or the documentary Saving Capitalism on Netflix. You can also look at this site for a little more information about wealth inequality in America. 

[yasbxxgie]

The photograph is one of the standout images of the 1970s black liberation struggle. An African American man, his hair in dreadlocks, chest bare, stands with arms outstretched as though emulating Jesus on the cross. A white police officer is jabbing a shotgun at him with the muzzle inches from his throat. Another officer clasps a police helmet in his right hand as if preparing to whack him over the head with it.

Forty years almost to the day after that photo was taken, the same black man described how he came to be standing there on a sidewalk, half-naked and surrounded by angry police. His account was almost too graphic to grasp, sounding more like something out of a movie than the recollection of what really happened in the heart of one of America’s major cities.

It was 8 August 1978 and he had just emerged from the basement of the house in Philadelphia that his black revolutionary group, Move, used as a communal home. In an attempt to evict them from the property, hundreds of officers had just stormed the building, pummeling it with water cannons and gunfire, and in the maelstrom a police officer had been killed and several other first responders injured.

“As I emerged from the basement I had the presence of mind to let them see I was unarmed, so I took my shirt off,” the black man said. “That’s when I put my arms out wide.”

The black man is Delbert Orr Africa, Del for short. When I went to meet him he was wearing a burgundy one-piece with a white T-shirt and blue shoes. Everyone else around him was wearing the same uniform of Dallas maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania that he has worn every day since appearing in that photograph 40 years ago.

I had come to interview him as part of a two-year project in which I made contact with eight black liberationists who have all experienced long prison sentences. They each agreed to embark on an ongoing conversation with me about their political beliefs today and their battle to secure their own freedom.

Del Africa, 72, and I talked for three hours in the prison visitors’ room. He spoke rapidly and intensely, as though he needed to get it all out, relating how he had joined the Black Panther party in Chicago and then switched to the Move organisation after relocating to Philadelphia.

He also told me what happened the second after that photo was taken, as though he were narrating the next few frames of a news reel. As it turns out, that police officer really had been about to whack him.

“A cop hit me with his helmet,” he said. “Smashed my eye. Another cop swung his shotgun and broke my jaw. I went down, and after that I don’t remember anything ’til I came to and a dude was dragging me by my hair and cops started kicking me in the head.”

Del Africa is one of the Move 9, the group of five men and four women, all African American, who were arrested 40 years ago this August during the 1978 police siege of their headquarters in Powelton Village, Philadelphia. They were charged as a nine-person unit with the murder of the police officer who died in the melee, James Ramp. Each was sentenced to 30 years to life, though to this day they protest their innocence.

The ranks of the Move 9 have slowly been depleted over the years. Two have died in prison. In June, the first of the nine to win parole, Debbie Africa, was released from a Pennsylvania women’s prison.

As the 40th anniversary approaches, six of the Move 9 are still behind bars, Del Africa included. They are among a total of 19 black radicals who remain locked up in penitentiaries across America having been convicted of violent acts committed in the name of black power between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

Along with former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army members, they amount to the unfinished business of the black liberation struggle. Many of them remain strikingly passionate about the cause, even as they strive for release in some cases half a century into their sentences.

In the case of Move members, their politics are a strange fusion of black power and flower power. The group that formed in the early 1970s melded the revolutionary ideology of the Black Panthers with the nature- and animal-loving communalism of 1960s hippies. You might characterise them as black liberationists-cum-eco warriors.

That sense of passion for the cause leaps out from the first email that Del Africa sent to me from Dallas in September 2016, after I’d contacted him asking to talk.

“ON THE MOVE! LONG LIVE FREEDOM’S STRUGGLE!” he proclaimed in capital letters at the top of the message. “Warm Revolutionary greetings, Ed!”

He then launched into a long deliberation about the “plight of political prisoners here in ameriKKKa!”. Move members are still imprisoned, he wrote, “just because we steadfastly refused to abandon our Belief in the Revolutionary Teachings of Move’s Founder” and because of “our refusal to bow down to this murderous, racist, sexist rotten-ass system”. He ended with the quip: “But, hey, I don’t wanna burn you out the first time I reply to your email.”

There was a similar robustness to the first response I received in December 2016 after reaching out to Janine Phillips Africa, one of the four women among the Move 9. Unlike Del Africa’s email, she wrote to me by hand, sending the letter by mail as she has continued to do over the ensuing 18 months.

“Me and my sisters are doing good, staying strong,” was the first sentence she wrote to me. That was remarkable in itself coming from a woman who is not only approaching the 40th anniversary of her incarceration but has had two of her children killed in confrontations with police.

“Everybody knows how strong Move men are. We’re showing the world how strong Move women are. That’s how it’s been since our arrest in 1978,” she said.

In the course of that first letter, Janine Africa, who was 22 when she was arrested and is now 62, took me deep into the “torture chamber”, the cruel solitary confinement wing where she spent the first three years of her sentence.

“There were no windows, just a section of the wall with frosted panes. You couldn’t tell when it was night or day, they kept the lights on 24/7. They were ordered to break us but it didn’t work – no matter what they did, they were not going to break us.”

Over the months, I came to learn about the double tragedy in Janine Africa’s life. In 1976, Philadelphia police officers turned up at the Move house in Powelton Village having been called out to a disturbance. Scuffling ensued between some Move residents and police. Janine was shoved and her baby, whom she had named Life, was knocked out of her arms to the ground. His skull appears to have been crushed, and he died later that day in her arms. He was three weeks old.

Then on 13 May 1985, seven years after Janine Africa was imprisoned, she received further terrible news. Philadelphia police had dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto a Move house on Osage Avenue in the west of Philadelphia in an attempt to force the black radicals to evacuate the premises after long-running battles with the authorities. The bomb ignited a fire in the Move house that turned into an inferno.

Janine’s 12-year-old son, Little Phil, was being cared for in that house by other Move adults while she was in custody. The then mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode, notoriously gave the go-ahead for the bombing, and the fire that ensued was allowed to rage, the blaze spreading across the black neighborhood and razing 61 homes to the ground.

Little Phil and four other children burned to death. So too did six adults including Move’s founder, John Africa, AKA Vincent Leaphart.

I asked Janine Africa how she coped with losing two young sons during clashes with law enforcement. She was reticent. “I don’t like talking about the night Life was killed,” she wrote in April. “There are times when I think about Life and my son Phil, but I don’t keep those thoughts in my mind long because they hurt.”

In that same letter she said she had turned grief into what she contests is a force for good: deeper commitment to the struggle. “The murder of my children, my family, will always affect me, but not in a bad way. When I think about what this system has done to me and my family, it makes me even more committed to my belief,” she said.

Del Africa also heard bad news on 13 May 1985. His 13-year-old daughter Delisha was also living in the Move house. She too died in the fire. When I asked him how he dealt with being told his daughter had been killed in an inferno that had been ignited by the actions of the city authorities, he wasn’t as sanguine as Janine.

“I just cried,” he said during my prison visit. “I wanted to strike out. I wanted to wreak as much havoc as I could until they put me down. That anger, it brought such a feeling of helplessness. Like, dang! What to do now? Dark times …”

Mayor Goode made a formal apology for the disaster the following year. But a grand jury cleared all officials of criminal liability for the 1985 bombing that killed 11 people, including five children.

The only adult Move member to escape the inferno alive, Ramona Africa, was imprisoned for seven years.

All Move members take the last name “Africa” to denote their commitment to race equality and their strong bond to what they regard as their Move “family”. “A family of revolutionaries” is how Del Africa once described it to me. Unlike the Black Panther party which formally dissolved in 1982, Move is still a living entity.

“We exposed the crimes of government officials on every level,” Janine Africa wrote to me. “We demonstrated against puppy mills, zoos, circuses, any form of enslavement of animals. We demonstrated against Three Mile Island [nuclear power plant] and industrial pollution. We demonstrated against police brutality. And we did so uncompromisingly. Slavery never ended, it was just disguised.”

Deeply committed as they were to each other, the Move “family” undoubtedly had the ability to incense those around them. They liked to project their revolutionary message at high volume from a bullhorn at all hours of night and day. Passersby were accosted with a torrent of expletives.

Then there were the dogs. When the 1978 siege happened, there were 12 adults and 11 children in the Move house in Powelton Village – and 48 dogs. Most of the animals were strays taken in by the group as part of its philosophy of caring for the vulnerable. Black liberation, animal liberation – the two are as one with Move. John Africa was known as the “dog man”, as he was rarely seen without one.

The unconventional nature of the Move community which drove some neighbors to despair in turn led to demands for their eviction, and ultimately to the fatal siege. Over time relations grew more belligerent. Months before the siege Move members made visible their threat to resist attempts to remove them from the neighborhood – they stood on a platform they had built at the front of the house dressed in fatigues and brandishing rifles.

On its side, the city was led at that time by the Frank Rizzo, Goode’s predecessor as Philadelphia mayor, a former police commissioner who liked to talk tough and was fond of dog-whistle politics. He once said of the Move radicals: “You are dealing with criminals, barbarians, you are safer in the jungle!” Another Rizzo classic was: “Break their heads is right. They try to break yours, you break theirs first.”

When Move refused to vacate the premises having been issued with an eviction order, Rizzo said he would impose a blockade on the house so tight “even a fly wouldn’t get in”. He was not kidding. For 56 days before the siege, a ring of steel was erected around the house, no food was permitted into the compound and the water supply was cut off. Rizzo bragged he would “show them more firepower than they’ve ever seen”.

At about 6am on 8 August 1978 the action started. Move members were battered by water cannon as they took refuge in the basement of the building. Tear gas was propelled into the house. At 8.15am shots rang out and a thunderstorm of gunfire erupted that is captured on police footage of the incident. Police and fire officers are seen scattering in all directions as bullets whistle overhead seemingly in all directions. It looked like a war zone.

Soon after Move adults and naked children began emerging from the smoke-ridden basement. Janine Africa can be heard in the police footage screaming. Next, Del Africa appears, his hands outstretched in that Jesus pose. The camera pans in on him as he lies on the street after he was hit with the police helmet. Two police officers begin kicking him on his head which bounces between them like a ball. Three officers later faced disciplinary measures but a judge dismissed the charges.

Prosecutors accused the Move 9 of collaboratively killing Ramp, even though he died from one bullet. They said the shooting had been started when gunfire erupted from the basement where the Move members were gathered, a theory supported by some eyewitnesses.

Move’s attorney gathered other witness evidence suggesting the fatal shot had come from the opposite direction – in other words, it was accidental “friendly fire”. At trial no forensic evidence was presented that connected the Move 9 to the weapon that caused the fatality. For the women in particular the prosecution did not even argue the four had handled firearms or had been involved in the actual shooting of Ramp.

Del Africa insisted when I interviewed him that though Move had guns in the house, none of them were operative. “There was no shooting from our side,” he told me. “No one in the house had any gunshot residue, none of us had fingerprints on any of the weapons they claim came out of the house.”

The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police has a plaque for Ramp on its memorial site. I reached out to the order many times in the course of a month to hear their reflection on his death and Move’s role in it, but they did not respond.

You can get a sense of the depth of feeling by reading the comments under Ramp’s page on the Philadelphia Officer Down Memorial website. Several commentators, some of whom vividly recalled the 1978 siege, sent blessings to the deceased police officer and his family.

Others expressed anger at the lack of justice for Ramp, though they didn’t specify what they meant. One woman, whose late husband was on duty at both the siege and the 1985 bombing, was more direct. She said of Ramp: “I was so sad to hear of your passing. I felt, and still do feel so badly for your family. Move were scum and cowards, hiding as they shot. You were SO brave. Never forgotten. RIP.”

As they approach the 40th anniversary of the siege and of their subsequent captivity, Del and Janine Africa described to me how they’ve coped for so long doing time for a crime they insist they did not commit. They each have their own survival methods.

Janine Africa told me she avoids thinking about time itself. Birthdays, holidays, the new year mean nothing to her. “The years are not my focus, I keep my mind on my health and the things I need to do day by day.”

Del Africa thinks of the eons behind bars not as “prison time” but as “revolutionary prison activity”. “I keep saying to myself: ‘I will not fall apart. I will not give in.’”

They’ve both experienced long stretches in solitary confinement, a brand of punishment that the UN has decried as a form of torture. In 1983, Del Africa was put into the “hole” – an isolation cell – because he refused to have his dreadlocks cut.

He stayed in the hole for six years. He relieved the stress and boredom by organizing black history quizzes for other inmates held in the isolation wing. Russell Shoaltz, a former Black Panther, helped him devise the questions, and shout them out down the line of solitary cells. Questions such as: when was the Brown v Board of Education ruling in the US supreme court? What year was the Black Panther party founded? Who was Dred Scott? For what is John Brown remembered?

Eventually Del Africa won the right to keep his dreads. When I visited him in Dallas there they hung, salt-and-peppered now, proudly down to his hips.

Throughout, the Move prisoners have drawn strength from companionship with other members of the nine. Janine shared a cell with two other surviving Move women – Debbie Africa and Janet Holloway Africa – in Cambridge Springs women’s prison in Pennsylvania. They called each other “sisters” and did everything together. “We read, we play cards, we watch TV. We laugh a lot together, we’re sisters through and through,” she wrote in a letter in February.

There was one other member of their gang: fittingly given the history of the organization, a dog called Chevy. The prison authorities let them keep the dog kenneled in their cell as part of a program in which they train the animal for later use as a service dogs for disabled people.

Life went on like this for years, and had acquired its own normality, almost a certain tranquility. Until last month when Debbie Africa was granted parole and set free. Her departure came as a jolt.

“It’s strange not having Deb here,” Janine said. “I keep expecting her to walk in from work. They snuck her out at 5.[:]00 in the morning. We only got to hug her briefly and watch her leave. Chevy misses her, he keeps sniffing her bed.”

In June, Janine and Janet Africa also went before the same parole board as Debbie and made essentially the same case that they had earned their freedom. The board asked Janine whether she would be a risk to the public were she to be let out, and she referred them to her pristine prison record: the last time she had any disciplinary rap was 26 years ago. “The way I’m in here is the way I’ll be outside, there is no risk factor,” she told them.

While Debbie was set free, both Janine and Janet had their parole denied. The board said they showed “lack of remorse” for the death of Ramp in the 1978 siege.

Janine Africa wrote to me a few days after she learnt of the denial, speculating that games were being played with her mind. The contrast of Debbie’s release with her denial was “either to make us resent Deb or make me feel hopeless and break us down. Whatever their tactic, it isn’t working!”

Debbie’s release also made a profound impact on Del Africa. “I feel overjoyed that Debbie is out,” he wrote to me. “Her release is a breakthrough! I see it finally opening the door a crack.”

Del Africa also hasn’t had a misconduct report in prison for more than 20 years. Yet he too was turned down for parole last year and must wait another four years before his next chance to convince the parole board that he can safely be returned to society.

Like many of the 19 black liberationists still behind bars, Del Africa is caught in a trap attached to the crime for which he was convicted. He knows he will only be paroled if he expresses heartfelt remorse. But says he cannot do that.

“How can I have any remorse for something I never did?” he said. “I had nothing to do with killing a cop in 1978. Have they shown any remorse for what happened to my daughter in 1985?”

Would he show remorse to the parole board if he felt it would secure his release?

“No, never going to do that,” he said. “That would be akin to making them right. They are the ones who were wrong.” [x]

Photograph:

The arrest of Delbert Africa of Move on 8 August 1978

Debbie Africa was released in June after 40 years in prison

Members of Move gather in front of their house. They were arrested 40 years ago during a police siege.

Janine Africa preaching to the crowd in front of the barricaded Move house in the Powelton Village section of Philadelphia

Move members hold sawed-off shotguns and automatic weapons as they stand in front of their barricaded headquarters

Debbie Africa and her son, Mike Africa, whom she gave birth to in her prison cell a month into her incarceration. She was released last June.

[rankpersonal242]

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There is this weird prejudice in our society implying that a man has to be taller than his girlfriend – anything other than that is seen as “weird” or “unorthodox”. This often leads to many shorter men feeling insecure and anxious when it comes to dating taller women.

Dinky One, a new matchmaking website, aims to combat penis-size pressure by helping those with smaller phalluses find love. “Dinky One was created to help guys who are smaller than average,”. Short Friends Date is a Completely FREE Short Dating Site which connects Short Single Men & Women with fellow Short people. Meet Single Short Personals in your local area at ShortFriendsDate.com. Our Short Friends Date have diffferent categories of people, i.e Short & Cute Singles Meetup, Short Friends Club, Short Friends Dating Buddies, Short.

Actress Lizz Adams recently shared a picture of herself and her shorter husband

Image credits: Lizz

Image credits: Lizz

Image credits: Lizz

“The reaction was much bigger than I’d anticipated, to be honest! It blew up after a couple of big accounts retweeted it, and I think it hit a nerve with a lot of people who misunderstood the intention behind it,” said Lizz in an interview with Bored Panda.

Image credits: Lizz

Image credits: Lizz

The woman is a comedian as well and says she speaks in hyperbole a lot which is probably why many people thought she was speaking badly about tall people. This was not her intention, however. “I am taller than my husband, who I love very much, but was just pointing out how arbitrary height requirements are, and that discounting a potential partner based on their height could prevent you from meeting someone really special,” said Lizz.

Lizz’s post inspired many other women who date shorter men to share their own adorable couple pics

Image credits: aiviloangel

Image credits: PorcelainAngelx

“I imagine it’s because of the reaction people have when they see a taller woman with a shorter man,” said the woman when asked why some men feel insecure being shorter than women. “I don’t think the stigma applies as much to non-hetero couples, but there’s this perception that women should be with men that are larger than them and that sort of toxic masculinity makes men feel like they have to be huge and strong to be manly, but being a good man has nothing to do with how you look.”

Image credits: whitalynn_xo

Image credits: geoff_green

Image credits: Mafedelori

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Image credits: monetmignon

Lizz’s advice to girls interested in dating shorter guys and guys interested in taller girls is to shoot their shot. “Get to know the person you’re interested in, establish a connection and go for it!” says the actress. “If they’re not interested, that’s ok, they’re not the person for you, move on to someone who appreciates you for you, not just your optics!”

Image credits: tory_scribbles

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Image credits: thedealwithalex

Image credits: AllieMore

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Image credits: EmmaleeAlese

Image credits: NMC2010

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“I just wanted to add that the only thing I regret about my original tweet is making light of a very real disease that affects a lot of people. I didn’t mean to shade alcoholics, or imply that all tall people abuse alcohol, it was a flippant tweet I sent off without thinking, and I appreciate the people who brought that to my attention and apologize for any offense in that regard!” added Lizz.

People loved Lizz’s message

Image credits: SimianJimmy

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Dating Site For Short Guys

From The Desk Of: Scot McKay Subject: Attract the women you want..regardless of your height.

If you're like me, you've felt underestimated or even flat-out dismissed your entire life because you're shorter than average.

I'm sure you've also heard there's nothing you can do, so you might as well 'get over it'..especially when it comes to attracting women.

After all, overweight guys can lose weight. Bald guys can use Rogaine.

But shorter guys can't become taller.

To top it all off, chances are you've been discouraged by the astounding lack of resources available to help you counter that kind of bad information. Obviously, none of this is your fault..which is why feeling helpless--and hopeless--hurts so much.

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If you're skeptical, it's because you have been programmed by the opinions of others.

I know what you've heard and what you've been through. I've been there myself.

And given what the media leads us to believe about ourselves, far too many men of shorter stature struggle when it comes to women.

Let me confirm what you already suspect: You've been lied to.

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I've spent countless hours organizing the field-tested strategies that have led me (and many friends my size and even shorter) to unequivocally conclude that shorter men can utterly obliterate any perceived disadvantage based on shorter stature--while magnetically inspiring hot, sexy women to favor us over taller men.

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The answer is simple, really.

Once you know for sure (like so many others do already) that I am on to something here, I'm confident you'll want to know every other secret I have.

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[the-mythical-norm]

*batteries not included

Paying for fun is stupid. But we do it because that’s the bill of goods we’ve been sold by a capitalist society. Everyone thinks “I️ need to have a lot of money or make a lot to do fun things. And I only do a thing most of the time if I’m getting paid” But making all this money is usually not fun. I️t doesn’t cost anything to sing in the rain or dance in the street. Of course a lot of fun things cost money and I️ do recognize it’s nearly impossible to live outside the marketplace. But why only do things that you get paid for? And why be imprisoned by paying for enjoyable things? We should strive to live lives where we mostly do things we aren’t paid for, rather things we love doing. Instead we spend most of it working and then doing stuff on the side that we don’t get paid for. Why do we have to work so much, are all of these things we want to buy really worth it? These bentleys, these hilltop mansions? And how the heck did we accept such a transaction? How did we get so caught up in the material world that we are forced to support it through hard work at whatever cost. I think it’s because of distraction. Our lives are largely filled with studying, test taking, being bored, working and other shit we don’t want to do, so how do we get through it? We need little pressure releases to keep us from killing ourselves. To keep us from questioning if this is all worth it. So they keep us distracted. Ultra, frat parties, video games, weekends. Just when we start to turn our heads and question our standing, ZAP!, Coachella!, oh theres a party this weekend? Ill do some drugs, blow off some steam.. life doesn’t suck that bad.

If we didn’t have these little treats, and we pondered all this work and pointlessness, we could become very dangerous to the marketplace. We might even start a revolution. They know what happened in 1968. They know about the stonewall riots, the black panther party, the civil rights movement, the counter culture, the situationist, et cetera.  

If we were gonna work, they had to make the work place cool too, some businesses will have a bar in the office, or a jungle gym, a nice cafe.. At google, you don’t even have to wear shoes and you can bring your pets, I wanna work there! Why would anyone refuse to spend their 9-5 here, its so comfortable! All of these little bites of coolness, and packaged rebellion, its just enough to keep us going. Keep the hamster in its wheel. The marketplace is genius. They know we don’t want to work, and they know we don’t need all this shit we are saving our money to buy, but they found a way to dismantle the young bombs inside us and we ended up on the hamster wheel anyway. Market researchers came into to our homes and studied us, so they knew exactly what we wanted, and exactly what else we wanted too. We wanted a burger, so of course we want the fries too, and the soda, ketchup, mustard…the products never stop. So we have to work more to afford it, but the work is comfortable enough so that we don’t question it. So if the work is comfortable, the benefits are nice, eventually you’ll get to use your money on the weekends or over the summer, whats the big deal? Why is it so bad to be a sheep?

I would argue its akin to the man who can’t see color. He lives his whole life without color, he doesn’t complain because he has no idea what he’s missing out on. But we can still see the color if we really want to. Jeffrey Kaplan writes about how they’ve devised a formula to keep us wanting in his article, “The Gospel Of Consumption,”

“Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work — more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.” By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption” — the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

No wonder we want to make so much money, we have too many things we want to buy, and its all part of their plan. The market is even smarter than that. They hijacked cool culture too.

“Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron ("the revolution will not be televised"); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product category sprectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves.”  -The Conquest of Cool

It doesn’t stop there. Anything new, revolutionary, bold, exciting, cool, everything will be packaged and sold to the masses, by the market. Everything and anything cool you do will be quickly be co-opted and marketed. So then we gotta find something else thats cool, but thats exactly what they want. It’s the perfect equation, we rebel, they sell it, we quit that and find something else, then they just go and sell that too. We’re just rotating the crops. But they got tired of chasing the cool, now they just tell us what to want. Cool still existed and it still rocked. True rebellion existed too, the dadaists, the renaissance, counter culture, LGBT, the beats, the hippies, the black panther party, the list goes on. But it’s sort of diluted, it’s hard to tell if an act is authentic rebellion or just something to sell. I️ know Marcel Duchamp was really rebelling when he submitted his urinal to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1917, but is Marlon Brando really rebelling? When he struts into town with his formidable stature, and wandering gaze. With his blue jeans and leather jacket, or is I️t just a big commercial for Levi Strauss? Buy this new look if you wanna be cool like Brando. All this rebellion was real, but the market eventually saw this and did something about I️t. They sold our little rebellions to us with Dr Martins, hot topic, urban outfitters, etc. These companies have packaged and sold our oppositional energies. The words rebellion and revolution are so watered down, they were even able to make us feel rebellious by our decision to wear vans instead of converse! They are fueling our rebellions so that we feel satisfied.  So we don’t freakout!

So now they tell us what we want. Oh you need this new iPhone, this outfit, these shoes, blah blah I️t never stops. How many times did Wozniak say that this new iPhone will revolutionize everything. We are literally put on this earth to buy and sell.  

Can we really live authentically? And how can we exist outside the market place? Or at least try? Advertisements for these ivory towers to live in, for these vehicles of mass opulence, for these clothes knitted in gold… its been shoved down our gullet and posted on every wall we pass. In class we talked about how we don’t need all this shit, but they’ve made us want it so bad, that we are basically imprisoned by material. Because we are imprisoned, we must fund our material obsessions, by studying business and accounting, getting internships that put your foot in the door, then a cushy job after college. They’ll tell you, college is for making connections.. you don’t actually learn shit. Nobody uses their major anymore, its just a stamp of approval. I think thats why some people hate college, why doesn’t anyone study art history, or the apartheid in Africa, or the renaissance, music history…why doesn’t anyone want us to know these things? Everyone you meet is just seen as a stepping stone that leads to your palace someday. Oh I gotta be friends with this guy, he can cut me a deal on a nice house later on, and this guy will get me a free car..etc. I got a photographer friend, a banker friend, a chef friend, man I’m set! I mean so many of our relationships are just like empty calories. When you say ‘have a nice day’ as you pass the hostess on the way out of a nice dinner, do you really mean it? Do you want to help her actually have a nice day? Do you care if she does or not? The answer is probably not. But what are we supposed to do just walk out and say no words? I think this is tunnel vision at its finest. We think that this is the only way to live so we do it without question because the unknown is too scary.  So then we do things like joining a fraternity because theres nothing else to do in this town. We don’t want to be lonely. We don’t want to venture into the unknown. Joining a fraternity as an antidote for loneliness is gasoline to put out a fire, man. We study to get degrees that will get us great jobs so we can drive to work faster in our Ferraris, to make more money…just running faster and faster on that hamster wheel. Why are we so obsessed with being successful? That equation is why most people live lives of quite desperation. “Well, theres nothing else to do, theres no other life to live….If I didn’t do this with my life, what else would I do with my time?” So who’s to blame for this plutocracy, this capitalist society? Is it our fault? Is it the markets fault? The market research teams, our parents, society…who’s responsible for this! A world of mooks and midriffs! I don’t know, and at this point I don’t think it matters.

Maybe We Just have to Go. Go outside, go for a walk. Life’s joy doesn’t only come from personal relationships and material posessions, but experiences with nature too. Christopher McCandless knew that when he set out for Alaska.

I️ have found great joy in riding my bike on a breezy day, through the falling leaves that shed from the trees above, or sitting out on a doc at some marina underneath the moonlight, playing my harmonica as the boats sway. Hell, I’ve had times far more mysterious and enjoyable then any trip abroad, just looking at the Lake or the beach for a while. Its true we all need a tonic of wildness, but its closer than you think and a lot cheaper too. These things are basically free, and I️m not getting paid to do them. Granted there was a transaction to get the bike.. but these are ways I️ try existing outside the marketplace. Of course brands like REI, Patagonia, Vissla, etc, they try to sell me things I’ll need when I️m off exploring, and I️ buy them because I️m a hedonist too. I just try my best to only take what ill need. And most the things I do buy, I won’t actually need. I️ met a kid the other day while biking. Brandon Stephan Davis. He stood tall and radiated this strange cloud of wisdom around him. His hair was wild and dreaded, clothes withered and faded. He’s a kid about our age, from the big Apple. Hitchhiked all the way to the 305 with nothing but a backpack, an instrument he invented, and his poetry journal. Thats pretty cool. Brandon did that entire journey with basically no money, and not a lick of REI or Patagonia apparel on him. Man, did he have a lot to say! He wrote poetry in a small journal that he kept in his fanny pack, I had the pleasure of hearing one on black oppression. I️ asked him where he was headed, he pulled out a neatly folded map that looked like it had been around. He pointed to this small river and said, “I️m just gonna sit there and watch the water, then I’ll figure out what next. I️ got no where to be.” I can bet he didn’t have a lot of money, but I’d say he’s one the most successful people I’ve met in a while.

[rametarin]

If I had the ear of South America..

I would say, “Latinx is only the beginning.”

Yeah. It’s perceived as an anglo plot to colonize and imperialize the Spanish language, as it was born in the US thanks to a bunch of cultural marxist shitheads that are shamelessly trying to argue against gendered language on some futurist utopian transhumanist bullshit, white claiming it’s purely, “for diversity and inclusion of the transgendered and non-binary gendered people.”

But you aren’t going to stop or stem this tide of stupid by writing it off as some anglo plot. It just.. it won’t stop.

Here in the United States a guerilla cultural war went on. As a child I was exposed to radical feminists that took careful measures to engineer my experiences and get me to draw conclusions. That white people were evil, as individuals and as a group. That white people were destroying the world. That white people were soulless, cultureless imperialist monsters that just wanted to subvert all the innocent and harmless brown people and verifiably undeniably had enslaved everybody and everything.

That togetherness you enjoy under the label Hispanic and/or Latino? These people that formulated Latinx are working to subvert that, too. Here in the states, “I don’t see race” became controversial because the supposed progressives don’t like the egalitarian model that eliminates race and class from the equation to address if an individual is free or not based on their own personal merits, poverty level, education, etc. They DO like to ask, “Are these COMMUNITIES and MINORITY GROUPS (self identified) thriving and growing? If not, is it because the majority isn’t helping them grow at their own expense?”

In the United States, for the longest time, the narrative was that Spanish colonialism was irrelevant, at least in the US conversation about race and oppression, because, “Spanish speakers are marginalized and oppressed.” And also implied to be synonymous with being as different from white people as Asians and black Africans. So giving the Spanish the same stigma as they give, say, people descended from the English, or the French, or the Germans, was considered wrong.

But now that they’ve decided they want to cement more ties with drug cartels and guerillas across South America, the conversation and discourse has progressed. Now they want to kick up activity in Latin America to make society divisive and talk about how the black Latino is inherently oppressed by the white Latino. Rather than the discourse assume everybody south of the border is some big happy singular culture and family, it’s becoming clearer they don’t like white Spanish, and want the progressive and hip and cool kid view that white Spanish people, regardless of their origins or immigration status, are oppressors of people with different skin, solely on account of their, “privilege.”

This mentality that encouraged minority groups to militantly self-segregate and declare themselves separate cultures unto themselves, being oppressed by a white majority, is being used to sell social theories and scapegoat majorities for any and all problems being faced by a community .Exploiting the very real colorism and history of discrimination, but not for the ends of ending it, but for exploiting it to motivate division, discord and violence.

Feminism’s surface stated values and goals in and of themselves aren’t all bad. Obviously, there are backwards and exploitative or outright misogynistic views, values and social policy put in place to prevent women from living independent lives or progressing in work or business. The concept of a niche of interest that covers that WOULD be good, except it has been co-opted and platformed by these same marxist guerilla people for the purposes of selling dialectic materialistic views on what is unfair and what is unjust, and they’re harnessing that anger to create a culture that makes women feel oppressed as a class and under the auspices of what they’re learning from the Marxists.

They use and exploit this niche, this legitimate advocacy towards equality and advancement for women, the way a horror movie monster wiggles into the skin of a crewmate to characterize itself as something it is not while sabotaging the environment and exploiting the situation for its own ends. Infiltration. So female uprightedness and empowerment in and of itself is not the problem, but ‘feminism’ as a social organization is. The banner has been platformed and tained, and a lot of the literature mixed in with it is more of the same Critical Legal Theory crap that tells them certain things are true and absolute based on arbitrary theory.

It is important to not see this egalitarian undertone as the problem. It is not. The egalitarian element that is appropriated by these conspirators and guerillas is not the issue. The issue is the people that have exploited the conversation of female equality, are doing so to stick lenses over the eyes of the people with the only outlet of social organization they can see or know to do anything about it. And that’s how you get populist radical feminism as the only or biggest, loudest game in town for their organizing.

That’s how you get buzz cut self-proclaimed radfems rioting and attacking churches and other, “patriarchal organizations.” That’s how you get the same sort of woman taking the liberty of telling young girls (whom then go on to see young boys so dourly and poorly) that “society is corrupted and evil.”

It is so, so important going forwards to fight shit like Latinx in the correct way. If you make the wrong arguments, you won’t break through to your daughters or sons. They’re being told that white people (and this now includes Spanish-Latinos) are monsters. And they’re being told that men are shit. Little boys (like I was) are being cornered by their female age-group peers, their peers older sisters, aunts, mothers, other peers, that men by default are oppressive, woman-hating monsters by default and by society/culture.

You need to understand that the things these supposed progressives try to fight for, they do it solely to take the niche away from anybody else and DEFINE progressivism as what they want, and anything they do not, to be more of the same oppression by race, by sex, by religion, by culture, by money. It’s a propaganda game, and the more any of you try to preach about Jesus or the church knowing best, or ‘things are just naturally a certain way and you need to understand that,’ the more you play into their hands.

Your enemy is radical, and it is only secular on paper. But they’ll induct people to have “important conversations” with your children and community that appeal to what they only call science and logic, that are in fact only loosely that. And really just subjective opinion, philosophy. Social science. You try and appeal to religion to argue their stuff, they’ll beat you like a drum and you’ll just prove them right in the developing hearts and minds of a generation that is trying to not be stuck with the stigma of their parents or ancestors in the eyes of their friends.

This is not an enemy you can just sing a song about Jesus and Mary and defeat. These people will take and twist any real or even perceived and interpreted flaw in your society and those that suffer from the ills the most will internalize it, if what’s made to appeal to their sensibilities takes.

In America, that comes in the form of mixing racial separatism and supremacism with conflating it for the struggle for black freedom and equality. And I cannot imagine it being any different south of Mexico, whatsoever. They’ll work on the girls and tell them that to be born white-Latino is to be an oppressor, tell the girls they’re largely exempt from this because women are a marginalized and oppressed minority/demographic, and tell the misc. non-white groups across South America that they should organize against the hegemony of white people and “whiteness.”

They’ll do it while pretending their attempts and desire to spread disunity and hostility is “sticking up for the little guy.” They’ll do it while confronting overbearing actual patriarchal culture and binary gendered culture (so long as it’s white)  and write off ALL of Catholicism in South America as equal to the WORST of examples of bad Catholicism.

American conservatives continue to struggle dealing with these people because they see an opportunity to polarize and capitalize on the totalitarian nature of this polarization. They see it as a way to incentivize people to vote for more conservative, religious and similarthings, because if their alternative are literal communists and socialists, they can afford to ask for more.

Meanwhile they lose when it comes to hearts and minds of the young because their messages are just utterly worthless when as a 2-13 year old, you’re being told religious, old, white, capitalist people are oppressing everybody and destroying everything and trying to force everybody to live and society to work under the totalitarianism of religion.

When the angry political lesbian type corners you as a small child and explains that men are why women are so afraid of men, and you can’t even rebutt that it’s a feminist talking point without them talking about how that’s a Nazi/conservative propaganda view, and the young girls they’re grooming go with that interpretation of the world and events because it holds more romantic value for them, things they want to be true and things that they’ve been given just enough facts and reason to think are true, it doesn’t help when competitive arguments are either, “you’re too young to think about or talk about social issues or political discourse,” or, confirm every negative suspicion they now have with, “well they’re right, we are oppressing them, but we have every right to.”

The only way to truly beat these manipulative, lying, exploiting animals is to beat them at their own game.

They do not care about minority welfare or rights beyond their solutions on how to address any given injustice they can think of. Whether it be by making society respect the establishment of different racial communities again solely to provide financail welfare to people on the basis of race, or rules that say they’re free to discriminate against groups of people in the name of hiring and defending others. They care only about using those struggles to give the state more power over not just people, but groups, and even how communities are defined. Right down to trying to demand biological sex be marginalized in importance of terms like gender solely because less than .4% of the human population claims to not be defined by the biological sex/gender binary.

So the only way to defeat them is to address the problems in a way that route and solve them, while you still have power and the means by which to solve them the proper way. For if you don’t, the Marxist village idiots will.

[covid19worldnews]

Proposition 22 Passes, but Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable

On Tuesday night, Californians voted to pass Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by app-based gig companies that exempts them from reclassifying their workers as employees.

Companies including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and more, spent big to convince voters to approve the measure. The company-funded Yes on Proposition 22 campaign spent over $200 million (including millions in donations to the California GOP), deployed a record number of lobbyists, and spread waves of misleading political mailers. At the same time, Uber’s and Lyft’s chief executives undertook a media tour featuring threats to exit the state and repeatedly attempted to exempt themselves in California’s courts. The campaign bought  digital, television, radio, and billboard ads, and also sponsored academic research Meanwhile, delivery drivers were forced to use Yes on Proposition 22-branded packaging while the apps themselves told users to vote yes. 

On the other side of the issue was a grassroots campaign run by driver advocacy groups and organized labor, which spent just over $20 million. 

“We’re disappointed in tonight’s outcome, especially because this campaign’s success is based on lies and fear-mongering. Companies shouldn’t be able to buy elections,” Gig Workers Rising, a California-based driver advocacy group said in a press release early Wednesday morning. “But we’re still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight. Gig work is real work, and gigi workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”

As news of the results broke, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to show his excitement and shared a tweet from early Uber investor Jason Calacanis calling Assemblywoman Lorena S Gonzalez, the author of AB5, a “grifter” who “failed to hand gig workers over to big-money unions”.

After some time, Khosrowshahi reversed the retweet and instead emailed drivers a more subdued message celebrating that the “future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up and made your voice heard—and voters across the state listened.”

This is undoubtedly a victory for capital over labor, and one that will likely allow the unprofitable gig economy to continue limping along at the expense of workers. It does not, however, change the reality that the “gig” business model is doomed in the long-term.

For years, gig companies have misclassified employees as independent contractors—a legal distinction that has allowed unprofitable enterprises to avoid expensive labor costs such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and safe working conditions, among other benefits of employment. Proposition 22 was cooked up to undo Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that codified an “ABC test” to determine if a worker was independently contracted or employed by a company and which went into effect in January.

After AB5 went into effect, attorneys for some of California’s largest cities, along with the state’s attorney general, then filed suits demanding an end to app-based gig company worker misclassification. Uber and Lyft have waged the main legal battle, but lost the case and every appeal since, making Proposition 22 a make-or-break measure.

“Prop 22 means I get no workers’ compensation, no disability, no sick pay, it would be touch and go for me,” Mekela Edwards, an Oakland-based Uber driver who hasn’t worked since March because COVID-19 poses a high health risk to her. “I have to ask how long my unemployment will last, how long I’ll have before I’m forced to go back out there and work. I don’t want to imagine it, I can’t imagine being forced to choose between my health and making a living.”

Hundreds of thousands of people work for the gig companies behind Proposition 22 and many have been devastated by the COVID-19 recession. Still, this has not stopped the gig companies from threatening to take drastic measures if they’re not allowed to have their way. Over the past few months, Uber and Lyft in particular have threatened to radically downsize where service is offered, fire most of their drivers, radically restructure into a franchise model, or leave the state entirely, if Proposition 22 fails.

California voting Yes on Prop 22—which includes fine print that any changes to it must be passed with a seven-eighths majority in the state’s legislature—is a huge setback for labor. It will trap hundreds of thousands of workers under a permanent misclassification scheme that rewards a racist business model that disproportionately hurts Black and brown workers. Despite all this, Proposition 22 is not the final say on this matter in the U.S. or internationally.

AB5 clones are being considered in New York and New Jersey, while Massachusetts’ Attorney General has already sued Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers in the state. Despite objections from Uber’s and Lyft’s impressive lobbying operations, the PRO Act—which would grant gig workers the right to collectively bargain, as part of a massive overhaul of labor law—has passed in the House.

“This is really a story about the kind of cities we are building,” Katie Wells, a researcher at Georgetown University told Motherboard. “The kind of cities—the kind of world we’ve built—it has allowed these entities to come in and build up a workforce through an extractive and predatory system. Regulators have to keep that in mind.”

Outside of the U.S., the global 2019 strike on the day of Uber’s public offering has been followed by successive waves. Over the summer, thousands of delivery workers organized militant strikes and protests in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Ecuador targeting Uber Eats and other exploitative food delivery apps. These have been joined by even more strikes and protests in Nigeria, France, and India. At the same time, Uber is losing legal challenges in France, Britain, Canada, Italy, where high courts have either outright ruled Uber drivers are employees or have opened the door to lawsuits reclassifying them as such.

Governments across the world are also beginning to push Uber to pay billions in taxes that it has evaded over the past decade. In Britain, Uber will have to pay £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) in unpaid value-added taxes it avoided by exploiting a legal loophole. In the U.S., Uber has dodged billions in taxes and wage claims through misclassification: in New Jersey it owes over $650 million in taxes, while in California drivers have filed $1.3 billion in wage claims against Uber and Lyft.

Since Uber’s only hope for survival lies in misclassifying workers and labor law, though, it won’t give up the billions to be made both domestically and globally (even if at a loss) without a fight. 

“There’s a lesson here for workers of all sectors, beyond classification: companies are willing to spend massive amounts of money to take away their rights,” said Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver and organizer with Mobile Workers Alliance. “It’s incredibly important for workers to organize to protect themselves, to protect upward mobility, a minimum wage, sick leave, healthcare—to roll back a century of basic protections that try and keep Americans out of poverty.”

Proposition 22’s victory, however, can’t obscure the fact that these companies are doomed. Even with a wage guarantee that effectively pays $5.64 an hour, the companies are no closer to sustainably achieving profitability than they were yesterday. Overcrowded markets for ride-hailing and food delivery, along with vicious price wars and poor unit economics meant there was never any real hope of achieving a monopoly, erecting barriers to market entry, and raising prices to levels that, for many of these companies, would yield their first ever profits. 

There’s good news for investors, however, who will finally begin to see returns on investments that have long been underwater thanks to massively inflated valuations that have tumbled in public markets. Indeed, share prices for Uber and Lyft soared in premarket trading on Wednesday morning. 

For workers, though, things will be bad. It is hard to imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers earning wages just under half of the minimum wage will be able to feed themselves, maintain housing, afford medical care, or otherwise make ends meet, especially under the boot of a pandemic and with no hope of government aid until next year.

Localities, cities, states, and countries will have to begin cooperating if they’re to have any hope of weathering the storm. They’ll need to start being aggressive, experimenting with ways they can outright take over the platforms or prohibit companies from providing the service to begin with—all while figuring out ways to expand mass transit so that not only they’re not only meeting the needs of people who need transportation, both those who worked for app-based ride-hail companies previously.

For the sake of maintaining an illusion that they’ll one day be profitable, gig companies have waged war in California at great expense to their workers, the public, and employees in other industries whose employers may grow emboldened this moment. The fight is far from over, and there is hope for labor in the continuing coordination of driver advocates, regulators, and legislators around the world, but it will get messy as likely to harken a period of unprecedented social unrest among increasingly immiserated gig workers.

“Beyond California, we need to strike early and strike quickly to ensure swift defeat to this idea that you can change the basic nature of employment and deny benefits to your employees,” Gage told Motherboard. “I ask people not involved to try and understand the labor movement in your area. Reach out to unions and ask how you can help volunteers…Get involved with and spread the world—[money] can buy misinformation and it can deceive, but it can’t beat the solidarity between two workers or between human beings.”

Read More

https://www.covid19snews.com/2020/11/04/proposition-22-passes-but-uber-and-lyft-are-only-delaying-the-inevitable/

[shirlleycoyle]

Proposition 22 Passes, But Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable

On Tuesday night, Californians voted to pass Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by app-based gig companies that exempts them from reclassifying their workers as employees.

Companies including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and more, spent big to convince voters to approve the measure. The company-funded Yes on Proposition 22 campaign spent over $200 million (including millions in donations to the California GOP), deployed a record number of lobbyists, and spread waves of misleading political mailers. At the same time, Uber’s and Lyft’s chief executives undertook a media tour featuring threats to exit the state and repeatedly attempted to exempt themselves in California’s courts. The campaign bought  digital, television, radio, and billboard ads, and also sponsored academic research Meanwhile, delivery drivers were forced to use Yes on Proposition 22-branded packaging while the apps themselves told users to vote yes. 

On the other side of the issue was a grassroots campaign run by driver advocacy groups and organized labor, which spent just over $20 million. 

“We're disappointed in tonight's outcome, especially because this campaign's success is based on lies and fear-mongering. Companies shouldn't be able to buy elections,” Gig Workers Rising, a California-based driver advocacy group said in a press release early Wednesday morning. “But we're still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight. Gig work is real work, and gigi workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”

As news of the results broke, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to show his excitement and shared a tweet from early Uber investor Jason Calacanis calling Assemblywoman Lorena S Gonzalez, the author of AB5, a "grifter" who "failed to hand gig workers over to big-money unions".

After some time, Khosrowshahi reversed the retweet and instead emailed drivers a more subdued message celebrating that the "future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up and made your voice heard—and voters across the state listened."

This is undoubtedly a victory for capital over labor, and one that will likely allow the unprofitable gig economy to continue limping along at the expense of workers. It does not, however, change the reality that the “gig” business model is doomed in the long-term.

For years, gig companies have misclassified employees as independent contractors—a legal distinction that has allowed unprofitable enterprises to avoid expensive labor costs such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and safe working conditions, among other benefits of employment. Proposition 22 was cooked up to undo Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that codified an "ABC test" to determine if a worker was independently contracted or employed by a company and which went into effect in January.

After AB5 went into effect, attorneys for some of California’s largest cities, along with the state’s attorney general, then filed suits demanding an end to app-based gig company worker misclassification. Uber and Lyft have waged the main legal battle, but lost the case and every appeal since, making Proposition 22 a make-or-break measure.

"Prop 22 means I get no workers' compensation, no disability, no sick pay, it would be touch and go for me," Mekela Edwards, an Oakland-based Uber driver who hasn't worked since March because COVID-19 poses a high health risk to her. "I have to ask how long my unemployment will last, how long I'll have before I'm forced to go back out there and work. I don't want to imagine it, I can't imagine being forced to choose between my health and making a living."

Hundreds of thousands of people work for the gig companies behind Proposition 22 and many have been devastated by the COVID-19 recession. Still, this has not stopped the gig companies from threatening to take drastic measures if they’re not allowed to have their way. Over the past few months, Uber and Lyft in particular have threatened to radically downsize where service is offered, fire most of their drivers, radically restructure into a franchise model, or leave the state entirely, if Proposition 22 fails.

California voting Yes on Prop 22—which includes fine print that any changes to it must be passed with a seven-eighths majority in the state’s legislature—is a huge setback for labor. It will trap hundreds of thousands of workers under a permanent misclassification scheme that rewards a racist business model that disproportionately hurts Black and brown workers. Despite all this, Proposition 22 is not the final say on this matter in the U.S. or internationally.

AB5 clones are being considered in New York and New Jersey, while Massachusetts’ Attorney General has already sued Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers in the state. Despite objections from Uber’s and Lyft’s impressive lobbying operations, the PRO Act—which would grant gig workers the right to collectively bargain, as part of a massive overhaul of labor law—has passed in the House.

“This is really a story about the kind of cities we are building,” Katie Wells, a researcher at Georgetown University told Motherboard. “The kind of cities—the kind of world we've built—it has allowed these entities to come in and build up a workforce through an extractive and predatory system. Regulators have to keep that in mind.”

Outside of the U.S., the global 2019 strike on the day of Uber’s public offering has been followed by successive waves. Over the summer, thousands of delivery workers organized militant strikes and protests in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Ecuador targeting Uber Eats and other exploitative food delivery apps. These have been joined by even more strikes and protests in Nigeria, France, and India. At the same time, Uber is losing legal challenges in France, Britain, Canada, Italy, where high courts have either outright ruled Uber drivers are employees or have opened the door to lawsuits reclassifying them as such.

Governments across the world are also beginning to push Uber to pay billions in taxes that it has evaded over the past decade. In Britain, Uber will have to pay £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) in unpaid value-added taxes it avoided by exploiting a legal loophole. In the U.S., Uber has dodged billions in taxes and wage claims through misclassification: in New Jersey it owes over $650 million in taxes, while in California drivers have filed $1.3 billion in wage claims against Uber and Lyft.

Since Uber’s only hope for survival lies in misclassifying workers and labor law, though, it won’t give up the billions to be made both domestically and globally (even if at a loss) without a fight. 

"There's a lesson here for workers of all sectors, beyond classification: companies are willing to spend massive amounts of money to take away their rights," said Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver and organizer with Mobile Workers Alliance. "It's incredibly important for workers to organize to protect themselves, to protect upward mobility, a minimum wage, sick leave, healthcare—to roll back a century of basic protections that try and keep Americans out of poverty."

Proposition 22’s victory, however, can’t obscure the fact that these companies are doomed. Even with a wage guarantee that effectively pays $5.64 an hour, the companies are no closer to sustainably achieving profitability than they were yesterday. Overcrowded markets for ride-hailing and food delivery, along with vicious price wars and poor unit economics meant there was never any real hope of achieving a monopoly, erecting barriers to market entry, and raising prices to levels that, for many of these companies, would yield their first ever profits. 

There’s good news for investors, however, who will finally begin to see returns on investments that have long been underwater thanks to massively inflated valuations that have tumbled in public markets. Indeed, share prices for Uber and Lyft soared in premarket trading on Wednesday morning. 

For workers, though, things will be bad. It is hard to imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers earning wages just under half of the minimum wage will be able to feed themselves, maintain housing, afford medical care, or otherwise make ends meet, especially under the boot of a pandemic and with no hope of government aid until next year.

Localities, cities, states, and countries will have to begin cooperating if they’re to have any hope of weathering the storm. They’ll need to start being aggressive, experimenting with ways they can outright take over the platforms or prohibit companies from providing the service to begin with—all while figuring out ways to expand mass transit so that not only they’re not only meeting the needs of people who need transportation, both those who worked for app-based ride-hail companies previously.

For the sake of maintaining an illusion that they’ll one day be profitable, gig companies have waged war in California at great expense to their workers, the public, and employees in other industries whose employers may grow emboldened this moment. The fight is far from over, and there is hope for labor in the continuing coordination of driver advocates, regulators, and legislators around the world, but it will get messy as likely to harken a period of unprecedented social unrest among increasingly immiserated gig workers.

"Beyond California, we need to strike early and strike quickly to ensure swift defeat to this idea that you can change the basic nature of employment and deny benefits to your employees,” Gage told Motherboard. “I ask people not involved to try and understand the labor movement in your area. Reach out to unions and ask how you can help volunteers…Get involved with and spread the world—[money] can buy misinformation and it can deceive, but it can't beat the solidarity between two workers or between human beings.”

Proposition 22 Passes, But Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[recentanimenews]

The “Radically Casual” Charm of Lost Levels

This was my first year attending the Game Developer’s Conference as press, and I spent a lot of time crawling the expo hall and sessions, looking to uncover cool new games and behind-the-scenes development stories. But on Thursday afternoon, I took a break from the crowds at Moscone Center in San Francisco to sit down in the nearby Yerba Buena Gardens public park for something completely different: the seventh annual Lost Levels.

Lost Levels is what’s called an “unconference,” an anarchistic gathering where attendees sign up spontaneously to present talks or run workshops without a centralized organizing structure. Founded in 2013 by a cadre of indie game developers as an alternative to the wildly expensive GDC, it has since become more of a folk tradition, carried on by new people every year. The “rules” of Lost Levels — if you can call them that — are simple. Attendees gather near a small plaza (referred to as a “gazebo” despite it not really looking much like one), often with their lunch in tow, and sit in a circle. Anybody can sign up, open mic-style, to give a 5-minute “microtalk” about any subject they want, often but not always related to game development.

The ideas on display at Lost Levels are as radical as its structure. Microtalks can center around experimental game design concepts, post-mortems on projects, political statements (pretty much exclusively of the left-wing variety), or personal stories. The crowd skews pretty young, but attendees come from all sides of the industry, from students to indies to major studio employees, and include GDC pass-holders, folks who hover around GDC but can’t afford a pass, and even the occasional local office worker on their lunch break.

There’s a delicious irony to Lost Levels’ enduring popularity; while GDC charges hundreds to thousands of dollars to enter its halls, there are people who will skip all that for a few hours just to sit in a park and listen to stories from their peers. Its original organizers refer to the gathering as “radically casual,” which somewhat undersells just how radical the whole enterprise is. Lost Levels provides a space for game designers to decommodify their interactions, focusing for a glorious three hours on art and community-building over business cards and the building of personal brands. It was the highlight of my GDC this year, and since I managed to take notes on most of the microtalks, I decided to write up some summaries for the many people who couldn’t make it!

The following summaries are far from complete, since there were a few talks I missed and some others I couldn’t hear very well (amplification isn’t allowed in the park). If you were one of the speakers and would like me to include your name/social media handle and pronouns (I defaulted to “they/them” for most people) or if you want me to remove the summary for privacy reasons, just send me an email at evanm AT anigamers DOT com or DM me on Twitter @VamptVo.

Naming things

Advice on how to come up with names of locations and characters in your games. The speaker suggested using words from different languages as inspiration and taking a look at color to set a mood, among other things.

Teaching inclusion and anti-oppression to white men

A white man in his 50s spoke about how inspired he is by the younger generations and the new ways that we talk about identity and oppression, and how it’s pushed him to become a coach who tries to teach other privileged people how to be better.

“Fuck the rules”

Speaker: Scott Ethington

An argument for breakable games, lamenting the rise of games that are so polished that there’s no way for people to fall off the map or break things and make their own fun. Scott solicited feedback from the audience, who pointed out that breaking games “helps people see how the craft works” and “makes you a better designer,” and “a bad game that you can break can become a good game.”

Making games to deal with anxiety

The speaker talked about their experience with anxiety after a big move and how they made a game that they described as “low-stress WarioWare.” It includes mini-games like popping bubble wrap, watering plants, and aligning a picture, and has some rules around what mini-games not to include: no body horror, and no games that make you feel bad about your real life (like cleaning a virtual room only to be faced with your real, messy room).

Go to the bathroom!

Speaker: Fisher from Sundae Month

Fisher described an awful bladder infection he had as a kid, then implored the audience to “go to the bathroom!” rather than sitting at your computer to keep playing or keep making your game. I appreciated the little dig he threw in at games that are designed to be seamless experiences, never giving you a good moment to log off.

Procedural generation

Speaker: Cass (games avaiable on Itch.io)

How procedural generation inspired Cass, as well as some discussion of what makes for good procedural generation. They shouted out Spelunky, pointing out that it “systematized level design,” ensuring proper pacing and such, compared to other procedurally generated games where everything feels the same. They ended by asking devs to explore procedural generation of things other than level design: text, art assets, and more.

Children, labor, and Mark Zuckerberg

Speaker: @tyunderwood

Tech companies are promoting coding education, and not for good reasons. The more programmers they have in the market, the less they have to pay everybody. And the education they’re promoting is technical, but doesn’t cover ethics, cultural context, or “critical play” (the idea of games that exist primarily to convey a message rather than to entertain). As the speaker argued, this lack of ethical and cultural background makes workers easier to coerce into performing potentially unethical work without questioning their superiors.

Social media and callouts

I couldn’t hear everything this person said, but at least part of their microtalk focused on them avoiding online callouts to try to build a healthier community.

5-minute game jam

A description of a scene from a movie where a woman dances through the streets and how the speaker always wanted to replicate it in a game, followed by suggestions from the audience about how to achieve it (one of them was to give the player an opposite emotion first to create contrast). Then the speaker invited everybody to skip around the park with them for the last minute of their microtalk, which a few people did!

Game jams are bad

Speaker: Andrew Yoder

An excellent poem about the deleterious effects of game jams on developers, specifically in terms of things like sleep deprivation. There was a great line in which he compared game jams to musical jams, pointing out “arriving at a song is not the point, you’re there to play.” The haunting last line: “The second morning of the jam and the students are dying to make games.”

Monsterhood and queerness

Speaker: @gendervamp

This one was also hard to hear, but thankfully the speaker responded to me on Twitter to clarify some of the points. They discussed monsters as a metaphor for queerness, the way that queer people sometimes relate to monsters because of the way society treats their bodies, and how devs should reconsider monsters as adversaries. A part that I did manage to hear was about being friends with monsters in games instead of fighting them. And a particular highlight: “The worst monsters in the world are fascists, colonists, and bigots.”

Analog spaces

I couldn’t hear much of this one but I caught some bits about looking to analog spaces and live play as inspiration for your game designs.

Mecha as dual identities

A pretty interesting short exploration of the idea of mechs as a way for characters to experience a second identity. Characters can get into mecha to augment their abilities and become a different person who’s also the same in order to live their lives. There’s definitely a connection there between the experiences of trans and disabled folks, among others. Eventually the talk turned into an impassioned tirade against capitalism and how the speaker just wants to be boring and normal and not have to constantly battle against the forces around them to survive. In keeping with the whimsical anti-capitalism of Lost Levels, they ended the talk by yelling “at the end of capitalism we are having casserole!”

Third places

The speaker lamented the loss of “third places,” spaces outside of home and work where people can connect and build communities. As it relates to games, they specifically mentioned the ability for participants in third places to customize and augment them, and pointed out that games like Minecraft and Fortnite are enabling that to some degree. One term that stuck out to me was “digital community gardens,” calling to mind a space that belongs to everyone that can be collaboratively customized. A side-note that may be relevant to our readers: anime cons effectively act as a third place for many anime fans, and feature an element of real-world customizability since they are often highly driven by organic fan culture.

Tutorials and education

A call for designers to prioritize educating their players through tutorials and other means so as to not lock people out of playing their games.

Avoiding violence

The speaker talked about their personal dislike of violent games and celebrated games that provide ways to opt out of violence, allow players to customize their experience to make violence less visceral, or simply avoid glamorizing or over-utilizing violence. Examples included Undertale, with its famous pacifist/genocide system; Samurai Gun, which has an option to replace all the blood with cherry blossoms; and Hyperlight Drifter, where the violence is contextualized within the main character’s story.

Games about revolution

A designer who worked on Revolution 1979 (a game about the Iranian Revolution) talked about games about revolutions and encouraged fellow designers to tell more of these stories. One fascinating example was Suffragetto, a 1908 board game about suffragettes fighting police officers (heck yeah).

Don’t treat players like they’re stupid

There’s a common attitude among designers that players need to have their hands held in order to figure out a game, but the speaker implored the audience to reject that stereotype, and cited The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as an example of a game that doesn’t explain much and yet is still very learnable.

GDC and Lost Levels over the years

The speaker described the changing games industry scene since 2012, including a painful account of how they attended Lost Levels while homeless a few years ago. One point they specifically criticized was the development of “cults of personality” around some people in the community.

“How I almost fucked up real bad”

An account of the speaker’s starry-eyed virtual reality project, attempting to use VR as an “empathy machine” to connect abled people with disabled people’s experiences. They wanted to make a game where you play as a person with one arm and experience phantom limb syndrome, but after talking to a person with one arm they realized they were treating the condition as a novelty rather than as a real experience of real people. So they scrapped the project.

Hobbies

This one took aim at the idea that your hobbies need to be monetized, and the speaker described their gardening hobby. Eventually it took a darker turn toward discussions of climate change.

Front doors

A criticism of games that lock their “front doors,” creating initial barriers in terms of things like difficulty or accessibility. The speaker pointed out that it can be OK to lock the door as long as you “open a window” by providing the player with some other way of entering the game.

Hackerspaces

The speaker, who is local to San Francisco, talked up hackerspaces and makerspaces like Noisebridge in the city, encouraging developers to make use of their equipment and communities and create new ones in their area if none exist.

Image descriptions on Twitter (Me!)

Mid-Lost Levels I decided to get up for a PSA about image descriptions (a.k.a. alternative text) on Twitter. I encouraged everybody to turn on the checkbox in their Twitter settings and to write descriptions for all their images in order to help blind and low-vision folks take part in the conversation.

Slurs in online games

Speaker: @regisRquoi

As you can imagine, this microtalk lamenting the prevalence of homophobic and racist slurs in online gaming went over pretty well with the Lost Levels crowd. In particular the speaker got big cheers for saying “I don’t think homophobic people deserve to play games.”

Toe Jam & Earl is a Roguelike

This was a pretty simple one, basically just making the case that Toe Jam & Earl has many of the properties of a Roguelike (typically defined as having permadeath and randomized levels). As the speaker pointed out, lots of people probably think of Spelunky as one of the earlier examples popularizing the genre — not counting the original Rogue of course) — but may not realize that they already played a Roguelike much earlier in their life.

Don’t exclude nonbinary people

I didn’t catch all of this, but generally it focused on ways that progress is being made in terms of better representation for women and other identities, but it can still be easy to accidentally exclude nonbinary folks in games.

Randomizers and constraint solvers

Two speakers got up in a row to talk about their experiences building randomizers for retro games. It was my first time hearing about these things, but apparently they mod the games to randomize things like item placement. They talked about some of the social dynamics of that community as well, specifically how when one of the people leading a Final Fantasy randomizer project turned out to have said some slurs, they forked it and started their own version. The lesson? “If the people in power aren’t listening to you, fuck ‘em, burn it down, and build your own.”

Giving gifts

Speaker: Robert Yang

Yang encouraged designers to revisit the concept of giving gifts selflessly, and to make games as gifts — for your parents, for your significant other, for yourself. He also pointed out that the games industry has managed to take gift giving and make it sinister with the advent of loot boxes and gacha. As he put it, “the game industry fucked up loot and it fucked up boxes.”

Managing a community

A short one about how sometimes people create games or communities around games and then throw their hands up and absolve themselves of responsibility for those communities and their well-being, and how they need to instead listen to the needs of the community and try to help.

“There shouldn’t be authored stories in games”

A student who hadn’t made any games yet but was excited about starting presented their ideas about game narrative, which mainly revolved around the idea that games should focus on emergent narratives that stem from the game systems themselves, rather than linear, “authored” stories. They said that people trying to make “cinematic” games should probably just be making movies. This one was kind of funny for me because I remember having some very similar ideas when I was a student, though I’ve somewhat mellowed out in recent years (cinematic games are fine by me).

Asking for help

This was one of the more raw and emotional microtalks. The speaker got up to tell the audience that they’re struggling with life in general and trying to find a job in games, and encouraged people to hang out afterwards and talk to them. Compared to the kind of cynical networking that often happens at GDC, this was clearly someone looking for some genuine human connection to help them through their life.

Get involved in activism

In response to the many microtalks that mentioned the seeming inevitability of climate change, the speaker told the audience that there are still things we can do, and pointed them to organizations doing work to fight climate change. I second this one wholeheartedly!

How to solicit user feedback

A user researcher provided some tips and tricks on how to collect feedback on your game or software. As someone who performs user research pretty regularly myself, a lot of it was quite familiar, including one big takeaway: pay attention to user problems instead of their suggested solutions. Then you can come up with the best solution to their problems.

Pokémon Go and geolocation

This one was perfectly appropriate considering that this year a big Pokémon Go-branded “Powerbank” was installed smack in the middle of the gazebo. The speaker mused about the weird digital colonization/gentrification implied by a big company making a game that designates certain locations as “culturally significant.” They encouraged designers to make games about “our own spaces,” taking back control of them from large corporations.

How lucky we are

We wrapped up on a pretty appropriate final microtalk acknowledging the privilege of those who were able to attend GDC and Lost Levels, whether because they live near San Francisco or could afford a plane ticket, and reminding people to share what they learned here with the rest of the community, including those who couldn’t make it.

That’s a wrap. Again, if you were one of the speakers let me know!

The “Radically Casual” Charm of Lost Levels originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on March 23, 2019 at 11:44 PM.

By: Evan Minto

[felipemx]

40 powerful concepts for understanding the world.

Some are complex so forgive me for oversimplifying, but the main purpose is to incite curiosity. Okay, here we go: 

- Causal Reductionism: Things rarely happen for just 1 reason. Usually, outcomes result from many causes conspiring together. But our minds cannot process such a complex arrangement, so we tend to ascribe outcomes to single causes, reducing the web of causality to a mere thread. 

- Ergodicity: A die rolled 100 times has equal probabilities to 100 dice rolled once; rolling a die is “ergodic”. But if the die gets chipped after 10 throws so it’s likelier to roll 4, then 1 die 100 times =/= 100 dice once (non-ergodic). Many treat non-ergodic systems as ergodic. 

- Dunning-Kruger Effect: Awareness of the limitations of cognition (thinking) requires a proficiency in metacognition (thinking about thinking). In other words, being stupid makes you too stupid to realize how stupid you are. 

- Emergence: When many simple objects interact with each other, they can form a system that has qualities that the objects themselves don’t. Examples: neurons creating consciousness, traders creating the stock-market, simple mathematical rules creating “living” patterns.

- Cultural Parasitism: An ideology parasitizes the mind, changing the host’s behavior so they spread it to other people. Therefore, a successful ideology (the only kind we hear about) is not configured to be true; it is configured only to be easily transmitted and easily believed.

- Cumulative Error: Mistakes grow. Beliefs are built on beliefs, so one wrong thought can snowball into a delusional worldview. Likewise, as an inaccuracy is reposted on the web, more is added to it, creating fake news. In our networked age, cumulative errors are the norm. 

- Survivorship Bias: We overemphasize the examples that pass a visibility threshold e.g. our understanding of serial killers is based on the ones who got caught. Equally, news is only news if it’s an exception rather than the rule, but since it’s what we see we treat it as the rule. 

- Simpson’s Paradox: A trend can appear in groups of data but disappear when these groups are combined. This effect can easily be exploited by limiting a dataset so that it shows exactly what one wants it to show. Thus: beware of even the strongest correlations.

- Condorcet Paradox: a special instance of Simpson’s paradox applied to elections, in which a populace prefers candidate A to candidate B, candidate B to C, and yet candidate C to A. This occurs because the majority that favors C is misleadingly divided among different groups. 

- Limited Hangout: A common tactic by journos & politicians of revealing intriguing but relatively innocent info to satisfy curiosity and prevent discovery of more incriminating info. E.g. a politician accused of snorting cocaine may confess to having smoked marijuana at college. 

- Focusing Illusion: Nothing is ever as important as what you’re thinking about while you’re thinking about it. E.g. worrying about a thing makes the thing being worried about seem worse than it is. As Marcus Aurelius observed, “We suffer more often in imagination that in reality.” 

- Concept Creep: As a social issue such as racism or sexual harassment becomes rarer, people react by expanding their definition of it, creating the illusion that the issue is actually getting worse. I explain the process in detail here: How progress blinds people to progress. 

- Streetlight Effect: People tend to get their information from where it’s easiest to look. E.g. the majority of research uses only the sources that appear on the first page of Google search results, regardless of how factual they are. Cumulatively, this can skew an entire field. 

- Belief Bias: Arguments we'd normally reject for being idiotic suddenly seem perfectly logical if they lead to conclusions we approve of. In other words, we judge an argument’s strength not by how strongly it supports the conclusion but by how strongly *we* support the conclusion. 

- Pluralistic Ignorance: Phenomenon where a group goes along with a norm, even though all of the group members secretly hate it, because each mistakenly believes that the others approve of it. (See also: Abilene Paradox) 

- The Petrie Multiplier: In fields in which men outnumber women, such as in STEM, women receive an underestimated amount of harassment due to the fact that there are more potential givers than receivers of harassment. (See also: Lotka–Volterra equations).

- Woozle Effect: An article makes a claim without evidence, is then cited by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the range of citations creates the impression that the claim has evidence, when really all articles are citing the same uncorroborated source. 

- Tocqueville Paradox: As the living standards in a society rise, the people’s expectations of the society rise with it. The rise in expectations eventually surpasses the rise in living standards, inevitably resulting in disaffection (and sometimes populist uprisings). 

- Ultimate Attribution Error: We tend to attribute good acts by allies to their character, and bad acts by allies to situational factors. For opponents, it’s reversed: good acts are attributed to situational factors, and bad acts to character. 

- Golden Hammer: When someone, usually an intellectual who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept, becomes so drunk with power he thinks he can apply that concept to everything.

- Pareto Principle: Pattern of nature in which ~80% of effects result from ~20% of causes. E.g. 80% of wealth is held by 20% of people, 80% of computer errors result from 20% of bugs, 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of criminals, 80% of box office revenue comes from 20% of films 

- Nirvana Fallacy: When people reject a thing because it compares unfavorably to an ideal that in reality is unattainable. E.g. condemning capitalism due to the superiority of imagined socialism, condemning ruthlessness in war due to imagining humane (but unrealistic) ways to win. 

- Emotive Conjugation: Synonyms can yield positive or negative impressions without changing the basic meaning of a word. Example: someone who is obstinate (neutral term) can be “headstrong” (positive) or “pig-headed” (negative). This is the basis for much bias in journalism. 

- Anentiodromia: An excess of something can give rise to its opposite. E.g. A society that is too liberal will be tolerant of tyrants, who will eventually make it illiberal. I explain more here: Alex Jones Was Victimized by One Oligopoly. But He Perpetuated Another.

- Halo Effect: When a person sees an agreeable characteristic in something or someone, they assume other agreeable characteristics. Example: if a Trump supporter sees someone wearing a MAGA cap, he’s likely to think that person is also decent, honest, hard-working, etc. 

- Outgroup Homogeneity Effect: We tend to view outgroup members as all the same e.g. believing all Trump supporters would see someone wearing a MAGA cap, and think that person is also decent, honest, hard-working, etc. 

- Matthew Principle: Advantage begets advantage, leading to social, economic, and cultural oligopolies. The richer you are the easier it is to get even richer, the more recognition a scientist receives for a discovery the more recognition he’ll receive for future discoveries, etc. 

- Peter Principle: People in a hierarchy such as a business or government will be promoted until they suck at their jobs, at which point they will remain where they are. As a result, the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs. 

- Loki’s Wager: Fallacy where someone tries to defend a concept from criticism, or dismiss it as a myth, by unduly claiming it cannot be defined. E.g. “God works in mysterious ways” (god of the gaps), “race is biologically meaningless” (Lewontin’s fallacy).

- Subselves: We use different mental processes in different situations, so each of us is not a single character but a collection of different characters, who take turns to commandeer the body depending on the situation. There is an office “you”, a lover “you”, an online “you”, etc. 

- Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to become a measure. E.g. British colonialists tried to control snakes in India. They measured progress by number of snakes killed, offering money for snake corpses. People responded by breeding snakes & killing them. 

- Radical Phase Transition (my term): Extremist movements can behave like solids (tyrannies), liquids (insurgencies), and gases (conspiracy theories). Pressuring them causes them to go from solid => liquid => gas. Leaving them alone causes them to go from gas => liquid => solid. 

- Legibility: We see a complex natural system, assume that because it *looks* messy that it must be disordered, then impose our own order on it to make it “legible”. But in removing the messiness we remove essential components of the system that we couldn’t grasp, and it fails.

- Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Frog says to Fish, “how’s the water?” Fish replies, “what’s water?” We become blind to what we’re familiar with. And since the world is always changing, and we're always getting used to it, we can even become blind to the slow march of catastrophe. 

- Availability Cascade: When a new concept enters the arena of ideas, people react to it, thereby amplifying it. The idea thus becomes more popular, causing even more people to amplify it by reacting to it, until everyone feels the need to talk about it. 

- Reactance Theory: When someone is restricted from expressing a POV, or pressured to adopt a different POV, they usually react by believing their original POV even more. For a detailed example read my piece on my attempt to deradicalize a neo-Nazi: How not to de-radicalize a Twitter neo-nazi.

- Predictive Coding: There is no actual movement on a TV screen; your brain invents it. There are no actual spaces between spoken words; your brain inserts them. Human perception is like predictive text, replacing the unknown with the expected. Predictive Coding leads to… 

- Apophenia: We impose our imaginations on arrangements of data, seeing patterns where no such patterns exist. A common form of Apophenia is…

- Narrative Fallacy: When we see a sequence of facts we interpret them as a story by threading them together into an imagined chain of cause & effect. If a drug addict commits suicide we assume the drug habit led to the suicide, even if it didn’t. Another form of Apophenia is… 

- Pareidolia: For aeons predators stalked us in undergrowth & shadow. In such times survival favored the paranoid — those who could discern a wolf from the vaguest of outlines. This paranoia preserved our species, but cursed us with pareidolia, so we now see wolves even in the skies.

And that’s it! There are many other ideas but these are the ones that came to mind first (availability bias), and I think they provide good springboards for understanding a wide range of phenomena.

Retirado de: Gurwinder Bhogal.

[kadobeclothing]

Why Refusing to Discuss Failure Erodes a Culture of Growth

Have you ever sat in a meeting where a project was described as a success, yet all the details of failure that led to that success were left out? Alternatively, have you ever watched while data was cherry picked to make things seem rosier than they actually are? These are common embodiments of a very common, yet little known, phenomenon called “Success Theater”.

Success theater is, at its core, an informal operating system that says to employees: “you’re expected to win, and you should only discuss wins. Failures need not be exemplified.”

More concretely, success theater describes “the efforts that we make to make things look good, even if actual performance isn’t good or getting better.” Ultimately, it is an avoidance of data that conflicts with your opinions. It’s a fear of confronting failure or uncomfortable conversations and reflection. I like this definition (and the whole article) from John Cutler: “Success Theater is celebrating hitting the quarterly goal without acknowledging the corners you had to cut and the people who will have to clean up the mess. It’s listening to someone rattle off vanity metrics. And it’s being told you’re not a team player for having some doubts about a recent ‘win.’ … And it’s rampant in our internal meetings, blog posts, and presentations.” Success theater is … exactly what it sounds like it would be. Of course, in the real world, failure is going to happen. In fact, it needs to happen in order to succeed. Tons of value can come from documenting and sharing lessons from failed campaigns. Survivorship bias can warp the expectations of both leaders and new team members, and digging up your ‘graveyard of knowledge’ can help elicit new ideas and insights that could contribute to major breakthroughs in marketing and optimization. In general, it’s best we confront failure honestly, instead of hiding from it.

The Ruinous Path of Success Theater: GE’s Horror Story One of the most popular stories about success theater is a Wall Street Journal piece on General Electric. According to the story, former CEO Jeffrey Immelt was constantly optimistic in the face of future projections. In addition to his optimism and “can-do attitude,” he and his fellow top deputies also shielded themselves from any bad news or data that contradicted that narrative. Unfortunately, the results were catastrophic:

By 2018, the stock price had dropped by roughly 44%. In the same year, they announced they would cut their annual dividend for only the second time in their 125-year history. They also announced they were taking a $6.2 billion charge in their fourth quarter related to their insurance operations and needed to set aside $15 billion over seven years to bolster insurance reserves at the GE Capital unit. Finally, they had to restate their earnings for 2017 and 2016, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began investigating them for these accounting issues. Identifying and Diagnosing Success Theater GE is an extreme example of Success Theater starting at the top and trickling down, eventually taking over the company. But smaller and subtler versions of it could happen at your company. Liane Davey outlined some signs to look out for: Everything is an opportunity (If your organization finds creative ways to describe issues to obscure the real issues, worry) Every plan is a hockey stick (If your company is always predicting that next year will be the year it all comes together, you’ve got a problem) You hit the number at any cost (You know you’ve got a problem when you start taking short-term gains that create long-term pain) You shoot the messenger (If the harbingers of trouble can no longer be heard, you have a problem) Additionally, I’ve found a simpler sign — if you notice data cherry-picking and storytelling frequently (and on purpose), that’s a strong symptom of underlying success theater. Success theater can also show up in our industry-wide narratives. You can see it in the constant flurry of 315% conversion uplift case studies shared on Twitter, and at the top of GrowthHackers (and also, of course, in the glorious rise and tremendous fall of WeWork). How to Combat Success Theater There’s no silver-bullet solution to avoid success theater, and it will probably always exist to some degree. We just want to curb it to the point where it doesn’t poison productivity. I talked to several growth leaders and also wrote down my own favorite ways of combating success theater, which I’ll share now. 1. Write About and Share Failed Experiments Our team at HubSpot places a huge value on learning, and not just on reporting our wins week-over-week.

We keep a weekly calendar spot to write down our learnings for the week. We talk about those insights during Monday meetings. We’re all encouraged to write internal posts about failed campaigns — or even mediocre campaigns. We don’t want to build a graveyard of knowledge where we’re only writing about the big winners and seeking applause. We also have a company-wide Failure Forum where we share our failures and celebrate the risks we take on the path to innovation. When Joanna Lord was at Porch, she talked about a ritual they developed at the company involving a pink fuzzy animal named Mr. Sparkles. Whoever failed the biggest each week would get Mr. Sparkles. As she put it: “You put him on your desk and it’s like this badge of honor that you like did something so bold that you literally messed up the site badly. And you know what I love? You see my CEO walk around the room and he’s high-fiving the Mr. Sparkles owner. And people are like, ‘What did you do? What did you do to get Mr. Sparkles?’ But the reality is we’ve made it a positive thing. We’ve made it a badge of honor. You are living out the Porch-y way in being bold. What can you do in your culture to make it fun and acceptable? And almost, you know, become famous for it.” In a broader industry-wide context, blogger and marketing consultant, Ryan Robinson, has long been an advocate of transparently sharing the behind-the-scenes stories of his own business failures with the readers of his blog: “I’ve launched several businesses over the past decade, and most of them have landed somewhere between mixed results and utter failure. I go out of my way to highlight those experiences in long-form stories to the readers on my blog, because it’s important to illustrate that the path to achieving meaningful results will be filled with missteps and lessons to be learned along the way. My failure-related articles are consistently the most popular with my readers.” 2. Be Careful With Case Studies I’ve ranted about CRO case studies a ton by this point, so it’s suffice to say I don’t trust most of them. Even if the data is accurate and you’re not reading about a blatant false positive on a sample size of 14, you’re likely looking at a PR piece that is almost certainly subject to Survivorship Bias.

Very few companies and thought leaders are incentivized to write about their failures and inconclusive experiments, so you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Sure, you can absolutely get some inspiration from case studies. But don’t look around in exasperation and think that everyone’s winning except you. It’s all an Instagram-esque illusion. 3. Embrace Transparency Shannon Callarman, a Content Marketing Specialist at ShipBob, told me about a cool ritual they’ve developed at her company to share candid feedback and ask probing questions: “Every month, ShipBob’s leadership team leads a forum called ‘Ask Me Anything’ that allows employees to ask candid questions about the growth of the business and internal operations, and they’ll get an honest answer.” When leaders embrace uncomfortable conversations and open themselves to feedback and questions, it shows the rest of the organization that it’s alright to do the same. Along the same lines, I find it worthwhile to explicitly outline and publicly post your team and company values. This helps create both an explicit and implicit operating system where your employees and leaders are encouraged to embrace your values (in this case, honesty and transparency). A great example of this is this post from BounceX’s CEO, Ryan Urban. 4. Embrace Being ‘Wrong’ In Ronny Kovahi’s talk at CXL Live a few years ago, he brought up a great point on A/B test results: the best case scenario is when you test something you thought was ‘meh’, and it wins. If you thought it was going to win, however, and it wins, you haven’t learned much. Value in experiments comes when the “absolute value of delta between expected outcome and actual outcome is large.” Yes, being wrong is the best possible thing that can happen to you when you run A/B tests! This is also the strategic basis for Andrew Anderson’s Discipline Based Testing Methodology — test a wide variety of options, some of which might be totally radical, and let the winner surprise you (you’d never expect Comic Sans to win a font test, right?). Celebrate being wrong and learning new things. 5. Hug the Messenger When leaders expect only good news, those who bring up problems or constructive feedback are looked upon unfavorably. In companies like this, the messenger is ritualistically shot. A better way to act is to embrace those who are brave enough to ask interesting questions and point out possible flaws in the data. Nigel Stevens, founder of Organic Growth Marketing, encourages an embrace of failure internally and externally:

“Whenever I only hear of ‘wins’ for a while, I start to get nervous. Because that tells me we’re not proactively sharing — and learning from — the things that don’t work.”

  Stevens adds, “Fortunately, we’ve developed a very healthy culture of saying ‘hey, this completely flopped, and now I’m sharing it with others so you all know.'” 6. Lower the Cost of Failure (and Experimentation) One of the most impactful things you can do within an organization, especially if you’re working on growth or conversion optimization, is to lower the cost of failure. A/B testing does this by nature — you can only lose as much as your losing variant lost during the course of the test. However, you can further decrease the cost of failure by making it easier and cheaper for everyone to set up and run trustworthy experiments. After enough optimization, the big and easy wins stop coming so frequently, so growth looks a lot like this:

This is, of course, a riff on Nassim Taleb’s ideas on optionality — he uses a chart similar to the above to describe trial-and-error tinkering and how it leads to stark innovation. Simply put, it’s impossible to achieve any degree of outstanding innovation without a tremendous amount of tinkering. The more at-bats you allow, the more optionality/luck/upside you can generally collect. Content marketing blogger and expert Levi Olmstead mentioned this attitude (fail fast) being key in previous startups he worked at: “A core value we often repeated was ‘fail quickly and continuously, iterate quickly and continuously.’ Without failing, you can never learn from past mistakes. In my experience, many ideas have strong pillars but they’re not full-fledged ideas. To create a strong, sustainable strategy, you need to learn how to fail and how to turn those lessons into future successes.” Making experiments cheaper and easier to run isn’t an easy feat, but luckily there’s a lot of material out there on the subject (I’d start with this paper from the booking.com team). 7. Invest in Trustworthy Data Data attribution modeling is still a large digital marketing challenge today. With different data models like first-touch attribution, last-touch, multi-touch, and others, teams need to choose one and stick with it. Adam Enfroy, who runs the popular marketing blog AdamEnfroy.com, witnessed this data challenge firsthand while managing digital teams for different SaaS companies, including BigCommerce: “Success theater often runs rampant in companies when teams aren’t aligned on which data platform is the final source of truth. This leads to different teams reporting on conflicting data sources that drive the (often misleading) narrative they want to tell.” Let’s take a weekly business review meeting as an example. Consider this — the digital marketing team pulls from Analytics Platform A because the ROI looks favorable with last-click attribution. At the same time, the business intelligence team pulls from Analytics Platform B, which doesn’t look as good but is more aligned with finance. Then the partner team pulls from a different data source entirely so they can take credit for more revenue. In the end, this leaves confused executives looking at three different data sources — and listening to three different stories — while no actionable insights can be gleaned. To avoid success theater, invest in trustworthy data and align teams on which platform is the ultimate source of truth. This involves strong alignment between BI, marketing, sales, and partner teams. Additionally, seek to stress test and constantly monitor the veracity of your data. As my friend Chris Mercer always stresses, “trust, but verify.” 8. Invest in Education Old joke … CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?” CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?” This is true of any business function, but I find it particularly true in more technical fields like growth, conversion optimization, and SEO. There many ways to do this — invest in a library for your office, start a company book club, send your team to conferences, pay for training programs like CXL Institute or Reforge. HubSpot invests a ton in education and I always feel supported in learning new things (currently taking a course on Python and machine learning from Udacity). Small companies can do this, too, though (in fact, they need to). Ben Johnson, Head of Content at Proof, has seen the impact of this mentality at his SaaS company: “We’re a small team of 15, so a lot of time, you’re not going to be able to learn how to do something from someone in-house. For that reason, we’re always reading, meeting with more experienced individuals, and using our naivety as a strategic advantage.” Johnson adds, “Our leadership is great about encouraging this growth mentality across the organization — making introductions, providing funding for marketing conferences and programs like Reforge, and paying for a book per month. Overall, I think creating a culture of curiosity and helping your employees get the resources they need is a key part of building a growth culture.” 9. Diagnose Narrative Fallacy Storytelling is natural to humans, but it can also dilute efficiency and decision making. The Narrative Fallacy, popularized by Nassim Taleb, describes our tendency to ascribe a clean causal “why” to something that happened in order to simplify our understanding of the world. For example, if you A/B test two headlines against each other, you may determine that version B won “because it invoked social proof”, while someone else may attribute the win to “the clarity of new message”. A good way to transform your culture is to try to curb storytelling where you can, because while the narrative fallacy is limiting when ascribed to wins, it’s detrimental when people try to explain away suboptimal campaigns. Mark Lindquist, marketing strategist at Mailshake, mentioned one version of this is when people move the goalpost of what they define as “success” after the campaign is run (technically, this is known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy): “Consider an SEO who is brought into an organization to grow top-of-the-funnel leads. 18 months in, they’ve 50x’d organic traffic, but leads are only up 15%.” Lindquist continues: “A story you could tell yourself would be ‘well, this is great for our brand. We’re getting our name out there and we’re on our customer’s radars when they are ready to buy.’ That may be true, but it probably isn’t, and it certainly isn’t based on any data. Start your marketing campaigns with clear goals, and if you don’t reach those goals, don’t pat yourself on the back for accomplishing something you never set out to do in the first place. Be radically transparent with yourself and your team.” Ultimately, the purpose of experimentation is to encourage innovation and to mitigate risk, and in the process, most of your ideas are likely to fall flat of what they were intended to do. The best next step is to dust off and iterate and keep learning and trying. Success theater may feel good temporarily, but risks limiting the scope of the program. You should celebrate wins, but feel comfortable sharing failures, too.

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[landodiazmusic]

The only reason I feel safe these days is health insurance and a layer of dust that arrives periodically like a train.

For those unaware of the timeline, I moved from Texas, a ‘right-to-work’ state that refused federal money for healthcare to Seattle, WA, where the state offers healthcare to residents under a certain income.

I have a song about survivor’s guilt in that I came to a place where the government protects it’s people as much as they’ve forced them to, thanks to this being the birthplace of radical social ideas. 

I don’t blame my friends in Texas for having their labor stolen, like I did for 23 years. I still don’t reap the full benefits I bring to the company I work for, but there are definitely some, and that difference is literally a life-or-death variable.

Having health insurance for the actual first time in my life, that wasn’t because the state decided to take care of children’s basic needs, is a revelation. 

If someone has an ailment that immediately affects their day-to-day life, ability to work, and will to live, most would agree that person deserves any available treatment for it. If you add the wrinkle that I’m talking about anti-depressants, I suspect less would agree. 

The attitude that is as ubiquitous as the knowledge of what some-BODY once told me, is that mental health is a issue which is born of the rot of idleness, and hard work can shake the rust off. It’s become apparent to me and every mentally ill person I know, that this alone is not the case, and it’s mostly a consequence of harsh upbringing in a harsh society. 

So many of my personality flaws, mean things I did to people, conversations I bulldozed for my own comfort, drugs and alcohol I rode the brakes on, captive crushes, broken plans, obsessions, delusions of grandeur, broken boundaries, all of that, were a direct result of the undercurrent of numb discomfort and extreme anxiety I used to think were normal. I was trying to make it stop, and I made it other people’s problem, and left to figure it out. I’m very sorry my friends and family didn’t get to reap the benefits of their unending compassion firsthand. 

The conclusion of the saga of Lando thus far is that part of my decent paycheck buys me pills that mitigate the pain I thought I was going to have to die to ever see a reprieve from. 

I have friends that shared some of these symptoms, and we would cope together, quite often to the point of co-dependency. I know they’re suffering something they don’t deserve to feel. Some are making strides in getting better, others are still in the ‘avoiding pain at all costs’ business.

I caught several lucky breaks that I know these iron-willed people would capitalize on in ways beyond my ability. 

I spend money these days on things like food, medicine, rent, etc., but I also buy way too much coffee, and records, and audio equipment like I never dreamed was possible. Which kind of means at all.

Poverty in one’s past is fashionable in social justice culture, but it’s often romanticized by people who are far removed from the existential despair by years, or zeros, or miles.

I’m not making a killing, I’m making a living, and I think this is still technically poverty relative to the cost of living here. 

I can’t forget the pain of having nothing to eat and no will to figure it out. I’ll always be that person, with an inferiority complex in middle class white spaces, who is ashamed to have long hair, who is hiding holes in my clothes made by hand-rolled cigarettes. 

I will give you anything I can spare and I won’t ask questions. People are trying their best, and sometimes our best is dogshit, but we’re systematically backed into a corner where anyone would crumble in the same way. 

It feels weird to have anything at all, please take it.

Thats all.

List for the week or so:

Dave Chappelle is the best argument to temper PC culture, even if I’m still not convinced.

CARW is a great organization, if you’re white and ashamed, look up a chapter in your location and DO THE WORK. Come back to this and read this sentence: “Thank you.” My partner is part of the Seattle chapter and I’m proud of her.

I am still a hard of hearing musician and mixer-in-training with bad eyes and ADHD, so hire me to mix your album! We’re doing a remix of Big Money by Ghostfrom206.

I’m feeling pretty adversarial politically. I will (be) organize(d) and stand firm while the other side loses through complacence and unrealistic views, and make sure that I’m as correct and just as I can understand. 

All of my sports teams are not doing great after long stretches of greatness. The bandwagon has slowed enough that I have to help push it, and that’s sports.

I am listening to days worth of Chapo Trap House and The Majority Report, happy to feel the differences I have with people I mostly agree with scrape the rust off of my thinking. Of course election fever is in the air, I hope I actually believe in the coalition building and post-electoralism that I’m voting for Sanders for.

Shout-out to my friends who are so much more radical than I. I’m still picking boot rubber out of my teeth.

Shout-out to Black Twitter and Black slang, sorry for running your brilliance into the ground.

Seriously thanks for reading this ramble, let me know what you want to know.

-Lambdo Legal

[ecadimi-blog]

Finance Discussion questions

 Identify a party (other than stockholders) that can be classified as a stakeholder for a corporation. What obligation does the corporation have to this party? Describe a situation where stockholder claims on the organization might conflict with the claims of this stakeholder group. If you were CEO, how would you resolve these conflicts?   Response 1 Identify a party (other than stockholders) that can be classified as a stakeholder for a corporation. Corporation Customers, Supplier and employees. I am using corporation customers as the stakeholder to answer the remaining questions. What obligation does the corporation have to this party? For customers, the corporations has the obligation to provide value in terms of a good product or service that works correctly, is safe and last a long time. Describe a situation where stockholder claims on the organization might conflict with the claims of this stakeholder group. The customer could have legal claims, returns or warranty issue with the product or service. These things negatively impact the company profit and therefore the stockprice. Therefore, this would be in conflict with the stockholders best interest. Also, since stockholders want to maximize profit, they may encourage cost cutting measures chich could affect the quality of the product or service provided and this in turn will affect the corporation customer's best interests. If you were CEO, how would you resolve these conflicts? This is why the CEO is paid the big bucks :) In practice, I do not think the CEO can every permanently resolve these conflicts but instead he or she manages them and tries to minimize the conflicts. As CEO, I would do this by putting in place company practices, standards as well as checks and balances to assure that the corporation is maximizing value to all stakeholders. For example, I would have a department in charge of looking at and managing company costs to maximize profit for stockholders. While at the same time, I would have a department working to manage customer satisfaction by ensuring quality goods and services as well as good customer service after the sale. These departments would have to work together to achieve maximum value for both stakeholders.   Response 2 Employees one of the most important primary stakeholders in an organization. An employee contributes labor and/or expertise to an organization, and in many cases they are the connecting tissue between the products or services being provided and the customer. Efforts spent in selecting and training employees and creating a corporate culture in which they are empowered can lead to increased employee satisfaction and competence. This, in turn, can lead to superior service and increase customer satisfaction, which ultimately results in organizational growth and success. The corporations have a moral obligation to make business decisions in a manner that demonstrates concern for and seeks to advance the welfare of employees. This includes but goes beyond a duty to treat employees respectfully, to pay them fairly and provide good working conditions. An ethical employer does not think of employees only as a means to an end. Employees must be treated as a major stakeholder group. Ethical employers consciously and consistently treat the promotion and protection of the well-being of employees as an important business obligation and objective. Companies should be loyal to workers as well as shareholders. Layoffs, plant closings, and other dramatic events of this nature should be handled with caring and sensitivity and as acts of great moral significance. The use of euphemisms such as �down-sizing� or �right-sizing� may make managers feel better about the decision to terminate jobs, but it does not change anything from a moral perspective. There are, of course, situations where such actions are justified but they must be implemented in a way that demonstrates genuine concern for employees who will lose their jobs. Employees should always be treated with respect and it is the company�s obligation to see that individual managers do not abuse their power or mistreat their subordinates. Kill-the-messenger behavior at any management level is improper, as is any active or passive encouragement of dishonest reporting. Employees should feel free to raise ethical or other issues without fear of retaliation. Employees are entitled to count on the commitments of the employer especially about central matters such as pay, raises, and promotions. Employers who chisel employees, renege on promises, or treat them as if they were simply instrumentalities of the organization�s interests rather than ends in and of themselves fail to meet their moral responsibilities.     3-     Stakeholders include the people and groups affected by a company's business activities.  Along with earning a profit, a company faces social and political pressure to act responsibly toward customers, communities, employees, suppliers and government entities.  Communication is how you resolve these conflicting requirements.  As a project manager, you are constantly faced with this situation, and you need to communicate with each and every stakeholder in order to reach a balance.  The best way to handle this is to hold a meeting that all the stakeholders will attend, and discuss each and every person's requirements in the meeting, and point out with whom requirements that stakeholder's requirements conflict with.  At this point, stakeholders will do an extra effort to resolve the conflicts themselves, either by concessions or compromises.     Responses   Wednesday   Response #1 to Jiyorvmi Tobrise I appreciate your response to this first discussion question.  Your thinking is some that I can understand, respect and agree with.  Because you were first to respond, you aided me in formulating my thinking to answer this question appropriately.  You stated at the end of your posting that “they had to comply with the stakeholders point of view based on ethical conducts and that’s the direction I would go if I was the CEO of Budweiser.”  Are there no other options?   Response #2 to Rita Kelly Thank you for your response to this first discussion question.  The thinking you presented here is some that I can understand, respect, and agree with.  You stated at the beginning for your response that “a vendor could be a stakeholder for a corporation.”  Is this to say that this is the only one or does it top the list for you?   Sunday Response #1 to Jennifer Lerpold Thanks for your response to this first discussion posting.  You made some very valid points that I understand, respect, and agree with.  You took this response in a very interesting direction.  May I ask what information you used to formulate your thinking?   Response #2 to Tara Georgousis Your response to this first discussion question is appreciated.  I can not only understand, but respect and agree with the clear information you presented here.  You stated that there was a responsible way to manage the conflict, is that the only way or just the way that you feel is best?     During the summer and fall of 2008, the U.S. financial system and financial systems around the world appeared to be on the verge of collapse. How did we get into this condition? What did we do to get out of it? How can we prevent another such scenario in the future?     Response 1 During the summer and fall of 2008, the U.S. financial system and financial systems around the world appeared to be on the verge of collapse. How did we get into this condition? There are a variety of reasons given by experts but they all boil down to too much spending of money on cheap credit by the banks. The government did not have a tight regulatory control on banks. As a result, banks made very easy lending standards. The banks were giving consumers very easy credit without showing reliable proof of consistent income to pay the loan off. The banks also were not requiring much of a down payment on mortgages, auto loans or other consumer loans. Consumers had access to easy credit and took advantage of it by over spending on new homes, vehicles, boats and other assets. Then once the job market began to sour, consumers lost their jobs, could not pay their loans off and a financial crisis resulted. What did we do to get out of it? After the fact, the government tightened lending standards and injected money into the economy by lowering interest rates and selling bonds. This created a larger money supply and made loans cheaper and injected money into the economy. The government also gave tax breaks and mortgage payment forgiveness and assistance to certain consumer mortagages. Also, business incentives were provided. It was very painful but these things eventually caused the economy to turn around. How can we prevent another such scenario in the future? First of all, keep higher lending standards so that we do not get into the credit mess again. Also, the government has to be diligent in overseeing and monitoring the bank lending practices. Also, consumers need training on how to manage credit in a smart way to not get in financial trouble as well.     2 THE U.S. economy is currently experiencing its worst crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis started in the home mortgage market, especially the market for so-called “subprime” mortgages, and is now spreading beyond subprime to prime mortgages, commercial real estate, corporate junk bonds, and other forms of debt. Total losses of U.S. banks could reach as high as one-third of the total bank capital. The crisis has led to a sharp reduction in bank lending, which in turn is causing a severe recession in the U.S. economy. This article analyzes the underlying causes of the current crisis, estimates how bad the crisis is likely to be, and discusses the government economic policies pursued so far (by both the Fed and Congress) to deal with the crisis. The final section makes recommendations for more radical government policies that the left should advocate and support in response to this crisis. 3- The rise of great powers is inextricably linked to access to investments and their ability to function as leading financial centers.  Their decline is also closely linked to financial problems.  To help us get out of this situation, two bills in the 111th Congress, H.R. 4173, passed by the House on December 11, 2009, and Senator Dodd’s Restoring American Financial Stability Act, as ordered reported by the Senate Banking Committee on March 22, 2010, address many of the purported causal factors across the entire financial system.  The bills address systemic risk, too-big-to-fail, prudential supervision, hedge funds, derivatives, payments systems, credit rating agencies, securitization, and consumer financial protection You can’t expect immediate success but what is happening will have a lasting impact.     Responses   Friday   Response #1 to Savot Vorn I appreciate your response to this discussion question.  Your thinking is some that I can understand, respect and agree with.  Because you were first to respond and very thorough in your response, you aided me in formulating my thinking to answer this question appropriately.  You stated at the end of your posting that “also, consumers need training on how to manage credit in a smart way to not get in financial trouble as well.”  Do you feel that this a truly realistic?   Response #2 to Eric Hanck Thank you for your response to this discussion question.  The thinking you presented here is some that I can understand, respect, and agree with.  You stated at the end for your response that “We have to be strict on the money we lend to people that do not have the credit money to keep buying expensive things they can’t afford.”  Is this referring only to people in the US?   Individuals performing ratio analysis include (1) banks evaluating potential loan applications from small businesses, (2) investment analysts evaluating the investment quality of a firm’s stock, and (3) internal management, assessing the firm’s current strengths and weaknesses. Select one of the three parties above, and for that party, identify which of the five ratio groups (liquidity, activity, debt, profitability, or market) would be of most value and which would probably be of least value. Explain the reasons behind your choices.   1- Internal Management when assess the Firm's current strenghts and weaknesses, use liquidity ratio as the most valuable one. Liquidity ratios measures the company's strength to meet its short term debt obligations. Internal management is more concerned about the Day to day working of the Company and day to day working will run smoothly only when company will be able to fulfill its short term Financial obligation. Liquidity ratios give an Idea of short term liquidity of the company, like Acid Test Ratio, Current Ratio, Net working Capital ratio, Quick Ratio etc. All these ratios give indication of Liquidity position of the company in which internal Management is interested. Market ratios are the Ratio in which Internal Management is least interested bacause market ratios indicate firm's position in Market.. These ratios are more important for outsiders than the internal management. Normally these ratios do not affect day to day working of the company in which internal management is more interested. 2- Banks evaluating loan applications from small businesses will be most interested in the Debt ratios. No doubt profitability and liquidity ratios also play an important part of the evaluation but Debt ratios would be placed at top priority. Evaluating the credit history and the credit worthiness of the business is important to seek a reasonable cover against default of loan payments. If the amount of Debt against equity is considerably large, it depicts that the business is running predominantly on borrowed funds. It will have a greater amount of interest expenses and risk of default will be higher. The leverage ratio and debt Coverage ratio are some Debt ratios evaluated before considering a loan application. Market ratios would be of least value mostly because such ratios are more useful in determining the view of investors towards a Company. Some market ratios include Price to Earnings Ratio, PEG ratio, Dividend yield, etc. Such ratios are useful in determining the returns on investment and help in comparing the earnings from a business against its share price. These are more suited to large corporations and mostly used for investment decisions.   2-      Who are the major policy makers for the Federal Reserve System and how do they rise to such an influential position? How do these policymakers influence national economic objectives? Refer to Figure 5.1 on page 100 of the textbook. What part of this relationship could be influenced by the citizens of the country? Why?   The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States. Its unique structureincludes a federal government agency, the Board of Governors, in Washington, D.C., and 12 regional Reserve Banks. Current functions of the Federal Reserve System include: To address the problem of banking panics To serve as the central bank for the United States To strike a balance between private interests of banks and the centralized responsibility of government To supervise and regulate banking institutions To protect the credit rights of consumers To manage the nation's money supply through monetary policy to achieve the sometimes-conflicting goals of maximum employment stable prices, including prevention of either inflation or deflation moderate long-term interest rates To maintain the stability of the financial system and contain systemic risk in financial markets To provide financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payments system To facilitate the exchange of payments among regions To respond to local liquidity needs To strengthen U.S. standing in the world economy     2- The four major policy makers for the Federal Reserve System are as follows, -The Federal Reserve System that deals with monetary policy -The President who sets fiscal policy -Congress that deals with fiscal policy as well as addresses debt management -U.S. Treasury that helps carry out the fiscal policy and finances national debt According to our reading the policy makers that are discussed above majorly influence objectives using the monetary policy and fiscal policies in order to achieve economic goals. The monetary and fiscal policies are set in place to promote economic growth, stability and create a balance. The decisions made by these higher appointed officials greatly impact the relationship with society due to those decisions directly impacting them. These policy makers are appointed through a swearing in process or being appointed by someone higher such as the president himself. From our textbook citizens could be directly affected by these decisions due to an increase in interest rates which would hinder people from buying a car or house etc. If people are not spending money, taking out loans and/or investing their monies this will slow the economy as a whole. Events that have occurred in the past could have been avoided by proper regulation and people living within their means. Respectfully, Ashley Langer References TORTO, R. G. (1970). AN ENDOGENOUS TREATMENT OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM IN A MACRO-ECONOMETRIC MODEL. Journal Of Finance , 25 (3), 704-705.   3- The major policy makers for the Federal Reserve System is the Federal Open Market Committee.  The FOMC is composed of the board of governors, which has seven members, and five reserve bank presidents.  The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York serves continuously, while the presidents of the other reserve banks rotate their service of one-year terms.  The FOMC meets eight times per year to set key interest rates, such as the discount rate, and to decide whether to increase or decrease the money supply, which the Fed does by buying and selling government securities.  Social inclusion policies are strongly associated with the country‘s FDI inflows.     Responses   Friday   Response #1 to Eric Hanck I appreciate your response to this discussion question.  Your thinking is some that I can understand, respect and agree with.  Because you were first to respond, you assisted me in the formulation o  f my thinking to answer this question appropriately.  You stated in your posting that “the policymakers the chairman works with is the President, Congress, Secretary of Treasury, Chairman of Council of Economic Advisors, Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Comptroller of the Currency.”  Who are the policymakers?   Response #2 to Emily Lee Thank you for your response to this discussion question.  The thinking you presented here is some that I can understand, respect, and agree with.  The question was answered in questions to the instructor indicating that a mistake was made and to answer without referring to any figures.  You states at the end of your response that “if not managed correctly then it can adversely affect everyone.”  What are the proper management techniques?     Is it possible for a firm to have a positive profit and yet have a negative cash flow? Describe a scenario under which this might occur? Where does the money from profits go in such a case?   Company sometimes may show a negative net income but have a positive cash flow. It can be explained with the following example: Company SK had a net loss of $50,000 for the current accounting period. Suppose it has recorded $120,000 in depreciation and had bad debts of $70,000 that could never be collected. These are the non-cash items which are not included in the net income. Hence, it actually had a positive cash flow of $140,000 (i.e. $120,000+$70,000-$50,000). Here, the point should be noted that the company does not pay any tax on the net loss even though it has a positive cash flow.    If you were to examine the cash budgets of almost any organization, you would find distinct seasonal patterns of cash inflows and outflows. These patterns cause months during the year when almost every business is flush with cash, and other months in which things are extremely tight. Select an organization in which you are (were) employed, and describe the seasons of the year when this firm was flush with cash and the seasons when this firm was typically on a tight budget. Why did these times occur?   Consider the business of manufacturing of airconditioners, the sales of airconditioners will be high in the summer and low in the rest of the year. Maximum (nearly 80%) of sales will be from February to July that is 5 months and the remaining 20% of the sale in the remaining 7 months. Thus, the cash flows for the peak season of 5 months will be high and the cash flows in the remaining periods are low. As the turnover is high the cash flow will also be high and if the turnover is low the cash flow will also be low.      One of the basic financial principles is that the value of any asset (whether it be a stock, a bond, or a firm as a whole) is the present value of that asset’s future cash flows. As you learned in this chapter, finding present values requires determining a discount rate. Assume you want to buy a business, and you want to find the present value of its future cash flows. Name at least one variable you should consider in determining the correct discount rate to use and explain its role in discount rate determination. If possible, try to identify a variable that has not yet been mentioned by your classmates.   Current rate of interest The discount rate we use is weighted average cost of capital that is weighted average cost of debt, equity and preferred stock or any other source of capital. Current rate of interest helps in determining the cost of debt. It is the rate on which firms are lending and borrowing in the market. We do some adjustment in the current rate of interest based on the riskiness of the project to get before tax cost of debt. Therefore, this before tax cost is adjusted for taxation to get after tax cost of debt. Once we have after tax cost of capital, it is multiplied with the weight of debt in the capital structure toget weighted average cost of debt. It is thereafter, added in the other weighted average costs to get weighted average cost of capital. 2- This is the rate at which the firms cash flows will grow over the years for example dividends growth rate. one of the ways of determining dicount rate is through use of the cost of equity and cost of debt to get the weighted average cost of capital which in this case will be used as the discount rate. the cost of equity is determined using the dividends of ordinary shares and which in this case have a growth per annum. the growth rate will thus affect the cost of equity and the cost of equity affects the discount rate.     3- One of the basic financial principles is that the value of any asset (whether it be a stock, a bond, or a firm as a whole) is the present value of that asset’s future cash flows. As you learned in this chapter, finding present values requires determining a discount rate. Assume you want to buy a business, and you want to find the present value of its future cash flows. Name at least one variable you should consider in determining the correct discount rate to use and explain its role in discount rate determination. If possible, try to identify a variable that has not yet been mentioned by your classmates.   A wide variety of methods can be used to determine discount rates, but in most cases, these calculations resemble art more than science.  Still, it is better to be generally correct than precisely incorrect, so it is worth the time to use a rigorous method to estimate the discount rate.  A good strategy is to apply the concepts of the weighted average cost of capital (WACC).  The WACC is essentially a blend of the cost of equity and the after-tax cost of debt.  Therefore, we need to look at how cost of equity and cost of debt are calculated.     Responses   Wednesday   Response #1 to Eric Hanck I appreciate your response to this discussion question.  Your thinking is some that I can understand, respect and agree with although you were rather brief.  Because you were first to respond, you assisted me in focusing to answer this question appropriately.  You stated in your response that “the payback period analysis is a variable to determine the correct discount rate.”  Do you feel that this is the best method or just the first one you found?   Response #2 to Matthew Christina Thank you for your response to this first discussion question.  The thinking you presented here is some that I can understand and respect.  You stated that you “think that "future value" is an important thing to determine.”  Is it always possible to determine future value?   Thursday Response #1 to Nancy Coleman Thanks for your response to this discussion posting.  You made some very valid points that I understand, respect, and agree with.  You spoke on focusing on future cash flows in buying a business.  Is this the only important aspect when making these decisions?   Response #2 to Adam Richard Your response to this discussion question is appreciated.  I can not only understand, but respect and agree with the clear information you presented here.  You stated near the beginning of your response that “depreciation plays a significant part in any decision to purchase a business or physical entity as over time further investments may have to be made to ensure profitability”  Are there not other factors that should be higher in terms of level of importance?     Look at the Focus on Ethics box (“How Fair Is Check Into Cash”) in Chapter 5 of the textbook. These, businesses quote an interest rate of 15% to loan customers (most of whom are fairly unsophisticated) and yet the EAR of the loan is close to 400%. Explain the wide discrepancy between these rates. What do you believe is the correct regulatory response to these types of lenders?   Hard money loans work out to be more expensive than traditional loans as they are not dependant on traditional credit guidelines that shield lenders from high default rates. As hard money lenders might not need the income verification that usual lenders need, they may face higher default rates (and, so, quote a higher rate of interest). Households and companies might take a hard money loan if they cannot obtain traditional mortgage financing as they do not have acceptable credit or other documentation . Many states' usury laws, restrict hard money lenders from charging higher interest rates. Regulation of hard money not only varies by state, but also varies by the type of the borrower.Consumers have more protections in individual states and also under the Dodd-Frank Act. Very aggressive loan terms are given by commercial hard money lenders on commercial properties. Also, the type of property being lent upon might be a determinant in determining if state usury laws allow legal hard money lending.       There is an inverse relationship between interest rate changes and changes in the market price of outstanding bonds. Explain the logic behind this principle. Given this relationship, do you believe it is currently a good time to buy bonds? Why or why not? Answer: When a Company issue new Bond, it keeps interest rates on the Bond close to the prevailing market rates. So, Investors get equal benefit by investing in bonds which they can get by investing in other options available in the market. But these rates on the bonds are fixed throughout the duration of the bond while prevailing interest rates keep changes. With the change in the market interest rates, Opportunity cost of holding the Bond also changes. Suppose prevailing interest rates moves upward and goes higher than the Bond rates, it means investor can get better return in other securities available in the market than the return, which the Bond is giving. So, investors would like to sell their existing bonds and move towards other new securities which are giving return close to market. If interest rates goes upwards, all else being equal, stock prices would go down — because some investors would choose to move their money from stocks to bonds, given that bond yields have become more attractive than they used to be. (And this reduced demand for stocks will cause stock prices to decline.) And conversely, if interest rates go down, all else being equal, stock prices will go up — because some investors will choose to sell their (now lower-yielding) bonds in order to move to stocks. 2- Inverse relationship between interest rate changes and changes in the market price of outstanding bonds :- If interest rates go up, all else being equal, stock prices will go down — because some investors will choose to move their money from stocks to bonds, given that bond yields have become more attractive than they used to be. (And this reduced demand for stocks will cause stock prices to decline.) And conversely, if interest rates go down, all else being equal, stock prices will go up — because some investors will choose to sell their (now lower-yielding) bonds in order to move to stocks. The catch, of course, is this “all else being equal” business. In the real world, there are thousands of other variables, and they’re always moving around. So, for instance, if interest rates go up, how stock prices will actually react depends on why interest rates went up. That is, what changed in our economy to cause lenders to raise their rates? And how does that change affect our expectations for corporate earnings? If the change has a positive effect on corporate earnings expectations, stock prices could very well go up in spite of interest rates going up. Conversely, if the change has a negative effect on corporate earnings expectations, stock prices will go down, and they’ll go down by more than the amount that would be predicted solely by the change in interest rates. Further there can not be one answer to this question that Whether currently is a good time to buy bonds or not . The opinion will vary from person to person. In my opinion, Investment in bonds are always good, as they fetch period interest on regular basis. no risks are there. Further risk of default in bond payment at the time of maturity is also negligible. So for those investors, who prefers less risk, they can choose to invest in bonds. 3- Answer: When a Company issue new Bond, it keeps interest rates on the Bond close to the prevailing market rates. So, Investors get equal benefit by investing in bonds which they can get by investing in other options available in the market. But these rates on the bonds are fixed throughout the duration of the bond while prevailing interest rates keep changes. With the change in the market interest rates, Opportunity cost of holding the Bond also changes. Suppose prevailing interest rates moves upward and goes higher than the Bond rates, it means investor can get better return in other securities available in the market than the return, which the Bond is giving. So, investors would like to sell their existing bonds and move towards other new securities which are giving return close to market. If interest rates go up, all else being equal, stock prices will go down — because some investors will choose to move their money from stocks to bonds, given that bond yields have become more attractive than they used to be. (And this reduced demand for stocks will cause stock prices to decline.) And conversely, if interest rates go down, all else being equal, stock prices will go up — because some investors will choose to sell their (now lower-yielding) bonds in order to move to stocks.      Agencies such as Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard and Poors rate the default risk of various municipal and corporate bonds. While their rating systems are proprietary, it is widely known that they rely on financial ratios as key inputs to their bond ratings. Which financial ratios (list at least 2) do you believe would be the most helpful to rate corporate bonds? Why? In general Ratios are key performance indicators to compare the corporates performance within the industry , Credit rating agencies are also use these ratios to assess the company performance for rating. Liquidity ratios, which include the Current Ratio = Current Assets / Current Liabilities Quick Ratio = (Current assets – Inventories )/ Current Liabilities 2.Long term indicators are based on the present and past firm's profitability. Return on Assets = earnings before interest and taxes / Total Assets Return on Equity = Net Income / average stockholders' equity 2- Financial Ratios Helpful to Rate Bonds The credit rating agencies use following financial ratios to rate bonds: Liquidity Ratios These ratios show the ability of the firm to pay its short term liabilities with its short term assets. Higher the ratio, better it is. If the ratio is higher it will be easy for the firms to meet their short term obligations. It includes current ratio (current assets/current liabilities) and quick ratio (quick assets/quick liabilities). Profitability Ratios As the name indicates these ratios show the profitability of the firm. They also emphasise on the firm’s return on investment in the form of assets. These ratios show how well the firm has generated profits from its operations. It includes Gross profit ratio (Gross profit/Net Sales*100), Net profit ratio (Net profit/net sales*100). They also include return on assets, which is calculated by dividing earnings before interest and tax by total assets, return on equity, which is calculated by dividing net income by average shareholder’s equity, return on capital employed, which is calculated by dividing net operating profit by employed capital. These ratios are compared with industry ratios of with the other company in the same industry.       Read the full article