Human Bots

Ready to feel unsettled?  Labor is so cheap in India that people there are paid $2 for every 1000 CAPTCHA [anti-spambot puzzle] they solve.  If you’re waiting for the price of labor, i.e. your salary, to stop creeping downward, you’ll have to get in line behind a billion pairs of working hands and eyes.  The last time labor did well in North America was in the wake of a war that killed off the European competition.  Perhaps your local union can figure out how to promote a few nuclear exchanges in Asia?  Short of that, you can always move to a lower-rent country.  America the gated community–God Shed His Grace on Thee!

Disk Surges in Format Race

The story is interesting enough, but check out the photo in the Times.  Look at all the clunky electro-doodads in the frame.  If only they’d costumed the guy in a top hat and starched collar instead of shirt sleeves and an I.D. laniard!

At last, Slate Delivers!

Something I didn’t know about in Slate, delivered in an amusing way: Chinese in China are adopting English (not “Western”) names for day-to-day business.  I never tire of mentioning my acquaintance with a certain Yuan Dong in college–he also adopted an English name, which spoiled a great conversation-starter.  Has anything like this happened in America?  [I mean, other than my inability to remember the Christian names of persons I know more readily by Internet handle.]

Pontiac, R.I.P.

In memoriam. My first car was a 1977 Pontiac Phoenix. Battleship gray and with a turn radius to match. I had it towed away for charity when the gas tank fell off in the parking lot. Every car I’ve had since has been more comfortable and reliable by an order of magnitude, but I still retain an irrational love for that car, and if I could muster the money and time I’d buy it back and keep it in shape for Sunday touring.

Swine flew where?

I’m responding to la Gripe Puerca in the only way I can: swearing off pork-filled burritos at Taco Bell.

The worse, the better

I think I’ll fill my portfolio with this.  It’s a boom market.

[A] mid-size factory in Siberia is promoting a product that it hopes is just the thing for hard times. Employees here call it the “anti-democracy truck,” a modified fire truck fitted with a water cannon and designed to quell riots.

“We look at this as a product with a market,” Vladimir N. Kazakov, the factory director, said in an interview in his office. “We don’t mind who buys them. We would be happy to sell them to Israel, America or France.”

Rotten to the Core

Sometimes a gut reaction brings more clarity than a lifetime of meditation.  Not until seeing an advertisement in a magazine for a leather-bound, gold-leafed copy of Niven’s Ringworld did I realize what I thought of him.  My reaction was plainly, Ringworld doesn’t deserve a leather cover.  It was not without pain that I decided that Niven wasn’t for me.  ”Neutron Star” and “At the Core” are among the most exciting things I’ve ever read, giving the feel of a top-down, tail-finned sedan drive through the American Southwest to outer space.  But Niven has no feel for human beings and should never write about them.

I accept that Science Fiction is a sub-set of pornography. But Ringworld reached a level of misogyny one might expect to find at a meeting of newly-minted divorcees. Niven’s future features free love but no homosexuality–just another condition cured by the Auto-doc, no doubt.  And it would spoil the fantasy to have the hero raped by some strapping he-man while on sabbatical.  My complaints aren’t mere liberal carping.  Niven shows a poverty of imagination when populating his universe–a serious offense in a fantasy writer.

You-Usury [Long]

My interest was so strongly piqued by a blurb on Slate and a tease on Harper’s Magazine’s website that I spent $7 on their magazine, from which I here quote extensively:

First, we removed the possibility of creating real, binding contracts by allowing employers to bust the unions that had been entering into these agreements for millions of people.  Second, we allowed those same employers to cancel existing contracts, virtually at will, by transferring liability from one corporate shell to another, or letting a subsidiary go into Chapter 11 and then moving to “cancel” the contract rights, including lifetime health benefits and pensions.  As one company after another “reorganized” in Chapter 11 to shed contract rights, working people learned that it was not rational to count on those rights and guarantees, or even to think in these future-oriented ways.  No wonder people in our country began to live for the moment and take out loans and start running up debts.

And then we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter’s term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school.  That’s when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.

Here’s what happens: the financial sector bloats up.  With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that bans prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking.  When banks get 29 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing.  Sure, GM is awful.  Sure, it doesn’t innovate.  But the peope who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs.  All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment.  What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, abor, and the banks?  In the United States, we shrank manufacturing.  We got rid of labor.  Now it’s just the banks.

Which is why the middle class is shrinking.  Basically, we’re all waiters now; we’re bowing and scraping and working for the banks.  Look closely at any American, and it’s even odds that he or she, directly or indirectly, is somehow employed by the “financial services sector,” which covers insurance and real estate and financial instruments of any kind.  As brokers, lawyers, loan collectors, loan consolidators, secretaries at big investment firms, chauffeurs of private limousines, or even the high-tech types who exist solely to service banks–all of us, millions of us, are part of it, living off it i some way, as three generations ago we lived off manufacturing.

One could take the author to task for calling the US a debtor’s prison when personal bankruptcy is easier here than in Europe or Asia, and was even easier a few years ago; the breaking of contracts he bemoans on the part of Industry has its counterpart in the proletariate [we're Welshers one and all].  He also could have helped sell his case if he knew the Bible better; it was a clear misstep to hurl the Golden Rule against bailed-out banks’ issuing of foreclosure when the parable of the forgiving master is the correct citation.  But a point-by-point analysis is beside the point.  This thesis, that the collapse of usury laws set into motion the cannibalization of the US economy by its heretofore backwaters financial sector, is the narrative that will be settled upon when the history of our current crisis is written, once the over-exposure of this guy blows over.

My Latest Jihad

I’m giving up on “irony,” a lost cause if ever there was, and taking up “forbears.”  Lately I’m seeing “forbearers” in its place, and can’t help but ask, “show forbearance how?”

My Name is Obama, and I’m Here to Rescue You

Fine work with the pirates, Mr. President, but if you manage to save this girl from the Ayatollahs you’ll be re-elected in a fifty-state landslide.