Jack Saturday

Monday, May 29, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1618-1620

“Our generation is going to have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation, like self-driving cars and trucks, but we have the potential to do so much more than that,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said the greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail, and with universal basic income, more people might have the freedom to take risks.
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg Calls for Universal Basic Income

 Nick Lucchesi on May 25, 2017
Inverse Culture

[emphasis JS] 



 In the simplest analysis, Americans today, unlike nearly any other country in the word, deny one another basically good lives. You may think that is new, but it is not. They always have — that is what slavery and segregation were, weren’t they? The deep antipathy to public goods, healthare, education, and so on, in America is the result of a legacy of hate. And that legacy is what stopped America from investing in itself, ever, and still does today — hence collapse.
Bye Bye, America
umair haque





 …a philosophy of play is the only theory of the present age worth considering.
Our Identities and Political Thinking Are Formed in Our Free Time, Which Is Constantly Shrinking
Peter Sloterdijk







 

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1615-1617

From energy to pharma, from the shale gas boom to lucrative lifesaving drugs, public research has everywhere laid the foundation for private profit. And the industry that produced Juicero has been an especially big beneficiary of government largesse. The advances that created what we’ve come to call tech – the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment. Even the iPhone, that celebrated emblem of capitalist creativity, wouldn’t exist without buckets of government cash. Its core technologies, from the touch-screen display to GPS to Siri, all trace their roots to publicly funded research.
noamchomskyw
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At the corporate level, tens of billions of dollars go in  subsidies to the fossil fuel, fishing, and agricultural industries. Fossil fuel subsidies may be much, much more. The  IMF reports U.S. fossil fuel subsidies of $502 billion, and according to  Grist, even this is an underestimate.
5 Ways Rich People's "Entitlements" Cheat You and Me
By Paul Buchheit
AlterNet






 The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.
The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery
By ANNIE LOWREY
September 10, 2013
New York Times






Monday, May 15, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1612-1614

At the corporate level, tens of billions of dollars go in  subsidies to the fossil fuel, fishing, and agricultural industries. Fossil fuel subsidies may be much, much more. The  IMF reports U.S. fossil fuel subsidies of $502 billion, and according to  Grist, even this is an underestimate. 
5 Ways Rich People's"Entitlements" Cheat You and Me 
By Paul Buchheit 
AlterNet




 I spent much of my young adulthood working at a fast-food job I hated. I would distract myself from the drudgery by mentally protesting the notion that people should wake up every morning to an alarm clock, then go to their jobs and spend the bulk of their days doing something they don’t like to earn money. Who came up with this crazy system, anyway? The idea that I, and everyone around me, would be expected to continue doing this until age 65 or higher filled me with utter despair. There had to be a way out of the work-consume-die treadmill. There just had to.




Comprehensively and incisively programmed with all the relevant data regarding education, it will be evidenced that the physical and social costs will be far less for individual, at-home initiated, research-and-development interned self-teaching that have individual students go to school, being bussed and so on. This mass-production baby-sitting is only continued because of the union-organized response to the fear of the teachers about losing their jobs. Their political clout has for long been strong enough to guarantee continuance of this inefficiency to the present moment.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path P. xxxv.








Monday, May 08, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1609-1611

General Motors is now the subject of a Justice Department inquiry over its failure to recall cars with a defect that is linked to 12 deaths.
...
Prosecutors said that Toyota concealed problems related to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals and made misleading statements to consumers in an effort to defend its brand image.
..
While regulators have not given an exact number of deaths associated with the defect, the company still faces many wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits.
...
While the $1.2 billion penalty is the biggest ever for a carmaker, it still represents a small fraction of the more than $60 billion that Toyota has in cash reserves.
..
The company has admitted in filings with federal regulators that it had proposed fixes for the problem on at least two occasions, but did not follow through.
Toyota Is Fined $1.2 Billion for Concealing Safety Defects
By BILL VLASIC and MATT APUZZO MARCH 19, 2014
New York Times

[emphasis JS] 



 Ah, but, the logic of “consumption” is quite different, and goes like this:

  1.  we need to employ people all the time,
  2. such employment produces a surplus,
  3. people need to be convinced to purchase the surplus through marketing and advertising,
  4. the surplus has to be quickly converted to waste, so people will purchase again,
  5. this is accomplished by denying basic needs to everyone so that they have to work in order to consume.

Paul B. Hartzog





 Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology. But it also means that we need to rethink deeply our social contracts, because labor is so important to a person’s identity and dignity and to societal stability. They suggest that we consider lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital labor, that we reinvent education so more people can “race with machines” not against them, that we do much more to foster the entrepreneurship that invents new industries and jobs, and even consider guaranteeing every American a basic income. We’ve got a lot of rethinking to do, they argue, because we’re not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We’re in a technological hurricane reshaping the workplace — and it just keeps doubling.
If I Had a Hammer
New York Times
JAN. 11, 2014
Thomas L. Friedman
 

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Monday, May 01, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1606-1608

Most of our new jobs are in service industries, including retail and health care and personal care and food service. Those industries generally don't pay a living wage. In 2014, over half of American workers made less than $15 per hour, with some of the top employment sectors in the U.S. paying $12 an hour or less.

Worse, most underpaid workers are deprived of the benefits higher-income employees take for granted. A Princeton study concluded that a stunning 94 percent of the nine million new jobs created in the past decade were temporary or contract-based, rather than traditional full-time positions.
The Shocking Reality of a Future of Shrinking Jobs
By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet
April 20, 2017

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 ...And the jobs being created in their stead, in online warehouses for companies like Amazon, are too few to soak up those displaced.
…The numbers: U.S. retail jobs (mainly cashiers and sales people) plummeted by about 60,000 in the first three months of the year, to about 15.85 million, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
..."The department store platform seems to be falling apart."

Retail workers are being displaced in droves
Steve LeVine
XIOS

[emphasis JS]




 There are millions of Americans who work to the bone yet have to borrow from next month’s wages to pay last month’s bills. Millions more work two jobs just to keep the home warm and food on the table. Yet no one celebrates their hard work, and among certain circles they are derided as takers instead of makers and condemned to Mitt Romney’s “47 percent.”

The rich may worry about envy, but most Americans worry about making ends meet.
LEONARD STEINHORN
Letter to the New York Times
Washington, March 2, 2014